everyday life

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.

Four years & taking questions

Today is my four year anniversary in this space. Which is amazing, to me.

To mark the date, and because I’m brain dead and slightly heartbroken these days (my beloved Kelly Diels said this {as usual} better than I ever could) I thought I’d follow Corinne’s able lead and ask you if there is anything you want to know. Please share any questions or things you are interested in in the comments – big or small, anything you’d like to hear more about. I am very interested in what you are interested in.

Summer 2010

I’m late with this year’s end-of-summer post, but I’ve been sifting through the richness of the last few months, feeling the happy and the heavy memories drift through my fingers, parsing what it is that rises to the top.

I re-read my reflections on the summer of 2009 and was struck, predictably, I guess, by the feeling that they were written ages ago and also yesterday.

This summer was many things … most of all, different from the rest of my life, an interlude between two more standard realities, a carved-out three months where I spent more time than I ever have with Grace and Whit.

I read almost nothing this summer. I didn’t feel like reading books, on the whole, which is unusual for me. What I felt like reading, intensely, and over and over, was Mary Oliver’s poetry. And so I did. I even listened to her reading (thank you, Katrina, for the suggestion) her own poems as I drove down to see Dani Shapiro at Aidan‘s Happier Hour event in July.

Mary’s words, spoken and read, called to me all summer long. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m listening.

I spent a lot of time this summer driving with Grace and Whit, often singing along at the top of our lungs to Top 40 songs. One Saturday morning as we drove up to see Hadley and her family, the kids and I were listening to a top 20 countdown. We had a debate going on about what song would be number one. We dashed into a rest stop bathroom during the commercial break before #1 and ran back out just in time to catch the first notes of California Gurls. I’ll never forget the sheer joy on the kids’ faces as they collapsed into their carseats, giggling, the fact that something so small could make them so happy.

Many, many times this summer, enough that I’m paying attention, I turned on the car radio to hear Let It Be. Okay. I’m trying.

I am homesick for my trip to LEGOland with the kids. Those four magical days only grow more burnished as I move away from them. Grace and Whit were absolutely enchanted with the idea of a mom who did such spontaneous and downright fun things. This translated into their being absolutely delightful to be around: cheerful, agreeable, and charmingly wide-eyed at everything they saw. I am so grateful that I planned and took that trip, and the fact that it was a last-minute idea makes me even gladder. How uncharacteristic. I wonder if I can carry some of that enthusiasm, flexibility, and sheer joy into this new phase of my life. I hope so.

Running through my head the past few days has been this quote, which I think perfectly captures the photograph above:

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.
– Sophocles

The first day of kindergarten, 2.0

Dear Whit,

Today you start kindergarten. I’m astonished, in a way both cliched and powerful, that we are here.

For three years you didn’t say much of anything. Your first preschool teacher, in fact, urged us to have you evaluated by a speech therapist. She even gently suggested that you might have cognitive delays. Within months your speech therapist (an adorable blonde woman that you thought was fabulous) had you talking a blue streak, and within weeks she had ascertained that there was definitely nothing cognitive going on. You do speak with a distinctive accent, which we like to joke is from Pawtucket. You may not have spoken for three years, but you haven’t stopped since.

You say the funniest, most observant things, often causing me to pull over to jot them down for posterity (or use on this blog). You, Whit, are just downright hilarious. I’m not sure where that came from, since neither your Dad nor I is particularly funny. But you make me laugh out loud every single day, which is an enormous gift.

This was the summer you really became comfortable in the water. You can reliably – though inelegantly – swim laps and stay afloat for a long time (which is kind of amazing because you have no body fat and generally sink like a stone). In June you decided you wanted to learn how to dive and you have. The way you hurtle yourself off a diving board is a good metaphor for the unbridled enthusiasm and fearlessness you bring to life. You shout, “I’m going!” to make sure all around you are watching and then you take off at a run, not even hesitating before plunging into the water. I’ve yet to meet a diving board high enough to give you pause.

You love Legos and robots and trucks. You are always looking to understand how things work. As a three year old you crept under the toilet, put your hand on the pipe after flushing, and said to me, awestruck, “There’s water running here, Mummy!” And just last week at Basin Harbor I couldn’t find you for a minute on the beach. I finally noticed you crouching near one of the paddleboats, looking underneath it, trying to understand how it moved and steered. I am eager to watch where this curiosity takes you, and hope I will always nourish it, even when being asked “why …” every three minutes all day long gets old.

Whit, you are the definition of marching to your own drummer. One evening this summer I went in to kiss you goodnight to see that you had stripped down and were sleeping naked on the floor, lying flat on your back on top of the sleeping bag that you’d found in the closet, with your small fan blowing right on your face. Decked out in mardi gras beads this summer after Magic Night with Hadley and family, you announced from the back seat of the car, “I could be an international pop star with all of this jewelry!” Where you learned that I have no idea.

Your presence in my life pushes and challenges me every single day. We see the world so differently, Whit, you and I. You approach every day as a wide open canvas, never assume that there are limits until you physically meet them, and need to have the reason for rules proven to you before you follow them. You inspire me, in this way, because the automatic way I stoop before authority has held me back so much in my life. Where I see a closed door, you see a hurdle to find your way around. You are wily and bright and as a baby we called you Houdini for the infinite ways you found to wriggle out of your pajamas and then your crib. I tried everything, eventually winding up with too-small footie pjs on backward with the feet cut off and a crib tent with the zipper carabinered to the side of the crib.

Two years ago I wrote a letter to Grace on her first day of kindergarten. Reading it always makes me cry. Now here I am, even more sentimental, even more raw, surprised once again at the speed with which the days pass by. You, the baby who healed so much for me, whose arrival showed me I could fall in love with a newborn, who made me believe that maybe, just maybe, I was cut out to be a mother after all. You, who gave back to me all that I missed the first time around. You aren’t easy, Whit, with your stubborn outbursts and steadfast refusal to accept “because I said so” as a reason.  But it is so worth it.  I learn so much from you. You make me question so many of the things I’ve always taken for granted, and watching you operate in the world both bewilders and dazzles me. You are so immensely sweet at your core, and so, so funny: this morning I woke up to a soft kiss on my cheek and turned to see you standing there in your pajamas and sunglasses, cocking your finger at me and smiling, as though to say “Hi there, lady!”

Happy first day, Whit. I am so excited for you about all of the adventures that lie ahead, and I know I’ll never, ever stop laughing as I travel them alongside you. I’m so grateful to be your mother.

I love you.