everyday life

2012: January

We all began to process our extraordinary family trip, nothing short of a pilgrimage, to Jerusalem.

I chose light as my word for 2012 (not uncorrelated to the previous point).

My favorite blog post of this month: In the Labyrinth.

I noticed the way bare trees allow you to see bird nests in their branches, for the first time, and then I could not stop seeing them.

Grace and I visited my dear friend and her godmother, Q, in Chicago, for a trip full of ferris wheel rides, sea otters, white wine, and laughter.  As is the case with my very best friends, even though everything is different than when we met, everything that matters is exactly the same.

Whit turned seven.

I read An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor, Once by Meghan O’Rourke, Evensong by Gail Godwin.

We spent a wonderful weekend with close friends in New Hampshire skiing.  Our children are all the same ages, and there is always sledding, chili, red noses, and outright joy during this annual tradition.

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. – Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

Too big to comprehend

Candles lit by pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. 

Like everyone else, I am speechless about and stunned by the events at Sandy Hook Elementary yesterday.  Like everyone else, I feel an overwhelming desire to hold my children tight coupled with a devastating sense of helplessness.  There is also a powerful mixture of gratitude and guilt, that my children are safe, and, of course, a hovering fear: what if someday they are not?

There is one thing we can do, and I am so, so grateful to Gail for posting about it.  Her post is short, actionable, and to the point: please write to your representative.

My sister (who is both a mother and an educator, not to mention the wisest and most thoughtful soul I have ever met) and I emailed back and forth yesterday.  She shared my strong outrage that this should happen in school, a place that was always for the two of us a haven, a safe place, a home (I just wrote about why this is one reason I so love Hogwarts).  She said she was planning to make sure her children didn’t find out about Sandy Hook.  I would love to shield mine, too, but I’m not sure I will be able to.  They are older, and I fear they will hear.  To be prepared for those conversations, I clicked through and read Brene Brown’s resources about talking to children about violence and death.

Finally, I was moved by these words, which I read on Smacksy.  The darkness that led to this and the suffering of those who lost children are both too big to comprehend.

Prayer for Newtown from Marianne Williamson, December 14, 2012

Dear God,
We come to You with broken hearts,
surrendering the catastrophe that has occurred  in Connecticut.
We cannot comprehend the darkness that led to this,
or the suffering of those who have loved and lost.
They are both too big.
But in You, dear God, there are Answers we cannot surmise and Light we cannot summon by ourselves.
For those who bear tonight the unbearable burden
of unimaginable grief,
who in their agony yell at the forces of fate…
For those who moan and those who faint,
for those who rage and those who pray,
we moan and pray along with them.
For tonight, those were our children too.

May a legion of angels come upon the parents
and bring to them an otherworldly touch,
an otherworldly comfort
and otherworldly sense that their children are well,
that they are safe with God,
and shall be with them always.
Give to those who grieve what no mortal force can give…
the touch of Your Hand upon their heart.
May all who are touched by this darkness
be lit by Your grace.
Please wipe away all tears, dear God.
as only You can do.
We present to you our brokenness, and the horror and pain of those who grieve.
May those who died find joy in the immortal realms.
May those who mourn them be comforted in this hour of their agony.
And may our prayers and actions be guided by You, dear God,
to create a world where this occurs no more.
Amen

An MRI, and being smart and brave

Last weekend I had an MRI on my knee, because of some funky stuff that’s been going on.  It was uneventful (though I did think to myself: I’m glad it’s December, because my requesting Christmas carols on the headphones doesn’t seem weird): I was chilly in my enormous hospital pants and double gowns, and Grace sat patiently in the waiting room for 30 minutes.  What the experience really did is make me respect, in a new and wild way, my daughter’s bravery.

Let me explain.  Over the summer, Grace participated in a study at MIT where they watched her brain activity on MRI while she did memory games.  She did it for a number of reasons, which included cool pictures of her brain, the opportunity to contribute to science, and an $80 Amazon gift card.  I had never had an MRI at that time, so I didn’t think much of it.  I stood in the room with all the controls and computers and watched her through a thick glass window.  She nodded as a stranger explained what was going to happen and then lay down obediently on the table.  She was slid into the MRI tube, and then I heard her voice over the speaker.  “Grace, say hi,” the technician prompted.

Her voice shook and I heard tears in it as she said, “Hi, Mummy.”  I said hi back and then the tech turned the microphone off and turned to me.  “This is when they lose it, if they’re going to,” he said with a shrug.  I left and spent an hour and a half building a marble run with Whit (not a surprise, is it, that the MIT waiting room had the best engineering toys ever?)  It turns out Grace didn’t lose it, and she spent an hour and a half in the tube playing games with the PhD students on the other side of the thick window.  When she was finished she bounded into the room where Whit and I were sitting holding print-outs of brain images, Amazon gift cards, and lots of stories about the games she had played.

For weeks after her MRI experience Grace regaled people with the stories.  I did not realize the extent of her pride in what she’d done – her justifiable pride – until I lay there on Saturday, listening to the loud whirr of the MRI machine even through the Christmas carols playing in my ears.  My head wasn’t even in the machine; my neck and face stuck out (thank God).

When Grace was a toddler, I always used to say that I wanted her to grow up to be smart and brave.  For some reason, these were the two traits I picked, mostly to combat what felt like the wave of emphasis on being pretty.  Smart and brave.  Brave and smart.  I thought of those two words as I lay there motionless in the MRI machine.  Whether it’s flying alone at the age of 5 or sliding into an MRI machine for two hours in the name of her own understanding and that of the world: she’s smart and brave, and I am proud.

Miracle and wonder

a daytime moon: sure to flood me with emotion, awareness, reverence

Thursday last week was cold and crystal clear, the sky the saturated blue that most makes my heart ache.  I was driving home from some meetings mid-afternoon and as I waited to turn onto a familiar street in my town, I watched the blue pickup truck that was waiting, perpendicular to me.  My blinker clicked as I noticed the driver, who was yawning, and his passenger, who was wearing a thick wool mitten on one hand and navigating the smart phone that she stared into with the other.  I turned past them onto a street that each fall has the most spectacular orange leaves and was hit by a wave of something – an inchoate emotion, somewhere between powerful gratitude and powerless awe – so strong I had to pull over.

Does this happen to you, this sense of being overwhelmed by this world, this life, this right now?  It’s as though an aperture inside my spirit yawned open and was overcome by what it saw, by the brilliance and the brutality, an onrush of wonder so extraordinary it had to snap shut, unable to take any more.  I sat in my car pulled over on the street, my eyes swimming with tears, slightly out of breath as I stared around me.  I’ve looked at these fences a million times, these houses whose owners are as foreign as the permutations of their hydrangeas and particular shapes of their cornices are familiar.

This is my life. 

This, right here.  It is such an outrageous miracle, human life, this planet we walk on, these days we fill with activity.  Sometimes I wonder if other people have this same experience of skinlessness, this sensation of being literally stunned by the fact of life itself.  I suspect they do.  They must.  The very fact that we are born and grow and build families and careers and lives is a breathtaking marvel.  We are microscopic ants on the surface of this great turning ball, whose existence it itself a miracle that renders me inarticulate as I try to comprehend it.  And even though we are so small, we are granted glimpses of the universe that yawns, cavernous, all around us.

I don’t know why this happened last Thursday afternoon, what combination of environment and personal and physiological factors combined so that the man in the pickup and his companion and the leaves and the sky and the cold air on my face startled me, like foil being shaken in my eyes.  I do know this happens to me a lot, with varying degrees of intensity, this slicing realization of the wonder of it all.  The frequency with which I’m brought to tears is one manifestation of the phenomenon, as is, I suspect, my propensity to trip because I’m staring wide-eyed at the sky instead of at the ground in front of me.

When I got home I opened the door onto the noisy chaos of after school, homework being protested and hockey gear being thrown around and dinner being reheated in the microwave.  I kissed Grace and Whit hello and asked about their days and then retreated to my office, where I shut the door and sat looking out the window at the pink-tinged sky, trying to settle my racing heart before my next work call.  These reminders of how extraordinary this life is leave me fragile, shaken, more porous than usual.  But I would never choose not to have them.  They are the streaks of silver that shimmer in the fabric of my life, glinting in certain lights, almost imperceptible in others, but I always know they are there.

A day with Whit

One day a couple of weeks ago, Whit stayed home from school.  He’d been sick to his stomach the night before, and though he woke up feeling 100% fine, I felt I should abide by the rule that says you can’t come to school if you’ve vomited in the last 24 hours.  I rearranged a bunch of meetings and was able to spend the day at home with Whit.  For most of the day, I was at my desk and he was watching TV, reading, or playing with Legos in the room right next door.  But I managed to carve out a few pockets of time for us to do quiet things together, and it turned into a lovely, lovely day.  One of those absolutely ordinary days that I know I’ll remember forever.

In keeping with my fierce belief in the healing properties of both fresh air and books, we went for a walk to the library.  On the way we walked past a barren bush that was full of sparrows.  Their dun-colored feathers made them almost invisible to the eye, but their music was loud enough to stop Whit in his tracks.  “Do you hear that, Mummy?”  He tilted his head.  I nodded.  He squinted, and leaned towards the bush.  “I guess I can see them, if I look carefully,” he peered even more closely.  “But not at first.  And they are so loud!  It’s magic.”

Yes, Whit, it is.  I’ve been startled by the beauty of the song of sparrows before, and to witness Whit having the same reaction was powerful and surprising-but-not.  We continued down the street.  I pointed out birds’ nests, newly visible in the bare branches of the winter trees.  At one point as we walked he slipped his hand into mine, and I squeezed it, and we walked on.

I asked him what he would like for lunch, letting him choose, as a treat.  And he asked for a Panera grilled cheese, so that is what we got.  Then we drove to the car wash.  As we lurched into the tunnel of the wash, I looked back to watch Whit’s palpable wonder.  His eyes were wide and his head was swiveling back and forth as he watched the action around us.  “Look, Mummy!” (what’s better, ever, to hear than that?)  “Look at the lights!”  Then he held his hand to the window, noting, “I can feel the flaps banging against the side of the car.”  His delight was infectious.

I picked up my phone and noticed several new Safari windows open.  “Have you been on my phone, Whit?”  I glanced back to see a mischievous smile on his face.

“I asking Siri questions.”  I shook my head, smiling.  I am not a Siri fan.  “Siri is really good, you know, because if you don’t have anyone to talk to, you can always talk to her.”  Meet my son: a true extrovert.

Then we went to the farm stand where I buy our Christmas wreaths every year.  We picked out two: boxwood for the front door and pine for the kitchen window over the sink.  Whit counted out 12 paperwhite bulbs, putting each one carefully in a brown paper bag.  The man behind the counter gave him a sheet of space stickers and a lollipop.  As we drove home, dusk gathering around us, Whit sighed, “That man was so nice,” and I thought to myself: please don’t ever, ever stop noticing kindness in strangers, the magic of bird song, the adventure of a car wash.

When we got home we hung the wreath on the door and walked upstairs.  I had to get back on my computer.  But first I looked out the window.  “Whit, look!”  he poked his head around the corner from the family room.  “Look at that sky.”  I pulled him onto my lap, his legs long and knobby, his feet almost touching the floor, and we watched the sky streak with pink through my office window.  He leaned his head back against my shoulder.

“Mummy?”  I pressed a kiss into the side of his cheek.  “I really love days like this with you.”

Oh, my Whit, my still-seven year old son, my savant, my sage, my spirited comedian.  I do too.