family

A third child

The first time Grace met Whit.  January 20, 2005.
The first time I was with my two children.

I am done having babies.

I’ll say that again.  I will not have another baby.  We are going to be a family of four.  In our community, this sometimes feels counter-cultural.  There are a great many families with three and four children.

The truth is, for a long time, I felt torn about this.  I wrestled with whether or not to have a third baby.  I considered how high my odds of twins must be, with my father a fraternal twin (and he’s not the only one in my close family).  I thought about how we would have to move, and I love our house.  I thought about how much I wanted to live those disorienting, raw, extraordinary first months with a newborn one more time.

But ultimately, I realized was that what I really wanted was for this not to be over.  I want to have this phase of my life, this golden moment, not to end.  I wanted another opportunity to live – to do a better job in – all the weeks and months and years that have already clanged shut behind me.  And that is not the same as wanting a third child.  Understanding this distinction, which was somehow blunt and evasive at the same time, clarified everything for me.

I absolutely loved being pregnant.  My two labors were the most extraordinary and empowering experiences of my life.  While I struggled with my first infant, I reflect on that time – and, especially, on Whit’s babyhood- with enormous affection.

But I don’t want to have a third child.  I want to have another spin around the rink, to feel again that gasping, outrageous miracle of small feet inside my body, to surrender once more to the incandescent pain of birthing a baby.  But all of that is because I don’t want this to be over.  And in my heart of hearts, I feel as though our family is complete.  We are L, M, G, and W.  We fit.

Realizing this is not without a sense of real loss.  It is complicated and then, startlingly, simple.  We continue down the not-deciding road of “maybe, we’ll see, perhaps one day” and time slips away.  One day we realize that not-deciding was deciding.  And, while I wasn’t looking, those days I didn’t want to end, did.

And here we are.  Our family of four.  My Grace and my Whit.  My drum and my descant.  I would not have it any other way.

If you have children, how many do you have?  How did you know when you were “done,” if you are?  If not, how do you know that?

 

Love and instinct

The long, coltish legs of an almost-young-woman

A few weeks ago, in a beautiful post called Pretty, Kelle Hampton wrote this about parenting: I don’t have all the answers, but I have good instincts and I love my kids something fierce.

I’m not sure that I have ever heard a lovelier description of what I believe parenting is.  Instinct and love.  That’s all I have ever had.  As Grace’s tenth birthday nears, what parenting means to me has been on my mind.  I’m not entirely sure why.  What I do know is that in the last several months we have crossed a line, Grace and I.  We have walked into a new season together.

I have never had all the answers.  Far from it.  But lately the questions are different, and I don’t feel like I have any of the answers.  I am daunted by decisions about technology, boys, body image, confidence, and identity.  For the first time, I confront closed doors and eye rolls. The issues that rise up feel newly fraught, and I’m ever more aware that the patterns she and I set now will take us through into the teenage years.

But, for now, I still get hugs at bedtime and requests to snuggle.  Grace continues to love simply being with me, whether we are reading or doing errands or working on a puzzle.  I know these days are likely numbered, and I’m sure this is why I hold each afternoon chatting idly as I cook and she draws at the table more and more tightly.  My awareness of how fleeting this time is is so keen as to be painful.  Every minute contains an ending, as well, of course, as a thrilling beginning.

The mothering ground is shifting under me in a particularly dramatic way right now and I’m trying to find my footing.  I have no choice but to trust that the instincts that have always been strong will continue to guide me through.  There’s no question that the ferocious love is undimmed.  Just as I figured out how to coax a colicky baby towards sleep (though it took me a while, and an ocean of tears) I will figure out how to parent a nascent adolescent.  Right?  I have to believe this is true.

Love and instinct.  Instinct and love.  Here we go.

If you have children in the 9, 10, 11 year old range, does this sense of transition feel familiar?  Any tips, advice, or words of wisdom are most welcome.

 

I want to remember

I want to remember Whit’s still-wobbly handwriting, and the fact that he unabashedly wrote that he “loves me very much” for public consumption in his back to school night letter.

I want to remember that part of my run where, in late summer and early fall, I have to push through a thicket of cosmos which are growing out of the sidewalk around a pole.  I love that these flowers grow so insistently in the middle of an urban sidewalk, and I love the way they remind me of my grandmother.

I want to remember the way Grace looks, curled on her side, when I wake her up every morning.  Her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks, she still hugs her brown and yellow bears to her chest, and she looks so peaceful.  When I wake her up she always smiles slowly and stretches her arms over her head before saying “Good morning, Mummy!”

I want to remember the outrageous, lucid blue of the sky in the middle of September, the goosebumpy way September 11th is always gorgeously clear, just like 2001, and the beginnings of the flash of orange leaves in the trees on my street.

I want to remember the surge of joy I felt as I watched Grace streak across the soccer field at her first practice this fall.  I was worried about how she would feel, returning, after her broken collarbone.  I need not have worried.

I want to remember the weekend afternoons when Grace and Whit sit on either side of me in bed, the three of us in companionable silence, reading.  When my company, and a book, satisfies them utterly.

I want to remember this golden moment, these ever-taller, lankier children who still carry echoes of the babies they were, the peace-sign and robot-patterned backpacks, the floating sound of lullabyes from the rooms of sleeping children, right now.

Inspired by Ali Edwards‘ beautiful post on this theme.  What do you want to remember?

12 years

Leaving our wedding, 9/9/00

Yesterday, Matt and I celebrated 12 years.  We began our journey into the mystic on September 9th, 2000.  The thunder and lightning during our vows may have been a harbinger of some sort, but so was the clear, beautiful night that unfolded after the storm. 

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

– Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage (excerpt)

Lately I’ve been interested by wedding rings.  If you are married, do you have anything engraved inside your ring?  Does your spouse?  In case you are curious, I don’t have anything, because my ring couldn’t be engraved, but Matt’s says “you are my sunshine.”

Matt, I am still amazed. Thank you. 

Nostalgia like an undertow

I can’t explain exactly why our now-annual trip to Legoland is so special, but it is.  A light veil of magic that descends on the three of us the minute we walk out of the airport in California and it floats around our shoulders until we get home.  On the taxi to the airport in Boston, as we set out on a long day of travel, Grace announced that she looked forward to this trip as much as she did to Christmas.  And on the second day, as we discussed the new Lego-themed hotel that is going to open this year and whether we should consider staying there, Whit brought tears to my eyes when he said,  “Well, it would be cool, probably, but I really like our tradition the way it is.”

They are as sentimental as I am, these two, and as wedded to ritual.  One of my firmest beliefs about parenting is that traditions, large and small, have huge power to ground children.  This trip is now one of the central rituals around which our family year spins.

Cruelly, the days of our short visit to California seem to accelerate every year.  This summer they passed in a blinding blaze of ice cream and swimming pool jumps and rides and laughter.  Our final day in the park I could not get Colin Hay singing just be here now (from his beautiful song, Waiting for my Real Life to Begin) out of my head.  I rode behind the children on the safari ride, watching them more than I did the incredibly detailed Lego animals, fighting to stay inside my own experience.  Nostalgia pulled at me like an undertow, and I struggled not to slide into full-blown grief for a trip that wasn’t even over yet.

This is a familiar pattern for me, and it was a part of my time at Legoland this year more keenly than ever.  It is so easy for me to slip into anticipatory grief about a moment being over even as I inhabit it.  My awareness of time’s passage grows more and more acute, and it is often an effort not to let the s0rrow of that unavoidable reality overwhelm me.  I remind myself that my days are short here, and that I risk squandering them by surrendering to a morass of relentless missing and sadness.  At the same time, I thank the universe for my own particular emotional wiring, because the truth is that being able to sense the throb of time under every minute makes my experience, while often painfully bittersweet, tremendously rich.

And I blink back my tears and smile when Grace and Whit barrage me with how they noticed for the first time that the giraffe’s head swivels, and then follow them as they run to the next ride.  Looking around as I try to keep up with them, drinking in with my eyes and nose and ears – with my whole self – this magic place.  This golden moment in my life.  Yes, it is about to end.  As hard as I try, I cannot get around that.  So the best I can do is be here now.