everyday life

Alleluia

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Last week I shared a quote from Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous memoir, The Narrow Door, about the life that the cup can’t hold without spilling.  I shared a shard of the same quote on Instagram, and asked “is all writing an attempt to capture some of what spills over our cups?”  I suspect it is.  I know that that’s precisely the goal of this blog, of why I started doing this almost 10 years ago.

Then, on Sunday, we went to church for Easter and I heard one of my favorite words over and over again: alleluia!  alleluia!  I kept thinking of the drops of life that spill from our memories – really, the torrent of life that we don’t recall.  That flood of drops is full of alleluias, isn’t it?

A few of mine, lately:

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For Whit’s backpack as he headed to Florida to visit Matt’s parents.  His four friends who sleep with him, still, a copy of Make magazine, and the new Rick Riordan hardback book.  Folks, this is my son in a single photo.  Alleluia.

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The crocuses in our backyard.  I love these for several reasons.  First, because I did not plant them, but they come up every year, this time, our 16th in this house.  Second, because I would not have noticed them unless Matt told me to go look.  And third, because they survived the late-March snowstorm we got in Boston and kept shining, bright, a harbinger of spring, a reminder that we are coming around again, always.  Alleluia.

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Picking Grace and Whit up at Logan after their week in Florida.  I felt grateful for the generosity of their grandparents, grateful for the intimate and comfortable relationship they share with those grandparents, grateful to have them back with me.  Alleluia.

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An upset win by Whit’s team in the quarterfinals of their playoffs.  Which Grace, Matt and I watched with my parents by our side.  I felt grateful for these grandparents, for their presence and nearness, for the relaxed and joyful dinner we had all together after the game.  Alleluia.

the bright freight of memory

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On the morning when we bought a talking camel, December 2011, Jerusalem, Israel

“Okay, buddy, one more page.”

Whit nodded and kept reading his current book, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods.  We were sitting in my bed reading together, which is always a highlight of my day.  How long will he eagerly run downstairs and jump into bed to read next to me?  I stood up and he turned down the corner of the the page and slowly we headed up to his bedroom.

He climbed into his lower bunk and pulled up his covers as I turned off the overhead light and switched on the nightlight, which is in the shape of a Bruins zamboni and was a Christmas present from Grace last year.  Whit made sure he had the four special animals that he sleeps with.  I kneeled by his bed.  I love bedtime.  Every single time I tuck a child in and say “I’ll see you in the morning” I am aware of what an incandescent privilege it is.

I leaned over to kiss his forehead as he whispered the same prayers he says every night.

“I love you.  I love you.  I love you.”

He sat up in surprise. The sing-songy voice of a camel that we bought in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives spoke from the top bunk.

“Daddy?”

Matt’s laugh erupted from the top bunk as he sat up.  Both Whit and I started laughing too, and I heard Grace’s footsteps on the stairs as she dashed up to join us.  An aside: much like Whit reading with me in bed, another thing I am clinging to, and loving, even as I know its days are numbered is Grace thundering to join the rest of the family when she hears us laughing.  This reminds me of knowing the tide’s coming in and building sandcastles anyway …

Grace clambered into bed with Whit, and Matt joined them once he’d climbed down the ladder.  He was still squeezing the camel, whose robotic voice kept saying “I love you.  I love you.  I love you.”

Ordinary life is a slurry of mundane moments which is occasionally dotted with a glittering experience of dazzling beauty.  I know that being aware of and awake to that slurry allows us to see the glimmer.  I also know that it’s unusual for me to be aware, as I live a moment, that it is one of those that I’ll think back to and remember. In fact I write a lot about how complex and unknowable is the algorithm through which experience becomes memory.  Last week’s laughter-filled bedtime was a rare experience of knowing even as I lived a series of minutes that they would become a cherished stone in my memory’s pocket,  burnished from being held, turned over, recalled.

Will it be one of Grace’s and Whit’s, a moment that stands out in their recollections of their childhood? I can’t know. I think of the Pat Conroy quote from The Prince of Tides that I used as an epigraph to an essay I wrote in high school:

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

I hope that sliver of time last week, the minutes we all shared in Whit’s nightlight-lit room, laughing hard and remembering a chilly, windy morning on the Mount of Olives when the children bought talking camels will be a part of Grace and Whit’s bright freight of memory of these years.  It will be for me.

 

So taut I might snap

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It has been a very difficult few weeks in my world.  Mostly work-related, but I feel worn down and stretched thin and generally as though I am about to fall apart.  I read my friend Amanda’s piece, Love, Doubt, and Guilt Dance on the Head of a Pin at exactly the right moment.  Last Wednesday night, to be specific.  I’ve been dropping balls.  I’ve been snappy.  I haven’t been sleeping.  I haven’t been writing.  I feel pretty terrible all around.  I read her piece, particularly these lines:

It’s inevitable that we spend moments pulling ourselves taut; it’s how we grow. Stretching doesn’t make us weaker or put us at risk of breaking, it makes us stronger. We lean into work, surrender ourselves to intimacy, devote time to our kids, these are the ways that we nurture the different parts of who we are and the people we love. It isn’t easy and I don’t think any of it comes without debt or compromise, but each instance of enduring the tautness and learning from it helps us understand the things that we want to hold on to and the ways that we can contribute.

Oh, God, I read this paragraph and started to sob, alone in my office with the rain pelting against the windows and the rapidly-darkening street outside.  Is this tautness, this feeling of holding my very life together with held breath and wobbling scotch tape, helping me grow?  I sure hope so. One thing I don’t feel a smidgen of right now – not even a little bit – is ease.  Not at all.  I feel tired, and wired, and anxious, and sad, and overwhelmed.

I loathe complaining (just ask my children: there are a few surefire ways to set me off and one is complaining). The truth of my feeling not-at-all-good is at war inside my head with my own awareness of my tremendous good fortune.  How can I be whining, when so much is so good?  How is it possible that I can admire the beauty around me – and I do – and still feel like this?  I don’t have answers for that, though I can’t stop thinking of what Leslie Jamison writes on the back of Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite book of essays, The Givenness of Things:

…Robinson’s determination to shed light on … complexities – the solitude that endures inside intimacy, the sorrow that persists beside joy – marks her as one of those rare writers genuinely committed to contradiction as an abiding state of consciousness.

Contradiction as an abiding state of consciousness.  Maybe that’s what this is.  The darkness and light that mark my life are shifting like tectonic plates, creating small earthquakes inside of me.  They are both still there.  Even on days – weeks, months – when the darkness feels all-consuming, when I feel brittle and exhausted and spent, I have to remember that the good exists, flickering like a pilot light.  I need to trust it will return.  And I do.

honoring the end as much as the beginning

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Silver bells from our tree lined up after we took them down on 1/3/16.  Time for some silver polish?

On January 3rd, we took down our tree.  I woke up that morning and went for a run during a glorious sunrise, and then came home to a regular morning of coffee, laundry, and, eventually, ornament removal.  And all morning I felt sad.  Really sad.  Like, sitting in the chair by myself with tears rolling down my face sad.

I couldn’t get out of my own way.  Our tree was coming down, and we were wrapping up another Christmas.  Our 14th as a family, our 11th as a family of four.  I’m a nostalgic person, prone to melancholy – we’ve established that – but this sorrow was unusually acute, even for me.  How many more years do we have when the children will relish the quiet, slow week at home with us between Christmas and New Year’s?  How long until they no longer embrace enthusiastically our family traditions, like celebrating New Year’s Eve as a family of four?  I’m not a fool.  I know these days are numbered.

It was my wise friend Julie Daley who gave me words for what I was feeling.  On Instagram she noted that what I was doing was honoring the ending of something, and she said that always carried grief with it.  Her words hit me with the force of a sledgehammer.  Yes.  That’s precisely it.  I’m a porous person, that’s not news to anyone who knows me, but still, sometimes I’m bewildered by how bittersweet this life can be and by how much loss is contained in every single day.

Even as I write this I realize how tiny this goodbye is.  Everyday life is full of farewells, and if we’re fortunate, they’re mostly small.  I thought of my friend Lisa often during this Christmas season, a friend who walked with all of us who knew her right to life’s final farewell.  Her courage in that process astonishes me still.  I suspect it always will.  Bidding goodbye to another holiday is a huge privilege, of course, compared to her experience.  Compared to anything real.  I know that.  Trust me, I do, and still, I’m sad.

But I’ve been musing over this notion now for weeks, the concept of honoring the ends of things.  The idea that the end is as sacred as the beginning, while something that feels deeply true to me, also seems somehow counter-cultural in American life, with our quasi-obsession with newness and the start of things.  I think of a vase of flowers, drooping and faded, or of those who are elderly, or of even the darkest, end days of the year.  All of these things make me feel some vague sense of unease, but as I get older I also recognize their particular beauty.

I think also of Whit’s off-the-cuff comment, one I think of almost daily, that Grace gets the firsts, but he gets the lasts.  How true that is.  And both are vital, essential, powerful. We are marked and shaped as surely by the beginnings of things as we are by their end.  The start of something (birth being the most fundamental example) is holy, no question about it, but so too is the end (death, here, in this analogy).

Despite our societal discomfort with endings – and my own – I think witnessing the individual losses and farewells and losses is crucial to fully living this life.  At least, for me, there’s no other choice.  So thank you, Julie, for helping me understand the grief that is so much a part of my daily experience. It is this: honoring the ends.  I don’t love how this sorrow feels as it courses through my days, but I feel certain that it makes the joy more vivid.

Saying yes

Years ago I wrote about not understanding what people meant when they called their children their greatest teachers.  And then I wrote about suddenly getting what that means.  I wrote about that on Karen’s beautiful blog.  And Grace and Whit are still teaching me things, over and over again.  Most recently, the lesson was about the difference between saying no and saying yes.

I read Shonda Rhimes’ Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person at the end of last year and it made me think.  A lot.  I fretted: was I just saying no to things too much?  I talked about this reaction, and this question, with Grace and Whit.  Maybe I needed to start saying yes to social engagements more, to going out?  What did they think?  Was I saying no too much?

They looked at me in abject horror.  I stared back, surprised by their reaction.  “What?”

“No.”  Grace said firmly, shaking her head.

“Mummy,” Whit interjected.  “You aren’t saying no to things.  Don’t think of it like that.  You’re saying yes to us.”

And once again, I was reminded of that when I stared into these two faces.  Grace, olive skin, brown eyed, her features angular and lean and those of a young woman now, and Whit, blue eyed, fair, blond.  I looked at their two cleft chins, just like mine, the planes of their faces as familiar as my own.

Right.

I’m saying yes to them.  Yes, I am.  And to writing, and reading, and sleeping, and the things I’ve chosen as my priorities.  But most of all, I’m saying yes to them.  To Grace and Whit.

What are you saying yes to, these days, this new year?