family

Happy Birthday, Matt

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Right now I feel swamped by gratitude.  For many years, I’ve thought at least daily of Meister Eckhart’s assertion that “if the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.”  I could not agree with that more, and I’m equally certain that the world would be a better place if we expressed those thanks more often.

So, on the occasion of your birthday, Matt, the 17th we’ve celebrated together, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for…

All the ways in which you are an extraordinary father to Grace and Whit.  For your contribution to 50% of their genes (well more than 50% if you consider how they both look).  As you can see below, based on the cover of Whit’s journal, I think you’re doing okay, though you need to watch out for Legoland.

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For your loving, prodding, affectionate-yet-inspiring shepherding of Grace and Whit’s athletics.  I didn’t ever play team sports so I didn’t know how very much there was to learn from them.  I’m so glad you did (both play and know).

For the way you’re learning, as I am, to parent the children we have.

For always letting me go running first in the morning, because you know I have a touchy stomach and need to go as soon as I get up.

For making me the perfect cup of coffee (coconut milk, 2 minutes in the microwave, coconut sugar) and bringing it to me in bed.

For the blue hydrangea bushes in the front yard that you sometimes tend (though that left one is looking pretty sad this year).

For letting me talk you into going on family adventures – Jerusalem and the Galapagos in particular – and for so thoroughly loving the experiences the four of us had.  I view these as a continuation of our first great adventure, to Africa, in 1998, only a few months after we met.  The picture below, from that trip, is one of my all-time favorites.

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For reading this blog, and for telling me what you think about it.

For that one time you surprised me at the airport with yellow roses and blue hydrangeas, out of the blue.  You can do that again any time you want.

For dancing with me to Maybe I’m Amazed for our first dance and to Into the Mystic for our last at our wedding reception, and for all the times you’ve danced with me since.  Even though you say dancing with me is like driving a truck.

 

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For tolerating my unwavering idiocy in all professional sports-related matters, and for not starting a Twitter account, as you’ve threatened, with the sole purpose of tweeting the stupid things I say.  (“Who’s throwing out the first pitch?” for the Bruins game, or “which inning is it?” during a Patriots game, for example)

For that one time, years ago, when we were driving somewhere and I was in a blackly cranky mood.  “You’re in a bad mood,” you observed off-handedly, looking through the windshield.  “And that’s okay.”  Thanks for that.  I hope it’s still okay (and not too often).

Happy birthday, Matt.  I love you. 

I don’t write about Matt a lot, as you’ve surely noticed, but for the last several years I’ve written to him on his birthday: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

 

Family dinner

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We have family dinner a few nights a week.  Sunday, always, without variation.  And usually one or two other nights a week.  Understanding as I do how crucial family dinner is to happy, well-adjusted children, I feel guilt about this.  I wish we sat down more often.  But we do it when we can, and what continues to surprise and delight me is how much both Grace and Whit love it when we have family dinner.  “Are we having family dinner?” one of them will ask, breathlessly, if they see me setting the dining room table.  We always have family dinner in the dining room.  We always have candles, and usually flowers.  And I love family dinner.  There are lots of reasons why, but here are some:

Compliments.  Grace started a tradition years ago which has stuck, and which I love.  At dinner each of us says “compliments” which really are specific thanks to each family members. We take turns thanking each member of the family for specific things they did that we noticed and appreciated over the past day or two.  We do this without fail when we all sit down together, and I absolutely love it.

Using the silver.  I learned this from my mother, who always believed in using the silver (and still does).  I do too (we have the same silver pattern, incidentally).  Part of what makes this doable is that I put my silver in the dishwasher without hesitation.  And Kathryn introduced me to silver polish wipes recently, which changed my life.

Cheers. We always cheers at the start of dinner, and the sight of the four glasses, three water and one milk, always makes me smile.
There’s usually some yelling, “Grace!  We’re waiting for you!” or “Whit!  Anytime now!” but once we’re all seated, before we begin, we cheers as a family.

A sense of celebration. There’s something about setting the table, lighting candles, and sitting down together, without books or electronics, that I fiercely love.  It’s a way of celebrating this ordinary life, of pausing in the slipstream of life to note how rich it is, if head-spinningly fast-moving.  It’s the practice of being grateful for the poem.

Traditions are important to me, and this is one that has become a backbone of our family life.  I dearly hope that Grace and Whit will grow up remembering family dinner, and seeing each others’ faces in the glow of candles, and taking the time to think of and articulate specific things we are grateful for about each other.

Do you have family dinner?  Or other family traditions that mark everyday life and that matter a lot to you?  I’d love to hear about them.

Mothers and daughters

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Thanksgiving 2002.  Grace was one month old.  Three generations, who share the same middle name.  The red hair clearly didn’t translate.  Also, Grace seems displeased by Thanksgiving.

My fascination with and investment in the mother-daughter relationship is well documented.  Just last week I wrote about it for Brain, Child.  This is a long-standing interest of mine.  If I’m honest, the ferocity with which I wished for a daughter when I was pregnant sometimes scared me.  It also shocks a lot of people that we chose not to find out the gender of our baby (either time).  And then Grace arrived – somehow brutally slowly (40 hours of back labor) and instantaneously – and suddenly I had a daughter, my frantic wishes were answered, and I became the fulcrum, a daughter to a mother and also a mother to a daughter.

One of my most vivid memories of those first blurry and difficult weeks of motherhood was of an afternoon when Mum came over to sit with Grace so that I could nap.  I lay in my darkened bedroom, knowing that my infant daughter slept above me and my mother cooked in the kitchen below me.  Matrilineage flanked me in a concrete, visceral way and I remember feeling warmed by it, firmly aware of my place in the line of women that I came from and had, now, birthed and contributed to.

Mothers and daughters and daughters and mothers and the women out of whose soil we grow.

While I don’t write about her that often, my mother is truly extraordinary and I am fortunate to live only a mile away from her now.  Last fall I said that “one of my mother’s many gifts is her immediate and expansive warmth, the genuine way she welcomes everyone into her life.  She has always attracted people to her, and, like a sun, is surrounded by more orbiting planets than I can count.”  I aspire to be the kind of relaxed, loving, outgoing, the-more-the-merrier kind of mother that Mum was and continues to be.  Watching her with my own children, as I did over Easter, is one of the principal joys of my life.

Mum embodies the quote that she and I both chose (clearly, I was copying!) for our high school senior yearbooks: To miss the joy is to miss all.

Motherhood and daughterhood, while always on my mind, has been particularly so of late.  I’ve been thinking of lessons that my mother taught me …

1. Some of the best stuff in life occurs in the outtakes.  Keep your eyes open to the stuff around the edges.

2. Don’t worry about the small stuff.  Really.  It takes care of itself.  Keep an unerring focus on the big stuff.

3. It is not an issue to cook dinner for 14 people with an hour of notice. Or to routinely serve Thanksgiving to more than 30 people.  In fact it’s not really Thanksgiving without a random international student or someone your daughters have never met at the table.

4. Use the silver.  All the time.

5. Female friends are essential and are in many ways the single most important bulwark against life’s storms.  Invest heavily in those you know you love dearly.  Old friends are precious, and cherish them.  Family friends are a genuine gift.

6. Showers are always better outside.  Even in November.  In New England.

7. You can’t judge peoples’ insides by their outsides.  Don’t bother trying.

8.  When your new son-in-law brings you a whole pheasant that he shot to cook, just smile and make pot pie.  Serve it for Christmas Eve dinner.  It’s not a big deal.  To go further, there is nothing culinary that is a big deal.  At all.

9. Attitude is everything.  When Mum was injured several summers ago she demonstrated this in spades, and I can’t count the number of people – literally, tens upon tens – who reached out to tell me that her positive spirit and energy were tangible and would carry her through.  They did, and I admire(d) it.

10. There is a mysterious alchemy in the wind and the water that cannot be fully explained.  I watch her at the helm and understand what that there is something truly intuitive and beyond logical thought about sailing.

11. You can and should play tennis until you are 90 years old.  And possibly beyond that.

12.  Don’t waste your time and energy on negativity.  Of any kind.  Focus on the good in people, in the community, in the world, and eventually that positivity will become your default.  “It takes an awful lot of energy to hate,” Mum used to say to the occasionally irate, incensed child me.  She was always right.

13. Always write thank you notes.  By hand.  On paper.  In the mail.

14. Look forward, not back.  There are adventures to be had, gardens to plant, Scrabble games to play, trips to be taken, people to meet.  So much lies ahead, and turn your energy that way.

15. People flock to those who radiate energy and warmth like my mother does.  At an event recently a man I’d just met took me aside and whispered, “Your mother is a force of nature.”  I know, sir, I nodded.  I know.

Parts of this post were originally written in 2012.  And I was hugely inspired by Galit Breen’s beautiful piece about lessons learned from her own mother,

A Walk With Whit

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We awoke on Sunday morning to full, glorious spring sunshine.  Matt and Grace headed off to an early soccer game, and Whit and I had the morning together.  After a slow start to the day (Survivor, his current obsession, and an extended breakfast) we went for a walk.  As we strolled towards the library I thought about how many times I’ve walked these streets with Whit.  More than I can possibly count.  The first paragraph of the introduction to the memoir I decided not to write described walking past the park where I spent so many hours with my children.  Whit and I, hand in hand, walked past that same park and the lines rose in my head:

… I felt a pang so acute of all that was gone I had to stop and catch my breath. That time, when empty days unfurled in front of me, seems like another country. While my children still play on playgrounds, I know those days themselves are numbered.

I gripped Whit’s hand harder, wondered to myself when will he stop holding my hand?, shook my head to clear my eyes, and kept walking.  We walked past the bush whose sparrow population must number hundreds and stopped in front of it, listening.  We have been stopped in our tracks before by the birdsong emanating from this bush.

“This past week, Mummy, one morning, I was on my way to touch typing before school and I had to stop and sit and listen to the birds,” Whit offered.

“You did?”

“Yes.  It was just so beautiful.  I sat down on one of the stone walls by the building and listened.  I looked up at the sky.”

“Wow, Whit.  That’s great.”

“I felt like I didn’t have a choice.  I just wanted to take it in.”

We kept walking, my heart tumbling around in my chest.  Sometimes he dazzles me with his sensitivity and thoughtfulness, Whit does (rest assured he is far from perfect; he also drives me insane with his stubbornness).  I am fiercely familiar with the overwhelming need to sit, look, listen, to simply observe and in so doing worship the world.

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As we walked Whit gave me a detailed account of the movie The Odd Life of Timothy Green (which he saw ages ago; I’m not sure why it was on his mind that day).  He described Timothy standing, arms outstretched soaking up the sun, and demonstrated it for me.  Then we walked by another bush full of sparrows and Whit’s mind hopscotched to Still, the bird who spent months living under the eaves of our porch.

“It feel like the hours of the day go so slowly but then you look back and it has been two years since Still lived at our house,” Whit observed, walking next to me.  I stared at him.  Yes, yes, it does, my dear.  I swallowed hard so that I didn’t start crying.

We walked on.  Whit pointed out a spray of magnolia petals across the sidewalk, the budding green on all the trees, the chirping of birds.  I watched him as he noticed the world around him, compelled to simply observe and, in so doing, to worship.

 

Can’t have one without the other

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We had a spectacular spring break.  The trip to the Galapagos was more magical than our everyday life, of course, and Grace and Whit, sponges that they are, soaked it all up.  As we headed home, on the last morning, Grace was tearful. In the airport lounge (as we embarked on what would be a full 24 hours of travel) she looked at me with mournful eyes.  “I don’t want it to be over,” she said, hugging me hard.  I nodded, my own eyes filling with tears.

“Why does it have to end?  Why does it have to be so sad?” she asked me, her voice muffled against my shoulder.  A wry smile flitted across my face, though she couldn’t see it.  Why does it?  This is something I ask myself every single day.

“Oh, Gracie.  You can’t have one without the other,” I said.  She pulled away and looked me in the eye, a question in her face.  “You know, the amazing experience is part of it and then being sad it’s over is the other part.”  She nodded silently, chewing her lip.  We sat in silence, the huge ceiling fans in the Guayaquil airport spinning slowly overhead.  I watched Grace’s knee jiggle as I thought of the two edges of this world, of the joy and the sorrow, of the beauty and the pain, of how inextricably linked they are, of how ambivalent I feel that my daughter is learning this lesson already.

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The last night of break, Whit came out of his room a few minutes after I had tucked him in.  I walked him back into his dark room and sat down on the edge of his bed.  “What’s on your mind?”  His cheeks were wet and he had clearly been crying.  He shook his head and I waited.

“I want to go back to the Galapagos, Mummy.  And I am just sad.  Sad about everything that’s over.”  I stroked his blond hair off his forehead.  “I’m sad we’re not going back to Legoland.”  I nodded.

“I know, Whit.  It’s always sad when things are over.”  I had a lump in my own throat as I spoke.  Over and over again, Grace and Whit seem to go straight to the heart of all the things I find the most difficult.  This is what they do: they drag me to confront the emotions with which I most struggle.

“So many things,” he hiccuped, “that didn’t seem that much fun at the time, like the hot slow bus to the turtle farm, or the long layover in Guayaquil, or the flight where we didn’t sleep…” his voice trailed off.

“Or that lunch in Puerto Ayora when you were so cranky,” I offered, and a small smile cracked his face.

“Yeah.  All of those things.  They didn’t seem that much fun when we were going them, but now I miss them all.”

Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember. – Oscar Levant

I read this quote the day after that bedtime conversation with Whit, and I think it’s saying what he was, too.  So often things take on the sheen of joy after the fact, their memory burnished with something that wasn’t necessarily there as we lived it.  I don’t think this is a bad or a sad thing, though it does make me more aware that the experiences that feel like a slog (and Whit is right, that long bus ride back and forth across Santa Cruz qualifies) often become cherished memories.

It’s all connected, all of it: the delight and the sorrow, the experience and the memory, the difficulty fading into the background as the joyful center of an experience moves to the front.  You can’t have one without the other, of any of these dualities, of that I’m sure.  It’s a bittersweet thing, to watch my children learn this, and they both did on our trip to the Galapagos and in its wake.  And it’s something I’m still learning, too.