everyday life

Hurt feelings and face paint

We are at the Basin Harbor Club in Vermont. This is a marvelous place for families, totally oriented towards kids. Tonight was a barbecue with all kinds of activities for the children – bouncy castle, face painting, games, prizes, hayrides, etc. Towards the end of the evening, Grace came running across the field towards me, eyes streaming, visibly crying. I was talking to a friend who coincidentally is here too, standing with her 2 year old.

“What’s wrong, Gracie?” I asked.

“Whit threw the sticker I gave him on the ground!” she sobbed, hiccuping between words. The story, as I gathered it from her broken and interrupted telling, was that she had selected a sticker for Whit for her prize and he’d rejected it. She bawled that she would have chosen something else if she knew he was going to throw it on the ground.

“Hey, Grace, what if you gave the sticker to Bodhi?” I nodded towards the 2 year old, who was watching Grace, transfixed.

She immediately stilled. Considered the idea. She shrugged and proffered the Star Wars sticker to the little guy, who took it from her hand with a huge smile. He leaned in towards her shoulder and kissed it. “Fank you, Gwace,” he murmured.

I thanked my friend, grateful for the kindness of her son. Grace tugged at my hand, face paint streaked with tears, dragging me towards the ice cream line. My friend and her son came with us, and introduced us to her father, standing behind us. They then drifted away. As Grace and I stood in line, her tears came again. She reiterated that Whit had hurt her feelings.

“Grace, there are going to be a lot of hurt feelings in your life.” she looked at me, chin trembling. “I can only promise you this: most people don’t mean to hurt your feelings. Remember that,” I wiped a tear away from her cheek, coming away with black and orange paint on my finger.

“And there will be lots and lots of wonderful feelings too,” chimed in my friend’s dad with a rueful smile. “Lots.”

Yes, there will, Gracie girl. Lots of hurt and tons more joy.

And lighten up, Lindsey!

Witty Whit

Right now my head and heart are running dry. I feel exhausted in a bone-deep way. The words are eluding me.

But this kid? Well, he’s priceless. He can be serious, but usually, he’s not. The material keeps on coming.

****

He didn’t fall asleep last night until 9:30, and for about half an hour before that lay in bed singing California Gurls to himself. Grace somehow can tune him out, which is a skill that I’m pretty sure she’s had to develop to survive. Then he got up at 5:30 and started talking. At 7:20, as we walked into breakfast, I think it’s possible that my normally impenetrably calm, Zen, mother-of-the-year facade cracked slightly. Responding to this, he stopped in his tracks.  He sighed, resignedly, and said, “OK, Mummy, how about I give you a break from questions for a while?”

Sounds good, Whit.

****

The other day Whit was short-circuiting from being tired and overwrought and generally falling apart. He was half-whining, half-crying, dragging his feet as we walked home from the camp bus. He finally burst out, “Mummy! I’m hungry! I’m tired! I am thirsty!” He sobbed.  “I don’t know what I am, but I’m something!”

That’s a feeling I know.

****

Apropos of absolutely nothing, on the long airplane ride home from Legoland, Whit elbowed me urgently.

“What?”

“Do you know what the problem with turtles is, Mummy?”

“What??”

“The problem is they have short legs so when they flip over onto their backs they can’t get back over.”

I tell you, spending an hour inside his head would be comedy.

****

Last week, after dinner, when I was trying to wrestle Whit into the submission of sleep, he began agitating that he was hungry.

I glimpsed a pretzel from a couple of hours earlier on the floor. I scooped it up without his noticing (I thought) and handed it to him. “Here, eat this.”

We walked upstairs towards the bath. Through his mouthful, Whit asked me, “Did you just give me food from the floor?”

“Yes, Whitty, I did,” I sighed. “That’s just the kind of mum I am.”

“That’s the kind of awesome you are!” he exclaimed.

Towards the radiance

This has been a marvelous summer in many ways. I’ve really let myself sink into life at home with Grace and Whit, and I’ve been fortunate to do some special things with them that I hope they will always remember. They have each commented to me that they like having me around more, a comment which delights and saddens me at the same time (I am going back to work in a few weeks). The kids seem taller by the day, both are tanned, relaxed, and happy, and their relationship is developing into a true friendship (though of course the non-stop fighting has not changed).

It’s also been a strange and somewhat sad summer, an interval of time suspended between two realities, between the known and the unknown. Newness and change hover on the horizon, and as we move towards the end of August the shadows they throw grow ever longer. The summer always feels a bit apart from regular life, and that has been even more true than usual this year. There’s something safe about that knowledge, but also something sorrowful. This special time draws to an end and I feel its closing in my bones, like the sudden chill in the evenings and the infinitessimally different angle of the sun.

We still have three weeks left, but a part of me is already lunging towards the fall, wishing the changes would just come already rather than continue to lurk around the corners of my days. I’ve begun to feel that preemptive anxiety that always robs me of the riches of today. I wish I could push the insistent awareness of what is coming out of my field of vision, so that I could purely inhabit the days that still lie between me and that future. I’ve never been good at that, though.

Today is my birthday, signaling the clanging shut of another year, and the promise of another (oh the blessing it is that this is so – I know it, I do). Mid August seems to be when peoples’ attentions shifts towards fall, despite the fact that we are still deep in long hot summer days. A perfect analogy for me, I think, and the way I exist both here, now, but also in the future (and the past) in a way that sometimes occludes the radiance of my ordinary life.

“What will be will be well, for what is is well.” (Walt Whitman, thank you to Glenda Burgess for the reference).

Onward. Into the unknown – and the unknowable. Towards the radiance.

As much radiance as shadow

The world spins as it spins.
Your life is on that same axis,
half shadow, half radiance
and turning, always turning.

-Maya Stein

There is as much radiance in my life as shadow.  I know that I lean towards the shadow, for lots of reasons, but in so doing I may give the impression that there is little radiance in my life.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  There are moments of overpowering sweetness in every single one of my days.  That bear?  Whit won him at Legoland.  His name is Lego.  Whit had to balance on a teetery ladder and climb up quite high.  The smile on his face when he won?  Beyond description.  The generosity Grace showed (she did not win) in celebrating her brother’s achievement?  Impossible to convey.  A million other flashes of radiance light my days.  There is no question about this, and I am sorry if I ever seem that this is not so; that makes me feel ungrateful, something I try very hard not to be.  I must do a better job capturing the endless light and joy that streams through my days; there is richness, too, in happiness, though it feels to me more slippery somehow.

Even – or maybe especially – the moments of radiant joy, though, are twined around some sadness.  That is just how I’m wired.  I can’t figure out the shape of the shadow, whether it is a faint rim around the happy experiences or a jagged grain at their center, but I am certain of its origin, which is about time’s passage.  The unavoidable reality that it can never come again haunts the edges of a moment even as I live it.  I am ever more certain that coming to terms with impermanence is the great challenge of my life.

I know that life is both an endless alleluia and a constant goodbye.  That the shadow and the radiance are a single axis along which my life spins.  Always turning.