everyday life

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”?

Summer solstice

Today is the summer solstice.  It is the longest day of the year.  The day out of 365 that holds the most light.  And from here we turn towards darkness again.

I have always felt a connection to the solstices, surely in part due to my family’s long tradition of celebrating December 21st.  But something even deeper than this tradition beats in me.  My soul vibrates with the ever-shifting balance of light and dark and recognizes the importance of its brief, teetering pinnacle (and nadir) on the summer and winter solstice.  I asked my husband recently which was the happier day for me, the summer solstice or the winter solstice.  It was a little quiz.  He got it wrong.

The answer is the winter solstice.  From there we are turning towards the light, moving in the direction of longer days, out of the dark days that takes the most faith.  The summer solstice comes at the very beginning of a season I love so dearly, with its swollen days and evenings of slow-arriving dusk, fireflies and popsicles, sandy toes and children worn out from wonder and the ocean.  But I do find June 21st tinged with sadness.  It reminds me that we are commencing our revolution towards fall and winter again.

I wish – desperately, wholly, wildly – that I could just sit and enjoy a day of my life.  One day.  I wish I could sit by a pool, giggling at my children jumping off a diving board, a glass of white wine in my hand and a dear friend at my side.  And if you were at that pool, that’s what you would see.  That’s what it looks like from outside.  But inside there is an essential crack in my spirit that yawns open, more narrowly or more widely depending on the moment.  This crack – this wound– is always there.

I promise I’m not a hugely depressing person.  I’m not even depressed.  I’ve been there, believe me, and this isn’t it.  I’m actually a fairly happy person. My husband has even noted that I’m funnier in person than anyone would imagine from my writing here.  I guess I try to keep my heartbreak to myself.  But the truth is that even on days like today, a day as gorgeous and perfect a summer day as I can imagine, the longest day of the year, there is a kernel of sadness buried deep inside my experience that I can’t ignore.

And there is still so much here I do not understand.  These are my favorite lines in Adrienne Rich’s deeply moving poem that I publish every winter solstice.  No matter how much I struggle and think and unpack and write, there is still so much that is unclear to me, both within and without, so much that I find perplexing, sad, complicated.  Also, yes, there is also so much that I find devastatingly beautiful, radiantly joyful, and deeply satisfying.  What I am beginning to see is that it is in these knots of tangled meaning that my life actually exists.  I’m slowly realizing that my hope that someday I’ll be sailing smoothly down some clearly-defined path is simply naive.

Last year I said this:  “I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.”  Reading this avowal reminds me that for all the uncertainty, there are things I do absolutely know.  On a day like this when I want to simply enjoy, it is easy to forget these commitments I make, to myself, to my family, to those I love.  But I won’t.  I will pull out my camera, take some pictures of this glorious day, of my alarmingly tall and lanky and funny and sad children, surrender to the knot of sadness that will gather in my heart as the sun sets, and acknowledge this is what it is to be me in this world.  It just is.

Parts of this post were originally shared on this day last year.  And they are still so true, as I continue my spirals through the same questions, the same concerns, the same sadnesses, the same joys. 

Bumps

I separated my shoulder last fall, part of my brief sojourn in and introduction to the foreign and awe-inspiring land that is pain.  The injury hurt a lot in the immediate aftermath, and it has mostly but not entirely healed.  I’m told that’s part of the deal with separated shoulders: the joint is never quite the same again.  On random days, doing motions I do every day I will experience a startling jolt of pain.  I can never predict when or why it will come.  Also, I have a small but noticeable bump where my collarbone meets my shoulder.  Fortunately my collarbone and shoulder are sort of bumpy in general, so it’s not quite as stark as it might be, but it is still noticeable if you look.  I have a bump and I always will.

After 6 weeks of recovery, I went back to my orthopedist.  I asked him, tentatively, whether the bump would ever go away.  He is a tall, gentle man about my age, and he looked directly at me in the small room.  I’ll never forget what he said next.

“No, it won’t.”  I swallowed.  “But you know what?  If you’re living, you’re going to get bumps.  I have a bump on my shoulder.  You’re 37.  Don’t we all have bumps?  Everybody’s got a bump.”

I laughed it off in the moment, but in retrospect I think there was deep wisdom in this comment.  Of course this moment has been on my mind lately as Grace’s collarbone heals.  She has a small but visible bump that we are told will flatten out as she grows.  It’s on her left side, too, and I find this parallel both totally coincidental and breathtakingly not.

These bumps are just like our scars, outward manifestations of places we’ve been broken and healed.  Whit’s long scar on his leg, the trace of a skidding epi-pen, has already faded from angry red to raised white.  Grace’s broken bone, originally an enormous protrusion from her collarbone, has begun to flatten out and presumably the bones have begun to knit together.  At 7 and 9 my children have already been marked by life.  I myself am a map of scars, internal and external: several different bones healed, spots where suspicious moles were removed, the scar where I was hit on the face by a wine press when we lived in France.

We are all marked by our passage through life.  Some of these marks are visible and some are not.  I think it is valuable to remember the moments and experiences that made marks on us, for better or for worse.  They are part of what shaped us into who we are now, after all.  This reminds me of a passage from Donald Miller’s lovely book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Last year, I read a book about a man named Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.”  He is the one who discovered the actual reality that no two snowflakes are geometrically the same.  Bentley was a New England farmer who fell in love with the beauty and individuality of snowflakes…. What amazed Bentley was the realization that each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.  He discovered that each crystal is affected by the temperature of the sky, the altitude of the cloud from which it fell, the trajectory the wind took as it fell to earth, and a thousand other factors.

Big thanks to Erin, who told me she likes her own private collarbone bump for the reminder it is of her brave, tough child self.  I hope Grace feels the same way someday.