Cousins, fireworks, sailing, candy, Nana’s birthday, and red, white, and blue. This is one of my favorite holidays of the year.
Grace, 2005
Whit, 2005
Grace, 2006
Whit, 2006
Grace, 2007
Whit, 2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2014
2015
We missed 2013 because of other-family obligations. I hope never to again!
Twice a year, I write about this man. Who is otherwise generally spared. I have to protect some things, after all! But today is his birthday, and on this and our anniversary, (9/9) I turn my lens onto him.
This is the 19th of your birthdays we’ve celebrated together, Matt.
The first one, I was heading to my sister’s college graduation, and you drove me somewhere (I can’t recall where) and told me you loved me for the first time as I left. I’ll never forget the butterflies and elation that filled me when I heard you say that.
The third, my sister-in-law and I surprised you and your twin with a party to celebrate 30. You had pulled an all-nighter at work and were pretty exhausted. I think you were happy, though. We were months away from getting married.
The fifth, we had a small gathering at our then-new house. My pregnancy belly popped, I swear, that morning. The change was sufficiently marked that one of my friends walked in the door and noted that the baby had decided to show up on his or her father’s birthday.
The eighth, we had another party with your twin and his family, this time at their home. We had a baby at home, and a 2 year old, and I remember you thinking the college-aged bartender was very cute. We have some rowdy photographs from that night.
The tenth, we celebrated with a dinner in the backyard of our house, and a small round cake with a single table candle in the middle. A pigtailed Grace helped you blow that candle out.
The eleventh, we spent in Bermuda with your twin and his wife. You two bought black knee socks and Bermuda shorts and wore them to one of the most delicious meals I have ever had.
The thirteenth, I surprised you again with a small dinner at one of our favorite restaurants with some of our most beloved friends. It was a night I’ll never forget. We drank a lot of Matt & Stormy’s. There were toasts. I wore orange. You were happy.
The fifteenth, we spent with our dear family friends in New Hampshire, on a weekend that has become a cherished tradition. We took an Olde Tyme photograph of all the children. You blew out candles, alongside members of the other two families who share your birthday week. Grace was in a sling with a broken collarbone.
The eighteenth, we were back in New Hampshire with the same friends. We helped build a house. We took another Olde Tyme photograph. There was another cake with candles for three birthday people. There were lilacs everywhere, and my memories are tinged with their smell.
This year the nineteenth, we’ll celebrate with with Whit’s baseball game, and, tomorrow, a family dinner. I’ll bake a cake. It will be the most ordinary, and therefore, the most extraordinary. As is every day.
Thank you for all the varied and marvelous roles you play in my life and those of Grace and Whit. You are a thoughtful question-asker, an improving bed-maker (though still a sub-par laundry-folder), an excellent hockey coach, extremely handy around the house (proven this weekend with the stove saga), an enthusiastic married-in Princeton reunion-er, an avid reader infuriatingly resistant to my book recommendations, and a world-class maker of bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. You are willing to curl into a bottom bunk to read, to encourage a child to go up a mast, to explain how a sport or technology works, to listen when I repeat myself, to tolerate my moods, to be there. Thank you.
Previous happy birthday posts to Matt are here: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010
The world is in riotous bloom. We are reminded at every turn of beginnings, fecundity, growth. The days are long and warm, and summer glints on the horizon, and everywhere I look there are bare legs and smiles. This is the height of spring: dizzy, jubilant, glorious.
But I can’t stop experiencing lasts. In the past couple of weeks, I have attended my last Lower School spring concert, performed my last tooth fairy duties for my older child, watched our household’s last World’s Fair poster board come together. Last, last, last. Time is whipping by so fast I can barely breathe.
Last week, I drove by a large tent at Boston University, which I assume is for graduation, and I think of how the way that the reunions tents going up at Princeton was a visceral harbinger of the end of year. I used to watch them putting up fences and tents with a tangible sense of loss: those wooden and canvas structures were a threshold between now and then, between the present and the future, and I was forced across it. The peaks of white canvas tents will always spell the ending of something to me. Even as they mark the biggest beginning of all, that of commencement.
I’ve written about commencement a lot before. Living in a university town, this time of year, it’s impossible to avoid. In 2013 I asked if it was just another word for what might be the “central preoccupation of my life.” The ways that endings and beginnings are wound around each other, inextricable, enriching one another even as they seem opposed, opposite: this is one of the themes I return to again and again, there’s no question about that.
The other night, Grace lost her last tooth. Her last baby tooth. She’s over 13.5, so this is not a last that should surprise me, and she’s late to lose it. But still. Still. I went in before bed to take the tooth and to put tooth fairy money under her pillow, and she woke up as I did so. Her eyes popped open and she whispered, “What are you doing?”
“Just saying goodnight,” I said quickly, holding the pouch with her tooth that I’d taken from under her pillow but not yet opened down by the floor on which I was kneeling. A slow grin spread across her face.
“You sure about that?” she asked with a sly smile. I burst out laughing. I know she doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy. She hasn’t for years. This humorous young woman makes me laugh so much. I adore her. Do I miss the much younger girl, the small child who slept, under whose pillow I slid the first couple of tooth fairy dollars? Of course I do. But I don’t want to go back: I love right now.
Kunitz’s feast of losses, which I’ve also written about ad nauseum, runs through my head at this time of year. Grace doesn’t have any more baby teeth. Whit doesn’t have any more spring concerts. His class sang sang several songs, but my favorite was Seasons of Love, from Rent, which I have long loved (and have often thought about writing about!).
We will head to Princeton at the end of next week to celebrate my 20th reunion (where we will take advantage of those great fences and tents whose arrival marked the end of my undergraduate year). It is my first reunion in my life where my grandfather won’t be there. I didn’t know the reunion in 2011, when I walked with him, was the last.
There is so much beauty and so much loss. There is laughter in the dark with my teenage daughter just an hour after holding her last baby tooth in my hand. There are tears in the lower school gym as my son, now the Big Kid on the stage, dances to Soul Man and then to a song from Rent which reminds me of college. There is aggravation that the Ecuador presentation doesn’t seem ready, and in the wake of that irritation, I feel simultaneously thankful that Jesus this is the last time and mad at myself for not fully appreciating this, the last time I’ll hear a child practice their 5th grade presentation.
Still, then tinges now, and no matter what I do, I can’t run away from the shadow of loss the haunts every single moment of this life. The magnolias bloom but even as my head spins with their gorgeous beauty I know how transient it is, and preemptively mourn the brown puddles they’ll be on the sidewalk in a matter of days.
Teeth, concerts, presentations. Commencement, graduation gowns, canvas tents. My friends, my grandfather, my children. It’s all one big, glorious swirl, this life, alleluia and farewell, loss and beginning, love and tears. Every single day.
When I was growing up Mother’s Day wasn’t really a thing in our family. I’ll be honest that I still don’t love it as a holiday – feels a little contrived to me. And the truth is what I really want on “my” day is a regular day (perhaps this is a midlife thing, like my 40th birthday realization that all I wanted was more of this). So while the construct of Mother’s Day isn’t my favorite, motherhood – and daughterhood – is my favorite subject, without question. So I was shared some photographs and thoughts on Instagram this weekend, about mothers, children, and godmothers. I wanted to collect them here, as a record of sorts of this weekend, of the waves of love I felt for the people in my family (that I was born into and made as well as that I chose in my dearest friends).
The women who flank me, my mother and my daughter, on the first day they met (10/26/02). Grace is about an hour old. Everything I know about motherhood and mothers and daughters, I learned from them.
On the eve of Mother’s Day I have godmothers – my own and those of my children – on my mind. This photo is of my godsisters and me, many years ago (please admire the charcoal starter right near us – oh, 70s! And, a mystery: why I’m not dressed). Their mothers – and they – remain very dear to me, as do the friends in my adult life who are an extended family to my own children. This photograph is on the board above my desk and I look at it every day. Just had a drink tonight with my oldest friend (well, tied with these two, photographed here). We met when I was 3 weeks old and he was 7 weeks old, and we grew up together. His mother was my Fairy Godmother, a true second mother (for example when I came out of anesthesia at age 10, it was she, and not my biological mother, holding my hand in the recovery room). Tonight, I’m intensely aware of the web of friends-who-are-family who have carried me for many years and I’m so grateful.
The first photo after Grace was born (well, the fourth, but within 30 seconds and the first I want to share here). Motherhood is the defining role of my life. It took me a while to feel that way, though, and I can’t help but think today of those long, exhausted, tearful first months, defined by colic (hers, though maybe also mine) and postpartum depression (mine, though maybe also hers). There are as many definitions and visions of motherhood as there are mothers, and it doesn’t happen overnight. That’s something I feel strongly about saying out loud. There are so many mothers who inspire me – starting with my own, of course – women I know in person and online, writers, poets, teachers, investors, managers, consultants, yogis, PTA presidents, stay-at-home moms (often more than one of these identifiers fits), mothers of six or zero biological children, women of 30 and women of 90. I’m grateful for them all today. Tagging many mothers who inspire me. Hope you’ll do the same.
This isn’t a holiday I much care for, but motherhood (and daughterhood) in all its shapes and permutations is my favorite subject. Closing out the day with these two, the people I love most. Grace and Whit, being your mother is the most important thing in my life. You teach me every day, about love and empathy and humanity and patience and music.ly and how long it takes to get to Mars. You exhaust, frustrate, bewilder, and astonish me, and you have shown me what love really is. I’m grateful for every single day I get to spend as your mother. It is an incandescent privilege and I hope never to take a moment of it for granted. You’re my alpha and my omega, my sun, my moon, and all my stars, and I am prouder of you both than I can ever express.
Lexington Battle Green, 5:15am on Patriot’s Day
I should have expected the slap-down from the universe. I really should have.
In March 2009 I wrote about fragility. “At any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger, either through an accident or through development of illness. When thinking about this post last night, I thought initially: I have chosen not to live in fear of these risks.” As usual, I write my posts a few days in advance. The day it went live, Whit ended up in the ER with his second allergic reaction to tree nuts. It was scary.
In May 2012, I wrote about the 10 things I wanted Grace to know when she turned 10. One of them was “Don’t lose your physical fearlessness. Please continue using your body in the world: run, jump, climb, throw.” Days later, she broke her collarbone.
Over the weekend, I wrote about ease, and the ways in which my life right now is the opposite of ease and, perhaps, the embodiment of it. The post went up on Monday morning. Monday itself was an exceedingly bumpy day in our family’s life. I thought almost all day of my friend Launa‘s image of a family of four as a shopping cart. When one wheel’s wonky, you just can’t drive smoothly or straight. Monday we had four wheels out of joint. Which meant, of course, we went nowhere fast and with great aggravation.
It was, on the surface, a great day. We got up at 4:40 to go to the reenactment of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War in Lexington. I’ve never seen it before, and it was both fascinating and unexpectedly powerful. But that early wakeup put everybody on edge for the rest of the day.
We watched the marathon some, I worked a lot of the day, the kids both finished homework they had not gotten to over the weekend. Nothing specifically went wrong. But everyone was crabby – myself included, most certainly – and there was a lot of short-tempered snapping. Dinner was filled with tense silence and crossed arms.
I didn’t feel ease. I felt frustration and a generalized feeling of anger and exhaustion. How could one early morning derail us all like this? Why are we all living so close to the edge right now (all the time)? Why does everything feel so hard?
As it often has, reading saved us. After some dish-clanging and raised-voice dinner cleanup, we all retired upstairs. Grace and Whit showered. I did some email. Before long, I was in my favorite place, sitting in bed with a child on each side of me. We were all breathing, we were all reading, we were all together. The dissent and aggravation and tears of the day dissolved in the face of those irrefutable truths.
This is what I’m learning, finally:
This is what ease is.
This is what grace is. They’re not the same thing, but they are, at least in my head, related. They are also some of the many, many manifestations of the way life is not necessarily what we expect it to be.
Ease is not never being aggravated. It’s coming back to center more quickly. I think of the round-bottomed glasses my parents have on their boat, which wobble but don’t actually tip over. It’s breathing through the discomfort. It’s trusting that the light will return, even when it’s dark. It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would, ease, but it’s still here, in every step, in every breath, in every moment.