everyday life

A foot in two worlds

In September I saw my words in print for the very first time.  The Princeton Alumni Weekly published an essay of mine called “A Foot In Two Worlds.” The essay explores one of my most fundamental and lingering fears, which is that by choosing to work part time and ‘stay home’ part time I’ve in fact done a poor job at both.  By refusing to let go of either “world” I have failed at both.  It is worth noting that I think the bifurcation between “home” and “work” is a bit antiquated, and that that categorization is simplistic and fails to capture what is in most cases a complex dance rather than a binary distinction.  Still, the fact remains that I have chosen to work part-time in business settings since my children were born, and I’m full of doubts about this path.

My friend Lacy wrote me a thoughtful, provocative email yesterday responding to the essay, full of her classic sensitivity and intelligence.  She posited that in fact the point I make isn’t about a choice at all but about being present and really surrendering to whichever experience I’m in at a given time.  And I think she’s right.  After all, I do say this:

I think it’s about my wiring, my frantic restlessness, the way I struggle to be fully engaged in one thing at a time.

I’ve been thinking about Lacy’s comments, and about the distress I feel about my work/home choices are maybe, in fact, a red herring.  Maybe I just regret not really immersing myself in anything, fully, for the last many years.

This summer, being home full-time with Grace and Whit for the first time, was nothing short of a revelation.  My part time schedule meant that I have always been able to do the random Tuesday afternoon birthday parties, and the doctor’s appointments, etc, but the day-in and day-out participation in the mundane details of my children’s lives was new.  It was only when I capitulated to what I might have previously called monotony that the divinity revealed itself.  And now, somehow, the details of this domestic life are newly bright to me.

I hope I can likewise find myself fully present and committed to a professional challenge.  My new job, maybe, a book, maybe, who knows.  I frankly ache to feel in the professional realm the same sort of deep peace, combined with a fundamental opening, that I’ve felt towards my life with my children.

I’ve heard from many readers of my Alumni Weekly piece, and am happy to know that others relate.  I’m sorry, though, that the note that we seem to resonate on is one of malaise, of fundamental restlessness.  I find myself wondering if this is not about the work/life balance mothers are aiming for, but instead about some profound truth about the human condition.  Surely the challenges of working and mothering, of meeting the needs of myriad people, of trying to navigate the choppy waters of identity, personhood, and fulfillment contribute to this sense of frustration and unhappiness.  But maybe they aren’t actually its fundamental source.

I don’t know – I am thinking through this as I write it.  I sense something greater here, in the debate about work/life “balance,” a grander theme.  The topic is fraught and complicated, for sure; Lacy called it “volcanic” and I agree with her.  But the reason it’s so charged, I think, is because it probes at our innermost fears about how we are living our lives.  These fears are projected onto the scrim of professional/personal choices, but I suspect they run even deeper than that.  These fears are about the way we engage with the world and with those we love best, and about the way we spend our only true wealth: our time and our attention.

Wonder

“Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.”
– Diane Ackerman

A night or two a week these days we go for a walk after dinner.  Grace and Whit get to go in their pajamas, which they find both thrilling and hilarious.  I’m struck by how aware they are, as we walk, by how much they notice, by how they – and, correspondingly, I – swell with wonder at the ordinary world. 

Wonder.

I think my most devout wish for Grace and Whit is that that they never lose this ability to see the magic and enchantment in their lives.

Goodbye to Doctor Rick

In March I received a letter that made me cry.  It was from our beloved pediatrician, writing to let his patients know that he was leaving his practice in the fall.  He had decided to go work full-time in palliative care with pediatric cancer patients, something he had been doing a day or two a week in recent years.  In March “the fall” seemed awfully far away, and while the news made me very sad, it felt remote.

Flash forward to Thursday last week, to Grace’s eight year check up.  When I’d spoken to Dr. Rick over the summer about our transition to another pediatrician in his practice, he urged me to make Grace’s appointment a few weeks before her birthday so we could have one last visit with him.  I didn’t realize that our appointment, on September 30th, was the very last day he was seeing patients.  I didn’t realize we were the third or fourth to last patient he ever saw in the practice he’d lovingly led for years and years.

Yikes.  I learned this when I got the office’s confirmation call on Wednesday.  Startled, I realized that the distant fall had arrived and my eyes filled with tears.  He was really leaving.

So it was with great sadness that I watched Dr. Rick interact with Grace with his usual blend of warmth and humor.  What I didn’t expect, though, was the intense gratitude I felt.   This man, I realized, was the person who had held the door to motherhood open for me.  I think of him in those first few weeks and months, when he was much more of a presence in my life as a mother than he will probably ever know.  I remember the call, when Grace was 2 weeks old, when I told him, through sobs, that I had just been diagnosed with post partum depression.  I don’t know exactly what he said to me, but I remember vividly feel calmed and comforted when I hung up the phone.

Just like that, from the very start, Dr. Rick made me feel I could do this.  He didn’t ever pathologize my initial, frankly violent feelings about motherhood, and he patiently waited as they subsided into the more regular, gentle throbbing of mother-love that I’d expected from the start.  He seemed to have anticipated this arc, and somehow that felt reassuring to me rather than condescending.

Over the years Dr. Rick has been an important supporter of my approach to parenting, whose commitment to not over-scheduling or over-indulging my children often makes me feel out of step with everyone around me.  I’ve felt his quiet but steady approval bolstering me when I feel insane or different, and have more than once called on him for advice in matters that have very little to do with my childrens’ physical health.

Dr. Rick has been a calm and non-reactive doctor, who responded to a call at 11pm about a fever fever with the soothing and nonchalant advice to administer motrin and call in the morning.  He examined Grace after she fell out of a Whole Foods shopping cart onto a concrete floor at 14 months, advised on flu shots (not a fan), and diagnosed dozens of ear infections.  All without batting an eyelash.  His relaxed approach, which evinces a fundamental faith in the sturdiness of our children and in the goodness of the world, certainly informed my own.  As I’ve written before, I’m a far more laid-back mother than I ever expected.  The lion’s share of credit for this surely goes to my mother, whose own laissez-faire approach incubated mine, but some of it belongs to Dr. Rick.

That said, Dr. Rick knew when to be concerned, and he has been, once for each child.  And in each case, he delivered his concern to me calmly but seriously, and because of his generally easy demeanor, I took his input and advice directly to heart.

Rick has been the perfect pediatrican.  I feel great sadness at his moving on, and know that all of us will grieve his absence in our lives and those of our children.  Just a few weeks ago, driving to the “procedure” about which he was very concerned, Whit asked me, voice wobbling, “this doctor is a friend of Dr Rick’s, right?”  When I said yes I felt him relax slightly, still scared but at least sure that he was in good hands.  Anyone who is a friend of Dr Rick’s is inherently to be trusted.  I feel the same way.

I am sure that the patients Rick will be treating now need him much more than we do.  I am equally certain that he is pursuing his dharma, following his path, which takes him towards incredibly difficult and important work.  I am grateful beyond measure for his consistent support, which was always gentle and firm at the same time.  As I told him on Thursday, leaving our final appointment, with tears in my eyes, he was the first person who really made me think I was capable of being a mother.

And that is an extraordinary gift.

Thank you, Dr. Rick.  We will miss you.

What you see is what you get

I’ve written often of the sometimes-stealthy ways that the universe communicates with me: words that rise, unbidden, into my head, songs that seem to always be on the radio, conversations with friends who speak to a certain thing I hadn’t even realized was concerning me.  Today I was looking through my bookcase in the living room, a room I seldom sit in.  I noticed a book on the bottom shelf, between Feminisms:An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism and Christiane Northrup’s Mother-Daughter Wisdom: The Art of the Personal Essay, selected and introduced by Phillip Lopate.  I have no memory of this book whatsoever.

I opened it to find that it was from my dear Jessica, for my 22nd birthday.  1996.  I had just graduated from college and was about to start my first job, in strategy consulting.  And her inscription read:

Happy 22nd birthday, Lindsey – and happy 10th year anniversary of friendship!  To read when you’re tired of all that consulting; a reminder of your true calling.  I love you.  xox Jess

Tears filled my eyes and a swell of gratitude tightened my chest.  Someone had known all along that this – whatever you call this, what I do here, what I do in Word, what I do in my head all the time – was my calling.  And someone whose opinion – and whose writing! – I esteem so incredibly highly, too.  One of my true kindred friends, a native speaker, a steady and solid part of my life.  I may have wandered for years – I’m still wandering – in another sphere of the world (business) but I’m not crazy to feel a tug back to writing.  This is not insane, and it is not new, and it is not fabricated out of thin air.  Someone who really knows me has always known this.

What a relief that was: seen, understood, known.  Thank you, Jess.

Then I opened the book, scanned the table of contents, and flipped quickly Annie Dillard’s essay Seeing.  The words are familiar, some of the images etched in my memory, ones I return to.  But somehow, despite knowing the piece, I had forgotten this line, which seemed to both emanate from and pierce some deep part of me:

What you see is what you get.

An adage that we repeat to our children, over and over, through gritted teeth, willing them not to have a tantrum of dissatisfaction.  But so much more, too.

What you see is what you get.

That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?  This blog, this writing … I return again and again to the effort to pay attention.  To the belief, faint or foolish hope, that by really seeing I can somehow better cope with time’s relentless passage.  I don’t think I’m trying to stop time, anymore, but maybe what I’m trying to do is to capture the intense vividness of some of the moments.  That in doing that I both experience them more fully and create a cache, a store, that I can return to (Wordsworth’s “life and food for future years”).

If we don’t see our lives, in all of their gore and grandeur, mundane moments and startles of joy, we don’t really have them.  We all know this, I suspect, and it’s just a question of how hard we find it to stare into the sun, how attuned to the loss that underlies every single moment on earth.

This has been a day of weird weather, restless winds, a big branch falling unexpectedly from the tree right outside my window. It’s definitely fall and the streets and spattered with wet orange leaves, but it’s hot, summer-humid.  We are caught on the fulcrum between the seasons.  The storm portended by the day’s meteorology echoes inside of me, and I feel gusty, blown off course.  The words of both my dear friend and Annie Dillard provide a still point, however fleeting, and a reminder of what it is I am doing here.

A sprinkling of moments

It hasn’t been my favorite week or two of my life.  The words are running dry and I’m just bone tired.  So, I can offer some snapshots from the past couple of weeks, which also reminds me that there were some moments of joy in there.

Whit had minor surgery two weeks ago.  Everything went great, though he did have to go under general anesthesia which was not a picnic for the mother who was holding him in her arms when he went under.  I don’t really recommend that.  Otherwise, he is fine, and we are both relieved it’s over.

Grace and I had mother-daughter bookclub again, where we read a version of the Princess and the Pea.  The book made me really thoughtful about what love is, what we all really want from relationships, and how we deal with difference.

I bought several bunches of zinnias to cheer myself up (and to think of you, Hadley!)

I remembered Picture Day this year, and managed to get both kids to school with hair brushed and non-stained tee-shirts on.  Victory.  And an improvement over last year.

Whit is being Maverick from Top Gun for Halloween.  His favorite move these days is to cock his finger like a gun, point it at you, and cluck, as though to say “right on, lady.”  He has been doing this for a while, before I decided this was the perfect costume for him.  He’s way into it though is insisting that he carry a gun (reinforcing my dislike of Halloween, which I sometimes feel is a holiday that is an excuse for women to dress like prostitutes and for boys to arm themselves).  See, I told you he was fine.

One day this week was stunningly beautiful, and warm, and I surprised the kids by taking them for a walk after an early dinner to the ice cream store and then to two playgrounds.  I’m trying to remember to be the mother who says yes, at least some of the time.

This one?  Overnight, a tween.  Second grade, so far, is not my friend.  Lots of eye rolling, sighing, and shutting of doors.  This is starting already?  I am not ready.

Last night’s sunset, from my office window.  There is so much that is stunning about this season, yet it remains ineffably sad to me.  There is an elegy in the air every single day.  As Jo calls it, this season is the dying one, and I deeply aware of that. This is the final, flaming-out beauty of the natural world on the way to death and hibernation, and I see its incandescent beauty through the lens of that loss.  Another year turning to its close.