everyday life

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.

Walking

I’ve mentioned that things are a bit shaky chez moi lately, with unanticipated changes and tremors, a brand-new and somewhat startling shakiness to the ground.  Last week I felt tentative and edged my way out into the world only when it was necessary.  Other than one dinner out (a celebration with a few of our dear local friends) I have been staying very close to home.  The truth is I am feeling internal again, quiet, and there are only a few people I feel comfortable being with.

I have been working a lot, writing, reading, sleeping when I can (not that well), and curling up with Grace and Whit.  Cooking random vegetables out of the bin that arrives weekly, making my way through Gail Godwin’s glorious Evensong, working slowly on a couple of essays I have in process.

I’ve also been going for walks in the afternoons.  Whenever I can, when I have breaks between calls, I sneak out, bundle up, pull on a fleece hat and mittens and parka and head down the street.  It’s often late afternoon when I go out, so in particular I have been watching the light change.  In the space of a couple of days it suddenly seemed as though the days were markedly longer.  A movement which had seemed slow, almost imperceptible, like the hour hand creaking around a clock, suddenly jumped and made itself known.

I walk and I watch.  I see the light on the trees, the black nests in bare tree branches, the glowing rough-edged moon in the saturated, still-blue sky.  The unfortunate thing, though, is that I seem to go on every walk with myself.  No matter how far or how fast I walk, I can’t get away from myself.  Sometimes I can still my racing thoughts and heart with the abiding calm of a late afternoon in deep winter, but most of the time I can’t. I’m right there with myself.  As it were.

And still, not really knowing what else to do, I keep walking.  Looking up, looking down, noticing things every step of the way, often feeling waves of wonder.  Realizing that no matter what, I can’t outrun myself.  Even as the world turns towards light again, I am, in ways big and small, turning inward.  Who knows how long this will last, this phase of inwardness, this time of late-afternoon walks, this season of anxiousness and waiting, of patience and fear.  I can’t know how long.  So I just keep walking.

 

Close to the surface

One evening last week Whit and I sat in companionable silence in the family room.  He was building a LEGO and I was working.  “Mummy?” At his voice I looked up from my laptop.

“Yes?”  He was perched on the side of the low train table, LEGO pieces in one hand and the other held to his chest.

“I can feel my heart beating.”

“Cool, Whit.”  Why did you suddenly think of this?  The inner workings of Whit’s mind and heart will always be a mystery to me.  Which reminds me, daily, of the vast and essential unknowability of even those we love best.

After a long moment of silence, during which I watched him sit, holding his hand over his heart, he spoke again.  “It feels amazing, Mummy.”

Why yes, Whit.  It is amazing.

The next morning was Whit’s seven year doctor’s appointment.  He sat on the doctor’s examination table in just his jeans, his white chest looking impossibly tiny and incomprehensibly grown-up at the same time.  The doctor pressed his stethoscope to Whit’s back.  He asked him to turn his head this way and that.  He kept listening.  Time stretched uncomfortably.  I glanced at Matt, my anxiety mounting.  What was he hearing?  What was he listening for?  Whit looked over his shoulder at the doctor, sensing, too, that this was taking an awfully long time.  “Whit, turn this way,” the doctor’s voice was stern, his face limned with concentration.

I chewed a nail and watched, feeling my own heart skittering in my chest.  Was last night’s comment a harbinger of this, a prompt by the universe to appreciate the amazement of our hearts beating, of this most taken-for-granted and yet outrageous gift?  I could feel my breath speeding up and I began to awful-ize.  He needs open heart surgery.  I should have paid attention last night, put down my computer, pressed my hand to his chest, noticed the extraordinary beauty of his ordinary heartbeat.  I should have done that years ago.

“Okay,” the doctor cleared his throat and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears.  “He’s fine.”  I exhaled, but only part way.  “But you can hear the whooshing of the blood in his aorta.  It’s something we see rarely in kids, and I kept asking him to turn his head to test if it was that or not.  I wish my med student was here right now; this is rare and it’s cool to hear.”

“But it’s really just normal, and not an issue?”

“Yes, really.  Promise.  It’s just a detail.  It’s interesting, and unusual.  His blood just flows close to the surface, your kid.”  I exhaled the rest of the way and helped Whit pull on his shirt.

After a few more minutes, we walked back to the car.  I thought of a quote I’ve always related to, which I just tweeted recently, by Alan Gurganus: “Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.”  I let go of Whit’s hand and held my fingers against his back.  Thump, thump, thump.  His small heart rabbited against my hand.  It is amazing, mummy.  Calamity is always so close.  We walk the line between ordinary and catastrophe every moment.  Thump, thump, thump.  Close to the surface.

Worn red barns, fresh snow, and birthday candles

It is with my iphone, most of all, that I capture those tiny moments and details through which I glimpse the eternal.  Here are some, from the 7th birthday edition.

The view from the sink at our dear friends’ house in New Hampshire where we spent Martin Luther King weekend.  I remember the weekend when that red barn went up.  Now it is time-scarred and worn.  More evidence of life, leaving its mark on all of us, in ways both visible and unseen.

Reading to a six year old before bed for the very last time in my life.  After putting him to bed I bawled my eyes out.  I know, I know, I know: very ending is a new beginning, and it does just keep getting better and better.  Still, something is ending, and I’m incapable of not mourning that.

On Whit’s birthday I found him standing, silently, in my office looking out the window at the snow.  He was delighted beyond words at the white world.  When we got to school, both kids and Matt made tracks in the fresh, untouched blanket of snow.

The message Whit left in the snow: I’m 7.  It reminded me of our late-summer day at Crane’s Beach, when the children both wrote in the sand and then watched their messages eroded by the inexorably rising tide.

We celebrated Whit’s birthday with dinner at home.  My parents and Matt’s dad joined us for pizza, roast chicken, and salad with homemade croutons (Whit chose the menu).  The birthday boy’s cake request was chocolate, with chocolate icing.

Our front door.  I actually dislike Valentine’s Day, and always have.  I like its decorations, though, and I finally realized it is because I love red and pink together.  This wreath makes me smile every time I come home.