Things you do when you are an adult

I am turning 39 this summer.  I have a 10 year old and an 8 year old.  I drive an SUV, own a house, have been married almost 13 years, and have a graduate degree.  It’s pretty hard to deny that I’m an adult.  I’m constantly surprised, however, by what it takes to make me feel like a grown up.

Some of the realization comes in the Big Moments.

This past summer I sat at the funeral of my last grandparent, and felt the ferris wheel hitch forward and the car I’m sitting in lurch closer to the top.  I have watched friends lose both parents and pregnancies.  I’ve seen the way illness and misfortune –  mostly in the shape of cancer, in my life – can strike suddenly, shockingly, and leave everyone who witnesses it reeling.

But, truthfully, a lot of the a-has happen in the Small Moments.

It is the night I went out to dinner with a friend and learned that her husband had forgotten the stickers with which her son was supposed to make Valentine’s for his class in Vermont.  It was February 13th.  We drove by my house on the way home and I ran upstairs to gather up all of our leftover stickers, and brought them down to her.

It is the ease with which I cook for my children now, and way I feel my own mother’s hands guiding my own as I move casually around the kitchen.

It is the quiet hum inside the car when Matt, Grace, Whit and I are driving, after dinner, to New Hampshire to ski with friends and I realize that everything I care about most in the world – everything I truly need – is in this darkened car.

It is reading the alumni magazines of my high school, college, and business school classes, and noticing what my peers are doing: CEOs and Congressmen and heads of departments at hospitals.  It is taking my daughter, with a broken collarbone, to see an orthopedist who is the younger brother of a friend from high school.

It is driving through Harvard Square on move-in day and wondering aloud to my husband that the college freshman are closer to our childrens’ age.  It is his baffled response: “That has been true for a while now, Linds.”

I suspect I’m not alone in this disbelief about my age.  Is it too scary, to accurately locate myself on life’s ferris wheel?  I write about that wheel all the time, about nearing the top, about how gorgeous the view is from here, about how I can see ahead and how quickly we’ll descend.  And I do believe that, and feel it – fervently, truthfully, often.  But at the same time I struggle to accept that I am actually almost 40.  I still think of my parents as 40; it was only five minutes ago that I ran around the back yard in a sundress while my handsome father, smiling under his brown mustache, gazed at his birthday windsurfer leaning against the wall of our house.  How can that be almost thirty years ago?

What is this about?  Is it stubborn denial?  Do we all still think of ourselves as 18?  The aches in my back, weakness in my knee, and wrinkles on my face all speak to my actual age.  As do the, you know, children.  And yet.  And still.  In my head I’m always eighteen, dancing in the late-day sun amid a swirl of magnolias with the women who knew me then and still know me best.

Do you feel like a grown-up?  Why or why not?

 

 

What’s On Your …

I am always looking for ways to capture right now.  After all these, right now is my life, after all.  I found this meme on Ali Edwards’ beautiful blog, and loved it.  I’m so curious about what’s on … in your world right now too!

Vanity – I don’t have a vanity. I’m not totally sure what a vanity is?

Perennial to-do list – Laundry.  There is always laundry to do.  And Whole Foods.  I cannot walk out of that place without forgetting something.

Refrigerator Shelves – 1% milk, rice milk, Greek yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, pineapple, sliced up red pepper, a bottle of homemade green juice.

Itinerary – Our annual trip to Legoland this summer, and our traditional family trip to Vermont for a week in August.

Fantasy Itinerary – At a dinner recently a friend asked everyone to go around the table and say the one place they most want to visit.  That was easy for me: the Galapagos.  I want to go there, and soon, because I know my animal-obsessed daughter will love it.

Playlist – I don’t listen to music other than in the car (Mumford & Sons, James Taylor, One Day by Matisyahu, songs from Brave, The Story by Brandi Carlile, Home by Phillip Phillips) and when running (top 40 all the way: Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Pink).

Nightstand – A stack of magazines.  A framed picture of Matt and me at a friend’s wedding a month after we were married.  A heart-shaped glass dish that Grace gave me with chapsticks and ear plugs in it.  A copy of Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening.  An alarm clock.  A notepad and pen.

Workout Plan – 5:30am runs 4(ish) days a week.  Yoga or Pilates when I can figure out how to jam that in.  

iPhone – Instagram, Twitter, Words with Friends, Ruzzle.  I am lame and mostly use email and text.  So 2006!

Top 5 List – Poetry, the sky, baggy Lululemon studio pants, notes from Grace, Whit’s laughter.

Bucket List – Write a book, fly in a helicopter, go to Alaska, St Petersburg, the Grand Canyon, be able to do a handstand in the middle of the room.

Mind – The bewildering state of the world, lines from poems by Stanley Kunitz and Adrienne Rich, whether my children will grow up into nuclear winter with a trashed environment and violence all around them, will I ever get my inbox under control, my grandfather as Princeton reunions near.

Blogroll –  Katrina Kenison, Amanda Magee, Le Catch, A First Sip (and so, so many others!)

Walls of your Favorite Room in Your House – A large memo board with photographs of Grace, Whit, my godchildren, my nieces and nephews, my bridesmaids, and my best friends as well as a couple of quotations (The Work by Wendell Berry), notes from three special people, and a string of small prayer beads.  A large framed print that says “LOVE” and three small prints that say, respectively, “we are all made of stars,” “peace, be still,” and “you are so loved.”

Liquor Shelf – Sauvignon blanc, French red wine, vodka, gin, tonic, Mount Gay rum, and ginger beer.  

Last Credit Card Statement – Lots of things.  Airline tickets, Whole Foods, crewcuts, Amazon.  I could go on.

Screensaver – Scrolling photographs from the last year in iPhoto.  I often sit and watch it when I return to my desk.

TV Every Night –The TV isn’t turned on every night.  When Matt’s home, he sometimes watches sports.  I’m waiting for Homeland to come back!

What’s on your …?

I’m going to be so proud to say I’m from Boston

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Several years ago, I admitted that it had taken me a long time to understand what people meant when they said their children were “their teachers.”  I finally understood.  And this past week I have learned anew what that means.  Over and over again, the things my children say and see startle me with their truth.  I have an endless appetite for their perspective, filtered through a lens so free of assumption and bias as to contain revelations.

Watching Grace and Whit take in the Marathon bombings and then the wild, intense events of Friday was both deeply touching to me and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.  For the Huffington Post, I wrote about what Friday morning was like.  It was surreal.  We woke up to a world that felt jaggedly separate from real life, to photographs of familiar streets deserted except for humvees and hundreds of police officers with long guns and heavy body armor, to an eerie silence punctuated by sirens and gunshots (we were able to hear the shots in Watertown from my open office window).

Friday night, exhausted from waiting and uncertainty, we sat down to dinner as a family.  As she often does, Grace said grace.  And her words moved me to tears.  It seemed like an adult was speaking.  She offered thanks to and asked for protection for all the policemen and doctors and first responders.  She asked for grace for those hurt and for the families of those who had died.  And then she said, “I feel really sad that it takes a tragedy like this to see all the good people and beautiful things in our life.”  My head jerked up, tears spilled down my cheeks, and I squeezed her hand.

The kids went to bed in one room, as they have several nights this week.  I tucked them into Whit’s bottom bunk together to read, and then returned to my desk.  A few minutes later, through the open door, I heard Grace say to Whit, “You know, you have to remember, that for every one evil person, there are ten good ones.  At least.”

On Saturday morning, the first thing we did was get in the car to go to our favorite breakfast spot, a diner in Watertown which had been at the center of the action on Friday.  The team from CNN was standing in front of it at one point.  I was happy to see that there was a line, that others, like us, had the impulse to go be in the world that we had feared just yesterday, to return with our business, our energy, our money to places that had suffered during the lockdown.

Whit, mumbling through a mouthful of chocolate chip pancake, threw his two most awful words at the attackers.  “They’re donkeyholes,” he said.  “Tionaries.”  (A few weeks ago he pronounced someone a “dictionary without the tionary,” and that second word has become his favorite sort-of-bad word.)

“Russia must be ashamed of them,” Grace added from across the table.  I nodded at her.  And later she offered, “When we go to Storyland or anywhere that’s not here, and people ask where we’re from, I’m going to be so proud to say Boston.  I know people will think: oh, that’s a strong city.”

After breakfast we came home and made brownies to bring to our local police station.  Grace made a thank-you card as the brownies baked.  Other than asking which color stripe came first in the flag (which I had to look up; the answer is red), she wrote it all without any prompting.  When the brownies had cooled off, we went to the police station.  We drove past Norfolk Street, and I felt the chill of something run up my spine, a reminder that even the most intensely familiar things, places, and people can contain unknowable, possibly terrifying terrain.

And then we went home for lunch with Matt and Whit, a haircut, a stop at the drycleaner, some family reading curled up on the couch.  All afternoon the air was heavy with my sense of the gossamer veil between this life and what we most fear, with my awareness of how much we take for granted.  As I have done so many times in my life, I squeezed my eyes shut and swore never to forget what a privilege it is, this normal, unexceptional life.  I whispered fiercely to myself: i thank you god for this most amazing day. 

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I am a runner from Boston

There are a very few things that I am deep in the marrow of my bones.  One of them is a Bostonian (I was born here, my parents live here, I met my husband here, my babies were born here, this is my home in the most essential sense of the word).  Another of them is a runner.

I am a runner from Boston.

I have been running in Boston for 30 years (part of why the photograph of Grace’s first road race so moved me is because when I was her age I was running regularly in 10K road races; the echoes and flashbacks are powerful).  I have run two halves but never a full marathon.  I’m not sure if my iffy knee could take it, unfortunately.  But if I ever do run a marathon, you know there’s no question which it would be.

On Tuesday morning, when I drove to school with Grace and Whit, we had had a conversation about fear.  We didn’t listen to the radio, because I knew what we’d hear, so I turned on a CD.  Immediately, Phillip Phillips’ Home flooded the car and tears filled my eyes.  So I turned it off and we talked.  Grace told me that she was scared.  I said I understood that.  But, I went on, to be scared and to cower is to let them – whoever they are – win.  I caught her eye in the rearview mirror and saw that she understood.  And, when I got home, I laced up my sneakers and went out for a run.

That day, and yesterday morning as I ran along the Charles River at dawn, I sensed that I was asserting something, claiming something, refusing to give something up.  I have run for as long as I can remember.  When I searched the archives of my blog for “running,” 10 pages of posts came up.  In many of them, my memories of running are braided so tightly around my memories of Boston and Cambridge as to be indistinguishable.

Running is as natural to me as breathing.  This week, my runs felt suddenly like an act laden with meaning as powerful as it is inchoate.  They felt like a statement of defiance and of optimism.  This is a running town, this is a proud town, this is a brave town.  We won’t stop running.

I’ve never run a marathon before.  Maybe next year is the year to do it.

 

City of my heart

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On Sunday, the day before Patriot’s Day and the Boston marathon, Grace ran her first road race.  On the marathon course.  I was in New York for work, so I missed it, but I was sent this fantastic picture.  My heart swelled with both pride and shock, because really, how can my baby be that old?  That tall?

On Monday, Patriot’s Day, as you know, there was an explosion at the Boston marathon.  That tall, lanky girl, for whom I think the word coltish may have been coined, dissolved into a puddle of anxiety.  I told both she and Whit what had happened the minute I heard (they were home from school, sitting in the room next to my office), mostly because I was so startled by the news.  She hovered around my office all afternoon, lurking, asking constant questions, reading over my shoulder.

Right before the explosions, we had been talking about groups of people from the Marines (or Army, I admit I don’t know) who ran the course in their uniforms with backpacks.  Grace’s first reaction to the events, and to the few pictures she saw of the devastation (before I turned the TV off), was: “But those poor people just came home from war, where they saw this all the time.  They weren’t supposed to see it at home.”

Indeed, they weren’t.

I spent the afternoon toggling between bewilderment at this world that we live in, trying to understand what feels like a relentless wave of violence, and hugely heartened by it, as I received more texts and emails than I can count from people from all corners of my life (and the world) checking that we were okay.

But most of all, this: the city of my heart, my home, is bleeding and broken, under attack.

On our day of celebration, which starts at dawn with reenactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends with the last runners limping across the finish line long after the sun has gone down.  Our day of inspiration and striving, of humanity at its finest: I am always moved equally by the runners who push themselves past all reason and by the spectators who come out to watch the river of dedication and devotion.  Marathon Monday is a pure celebration of our beating hearts and of our feet walking on this earth.  This day, this Patriot’s Day, our day, is now forever marked by explosions, lost limbs, dead children (my GOD – an eight year old – Whit is eight – how is this possible?), senseless death and hurt.

I hate that it happened on our day, on Patriot’s Day, on Marathon day.  I hate that this happened at all.

I ache for my city, the city I was born in, the city I’ve lived in since I graduated from college, the city I love, my home.

I know that many other cities in our country have been visited by tremendous pain and brutality over the last several years.  I feel a sense of “it’s our turn,” followed immediately by outrage that I could ever say that. What world do we live in where that’s the deal?