everyday life

missing my life

Last week I was away from home.  I was physically away, in a different city, but I was also really, really emotionally away.  I was totally released from my day-to-day domestic responsibilities and completely consumed by my professional ones.  In this state, untethered from the ordinary life in which I’m usually so entirely rooted, I realized how intensely I love it.

With the crystalline perspective of distance, I fell in love, all over again, with my own life.   The practice and the poem.  I missed the poem and I even missed the practice.  I am immensely grateful for this reminder of how blessed and fortunate I am, for this reminder, again, to stop and look and breathe and be there for my own life.

I missed picking a sleeping Whit up before I go to bed and taking him to the bathroom, his head heavy on my shoulder, his feet dangling against my knees.  He is always soft with sleep and I have to prop him up in front of the toilet.  When I carry him back to bed, even though he’s surely more awake, he curls against me just as tightly, and often keeps his hands wrapped around my neck an extra moment or two after I put him back down into his bottom bunk.

I missed the morning chatter that Grace and Whit share as we drive to school and then hurry, cold, into the lobby of the Morse Building.  I’m keenly aware that Whit only has one more year in the Morse Building and then these cozy mornings in the lobby with the polka-dot rug and old teachers who envelop my children in enormous hugs are over.  Grace and Whit like to sit and talk to me for a few minutes before I take them to their respective before-school destinations.

I missed rubbing Grace’s back as she says her prayers, her voice slowing as she drifts towards sleep.  My fingers trace her spine, remembering the string of pearls, bright on the fuzzy ultrasound screen, so many years ago.  Grace’s prayers are full of thanks.  She always thanks the universe and her family and mentions her parents’ hard work and our tremendous good fortune.  I know she means these things and I fiercely hope she always knows them.

I missed talking to one of my closest friends every day for a catchup on all the minutiae of a life, my husband’s lattes, getting the mail out of my brass mailbox in the morning, and my familiar running route around my neighborhood.

I missed the strangely soothing inside-outing of pajama pants as I fold laundry, the smoothing of bright robot-covered underpants, the folding of tee-shirts, each piece of clothing full of memories.  I missed the flowers I always have on my kitchen island.  I  missed my long-term toxic beverage, Diet Coke (my office is a Diet Pepsi office!), and my brand-new beverage, morning green smoothies.

It’s so good to be reminded of my immense good fortune, to have my gaze yanked back to the abundance that overflows right here, right now.  I don’t want to wait for bad news, or disaster, to realize what I have now; none of us should.  Say thank you today for every single ordinary day.  As Katrina says, each one is a gift.

Lightning in a jar

My children are 8 and 6.  It is life’s biggest cliche and most painful truism that just yesterday they were babies.  This week my friend Kris pointed me to Julie’s post about watching her children play in the ocean and I gasped, remembering watching my own children in the Massachusetts coast waves this past summer.  They were 5 and 7, she towered over him, he was just learning to swim.

Admittedly, I am tired, having been away from home and not sleeping very much.  I’m even more porous than usual.  But I sat at someone else’s desk in my firm’s New York office with tears rolling down my face as I read Julie’s gorgeous words.  “… I’ve caught lightning here, in these slender vessels …” Julie writes, and my heart tightens with identification.  It’s all so astonishing, so baffling and overwhelming at the same time, and I feel awash, often, in the swarming wonder that is parenting.  My own children, growing tall and lanky in front of my eyes, their childhood passing in one swift swirl of color, the brilliance of their being here flashing intermittently like a firefly in the dark.

Julie’s photographs remind me of ones I took last summer and posted here.  There is something both profoundly moving and absolutely apt about children – the definition of liminal beings – playing along the border where earth becomes water.  Threshold-dwellers dancing at an essential threshold.

I suppose I’m just extra-aware right now, after long days away, of the piercingly poignant reality of Grace and Whit’s lives.  I feel abundantly grateful for their health and in frank awe of the basic fact of them.  It’s all such a gift, this opportunity to be in the presence of nascent human beings, to witness them step through these never-to-be-revisited halls of childhood, to watch their minds and personalities form.  They are as sturdy as they are evanescent, corporeally present even as they seem to waft by me, evading capture.

The dailiness of life

There’s a line in Train’s Marry Me that sums up something I think about all the time: marry me … today and every day.   Even the biggest things in life – marriage, motherhood, career – are built of a tiny little daily moments.  Each moment is as insubstantial on its own as a snowflake but in aggregate they become as solid and immovable as a snowbank.  A glacier.  We build our lives – our commitments, our desires, our identities – through quotidian acts that can feel infinitessimal and meaningless as we enact them.

Of course there are undeniable moments and decisions that shape us.  We can all reflect on the application we put in the mail or the date we said yes to or the job interview we went into enthusiastically or the day we looked at the two lines on the pregnancy test.  Even in this case though, as Kelly wrote beautifully this week, and as I’ve mused before, we don’t always know the big definining moment as we live it.  As Agnes de Mille says, “No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our lives are made. Destiny is made known silently.”

But the truth is that 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.  These currents, these slight moments of everyday-ness, so many unnoticed, pile up and we find ourselves in a life.  I remember for me it was the day I bought a station wagon.  At that point I had a husband, a daughter, a house, an MBA, a job, but somehow it was the station wagon that made me sit up and realize: I am a grown-up.  Wow.  Of course I’d been tiptoeing into that identity for a long time, minute by invisible minute, but then I looked around, triggered by the car, and saw what I’d built.

I’ve become exquisitely sensitized to those small snowflakes of moments now, have bounced to the other extreme where I can hardly see the snowbanks for my attention to every single particle that comprises them.  I guess this is on my mind because I’m heading out tomorrow morning for a week of work.   I am preemptively sad, already missing my children and the very mundane details of this ordinary existence.

Addendum:

My ever-wise sister Hilary, responding to this post, send me the following poem this morning.  Notably, it was read at Launa’s wedding.  I adore it.

Well Water

What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up . . .” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Randall Jarrell

Busy

I am cruising headfirst into a very busy few weeks, mostly because of my real job.  This week alone has involves a trip to California (round-trip in one day) and a long day in New York (6am shuttle down, 9pm shuttle back) on Friday.  The days I’m in town are crammed too.  I am missing a few kids’ school things here and there, but I am mostly comfortable with it.  This is important.  And I do like the people I work with a lot.

Still, I worry.  I often feel anxious in this anticipatory way, sense that familiar old preemptive emotion coming in to swamp me.  When I graduated from business school I worried constantly about finding a job that would allow me to pursue my new but passionate yoga practice.  There’s no question this helped shape my choice.  Was this wise, or was this a capitulation to the immature fear of something that had not happened yet (the consumption of my life by my job)?

People always tell me that I am busy.  And yes, absolutely, I do have lots of things going on every day.  I rarely have long stretches of uninterrupted time without claims on it.  For a long time I definitely bought into this – I was busy, busy, busy.  But at some point over the last few years I started resisting that ever-offered excuse for why someone didn’t do something/didn’t call/didn’t show up/was late … “I’m so busy!”  Come on.  Everybody is busy, tired, fighting their own battles.

I realized I wanted to stop making this excuse.  Busy is a state of mind, and a relative term, quite uncorrelated with the subjective truth of how crowded one’s hours are.  Furthermore, “busy” as an excuse asserts a lack of choice and control that I think is inaccurate.  Somehow, we all find time to do the things we really care about.  As Anne Lamott asserts, the time is there: just find it.  Choose it over something else.  Remember what Annie Dillard says: how you spend your days is, in fact, how you spend your life.

So, mostly, since then I have stopped claiming busy-ness, and what I found is I – delightfully! – mostly didn’t inhabit that space anymore.  Still it remains true that there are undeniably times when the demands on me feel heavier than usual.  There are times when I feel at risk of being frenzied and out of control, when I worry about not having time for the things I love most: reading, writing, sleep, running, yoga.  I feel that way now: I am concerned that the next month won’t allow for as much of these things as I’ve grown accustomed to.  I’m worried about time to write this blog: how can I expect you all to be here if I am not?  And this community has come to mean so much to me.  I also worry about what it says about my priorities if I find myself unable to come here.  Am I failing to prioritize my writing and nascent creative life or am I simply being realistic about short-term unavoidable realities?

Overall, what I wonder, nervously, is this: am I falling back into the patterns where things felt busy, busy, busy?  Does this creeping slipperiness under my feet, this slight but noticeable tightening of every minute of my day represent a backslide into old habits? Part of me thinks yes – the faint shadow of panic is so familiar – but another part of me thinks no.  I am so keenly aware, now, of how much I prize quiet.  Of how much I value time alone.  Of how much certain practices mean to me.  I never knew those things before, and the reason I feel anxious about the encroaching busy-ness is because I know now what I need.  This knowledge and this reason are new, and I hope that they can be a bulwark against the encroachment of busy-ness.

I read Jena’s (always, always, always) stunning blog and learned that the Chinese characters for “busy” also mean “heart-killing.” It has been a long road for me to realize that there was part of my heart that was dying in all the busy-ness.  Actually, I think a better way of saying it is that part of my heart was never allowed to live.  I still fear a return to that, when I launch into a period of intensive commitments.  But I return again to the same word, circling to the same place, a needle tugging north: I have to trust that I’ll come through this phase and return to what I now know I prize.  I have to trust that I won’t lose my heart in the busy-ness.   And, most of the time, I do.

An attempt at humor

About halfway through this day, at home with a not-very-sick Whit, I realized it was my half birthday.  36 1/2.  Gulp.  I remembered my attempt at being funny, exactly a year ago.  For some reason, humor makes me feel MUCH more exposed than writing my regular, self-revealing posts.  I don’t know why this is, but I am trying to face the fear (a sign by the trapeze said this) so here it is again … a letter to my body:

Tuesday was my half birthday. Nobody remembered. Why should they? They shouldn’t. I realize my attachment to my half birthday is irrational, and I trace it to the fact that my actual, mid-August birthday was often a bit … well, lacking in celebration. This is not my parents’ fault – they were always wonderful in marking my birthdays. But, say, a party? Not really, on August 16th. This has resulted in some specific tendencies in my adult self:

  • I am totally obsessed with my kids’ birthdays, and their parties
  • I remember people’s birthdays, often send cards, and usually remind others of these key dates (this reached a pinnacle a few years ago when one friend actually got annoyed at me for forgetting to remind her of another friend’s birthday … this was now my official responsibility?)
  • My half birthday is more important to me than it should be

So I decided to mark the occasion of my 35 1/2 birthday with a letter to my middle-aged body. I’m inspired in this by two of my favorite writers out here in the blog wilderness. The Kitchen Witch‘s letter to her her 40 year old self and Momalom‘s letter to herself in her 31st year both made me writhe on the floor in laughter. I also like how I am midway between these two wonderful, funny (not to mention, as far as I can tell from their photographs, beautiful, which is relevant only because we are talking about their physical selves) women. Despite the fact that I seem to have birthed a five year old stand-up comedian, I am not myself funny. But these letters were so wise and poignant in their humor, too, that I wanted to give it a go.

Dear Body, as you turn 35 1/2,

First of all, I’ve finally come around to agreeing with my wise-ass middle school self about the fact that I am actually midway through my 36th year. I don’t much like it, but I can’t see a way around it. Yikes. Crap.

There’s a lot I’m really grateful for, Body. And I think – I hope! – I’m a little better at appreciating what you are able to do now than I used to be. Of course, this is pretty bittersweet, seeing as I’m finally appreciating you just as you seem to be falling apart. But maybe that’s by your design, to show me how ungrateful and horrible I was to you for so many years? I’m sorry.

I’m definitely pretty unhappy about certain things you are doing to me, now, as I glide (saunter? skip? am dragged, kicking and screaming, heels dug in until kingdom come?) into middle age. But I’m also aware of some bad behavior on my part, and I want to conclude by apologizing for some of the abuse I’ve forced you to take.

First, things I really am thankful for, dear Body:

  • I still have 20/20 vision. I don’t wear glasses or lenses. As the daughter of a woman who is practically blind, I really appreciate that.
  • I hope that I share the hair fate of the aforementioned almost-blind woman (hi Mum!), because at 62 she doesn’t have a single gray hair. Please, please, please, genetics, show me your power!
  • Thank you for still letting me run. It is vital to my staying sane, so I’m really glad you haven’t taken it away from me yet. Thanks for letting me finish that half marathon in under 2 hours. I still wonder about a marathon, but I don’t know if you would let me get away with that. I’m sure we’ll talk it over.
  • I am immensely grateful for the fact that you were able to conceive, carry, and deliver two healthy children. I am aware of what a blessing this is and I am sorry if it ever seems that I take it for granted. In fact, it is more than a blessing: it is an outright miracle. Thank you, thank you, thank you. (PS: the no stretch marks and easy return to pre-baby weight were a double bonus, don’t think I didn’t notice those. Thanks.)

There are, however, some things I am pretty pissed off at you about:

  • The chest. My God. I did not know what I had. When I saw one of my college roommates lately, and she saw me shirtless, she did a double take and remarked on the sad state of affairs in my bosom region. Remember, this is from a woman who was seeing said bosom daily during its (arguable) heyday. Alas. I think the best way to describe the situation is that I never really realized you could be both tiny and saggy. That’s just plain cruel. I’d lift – ahem – things up, but I’m told you have to have something to lift first. And while I’m cool with plastic surgery, something about artificial sacks of fluid inside my body scares me. I think Michael Scott, that sage, that cornerstone of today’s women’s studies, described the situation best: shrunken chesticles.
  • The skin.  I hate my skim-milk skin. I hate its pallor, its translucency, its propensity for cold sores, its wrinkles. I’ve been called Casper more than once. Is it a surprise that I chose to run in the Nude Olympics flanked by two dear friends, both of whom have similar coloring to me? I figured we might as well all glow in the dark together. Most days I can see my veins through my skin, not just faintly but in glorious detail: I am aware of my blood throbbing through my arms a little more vividly than I want to be (ironically, it has always been really hard for phlebotomists [great word] to find my veins). And the cold sores? Oh, the horror. So ugly. So painful. Such a physical manifestation of my anxious, nervous personality. Yuck, yuck, yuck. My cold sores have caused me so much embarassment, Body … really, are you not done shaming me with them yet? But maybe most of all, I dislike my skin’s thinness. Everything gets to me. I had hoped that living more years would result in thicker skin but, no, sadly it seems to be going in the opposite direction.
  • The hair. Why do I have so damned much of it?  It takes forever to dry. Blow-dry? Only when my life depends on it. Also, that ever since I had pregnancies, it curls in the back in weird, strange ways (which makes the aversion to blow-drying ever more tragic). I pull my own hair out, specifically feeling around for the really curly pieces. I’m told by people who aced Psych 101 in college that this, trichotillomannia, is the gateway behavior to more awful compulsions. Actually, I think I’m just subconsciously trying to thin my own hair.
  • The joints. You seem to have granted me this odd, free-floating joint pain. Some days it is my ankle, others my wrist, for a while last summer, most painfully, my knee. This week my elbow is bothering me. What is this about? Are you asking me to take some kind of vitamin? Speak English! I don’t think I make major demands of my joints: fine, yes, I run, but come on. 4 miles 3 times a week? Seriously?
  • The back. Holy hell does this make me feel old. A long airplane or car ride makes my lower back, on the left hand side, hurt. I understood the back pain in pregnancy. I did, I really did, and I tried not to complain too much. Both of the children were carried basically against my back and I don’t blame you, Body, for finding that hideously painful (it is the downside of the perk of not getting super big when pregnant, I know, I know). But now? Hello, there are no small bodies curled up against my spine anymore. What are you doing to me? You’ve driven me back to yoga lately with this pain. I hope that’s what you were getting at. If not I’m kind of at a loss for what to do next.
  • My teeth. First of all, how could you let me not get any cavities for 28 years, let me develop such an enormous superiority complex about that, and then crush me with four cavities six months after having Grace? That was just plain mean. And in four different corners of my mouth? Thanks. That was an awesome appointment at the dentist, that one (and yes, don’t remind me that I insisted on doing them all at once against the dentist’s advice [ADA?] – you have to agree it was more efficient that way). And the receding gums? I realize that this is my fault for the grinding and clicking as I count off by 8. But come on. I’m just trying to deal with my crazy brain. When I had to have a gum graft, and I had to pick between using skin from the top of my mouth or from a cadaver, that was a nadir. Please just let me have my teeth and gums as they are. Please?

I will, Body, take responsibility for some bad stuff I did to you. Some of the things I am sorry about:

  • The Diet Coke. I know. It’s a really bad habit. But damn I like the stuff. I’ve really cut down; I don’t know if you have noticed, but I used to drink 3 or 4 20 ounce bottles a day and now I’m down to one most days. I hope this is making a difference. When you get annoyed and nauseous on me, please remember I never smoked or did a single illegal drug of any kind! Do I get any credit for that?
  • The conspicuous lack of calcium consumption. I have read in more than one SELF magazine article that this is especially awful in combination with the Diet Coke. I am hoping that my daily venti lattes help with this a little bit, because I really don’t want to start shrinking. I’m not tall enough as it is.
  • My diet. Dear God, Body, I am sorry! I know better. I really do. I eat mostly bread, cheese (see! calcium!), and gummy candy. Occasionally a hamburger or some pizza. I am so sorry. It is truly a wonder that I don’t have scurvy. I keep swearing to do better, and I will recommit to that effort.
  • The sunshine. I cringe when I think of all of the summers that I sunbathed. Wow. That seems amazing now, doesn’t it? I accept that my penance for that is bi-annual dermatologist appointments and a whole lot of small moles being dug out of my skin with scalpels. That’s my fault and I am really sorry. Did you have to retaliate so aggressively with the wrinkles, though?
  • The high heels. I know. I’m not supposed to wear high heels all the time. But I don’t! I really don’t. Just a few days a week. And the rest of the time? Flip flops or sneakers. Haven’t you noticed? I am trying to make up for it, I really am.
  • The broken bones. Maybe more than my share. An ankle, an arm (both bones, both compound fractures through the skin – that one really rocked), some ribs, and a toe. And I guess you thought I was kind of a brat for saying that having broken fingers and toes didn’t count … when I broke my toe sweet Jesus did I realize it counted. Yes, that hurt. Lesson learned. Thanks for healing all of those breaks, as good as new.

All in all, Body, I’m really thankful for all the ways you keep me in one piece (where on earth would this crazy mind of mine be if not contained in you? Now that is a scary thought). Now, I know I’m just plain not psyched about aging, and I’m sure I’m taking some of this discomfort out on you. I’m sorry about that. There are some ways you could cooperate more, though, and I hope my descriptions above inspire you to maybe do that.

Here’s to many more years together, as a team, and by the way thanks for putting up with all the ways I’m a total pain in the ass. I know, you’re as stuck with me as I am with you.

Love,

Lindsey