everyday life

Life is beautiful

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I walked through Boston the other morning and marveled at what the heart of my city looks like in deep snow.  It was sunny but cold, and everything felt more difficult than usual: streets narrower, hands cold, wind whipping.  I crossed Beacon Street and headed into the Public Garden.  I passed a bush, empty of branches but full of clumps of snow, and the suddenly-deafening song of sparrows stopped me in my tracks.  Every time I notice a bush full of birds, singing their hearts out, I wonder at all the people around me, rushing past, heads down, apparently oblivious to the sound.  Am I the only person who notices this music?  Sure, it’s not symphonic.  But still: it is there, and reminds me of all of life that is invisible to the eye and yet still, asserting itself, going on, making beauty, making its mark.

A smile played on my face as I remembered the early-winter day with Whit, when he’d commented on the song of sparrows in an altogether different (but similarly barren) bush near our house.  A sensitivity and awareness whose source I know well throbs through my son’s veins, there’s no question about that.

I kept walking.  The sun glinted off of the frozen pond where the Swan Boats float in summer.  Snow dusted the back of the statue that marked the gate to Arlington Street.  Boston’s most natural season is winter.  This is the season of my city’s soul.

Life is beautiful.

The next day was difficult, and I had an overwhelming impulse to sit down to write this.  I think I wanted to remind myself that even amidst tears there is so much beauty.  As I sat at my computer, writing, dusk fell.  I looked out the window and sprang up, moved by the color of the late-day sky.  I took pictures and remembered: I am smitten by this world.

I leaned my forehead against the cold window, noticing the pinkish-white streak of an airplane across the gloaming, and thought: thank you.  No matter what, this life is beautiful.

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Working mom snow day

snow day picnic

This is what happened a few weeks ago, during Nemo: Friday, snowday.  Monday, snowday.  Tuesday, conference day.  I work full time.  I do not have anywhere near full time childcare.  Put these things together and you create a difficult brew with the potential for raised voices, frustration, and hurt feelings.  I think of the witches at the start of MacBeth, even.

Because I had known all along we weren’t going to have school on Tuesday, I’d booked Monday solid.  From 8am to 4:30 I had phone calls in 30 minute increments.  Sunday evening, the phone rang and the school’s number came up on caller ID.  I picked up, my stomach sinking.  The familiar automated voice began … Another snow day.

As my friend Christine says, I love when I can be relaxed and roll with a snow day.  I love when – and this is sometimes true – I’m able to reschedule things and spend the day sledding, baking cookies, and just hanging out.  But at this particular moment, I couldn’t be that mother.  I was just grateful that my office is in my house, so I could at least be in the building with Grace and Whit.  I know a lot of people don’t have this luxury.

All morning long I ran back and forth between my office and the family room.  I set the kids up with a big game of War with my grandfather’s old orange and black cards before capitulating and letting them have their screens.  Whit played Minecraft and Grace played games with cartoon dogs on her itouch.  It was mostly calm.  But I could hear them talking when I was on my work calls, and could see my email piling up during the minutes I stayed with them.  The strands of my life, which mostly keep me steady, upright, pulled at me from all sides.

I had already packed lunch before the snow day call came, so we brought down a blanket, spread it out on the kitchen floor, and the kids had a picnic with their lunchboxes.  They were slow to eat, and finally I had to go upstairs for an interview on the phone, and Grace sat on the floor, arms crossed, crying, angry that I was abandoning them during lunch.  A few minutes into my call I heard their quiet footsteps on the hardwood floor outside my closed office door, and then the soft click of the family room door closing behind them.   Throughout that phone call I was distracted, heavy with sorrow, aware of all the things I am not doing well enough.

That night, as I tucked her in, Grace said her prayers as usual.  These prayers vary slightly day to day, thought they are always a simple list of thanks.  This is so without my ever having coached her; it’s just her instinct. The impulse to say thank you must run in our family.

That night, my day of imperfect juggling of their needs and those of work, Grace said, “Thank you for so much screen time.”  Oh, great.  But then she said, “Thank you for letting Mummy work from home.”  My eyes filled with tears.  And then she continued, “And thank you for getting to live in this awesome world,” and I felt a rush of something like gratitude, something like forgiveness, something like grace.

Few things reveal the cracks and crevasses in a life like a snow day when you’re a working parent (particularly the one who has primary responsibility for the children that day).  I’ve noted before that my family’s life spins fast, and that we all, and me especially, keep a lot of balls in the air.  Most of the time this works for us.  But on a snow day the tightrope that I walk every day feels tauter, less forgiving, and a fall seems more likely, more perilous.  I remind myself, always, firmly, that this is a conflict of privilege, that having both work and children I love is a tremendous blessing.  I think of my childless 26 year old self, boldly saying this to a roomful of much older women, all mothers.  What I’ve learned, though, is I can be aware of my good fortune and still exhausted by the demands it brings, still sliced – to ribbons! – by the sharp edges of my commitments, my promises, my loves.

Business travel

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Dawn breaking through the airplane window

I don’t travel much for work, but occasionally I do. I haven’t experience travelling on a private aircraft like the ones at Jettly so I hope I can try it soon! Last week I went to New York for the day.  As I was getting ready to leave at 5 am, I heard Whit’s door creak open and his feet pad to the bathroom.  He must have seen the light on downstairs because I heard him calling quietly to me.  “Mummy?  Is that you?”  I went upstairs, following him into his room, marveling again at his narrow, bird-like shoulders, his pale skin, the two freckles on his back.

I leaned over to tuck him back in, explaining that I was on my way to Logan.  He wasn’t totally awake and, nodding, he rolled over and clutched his monkey, Beloved.  I tiptoed out of the room, trying not to let my heels click on the hardwood floor. I heard him murmur something sleepily.  I turned, went back in, and crouched by his head.  “What?”

He turned his head and his eyes gleamed in the dim light.  “I just said I miss you already.”

The whole way to the airport I felt that moment inside my chest, like an ember.  I felt warm, heavy, grateful, sad.  One surprise of parenting for me has been the amplitude and speed with which my feelings oscillate: during an afternoon of meetings I desperate ache for my children and then, five minutes after returning home, I’m overcome by their noisy demands.

All through the bumpy flight I thought of Whit’s quiet voice, his nightlight-lit room, his beat up Beloved monkey, that he still, at eight years old, is happy to express love towards me.

Around 7am we landed and I opened my email.  I found two emails from Grace that said good morning, and was it okay for her to stay after school so that she could attend an extra session with her Math teacher?  Of course, of course, I typed, feeling both organized and aggravated that I was orchestrating these details from the runway at Laguardia.

Then, another email:

Grace Russell

Feb 7 (1 day ago)
to me

(This is Whit writing!) help me Grace is really annoying and I can’t survive please I beg you.

I burst out laughing.  This is parenting, at its essence, right here, isn’t it?  So heart-wrenchingly sweet you feel like you can’t breathe and then, an hour later, so hilarious you laugh out loud.

A Pebble For Your Pocket

One recent weekend morning Grace, Whit and I were puttering at home (I know!  What else is new!?).  I was doing laundry and they were in Grace’s room, next to mine, and they started to bicker. Suddenly, without a plan, I called, “Hey, guys!  Let’s get in my bed and read.”  Why not get into bed at 10:30 in the morning?  My bed is, after all, a refuge for both of them and, in truth, for me.

To my surprise, Grace and Whit agreed.  I thought at first we were going to read Harry Potter and then, out of blue, I noticed the stack of library books on the edge of my bureau.  A Pebble For Your Pocket, a book of “mindful stories for children and grown-ups,” by Thich Nhat Hahn, was sitting on top.  Ah, thank you, universe, I thought, grabbing the paperback before clambering into the middle of my bed between Grace and Whit.

As I opened the book I hesitated.  I thought, for a moment: I wonder if they are going to go for this.  Well, one way to find out, I thought as I cleared my throat and opened to the first story, called “Who is the Buddha?”  Just as it had in the library, a gossamer veil of quiet descended on the room.  It seemed as though all of our breathing slowed down.  I felt as though something brushed past me in the dark, touching me so barely I might have imagined it.  The last time I felt this sensation was in May, in the ER with Grace, and I described it thus: “I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.”

I think that feeling is grace.

We read two stories and put the book away and the current of our day took us all with it.  It wasn’t until the next morning, when Grace and Whit were sitting at the kitchen table working on their classroom Valentine’s, that either of them mentioned Thich Nhat Hahn.

“Mum?”  Grace was looking down, concentrating on the glitter she was shaking onto a card.  “Can we read more of those pebble stories?”  I run upstairs to get the dogeared library book, and then, sitting between them on our battered wooden kitchen chairs, read several more stories.  As I read I remembered the first time I read Thich Nhat Hahn.  Peace is Every Step was an important book for me in college, a reminder of what mattered, what I wanted, to keep breathing, to live here.  As you can tell, I’m still working at this, still learning the same lesson, and I keep flubbing it.  Over and over again.  But what is there to do but to keep my eyes open, to take a deep breath, to love this life of mine, in all its flawed, real, glittering beauty?

The hermit is inside of you.  In fact, all the wonderful things that you are looking for – happiness, peace, and joy – can be found inside of you.  You do not need to look anywhere else. – Thich Nhat Hahn, A Pebble For Your Pocket

The clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.

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An old post about snow that seems utterly apt after this weekend of snow and then, today, blindingly clear blue skies.

I have been thinking for days about writing a post about snow, and, lo and behold, it’s snowing again!  It’s so great with the universe comes through like that.  Of course, it’s been snowing almost non-stop since December 26th, so possibly it’s a coincidence.  When I look out my office window, whose four panes frame so many hours of my gazing out at the world, it looks like I live in a snow globe.

People always write about the “muffled” quality of snow, about its quiet, the silence it lends to the world.  For me this is absolutely true when it’s snowing.  There is an outside-of-real-life feeling when the sky is mottled with moving white snowflakes.   Maybe it’s a vestige of childhood snow days, maybe it’s the way movement in the outside world is slowed down to a crawl.  Something just floats over me, a gossamer cape of wonder, a reminder to breathe and watch.  The snow globe is a good place to live, insulated from the real world, the rough jolts of life somehow less jarring, muted.

And yet when it’s no longer snowing, but the world is covered with snow, I don’t find it muffled at all.  It’s the opposite: I find it sharp, its clarity in such high definition that sometimes it hurts.  Pam Houston’s words always come to mind: “When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.”  There’s something wide-awake, hyper-saturated and, as she says, precise, about life with clear skies overhead and snow underfoot.  Emerging from my swaddled time in the snowglobe, everything seems purified, clarified, washed clear by the white everywhere.

Today I knelt on the floor by my office window and watched the flakes fall.  This afternoon they were huge, big clumps of snowflakes dropping out of the pale steel-gray sky.  Watching them, I remembered the passage in Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how “each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”  I looked up into the sky, straining to see as far as I could.  I thought of another time that I instinctively knelt, when, just like today, “…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.”

Another thing about snow: it is practically impossible (at least for a hack like me) to take pictures that capture the falling snow.  Hello, metaphor.  You just have to watch.  Pay attention.  Inscribe it on the vellum of memory.  What you see is what you get.

Originally written January 19, 2011, during another season of snow.