family

The tenderness of pain itself

I didn’t have the best Easter I’ve ever had.  On Saturday afternoon I began feeling sick, a nausea that intermittently escalated and ebbed.  By 7 I was in bed with a fever, trying hard not to throw up.  Sunday I woke up feeling somewhat better, though I remained vaguely carsick all day long.  This made me short with the children and with Matt in the morning, barking at them when I felt frustrated, annoyed at myself that I could not avoid this behavior.  Everything felt frayed and difficult by 8:30 in the morning.

At church, ease floated down to rest on my shoulders.  Sitting there, in a place that has held so much of my history – my sister’s marriage, both Grace and Whit’s christenings (each, actually, on Easter weekend)  – I exhaled.  I sang the songs I know by heart, their lyrics rising from some deep, hidden reservoir of memory, from the years at St. Paul’s Girls’ School.  My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the three grandparents I have lost, particularly Nana, my maternal grandmother, who always cherished Easter above all holidays.  I sank deep into the familiar cadence of the prayers before communion.  I felt gladness enter my heart, and in its wake, gratitude.

But as soon as we left the church, into the almost startling brightness of the day, into the sudden full-bloom of spring, the grace I’d felt in the pew sloughed off and my agitation rose to the surface again.  I felt nauseous, I felt tired, I felt cranky.  We had a lovely egg hunt at my parents’ house, with both my godsister and her family and my cousin and her boyfriend.  And then we had a relaxed, comfortable lunch at our house, my father and mother full of fascinating stories and observations from the trip to Jerusalem from which they just returned yesterday.

The day was nothing short of delightful, with only a couple of whiny kid moments to mar its gleam.  And I felt the person – the mother, wife, daughter – I want to be floating in the room, sometimes within reach, sometimes not.  The presence and peace that I grasp for so clumsily was just in my palm and then jerked away again, replaced by an unease of the soul that manifests as physical discomfort.

After lunch my nausea rose up in my throat again, threatening, and I climbed back into bed.  I felt demoralized, frustrated: after so many years, after so much trying, how can I still stumble, fall back into these traps, these old ways of being?  Didn’t I just write, a few days ago, that the black emotions can blow through, like a squall, and still leave me with the memory of a beautiful day?  I know what this agitation is about, I think: it is hiding, it is refusing to stare into the sun.  It is my attempt to evade the pain that is an inextricable part of truly engaging in my life.

But oh, what irony there is in this, I see now.  The pain I feel in knowing how much I’ve missed, in realizing how much these avoidance behaviors have cost me is so much keener than the pain of looking my life in the eye.  I know this as well as I know my own name.  Many days now, like last week, I can acknowledge the irritation that comes as regularly as a tide, and let it pass.  On Easter I could not: I got tangled in it.

“Healing,” Pema Chodron reminds us, “can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.” I read this last Easter, on Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous blog, and the words returned to me today.  The pain of living my life, of accepting the passage of time, of embracing my own wounded heart: these are the kinds of pain that Pema speaks of.  The awful, toxic pain of regret, however, carries no tenderness.  There is no healing in avoidance, in the way I felt for big swaths of Easter Sunday.

What is Easter if not the day of renewal, rebirth, resurrection?  Yes, I squandered a lot of it being crabby and irritable and short-tempered.  Yes, I drove myself to sobs alone in my room thinking: I will never have another Easter egg hunt when Grace is 8 and Whit is 6.  I don’t know exactly why I felt this way on Easter, a day I’ve always loved deeply.  I know that instead of attacking myself for this waste, lying in the dark, crying, as my stomach roiled as though I’m at sea in a storm, I should instead embrace what Easter means, believe in the return of my peace.  I am trying.

The big transitions and the little ones

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.

Grandmotherless

I started an essay years ago with this sentence:

I am grandmotherless.

I lost my grandmothers in 1997 and 2001.  I know: I am profoundly fortunate to have had four grandparents at my college graduation (see above, and please be kind about the swollen sunburned beer face I am sporting).   All four of my grandparents were a big part of my life for a long time (and one grandfather still is!) My grandmothers, Priscilla and Janet, were very different but they shared energy and intelligence; they were both tremendously important to me.  I’ve written about their influence on and example to me before.

Julie Daley writes compelling, gorgeous prose about the sacred feminine.  Months ago she urged us to name our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, positing that in naming our matrilineage we can restore – or at least remind ourselves of – its innate power that has been dismissed in so many ways.  And so I did: Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion.

Last week Julie shared a video that is nothing short of stunning of a poet, Mayda del Valle, speaking her words – her truth – at the White House.  I urge you to watch it.  Del Valle speaks about grandmothers, about the wisdom that exists in womens’ bodies, about reclaiming the sacred feminine and creative power that has been taken away from us.  Hers is an incredible performance, one that made me cry and stunned me into contemplative silence.

abuela how did you pray before someone told you who your god should be?
how did you hold the earth in your hands and thank her for its fecundity
did the sea wash away your sadness
how did you humble yourself before your architect
did your lower yourself to your knees
or rock to the rhythm of ocean waves like I do
grandma how did you pray ?

Del Valle evokes the cords that ripple between generations of women and the truth that beats deep in our bodies.  This truth is “…a knowledge that is on the flip side of reason, beyond logic … a place where all there is is belief. Something soaked in blood, in tears, in milk. Something that might – maybe? – be showing me the way towards faith, towards meaning, towards the things, both maddeningly abstract and all-important, that I ache for most powerfully.”

Speaking directly to her grandmother, del Valle shows us that women “have always raised our hands to the sky wanting to touch the invisible force that holds these cells together into a fragile mass.”  She reminds me of my own grandmothers, whose lives I sometimes feel throbbing in my own bloodstream, whose faces float near me from time to time, whose words recur in my head.  We are all a part of something larger than ourselves, something that of course encompasses men too but that somehow exists deeply in the fertile soil of the female body.  We are linked through the generations – through generation, in its basic sense – and to lose sight of that connection is to rupture our access to the source of humanity itself.

The moon, like a conductors’ baton, sweeps the ocean back and forth.  These tides operate in the female body too, which resonates, like the sea, with the moon.  This was true for our grandmothers’ bodies, and for their mothers’ bodies, and for as far back as we can see.  We have all been simultaneously buffetted and held by currents beyond our understanding and control.  We must remember and honor where we came from, the place of dark, tidal passion and sacred knowledge, a place that inspires both fear and wonder, a place that began in the women that came before us.  May we not forget it, or them.

I am that loved

As usual, Kelly made me cry.  She also made me smile, nod vigorously in agreement, and think furious.  Her post, mothersisterdaughterfriend: woman touched something deep inside of me.  She writes about the emotional post-birth weeks when she fell in love with her daughter – and when she fell in love with her mother.

When I saw my beloved, magnificent, miracle-baby in my mother’s arms, the fraught kaleidoscope of mother-daugther angst cleared to reveal a truth that levelled me. The way I overwhelmingly love, adore, fear, and worship my daughter, how I know that she is the best of me and more, is the way my mother loves me….I am that loved.

I am that loved.

I remember those weeks, and I know intimately that fraught kaleidoscope.  I remember vividly a day in the first couple of weeks of Grace’s life, when Mum came over to stay with her so that I could try to sleep.  I lay in my bed, my daughter asleep on the floor above me and my mother in the kitchen cooking on the floor below me.  I was flanked by my own matrilineage, and I could not sleep for the pounding in my chest.  I felt the generations collapsing and expanding at the same time, felt a visceral awareness of the women from whom I came and of the girl I’d just birthed.

I’ve always been fascinated by mothers and daughters.  I am one of two girls.  I wrote my thesis in college on the mother-daughter relationship (and wrote in my acknowledgements to my mother: “Especially thanks to you, Mum, for having the patience to allow me to study so intently this relationship.  The examined bond grows every stronger”).  The preface to my thesis, which was titled “the main thing” (for Anne Sexton’s line “a woman is her mother.  That’s the main thing”) was Margaret Atwood’s stunning poem, Spelling, about a mother watching a daughter play with words.

I fully admit that I was afraid the universe was going to respond to my unambiguous passion by giving me only boys.  But then I had Grace.  My grace.

And I am immensely blessed to be witnessing the flowering of my daughter’s relationship with my mother.  Is there any greater privilege?  I suspect not.  I won’t lie: there are absolutely issues and deep bruises and hurts in my own maternal relationship that are triggered now that I’m a mother myself.  No question.  But there are also reservoirs of love that I did not realize I had, accessed through the extraordinary experience of watching my mother and my daughter together.

My senior year in college I wrote my thesis in a tiny study carrel in Firestone Library.  The bulletin board front wall of the carrel was full of tacked-up index cards filled with quotations about mothers and daughters, creativity and procreativity, the dense and complicated morass in which I now tread.  I could never have imagined how animate all of these black-and-white words would become for me, how viscerally I would live the ideas and concepts I blithely dissected in my thesis.  Kelly’s post reminded me of this, in particular her stunning evocation of the moment we realize, staring, wild with love, at our own baby that our mothers loved us like that.  This sublime experience folds us in love and makes us look at our own mothers (if we are fortunate enough to have them near, and I know there are those who are not) with a renewed intimacy and intensity.

Anne Sexton, in a letter to her daughter Linda, writes “Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart – I’m in both.”   Reading that, my eyes fill with tears, overwhelmed at the image of my 21 year old self quoting that, understanding only half of the equation.  I knew well the daughter role, but I had no idea of the richness and ambiguity that motherhood would bring.  I know now what I did not know then: I exist in my daughter’s heart (and in my son’s), and my mother exists in mine.  Put another way, as Kelly says, I now know how I am loved.

Lightning in a jar

My children are 8 and 6.  It is life’s biggest cliche and most painful truism that just yesterday they were babies.  This week my friend Kris pointed me to Julie’s post about watching her children play in the ocean and I gasped, remembering watching my own children in the Massachusetts coast waves this past summer.  They were 5 and 7, she towered over him, he was just learning to swim.

Admittedly, I am tired, having been away from home and not sleeping very much.  I’m even more porous than usual.  But I sat at someone else’s desk in my firm’s New York office with tears rolling down my face as I read Julie’s gorgeous words.  “… I’ve caught lightning here, in these slender vessels …” Julie writes, and my heart tightens with identification.  It’s all so astonishing, so baffling and overwhelming at the same time, and I feel awash, often, in the swarming wonder that is parenting.  My own children, growing tall and lanky in front of my eyes, their childhood passing in one swift swirl of color, the brilliance of their being here flashing intermittently like a firefly in the dark.

Julie’s photographs remind me of ones I took last summer and posted here.  There is something both profoundly moving and absolutely apt about children – the definition of liminal beings – playing along the border where earth becomes water.  Threshold-dwellers dancing at an essential threshold.

I suppose I’m just extra-aware right now, after long days away, of the piercingly poignant reality of Grace and Whit’s lives.  I feel abundantly grateful for their health and in frank awe of the basic fact of them.  It’s all such a gift, this opportunity to be in the presence of nascent human beings, to witness them step through these never-to-be-revisited halls of childhood, to watch their minds and personalities form.  They are as sturdy as they are evanescent, corporeally present even as they seem to waft by me, evading capture.