everyday life

January updates

I took this picture one afternoon last week, from my seat at the desk where I spend so much of my time.  This second week of the new year feels like it’s all real now, like it’s time to sink into our regular lives again, whether they are defined by new words or not.  I’m feeling uninspired right now.  A few short updates, instead.

1. I’m not much of a resolution person.  Nevertheless, I think it’s really valuable to be reminded of what our priorities are as we launch into a new year.  These glorious words by Jena Strong, on this topic, took my breath away.  The simplest acts of tending, full of meaning, full of metaphor.  Oh yes.  And she quotes these extraordinary lines, suggesting this as one alternative to the standard resolutions, and I nodded vigorously and blinked away tears.  May we all remember to feel the wonder.

Drink the awe
It’s a brutally fast-paced, Facebooked, hypertext-drunk world, my loves, and it’s just ridiculously easy to take it all for granted, to sit there and type your message into your glorious little device and attach a video and send it halfway round the world as you sip your coffee that came from 8,000 miles away and think nothing of it all, when in fact there are roughly 1,008 astonishing miracles banging around your life right this second if you just were able to realize their wobbly gifts. What a thing.

2. I finished a draft manuscript of my memoir!  Yikes.  Scary.  I’m am now looking for an agent.  Wish me luck!

3. It was a huge pleasure to meet a few online friends last week.  Christine Koh from Boston Mamas, Rachel Bertsche from MWF Seeking BFF, and Katie Leigh from cakes, teas, and dreams.  My experience certainly defies that who claim that online friendships are not real, and I have mostly been hugely impressed by everyone I’ve met in person who I knew here first.  These three women were no exception.

4. I’m devouring everything Michael Ondaatje wrote that I haven’t yet read.  His poetry, his novels.  It surprises me, over and over again, that my favorite fiction writer is a man, but there it is.  The working title of the novel I’m working on is drawn from a line from one of his books, and Divisadero is one of the books I love best of all.

5. Grace (and sometimes Whit) and I are in a habit of going for walks around the neighborhood as much as we can.  We notice the nests in bare branches, we notice the houses that still have Christmas (or Halloween) decorations up, we notice the light on trees, we notice the different colors in the sky.  Even in this barren season, of early darkness and raw cold, there is so much beauty.

What are you doing these January days?

September: Trust the tides

On September 1st I took Grace and Whit on a last summer adventure.  We drove about an hour north to the beach.  The day was magical.  It started out with Grace noticing a rainbow in the cloudy sky – not the standard arc but literally a patch of rainbow among the clouds.  I thought of the Tennessee Williams line I love about a complete overcast, then a blaze of light.  The rainbow is always there, even in a sky mottled with clouds.  You just have to look.

We got to the beach early and it was low tide and beautifully deserted.  Throughout the morning the tide came in, creating and then erasing a series of sand bars as it did so.  We spent the day dancing with the inexorability of the tides.  We stood on sandbars until the water lapped at our feet, wondering at how something that can be so seemingly solid – the sand under us – can suddenly disappear into the ocean.  Whit kept shouting about how the sandbar had been “washed out to sea” and I explained that no, the next time the tide went out it would reappear again.  He looked at me when I said this, baffled, but then he smiled, visibly reassured.

Grace and Whit played in the shallow water as the waves came in, noticed how you could feel the water pulling away at sand under your feet as it receeded.  They jumped in the waves, holding hands.  I watched, fighting tears.

Then they built a castle right at the water’s edge and worked at defending it against the incoming tide.  Grace scooped out a moat in front of the castle and Whit piled new sand on top of it.  They giggled as the waves washed over their castle, slowly wearing it down to flat sand.  No matter how hard they worked, of course, the tide won in the end.  But of course we know, with utter certainty, that the tide will turn and go out again next.  May we trust the tides.

Drudgery and divinity

Sunday was one of those rare days I’ve come to treasure almost above all others: a day with absolutely no plans.  We puttered as a family, each of us doing his or her own thing, coming together in various combinations at different moments.  Grace and I went to the grocery store and to drop some things off at Goodwill, and she sighed from the backseat, “Mummy, I love days like this with you.”  My eyes filled immediately and I nodded, not speaking for fear she’d hear the tears in my voice.  Whit and I curled up on the couch and he read The Velveteen Rabbit to me, proud of his newly-fluent reading.  The kids and I made cookies for their school’s teacher appreciation lunch, and then worked at the dining room table on a puzzle while they baked, the house filling with sugar cookie smell and the sound of Christmas carols.

I made homemade tomato sauce and apple sauce, hardboiled some eggs, baked two potatoes for lunch.  I did two loads of laundry.  As I was folding Whit’s pajamas and stacking Grace’s jeans in a careful pile, I felt a swell of gratitude and of well-being.  I realized, not for the first time, that there is something I find deeply comforting and satisfying in the most quotidian domestic tasks.  It has to do with the mundane and the magnificent that I have written about before, with the way that life is a collage of the prosaic and the transcendent.  I wrote then, and I still believe, that the divinity and the drudgery are both essential for me, and that somehow they sharpen each other’s vividness.

This belief is joined now by a new one: in some way that I don’t quite understand yet, the drudgery actually allows me to access the divine.  Over the last few years we’ve cut way back on our childcare, and I have all of the household responsibilities now.  And I am startled, I admit, by the deep sense of satisfaction these tasks give me.  I feel actual happiness when I fold laundry, or when I unpack half-eaten lunch sandwiches, or when I wake my children up every single morning, brushing their sleep-tangled hair back from their faces.  Or perhaps what I feel is contentment.  But I’m not sure there’s a big difference between happiness and contentment anyway; are you?

I suspect that this is a manifestation of a larger settling into my own life, a sinking into what is, in all its dishwasher-emptying, lunch-packing, homework-checking reality.  The everyday details and endless work of taking care of a house, and children, and a marriage sometimes daunt and frustrate me, sure.  But more often than not, these days, they also fill me with something warm and steady that feels awfully good.  I am certain it’s no accident that this sinking in comes just as I realize how truly numbered these days are.  This time, with small (and medium) children at home, of lost teeth and found pennies, of delight at a bird on the porch and despair at a missing teddy bear, will not furl out indefinitely.  For some reason lately I sense the preciousness of these days; the awareness that they will end floats constantly around the corners of my experience.  For so many years I assumed that life would be this way forever, one combative naptime spilled into another, the rocking before bedtime felt endless, and so forth.  I took these days – with their bathtimes and melanine plates and kissed bruises, their exhaustion and their wide-eyed wonder – for granted.

But no, they aren’t forever.  In fact they only last a minute.  And I am so immensely grateful that I realized that before they were gone, and that I found, in my daily chores and responsibilities, a door through which I can glimpse the holiness of this season in my life.

The tenuous physicality of motherhood

This is my every morning.  I park the car, we walk into school, first to Whit’s building, and then to Grace’s.  I always trail them up these steps, for some reason, watching their bodies skipping towards the door.  Lately I’ve had the physicality of motherhood (and childhood) on my mind, and it is never more apparent than those moments when I watch their ever-lengthening bodies walking away from me.

We’ve been listening to Love Came Down at Christmas in the car, which Whit loves because it’s “the song he was the drum for.”  Last week, one morning, we had a very detailed conversation about my pregnancies with each of them.  Whit knows he kicked every time that carol came on and Grace, with her razor-sharp focus on fairness, wanted to know what song made her kick.  I don’t know, I told her honestly.  I went on to tell her about a day I’ll never forget, at my friend Schuyler’s wedding, in the summer of 2002, when I hadn’t felt Grace (then known as Finbar, gender unknown) for a while and sat on a couch prodding my stomach, my entire world narrowing for the first time to a beam of frantic concern about my child.  Okay, she said, satisfied that there was also a story about her inside my belly.

I watch them walk away and I think about all those days when I felt their little feet in my ribcage, when I watched an arm, a knee, an elbow, turn over inside me, a knobby piece of a yet-unknown person bulging against my domed skin as it did so.  Just as everyone cautioned, it’s hard to remember exactly what that felt, having a new life swimming inside of me.  While I know it was both miraculous and uncomfortable, I wish I remembered more precise details.

The intense physical union of pregnancy gives way, in a moment as brilliant and searing as lightning, to a time of continued bodily intertwined-ness.  I miss those days, too, in an odd, grateful, relieved kind of way.  And then, as the years of childhood unfurl, gradual but indeniable physical separation occurs.  I know there will be a day when my children don’t want me to curl up in bed with them.  A day when they will close the doors of their rooms and retreat to a world where I am not welcome.  A day when Whit’s first request, upon stubbing a toe, is no longer “will you kiss it, Mummy?”

I fear and dread that day, but I ought not let that keep me from imagining what is right now.  Isn’t this one of the central themes of my life?  The way I sometimes let fear of what is coming occlude the brightness of the moment?  Instead of falling into this familiar groove, allowing myself to be engulfed by an anticipated loss, may I instead lean into what is true right now.  Last night I tucked Grace in and discovered that she was clutching a tank top of mine; I hadn’t put her to bed, and in my absence she had gone into my closet and pulled out a piece of my clothing to hold close.  Whit still lets me wash his hair and soap his back in the bathtub, and each time I admit I wonder if this is the last time.  How long will the simple fact of my physical presence be enough to soothe whatever it is that upsets my children?

I want to stop that wondering and abandon myself to what is.  It’s so hard for me to do this.  But as I watch Grace’s feet grow and grow, edging into territory where our flip-flops could be confused for each other’s, and as Whit’s teeth fall out, I feel a vague panic about the future encroaching on the present.  I suspect part of this is my own deep longing for a day when concerns and anxieties could be so easily solved, in the body of a parent, in a kiss, in a sweet-dreams-head-rub.  The solution to this panic, I know, is the most counter-intuitive thing for me: I ought to turn away from it and curl into right now.  All I can do is try.

Turning our brokenness into something beautiful

This is the darkest season; we wake in darkness and we watch the sun wane again before the clock has hit 5:00.  The light in the middle of the day is often pitched, somehow, at a high, wavering note; it is full and thin at the same time, endings tangible within it.  Somehow, the dark bothers me less than it used to.  There is an internal light that helps keep the thick, sometimes-threatening darkness slightly at bay.

The optimist in me feels a wild surge of hope about this: perhaps I am witnessing the birth of my own faith. This is a holy month, after all, full of imagery of light, regardless of your religion. Perhaps it is the flickering, nascent light of my own belief that illuminates these dark days. The candles in windows and the holiday lights strung on trees and in windows everywhere I look both reflect and contribute to that internal flickering.

We move towards the solstice, every day closer.  The winter solstice may well be the single holiest day of the year for me.  I definitely prefer it to the summer one, which demonstrates as clearly as any detail about me how much the promise of something (good and bad) impacts me.  Even at the height of summer, with the longest days we’ll ever know, there is something gloomy to me about the solstice.  It represents the turning back to dark.  That’s the preemptive regret that I’ve written about, which can completely occlude any present radiance for me.  This solstice, two weeks away, is the opposite.  It promises a turning back towards the light.

A year ago I read some of Meg Casey’s thoughts on the holiness that exists in darkness.  Once in a great while I read a piece of writing that makes me want to kneel and press my head to the ground, saluting its gorgeousness and ability to evoke emotion. This is one such piece. Please read it.

December is a holy month. Maybe it is the dark silky silence that descends so early, that speaks to me of reverence. Maybe it is the promise that December holds–that no matter how dark, how cold, how empty it can get, the light is coming back. Something always shifts in me when December arrives–I embrace the darkness and am eager for the coming solstice when the whole world is still and holds its breath, waiting to be reborn again. December whispers to me of midnight mass, of ancient choirs, of stained glass windows turned into gems by candle light.

Meg then goes on to talk about the connection between holiness and wholeness, using the image of a stained glass window: Broken, jagged, sharp pieces of glass held together magically, transformed into one perfect design not by gold or silver but by something as mundane as lead. And, of course, it is the light that animates the beauty.  Meg’s post reminds me of one of my very favorite of Anne Lamott’s lines: “Love is sovereign.” Yes. As Meg says, Love is the transformative power that turns our brokenness into something beautiful.

I love this because I think we often think of light as exposing flaws, unearthing chinks, revealing ugliness.  Yet in Meg’s metaphor it is light that knits disparate pieces into a whole, that reveals the light that exists within them.  Love as light.  Transformative, healing brokenness, uncovering worth.  May we all strive to be this kind of light, even in the dark moments of our lives.

There are some themes in my writing of which I’m very conscious.  Others emerge organically, and I’m not aware of them until I reflect for a moment.  Light and darkness has been a message to which I’ve returned this year, over and over.  I am often moved to tears by the quality of light in nature, and the metaphor of dark and light has also been one to which I am consistently drawn. Light and darkness.  Holiness and grace.  Radiance and shadow.  We keep on turning, and the shadows keep dancing, the light flickering.  All I can do is keep watching.

A repost from last December that is still immensely resonant for me.