family

Lucky enough to come between

For decades my role model was my mother. Now it’s my daughter. I’m just the woman who was lucky enough to come between the two.

– Anna Quindlen

I looked through my photographs and was surprised at how few I actually have of Grace and my mother together.  They have always had a special bond, from day one, when Mum and Hilary waited outside the delivery room while Grace was born and then met her immediately.  I didn’t know whether my baby was a boy or a girl, and I admit a very large part of me suspected the universe had an all-boy family in store for me, mostly because of how desperately I wanted to have a girl.  Well, 39 hours of brutal labor later, the first but not last time her will and mine went to war, Grace was born.

And minutes later, my mother was there.  My mother, who patiently withstood my senior year deconstruction of the mother-daughter bond, both in overarching generalities and in painful specifics.  My mother, whose red hair landed precisely and permanently on my head.  My mother, whose confidence and competence together make her a force of nature.  My mother, my role model.

My mother, my daughter, and I all have the same middle name.  We share an intuition about the world and an empath’s ability to read the emotions of others.  There are a million differences between us, of course, but the same blood – that which came from Marion, and Priscilla after her – beats in all of our veins.

  And once in a while, I am overwhelmed with awareness of how fortunate I am.  Of the lucky, lucky woman I am.

A constant transition

This is a time of transition.  I can feel us moving to another phase, another season, in every sense of the word.  I am aware of that deep in my body and my spirit.  I dislike change with every fiber of my being, and I wish I was able to let go more.  I’m really more of a holder-onner.  Still, I continue to remind myself that this is futile effort, and that my white knuckle grip on every day is only serving to exhaust me.  I wear a reminder over my heart.

We are shedding skins around here.  Spring is slowly creeping around the edges of our hours, and with every day it seems more inevitable, though I think there is snow forecast for this weekend.  It’s still raw and chilly, though, and we all shiver like the brand-new, slender crocuses.  Grace and Whit are re-adjusting, slowly, to the school routine after two weeks off; I’m waking them out of sound sleep in the mornings, yet finding them unwilling to go to sleep at night.  There have been some reminders in my life of how near the precipice is, always, and of how we tread, every single day, on the line between divinity and disaster.

And then I read these beautiful words by Rebecca at Altared Spaces, about the ultimate parenting transition.  I read this post on Tuesday and by halfway through I was literally sobbing – not just the standard tears-rolling-down-my-cheeks that happens every day, but full-on gasping for air, actively crying.  The line that gouged itself into me was this one: “I came here to let her go.”  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Isn’t this, ultimately, the story of what we all came here to do, as parents?  Aren’t we letting to every single day?

Even knowing that, I’m chilled and stunned by the idea that someday – perhaps as soon as 7 or 8 years from now, if she goes to boarding school – I will hug and kiss Grace and watch her walk away.  I remember hugging my mother on the grass lawn in front of a dorm in New Hampshire in September 1990.  That was an particularly draconian farewell: she drove to Logan and got on an airplane to London.  Talk about far away.  I didn’t know until years later that she cried in the car driving away.  I went up to my little teeny closet of a room and sobbed my heart out.  I was scared and lonely and excited, and on the edge of something big.

There are certainly major, notable goodbyes and transitions in parenting, the ones that we all anticipate: kindergarten, high school, college, weddings.  But there are also tiny little goodbyes every single day.  Parenting is a constant farewell.  It’s replete with joyful hellos, too, of course, but it’s undeniable that every day holds an ending.  Every night before I go to bed I carry Whit to the bathroom, his blond head heavy on my shoulder.  Every single night I wonder if this is the last time.  I haven’t read Good Night Moon since I wondered if I ever would again.  The truth of that chokes me up, sits like a stone in the heart of me, a core of loss I simply can’t ignore.  Every day, infinitessimally but inexorably, they move further away from me.

I commented on Rebecca’s blog, letting her know how much her words touched me.  And she emailed me back and said this:

You are so passionate in the way you love your children. Sometimes I think you taste letting them go regularly. You live WIDE awake. At times that overwhelms you.

And I read her words, crying fresh tears, thinking: yes, yes, yes.  The big goodbyes will submerge me in emotion, fear and grief and pride all mixed together, of that I am sure.  But the little ones are in many ways harder for me, since they are so slippery, so difficult to note.  And I do taste them regularly.  I hope she’s right about living wide open; truthfully, I often doubt that.

And now, off to another bedtime.  More pages of Harry Potter, another turn at the Ghostie Dance, the Sweet Dreams Head Rub, and a full-body hug before bed.  Another night when my attention, my kiss, my hug can fix any problem at all.  How many more nights will it be my privilege to do, and be, this?  I don’t know, and that not knowing haunts me.  But tonight, it is.  I try to focus on that.

A repost from exactly a year ago.  And guess what?  It is still a time of change.  The realization that is seeping slowly into my bones is this: life is a constant transition.

Images from a week by the sea

A symphony of blues.

9.5 years since a successful heart transplant.

Our long shadows on a morning walk out to the end of a pier into the ocean.

Caped in towels, they disappear around the curve.

Sunsets every evening over the Gulf of Mexico that took my breath away.

If that’s not sacred, I don’t know what is.

Enormous excitement over the honey badgers at the Naples Zoo.  I swear Whit has not seen the YouTube video, but you’d think he had because his rendition of “honey badger don’t care” is eerily good.

Filling the spaces

It’s true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before.  In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art’s eyes, she resembled our mother.  I can’t look at Mike’s face without seeing Dad’s.  Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen.  We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds.  We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

– Jennifer Haigh, Faith

This passage, from Jennifer Haigh’s lovely novel Faith, has been haunting me for days.  It’s not an understatement to say that this is the central theme of the novel I am so clunkily attempting to write: an exploration of the holes inside each of us, punched out in the shapes of our earliest loves, first dear friends, and family members, around whose contours our own are shaped.  I am fascinated by the ways our lives are shaped and directed by early experiences, and by the disproportionate power of those we first love.

I am thinking this week about the people in my life who contributed to those hollow wounds, those whose words and input will echo throughout my life.  For many of us the – most, even – I suspect that the response to those who early, and irrevocably, shaped who we are is subconscious.  Certainly we are rarely aware of the spaces as they are being gouged out; more likely we happen upon them, later, either because they howl and ache or because we trip over them, startled, on one way somewhere else.

Are you aware of those who shaped and defined your own peculiar voids?  My sense is that for some these people are obvious, and for others they are a surprise.  Maybe that combination exists, actually, in each individual life: we are carved out and hollowed by both those we might imagine (a parent, a first love) and those whose power we did not understand in the moment (a friend, a quick relationship).  I often think of the interior of others as a landscape (or as of a night sky, full of sparkling) and so I love this image of there being hollows and chasms in that terrain, molded by people long gone.

And on we walk.  Empty and full, shaped and carved out, swollen with love and devastated by loss, every single day.

 

The grubby intimacy of siblings

 

Last week, we watched Tin Tin.  I mostly watched Grace and Whit.  At one point her leg was slung over the arm of his seat, and his hand rested on her foot.  Sometimes this kind of intrusion results in a loud explosion of bickering, with some shoving.  But at other times it falls unnoticed into the rich swamp of shared childhood that they are crossing together.  I thought of the intense, often grubby intimacy of siblings, the way they are each other’s morning and night, the only other person growing in this unique terroir.

I missed my sister then, who is halfway across the world in Jerusalem.  I’ve written before about the opinion, held by some, that our most formative relationships are with our sibling(s).  And I have written reams about my particular sibling, my adored sister Hilary, the adventurous one, the brilliant one, the brave one.

Watching Grace and Whit – every day, but especially inside the hothouse of a week of vacation – I think of Hilary constantly.  They are each other’s first peer relationship, the person with whom they share these essential early experiences, to whom they will announce excitement and heartbreak, against whom they will probably always measure themselves.  They witness together the messy reality of our family life, both its raised voices and its enthusiastic embraces.  I admit perhaps too readily that my desire to have a second child was secondary to my desire to have a sibling for Grace (of course, that faded the instant Whit arrived, when I immediately loved him as much as I’ve loved anyone else on earth).  But my impulse was right, of that I’m certain.  I am intensely thankful when I observe their closeness, striated as may be with arguing.

After all, I would not be who I am today without Hilary.  In the simplest terms, her influence pushed me to explore further and to try harder.  There’s no better example than that we would never have gone to Jerusalem last December if she and her family had not chosen to live there for a year.  I watch my children bounce off of each other, their sharp corners gouging into each other and  their arms providing comfort when it is needed, and I think of Hilary.  And I am overwhelmed with gratitude.