family

Leaning in, doing it all, and packing lunches the night before

I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.  I know her work is controversial (though I’m not totally sure why, to be honest, after reading her book), and my goal is not to review the book.  But I will say I loved Lean In.  I found it supportive and inspiring, and while I agree there are big problems with the “system,” I was personally motivated by Sandberg’s focus on what we can do within the constraints of today’s reality.

Accepting the reality of right now, and embracing what is, is, of course, a big theme of my writing – and of my life.  Where that begins to bleed into capitulating to things that are unacceptable is a topic for another day.

People ask me a lot how I “do it all.”  The truth is, of course, that I don’t.  None of us does.  I’m not the only person who has written extensively on this topic, nor am I the only one to conclude that the definition of “it all” is both an intensely personal and a vitally important thing.

Lean In triggered a cascade of thoughts and reflections for me.  One was that discussion of “work-life balance” (a term I personally dislike) tends to fall into two categories: big picture theorizing and granular advice.  The former is complicated, and all I can say for sure is that any discussion of the topic of working and mothering touches some deep ocean of feeling buried deep inside me, as enormous as it inchoate.  Within a page or two of any book or article on the subject, I am in tears.  I need to spend more time thinking about what those feelings are.

It is the latter category that I want to talk about today.  No matter what it is that each of us juggles – and while I know that that assortment looks different for each of us, I also know that almost everyone’s plate feels hugely full – we all have tricks for minimizing dropped balls.

My appetite for talk about these particular, specific strategies is almost endless.  I love to hear about the ways that others make it all happen, and always learn something when the conversation turns to this topic.  I wanted to share some of the tactics that make life work for me right now.  None of these are rocket science.  But they help me.  I’d love to hear your tricks and strategies:

  • Living close to both my kids’ school and my office.  Limiting my commute has made being engaged in Grace and Whit’s school lives (drop off every day, occasional pick up, conferences) feasible.  It has had costs, of course: we live in a small house and do not have a yard.  But every time we talk about it, Matt and I conclude that this is the right choice for now.
  • Pack lunches the night before.  Always, without exception.
  • Early bedtimes.  For the children and for me.
  • Pick your battles.  Grace goes to school every single day in black leggings.  She loves them and has 5 pairs.  Do I love the look?  No.  Is it easy, and – more importantly – does it make her happy to have control over this choice?  Yes.  It also simplifies and smoothes the morning routine.
  • If you have a spare 5 minutes (early to an appointment, finished with grocery shopping faster than planned) fill up the car even if it doesn’t need it or get cash at the ATM even if you don’t need it.  You will be glad you did.
  • Treat your babysitters extremely well.  I don’t ever cancel within a few days without offering to pay, and I usually round up when settling.  I’m never late.  I over-communicate.  And as a result: I have hugely loyal babysitters who go out of their way to help.  It makes a big, big difference.

What are some of your particular pieces of advice for managing a very full life?

 

The physicality of them

IMG_8166

Every night, when I put Grace and Whit to bed, I whisper, “I’ll see you in the morning.”  That sentence is, as I wrote a few months ago, the distillation of parenthood.  I will be here in the morning.  You can go to sleep, safe, sound, trusting.  I’m not the only mother who finds bedtime, and the hushed hours after the children go to sleep, to be among the sweetest parts of the parenting day.  If I search my archives for bedtime posts, pages and pages come up.  Good night, Whit is among my favorites; I can’t read it without crying.  That’s especially true now, as I read through the scrim of years, with the awareness of all that has irrevocably changed.

Often, I go back in to see Grace and Whit before I go to sleep.  And sometimes I sit next to them on their beds, watching their sleeping faces, observing the shadows that their eyelashes cast across their cheeks.  Sometimes I put my hand on their chests, feeling their breath rise and fall.  There is a tangible grace in the rooms of my sleeping children, a magic that hovers in the dim, nightlight-lit air.

I love these moments, when I watch them, listening to the quiet of the room, the soft thrum of their breathing.  I stare at the length of their bodies under the covers, tumbling down the hall of mirrors that is my memory, remembering their baby selves in their cribs in these very same rooms.  It is such a cliche, but many cliches grow out of truth, don’t they?  How did these children, simultaneously sturdy and fragile, long and angular and lean, come out of my body?  Where did my babies go?

The expanse of Whit’s back, as he stands up to his ankles in the ocean, or the shadows Grace’s eyelashes cast on her cheeks when she’s looking down, reading: these are as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror.  They came from me and they are still intimately known; this is the private geography of motherhood.

As I write this I’m away from Grace and Whit, and I’m heading home today.  I can close my eyes and imagine their bodies barrelling into mine when I walk in the door, the smiling faces and mile-a-minute talking and hugs.  The hug that will remind me that Grace’s head now falls pretty close to right under my chin, and that Whit is the height I still delusionally think that his sister is.  And tonight, you can be sure, after I tuck them in, I’ll go back into their dusky rooms to watch them sleep, to be reminded of their beating hearts and breathing lungs, of their sturdy and fragile bodies, of them.  My daughter and my son.

 

GIVEAWAY: The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage

When my copy of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage, I opened it hurriedly and dove in.  One of the editors, Lisa Catherine Harper, is both a friend and a writer I adore.  I read, loved, and reviewed her first book, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood.  Other writers I love, like Deborah Kopaken Cogan and Catherine Newman, also contributed.  This book is a wonderful meditation on what food means in the context of a family.

When I think about food and family, my mother comes immediately and always to mind.  I wrote about her, years ago, about how she embodies the sentiment that casseroles are grace.

I am deeply honored to share a beautiful essay by Lisa Catherine Harper here today.  I love everything she writes, and this is no exception.  I know you will too.

I’m delighted to offer a giveaway copy of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage.  I can’t recommend this book enough: you will love it.  Please leave a comment here – if you want to share a story of food in your life, that would be terrific! – and I will choose a winner on Sunday. 

Still Life with Orange

By Lisa Catherine Harper

 

In our backyard, we have a gorgeous, old orange tree. Its leaves are thick and glossy, and come winter, it’s studded with more bright fruit than we know what to do with.  We snack on it, and make arancello, and squeeze gallons of fresh juice, and still, we have sacks and sacks to give away.  In the spring, when the blossoms for next year’s crop are budding like tiny, fragrant constellations, we have a few brief weeks when we can picnic under its sweet-smelling shade.

For me, the orange tree is a California dream and everything the fruit of my northeastern childhood was not.  No matter how many years I live with them, those oranges still seem to come from a faraway place. For my children, though, the tree is ordinary, the stuff of home.

And this is where things get interesting. I think that it’s in this tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary, the unusual and the mundane, that traditions are made. The fact that those oranges are a part of our everyday life is what makes them special.  We wait for them, we watch them grow, we harvest them, we eat them. Most of the time, it’s just there, a pretty tree that stands beyond our kitchen window, as much a part of our yard as the cats.  But when I bother to pay attention, in those out-of-time moments when I become aware of its natural cycle, then I know that–without trying or doing anything special–we have a tradition.

What are family food traditions? How do they come about? And why should we care? These are the questions I’ve been thinking about for the last four years as I worked on my new book, The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat.  As my co-editor and I selected stories, submitted by a wide range of food writers, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists we found ourselves thinking hard about our own family food and we realized we wanted to tell a different story, one that moved away from mantras and manifestos and talked about the real issues facing real families every day. Not what we feed our families, but how, and why, and why should we care?

The stories we included in Cassoulet share two important things. First, family food isn’t just the food we feed to our kids.  Husbands feed wives, dads feed kids, siblings feed each other, children feed parents. Second, family food doesn’t necessarily involve special occasions or long-standing traditions. As the stories accumulated, we had accounts of everyday food, snack food, despised foods—these were at least as important as celebratory food, or recipes sanctioned by generations. Writers remembered the absence of food, too, because for better, for worse, in sickness, and in health, every aspect of our relationships is implicated in our family food. It’s something of a cliché to say food is love, but our tables rehearse—explicitly, implicitly—the joy and connection of our most intimate relationships as well as the conflict. What became abundantly clear is that family food is shared in relationship, and it reflects these relationships.

 

The point, though, is not to give us parents one more thing to feel guilty about. We don’t need more rules, or more people judging us.  What many of us need is simply to broaden the conversation and understand that what happens in the kitchen or at the table is at least as important as the ingredients that end up on the plate.

 

And here’s where my orange tree comes in.  In a very simple way, it reminds me to pay attention to what I already have. Sometimes, the simple act of picking an orange is enough to restore us.  In the midst of all the rush and bustle of family life, in the middle of work and homework and carpools, sometimes, a sustainable family food culture is more important than sustainable food. My family’s food will not look like yours-and this is the whole, beautiful point.  In our family, we have the tree. Your family will have something else–a red sauce, or a pancake recipe, or a garden.  We can start by telling our stories: this is what family food means in our life. What does it mean in yours?

The Navy hymn

IMG_8020

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep,
Its own appointed limits keep.

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea! Amen.

Eternal Father, lend Thy grace To
those with wings who fly thro’ space,
Thro wind and storm, thro’ sun and rain,
Oh bring them safely home again.

Oh Father, hear an humble prayer,
For those in peril in the air! Amen.

Oh Trinity of love and pow’r,
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour,
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them where so e’er they go.

Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea! Amen.

I love the Navy Hymn.  We sang it at the funerals of both of my grandfathers, and it ran through my head without cessation last week when we visited the Air & Space Museum in Washington.  As I walked through an echoingly large room filled with airplanes and rockets, I thought about how I come, without question, from those who traveled in the air and in the sea.

I come from two long lines of sailors.  In fact, my parents famously met when my father (leaving a party as my mother arrived, a telling detail if you know their individual predilections towards earliness and lateness now) noticed a silver brooch of a sailboat my mother wore.  My mother and father are skilled and passionate sailors, and I would call the ocean and sailing the central passion of each of their lives.  My grandparents all sailed.  These were people who weren’t often in peril on the sea, because they knew what to do.  Sometimes, when Grace gets nervous about the sailboat heeling over too steeply, I whisper in her ear that there is nobody, ever, that I’d want at the helm in a storm other than Nana and Poppy.  That’s the truth.

But my grandfathers were also pilots, which is what I was thinking of at the Air & Space Museum.  My paternal grandfather, whose death we recently mourned, designed airplanes his whole life.  The photograph above shows Grace and Whit in front of “his” airplane, the A6 Intruder.  When I see this airplane, inelegant but tremendously effective, I think immediately of the corner of the room in Pops’ last apartment which he used as an office, which featured several airplane models (including one which now sits in my dining room).

Pops designed airplanes, and my maternal grandfather, Ba, flew them.  He flew across Africa in World War 2 in the Navy, and he was also a commercial pilot upon his return home.  I felt the presence of both of my grandfathers in that cavernous hangar full of planes and rockets.  And I thought about how I’m descended from travelers, people interested in flight and the air, in sailing and the water, in the angles of wind and water and fiberglass.  I come from people of the air and sea.  There is a restlessness in my blood that I often wish I could shake, overcome, deal with; perhaps instead I need to recognize that it’s just a part of the inheritance that comes along with my names, my red hair, and the shoebox of Princeton paraphernalia in my living room.

How many greater things

Kidsbeach

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.  How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!  How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.   – Thoreau

For as long as I can remember, I have been literal.  I have almost always wanted with a fervor bordering on desperation to control, categorize, and to understand.  I am the child of a physicist and engineer, remember.

And yet that has been changing.  Years have given me perspective, and now I can look back through the lens of time.  The arc of my life is loftier, but also less clear.  I understand so much less than I used to.  But I also see so much more.  This can’t be a coincidence.  And the things that really capture my imagination are those which I understand the least: the sky, the passage of time, the capricious, unpredictable nature of memory.

A few years ago I asked my readers what this blog was about.  I still don’t have a good answer, when people ask me.  I hem and haw, stutter and stumble, coughing out some inarticulate paragraph about what it is to be in the world, to pay attention, to parent and live in a mindful way.  A succinct elevator speech it isn’t.

But I was fascinated by the answers I received from you.  One word came up over and over again, far more than any other: wonder.  And I do think that wonder is at the center of what it is I want – for myself but perhaps more importantly, for my children – in this life.  I want to help protect Grace and Whit’s capacity for wonder.  And isn’t wonder, at its core, the absolute opposite of logic and understanding?  At the very least, I am certain that true wonder requires the willingness to suspend our often-frantic need to comprehend and intellectualize our experience.

This must be connected to the fact that I am more and more intimate with doubt.  As I get older, I move further away from a ravenous desire to understand.  The not knowing at the center of our lives is immutable, I’m coming to see.  What we need to do is inhabit it, enfold it, learn to live with it.  Our human lives flow around some essential, unknowable truths, like a river around jagged rocks.  We can’t change the existence of those rocks.  So instead I am learning to love the glitter of the water’s drops as they bounce off of it.