family

Proud

tryouts

I have said before, and I will say again, that demonstrations of independence, bravery, and kindness by my children make me prouder than conventional achievement.  Recently I have had an opportunity to see Whit in particular wade into these waters past where he is comfortable.  It has been both nerve-wracking and fabulous to watch him swim.

A few weekends ago, I took Whit to baseball tryouts.  Little league tryouts.  I live in a famously liberal town.  Whit has never played baseball before in his life.  Never.  Both of us were entirely, absolutely unprepared for what we encountered in that school gym.  The boys had numbers pinned to their backs and went through their paces, one a time.  Sprinting.  Catching.  Throwing.  Batting.  All while a lineup of adult men – the coaches of the various teams – watched, scribbling notes on clipboards as they did so.  I looked around, bewildered, wondering if I’d mistakenly stumbled into spring training.

As Whit stood in line to do his timed sprint, the first of the various drills, I caught his eye across the gym.  He looked somewhere between terrified and mortified.  My stomach twisted.  For an hour and a half I watched him in the various activities, feeling relief and anxiety rise and fall like tides inside of me.

There was no complaining, there was no posturing, there was no giving up.  He just found himself in an unfamiliar and intimidating situation, put his head down, and did his best.

Tryouts reminded me of this fall, when, after an uncomfortable encounter with our head of school, Whit walked into the gate the next morning, looked her in the eye, and said, “Good morning.”  He did it again the next day.  And the next.  And each morning, walking next to him, I was pierced with both powerful pride and an intense awareness of how much that eye contact and “good morning” took from him.  And for many days I told him how I felt when I tucked him in.  He looked at me, eyes gleaming in the dim light of his room, and I could tell that he felt acknowledged.  That he felt seen.

These experiences remind me of some of my dearest wishes for my son:

May he always look life in the eye and not flinch.  May he always welcome what is to come with open arms.  May he know that to do the best he can is all there is.  May he not shy away from trying, even when he doesn’t know if he will succeed.

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Working mom snow day

snow day picnic

This is what happened a few weeks ago, during Nemo: Friday, snowday.  Monday, snowday.  Tuesday, conference day.  I work full time.  I do not have anywhere near full time childcare.  Put these things together and you create a difficult brew with the potential for raised voices, frustration, and hurt feelings.  I think of the witches at the start of MacBeth, even.

Because I had known all along we weren’t going to have school on Tuesday, I’d booked Monday solid.  From 8am to 4:30 I had phone calls in 30 minute increments.  Sunday evening, the phone rang and the school’s number came up on caller ID.  I picked up, my stomach sinking.  The familiar automated voice began … Another snow day.

As my friend Christine says, I love when I can be relaxed and roll with a snow day.  I love when – and this is sometimes true – I’m able to reschedule things and spend the day sledding, baking cookies, and just hanging out.  But at this particular moment, I couldn’t be that mother.  I was just grateful that my office is in my house, so I could at least be in the building with Grace and Whit.  I know a lot of people don’t have this luxury.

All morning long I ran back and forth between my office and the family room.  I set the kids up with a big game of War with my grandfather’s old orange and black cards before capitulating and letting them have their screens.  Whit played Minecraft and Grace played games with cartoon dogs on her itouch.  It was mostly calm.  But I could hear them talking when I was on my work calls, and could see my email piling up during the minutes I stayed with them.  The strands of my life, which mostly keep me steady, upright, pulled at me from all sides.

I had already packed lunch before the snow day call came, so we brought down a blanket, spread it out on the kitchen floor, and the kids had a picnic with their lunchboxes.  They were slow to eat, and finally I had to go upstairs for an interview on the phone, and Grace sat on the floor, arms crossed, crying, angry that I was abandoning them during lunch.  A few minutes into my call I heard their quiet footsteps on the hardwood floor outside my closed office door, and then the soft click of the family room door closing behind them.   Throughout that phone call I was distracted, heavy with sorrow, aware of all the things I am not doing well enough.

That night, as I tucked her in, Grace said her prayers as usual.  These prayers vary slightly day to day, thought they are always a simple list of thanks.  This is so without my ever having coached her; it’s just her instinct. The impulse to say thank you must run in our family.

That night, my day of imperfect juggling of their needs and those of work, Grace said, “Thank you for so much screen time.”  Oh, great.  But then she said, “Thank you for letting Mummy work from home.”  My eyes filled with tears.  And then she continued, “And thank you for getting to live in this awesome world,” and I felt a rush of something like gratitude, something like forgiveness, something like grace.

Few things reveal the cracks and crevasses in a life like a snow day when you’re a working parent (particularly the one who has primary responsibility for the children that day).  I’ve noted before that my family’s life spins fast, and that we all, and me especially, keep a lot of balls in the air.  Most of the time this works for us.  But on a snow day the tightrope that I walk every day feels tauter, less forgiving, and a fall seems more likely, more perilous.  I remind myself, always, firmly, that this is a conflict of privilege, that having both work and children I love is a tremendous blessing.  I think of my childless 26 year old self, boldly saying this to a roomful of much older women, all mothers.  What I’ve learned, though, is I can be aware of my good fortune and still exhausted by the demands it brings, still sliced – to ribbons! – by the sharp edges of my commitments, my promises, my loves.

A Pebble For Your Pocket

One recent weekend morning Grace, Whit and I were puttering at home (I know!  What else is new!?).  I was doing laundry and they were in Grace’s room, next to mine, and they started to bicker. Suddenly, without a plan, I called, “Hey, guys!  Let’s get in my bed and read.”  Why not get into bed at 10:30 in the morning?  My bed is, after all, a refuge for both of them and, in truth, for me.

To my surprise, Grace and Whit agreed.  I thought at first we were going to read Harry Potter and then, out of blue, I noticed the stack of library books on the edge of my bureau.  A Pebble For Your Pocket, a book of “mindful stories for children and grown-ups,” by Thich Nhat Hahn, was sitting on top.  Ah, thank you, universe, I thought, grabbing the paperback before clambering into the middle of my bed between Grace and Whit.

As I opened the book I hesitated.  I thought, for a moment: I wonder if they are going to go for this.  Well, one way to find out, I thought as I cleared my throat and opened to the first story, called “Who is the Buddha?”  Just as it had in the library, a gossamer veil of quiet descended on the room.  It seemed as though all of our breathing slowed down.  I felt as though something brushed past me in the dark, touching me so barely I might have imagined it.  The last time I felt this sensation was in May, in the ER with Grace, and I described it thus: “I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.”

I think that feeling is grace.

We read two stories and put the book away and the current of our day took us all with it.  It wasn’t until the next morning, when Grace and Whit were sitting at the kitchen table working on their classroom Valentine’s, that either of them mentioned Thich Nhat Hahn.

“Mum?”  Grace was looking down, concentrating on the glitter she was shaking onto a card.  “Can we read more of those pebble stories?”  I run upstairs to get the dogeared library book, and then, sitting between them on our battered wooden kitchen chairs, read several more stories.  As I read I remembered the first time I read Thich Nhat Hahn.  Peace is Every Step was an important book for me in college, a reminder of what mattered, what I wanted, to keep breathing, to live here.  As you can tell, I’m still working at this, still learning the same lesson, and I keep flubbing it.  Over and over again.  But what is there to do but to keep my eyes open, to take a deep breath, to love this life of mine, in all its flawed, real, glittering beauty?

The hermit is inside of you.  In fact, all the wonderful things that you are looking for – happiness, peace, and joy – can be found inside of you.  You do not need to look anywhere else. – Thich Nhat Hahn, A Pebble For Your Pocket

The clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.

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An old post about snow that seems utterly apt after this weekend of snow and then, today, blindingly clear blue skies.

I have been thinking for days about writing a post about snow, and, lo and behold, it’s snowing again!  It’s so great with the universe comes through like that.  Of course, it’s been snowing almost non-stop since December 26th, so possibly it’s a coincidence.  When I look out my office window, whose four panes frame so many hours of my gazing out at the world, it looks like I live in a snow globe.

People always write about the “muffled” quality of snow, about its quiet, the silence it lends to the world.  For me this is absolutely true when it’s snowing.  There is an outside-of-real-life feeling when the sky is mottled with moving white snowflakes.   Maybe it’s a vestige of childhood snow days, maybe it’s the way movement in the outside world is slowed down to a crawl.  Something just floats over me, a gossamer cape of wonder, a reminder to breathe and watch.  The snow globe is a good place to live, insulated from the real world, the rough jolts of life somehow less jarring, muted.

And yet when it’s no longer snowing, but the world is covered with snow, I don’t find it muffled at all.  It’s the opposite: I find it sharp, its clarity in such high definition that sometimes it hurts.  Pam Houston’s words always come to mind: “When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.”  There’s something wide-awake, hyper-saturated and, as she says, precise, about life with clear skies overhead and snow underfoot.  Emerging from my swaddled time in the snowglobe, everything seems purified, clarified, washed clear by the white everywhere.

Today I knelt on the floor by my office window and watched the flakes fall.  This afternoon they were huge, big clumps of snowflakes dropping out of the pale steel-gray sky.  Watching them, I remembered the passage in Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how “each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”  I looked up into the sky, straining to see as far as I could.  I thought of another time that I instinctively knelt, when, just like today, “…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.”

Another thing about snow: it is practically impossible (at least for a hack like me) to take pictures that capture the falling snow.  Hello, metaphor.  You just have to watch.  Pay attention.  Inscribe it on the vellum of memory.  What you see is what you get.

Originally written January 19, 2011, during another season of snow.

Matrilineage

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I began an essay several years ago with this line: I am grandmotherless.  Now, of course, I am grandparentless.  But that’s new.  At my college graduation I had four healthy grandparents (see above), and at our wedding I had three.  I’m fortunate that my grandparents were well into my adulthood, and I cherish the relationships I had with all four of them.  I wish my grandmothers had met Grace and Whit.

I know my grandmother Gaga (who was married to Pops) would have loved to have met the first-born daughter of her first-born granddaughter.  She mothered four boys, with a keen sense of humor and a frankly brilliant mind.  A few years ago, after Whit was born, Pops sent me several pages of thoughts on raising boys that she had typed years ago.  I learned a lot.

Gaga, however,  made no secret of her enthusiasm when her first grandchild (me) was a girl.  There were a lot of dolls, ruffles, and skirts at my grandparents’ house in Long Island with the curving driveway and bench-style swing in the back yard.  And I loved it.  I wish Grace could meet her, pull out the huge wicker basket of dolls and doll clothes, play with the mirror that simulated outdoor and indoor light in her dressing room, curl up against one of her pillows with arms to giggle at her reading Erma Bombeck, admire her fierce intellect and interest in medicine, which she’s inherited.

I also wish Grace could have met Nana, my mother’s mother, who was tall and elegant and who, it seemed to me, glided rather than walked.  I wish she could sit in the deep white chair on the screened-in back porch, smile at the zinnias cut from the garden that were always on Nana and Ba’s boat, Fleetwing, and eat corn that Bad had cut from their garden once the water on the stove was boiling, heard stories about her passionate love for her alma mater, Middlebury.

So much about Nana’s personality, and her quiet but powerful faith, is summed up with the hymn we sang at her funeral, Simple Gifts.  When I look up at the ceiling above the altar in church, it’s Nana I think about.  I wish Nana could know that Grace, my first-born child, carries her name, the name that is both Mum’s and my middle name.  Maybe she does know.

There’s something primal in my visceral sense of my grandmothers’ and mother’s blood beating in my veins, and in Grace’s.  Hand over hand, generation to generation, we pass down more legacies than we can count.  Big and small, conscious and not, these lessons accumulate and shape our sense of the world.  I’ve written more than once of my powerful awareness of matrilineage, of the importance of naming the chain of women from which we are descended.  I come from Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor

I will always remember these names.  They are where I come from.  Where do you come from?