family

Seventeen years

September 9, 2000
Not the greatest photo of us, but I still love it because it’s pretty clear we’re having a good time

Seventeen years ago September 9th, in a thunderstorm, Matt and I got married.  We didn’t know what lay ahead, and I think it’s safe to say the years between then and now have been both exactly as we planned and nothing like we expected.

What is on my mind lately is how full circle we’ve come from that day.  It was the two of us then, and these days I can see clear to when it will be the two of us again.  That truth is filled with loss and sorrow, but also with pride and celebration.  From the moment I became a mother I knew my job was to let her (and then, 2.25 years later, also him) go.  That’s been crystal clear to me from day one.  That I didn’t know how hard it would feel is a topic for another post.

In his sermon at our wedding, the minister who married us spoke about Kilimanjaro, which we had recently climbed.  I’ll never forget how he closed his remarks, speaking of marriage: “Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to this.”  And he was right, and I’ve been learning that lesson every year that we have been married.  As I’ve written before, the views are as spectacular, too.  The climb of married life, like that of Kilimanjaro, has been unexpected, sometimes surprising, and once in a while I have had a hard time drawing a deep breath.  But like Kilimanjaro, the journey of marriage is head-spinningly glorious and unforgettable.  I have never wanted to turn back.  Matt was there with me as we neared the summit of Kilimanjaro in the darkness, and he witnessed my determination that day.  I feel the same way now: keep moving forward. It’s worth it.

During a few days in August when neither child was home, Matt and I looked at each other and saw both the young people we were in the photo above and who we’ll be in a few years when we’re alone again.  It was disorienting, I’ll be honest.  But I just have to remember that he’s my wingman and has been for many years: on the mountain, on the dance floor, in the delivery room, and in the years ahead.

They are not long, the days of young children at home.  They fly, in a blur of crayons and crying and then, later, hockey games and baseball games and track meets and Snapchat.  I think the key, when choosing a spouse, is taking a gamble that the person you stand next to in a white dress (or another outfit, depending on your preference) is one you’ll want to be standing next to many years later.  In many cases, that’s after the intensity of the family-focused years has ebbed.

2017 has held great new beginnings for all of us and a huge amount of tumult.  A lot of change.  I described the last month or two as “whitewater” to someone recently, and that’s what it has felt like. May there be both smoother sailing and gentler voices in this next year.

Happy 17 years, Matt.  This message, like life lately, is a little disjointed, but it comes from a place of deep feeling and tremendous commitment.  I love you.

Tradition and adaptation, metaphor and flying

I have written a lot about traditions, and how they can form the scaffolding of family life. That’s certainly true for us.  For many years our family’s calendar has been dotted with traditions big and small.  As the kids have grown, some of these have fallen by the wayside and others have shifted but remained present.

There’s both tension and the possibility of power, I’ve come to believe, in how we adapt our traditions to fit our changing lives.  Many years ago, I took Grace and Whit to Storyland for a night at the end of the school year.  It was a wonderful trip – so great that we went back the next month.  For several years we did that, and then one year we did something else (a treetop course at Cranmore) and this year we went ziplining.

We got to Gunstock on Saturday morning and signed lots of waivers.  Matt took a pass on ziplining because of his leg, so Grace, Whit and I went up the chairlift together.  As we rode to the top of the mountain, we watched some people pass on the zipline to our left.  I could not believe how high they were or how fast they were going.  I took a deep breath and caught Grace’s eye.  What were we in for?

We ziplined a short distance from the chairlift to the top of the longest, highest zipline of the course.  The kids went together, ahead of me, and I followed them. As we wound up a rickety spiral staircase to the platform I felt dizzy ad paused.

“Are you okay, Mum?” Whit asked me from above.  I nodded, but waited a moment to regain my bearings.

“I’m a little nervous, too,” he whispered to me when I reached the top. I felt the world swirl below us, and standing with my feet further apart than normal, to feel balanced, I reached for my phone to take a photo.

They got ready to go.  The lines soared away from the platform, and with a thumbs up over their shoulders, they did too.  I stood and watched them go, leaping into the great wide open, flying away from me.  The metaphor hit me over the head and I stood alone on the platform, slightly stunned and grateful at the same time.

In a few moments it was my turn.  Channeling their openness, I stood while the attendant hooked me to the zipline, and then I jumped.  And I flew.

When I arrived at the next platform, I saw Grace and Whit standing there, waiting for me, grinning.  I had tears in my eyes as I landed and joined them.  I thought back to another day, years ago, when the three of us flew.

We went to the hotel we have stayed at for so many years, had dinner at our beloved Red Parka Pub, played at the water park, and fell asleep in a small room.  There are few things I love more than the four of us sleeping in one room.

Everyone fell asleep before me, and I lay in the dark room, thinking back to the early Storyland years. They were animate in the room, I felt, and the 5 and 7 year old versions of Whit and Grace floated in my memory.  I miss those years, desperately, but I’m so glad we’ve found a way to keep celebrating who the children are – who the four of us are – right now, and to keep our family rituals alive.

As we drove home on Sunday, Grace noted that she loved our annual celebration trip, and I swallowed hard to hide the tears from my voice when I agreed with her.  Oh, me too.  It is only by releasing our grip on what was that we can fully embrace what is.  The truth of that hit me hard this weekend.  I miss the days that were, but my God, that sorrow isn’t going to get in the way of my grabbing the days that are.

This is ritual at its most powerful, I believe: a way of honoring what was and of celebrating what is.  A reminder of the sturdy underpinning of family life. A confirmation that something bigger than each of us holds us, and a plain say of love. This is who we are, Grace and Whit: a family that honors June each year, and one that trusts that when you jump off a platform into the sky, you’ll fly.

Commencement

Tomorrow, both children graduate – Whit from sixth grade and Grace from eighth.  At the school they’ve both been at since they were four, sixth grade and eighth grade are inflection points (the other is twelfth grade), so they each have graduation ceremonies.  As you can probably imagine, I’m perpetually in tears these days and expecting an emotional day tomorrow.  I did my last pickup at the gym. I packed the last lunch of my career as a mother. Etc.  Etc.  Etc.  The lasts are coming thick and fast right now, and I’ll be honest, I’m trying to catch my breath and keep my balance.

This time of year always feels this way to me, limned with endings and loss despite its perch at the moment that my favorite season, summer, bursts into reality.  I have written a lot about how this season of ends and beginnings feels for me.  This year the complicated emotions are stronger than ever, with both children moving on (and in particular with Grace leaving for boarding school).

There’s something about the word, commencement, that captures all the conflicting emotions that are bound up in this moment. This moment every year, but perhaps, most of all, this moment in my life right now.  Grace and Whit are, as I’ve written before, taking flight.  I’m so proud I ache, but I’m also keenly aware of something big coming to an end.

So much radiance.  So much sorrow.  Inextricably wound together, twisted through every hour. Tomorrow, we commence.  Onto the next thing, into the onrush of time, keenly aware of all that’s glorious and all that’s lost, always, at the same time.

***

Years ago I described the fleeting nature of time as the black hole around which my whole life circles, the wound that is at the center of all my writing, all my feeling, all my living.  Certainly that seems to be borne out by what it is I write, over and over again.  At the very midpoint of the year, the sunniest, longest days, I find myself battling an encroaching sorrow, an irrefutable sense of farewell.  The proof is in my archives.

The world bursts into riotous bloom, almost as though it is showing off its fecundity.  The days are swollen and beautiful, the air soft, the flowering trees spectacular.  The children gleefully wear shorts to school, the sidewalks are dusted with pollen and petals, and we round the curve of another year.  We start counting down school days, we say goodbye to beloved babysitters who are graduating from college, and I find myself blinking back tears.

Every year, I’m pulled into the whitewater between beginnings and endings that defines this season.  I can barely breathe.

It’s all captured in the event that so many of us attend, year after year, at this time: commencement.  It was my own commencements that marked this season, for years: from grade school, high school, college, graduate school.  And then there was a time when, though I wasn’t personally attending commencements, I felt their presence, sensed the ebb and flow of the school year.  It seems that my spirit and the very blood in my veins will always throb to the cadence of the school year.  And now it is my children who commence, who close a year and begin another, wearing too-long hair and legs, vaguely tentative smiles, and white.

Commencement.  Isn’t this word simply a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  You end and you begin, on the very same day.  You let go of something and while that I-am-falling feeling never goes away, you trust that you’ll land.  And you do, on the doorstep of another beginning, a new phase, the next thing.

No matter how many times I’m caught from the freefall of farewell by a new beginning, though, I still feel the loss.  As much as my head understands that endings are required for them to be beginnings, my heart mourns what is ending.  That a seam of sorrow runs through my every experience is undeniable; it may sound depressing, but I genuinely don’t experience it that way.  It is just part of how I’m wired, and it’s never closer to the surface than right now, as this school year winds down, as we celebrate the beginning that’s wrapped in the end, as we commence.

These words (since the break), were first published in 2013

Happy birthday

Dear Matt,

Last year was nobody’s favorite year.  Not yours, not mine, not Grace’s, and not Whit’s.  A host of things were challenging, but none more than your injury.  At the end of August, you tore two of your hamstring tendons and wound up in surgery.  It was a stressful and scary week while we figured out what to do, but finally we connected with an excellent doctor and the path forward felt clear.  You spent almost two months this fall sleeping in our living room, recovering slowly from an injury that was described to me by your doctor as the “worst in sports medicine.”  As I’ve told you, when he came out to talk to me after your surgery was complete, he said, ruefully, I’m not going to lie to you, you wish it was his Achilles or his ACL.  It wasn’t.

And yet.  Your character shone in those months. It feels strange to say this but in a way I’m nostalgic for the fall.  It was an intense time – both kids preparing for standardized tests and applying to new schools, my busy season at work, you flat on your back in the living room.  But somehow life was distilled, too, down to what mattered.  I’ll never forget the Labor Day visit from two of my oldest and dearest friends, and the warmth I felt as we all sat around the living room and laughed, eating cheese. It was an evening I will always remember as incredibly special. You were one of the first boyfriends and then husbands to enter the scene of my college friends, who remain largely the most important people in my life. Your relationships to and with them is a source of true joy for me, and I remembered it over and over again this past fall.

Your attitude was excellent.  You steadfastly refused to let me have Comcast install a television in the living room, a decision that surprised me as much as it impressed me.  You read books.  You were positive, resolute, and focused on your physical therapy and gradual improvement.  We would go for slow walks up our (short) street, which took 20 minutes round trip. You were loving and proactive with helping me as much as you could.  I know I wasn’t always a picnic to be around, and I’m sorry about that. Beyond your injury there were actually a lot of other things that contributed stress to our lives.  I’ll just say that in the last part of 2016, a lot went wrong.  But something essential went right, too: I learned a lot about who you are this fall, and I won’t forget it.

We are heading into a new season of our lives now, as Grace heads out of the house, and you know I’m anxious and emotional about it. Still, this past fall taught me there’s nothing we cannot endure together. I look forward to many years ahead, on crutches or on foot (hopefully the latter), and thank you for being the best, most patient partner I can imagine on life’s surprising, beautiful, startling roads.

Happy birthday, Matt.

I love you,

Lindsey

I have written to Matt on his birthday for many years now (and it’s one of the only times of the year I write about him!)

2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

Matrescence 2.0

December 2002

I loved reading The Birth of a Mother in the New York Times, and not just because that photograph reminded me of one of my favorite photos of Grace when she was a baby (see above, December 2002).  I read the article, which asserts that matrescence (the process of becoming a mother – a word that I had never known and which struck me because it acknowledges that that is, indeed, a process) is important and under-examined.  I share this view.

What I’m living right now is not so much my own first matrescence – that took place a long time ago, and being a mother is firmly at the center of who I am.  It’s more the transition of my motherhood into a new phase, but it feels as material and as jarring in its own way.  I’m struck by how I read about maternal ambivalence and postpartum depression (which was very much a part of my own matrescence) and those feel long, long ago.  I’m entirely, absolutely, head-over-heels in love with my own children now, and don’t feel much – any – apprehension about those being the central relationships of my life (along with their father). Those early, complicated days, which I can recall vividly, but with effort, have faded into the background entirely.

The future, however, is full of uncertainty.  This moment may be defined by my own full-fledged embrace of motherhood, but I can’t escape the shadow of what’s coming. My reality is taking on a new shape. Grace is going to boarding school and our family life is about to change in a major way.  There is no question this is the end of something.  I realize this is the most first world of first world problems (and when I read books like The Bright Hour, I’m reminded to Get A Grip).

As soon as I got my feet under me as a mother, it feels like, this season is about to end. I know, I know, this is just another reminder that life’s only constant is change.  My children, at 12 and 14, are such entertaining people.  I love them, but I also truly like them. They’re my favorite human beings to be around, and they easily make me laugh, think, and, sometimes, yell and also cry.

Life’s ordinary rhythms have taken on an almost unbearable beauty.  The routine of morning wakeups, breakfast, and driving to school (3/4 of a mile so it doesn’t take long!) makes me cry every single day and I have to actively try not to count how few mornings like this we have left.  I am trying to be here now, I really am, but wow, it’s hard.

I realize that it is impossible that this transition is as much of an earthquake as Grace’s arrival, but it feels almost commensurately big. I think of Jon Kabat-Zinn, of his line that “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf,” I take a deep breath, I try not to look into Grace’s room where the folded piles of laundry I put there remind me that she still lives here, for at least a little bit more.  I try to appreciate the gorgeousness around me. No matter what happens, I will always be their mother. She isn’t going that far. I believe in the depths and fibers of my soul that this is the right next step for her.  I always said I wanted to raise a brave and a smart daughter, and here I am, watching her take flight. She is brave and smart. Everything is as it should be. I just didn’t know how much it would hurt.

April 2017