everyday life

I want to remember

I want to remember Whit’s still-wobbly handwriting, and the fact that he unabashedly wrote that he “loves me very much” for public consumption in his back to school night letter.

I want to remember that part of my run where, in late summer and early fall, I have to push through a thicket of cosmos which are growing out of the sidewalk around a pole.  I love that these flowers grow so insistently in the middle of an urban sidewalk, and I love the way they remind me of my grandmother.

I want to remember the way Grace looks, curled on her side, when I wake her up every morning.  Her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks, she still hugs her brown and yellow bears to her chest, and she looks so peaceful.  When I wake her up she always smiles slowly and stretches her arms over her head before saying “Good morning, Mummy!”

I want to remember the outrageous, lucid blue of the sky in the middle of September, the goosebumpy way September 11th is always gorgeously clear, just like 2001, and the beginnings of the flash of orange leaves in the trees on my street.

I want to remember the surge of joy I felt as I watched Grace streak across the soccer field at her first practice this fall.  I was worried about how she would feel, returning, after her broken collarbone.  I need not have worried.

I want to remember the weekend afternoons when Grace and Whit sit on either side of me in bed, the three of us in companionable silence, reading.  When my company, and a book, satisfies them utterly.

I want to remember this golden moment, these ever-taller, lankier children who still carry echoes of the babies they were, the peace-sign and robot-patterned backpacks, the floating sound of lullabyes from the rooms of sleeping children, right now.

Inspired by Ali Edwards‘ beautiful post on this theme.  What do you want to remember?

Proof that Whit is my son

I have often joked that parenting is primarily the painful experience of watching your own worst traits animate in another person.  That’s certainly something I do often with my children.  Grace’s similiarities to me are immediately evident, but Whit’s are more buried.  His little boy bravado and bluster hide a core of deep sensitivity.  He can be sentimental and nostalgic, and is prone to emotional outbursts about things being over.  There were several moments this summer when I was reminded with breathtaking clarity how much my son’s emotional terrain resembles my own, though we are wrapped in such different packaging (and how different those packages are.  notably, his is adorable, and hilarious.  mine, not so much.).

Three experiences in particular did this.

Arguably the scariest ride at Legoland is called “Knights Tournament,” and two riders are strapped into seats which are then thrown around, upside down, all around.  There are 5 levels, and Grace and Whit are only tall enough to do 1 or 2.  Last summer we tried 1.  This summer we went for 2.  The first time we went on it was at dusk on our first evening in the park (we have a routine of going back after an afternoon swimming break and early dinner).  Whit disembarked and, taking my hand, announced, “Well, that was fun.  The best part about it was that you got such a good look at the sky.”

Our second night home Whit was absolutely inconsolable at bedtime.  He could not sleep.  He was tearful and clingy.  He told me he missed Legoland desperately, and was incredibly sad that something he’d so anticipated had come and gone.  It’s just going too fast, Mummy, he said, murmuring into my neck as we lay on his bottom bunk in the dark.  It’s hard to console someone when you yourself are overwhelmed with the precise emotions they are trying to deal with.

On the first Friday of school, I picked Grace and Whit up and took them to our local library to return some books and collect some others that I had ordered.  I let them each choose a movie also.  Two of the books in the stack the librarian handed to me were for Whit: Origami Yoda and The Way Things Work.  As we walked out to the car I had a stack of books and the two movies on my arms.  Whit held the door for me and then, trotting next to me to the car, announced, “Oh, Mummy, I love the library.  Look at all this great stuff we got there!”

I am constantly amazed and often flummoxed by the ways that genetics work.  Both of my children contain aspects of Matt, parts of me, and some mysterious element all their own; and through the particular alchemy of personhood they are each their own, unique, maddening, extraordinary person.

No blueprint

Last month Christina Rosalie, in a beautiful post called there is no blueprint for being everything, asked “Is it possible to be great, to be a Creative in the broadest sense, to live deeply into the world, and still create the measured tempo of home, the rhythm of domesticity, the moments of daily bread and wonder?”

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since.  I think the answer is yes.  I hope the answer is yes.  But even if it is, that yes isn’t simple, and we don’t arrive at it without major trade-offs.  As I’ve shared before (ad nauseum), I wrote my college senior thesis on this very question.  Focusing specifically on mother-daughter relationship in the work and lives of three 20th century poets, I explored the tension between motherhood and creativity.  My ultimate conclusion was that the work of these poets was enriched profoundly by the experience of mothering their daughters (and other children).  But the questions raised in those long months in Firestone Library have echoed through my life in ways I could not possibly have anticipated.

It gives me goosebumps, in fact, to think back to my 21 year old self hunched in her small carrel in the library, writing about the questions that she would intimately inhabit 10 years later.  It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, how the perspective provided by the arc of years illuminates choices we made long ago?

The thing is, talking about the ‘choice’ between motherhood and creativity feels artificial to me.  Sure, there are tensions – and they exist on myriad levels, from the initial choice to birth children as well as art all the way through the daily trade-offs of trying to be present to both small people and demanding creative work.  But the whole dialog is predicated on the assumption that the measured tempo of home (as Christina so beautifully puts it) is somehow at odds with creativity.  I’m sure that is true for many: creativity is a many-colored object, a phoenix of such startling brightness that it cannot possibly be reined in by the quotidian demands of life as a mother.

But the thing is, for me, it is precisely in that rhythm of domesticity that I find creativity.  It wasn’t, truly, until I had sunk deeply into the mundane details of life with my small children that I really began to see the magnificence that is at the heart of anything you might call creative about me.  My subject chose me, as I’ve said over and over, and that subject was these daily moments of bread and wonder.  I guess this just says that my creativity, such as it is (and I have a hard time thinking of myself as a creative person, I admit, which may well be correlated) is a sparrow rather than a phoenix, dun-colored rather than replete with dazzling brightness.  The more I think about it, I think that is just fine with me.

Please read Christina’s beautiful thoughts on this matter.  I’d love to hear what you think, and how this tension plays out in your life?  Separately, are there places in your past where, with hindsight, you can see the present glinting through, even though you didn’t realize it at the time?

Summer 2012

As I thought about the summer of 2012, I thought back to my reflections on the summer of 2011, 2010, and 2009.  This is my favorite season, though also one heavy with melancholy.  I noted last year that the only seasonal change I don’t lament, on some level, is winter to spring.  Because after that I’m aware that we are turning towards the end, the darkness, the cold.  There comes a moment in each summer when I sense fall underneath all the sun and heat and laughter; usually it’s somewhere in the end of July.  And then comes August, an elegaic season that is at once the fullest manifestation of summer and its end.

This summer was full of joys.  I saw first-hand the power of tradition.  Certain events are now carved into our family life as important rituals.  We started off by going to Storyland on the last day of school.  The kids are getting old for Storyland, but they love the tradition as much as I do, and embrace the way it marks the beginning of summer vacation.

Grace was recovering from her broken collarbone in June, so Matt and Whit went alone on the fifth-annual White Mountains overnight trip.  We visited our dear friends in Martha’s Vineyard and had a wonderful, albeit short weekend.  Grace went back to sleep-away camp and loved it, cementing her bond with my best friend from camp’s daughter.  I don’t have words to express what it’s like to watch this second-generation friendship flower.

We spent the Fourth of July with my family, happily welcoming home my sister, her husband, and her daughters from Jerusalem.  We watched the parade, played in the back yard, swam out to the raft, and jumped off the boat into the ocean.  It was a very, very happy week.

The summer wasn’t all re-treads of previous years, though.  That’s the beauty of rituals, I think: they are a framework around which you can build lots of new experiences.  Several times, Grace, Whit, and I woke up early and went to Walden Pond to swim.  Each time we were among the only people there, in a place whose magic is palpable to both the children and me.

Around Memorial Day we started the License Plate Game.  We wanted to see all 50 state license plates.  I printed out a list, put it on the fridge, and the children got really into it.  We were down to four by the beginning of August, and we knocked three of those (Hawaii, Nebraska, and Wyoming) out in California.  Alaska eludes us as of this writing.

We listened to a lot of Phillip Phillips’ Home, and the Mumford & Sons cover of The Boxer, and Katy Perry’s Wide Awake, and Willie Nelson singing Coldplay’s The Scientist, and to a few songs from the soundtrack of Brave.

I read a lot.  I absolutely adored Wild by Cheryl Strayed, The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, and The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman.  These three are among the most lovely books I’ve read in a long time.  I also loved The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith, I Couldn’t Love You More by Jillian Medoff, Light Years by James Salter, Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian.  I read lots of other books, mostly fiction.

We are deep in the happy hours, as Glenda Burgess wrote in her gorgeous memoir The Geography of Love.  I know these hours won’t last forever, and I am trying to sink as deeply into them as I can.  One thing I know is I can’t make them stay, so at least let me pay attention to them while they’re here.

 

 

Making room for new growth

Late last week I finally went out to the front yard and dead-headed the hydrangeas.  The gorgeous blooms from a couple of weeks ago had faded and drooped.  The bushes looked tired, laden with the clusters of paled and slightly-brown flowers at their base.  I clipped and clipped, filling an entire trash can.  When I was finished I had a full trash can full of fading beauty.

It was hard not to be overcome with the metaphor: to make room for new blooms, I had to cut way back on the existing ones.  The existing ones, which were not at their peak anymore but were still very beautiful.  I had to go in and clear space.  Clear out what was beginning to fade in order to allow for what was not yet visible.

Isn’t that what we all have to do, all the time?  It takes faith, doesn’t it, to cut away what we know is good, even though we understand that it is past its prime, in favor of what we cannot yet see?  And yet we must.  What is coming is beautiful.  I know it is.