everyday life

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.

 

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?