everyday life

Redefining Success, Celebrating the Ordinary

Recently my friend, teacher, and mentor Katrina Kenison shared an article with me from The New York Times.  She was quoted in a thoughtful piece called Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary, which explores a topic that feels both current and thorny: our intense need to be – or, more dangerously, for our children to be – exceptional.

I feel a simple and intense identification with the values espoused in the article.  When Katrina is quoted as saying “…there’s a beauty in cultivating an appreciation for what we already have,” I nodded so vigorously my husband looked over at me, wondering who I was suddenly talking to, but found me staring at my phone, reading.  Celebrating the ordinary, most mundane moments of every day is perhaps the central task of my life.  This blog is, you could say, a poem to the wonder and beauty, and to the heartache and pain, that exists in my extremely regular existence.

The article talks about how today’s parents all think their children are above average.  We know this is statistically impossible.  The extreme emphasis on exceptionalism feels familiar and familiarly uncomfortable to me.  One of the main tenets of my parenting is that I strive to praise my children for their effort, not any innate “specialness.”  Of course I love my children beyond reason.  But I don’t think they are in any way geniuses, or more remarkable than a million other children.  And maybe most importantly:  I don’t want them to think that they are.  I want them to know that I love them for who they are, of course, but I admire and esteem their effort, their dedication, their hard work.  This is the way to success, however we define it, and to joy.

Of course that small phrase, “however we define it,” is at the core of the article.  And this is where this topic gets tricky for me.  On one hand, I feel like a hypocrite.  I have certainly faced my share of critics who say it’s “easy” for someone who went to Exeter and Princeton and Harvard to disavow society’s focus on performance and achievement.  I feel a slippery sense of unease about this, sometimes: do I really, truly believe this, that ordinariness is extraordinary, even though I know I spent so many years valuing achievement and validation above all else?  Do my actions match what I say is my philosophy?

Well, yes.  Who is better positioned that someone who has lived that life to really understand at a deep level how incompletely achievement leads to joy?  Nobody.  And as I’ve written before, all of my frantic success was actually a way to avoid engaging with my own truest desires.  It is only when I let go of that map, released my reliance on an life shaped by external validation, that I began to experience real contentment.  And that was found – yes – in the most ordinary things.  In my children’s instinctive hush when they walked around Walden Pond.  In my observation of how light changes in fundamental ways as we wheel through the year.  In the quiet words of poets that whisper insistently in my head.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in my view, with achievement, and I plan to keep teaching my children that hard work and goals are critically important.  But this has to be coupled with learning to listen to what Robert Browning called “the low voice my soul hears.”  I want to celebrate my children’s ambition and give them many opportunities to taste the wonder of ordinary life.  Surely it’s possible to do both?  I’m certainly going to try.  When their deepest desires come up against what the world wants them to do, though, I hope they’ll choose the former.  It took me 30 years to have the strength to do that, and I’ve never looked back.

How do you think you measure success?  How do you walk this line in your own life, and, if you are a parent, as you help your children navigate theirs?

 

The annual Fourth of July Parade

As ever, I dressed the children in red, white, and blue.  There were lawn chairs on the sidewalk and tears when the veterans passed and children rushing around for the candy that people threw from floats.  There were sirens and marching bands and a lot of flags.  Just like that, another year gone. Everything and nothing changes.  And thank goodness for that.

Grace, 2005
Whit, 2005
Grace, 2006
Whit, 2006
Grace, 2007
Whit, 2007
2008
2009

2010

2011

2012

The story I can’t stop telling

I have a new piece on the Huffington Post, The Story I Can’t Stop Telling.  It’s a story which will be very familiar to anyone who’s read anything I write here.

And I really can’t stop telling it.  While swimming this afternoon, Whit hopped in one end of the pool while I happened to be walking by.  I watched him set out to swim the whole length, which he did, inelegantly but without stopping.  I hadn’t told him I was watching, so I didn’t think he knew.  But when he got to the other end, he hauled himself up by his still-narrow shoulders, water sluicing off his white back.  I smiled at the back of his head and then was startled when he turned to look at – or maybe for – me.  I gave him a thumbs up and a big smile and his grin in return was incandescent.  He still wants to know I’m watching him.

I know these days are numbered, and the drumbeat sound of their passage deafens me.  The sweetness overwhelms me and makes me cry.  And all I know how to do is to pay close attention, to watch and listen and love deeply, and then to write it all down.

To write down the story I can’t stop telling.

To fully live that golden hour

 

Last weekend was one of those golden, empty-of-all-plans weekends.  We spent it at my parents’ house on the coast, one of our very favorite places.  On Saturday morning my parents left for two separate out-of-town commitments, and the four of us looked ahead at two empty days with delight.  We simply hung out.  There was golf, tennis, hamburgers on the grill and dinner for four at the table on the back porch.  There was reading on the couches, a game of Clue, many games of Mancala. There was some shouting and a lot of hugging.  In short, it was our regular family life.

One thing that’s critically important to me is that my children know how precious it is to be alone, the four of us.  I want them to know how much I prize that time.  My attachment to these empty family hours grows ever fiercer and my experience of them shimmers with more and more beauty.  I am sure this is correlated to my keen sense of how limited they are, days with no plans and only each other for company.  These are the days I know they will remember as their childhood with a capital C, the days I’ll turn over in my pocket years and years from now like touchstones smoothed from repeated touching: them sprawled out on top of their beds asleep in the heat, the smell of sunscreen on Whit’s head when I kissed it, the clatter of Mancala pebbles as they played, talking quietly to each other.

My favorite part of the weekend, though, was Saturday afternoon at the beach.  I love the coast; for many reasons I have explored before, there’s something about this border between two worlds, this place that the moon demonstrates its power over the tides, this land of shells and myriad blues that feels like home.  On Saturday I stood where the ocean meets the land and watched my three family members’ heads, dark and sleek as otters, bobbing towards the wooden raft off the shore.  They clambered up and waved to me, arms above their heads, exaggerated as though they were miles away.

Then I watched Grace jump off the raft into the ocean.  She came up, broke the surface, and even from the shore I could see her grin.  It was 5 weeks to the day since she broke her collarbone.  I felt a wash of simultaneous wonder and gratitude, and saw the ghostly, broken bones on the x-ray in my head.   My eyes filled with tears as I thought about how healing happens, inexorably, undeniably, mostly invisibly.

And I stood there, shallow waves lapping at my feet, watching my children hurl themselves over and over again from the raft into the ocean, hearing their laughter, trying to simply be there.  I fought to keep my observer self inside my body, instead of letting her slip out and hover apart, watching, chronicling.  No: I squished my toes into the sand, felt the sun on my arms, squinted to watch Grace and Whit having a cannonball contest.  Trying to fully live that golden hour, even as I knew it was running through my fingers as I watched it.

Having it all

A snapshot of my version of “it all”: hydrangeas (one of our wedding flowers) grown by my husband, in our small front garden, on the kitchen island.  In the back you can see a construction paper garland that Grace recently made for father’s day.

Like everyone else in the blogosphere and real-world-o-sphere, I have been participating in many conversations about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cover story in the Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.   While I certainly don’t have a clearly-articulated response to Slaughter’s comprehensive and thoughtful examination of working motherhood today, I do have a profound emotional response.  By the third page of the article my eyes were full of tears, the words having touched some reserve of emotion in me as inarticulate as it is endlessly deep.

Most days I feel pretty good about my choices regarding work and family.  Sure, I wonder sometimes what would have happened had I not “leaned back,” as per Sheryl Sandberg, before I was even pregnant.  And yes, I do wonder what it would be like not to work, mostly whether I’d be a more relaxed and less distracted parent to my children.  But on the whole I feel pretty good about the decisions I’ve made and about the trade-offs I make every day (I hate the word and notion of balance when it comes to this topic).  My emotional reaction – quiet, but intense – when I read articles like Slaughter’s, however, suggests that something deeply buried in me still grieves, hurts, and wonders.  About and over what, I am not entirely sure.

Mostly what Slaughter’s article has me thinking about, though, is what “it all” really means.  My friend Kathryn, who is one of those can’t-live-without-her-friends that are for me a big component of feeling like I have anything like “it all,” emailed me to say she was at home because her nanny was out, sitting on her bed with her laptop working while her children lay on either side of her watching TV.  Is this “it all,” she mused?

For me, the answer to that is yes.

I am certain this is a deeply personal equation, and one that changes every day.  For me there are some elements of “it all” that are non-negotiable.  Downtime with my children most days.  A happy relationship with my husband.  Work that I find challenging with colleagues I respect and learn from.  Not missing any – or almost any – school events, plays, concerts, assemblies.  My handful of dear friends, those native speakers whose companionship I cherish.  Time, several days a week, to think and write about this divine and devastating life.  Time to read.  Eight hours of sleep most nights.  Time, several days a week, to run by myself.  The calculus of how each day’s hours are allocated is ever-shifting; I think having “it all” is something we ascertain over the arc of weeks and months, not in a single day.

The point of Slaughter’s piece with which I agree with most vociferously is that flexibility is absolutely essential to making this particularly rich, and demanding, phase of life work.  There’s no question that that is true for me.  I’m certain that my ability to be present for events both big and small in the lives of my children while working full-time has a lot to do with my job’s flexibility.  Of course I’ve made compromises though, and I have written before about how my life over the past years has simultaneously narrowed and widened.  What I’m not totally clear on is where the line is between a mature acknowledgement of the need for compromises and a defeatist acceptance of “not having it all.”

There is lots I don’t have.  Lots.  Tons of children.  A book published.  A fancy house.  A perfect figure.  Extravagant vacations.  Sound sleep every night.  A marathon under my belt.  A high profile CEO job.  A real yoga practice.  Unbitten fingernails.  A yard for my children to run in.  A king size bed.  A red-headed child.  A basic orientation towards calm.

But I think I would say that in the ways I care about, I do have it all.

What is your definition of “it all”?