everyday life

Air thick with both wonder and loss

Last Friday the 1st grade performed their annual movement and music assembly, which this year was called the Arctic Blast.  It seems like moments ago that I sat in the audience watching Grace in her 1st grade assembly (Musicians of the Sun), the morning after I threw a surprise birthday dinner for Matt.  We sat in the same gym, our heads telling the story of the night before’s raucous toasts, and while I remember feeling sentimental I was surely not as crushingly overwhelmed with time’s passage was this time.

Probably it’s because Whit is my last baby.  Perhaps part of it is that with each year, each week, each day, I seem to grow more porous, my awareness of life’s beauty and heartbreak.  Maybe it was just the afternoon.  I don’t know, but I sat there on the metal folding chair with tears rolling down my cheeks.  It’s as though the passage of time was in the room with us.

The air was so thick with both wonder and loss that I almost couldn’t breathe.  I marveled at my son.  My son, who just two seconds ago was one of those tiny almost-babies in the pre-K class who sat restlessly on mats on the floor.  My son, who just two days ago was born, his blond hair, his blue eyes, and his boy-ness all shocking me in equal measure.

I am a broken record, these days, I know.  But I cannot stop my astonishment at how swiftly it’s flying, at how vivid the colors of this life are as they blur past my eyes.

You know what else, though?  I don’t want to.

Cold clear morning

Monday morning dawned clear and cold.  I went out at 6:30 for my first run in six days.  Last week I my first real migraine – an unwelcome return to the country of pain –  and I have new respect for those of you who deal with those regularly.  Then Grace, Whit and I had a wide open morning.  We headed into Boston to visit the new playground, an outing they’ve both been agitating frantically for.

Because it was early, and because it was cold, we were alone at the playground.  And what a playground it is!  The kids ran wild, and then the three of us spent a long, long time on the zipline.  We each rode the zipline to the end, bouncing back after hitting the big black spring.  We laughed, hard, over and over again.  Then the kids rode it together.

Boston was gray and brown in the background.  Grace noted that the world was the color of Still’s (the sparrow who spends the night on our front porch) feathers.  The day before, as we drove home from New Hampshire, we had had a long conversation about state house domes, and we found the gold dome of Boston’s state house among the Beacon Hill roofs.  “It looks the Gold Dome in Jerusalem!” exclaimed Whit, drawing the first-ever parallel, I’m pretty sure, between our state’s state house and the Dome of the Rock.  “There’s not as much mosaic,” he observed, after staring for a few minutes.

 

And then we walked back to the car, our shadows falling long behind us.  I remembered another empty day, when the three of us did trapeze.  I found myself begging the universe: please let them continue to be enchanted by such small adventures, please give me more cold air full of their peals of laughter, please don’t take these mornings, somehow gorgeously rich precisely because they are so empty, away from me yet.

Right now

Dear Grace and Whit,

I want to remember right now, February of 2012, this season when we see our breath in the air in the morning but still await snow whose coming seems, every day, more and more unlikely.  There is so much I hope you’ll remember.  The red velvet brownies I made served you for breakfast.  Your eyes were wide, incredulous at the fortuitous treat you woke up to.  The chicken noodle soup I made from scratch several weekends in a row, that you devoured.  The golden, maple-syrupy light on the trees outside our house when we got into the car each morning to go to school. The Adele songs you both know by heart, the way we all sing along to them when they’re on the radio.  The day we drove with Allison, your beloved cousin, to see Pops, your great-grandfather.  You swam in the pool at his retirement community and then we all had lunch, with Pops and his friend Helen.  You marveled at the notion of ordering from a menu every single day, and you smiled at each of Pops’ friends that he proudly introduced you to.

The weekend in New Hampshire, skiing with our dearest friends, the way you gamely rolled out sleeping bags and slept on our floor.  Skiing first thing in the morning, barreling down Turkey Trot, each of you flying over that run’s groomed jumps.  On Saturday morning, being the first people to ski down and then, from the lift, admiring our tracks in the fresh powder.  On Sunday morning, we got a call that you didn’t feel well, Grace, and then you fell asleep lying on my lap in the very crowded, noisy lodge.  I could have watched the shadows of your eyelashes on your sleeping cheeks all day long.  The way the four of us got laughing, uproariously, on the way home.

The crayon hearts we made together, and the Harry Potter sweet shop chocolate frogs too.  The way each of you, without prompting, said to me during this month, “Mummy!  Look at the light of this hour.”  And we did, almost every day, with outright wonder.  Our kitchen, full of homemade Valentine decorations; construction paper hearts all over the walls and pink and red garlands hanging between the cabinets.  Grace’s touch-typing homework, Whit’s introduction to Harry Potter, and red and white heart-shaped ravioli.

There are some things I hope you’ll forget, too.  The morning I snapped at you, raising my voice, outright hollering as we sat at a gas station before school.  “Guys!” I shouted, and you both turned to look at me, silenced and startled.  I am sorry when I lose my temper.  There’s very little that sets me off like your bickering.  I call you the Bickersons and some days, when I have fortitude, patience, I am able to roll my eyes at the arguing.  But some days my fuse is short and I yell.  I’m sorry.

I love you, I love you, I love you.  This love is manifest in the tiniest details of every single day, even when I’m grouchy, even on the grayest days.  The grout between the tiles of life, I once called these small moments, and that’s what they are.  But it’s the grout that holds everything together, isn’t it?

These are the days of miracle and wonder

These are the day of miracle and wonder

These are also the days when my 9 year old tells me I’m embarrassing her (“just a little bit, Mummy”) when I take her to school in my Juicy sweatpants.  Does she not realize that these are my daytime sweatpants?  (I actually change out of pajama pants into the Juicys in the morning.  Just ask my husband who mocks me every single time I do it.)

These are the days when the true friends are the ones you can call up and ask for help with pick-up or drop-off, or if it’s okay if a child comes over to their house for a couple of hours.

These are the days when you start having to have medical tests that are sort of scary.  So you text your friends from the waiting room, trying for lightness, when really you’re just terrified.

These are the days of Words With Friends, The Hunger Games, Downton Abbey, US Weekly, Mary Oliver.

These are the days when an evening may include quizzing someone on the multiplication tables (1-12) for 15 minutes, washing someone’s back in a tub overflowing with bubbles, a black tie cocktail party, Gossip Girl, or too many glasses of wine at the local dive bar.  Or all of the above.

These are the days when some friends are doing cleanses, and others are subsisting on white wine and peppermint patties, and you oscillate wildly between those two poles.

These are the days when you know who you truly love, and why.  You know who your genuinely close friends are.

These are the days when a cancer diagnosis in someone you know is no longer shockingly rare, but becoming, instead, horrifyingly, par for the course.

These are the days when, on your birthday, the children of your old friends call to sing you happy birthday.  You can hear the voice of your friend, their mother, and the person who for years was the one doing the singing, in the background.

These are the days of rushing home and taking off your heels – the good pair that you finally bought – and your dress pants and jewelry and pulling on your pjs to read to your children and tuck them in.

These are the days when most of the time you feel 18, but once in a while you feel excruciatingly aware of every single hour you’ve lived.

These are the days of SUVs and minivans, of extra boosters floating around the trunk in case you need to put up the 3rd row, of kids who tell you what radio station to put on and who sing along, knowing every word, to Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Gym Class Heroes.

These are the days when you cry all the time, often because you feel like your heart is going to burst from the fullness of a single day.

These are the days of miracle and wonder, indeed.

Here, now

I don’t know how it’s possible that I didn’t know this song before.  Ray Lamontagne’s Be Here Now has been on repeat, in my car and on my computer, in my head, for the last many days.

It’s not a secret that these have been raw, vulnerable weeks for me.  January brought with it a new and intense awareness of how fragile everything is, one that I did not anticipate as the year turned.  I’ve been walking and listening and crying and reading and hugging my children.  I have been watching the light.  Some days the lengthening of the days feels so visceral, it’s as though I can literally feel the earth turning under my feet.

I can tell I’m particularly porous these days because, even more than usual, I’m crying at everything.  I feel more aware than ever of the extraordinary magnificence of this life.  I walk into Grace’s room and find this on the floor, a drawing from her brother, and dissolve into tears.  Tears of gratitude and tears that acknowledge the unavoidable, blinding pain of this moment’s impermanence.

I cried reading the book that Whit brought home from the library, a frankly poetic picture book called Moonshot, about the flight of Apollo 11.  The description of walking on the moon, in a place where nobody had ever been before, was so full of palpable wonder my expansive emotions overran my body, leaking out in tears.  I wonder how much of Whit’s current fixation with space, the planets, and flight is wound up with the way I keep seeing the moon rising.  A few weeks ago everybody in his class had to pick a biography from the library to bring home and read with their parents.  His choice of Amelia Earhart, predictably, made me cry.

I’ve walked by this window in the Nike store several times, and I’ve even stopped to photograph it before.  But last week I read the words, now familiar, and gasped at their truth.  As much as it feels I’ve plumbed those limits, the truth is I have no idea.  None of us ever can.

One afternoon last week Grace, Whit and I went to Mount Auburn, one of our favorite places.  It was deserted and quiet and the late-afternoon painted everything gold.  We wandered around, noticing things everywhere.  Grace and Whit are drawn to the wild and peaceful place as surely as am I.  They jogged and gazed and enjoyed each other’s company in a place whose every inch speaks of the power of both life and death.  More than once I had to blink back tears as I watched them.

Sometimes there is so much sweetness I can’t stand it.

Be here now.