everyday life

Books are the best present

Books are, without exception or doubt, my go-to present.  The holidays are hurtling towards us, and as I do every year, I’m starting to amass gifts for the people in my life.  Last year I shared the books I was planning to give to various people in my life and I loved hearing your suggestions back.  Some of my go-to books are perennial and don’t vary year to year.  For example, when I have a small child to give a book to, I’m likely to choose Miss Rumphius, Roxaboxen, Space Boy, and the others in the small-child category from last year’s post.  Equally, I often give Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume One or the work of Katrina Kenison (especially The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir) and Dani Shapiro (especially Devotion: A Memoir) to adults.

But on my list each year are also recent finds, either by me or by my children.  So, here are a few books we will be giving this year.  I’d love to hear what’s on your list.

For children (mostly older, though it’s worth noting that my kids, 9 and 12, still like picture books):

Rosie Revere, Engineer (Andrea Beaty) – Both Grace and Whit love this funny, inspiring tale of young Rosie and her unquenchable desire to invent things.  She’s briefly daunted by negative feedback but bounces back with positive input from a mentor.  I love this book and recommend it to children young and old of both genders.

Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun (Joshua Glenn) – To call Whit obsessed with this book is a ridiculous understatement.  We’ve been giving this as a present to any and all birthday parties all fall, and this year many boys close to our family will receive it under the tree.  The highlight of Whit’s fall, perhaps, was meeting Joshua Glenn in person.  The follow up book, UNBORED Games: Serious Fun for Everyone, is also excellent.

Amelia to Zora: Twenty-Six Women Who Changed the World (Cynthia Chin-Lee) – This book tells the story of 26 women whose lives and work impacted history.  The illustrations are a beautiful mixture of collage and drawing.  I’m always a fan of books that showcase the often under-reported achievements of women and I think Amelia to Zora does so in an approachable, entertaining way.

The Secret Series Complete Collection (Pseudonymous Bosch) – Whit has devoured this entire series with an enthusiasm I’ve not often seen.  A great gift for an elementary-school aged boy (or girl) who is looking for a world to dive into.

Grace for President (Kelly DiPucchio) – I wish the protagonist in this book wasn’t named Grace, since my adoration of the book (which my children share) has nothing to do with her name.  I cry every single time I read it.  Every. Single. Time.

I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Readers Edition) (Malala Yousafzai) – Grace loved this book and, having read it, was incredibly excited by and invested in Malala’s Nobel Peace Prize win.  Interesting and inspiring non-fiction for tween girls.

For adults:

Elements of Style: Designing a Home & a Life (Erin Gates) – This book would make a beautiful hostess gift and would please any design-minded woman on your list.  In addition, Erin’s voice is both hilarious and deeply honest and compelling.  I wrote a more complete review of my most-anticipated book of 2014 at Great New Books.

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (Anne Lamott) – I love every book of Anne Lamott’s I’ve ever read, and her newest is no exception.  Lamott manages to make me feel like she’s speaking directly to me, and as though she has access to the innermost reaches of my heart and mind.  I loved this book.

Dinner: A Love Story: It all begins at the family table (Jenny Rosenstrach) – This book isn’t new (though the companion volume, also wonderful, Dinner: The Playbook, is) but I love it and plan to give it often.  Jenny’s recipes are easy and delicious and more than anything, her philosophy is one I embrace.  I believe in family dinner and we do it whenever we can (though that’s certainly not every night, and I do think that the outsize pressure to have family dinner every night can be punitive to mothers).

It’s been a year of fantastic novels!  If you have a novel-lover on your list, I recommend All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (reviewed here), Euphoria by Lily King (mentioned very briefly here), Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (reviewed here), and Lila by Marilynne Robinson (reviewed here).

What books are you giving this holiday season?

Disclosure: these are affiliate links

Ghosts

We have lived in our house for a long time.  We moved in in the summer of 2001 with plans to stay here for a few years before moving on.  As it turns out, we are still here.  This fact has several ramifications on our daily life, almost all good.  One in particular is on my mind lately.  This house is full to the rafters with memories.  Every room holds ghosts.  This is the house in which we celebrated our first anniversary.  It is the house in which I sat two days later and watched the television coverage of 9/11, my new husband in LA, having flown out the night before instead of that morning .  It’s the house to which we brought home both of our babies from the hospital.  These walls have witnessed joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, first birthday parties and baby showers and engagement celebrations and many tantrums and even more glasses of wine.

Dec06.Grace writing (1)

I thought of this the other day when I stood behind Grace in her room as she rubbed cream into her face before bed.  I could not see myself over her head in the mirror because she is almost as tall as I am now.  Suddenly the image of her 4 year old self, standing in the same spot in the room, concentrating hard to write her name, spindly letters sprawling across the paper on the easel, almost knocked me over.  The Margaret Atwood poem that was the preface to my college thesis, Spelling, rose to my mind:

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

IMG_0854

The next morning I walked into Whit’s room to find him sitting cross-legged in the yellow-upholstered glider that stands in the corner of his room, reading a chapter book.  I spent so many hours in that glider, rocking him, nursing him, watching the moon out the window of his room.  And here he sat, buzz-cut, almost 10, reading to himself as he rocked quietly back and forth.

The past is animate in every corner of this house.  I sat in the kitchen rocking chair with a week-old Grace on my lap, looking mutely at my doula and nodding silently as she encouraged me to seek help for my already-overwhelming post-partum depression.  I labored by myself with Whit in the darkness of night in our bedroom, pacing back and forth, Ina May’s book open at the foot of our bed.  I have taken more pictures than I can count of Grace and Whit with their grandparents on the yellow couch in our living room.  We have celebrated Thanksgivings, Christmases, and hundreds of family Sunday dinners at our oval mahogany dining table.

I’ve written often about how time confounds me, about the ways that the past rises up through the present, augmenting and haunting it at the same time.  This is something I experience on a daily basis in my own home. The past and the present are layered together in a way that enriches my everyday life and tints it with sorrow at the same time.  When you’re this aware of the past, it seems to me, there’s an inevitable thread of loss and longing that is sewn through your days.  While I don’t think this is true merely because I’ve lived in my house a long time, I do think I confront specific and highly-textured reminders of what was more frequently because of that.

Even now, as I write this, I’m sitting  in the room where I paced for so many hours, a colicky Grace in the baby Bjorn, hoping she would finally fall asleep.  I am looking out the window at the tree whose branches I watch cartwheel through the seasons every year.  Down the hall is the bathroom in whose tub a baby Whit giggled, his plump body in a starfish-patterned bath seat.  When I walk downstairs I will wade through memories from over 13 years.  And the ghosts who populate those memories make me simultaneously sad, grateful, and intensely aware of my own life.

Time folds like an accordion

10632427_1547626918784233_332891533_n

On Friday, Grace ran her first cross-country meet.  She was nervous, I was not there, and she did well.  She did really well. I met her after the meet and we went straight to the airport to pick up her dearest friend from camp, J.  J is the daughter of my old and dearest friend, Jess, who I met at the same camp, when we were 12.  Grace and J were born 12 weeks apart to the day.  Their firm friendship, independent from ours though inextricably woven through it, makes me happier than I can articulate.

While waiting to pick Grace up, I tweeted that I was collecting my daughter from her first cross-country race.  Lacy tweeted back, “This makes me teary. The colt legs, the pony tail. Late light on the towpath. Go, Graciegirl, go!” That message sent me immediately and viscerally back into the fall light with my friend, a fellow redhead, walking along the towpath, the autumn light on our head.  Then and now collapsed together and I cried, alone in the car.

Grace arrived, I met her coaches, and we headed to the airport.  As we walked in, Grace took off running, her cross-country jersey billowing behind her, her ponytail bouncing.  She’s nearly as tall as I am now, long and lean, all planes and sharp angles, full of energy and a blooming, hopeful tentativeness that is both familiar and, somehow, sad.  I took the picture above and stood, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me, as I watched her go.  Always, they are running away.  My own cross-country days, in the woods of New Hampshire, among trees whose leaves flamed and then dropped to the ground, felt animate around me, both yesterday and a lifetime ago.  It’s her turn now.  And rather than making me sad, it feels right.  I am grateful to be here to cheer her on.  I can’t wait to go to her first actual meet and to watch her take off, as my mother did so many years ago.

And the seasons, they go round and round …

09.02.NYshower.LMR&Julia.jpg

We got to the gate early.  As I watched Grace wait for her friend I found that my eyes were brimming with tears.  When my dearest friend’s daughter walked off the airplane towards my own willowy tween, I remembered holding her as a newborn, her tiny self curled on top of my belly which was swollen with Grace.  Over and over again, memory confuses and confounds me with its power: how can that moment be so far gone, never to come again, when it also feels sturdy, still here?

I trailed the two of them back to the car, Grace still in her cross-country uniform, J carrying her own bag, their lanky bodies almost exact mirrors of each other, and thought that they are now the age that Jess and I were when we met for the first time.  I also remembered the day I first discovered I was pregnant with Grace, February 15, 2002, when the first phone call I made was to Jess.  I will never forget that conversation, my whispered, fearful question, and her warm, loving answer.  And from that day forward there were these two girls, whose lives I hope will be joined forever by what they shared even before they were born.  I imagine them when they are our age, hopefully still as beloved as they are now, and it makes me glad, relieved, breathless with wonder.

It is so much, all of it: my youth, then, her youth, now, running, the leaves turning, friendship, history, all that has happened before and is still here.  Time folds like an accordion, then kisses now and spreads apart again, and the past surfaces through the present from time to time, enriching it and reminding me of where I came from.  And always there is my startlingly tall daughter, running away, faster than I could ever imagine, her mahogany ponytail bouncing as the sun goes down.

Sometimes this life is so beautiful it is almost unbearable.

I wrote this post last weekend, but this morning it occurs to me that it nicely straddles September’s and October’s Here Year themes, time and friendship. 

Summer: long ago & some writing

One month ago today I picked Grace ad Whit up from sleepaway camp and turned 40.  It feels like that was a hundred years ago!  Today I just want to highlight a few writing- and web-related things that happened over the summer and recently.

WO-This-is-Ten-Art-2-300x200

This is Childhood, the book that Brain Child magazine published from our series about the various ages of childhood, is on sale this week for 40% off.  It’s just $6!  What a great birthday or holiday gift … just an idea.  I’m thrilled that my piece, This is Ten, an excerpt from the book (spoiler alert: it’s the end of the book) is on the site today and the link to purchase the book is easily available there.  I hope you will consider it!

 

photoI published Navigating by the Stars on Medium, a site I’ve come to really admire and respect.  For those who think I don’t write about Matt enough, here’s a rare example of a story all him.  It talks about our experience, a few months after we met, climbing Kilimanjaro.  I am proud of this piece and hope you like it.

 

photo(1)I was thrilled when Tabitha of Team Studer profiled me as one of her Moms Next Door.  Her interview, which includes a lot of pictures, is here.

 

 

 

Also: are you on Instagram?  I love it and even when I wasn’t writing here I was sharing photos there.  Please come find me!

This is 40: the thick, hot heart of life’s grand pageant

photo

The last night of my 30s, at the summer camp I went to for many years and which both Grace and Whit now attend and love.

I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago.  On the actual day I woke up early at my parents’ house on the Massachusetts shore and drove with Matt an hour to the camp where I spent 9 happy, sunny years as a child and teenager.  We picked up Grace and Whit, who had been away for 3.5 weeks.  And we drove home.  I get carsick, so this was perhaps more time than I would have optimally spent in the car, but who cares.  When we got home we unloaded their trunks and I commenced what would eventually be 5 loads of laundry.  I actually love doing laundry (the smell, the creating-order-out-of-chaos thing), and though this was maybe a bit more than I would have chosen to do, I didn’t mind.  Grace, Whit and I visited one of our favorite places, the tower in Mount Auburn Cemetery and the fairy stream.  Then we had a simple family dinner at our dining room table and I listened to the children regale us with stories from camp.

As is often the case, my birthday wound up to be a perfect reflection of where I am right now.

So 40 was all about my real life.

A couple of weeks before my birthday, I shared a photograph of what I was reading on Instagram.  The pile included magazines, Reviving Ophelia, and Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?  A friend commented that those two books revealed that I was in the “panini years” (a great expression – pressed between the generations).

And oh yes, I am.  These are the in between years, the thick, hot heart of life’s grand pageant, busy and rich and exhausting, overflowing with demands, responsibilities, and love.

Life is very far from perfect – there are work stresses and health questions and far too many logistics to coordinate – but it is wonderful.  I was ambivalent about turning 40, I’ll be honest.  Some of that had to do with vain and not vain health reasons, but most of it was about my deep discomfort and unease with time’s relentless forward motion.  Reminders of time passing do not make me happy.  But here I am, on the other side, and I am so glad to be here.  Life has never been more dense with feeling, more full of magic.

40 is a time of contradiction and complexity.  It realizing in a deep way that these really are the days of miracle and wonder.  It is knowing this season is finite.  40 is solemn about what is coming and grateful for what is, while for the work and stress I normally just use CBD hemp flower products to feel better.

40 is toggling between John Denver and Katy Perry on the car stereo, knowing the words to both Cat Stevens and Taylor Swift songs, having strong memories associated with both CSNY and One Direction.

40 is overseeing homework and driving to sports practices and games.  It is recognizing the wisdom in the comment someone made years ago that some of the best conversations with adolescent children happen in the car.

40 has answered many – most? – of the big questions that haunted my young adulthood. 40 is about embracing the reality that those answers have built.

40 is being glad that my children still want still good night hugs and the sweet dream head rub before bed. And on the off chance they ask to sleep in my bed when Matt is traveling, it’s always saying yes.  Because this may be the last time they ask that.

40 is more emails about sad, scary illness news or chemo than emails with baby announcements.

40 is being absolutely fine that hockey practice is every single Friday night.  Which means no Friday night adult plans, ever.  40 is spending (a lot) more time with the parents of the kids my children play sports with any other adults.  And 40 is loving that.

40 is female friendship, and knowing how essential the few women who are truly walking through life by my side are.  It is taking time to nourish those friendships, to ask questions, to listen, to remember birthdays, and doctor’s appointments, and important dates.

40 is knowing that the ferris wheel of life is ticking ever forward, and that this is probably the tippy-top.  It is watching the decline of some in the generation ahead of us and the blooming of those in the generation behind us.  It is taking a breath and looking around at this spectacular view, and loving it, and knowing that it is changing even as I admire it.

40 is seeing my mother’s hands when I look at my own, and realizing that my daughter is much, much closer to being a college freshman than I am, and accepting that what I see in the mirror – a middle-aged woman – is who I am.

40 is recognizing that more years lie behind us as a family all living together than lie ahead, and existing every day in the shadow of the goodbyes and departures that loom.  40 is thinking parenting just keeps getting better, but also knowing that one day – sooner than I would like – this season will come to an abrupt end.

40 is having missed the window to start wearing red lipstick.  I always felt like it was too sophisticated and I would learn how to pull that off “later.”  Oops.  And now it’s too late.  40 is often trying on dresses to find them too short.  40 is still wearing a bikini, but not for long.

40 is learning to dance with the limp, as Anne Lamott says.  I have had a hip that’s bothering me all summer and abdominal pain (yes I am seeing a doctor and no, we have no answers yet) that shifts between absent and excruciating.  But I’m still running, and I’m still living my life.  I refuse to let this pain, and these questions, keep me from doing so.

40 is realizing that a birthday of chores and errands and a candlelit family dinner is exactly what I wanted.  It is understanding in a new, visceral way, that all I want is more of this.