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Tears at hockey

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From a more placid moment last week

I recognize that things are moving fast most of the time in our family, and that I have a lot of things I’m trying to do, but most of the time it feels like it hangs together.  Usually we even fit in time for some quiet reading and a walk around the block and a few minutes of downtime.  That and hundreds of emails and writing and running and packing lunches and laundry and cooking and … well, writing that makes me tired.  Still, most days, my life – and that of my family – works.

Except when it doesn’t.

Last Monday was one of those days.  I had forgotten that Whit had hockey even though it was a holiday, so at the last minute I had to move my mother’s planned dinner-at-home visit to late afternoon.  We were running late for hockey, and I was snappy and frustrated.  By the time I got Grace and Whit into the car, hockey pads mostly (but not all) on, and headed in the light snow to pick up Whit’s teammate for practice, I was on the verge of tears.

It can turn so fast, can’t it?  Just the night before we had had a wonderful celebration of Whit, dinner at his favorite restaurant, a homemade cake (triple chocolate, which had required my going to three stores to get the ingredients) and presents.  I’d sat at our dining room table, watching the faces of my family in the flicker of candlelight, feeling calm, grateful.  My boy was eight.

But now I stood by the side of the hockey rink, fighting tears.  It was freezing, and in my rush I hadn’t brought a hat or gloves.  I jammed my hands into the pockets of my down coat and pressed my forehead against the cold plexiglass between the rink and me.  I watched Whit skate, feeling my breath coming fast and a tightness in my chest:  I am trying to do so much all at once.  Because of this, I do everything badly.  I am just so tired.

I drew a ragged breath and fought to control the tide of sorrow that rose inside me.  Suddenly I heard Billy Joel in my head: this is the time to remember, ’cause it will not last forever…  I shook my head, new emotion churning around the self-pity.  I felt both chastened and annoyed; I was reminded of my own desperate wish to be here now and of the simultaneous weight of my expectation that I can do so all the time. Is my constant sense of failing to be present getting in the way of my actually being present?

I don’t know.  I don’t think so, because I know I was far less here before I started thinking about this.  But it certainly makes me excruciatingly aware of all the ways and times that I fall short of the engagement in my life I so badly want.

I looked at Whit, his little figure blurred by my tears.  I want so fiercely to fully live these years, to pay attention, not to miss a thing.  But still, so often, I fail.  I allow my own exhaustion or aggravation to occlude the beauty of this ordinary, flawed existence.  It makes me weep to think of all that I have already missed.  I don’t even want to blink, for fear of missing anything else.

For the rest of the night, all I could hear was this:

This are the time to remember
Cause it will not last forever.
These are the days to hold onto
Cause we won’t although we’ll want to.
This is the time, but time is going to change.

 

INFJ, ENTJ, otherness, and the world at large

I’ve written before that I am an INFJ.  And I’ve also described the basic discomfort I felt while at business school.  Recently, Penelope Trunk wrote about something that explains the latter in terms of the former with a clarity that was like turning on a light.

I probably ought not have been as surprised as I was by the data Penelope Trunk shares that less than 1% of all women fall into the Myers-Briggs type ENTJ.  Yet that is the dominant personality type at the business school I attended, enormously disproportionately represented in the class.  I know this because we all had to take the test, and the results were shared widely and clearly, and it was said over and over again that ENTJ was “the type” that had long succeeded at the school and, perhaps more germanely, in the business world.

I sort of can’t believe I have never known this single piece of information, which seems to encapsulate so much of the dissonance that many women I know feel in today’s business world.  I am not sharing this to point fingers or to complain.  Not at all.  I think there is much to be said difference and for forging a new path in a well-mapped and crowded terrain.  But this data point does help me understand myself and the world better, much the same way reading Susan Cain’s Quiet did.

It makes me wonder how it is I wound up in an environment where I was (and am) so different.  Why did I seek out a place where I did not fit, where I felt so other?  Maybe, however, circumstances matter less than our internal wiring, because the truth is when I think about it I have almost always felt  somewhat other.  I have almost always felt as though I was watching the world through a thin pane of glass, close to but essentially apart from the action.

And maybe some subconscious part of me knew that aspects of me did fit in this world. l am both an introvert and a connector, and I do genuinely love the significant part of my life that occurs in the business world.  Maybe there isn’t one single place I fit, after all.  I have more than once described the contradictions that exist in every cell of my body.

I think it’s notable, though, that at least one business school the dominant personality type is one that is so minutely represented in women.  This can’t be separate from the passionate response to Anne Marie Slaughter’s piece about having it all.  That response interested me because it was twofold.  Yes, there was the assertion – and I agree with this – that traditional models of professional success are often incompatible with a hands-on approach to parenting small children.  But even more, I observed many, many women, myself included, writing whole-heartedly about how “having it all” meant many, many different things to different people.

I wish I had a clearly defined thesis, or any kind of neat conclusion to this post.  I’ve been thinking over this tangled mess of themes and questions for a long time now, and a clean answer eludes me.  I think there is value in continuing to expand the notion of success in the world.  I also think that recognizing the norms of situations we find ourselves in is powerful, because it helps explain why we may feel dissonant inside them.  I suppose that is the conclusion, after all: there is power in understanding, even if it that knowledge does not offer neat solutions and tidy resolutions.  Life eludes clean categories, I’ve found.  The best we can do is continue to try to understand ourselves and the environment in which we live.

Tell me, what is your Myers-Briggs type?  I am endlessly fascinated by this.

 

Things I Want My 10 Year Old Daughter To Know

 

Grace is rounding the curve to ten.  I am not sure how this is possible.  In my second month of blogging here she turned four.  Now she’s more than halfway to her tenth birthday.  It’s irrefutable.  I feel ever more aware of her girlhood and looming adolescence, and of all the things I want her to know, as if I could somehow instill values and beliefs into her, like pressing a penny into soft clay.  I know I can’t; the best I can do is to keep saying them, keep writing them, keep living them.

Ten things I want my ten year old daughter to know:

1. It is not your job to keep the people you love happy.  Not me, not Daddy, not your brother, not your friends.  I promise, it’s not.  The hard truth is that you can’t, anyway.

2. Don’t lose your physical fearlessness.   Please continue using your body in the world: run, jump, climb, throw.  I love watching you streaking down the soccer field, or swinging proudly along a row of monkey bars, or climbing into the high branches of a tree.  There is both health and a sense of mastery in physical activity and challenges.

3. Don’t be afraid to share your passions.  You are sometimes embarrassed that you still like to play with dolls, for example, and you worry that your friends will make fun of you.  Anyone who teases you for what you love to do is not a true friend.  This is hard to realize, but essential.

4. It is okay to disagree with me, and others.  You are old enough to have a point of view, and I want to hear it.  So do those who love you.  Don’t pick fights for the sake of it, of course but when you really feel I’m wrong, please say so.  You have heard me say that you are right, and you’ve heard me apologize for my behavior or point of view when I realize they were wrong.  Your perspective is both valid and valuable.  Don’t shy away from expressing it.

5. You are so very beautiful.  Your face now holds the baby you were and the young woman you are rapidly becoming.  My eyes and cleft chin and your father’s coloring combine into someone unique, someone purely you.  I can see the clouds of society’s beauty myth hovering, manifest in your own growing self-consciousness.  I beg of you not to lose sight with your own beauty, so much of which comes from the fact that your spirit runs so close to the surface.

6. Keep reading.  Reading is the central leisure-time joy of my life, as you know.  I am immensely proud and pleased to see that you seem to share it.  That identification you feel with characters, that sense of slipping into another world, of getting lost there in the best possible way?  Those never go away.  Welcome.

7. You are not me.  We are very alike, but you are your own person, entirely, completely, fully.  I know this, I promise, even when I lose sight of it.  I know that separation from me is one of the fundamental tasks of your adolescence, which I can see glinting over the horizon.  I dread it like ice in my stomach, that space, that distance, that essential cleaving, but I want you to know I know how vital it is.  I’m going to be here, no matter what, Grace.  The red string that ties us together will stretch.  I know it will.  And once the transition is accomplished there will be a new, even better closeness.  I know that too.

8. It is almost never about you.  What I mean is when people act in a way that hurts or makes you feel insecure, it is almost certainly about something happening inside of them, and not about you.  I struggle with this one mightily, and I have tried very, very hard never once to tell you you are being “too sensitive” or to “get over it” when you feel hurt.  Believe me, I know how feelings can slice your heart, even if your head knows otherwise.  But maybe, just maybe, it will help to remember that almost always other people are struggling with their own demons, even if they bump into you by accident.

9. There is no single person who can be your everything.  Be very careful about bestowing this power on any one person.  I suspect you are trying to fill a gnawing loneliness, and if you are you inherited it from me.  That feeling, Woolf’s “emptiness about the heart of life,” is just part of the deal.  Trying to fill that ache with other people (or with anything else, like food, alcohol, numbing behaviors of a zillion sorts you don’t even know of yet) is a lost cause, and nobody will be up to the task.  You will feel let down, and, worse, that loneliness will be there no matter what.  I’m learning to embrace it, to accept it as part of who I am.  I hope to help you do the same.

10. I am trying my best.  I know I’m not good enough and not the mother you deserve.  I am impatient and fallible and I raise my voice.  I am sorry.  I love you and your brother more than I love anyone else in the entire world and I always wish I could be better for you.  I’ll admit I don’t always love your behavior, and I’m quick to tell you that.  But every single day, I love you with every fiber of my being.  No matter what.

Close to the surface

One evening last week Whit and I sat in companionable silence in the family room.  He was building a LEGO and I was working.  “Mummy?” At his voice I looked up from my laptop.

“Yes?”  He was perched on the side of the low train table, LEGO pieces in one hand and the other held to his chest.

“I can feel my heart beating.”

“Cool, Whit.”  Why did you suddenly think of this?  The inner workings of Whit’s mind and heart will always be a mystery to me.  Which reminds me, daily, of the vast and essential unknowability of even those we love best.

After a long moment of silence, during which I watched him sit, holding his hand over his heart, he spoke again.  “It feels amazing, Mummy.”

Why yes, Whit.  It is amazing.

The next morning was Whit’s seven year doctor’s appointment.  He sat on the doctor’s examination table in just his jeans, his white chest looking impossibly tiny and incomprehensibly grown-up at the same time.  The doctor pressed his stethoscope to Whit’s back.  He asked him to turn his head this way and that.  He kept listening.  Time stretched uncomfortably.  I glanced at Matt, my anxiety mounting.  What was he hearing?  What was he listening for?  Whit looked over his shoulder at the doctor, sensing, too, that this was taking an awfully long time.  “Whit, turn this way,” the doctor’s voice was stern, his face limned with concentration.

I chewed a nail and watched, feeling my own heart skittering in my chest.  Was last night’s comment a harbinger of this, a prompt by the universe to appreciate the amazement of our hearts beating, of this most taken-for-granted and yet outrageous gift?  I could feel my breath speeding up and I began to awful-ize.  He needs open heart surgery.  I should have paid attention last night, put down my computer, pressed my hand to his chest, noticed the extraordinary beauty of his ordinary heartbeat.  I should have done that years ago.

“Okay,” the doctor cleared his throat and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears.  “He’s fine.”  I exhaled, but only part way.  “But you can hear the whooshing of the blood in his aorta.  It’s something we see rarely in kids, and I kept asking him to turn his head to test if it was that or not.  I wish my med student was here right now; this is rare and it’s cool to hear.”

“But it’s really just normal, and not an issue?”

“Yes, really.  Promise.  It’s just a detail.  It’s interesting, and unusual.  His blood just flows close to the surface, your kid.”  I exhaled the rest of the way and helped Whit pull on his shirt.

After a few more minutes, we walked back to the car.  I thought of a quote I’ve always related to, which I just tweeted recently, by Alan Gurganus: “Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.”  I let go of Whit’s hand and held my fingers against his back.  Thump, thump, thump.  His small heart rabbited against my hand.  It is amazing, mummy.  Calamity is always so close.  We walk the line between ordinary and catastrophe every moment.  Thump, thump, thump.  Close to the surface.

My life has simultaneously narrowed and widened

People ask me, with some regularity, how I “do it all.”  Of course, I don’t.  There is plenty I don’t do.  And I have been thinking about that a lot lately, of the immensely different ways we each populate our hours and what they say about what we value.

Every hour of our life is a choice, a trade-off between competing priorities and desires.  We are all given the same number of hours in a day.  What do you prioritize?  What do you care about?  Where are you spending your time?

In the last several years my own life has simultaneously narrowed and widened.  It has narrowed because I have substantially cut down on external (non-job and non-family) commitments.   I say no much more often than I say yes.  And even beyond commitments about my physical presence, I’ve withdrawn in a real way: for example, I spend much less time on the phone catching up with friends.

But even in this narrowing my life has startled me with an unforseen richness.  It’s like I stepped into a dense forest but then I looked up to see an enormous expanse of the sky.  Somehow, in my turning inward, I have learned to see the glittering expanse of my own life.  Maybe it is not having the other distractions.  Maybe it is that is training my gaze I have opened my heart.  I am not sure.

I spend my time with my family, I spend my time writing, I spend my time reading, I spend my time with a small number of people I entirely trust and wholly love.  I run at 5:30 in the morning because that’s the only time when the trade-off isn’t too steep for me.  It is very rare for me to have dinner, drinks, or lunch with a friend one-on-one.  The same is true for Matt and me with other couples.  On the other hand there are many evenings where I sit and read to the kids while they are in the tub, when I get into bed at 8:15pm with a book, and there are a great many days full of work.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. – Annie Dillard

Let’s all decide to no longer hide behind the excuse that we “don’t have time.”  The truer response would be “I don’t care enough to really protect the time.”  This may be harsh, but I think it’s also true.  Let’s take ownership of our choices rather than bemoaning their results.  Do you want time to meditate?  Time to go to yoga?  Time to spend reading with your children?  Well, something else has to go.  Unfortunately time, at least in the framework of a day or a week, is a zero sum game.  The ultimate one, perhaps.

Think long and hard about how you spend your precious hours, the only currency in this life that I personally think is actually worth anything.  A lot of these decisions are made instinctively, without deliberate thought or analysis.  But that’s how life is, isn’t it?  We know what we care most deeply about, and we run towards it, chins ducked.  We protect fiercely time for those things and people and events we truly value.  And those things, people, events we never seem to have time for?  Well, that tell us something important too.

I believe that if you look carefully at the map of your hours over a week or a month, you will see a reflection of what it is in this life you prize most highly.  Do you like what you see?