everyday life

There is no reason to be afraid

Yesterday afternoon Grace asked me to play American Girl dolls with her.  I told her I couldn’t right that minute, but that we could before bed if she wanted to, though she’d have to forgo TV.  No problem, she enthused.  Later, as we were playing, she mentioned that most of her friends at school don’t play American Girl anymore, and I felt a surge of emotion – some combination of panic and sadness, the steamroller of this life roaring in my ears as it flies past.

“Hold back!  Stop!  I panic, unprepared for change, but it’s too late … I cannot gather back one moment, only marvel at what comes next.” -Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

Blinking back tears, I helped Julie the American Girl brush her teeth, and then I brushed out her long blonde hair, watching Grace chatter to the toy dogs as she lined them up, kissing each goodnight.  God, I thought fiercely, I do not want this to be over.  Not now, not ever.  I am not ready.

Then Grace tucked her two dolls in and told them a bedtime story.  I sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against her bed, listening to her tale.  A lion named Aslan (guess what she’s reading) was presiding over a brand-new land in which a girl and her parents were lost.  The parents were scared of the lion but the girl could understand him, so he spoke to the adults through the child.  “Your daughter is special,” the lion said.  Grace looked up and caught my eye, and I smiled at her.  “She can understand when animals speak.  There is no reason to be afraid.”

Grace trailed off, leaning to pull the orange blanket up over the two girls.  “Grace,” I spoke to the back of her head, her brown hair already drying from her bath, “If you could have any super power, would you choose being able to speak to animals?”  She sat back down right across from me, shaking her head firmly.  “No.  I would choose invisibility.”

“Really?  Why?”  I was surprised.

“Well,” she hesitated, glancing away from me.  “Well,” she looked at me again and took a breath, “Sometimes at school, when someone says something that makes me feel silly, or hurts my feelings, I wish I could be invisible.  Just disappear.”

My chest clenched up.  I wanted to hug her against me, to kiss away all of those hurt moments, and to say to her, as her fictional all-powerful lion had, there is no reason to be afraid.  As soon as that thought passed, I realized I wanted someone to tell me that, too.

The tenderness of pain itself

I didn’t have the best Easter I’ve ever had.  On Saturday afternoon I began feeling sick, a nausea that intermittently escalated and ebbed.  By 7 I was in bed with a fever, trying hard not to throw up.  Sunday I woke up feeling somewhat better, though I remained vaguely carsick all day long.  This made me short with the children and with Matt in the morning, barking at them when I felt frustrated, annoyed at myself that I could not avoid this behavior.  Everything felt frayed and difficult by 8:30 in the morning.

At church, ease floated down to rest on my shoulders.  Sitting there, in a place that has held so much of my history – my sister’s marriage, both Grace and Whit’s christenings (each, actually, on Easter weekend)  – I exhaled.  I sang the songs I know by heart, their lyrics rising from some deep, hidden reservoir of memory, from the years at St. Paul’s Girls’ School.  My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the three grandparents I have lost, particularly Nana, my maternal grandmother, who always cherished Easter above all holidays.  I sank deep into the familiar cadence of the prayers before communion.  I felt gladness enter my heart, and in its wake, gratitude.

But as soon as we left the church, into the almost startling brightness of the day, into the sudden full-bloom of spring, the grace I’d felt in the pew sloughed off and my agitation rose to the surface again.  I felt nauseous, I felt tired, I felt cranky.  We had a lovely egg hunt at my parents’ house, with both my godsister and her family and my cousin and her boyfriend.  And then we had a relaxed, comfortable lunch at our house, my father and mother full of fascinating stories and observations from the trip to Jerusalem from which they just returned yesterday.

The day was nothing short of delightful, with only a couple of whiny kid moments to mar its gleam.  And I felt the person – the mother, wife, daughter – I want to be floating in the room, sometimes within reach, sometimes not.  The presence and peace that I grasp for so clumsily was just in my palm and then jerked away again, replaced by an unease of the soul that manifests as physical discomfort.

After lunch my nausea rose up in my throat again, threatening, and I climbed back into bed.  I felt demoralized, frustrated: after so many years, after so much trying, how can I still stumble, fall back into these traps, these old ways of being?  Didn’t I just write, a few days ago, that the black emotions can blow through, like a squall, and still leave me with the memory of a beautiful day?  I know what this agitation is about, I think: it is hiding, it is refusing to stare into the sun.  It is my attempt to evade the pain that is an inextricable part of truly engaging in my life. Moments like these call for gentle grounding, and kanna edibles from cheefbotanicals can help bring a sense of calm and quiet balance when emotions feel overwhelming.

But oh, what irony there is in this, I see now.  The pain I feel in knowing how much I’ve missed, in realizing how much these avoidance behaviors have cost me is so much keener than the pain of looking my life in the eye.  I know this as well as I know my own name.  Many days now, like last week, I can acknowledge the irritation that comes as regularly as a tide, and let it pass.  On Easter I could not: I got tangled in it.

“Healing,” Pema Chodron reminds us, “can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.” I read this last Easter, on Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous blog, and the words returned to me today.  The pain of living my life, of accepting the passage of time, of embracing my own wounded heart: these are the kinds of pain that Pema speaks of.  The awful, toxic pain of regret, however, carries no tenderness.  There is no healing in avoidance, in the way I felt for big swaths of Easter Sunday.

What is Easter if not the day of renewal, rebirth, resurrection?  Yes, I squandered a lot of it being crabby and irritable and short-tempered.  Yes, I drove myself to sobs alone in my room thinking: I will never have another Easter egg hunt when Grace is 8 and Whit is 6.  I don’t know exactly why I felt this way on Easter, a day I’ve always loved deeply.  I know that instead of attacking myself for this waste, lying in the dark, crying, as my stomach roiled as though I’m at sea in a storm, I should instead embrace what Easter means, believe in the return of my peace.  I am trying.

Messages from the universe

I often find words – lyrics, snatches of poems, quotes – rising to my thoughts, unbidden.  There’s also an external component – songs that come on the radio seemingly all the time, a book I keep reading about, etc.  In both cases, I think that these messages are real, from our subconcious or the universe or both.  I believe they are not at all a coincidence.

In the last several weeks, I’ve encountered Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful poem, Kindness over and over again.  I read it in Oprah’s magazine and wrote about it, I saw it somewhere else, it appeared today in my Google Reader.  The twinning of kindness and sadness, and the assertion that the latter is critical to fully appreciate and comprehend the former, very much resonates with me.

This past summer, every single time I turned on the radio it seemed like the Beatles were singing Let It Be.  Okay, I murmured to myself, okay, I hear it: I will try to let go.  I will try to trust.  Last summer – radiant, full of joy and wonder – was a time of major transition for me, and I definitely needed every reminder to let it be.

When I was pregnant with Grace, a pregnancy which surprised me and which began the unravelling and change that brought me here, I found pennies on the ground all the time.  Literally, probably six out of seven days a week.  For weeks and weeks.  I picked them all up – of course, to get the luck – and I wish I’d collected them.  For a while, in fact, my dear friend Courtney referred to Grace as my “lucky penny baby.”

And right now, everywhere I turn, I see hearts.  I see them in the pavement, in leaves, on signs.  I’ve photographed some but not all of the hearts that have stopped me in my tracks recently.  What’s interesting is that some of these are not newly in my path.  For example, the heart traced into the pavement is right outside the post office I’ve been going to for years.  And obviously it is not new, since it was drawn in the wet concrete.  And yet it’s only now that I’m noticing it.  Coincidence?  I don’t believe so.  What are these hearts telling me?  Be aware of my heart, be careful of my heart, surrender when it swells to the point of discomfort?  Love is all around.

What message is the universe sending you these days?

You become

I’ve written before of how I love this passage from the Velveteen Rabbit.  Of how it makes me cry.  It is true, isn’t it: it takes a long time to become who we are, to grow into ourselves, to learn to inhabit every inch of our spirits, to become Real.

This has obviously been on my mind lately: just last month I wrote about how “most of life happens in the current of dailiness, whose slight and invisible variations are nevertheless enough to carve enormous swooping oxbows into the terrain of our souls.”  About the ways that many of life’s critical roles are made up of small, daily occurrences.

What I’m thinking about today is how true this is of becoming a mother.  You have a child, and you also become a mother.  The thing is, for me at least, those things didn’t really happen simultaneously.  Well, obviously I was a mother, technically, the moment I delivered Grace myself and pulled her onto my chest.  But the meaningful, emotional inhabitation of “mother” took a lot longer.  I wish I had known that at the time.  I think knowing that would have made me much gentler and kinder to myself about the rocky traverse from one sense of self to the other, which I expected to be immediate and instinctive but which was instead slow and soaked in tears.

May I have patience as I continue to become, and trust about what I am becoming.

Words on the wall

This is the wall behind my desk.  My office is a tiny garret room on our third floor, and I adore it.  The desk, which takes up half the room, is a big slab of wood, an old kitchen table that came from Matt’s family’s house years ago.  I look at a bulletin board with pictures of my family, my best friends, my godchildren, and Mr. Valhouli.  There are also a few pieces of paper with words on them: a Wendell Berry poem up there, two Yeats quotes (one hand-written for me on my 16th birthday by Jessica), a piece by Jen Lemen, my sister’s wedding announcement, and notes from both of my parents.

A couple of years ago I took down all of the diplomas and awards, both mine’s and Matt’s, that filled the wall behind my desk.  In their place I hung these three prints.  A cowboy hat of Grace’s, from years ago, hangs on the hooks above the prints.

I often turn around in my chair and study them, feeling my chest rise and fall with my breath, reading the words I know by heart.  I suppose this is a way of meditating, of coming back to right here, of beginning again.

we are all made of stars – peace be still – you are so loved