everyday life

Friday random, with laughter


Grace, pensive at the library on Sunday.

I like the Hopper-esque light.

Sometimes I think I give the erroneous impression that Grace is serious all the time. She can be serious, yes, and she is certainly, more than anyone else, my clanging gong of truth and clarity, bringing me back to awareness.

But she’s also a seven year old girl. Who likes a good giggle, Judy Moody, Taylor Swift, and, well … shoes. I came downstairs after putting Whit to bed the other night to find this. You can’t really see that she is also draped with several sparkly necklaces she had hand-selected from my closet. And the shoes, which she had also picked out herself (from a fairly large set of options, I confess). Good taste, no? This child never met anything sparkly, spangly, or sequined she did not love. She may have been a Vegas showgirl (with an old soul and an introspective streak) in another life.

What strikes me most is how huge her feet are. She can wear these pretty soon.

And, this guy. Where Grace is my grace, Whit is my wit. I didn’t have any idea when I named them how they would come to embody these traits (well, Whit/wit, go with me, please). He is my clown (not the creepy kind), my reminder, always, to look at the hilarity that is there in every situation. His young soul and joyful spirit is such a nice counterpart to my more melancholic leanings.

On Tuesday night I took both the children out for pizza. After we sat down, the waiter arrived, asking for our drink orders. I’ve been encouraging them to place their own orders, because I think it’s a good way to practice such important and incredibly difficult (why?) life skills such as looking someone in the eye. Grace ordered water. We all turned, expectantly, to Whit.

“A Lone Star, please,” he said. The waiter’s head snapped to look at me. He was clearly appalled and, simultaneously, trying not to laugh. I did a double-take at my own child and said, “He’ll have a chocolate milk.” My first reaction, I admit, was to be proud that he had said please.

But, a Lone Star? Where did he get this? We have never, to my knowledge, had Lone Star beer at home. Neither Matt nor I drink it. I have no idea. I immediately thought of the day that I asked him, shaking my head in resignation, “Where did you come from, Whit?” and he answered, point blank, “Texas.”

Maybe he really is from Texas. Grace, as a baby, was nicknamed “Gracie Big Pants” because of the photograph below. To this day I still call her GBP. I have an LL Bean bag monogrammed “GBP.” I’m thinking Whit From Texas needs one with “WFT” on it.

My subject chose me

“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
-Ernest Hemingway

I’ve loved this quote for a long time. And ever since Saturday night I’ve been thinking about it in light of Margaret Atwood’s provocative poem, Spelling. There are so many lines of that poem that echo in my head, but the one I’ve been mulling specifically is “I wonder how many women/denied themselves daughters…/so they could mainline words.” She beautifully refers to the age-old tension between creativity and procreativity that defined women artists for centuries. As recently as 1899, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier walked into the sea as a way of avoiding the choice she could not make.

I feel so grateful to live in a time with more room for women to be both mothers and artists. Even more, for women to be both mothers and not-mothers, mothers and someone-other-than-a-mother at the same time. So glad because, ultimately, the subject that chose me clearly has a lot to do with my having had children. I don’t know that I would have come to the place that I am today, where my old way of being in the world simply does not suffice anymore, without them. It’s not precisely that my “subject” (if there is such a defining thing running through these diffuse musings) is my children, though clearly they are a big part of it. It’s more that the insistent awareness that I was missing something critical in this singular, short life of mine came only after I was a mother.

Of course it is not always simple, trying to mother and to write. Of course not. Adrienne Rich’s famous line that “Poetry was where I existed as no-one’s mother” speaks to the eternal trading-off of time, attention, and identity that we all engage in. But for me, one sphere enriches the other in ways I cannot yet fully articulate. They provide ample material, Grace and Whit do, but it’s actually more than that. It was they who woke me up to the sleepwalking way I was moving through my life, they who shook the foil in my eyes, they who said “Right here! Right now” loudly enough that I finally listened.

They, Grace and Whit, brought with them noise and sleeplessness and worry and chest-tightening love and most of all, a keen, bittersweet awareness of the fleetingness of it all. They brought stuffed animals and soccer balls and exercise pants and Harry Potter and sleepy whispers of love and a handful of dandelions offered with grubby hands and proud eyes. They brought my attention to my life, to a thousand million tiny moments, some of which glitter brilliantly, most of which blend into the slurry of memory. They brought me my subject. And how wildly, extravagantly fortunate I am that I don’t have to choose.

A week in pictures


Diner breakfast on a holiday Monday


A heart-shaped cloud in a stunning blue sky (this week of weather has been outrageously beautiful).

Chaperoning Whit’s class trip to the MIT media lab. I was probably more excited than he was. Hours of robots and Legos and intimidatingly intelligent people exploring the frontier between technology and the human experience. Incredible.


Lilacs to host “book club” (we’ve been meeting for eight years and have never read a book – time for a new name) at my house. These are the very embodiment of spring to me.


Two of my very dearest friends at the aforementioned book club. Wow, I am simply so lucky to know you two.


Helping Grace’s class pick up the school campus for Earth Day.  My work as class parent this year is done, after this week, no?


College annual meeting – really just an excuse to meet Bouff for drinks. I sort of thought the “business attire, festive orange and black, or beer jackets” line on the invitation was tongue-in-cheek. Apparently not.


A Friday morning hug with Whit. Trying to convince him that enough daytime snuggling means he doesn’t have to come out of his room 20 times after going to bed under the guise of “needing more snuggles.”

One phone call from our knees

A song I love by Mat Kearney came on while I was running yesterday, and one line was stuck in my head all day:

I guess we’re all one phone call from our knees.

The song was referring to a phone call bearing bad news. And I thought of the phone ringing in the middle of the night when Matt’s dad got his heart. I thought of while my mother’s best friend and her mother were dying, and about how every time the phone rang I would startle, and pick it up with icy dread in my stomach. To this day when the phone rings after about 8:30 in the evening my heart lurches, and I assume someone is in the hospital.  One call.  One moment.  One fleeting choice.  On our knees.  Or worse.

I thought more broadly of the decisions, choices, and coincidences that shape our lives irrevocably. As Dani Shapiro says in Devotion, “I had tuned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance” – each small choice we make takes us to where we are. A job interview taken, a second drink agreed to, a leaning into a kiss rather than away, walking a different way home. If you imagine our lives as a line etched into space, moving backwards and forward, going through forks in the road, there are some spots that would be luminous in the retelling, glowing with the importance that we did not know they had until after the fact.

Some of the big forks in the road announce themselves, with neon lettering and loud honking sirens: who to marry?  where to go to school?  what job to take?  But I believe that many of the choices that actually create our lives, and, perhaps more importantly, who we are, are small, surprisingly imperceptible in the moment.  And then, over years, the ramifications of each choice make themselves known.  Our lives echo with the decisions we make, with the steps we take, forward, back, left right.

It is the phone calls in the night and the emails out of the blue that are on my mind today, the innumerable small snowflakes of life’s decisions that build into the immovable, permanent icebergs of our lives.  I’ve written before about this, more focused on the the internal experience of these shifts, of this gradual contouring of who we are.

” I am thinking about my personal mythology, about the moments of my life that shaped who I am today. Some of them are big, I know, like the births of my children, but many of them are small. In fact I think it is true, this notion of destiny taking shape in silence. Often the true shifts that change our direction irrevocably happen invisibly to others. This is the terrible, wonderful privacy of this life: nobody can know our internal terrain well enough to walk it without guidance.”

It occurs to me now that being brought to our knees need not always be a tragic thing: one could spin Mat’s lyric around to say that one small phone call, one event we may not have controlled, could bring us to a position of communion and worship with this world.  I imagine he meant the more obvious and negative meaning, but I like my interpretation, which just says to me that both good and bad changes are always a single moment away.  The veil of our glorious, ordinary lives can be pierced, for good or for bad, in every second.  Which just brings me back to the same persistent theme that tugs at me every time I sit down to write: what we have is this.  Right now.  And only this.

Her own library card.

Grace has strep. Again. Putting aside my worries about what the since-January roller coaster of strep-mono-strep means, I enjoyed a day with her yesterday. She feels basically fine but could not go to school until she’d been on the antibiotics for 24 hours (this time I was more forceful with the nurse and asked that she not prescribe the antibiotic that could kill Whit if he ingests it – so Grace is on zithromax). Grace’s one request for the day was to go to the library and get her own library card.

So, just after 9:00, we walked into the doors of the library. Up to the third floor we went.

Grace filled out her very first form. Other than her zip code, she knew it all herself. This was the first time she ever signed her own name. We talked about that for a while. Admittedly, her signature looks an awful lot like her regular writing at this point.

As you can see.

Grace had a specific book she wanted to look up, and so she did. I marveled, again, at how intuitively children seem to interact with computers (most of all with Apple products, in my experience). As she searched for the book she wanted, I walked up and down the aisles, my finger trailing along the book spines, seeing so many familiar titles. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Tuck Everlasting. Terabithia. The House with the Clock in its Walls. Little Women. The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Phantom Tollbooth. Jacob Have I Loved. A Wrinkle in Time.

Oh … I could have spent all day there. I was seven again, and falling into a new world every time I opened a book, discovering the magic of fiction, beginning what has become a life-long love affair. I could practically remember where I was when I read each of the books, on my stomach on the floor by my childhood bedroom’s bay windows, curled on the off-white couch on my grandparents’ screened-in porch, on the creaky backyard swinging bench at my other grandparents’ house. I finally stopped exclaiming “Gracie!” and making her look at the book that was triggering my memories at that moment, because her eye-rolling reaction showed me I was just interrupting her personal agenda.

On our way downstairs, we stopped on the second floor for me to grab a book, and we had an impromptu lesson on the Dewey Decimal System. I was surprised that I remembered anything, but it came right back, and Grace seemed fascinated. All of my library love flooded over me as I stood in the silent, sunlit stacks, pointing to small white labels with typewritten numbers, explaining to Grace in a whisper how knowledge itself is categorized.

Grace checked out all by herself. I’ve decided on a general rule of four or five books at a time, and she also picked out two Star Wars books for Whit.


And she proudly carried her stash out into the day. I couldn’t help welling up with tears, looking at this so-old-and-so-young face, knowing that her own library card, signed in her own hand, is in her pocket. I felt as though she had just gotten her own personal key to the grand carnival of knowledge. She walked out of that building having had her own independent introduction to this universe, whose neat Dewey decimal categorization, as she would someday learn, belies its sheer complexity and depth.

We went immediately home and she pulled on yoga pants and got into bed with her books. Is this child a mini me or what? A day of reading and libraries is a great day. She can stay.