everyday life

It’s always worth it to play

Saturday was an absolutely perfect day.  Cloudless sky, 75 degrees.  I took Whit to soccer and then he and I joined Matt on the sidelines of Grace’s game.  She had only been on the field for a few minutes when she took a simply heroic fall.  She literally went flying through the air before crumpling to the ground on her left shoulder.  There was an audible gasp.  And then, worse, she was slow to get up.  All the players on the field sank to their knees.  I watched her coach approach and ask her if she wanted to keep playing, watched her shake her head, and watched her walk off the field next to him with her head bowed.  I purposely didn’t rush over to where she sat with her coaches and team on the other side of the field.  I felt like I should stay out of the way.

But at half time, Matt and I went over, and Grace was in quiet tears, holding a tiny bag of ice to her shoulder (one of her teammates had scooped a few ice cubes out of her water bottle and put them into the bag that had held the snack apples, a detail that charmed me).  I immediately announced I was going to take her to the ER for x-rays and neither coach fought me.  Yes, that makes sense, they nodded.  The whole way to the hospital, she cried softly.

After a long wait they finally put us into a room and I helped Grace change into a johnny and lie down on the gurney.  “Will you lie with me, Mummy?” she asked plaintively, and I did.  I curled my body around hers and rested my chin on top of her gold-streaked brown hair.  She whimpered quietly, and I could tell she was in a lot of pain.

“You’ve broken bones too, right, Mummy?” she said suddenly and I smiled in spite of myself.  For years and years I’ve maintained that if you haven’t broken any bones you’re “not trying hard enough.”  This is an obnoxious thing to say, I realize, and I think mostly I’m trying to explain to myself why I’ve broken one ankle, one arm (both bones, both compound fractures), three ribs, and assorted fingers and toes.

“Yes.  I’ve broken a lot of bones.  Unfortunately I think getting hurt is part of the deal.  It’s going to happen sometimes when you do sports.  I’m pretty sure there will be more injuries to come in other games.  And in general, in life.”  I hesitated.  “But I promise,” I blinked back the tears that sprang to my eyes.  “I promise you it’s always worth it to play.”

We lay there quietly for a while.  Then it was time for x-rays.  She was very freaked out by being alone in the dark room, by the lead apron, and by the big machine aimed at her shoulder.  By the time we were finished there she was weeping in my arms again.

Then we went back to the room and onto the gurney.  It was quiet in the ER on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, and I could hear our breathing.  “Mummy, you know what?”  Grace turned her head slowly to look at me.  “This is like when I had something in my eye the other day.”  (After a protracted effort to get an eyelash out of her eye, she had been in real pain for hours; my guess is that she somehow scratched her eyeball).  “You know, I realize how much I’ve been taking for granted all along.”

I tried hard not to cry.  I looked right in her mahogany eyes, nodding, biting my lip.  I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.

That night when I tucked her in her arm was propped on a pillow pet and her eyes were wary.  She was very worried about rolling over and injuring herself more in her sleep.  I smoothed her hair back from her forehead and kissed her cheek, murmuring again how proud I was of her and how brave she had been.

“Mummy, I just want to say thank you again.” With her good arm, she clutched her teddy bear to her chest as she spoke.

“Why, Grace?”

“Thank you for being there with me all day.  For always being with me.”  Her eyes brimmed and mine did too.  I hugged her because I didn’t have words to express what I wanted to say.  Which is that there’s nowhere I want to be but right here with her.  That I don’t want to miss a single second of this season of my life, or of hers.

 

 

A blur of white petals

I’ve often noted that I believe insight is everywhere, as long as you remain open to it.  I’m defiantly not an intellectual snob: recall my discussion of something I saw in Glamour magazine.

Lately, it’s the tree on a residential street that is near the end of my run.  This isn’t the first time things I’ve noticed something on a run that has made my think.  Maybe this is a series: seasonal reflections while running.  In winter, I was struck by the difference sunlight made.  One side of the street, in shadow, was crusted with ice and snow.  The other was wet, water flooding down the pavement.  Nothing took away the substance – water – but the power of light changed its form entirely.  Like inquiry, like honest discussion, I thought: in its light, things we fear lose their grip.

Last week I ran in the rain.  The world had a quality of light that I associate with a spring rain: clear, but vaguely pink-tinted, everything even crisper and more itself than usual.  I had to duck through the branches of the tree I mentioned because it was so heavy with white petals, soggy with water.  For blocks after I brushed through the branches, white petals flew off me as I ran.  The tree – and the world – was literally heavy with beauty, so replete with excess gorgeousness that it shed onto me, spread itself everywhere.  I kept hearing Kate Chopin in my head: “Pirate gold isn’t to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly!”

A few days later the rain had dried and as I rounded the corner I saw that many of the petals had fallen off the tree.  I didn’t have to duck anymore; the tree, while still fulsomely dotted with white petals, had sprung back to the shape I was accustomed to.  I glanced down as my feet slipped, though, and noticed the sidewalk was a blur of white petals.

Beauty – physical, experiential, emotional – is evanescent.  Drink it in, and fling the petals all around you, while you can.

 

Crystal clear and chilly

On the very last full day of summer vacation last year I took Grace and Whit to one of my very favorite beaches, about an hour north of Boston.  We swam and built castles, wrote our names in the wet sand, and generally danced with the tides.  The day was nothing short of magical and remains one of my favorite memories of last summer.

This past weekend we went back.  It was crystal clear and chilly, and a fierce wind gusted over us.  The beach was nearly deserted and the tide was out.  Grace and Whit ran ahead of us, picking up driftwood walking sticks and leaning over to examine the empty, barnacle-crusted shell of a horseshoe crab.  We all admired the ripples in the sand, noticing with wonderment how quickly – and temporarily, because the tide comes back in and erases it – the wind leaves its mark on the earth.

My parents often took Hilary and me on outings like this when we were kids; I thought of that as I watched my own children run on the packed sand, their coats flapping behind them like capes.  The years collapsed, as they so often do, and I marveled at how enormous swaths of life can sometimes compress into mere moments.

It was cold, my eyes were watering, my hair was flying in my face, but I felt a tremendous, surpassing peace for that hour on the beach.  I love the coast, drawn as I am to liminal places, to the border where one world melts into the next.  I am happiest near the ocean, that much I know for sure.  The weather and time of year doesn’t matter – in fact in many ways I prefer the beach off season, when it is more likely to be empty.  I just need to stand beside the ocean, to listen to the roar and the murmur of water and land meeting, the boundary between them mutable, redrawn every moment as the tide shifts back and forth in an echo of the waxing and waning moon.  And so, on Saturday, I did.

The poetry all around us

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem – Wallace Stevens

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. – Mark Doty

A couple of weeks ago I had three Marks in my head – Doty, Nepo, Strand.  I went for an amble through poetry books and quotes, and for some reason these two lines jumped out at me.  I’ve written before that everyday life is a practice and a poem.  It is clear that one of my life’s central preoccupations is witnessing the poetry in the most ordinary days.

My first response on reading that line by Stevens was that I disagree entirely; I think if you look closely, watch patiently, there is poetry to be seen everywhere, and every day.  And Doty’s point about the world consenting to be made into a poem makes sense to me turned around the other way: it consents when we let it.  When we turn our attention to the world, and keep our hearts open, there is poetry everywhere.

See the poetry I found, just in the last few weeks?  All you have to do is look.  Remember, what you see is what you get.

The soundtrack of those long, dark weeks

I sit at my desk in my small third-floor office, the only sound the click of the computer keyboard as I write a few sentences in Scrivener.  I listen to You Are My Sunshine wafting through Whit’s closed bedroom door and sit back in my chair, quiet, letting the song wash over me.  The song changes to Puff the Magic Dragon and my eyes fill with tears.  I go stand in his dim, nightlight-lit room, watching him sleep.

The shadowy room is full of ghosts who whisper to me.  I can hear the faint squeak of the yellow rocker as I sit in it, pushing back and forth, back and forth.  I hold a sleeping baby Grace and my tears splash on the blanket in which she is swaddled.  I lean over and plant a kiss on her forehead, my face wet with my crying, and murmur to her I am sorry.

I listen to those long-ago years, listen to the story they tell of a mother as newborn as her baby daughter, of a woman startled by the yawning cavern that has opened up right in the middle of her life.  I hear myself rushing through bedtime, desperate for an hour when I’m nobody’s mother.  I listen to Come Away To Sea, to Blackbird, to Baby Mine, to the soundtrack of those long, dark weeks and months.  I listen and I ache, wishing I could have those nights back.  In part because I want to do them differently, with more love, more patience, less frustration, less impatience.  Because I want my first experience of motherhood with my first baby to have been different.  But also just because I want those nights back.  Every single one of them.

To listen to You Are My Sunshine, to hear myself sing it in a whisper to a sleeping baby in my arms.  One more time.

Please click over to Momalom for lots of beautiful writing on today’s 5 for 5 topic, Listening.