family

The drum and the descant

(one of my favorite pictures, ever)

I really only listen to music when I’m driving.  And I tend to listen to the same song over and over again.  I know, normal!  On any given day a different song is preoccupying me.  Coldplay’s Fix You, U2’s Kite, and Matt Nathanson’s Come On Get Higher have all played on repeat in my car (and in my head).  A few years ago, December 2004 specifically, it was Shawn Colvin singing Love Came Down at Christmas.  I remember it vividly.  It was freezing, I had a two year old toddler, and I was pregnant with Whit.

The song is on my very favorite Christmas CD, which I listen to all year round but constantly during this month. Last Friday the familiar notes of Love Came Down at Christmas came on as Grace, Whit, and I were driving to school.

“Whit,” I said, turning around to look at him, wearing his new wool hat with robots on it.  “I listened to this song over and over and over again when you were in my tummy.”

“I remember that,” Grace chimed in authoritatively, though I’m certain she does not.  He smiled.  Both kids, for some reason, love stories of when I was pregnant with them and of when they were babies.

“You used to kick whenever it came on,” I mused, remembering the feeling of feet in my ribs, the eerie, powerful sensation of another person turning over inside of me.  The kind of feeling you couldn’t imagine until you experience it.  And one that fades; I can hardly remember that sensation any more, so unique in its joint visceral physicality and overpowering spirituality.

“Maybe I was trying to be the drums,” Whit offered casually from the backseat.

Oh, Whit.  Yes.  You are the drumbeat of my life, steady, underlying everything, a constant presence.  Your humor and stubbornness, intractability and lovingness twine together into the rhythm to which my life is set.

Grace, you are the soaring descant.  Sometimes your notes are there, lifting me to the rafters with their beauty, sometimes not, their absence as keenly felt as their presence.  A sound less steady, higher at its highs and lower at its lows.

Together you two are creating every day the music of my life.  The song that I, who is tone deaf and woefully unskilled at all things musical, hear in my head every single hour.  The tune to which I walk, stumble, and dance.

What if my sensitivity is the road home?

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston

I was thinking this weekend of the universality of sadness, of the inescapable fact that the sunshine of every life is mottled with shadow.  I think the thing that varies is our sensitivity to the shadow.  Some of us are just feel more keenly the loss that is always part of the deal.  Some of us are more prone to shadow than sun.  Some of us have a narrow but deep moat of loneliness around our hearts which is uncrossable by anyone else.

I love Pam Houston’s confident assertion that this awareness of loss lends itself to strength, compassion, and grace.  I spend a lot of time worrying about what I have bequeathed to my children, through example and heredity.  Pam Houston’s words offer a stunning change of perspective and I can imagine – momentarily – that this inheritance is a gift and not a burden.  What if, as Adrienne Rich said, “her wounds came from the same source as her power”?  What if what seems like great weakness is the source of great strength?

I fret about the message I’m sending my children by not hiding from them my occasional sweeping sorrow.  Sure, there are days I act happy when I feel blue.  And of course there are genuinely joyful days, many, many of them.  But there are also days where my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears and when they ask why I explain, quietly, that the world is making me sad.  I just re-read my words about a particularly sad weekend Grace had last winter and cried, again, struck by the fact that already, at seven, she has the self-awareness to say “I’m just sad, Mum.”  Actually it’s more than the awareness that strikes me: she has the propensity to be just sad in the first place, and this is clearly part of the legacy I leave her.  I often feel soggy with guilt about it.

Grace and Whit both witness and inherit my melancholy leanings, though so far Grace exhibits them much more frequently.  I have decided, personally, that to teach them to honor and accept all of their feelings, even the difficult ones, is more important than to put on a happy face all the time.  Of course, I am not sure I’d actually be able to fake it, so it might be convenient to call this a “decision.”  But I do believe that helping my children to recognize their strong emotions, even sadness and anger, is an important thing for me to do.  I also think there is great power in learning that one can be thoroughly tossed around in emotional whitewater and still come out the other side, spluttering, maybe, with sand in your pants, but still, standing.

In fact the words I wrote in July (in my musing on whitewater) seem to echo Pam Houston’s gorgeous lines (though less elegantly):

I know the terms I want to live my life by start with compassion and empathy and kindness, and that they include a deep need to honor the reality, savage and beautiful as it is, of my life.

It makes me sigh with comfort to weave together my own definition of what matters most and Pam Houston’s belief that awareness of loss can contribute to a fully-lived life.  It only comes in passing, this profoundly reassuring sense that my sensitivity, which marks how I approach everything, could be, in fact, my road home.  But in those moments I feel grateful and calm: maybe Grace and Whit can take what they learn from me and use it to be strong, and compassionate, and full of grace.

I do want my children to learn that the best lives are full of love, and that loss is part of the deal – I believe both of those things as firmly as I believe anything.  If I can do anything to help Grace and Whit believe this, through my example, my genetic material, or my direct teaching, then I will have done some good in the world.  Of that I am sure.

Family running through my veins

I went to my great-aunt’s memorial service yesterday. Eleanor, know as Aunt E to all of us, died in July. She was the younger sister of my grandfather, Pops (Great-Pops to my kids). I sat in a pew with my mother, my cousin (13 years younger), and behind my father, his twin, and Pops. Across the aisle were other, more distant cousins, all familiar to me by sight if not by name. Listening to soaring hymns and the buzzing of large fans (no a/c … steamy) I found myself lost in thought about my family.

Pops, in his eulogy, recounted some tales of growing up with E. There were stories of a steam ship crossing of the Pacific and of World War 2 missiles flying overhead at a country home outside Beijing. My grandfather and his four siblings grew up in China as the children of missionaries. I am the descendant of real adventurers, something that I sometimes forget.

I thought about my father’s family, for whom Whit is named. This family of engineers, of intense, intelligent people with (sometimes impossibly) high, demanding standards. Thought about their distaste for show and their strong privileging of content over surface. Their absolute belief in the life of the mind, their lack of interest in superficiality. Remembered piles of books (growing up, Dad had a “no textbooks at the dinner table” rule) and beloved boats (after he and my grandmother raised four boys, sailors one and all, Pops built a wooden sailboat by hand and delighted in sailing her in Long Island Sound).

I sat next to my cousin, who I don’t see often but who I always greet with genuine excitement and an immediate sense of closeness. I felt my family running through my veins, felt proud of my great-aunt whose ministry towards those who lived on the margins was lauded over and over again, felt a fierce desire to honor where I came from.

I thought about the ways that family, encoded in both our DNA and in the expectations and norms of familial culture, is passed down, hand-over-hand, through generations. Of the way that my cousin, seated beside me, looked so much like me as a baby that sometimes we get confused looking at baby pictures. Of the way that I see my father’s engineer’s mind in how Whit approaches the world, with a determinedly 3D lens.

Genetics and traditions ripple outward as the generations unfold, but simultaneously there is an undeniable circling back to the source. As time moves forward it also reverberates back. The march of years is regular, like a drumbeat, but it is accompanied by an occasional swooping echo of the past into the future, unexpected and unpredictable (like Whit’s blue eyes). Where we come from is such a part of who we are, and sometimes I lose sight of that. I have deep roots and am grateful for days like yesterday that remind me of their steadiness and of their richness.

Genetics

This boy.

This boy has two brown-eyed parents and four brown-eyed grandparents.

And those blue eyes.

(also, a continuing passion for mardi gras beads)

I can’t tell you how many people say, jokingly, “Hmmm … the mailman?” Each time, I ask, with varying degrees of patience, if the commenter remembers the basics of dominant and recessive genes.

This reminds me of my friend who has boy/girl twins. She told me she gets asked, at least once a week, if they are identical. To which she responds, well, there’s that pesky matter of gender …

I guess most people were just not paying attention when their junior high science teacher covered Mendel’s peas. To me, this was one of the most fascinating parts of school. But then again, I’ve always been a science nerd.

I’ve always loved the blue of my blog header. Cornflower blue, hydrangea blue, sky blue. Maybe all along I have subconsciously been seeking the color of Whit’s eyes.