family

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.

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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

Winter break

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I want to remember winter break this year, because it was utterly ordinary and not at all perfect.  Already, as I write this in early January, the not-perfectness, the yelling and the imperfection, is fading into the slurry of memory and I’m recalling the shimmer of quiet days together.  It was the last time that my children will ever celebrate Christmas at 14 and 11, and every moment these days is limned with its own numbered-ness.  I know we won’t come back here. I want to remember it.

The week before Christmas was sort of frantic, with Matt and I working and the kids seeing friends before they left town.  Whit had a wonderful visit with one of his besties from camp who was visiting Boston. We celebrated with dear friends and finally, on the 24th, baked Christmas cookies.  On the 24th, we went to our local church for the annual pageant and service that I love so dearly.  I thought of the two Christmas Eves that Whit spent in the Children’s Hospital ER before he was 5 and felt grateful that he was sitting next to me in the pew. Then we had Christmas Eve dinner with my parents and our oldest, dearest family friends.  I sat next to my very first friend (we met when he was 6 weeks old and I was 2 weeks old) and watched my son (his godson) as we sang carols and felt full – of love, of all that’s over and almost-over, of what’s coming, of life itself.

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Then, on the 25th, the world screeched to a halt for a few days of quiet, which was entirely welcome. We had several days of marvelous visits with my sister, her husband, and her two children.  We had dinner with my father’s brother and his family (his oldest daughter, my first cousin, lives in Boston and is near and dear to all four of us) and celebrated my sister’s birthday.  My parents took Hilary and me and our families away for a night and we enjoyed being together.  There was rain and blue sky, milkshakes and birthday candles, swimming in a tiny pool and board games on the floor of a hotel gym.

On New Year’s Eve, friends from the neighborhood came over for an impromptu drink before dinner.  It was lovely.  Then we had New Year’s Eve dinner as a foursome, under stars on which each of us wrote some intentions for the new year. We played board games and had dessert and then moved upstairs to the family room.  Matt fell asleep and I joined him about 10:30.  Grace and Whit watched the ball drop.  I don’t know how long they will want to mark New Year’s Eve this way, but I’m going to enjoy every single second of it while they do.

On January 2nd, Matt and I went for a run together!  We ran and walked, and mostly walked, but we were out there, and together.  I can’t believe how far he’s come from the fall, when he was immobile and recovering.  I’m thrilled for him, and proud. It felt like an auspicious way to start the new year.  I’m hoping it’s a great year for us all, and for you, as well.

Favorite words

We have been doing a lot of vocabulary studying lately around here.  SSATs and ISEEs will do that to you.  There’s a lot about standardized tests I do not love, but any discussion of vocabulary and words I flat-out do.

Last weekend, we had a couple of hours in the car as a foursome.  We were talking about words, and it led into a discussion of our favorite words.  First of all, let me say that talking about words with my three favorite people in the world was fantastic.  I actually think this is a great conversation starter (but maybe that only reveals my deeply nerdy personality).  I was interested to hear Grace, Whit, and Matt’s favorite words, and also to think about mine.  It’s impossible for me to pick one.  But, here they are:

Grace: onomatopoeia (long discussion ensued of buzz, and fizz, and of how one of my words is in fact also an onomatopoeia)

Whit: terminate

Matt: penultimate

Lindsey: shimmer, elegy, archipelago, phosphorescence

What is your favorite word? Why?