everyday life

Tears at hockey

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From a more placid moment last week

I recognize that things are moving fast most of the time in our family, and that I have a lot of things I’m trying to do, but most of the time it feels like it hangs together.  Usually we even fit in time for some quiet reading and a walk around the block and a few minutes of downtime.  That and hundreds of emails and writing and running and packing lunches and laundry and cooking and … well, writing that makes me tired.  Still, most days, my life – and that of my family – works.

Except when it doesn’t.

Last Monday was one of those days.  I had forgotten that Whit had hockey even though it was a holiday, so at the last minute I had to move my mother’s planned dinner-at-home visit to late afternoon.  We were running late for hockey, and I was snappy and frustrated.  By the time I got Grace and Whit into the car, hockey pads mostly (but not all) on, and headed in the light snow to pick up Whit’s teammate for practice, I was on the verge of tears.

It can turn so fast, can’t it?  Just the night before we had had a wonderful celebration of Whit, dinner at his favorite restaurant, a homemade cake (triple chocolate, which had required my going to three stores to get the ingredients) and presents.  I’d sat at our dining room table, watching the faces of my family in the flicker of candlelight, feeling calm, grateful.  My boy was eight.

But now I stood by the side of the hockey rink, fighting tears.  It was freezing, and in my rush I hadn’t brought a hat or gloves.  I jammed my hands into the pockets of my down coat and pressed my forehead against the cold plexiglass between the rink and me.  I watched Whit skate, feeling my breath coming fast and a tightness in my chest:  I am trying to do so much all at once.  Because of this, I do everything badly.  I am just so tired.

I drew a ragged breath and fought to control the tide of sorrow that rose inside me.  Suddenly I heard Billy Joel in my head: this is the time to remember, ’cause it will not last forever…  I shook my head, new emotion churning around the self-pity.  I felt both chastened and annoyed; I was reminded of my own desperate wish to be here now and of the simultaneous weight of my expectation that I can do so all the time. Is my constant sense of failing to be present getting in the way of my actually being present?

I don’t know.  I don’t think so, because I know I was far less here before I started thinking about this.  But it certainly makes me excruciatingly aware of all the ways and times that I fall short of the engagement in my life I so badly want.

I looked at Whit, his little figure blurred by my tears.  I want so fiercely to fully live these years, to pay attention, not to miss a thing.  But still, so often, I fail.  I allow my own exhaustion or aggravation to occlude the beauty of this ordinary, flawed existence.  It makes me weep to think of all that I have already missed.  I don’t even want to blink, for fear of missing anything else.

For the rest of the night, all I could hear was this:

This are the time to remember
Cause it will not last forever.
These are the days to hold onto
Cause we won’t although we’ll want to.
This is the time, but time is going to change.

 

A love letter to LEGO

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I love LEGO.  I always have.  This, above, is our old train table, which years ago was requisitioned to be a LEGO table.  As you can see, Grace’s half seems to be winning, but what you can’t see is the four large bins of LEGO pieces, all full, stacked to the side.  One of the drawers under the table is also full of LEGO pieces.

I show this mess only to demonstrate my family’s passionate commitment to LEGO.  I have no idea how many pieces we have, but I do know that a couple of years ago Matt decided we ought to sort them by color.  This effort, with fully four of us working, took a whole weekend.

That was a coupe of years ago.  Suffice it to say there are more now.  Even Grace has gotten into the swing of things, with a strong interest in LEGO Friends (the plethora above mostly came through birthday and Christmas presents this past year).  While I am generally opposed to the “girl versions” of ANY toy, I like that she’s playing with LEGO at all, so I’ll let it slide.

Several years ago I observed (and wrote) that watching a small child work on a LEGO kit is an excellent metaphor for parenting in general: you watch them do it wrong, and you have to sit on your hands and not jump in to correct them, even though you know the pain and undoing-and-redoing that lies ahead for them (and you).  These days, Whit flies through the kits on his own, and presents us with huge ships and rockets and vehicles he has made on his own.

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For example, here.  This picture provides another shot of the LEGO table, and also a punch in the gut gasp when I see him without his front teeth.  Though Whit loves an elaborate LEGO kit, he also spends at least as much time making things up, building ships and spacecraft that he designs in his own head.  Personally I think this imaginative, free-form play is probably even more valuable than learning how to follow the technical manuals.

Our passion for LEGO is also evidenced in our the three visits we’ve paid to Legoland.  Something about Legoland is sheer magic for the children and for me.

And then there’s just that it’s such a wonderful company.  This story here, about the letter a boy wrote to LEGO after he lost a minifig, and their totally awesome response, brought me to tears.

And finally, there’s the reason for this love letter.  My father-in-law sent Whit a large LEGO for his birthday.  FedEx showed that it had been delivered, but nothing had shown up at our house.  I called LEGO, distraught.  I explained that my son was a huge LEGO fan, that he was turning 8, and that he was desperate for the Excavator.  I think we can all agree that LEGO was in no way at fault here; they had shipped according to when they promised, and according to all records, the box had been delivered.  Yet the man on the other end of the line told me he would re-send another Excavator, and he would do so with expedited delivery, with no additional charge to us to to Whit’s grandfather, just to make sure that my eight-year-old had the set he so longed for to open on his big day.

I just wanted to publicly demonstrate and declare that my family has always been, and will always be, unshakably and immensely devoted to LEGO as a product, a concept, and a company.

 

Oh the places you’ll go

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A couple of weeks ago, we had one of those empty Sunday afternoons that I have come to prize above all others.  But in the moment, I was not prizing anything.  Everybody was cranky, pissy, annoyed.  The sky was spitting rain.  I asked Whit and Grace what they wanted to do, because the only thing that was non-negotiable was that we had to get out of the house. They didn’t want to do anything.  They certainly didn’t want to do anything together.

Fine.  I made an executive decision.  Whit needed some more Rotten School books to read anyway, so off we went to the library.  Luckily the main branch is open on Sunday afternoons.  We rode up the elevator to the third floor and I watched in wonder as the library worked its magic.  Extraordinary.  They were almost immediately calm, engrossed.  We had just been talking about the Sheep in a Jeep picture books and Whit wanted to see them, so we headed to the picture book section.

These days, we don’t usually set up shop in the picture book section.  But that day we did.  We found Sheep in a Jeep, read it, and then Grace and Whit both turned to the shelves.  Whit pulled out a stack of Dr. Seuss books, and Grace found several old favorites to revisit.  We sat together at a small round table and leafed through books.  I looked up.

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And instantly found myself blinking away tears.  Oh, the places you’ll go, my newly-minted eight year old.  Yes, the places you’ll go.  I can imagine them, can see them beginning to shimmer on the horizon, those places, away from home, away from this moment, away from me.  You’re going, and I am waving, and I couldn’t be prouder.

We stayed at the library for a long time.  I personally adore picture books and am glad to see that Grace and Whit still wanted to immerse themselves in them.  There was no scoffing about “baby books” or impatience or frustration.  There was just the quiet, suffused with contentment, the flipping of pages, the whispers of parents and squeaks of babies and mumbles of toddlers.

Then we went to the playground outside the park to play for a bit before heading home for dinner.  The rain had stopped and the sky was a thick, dense plane of gray cloud.  Grace and Whit played together, laughing, making up games.

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I sat on the swings and watched them play.  They leapt from rock to rock, chased each other around the deserted playground, and made up games together.  I’ve written before about my intense pride when I watch my children playing in creative, unstructured ways, about how I’m probably more thrilled by creative play than I am by conventional accomplishments.

I swung and watched them, and before I knew it my cheeks were wet with tears again.  How much longer will they want to spend a Sunday afternoon with me, at the library, at the playground?  Sure, not long.  The familiar awareness of how short this time is gripped me, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  Somehow my keen sense of the fleeting nature of this moment is both immensely familiar and, still, so powerful that it brings me to my knees.  My nostalgia for this time in my own life – even as I live it – is nothing short of overwhelming.

I swung back and forth, watching them laugh and jump, unable to hear what they were saying to each other, feeling tears run down my face.  Oh, the places they’ll go.  Oh, the places they are already going.

Small questions, glimpses of the whole universe

I’ve written before about how I believe small details about a person can reveal huge swaths about their essential nature.  Once in a while I happen upon a question that I think uncovers this kind of truth.  Usually the question is about something really tiny.  But somehow, in the glittering detail it reveals about a person, I think I can glimpse the shimmer of the whole universe that sparkles inside of them.  Sometimes I like to ask these questions on twitter.  I’m curious as to how some of you would answer them, too.

– If you are married, do you and your spouse have anything engraved inside your wedding rings?  If so, what?

– Have you broken bones?  A lot, or none?  Which?

– Who is your favorite fictional character of all?

– If you are (or have been) married, what was the first dance song at your wedding?

– What was your very favorite book when you were a child?

Do you agree with me that small details about people can provide windows into the expansive sky of their souls?  How would you answer these questions?

Lumbar puncture

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Well, it happened again.  In March 2009, I wrote a post called Fragile in which I talked about facing the world bravely, accepting the fact that “at any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger.”  That same day, Whit wound up in an ambulance and at the ER being treated for his second anaphylactic reaction to nuts.  And in May 2012, I wrote  10 Things I Want My 10 Year Old Daughter to Know, which included, as #2, “don’t lose your physical fearlessness.”  Two weeks later I was back at the same ER, this time with Grace because she had broken her collarbone.

This time it was my turn.  I was being smug about my own health.  The evening of New Year’s Day, at a lovely dinner with Grace and Whit and my parents, I spouted off about how I hadn’t been sick in years, how the green juice I drink every day was keeping me healthy.  I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself.  That was Tuesday night.

By Thursday, I had swollen glands and felt tired.  By Friday, I had a fever of 101 and a crushing headache.  I woke up Saturday morning and could barely move my head because of severe neck pain.  We called my doctor’s office.  They said to go immediately to the ER.  When we got there, it didn’t take long for them to decided I needed a lumbar puncture to rule out bacterial meningitis.

A spinal tap.  I started to cry.

Matt left the room as instructed and I curled up on my side as I was told.  They tried for 20 minutes to find spinal fluid, poking a needle around in my spine.  I swear I cried and yelled as much during those 20 minutes as I did during labor.  It was painful but, even more, it was a foreign and frightening sensation.  I felt as though icy fish were swimming up and down my spine.  I felt flashes of sharp pain down my legs.  I felt a needle scraping against the bones of my vertebrae.  To say I have new respect for the spine and for the power of nerves, and for the fact that the spinal cord is in fact a cord is an understatement.

Finally they withdrew the needle and told me they had to try again.  I cried some more.   They started over.  This second time was quicker, and they found the fluid.  In 75 minutes we knew that I don’t have meningitis.  I still feel lousy, as of this writing (Sunday night), but I’m hugely relieved, of course.   My back hurts a lot at the site of the puncture.  I asked Grace to take the picture above because it seems so extraordinary that all that is left from a long needle in my spine (twice) is this little band-aid.

I can’t forget the searing pain of that first attempted lumbar puncture, though.  I don’t think I ever will.  And I am reminded, yet again, never, ever to take anything for granted, and never to be so self-satisfied as I was on Tuesday night.  I am still drinking my green juice, though.

Have you ever had a lumbar puncture?  How was it?