everyday life

Farewell. Alleluia.

kids porch June 2016

Monday evening, June 6 – not the classic both-in-white photo, because they didn’t have the same last day.

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June 4, 2015, their last last day together until high school

Today, we’re out of school.  Actually yesterday was Grace’s last day, and today is Whit’s.  It is the first year in a great many that they haven’t had the same last day of school.  Yesterday I spent some time wandering down memory lane, falling headfirst into the tunnel of nostalgia where I spend too much of my time.  This 2012 post has many years of photos.  And that was already four years ago.  I can feel time whistling by my ears, I really can. A tired cliche. And an outrageously deep truth.

I don’t have a fifth grader and a seventh grader anymore.  This year is over, finished, a door is closed.

Farewell.

And, also, allelulia: summer!  tennis! ice cream! camp! sleeping in! reading books!  There is so much to celebrate and I love summer.  We consciously under-schedule our summer and make very few commitments (other than sleepaway camp, which both kids go to and love), and as a result there are long empty days and evenings on the porch with family.  I can’t wait.

But I also feel sad at what’s over.  Farewell and alleluia coexist for me in inextricable ways.  This year, with its particular drop-off routines and rhythms, was a good one.  Just yesterday morning, Grace, Whit, Matt and I were having breakfast in the kitchen.  Grace yawned before complimenting the fried egg I’d made her while trashing the one her father had made her a few days before.  We all laughed but then I said, “just wait, guys, you’ll miss these mornings, all four of us in the kitchen.”  I poured myself another cup of coffee and explained that it wouldn’t be long until they would be homesick – at least a little – for this particular morning, drooping peonies on the island, a friend egg and Life cereal for Grace and a waffle and some yogurt for Whit.

The thing is, I already am.  I am nostalgic for yesterday.

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The first last day they shared, June 9, 2010

This photo makes me physically ache.  Now they’re tall and lanky – Grace is within an inch of my height – and becoming the people they are.  Not that they always weren’t – in fact one of my primary learnings about parenthood is the way they are who they are from the minute they arrive – but they are young people now.  Childhood itself is in Grace’s rearview mirror, and it’s soon going to be there for Whit, too.

Farewell.

They are smart, and funny, and wise beyond their years.  They are sometimes also moody and irritable, and they leave dirty socks around the house and forgot where they put their water bottles.  But they are the light of my life, no question about it, and I love who they are more every single day.

Alleluia.

Ease doesn’t look like I expected it to

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Lexington Battle Green, 5:15am on Patriot’s Day

I should have expected the slap-down from the universe.  I really should have.

In March 2009 I wrote about fragility.  “At any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger, either through an accident or through development of illness. When thinking about this post last night, I thought initially: I have chosen not to live in fear of these risks.”  As usual, I write my posts a few days in advance.  The day it went live, Whit ended up in the ER with his second allergic reaction to tree nuts.  It was scary.

In May 2012, I wrote about the 10 things I wanted Grace to know when she turned 10.  One of them was “Don’t lose your physical fearlessness.   Please continue using your body in the world: run, jump, climb, throw.”  Days later, she broke her collarbone.

Over the weekend, I wrote about ease, and the ways in which my life right now is the opposite of ease and, perhaps, the embodiment of it.  The post went up on Monday morning.  Monday itself was an exceedingly bumpy day in our family’s life.  I thought almost all day of my friend Launa‘s image of a family of four as a shopping cart.  When one wheel’s wonky, you just can’t drive smoothly or straight.  Monday we had four wheels out of joint.  Which meant, of course, we went nowhere fast and with great aggravation.

It was, on the surface, a great day.  We got up at 4:40 to go to the reenactment of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War in Lexington.  I’ve never seen it before, and it was both fascinating and unexpectedly powerful.  But that early wakeup put everybody on edge for the rest of the day.

We watched the marathon some, I worked a lot of the day, the kids both finished homework they had not gotten to over the weekend.  Nothing specifically went wrong.  But everyone was crabby – myself included, most certainly – and there was a lot of short-tempered snapping.  Dinner was filled with tense silence and crossed arms.

I didn’t feel ease.  I felt frustration and a generalized feeling of anger and exhaustion.  How could one early morning derail us all like this? Why are we all living so close to the edge right now (all the time)?  Why does everything feel so hard?

As it often has, reading saved us.  After some dish-clanging and raised-voice dinner cleanup, we all retired upstairs.  Grace and Whit showered.  I did some email.  Before long, I was in my favorite place, sitting in bed with a child on each side of me.  We were all breathing, we were all reading, we were all together.  The dissent and aggravation and tears of the day dissolved in the face of those irrefutable truths.

This is what I’m learning, finally:

This is what ease is.

This is what grace is.  They’re not the same thing, but they are, at least in my head, related. They are also some of the many, many manifestations of the way life is not necessarily what we expect it to be.

Ease is not never being aggravated.  It’s coming back to center more quickly.  I think of the round-bottomed glasses my parents have on their boat, which wobble but don’t actually tip over.  It’s breathing through the discomfort.  It’s trusting that the light will return, even when it’s dark.  It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would, ease, but it’s still here, in every step, in every breath, in every moment.

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.