everyday life

Maybe I’m Amazed, Into the Mystic, and the future glinting in the present

When Matt and I got married, a hundred years ago, I didn’t overly obsess about most of the wedding details (as you can see, I wore a ponytail and my dress was a sundress, notable only for the fact that it had a scalloped hem).  The only things I really cared about were the songs and the readings.  I cared a lot – agonized, even – about choosing readings for the service and also about our first dance song.  Our readings were two: Cavafy’s Ithaka, and an excerpt from The Book of Qualities.  Our first dance was to Maybe I’m Amazed by Paul McCartney and the last song we danced to before we left, on a small boat into the dark harbor, was Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic.

I thought of this yesterday when I was driving and Maybe I’m Amazed came on the radio.  This doesn’t happen much – the song that Paul McCartney wrote for his wife Linda, while lovely, isn’t exactly on constant repeat on Kiss 108.  I chose it, as is often the case when it comes to my musical attachments, for the lyrics.  But really, when I read the lyrics now, I think I chose it for the title.

Maybe I’m amazed.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I drove, the setting sun chasing me home along the Mass Pike, that some part of the 25 year old me knew this would be, in many ways, the anthem of my life.  It’s definitely no understatement to say that I have been startled, and continue to be, by how much flat-out amazement my experience contains.  This life amazes me every single day, with its surprising beauty, with its stunning pain, with its lingering grief, with its enduring sturdiness.  Of course I was thinking of my marriage, and my soon-to-be-husband when I chose Paul McCartney’s somewhat random song, but I think I also knew I was thinking of my life.

Of course Into the Mystic hits the same note, too.  That’s what this life, is after all, isn’t it?  A journey into the mystic, into a dark harbor, into a world lit by sputtering sparklers who consume themselves as they burn brightly, by fireworks whose flare leaves an imprint in the sky even after it fades.  I am so often hard on my younger self, focus so resolutely on all the poor choices I made and things I did not do well enough.  It is a welcome change to recognize that even in that young, impressionable bride there was a flicker of the future, an awareness of the themes that would come to define both my marriage and, most of all, my life.

Are there specific memories, or choices, in your life like this?  Places you can see the future glinting in the present, even if it takes retrospect to really understand what those flashes were?  And if you’re married, what song did you dance your first dance to?

 

The changes that grind on inexorably and those things that never change

Christmas is the mainstay of my year because tradition is the mainstay of my life.  It keeps me whole.  It is the centrifugal force that stops the pieces from shooting wildly into the void.  The only way I can bear the changes that grind on inexorably around me is to pepper the year with those things that never change.  Bath and books for the boys before bedtime.  Homemade cakes on their birthdays.  The beach in August.

– Anna Quindlen, Christmas

You know sometimes you read something and you find yourself startled with the simple truth of something that you’ve known along, but you never knew you knew?  Something so obvious you cannot believe you never saw it before?  Yeah, that.  I read Anna Quindlen’s words in one of her Living Out Loud columns and smacked my forehead with my hand.

Duh.  Yes.  I’m as keenly aware as anyone I know of the whirlwind of this life, of the shocking, devastating speed with which it all rushes by, of how easily I’m knocked off my feet by the swirling rapids of time.  I’m also fiercely – you might say irrationally – loyal to a set of traditions, some big and some tiny, and Anna Quindlen finally helps me see why.  These known things are sturdy handholds in the river of life, helping orient me and reassuring me that all does not pass away.

What are some of these traditions?  A Sunday afternoon family tree trimming, including the new ornaments that Grace and Whit pick out at the farm where we buy our tree every year.  Our August trip to Legoland.  Grace’s half chocolate, half vanilla birthday cakes.  Birthday cakes always homemade.  Sunday night family dinners, sitting down the four of us at 5pm.  Doing the Ghostie Dance before putting Whit to bed.  Grace wearing white to her end-of-year ceremonies at school.  The letters I write to each child on their birthdays.  Our annual stay at Lake Champlain, with its cocktails at sunset and bouncy castles and hayrides and primary color plastic cups and dinner at the Red Mill.  Christmas Eve dinner with my oldest family friends, complete with lots of good red wine, singing carols at the table, and the children staying up until midnight.  Dinner out at a special restaurant, the four of us, on the last day of the school year and the night before the new year starts.

Do you have things like this, things that never change amid the inexorable change of this life?
Do you prize them as much as I do?

The bodies that rule the world

I’m 37 years old.  I have had two children.  I am a fair-skinned redhead who used to spend a lot of time in the sun.  My body is different now than it was ten years ago, even five years ago.  I have new wrinkles, new eczema, new pockets that are softer than I’d like.  There are many, many things I must accept as I grow into adulthood (which is, incidentally, taking longer than I ever imagined).  My physical self is certainly one of them.

I read Kristin Nilsen’s article about the hit show Up All Night and its two lead actresses with humor and identification, with a pit in my stomach and tears in my eyes.  She writes of Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolph – both mothers – noting both their beauty and the way that their bodies are “substantial and meaningful.”  These women’s beauty is not in spite of their midlife roundness but rather because of it.  Nilsen asserts that Applegate and Rudolph represent fully the “bodies that rule the world.”  I love this language.

Up All Night is one of the few shows that I do occasionally watch.  The realistic, powerful depiction of female friendship and the hilariously on-point capturing of a marriage turned upside down by a baby are the reason I like it.  I had never specifically noticed what Nilsen describes, but now that I’ve read her thoughtful words I can’t stop thinking about Applegate and Rudolph as exemplars of womanhood in its full flower, of the ways motherhood augments and enriches us, even as it forces us to accept things we don’t like at all.

I’m fortunate never to have struggled with any substantive eating disorder; I know many who have and I know the terrifying and fierce grip those illnesses can have.  As I watch my daughter turn onto the runway that leads to adolescence, however, I find myself newly aware of the fraught minefield that body image can be.  I’m not sure precisely how to navigate these waters that I’ve only traveled through once before, and that time I was coming from a different perspective.  I know I need to avoid derogatory comments about myself (check) and model healthy and genuine eating (check).

The place I trip up is in actively demonstrating self-love.  That remains very hard for me.  As I thought about my midlife body, however, I realized with surprise and joy that I worry a lot less about it now.  Though I still have a long way to go before I am one of those women who is described as being “comfortable in her skin,” I definitely inhabit it more fully and assuredly than before.  Of course I am not the beauty that either Christina Applegate or Maya Rudolph is, but I do appreciate instinctively and thoroughly the powerful gorgeousness they display.  There is a lot more to do, both for me personally and for society at large, but I’m grateful for the smallest steps in the right direction.

What do you consider the most important things to model for and teach our children?  How is your body image, at whatever life stage you find yourself?

 

The holiness in housekeeping

I love empty, unprogrammed weekend days.  Sometimes we have adventures and fly through the air.  Sometimes we simply hang out at playgrounds.  But most often, a wide-open Sunday contains some mix of errands, laundry, walks around the neighborhood, skating, work email, bill-paying, packing of lunches, and cooking for the week ahead.

And you know what I’m realizing, lately?  Very often, the days full of these chores, of life’s most prosaic tasks, are my very favorites.  Grace and I were walking to the drycleaner and bank last Sunday morning, holding hands as we admired the cloudless blue sky when she sighed and said, “Mummy, I love just hanging out with you.”

“I do too,” I said, squeezing her peace sign patterned fleece glove.

We walked on in amiable silence.  Often, on the weekends, we fall into pairs, with Matt and Whit playing hockey or starting a big Lego project and Grace and I being the errand brigade.

“You know, Grace,” I said as we waited for the light.  “I think it’s great if you can really enjoy these little things.”

“Why?  You mean because if we can think something as regular as a chore is fun, then something big like” she hesitated.  “Like … Legoland, well, something big like that is even better?”

I thought about this for a minute as we crossed the street.  What did I really mean?  I guess it’s that the ability to find authentic joy in the grout I keep writing about seems like a very strong predictor of a life filled with contentment and cheer.  When I see my daughter evincing pleasure in such basic, quotidian tasks I feel immense pride and also a flicker of hope that she will have a happy life despite being freighted by having a mother who’s more shadow than sun.

I suspect this is also about my growing conviction that there is a deep holiness in this housekeeping, this elemental life-keeping.  It doesn’t seem like an accident that in recent years some of the basic burdens of keeping a family going – packing lunches, folding laundry – have become things I do, often, with reverence.  I can’t explain what’s changed, but there’s no question that the most ordinary details of my life seem shot through with meaning, charged with a shimmer of the spirit.

And, finally, just as I exhort my children to simply notice things, I’m grateful for any signs of their sinking into their lives, of their learning to lean into the truth of whatever is, at any moment.  Even when it’s boring, even when it means standing in line at the post office or scrubbing dishes.  There is divinity in that drudgery.  I know there is, and it is a source of grand, enormous pride that my daughter may as well.

 

Being conscious of all of life

I loved Mariam Gates’ post last weekend, Brave Heart, about her son’s broken arm.  Mariam’s recounting of her conversation with her son – when he tells her he was not brave because he scared and was cried – is heartfelt, and the reflections she shares about what bravery really means are stirring and thought-provoking.  She writes that she is “not interested in bravery that is synonymous with fearlessness” and while I’ve never thought of it so clearly and compellingly, I find myself nodding.  Yes, yes, yes.  Fearlessness seems like a defense mechanism, doesn’t it?  An over-simplification of this life?  Mariam calls it disconnection, and I think that’s right.  I’ve never been fearless; if anything, I’m often consumed with fears.  Fears run through my veins along with hope and wonder and memory, sometimes making my heart skip a beat, sometimes clouding my vision so I can’t see anything other than that which I dread.

So maybe fear is not fearlessness.  But then what is it? Well, I like Mariam’s definition:

I think bravery is about being conscious of all of life.

Why yes.  Yes, that’s it.  Isn’t she utterly right?  Isn’t true bravery about remaining open to the fear, about letting the fear permeate you, even, and not running away from it?  Of course you could call this a self-interested response, since I think one of the central themes of this blog is being aware of everything, of all of life.  But truthfully I hadn’t thought of it this way before, and when I read Mariam’s post I found myself agreeing absolutely.

Bravery is staring into the sun, even when the brightness of life – and the brightness is precisely because life’s minutes are burning in front of us – is painful.  Bravery is not flinching and not looking away, even when the emotion of a moment overwhelms us.  Bravery is not hiding, in a thousand ways little and big, from our own lives.  Bravery is letting heartbreak gouge your spirit, because you know that that leaves a deeper well for joy.

Bravery is about being conscious of all of life.

Thank you, Mariam, for putting it so beautifully.