family

Trapeze

Matt was away this weekend, and Grace and Whit and I faced the luxury of an almost entirely empty Sunday.  I knew I wanted to do something adventurous, and a few days ago I signed the three of us up for trapeze school.

Trapeze school.  One of my friends texted and asked if we were skiing on Sunday and I answered that no, we were going to trapeze school.  She responded that wow, she didn’t realize we were a circus family. Okay, fine, it was random.

We showed up on Sunday morning at 10am.  Well, we got there 25 minutes early because of my chronic earliness problem.  But the class started at 10.  With very little preamble, we were strapped into safety harnesses and climbed a seemingly endless set of rickety metal stairs.  We faced a carpeted platform, a smiling helper, and a trapeze.  Grace went first.  I couldn’t believe her courage as she stood on the edge of the platform, grabbed the trapeze, and jumped.  My eyes filled with tears and my hands gripped Whit’s tiny shoulders as we stood and watched her flying through the air.

I was pretty sure Whit would refuse to go.  This child, remember, won’t even go on the spinning teacups, let alone even the slowest of roller coasters.  I was shocked, then, when he gamely stood at the platform edge.  The woman standing there had to hold him off the ground so that he could reach the trapeze.  And then he, too, flew.

The thing I was most afraid of was stepping off the platform.  You hold onto the trapeze, lean way forward into empty space against the weight of the helper who is holding your waist belt.  The ground yawns far, far below.  And then you just have to jump into thin air with only the trapeze bar and your faith to keep you off the ground.  The thing the children were most afraid of was the coming down, which involves letting go of the bar and trusting the belt and safety ropes to help you float down to the net, rather than plummet.

We went over and over again, culminating in being caught by another person on another trapeze.  It was flat-out amazing.  My hands are bleeding and callused and my children are exhausted and smiling.  At one point, after Whit had finally figured out the knee hang and let go, he smiled up at me and said, “Are you proud of me, Mummy?”

Oh, yes, my little man.  I was and I am.  Later Grace told me that she realized how good it felt to do something even when it seemed scary.  I expected an adventure, but I did not realize that once again my children would astound me and that they – and I – would learn yet another lesson about what it is to live this life.

Courage, bravery, trust, and letting go.  Being sure that something will catch you.  Stepping off into thin air with faith that you will fly.

I left a piece of myself there

Last week I read Amy at Never True Tales’ words on The Witching Years.  She writes about the years that her children were young, with a combination of regret, loss, gratitude and wonder that I recognize intimately.

It’s clearer here, on the other side. In the light. With kids who brush their own teeth and do their own homework and get their own snacks. I know now that being a mom of young children, staying in the house day after day, parenting solo 80% of the time…well, it is what it is. (Oh, is it ever.) I know that I did my best.

I also know I’ll never get those years back, as much as they often make me shudder: those years that passed so slowly as to nearly grind backward. Those years so long I measured my children’s ages in months instead. And that’s a travesty, because I left a piece of myself there. Something raw, and unmeasured, and instinctively maternal. Something sacrificial.

Those years were also, for me, a time that felt removed from the rest of my life.  It’s absolutely true that it’s clearer here, and also that this feels a bit like the “other side.”  In retrospect those dark years were a kind of slow, dark traverse, like the hours-long slog to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro where all I can remember is step, breathe, pause.  Step, breathe, pause.  In a white-out ice storm.  For eight hours.  All the while wanting it to be over, and then the minute I’m through it I want to go back.

Hurry up, slow down, faster, slower, the interplay of impatience and of regret.  This is the music to which my life is danced.  When my children were little I used to talk wistfully – everyone used to talk – about “getting my life back.”  And yes, I have my life back now.  But it’s not the same life.  And furthermore, I feel nothing short of anguish that I wished over some of the most tender, raw, and special days of my life.  I will never revisit that unique interval of time when your regular life – that life I wanted back so fiercely – recedes.  I will never have that wild magic back.

And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.  What I can’t stop thinking about is the notion of I left a piece of myself there. Oh, yes.  My first few months of motherhood were a crucible, so hot that I emerged made up of a totally different alloy.  In those dark weeks it rained and snowed constantly, we waited for Matt’s father to come through surgery, I woke up every morning from deep, soggy sleep and swallowed a white pill, believing desperately that it would help me?  Beyond those initial weeks, the first few years were also their own country.  Set to the drumbeat cadence of the needs of a toddler and an infant, the demarcations between day and night eroded, the very earth beneath my feet tilting perilously.   My sense of self adjusted slowly, creakingly, to this new forever-after reality?

What did I leave there?

I left my body swollen with childbirth, with milk, with life.  I left eyes so tired that they felt like they had sand in them; I’d press my fingers to my eyelids and see stars exploding faintly in the blackness.  I left behind the powdery smell of newborns, a bottle drying rack by the sink, mint green coils of diaper genie wrapped diapers, sterling silver rattles dented from being thrown on hardwood floors, and all sizes of white onesies. I left behind the explosive and extraordinary experience of natural childbirth, though it reverberates to this day through my sense of self.

I left my naive but absolute belief that motherhood was my birthright.  That shattered like a lightbulb exploding and left behind questions and doubts as numerous as those shards of glass.  One of the tasks of the last few years has been to see the beauty in the doubts, the tremendous richness in the questions.

Most of all I left behind my certainty.  My certainty that I knew what I was doing, that my path was assured, that I was safe.  That was lost forever in those weeks where my sense of solid ground shifted; the tremors of those days reverberate still.  Nothing feels safe, but the uncertainty holds a dangerous, fearful promise that I never anticipated.  The impact of those years is carved onto my soul as indelibly as a scar would be on my skin; the difference is it is invisible to others.

I grieve those old, surer, more confident versions of myself, though in retrospect I can see in each of them the buried seam of doubt, rising occasionally to the surface, disturbing the apparently smooth, clear surface like a pebble dropped into a lake.  That’s what I left there, most of all, in the autumn of 2002: who I was sure I was, what I was certain the world was, and the future I saw unfurling in front of me so vividly and assuredly.

Nothing has ever been sure again.  And what an immense, outrageous, terrifying blessing that has been.

Thanks to Denise for the link that sent me to Amy’s beautiful essay.

Race to Nowhere


It’s no secret that I have deep concern about parenting in today’s culture.  I’ve talked about my resistance to over-scheduling my children, my worries about how to preserve wonder in their lives, and my concerns about the overall intensity that seems to be taking over childhood.  I wrote a post on Zen Family Habits about my commitment to and concerns about limiting after-school programming with the kids, I read and loved Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids, and basically this is a drum I’ve beat over and over.  I’m desperate to raise trusting, hopeful children who are able to entertain themselves in a world that seems to squash that out of them no matter what I do.

I experience a constellation of themes and of worries that coalesce into a general unease about the world I’m bringing my children up in.  That said, I’m not entirely sure I understand exactly what the basic issue is, or how to unravel the various things that bother me.  My worries, while very troublesome, remain somewhat inchoate.

It was with great enthusiasm that I read about the new film Race to Nowhere, which strives to understand the root causes of what feels like an epidemic of stress.  Through the lens of particular stories, this film purports to bring to light the undercurrent of stress in parenting school-age children today.  I can’t wait to see it.  From the film’s marketing materials:

Race to Nowhere is a documentary film examining the pressures faced by young people, teachers and parents in our high-stakes, high-pressure public and private education system and culture.  Featuring the heartbreaking stories of young people across the country who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried that students aren’t developing the skills they need, and parents trying to do what’s best for their kids.  Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, experts, and policy makers to examine current assumptions on how best to prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens of today and for the future.

If you live in the Boston area, please join me and others at a screening of Race to Nowhere next week.  The film is playing at 5:30 on January 26th at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, and I’d love, love, love to see you there.  I many not entirely understand the root of the issue, but I’m crystal clear that it will require collaboration, trust, and community to begin to solve it.

Click HERE for more information on the showing on January 26th, and to purchase tickets.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Six Years Old

Dear Whit,

Today you are six.  It is so appallingly cliched of me, but let me just say that I cannot believe it.  Six years ago you arrived, your birth in the middle of the night the complete opposite of, and antidote to, your sister’s long, arduous labor.  You were not, in fact, as they’d scared me with late-stage ultrasounds and fear-mongering about my not having gained enough weight, a dwarf (I had been told at 38 weeks there was a 25% chance you had dwarfism).  No, you were 6 days early and weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces.  Two things about you immediately shocked me: your white-blond hair and the fact of your boyness.  We hadn’t found out the gender in either pregnancy, but I realized when you arrived that I had assumed you were a girl.  You were going to be Phoebe, and, I imagined, a colicky baby with a shock of black hair like your sister.

Nope.

Your personality was as different from Grace’s as was your hair color.  My father has always maintained that children are about 95% nature, and I didn’t believe that until I had a second child.  You were a calm, mellow baby, easy to be around, quick to sleep, delighted to cuddle all day long.  You healed many of the wounds I hadn’t even known I was carrying from your sister’s infancy.

From the very beginning, we all adored you.  This photograph of the first time Grace met you reminds me of William Blake’s famous line that “we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.”  You’ve been loved, fiercely, every single minute of your life.   Your father wept when you were born, taken aback by the intensity of his reaction, never having acknowledged to himself how much he wanted to have a son.  Your sister was passionately attached from the first minute; one of my early memories is of her coming in the front door, being handed her favorite doll to play with, and wailing, “But I want to play with the REAL BABY!”  And me, well, I fell in love with you from the first moment I saw you.  With you I enjoyed, for the first and only time in my life, that blissful bonding with a newborn.  Thank you for giving me that experience, for showing me that it wasn’t out of my reach, that I could, in fact, be overwhelmed by the instinct to mother.  Maybe I could do this after all.

These days you are less placid, less quiet, but no less amenable.  You’re game for any adventure.  You are physically bold, something I was reminded of this past weekend when we skiied.  Helmet covering your two-sets-of-stitches scar, you pointed downhill and simply took off.  You are fast and limber and flexible.  You are absolutely fearless.  You love to run and climb and kick and roll and shout and dig; you are, to use another cliched expression, “all boy.”  Sometimes I joke that you need to be run every day, like a dog.  And you do.

You’ve been growing into the sense of humor that we glimpsed early on.  You are just plain funny.  You remember things and bring them up months later, weaving them into a joke or a question, often startling me with your recall and with how closely you are paying attention.  You make puns and are often laugh-out-loud clever.  One thing I worry about, Whit, is making sure that you know there are many things about you other than your sense of humor that are wonderful.  People love and esteem you for far more than just being funny.  I promise.  Please don’t hide behind being the clown – don’t ever stop making me laugh, my beloved, but at the same time please know I adore all the other facets of your personality too (well, most of them).

Whit, you can be remarkably sensitive, and your keen memory for detail serves you well here.  You have demonstrated an awareness of what’s going on in a room, with other people, that’s often taken me aback.  You have wept for missing friends, places, and stages of your life, your tangible heartbreak seeming to emanate from a much older and more mature person.

You are loyal and loving towards your sister, even though you aggravate her, break her Lego contraptions, and draw on her pieces of paper almost daily.  One of my favorite things the two of you do is speak to each other through the heating vent that goes through the walls; each of your rooms has a grate that opens into the vent.  When you’re in your rooms alone, you often whisper to each other, and it makes my heart swell, the way you just want to make sure the other is there.  You always wake up before Grace does and your very, very favorite thing to do is to wake her up by crawling into her bed and snuggling next to her, whispering “I love you, Grace” into her tousled dark hair.

It takes a while to earn your trust, but once that is done it is tenacious and sturdy.  Your favorite person in the entire world is  Christina, who was your teacher last year.  You knew one of your two Kindergarten teachers, Miss Greene, before this year because you knew she was a friend of Christina’s.  The other teacher was new to you.  In November, this other teacher pulled you aside and asked you why you had trouble listening to her; apparently you were much more open to input and direction from Miss Greene.  You looked right at your teacher and said, “I don’t know you yet.  I need to know you before I can listen.”  While I think you need to learn that teachers and other authority figures should be treated with respect, I appreciate very much that you don’t automatically assume that those in “power” are right, and I also value the way your esteem for someone is built over time.

Whitman, I adore you with all of my heart.  You are a comedian with a deep sensitive streak running through you, and that combination both endears and entertains me.  I look forward to many more years of adventures together, and hope you will never lose your unique outlook on the world, informed by both wonder and practicality, equal parts convention and ostentatious individuality.

Happy sixth birthday, my only son, my favorite boy in the whole wide world.  I love you.

What a wonderful world

Last week Whit was home with strep for a couple of days.  At one point he and I were at the grocery store and he was sitting quietly in the cart in line, his pajama-ed legs sticking through the holes in the cart, his scar still fresh on his forehead.  I smiled at the cashier as she began to ring me up.  Suddenly we both heard Whit singing softly to himself, “I see skies of blue … clouds of white … and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

The cashier caught my eye and I saw that hers were shiny with tears.  I leaned down and kissed Whit’s blond head and whispered to him, “I love you.”  In the car I asked him why he was singing that, and he told me that kindergarten was singing it in the school’s Martin Luther King assembly on Friday.

And it is, in fact, of course, a wonderful world.  I hear that the parents of the 9 year old who was tragically killed in Tucson donated her organs, and my heart swells with gladness (organ donation?  an important cause to me).  But then I read Jo’s post and am struck by how much work we still have to do.

Last year I posted these excerpts from MLK’s famous speech, which I make a practice of reading in full on this day every year.  I recommend you do too: his words remain immensely powerful to this day.

…I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….

…one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers….

…This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963