everyday life

Gifts strangely, beautifully, painfully wrapped

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Whit, reading one evening by Matt’s first-floor bed

It’s not a secret that September was difficult around here.  Late August and early October, too, if I’m being honest.  We aren’t yet finished with this season.  Matt’s recovery is long and slow.  But this particular moment when life screeched to a halt other than the absolutely necessary has carried some gifts in its hands, too.  This reminds me that all of life’s experiences hold both beauty and challenge.  I truly believe this, though I also know first-hand how hard it can be to see one or the other in middle of a moment.

But, given my fierce desire to acknowledge what’s good I thought it would be valuable to enumerate a few of the silver linings of this challenging time.

I’ve spent a lot of time with my children and husband.  We were already a foursome that spent a lot of time together (and it’s my introversion that guides this, sometimes to my and our detriment, I’m aware) but it’s been more lately.  Matt rarely leaves the house, and I don’t do so for anything other than what’s required (work, school, sports).

I’ve read a lot of books. I will summarize my favorites of 2016 towards the end of this year, but right now I’m still reeling from the glory that is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.  Extraordinary.

I’ve learned who my true friends are. More on that in that post.  Yes.

I feel deeply grateful.  For our health (the distinction between this injury and illness is something I think about constantly), for our families, for the friends who’ve shown up.  For so, so, so much.

One of the questions I’m asked most often is what my favorite quote is.  I usually demur, saying something about how I can’t pick one.  And I can’t, that’s true.  But these words from Rebecca Wells (from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – no, I am not a snob about where I find wisdom!) have a claim to be my favorite.  I’m not surprised they’re in my mind a lot lately.  Lately as in several times a day. I recently shared the brief passage by Wells that I adore on Instagram:

I will do my best to give thanks to gifts strangely, beautifully, painfully wrapped.

I will.  I am.

Summer 2016

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I think this is my favorite photo from the summer.  Sunset, no filter, July 4th, Marion, Massachusetts.

Summer 2016 was uneventful and calm until the end, when it was far too eventful.  June, July, and the first half of August held lots of family time and a bunch of no-child time and many books and runs.  Summer was a reminder of how deeply blessed I am on the friendship front, as I was lucky enough to spend time with some of the women I love the most in this world. It also reminded us of how fortunate we are, and of the line we walk on a daily basis.  Despite difficulty at the end of the summer, we turn into September more viscerally aware of our good fortune than before.

I suppose challenges have a way of reminding us of all that’s good.

June started out with coding camp for Whit, then had hockey camp for Grace (meet my children), and then they spent 3 weeks with my parents doing sailing and tennis.  Matt and I spent weekends down there.  What a privilege to spend long empty days with both my parents and my children.  We had a marvelous reunion with my sister, her husband, and daughters, and all four cousins on my side of the family were together.  Then Grace and Whit went off to sleepaway camp for 3.5 weeks.  Matt and I laid pretty low during this time, weekdays working and weekends at the ocean.  We played tennis, sailed, swam, and read a lot of books.

We had a magical dinner with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jessica.  She, her husband, Matt, my parents, and I had a relaxed, happy, wine-soaked dinner.  We debated and discussed and laughed and reminisced.  I’m grateful beyond words for her company on this road, the truest kindred spirit I’ve ever met.  I just wish we saw each other more.

I spent a weekend in Shelter Island with two of my three college roommates.  This was our second annual visit and it was even more spectacularly wonderful than the last one.  We swam off a boat, we watched a thunderstorm roll in, we played with one roommate’s small children, we laughed so hard our stomachs hurt.

I read a lot of books, and will write a post about them shortly.  A lot of great fiction, as was my plan heading into the summer.

We had a week with Matt’s family in Vermont, which was joyful, exuberant, noisy, full of waterskiing and tubing.  Matt’s parents had all three sons and all six grandchildren together. A rare treat.

And then the summer ground to a quick, sudden halt.

Matt tore his hamstring severely while waterskiing. Then Whit was diagnosed with suspected Lyme and treated.  The last couple of weeks of August were not our best.  Matt had surgery on his hamstring (the injury was both significant and unusual).  He reacted poorly to the  drugs he was on after surgery and fainted not once but twice (both times I caught him) on the last day of August at home.  We had two 911 calls, and the second resulted in ambulance transport to the ER.  He was gray, clammy, and not fully awake.  I was very scared.  After many hours ruling lots of things out, they think he had a reaction to the medication, both anesthetic and pain killers.

Matt is resting quietly as I write this.  Our children are healthy and Whit’s responded well to his Lyme treatment.  I feel tired and deeply thankful at the same time.  I have Pam Houston in my mind:

I was breathless and frightened by the frailty of miracles, and full of the fact of our lives

I hope you are all entering fall with awareness of your blessings, many happy memories from the summer, and some good books under your belt. Beginning September full of the fact of your life.  I know I am.

 

camp drop off

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Another year.  Another camp drop off.  Her sixth summer, and his fourth.  The camp I adore.

Another reminder of the dizzying speed with which this world is spinning, with which the years are flying by.

Three years ago I wrote that I love right now more than I have any other moment of my life.  And that is still true.  I still love right now more than any other moment.  That fact is heartening, yes, but it’s also bittersweet: the years with Grace and Whit at home grow shorter, the shadows behind us lengthen.  I feel the same way about that indelible fact as I do about looking into their echoingly empty rooms: it’s like pushing on a bruise.  I can’t avoid the reminders of this life’s breathtaking beauty or its keen sorrow, nor the ineluctable drumbeat sound of time’s passage.

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The truth is it was a difficult drop off.  There were some tears, which had also filled the days leading up to the 21st.  I wasn’t entirely prepared for these tears, this anxiety, this fear.  My children are getting older, camp is a familiar, joyful place – where was this uncertainty and clinginess coming from? Maybe it’s just about age and stage, as I’ve described before, a last gasp of attachment before the children (the teenager in particular) push off for the other shore for good.

It was a difficult morning, last Thursday.  I left even though I was being begged not to.  As we drove down the Cape, I was sad, confused, reminded yet again that the minute I think I have understood this life – her sixth summer, his fourth, we’ve got this! – I’m shown that in fact the only constant is change.

What I do know is that her cabin – Courageous – is well-named.  I know that she and Whit (who, in case you’re wondering, despite some challenges last summer, bounded into his cabin and shooed us out before his bed was even made) are in excellent hands. I know they will flourish. I know that even if there is some homesickness, the opportunity to face our difficulties and triumph is one not to be squandered.  We watched Grace do it last fall with cross-country, and I’m confident she will again.  In fact maybe the point is this discomfort; without some sorrow and some tears, we wouldn’t be maximizing this summer opportunity. Maybe. I am not sure. I know I miss my little soul mate, and her entertaining brother around whom everyday is a celebration. I miss them, but this is the right thing for them. So, courageous all, we forge head, separated by miles but connected by the raveling red yarn that ties our hearts.

The struggle and the beauty

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this picture, which I took yesterday morning and shared on Instagram, reminds me of the photograph below

I have written about how I listen to On Being podcasts in the morning when I run.  I do so at 1.5x, a detail that Matt thinks is a metaphor for my whole life.  Last week, I listened to Brene Brown talking with Krista Tippett.  She said many things that made me think, but among them was the assertion that “hope is a function of struggle.”  She goes on: “You know, the moments I look back in my life and think, God, those are the moments that made me, were moments of struggle.”

I agree with this on an instinctual level.  It also reminded me instantly of Freud’s beautiful quote that “the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful,” and of this much-less beautiful post I wrote many years ago on the topic.  It seems fitting to repost it here today.  I’m aware that Matt and I are coming to the end of the particular season of struggle I wrote about and had in mind.  Our years with young children at home are short, and their challenges are different now, less physical, more emotional.  Of course the closing of this struggle will usher in new ones, and they’ve already begun to.

It has been six years almost exactly since I wrote this post (7/26/10).  The landscape of my life looks very different from it did that day.  But in other, essential ways, it is precisely the same.  The guiding principles and, yes, struggles, are unchanged. The beauty still exists in those struggles.  I know that even more surely know.

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. To enhance my beauty, I get most of my products from mcdaidpharmacy,ie Pharmacies shops, as recommended on mcdaidpharmacy.ie, based on your skin type.   The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.

don’t count anyone out

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Whit at bat.  He is #3.  In case you are curious, Babe Ruth played #3 for the Yankees.

This is Whit’s fourth year playing Little League in our town.  For the last three years he played in the “minor leagues,” for the Giants.  They were not a winning team.  For three straight years, they were bottom of the league.  6 of 8 minor league teams go to the playoffs, and Whit never went.  This year he was drafted into the “major leagues,” onto the Yankees.  It’s not a small thing for this Red Sox family to cheer enthusiastically for the Yankees, but we have, all season.

It has not been, shall we say, a winning season. Whit’s decided he’s a bad luck charm for baseball.  Heading into the final game they were 2-13.  Some of the losses have been close and others have been heroic (12-0).  The team is great and the coaches are wonderful and Whit’s improving and mostly it’s been a great experience, despite a fairly unrelenting series of losses.  The boys enjoy each other’s company and I’m consistently struck by how they talk to each other, on the field and off.  The coaches are mostly long-time coaches, whose own kids have moved onto older teams but who stuck with it out of passion and interest in the game.  The season is short and the commitment is manageable.  The other parents are great, from a mix of schools and across our neighborhood.  I love it, and so, mostly, does Whit.

We all came to the last game of the season expecting to go out with a whimper.  Hoping to keep the game in the “close” rather than “painful” category.  But this team of scrappy, mostly rookie players turned it around.  They shocked everyone – their parents and their opponents – by winning.  This meant that the other team was knocked out of contention for the top spot.

Our town’s major league has five teams.  One goes to the “mayor’s cup” (and the team we beat in the final game no longer had that option) and the other four go to the playoffs.  So Friday’s playoff game was Whit’s first in four years of Little League.  The Yankees came back to win it again.

Tuesday is the championship game.  I’m aware that this model of play – where the team with the worst record by a long shot can be in the finals – is flawed.  Still, it’s fun, and I’m struck by the lessons that fill team sports.  And I don’t mean the lessons taught by overzealous parents and expensive club sports (I have much ambivalence about the way youth sports have developed in our country or at least in my region).  Even in local, town little league, the learnings abound.

First and foremost, never, ever, ever give up.  You may turn things around in the last game of a disastrous 16 game season, but that’s worth a lot.

Respect your teammates.  Everyone on this team contributes and it’s a marvel to see.  There are no freeloaders.  Do your best.

Don’t goad others, for good or for bad.  Over the last few years, there have been boys at Whit’s school who have teased him for his poorly-performing teams.  I always encouraged him to try to ignore this line of talk, even though I know it stung. Similarly, we have always taught both kids not to draw attention to self when playing well (for example, dramatically celebrating goals is not ok in our house).  You can feel good and celebrate with your team.  But I know that Whit’s not teasing the kids whose teams he knocked out.

I did not play team sports as a kid, and so I’m learning all these things alongside Grace and Whit.  Hockey and cross-country have provided powerful lessons, and this season of baseball has too.  I’m grateful.