everyday life

Leaning in, doing it all, and packing lunches the night before

I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.  I know her work is controversial (though I’m not totally sure why, to be honest, after reading her book), and my goal is not to review the book.  But I will say I loved Lean In.  I found it supportive and inspiring, and while I agree there are big problems with the “system,” I was personally motivated by Sandberg’s focus on what we can do within the constraints of today’s reality.

Accepting the reality of right now, and embracing what is, is, of course, a big theme of my writing – and of my life.  Where that begins to bleed into capitulating to things that are unacceptable is a topic for another day.

People ask me a lot how I “do it all.”  The truth is, of course, that I don’t.  None of us does.  I’m not the only person who has written extensively on this topic, nor am I the only one to conclude that the definition of “it all” is both an intensely personal and a vitally important thing.

Lean In triggered a cascade of thoughts and reflections for me.  One was that discussion of “work-life balance” (a term I personally dislike) tends to fall into two categories: big picture theorizing and granular advice.  The former is complicated, and all I can say for sure is that any discussion of the topic of working and mothering touches some deep ocean of feeling buried deep inside me, as enormous as it inchoate.  Within a page or two of any book or article on the subject, I am in tears.  I need to spend more time thinking about what those feelings are.

It is the latter category that I want to talk about today.  No matter what it is that each of us juggles – and while I know that that assortment looks different for each of us, I also know that almost everyone’s plate feels hugely full – we all have tricks for minimizing dropped balls.

My appetite for talk about these particular, specific strategies is almost endless.  I love to hear about the ways that others make it all happen, and always learn something when the conversation turns to this topic.  I wanted to share some of the tactics that make life work for me right now.  None of these are rocket science.  But they help me.  I’d love to hear your tricks and strategies:

  • Living close to both my kids’ school and my office.  Limiting my commute has made being engaged in Grace and Whit’s school lives (drop off every day, occasional pick up, conferences) feasible.  It has had costs, of course: we live in a small house and do not have a yard.  But every time we talk about it, Matt and I conclude that this is the right choice for now.
  • Pack lunches the night before.  Always, without exception.
  • Early bedtimes.  For the children and for me.
  • Pick your battles.  Grace goes to school every single day in black leggings.  She loves them and has 5 pairs.  Do I love the look?  No.  Is it easy, and – more importantly – does it make her happy to have control over this choice?  Yes.  It also simplifies and smoothes the morning routine.
  • If you have a spare 5 minutes (early to an appointment, finished with grocery shopping faster than planned) fill up the car even if it doesn’t need it or get cash at the ATM even if you don’t need it.  You will be glad you did.
  • Treat your babysitters extremely well.  I don’t ever cancel within a few days without offering to pay, and I usually round up when settling.  I’m never late.  I over-communicate.  And as a result: I have hugely loyal babysitters who go out of their way to help.  It makes a big, big difference.

What are some of your particular pieces of advice for managing a very full life?

 

The physicality of them

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Every night, when I put Grace and Whit to bed, I whisper, “I’ll see you in the morning.”  That sentence is, as I wrote a few months ago, the distillation of parenthood.  I will be here in the morning.  You can go to sleep, safe, sound, trusting.  I’m not the only mother who finds bedtime, and the hushed hours after the children go to sleep, to be among the sweetest parts of the parenting day.  If I search my archives for bedtime posts, pages and pages come up.  Good night, Whit is among my favorites; I can’t read it without crying.  That’s especially true now, as I read through the scrim of years, with the awareness of all that has irrevocably changed.

Often, I go back in to see Grace and Whit before I go to sleep.  And sometimes I sit next to them on their beds, watching their sleeping faces, observing the shadows that their eyelashes cast across their cheeks.  Sometimes I put my hand on their chests, feeling their breath rise and fall.  There is a tangible grace in the rooms of my sleeping children, a magic that hovers in the dim, nightlight-lit air.

I love these moments, when I watch them, listening to the quiet of the room, the soft thrum of their breathing.  I stare at the length of their bodies under the covers, tumbling down the hall of mirrors that is my memory, remembering their baby selves in their cribs in these very same rooms.  It is such a cliche, but many cliches grow out of truth, don’t they?  How did these children, simultaneously sturdy and fragile, long and angular and lean, come out of my body?  Where did my babies go?

The expanse of Whit’s back, as he stands up to his ankles in the ocean, or the shadows Grace’s eyelashes cast on her cheeks when she’s looking down, reading: these are as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror.  They came from me and they are still intimately known; this is the private geography of motherhood.

As I write this I’m away from Grace and Whit, and I’m heading home today.  I can close my eyes and imagine their bodies barrelling into mine when I walk in the door, the smiling faces and mile-a-minute talking and hugs.  The hug that will remind me that Grace’s head now falls pretty close to right under my chin, and that Whit is the height I still delusionally think that his sister is.  And tonight, you can be sure, after I tuck them in, I’ll go back into their dusky rooms to watch them sleep, to be reminded of their beating hearts and breathing lungs, of their sturdy and fragile bodies, of them.  My daughter and my son.

 

How many greater things

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We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.  How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!  How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.   – Thoreau

For as long as I can remember, I have been literal.  I have almost always wanted with a fervor bordering on desperation to control, categorize, and to understand.  I am the child of a physicist and engineer, remember.

And yet that has been changing.  Years have given me perspective, and now I can look back through the lens of time.  The arc of my life is loftier, but also less clear.  I understand so much less than I used to.  But I also see so much more.  This can’t be a coincidence.  And the things that really capture my imagination are those which I understand the least: the sky, the passage of time, the capricious, unpredictable nature of memory.

A few years ago I asked my readers what this blog was about.  I still don’t have a good answer, when people ask me.  I hem and haw, stutter and stumble, coughing out some inarticulate paragraph about what it is to be in the world, to pay attention, to parent and live in a mindful way.  A succinct elevator speech it isn’t.

But I was fascinated by the answers I received from you.  One word came up over and over again, far more than any other: wonder.  And I do think that wonder is at the center of what it is I want – for myself but perhaps more importantly, for my children – in this life.  I want to help protect Grace and Whit’s capacity for wonder.  And isn’t wonder, at its core, the absolute opposite of logic and understanding?  At the very least, I am certain that true wonder requires the willingness to suspend our often-frantic need to comprehend and intellectualize our experience.

This must be connected to the fact that I am more and more intimate with doubt.  As I get older, I move further away from a ravenous desire to understand.  The not knowing at the center of our lives is immutable, I’m coming to see.  What we need to do is inhabit it, enfold it, learn to live with it.  Our human lives flow around some essential, unknowable truths, like a river around jagged rocks.  We can’t change the existence of those rocks.  So instead I am learning to love the glitter of the water’s drops as they bounce off of it.

Discomfort

Last week I had an email exchange with my friend Jessica about the five years I spent living in London (ages 12 to 17).  It was a rich, irreplaceable interval of time, full of the number 9 bus and Fruit Pastilles and Doc Marten boots and weekends riding in the Cotswolds and signing our names on the Berlin Wall.  I still have dear friends from those years.

But there’s no question that the five years that I lived in London, the fifth of which I spent at boarding school in New Hampshire, were bracketed by deep discomfort.  I can close my eyes and stand in the doorway of my Upper Fourth classroom on a cold January day, when my future friend Stephanie threw open the doors and announced, “this is the new girl” before disappearing into the mass of foreign girls speaking in rapid, accented English.  I have rarely wanted to disappear more keenly (and trust me, that’s an emotion I experience a lot).

My childhood was as full of farewells as it was of blindingly bright experiences.  I saw countries and cathedrals and I also cried my eyes out, missing friends in Cambridge, in Paris, in London.  I went back and forth across the ocean so many times I wasn’t really sure, for several years, where home was.  I would never trade my childhood, and the unique terroir in which I grew (shared only by my sister).  But it was certainly full of dislocation, threaded through with a fundamental sense of discomfort.  I was always new somewhere, or about to leave.  The fabric of my life was woven through with departures.

I don’t know why this has been on my mind lately.  Maybe it is because I am particularly cognizant of how comfortable my adult life is, how different Grace and Whit’s childhoods are from mine.  After our trip to Jerusalem last year, I reflected that my sister and I had had seemingly opposite responses to our shared childhood.  I am the unadventurous one.  I have always chosen safety and comfort.

And yet.  The thing is, I still feel uncomfortable a lot of the time.  It’s not the same uneasiness that comes with being in an unfamiliar country: different coins (oh, how many times have I offered a palm full of foreign money to a bus driver and asked them to take what they need?), different names of dish soap, different kinds of foods.  But it is a vague sense of discomfort in my own life.  There are not that many people who feel like native speakers of my language.  There are not many places that I feel entirely accepted.  I long to belong.

I used to think that it was my childhood of constant goodbyes that created this feeling of fundamental otherness.  Years ago I described the way all those “departures remain within me, hard little kernels of sadness that the rest of my experience flows around, but not undisturbed.”  But maybe that’s not it.  Maybe it is actually the other way around.

Perhaps for too long I’ve incorrectly ascribed responsibility for the way I am to my peripatetic childhood.  Maybe this is my essential self, this nose-pressed-against-the-window sensation simply my way of being in the world.  It’s the reason I take the pictures.  It’s the reason I am often misconstrued as aloof and chilly.  I guess it is just part of who I am, for better or for worse.

Numbered Days

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Right now I feel incredibly keenly aware of how finite these particular days are.  I’m already more than halfway through my years with Grace living at home.  How is this possible?  I’m already seeing Whit blush when I kiss him goodbye on the playground.  They still hold my hand when we cross the street, but for how much longer?  Mere minutes.

A while ago I wrote a post about things whose days are numbered.  Almost all of those things are gone now, and even reading that piece brings hot tears to my eyes and a tightness to my throat.  These days are sliding through my hands even as I try to grasp them.

The truth is that all our days numbered.  Every hour is running out as we revel in it.  Isn’t that the very definition of life?  So maybe the intensity with which I long for these days even as I live them is about the fact that I so passionately adore this season of my life.  The aching loss that’s threaded through every hour is simply the flip side of the deep love I feel for right now.  I have never had one without the other, and they seem to be directly correlated.  The more joy I feel in a moment, the more pierced I am by my knowledge of its swift passage.

I’ve made some difficult decisions lately that reflect this growing sense of how limited are these sunlit hours.  What I want is more days at Crane’s Beach, more long notice-things walks, more evenings reading Harry Potter with my children curled beside me, listening raptly. I want to be here right now, this ten year old, this eight year old, this very early spring.

But I can’t have this without letting go of other things.  It is hard for me to admit that I have to choose.  This is the difficult, unavoidable truth of something I have long maintained: our only true zero-sum resource is time, and how we allocate this, our true wealth, is a direct representation of what we most value.

And I choose those three people in the picture.  Above all else.