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An ordinary Saturday

Today dawned bright and cold. Matt is in Asia, so it is just Grace, Whit, and me this weekend. Grace woke me up and then returned to her room to read (okay, fine, play with her new dsi) so I could wake up slowly. Whit slept until 8:30 (possibly a record). Already: delightful. After waffles and bacon for breakfast the children watched cartoons while I began wildly throwing things away. I’m almost finished with The Happiness Project and so far the idea that has the most traction with me is the empty shelf. I woke up desperate for my empty shelf.

After an hour of work, six Goodwill bags, and three trash bags, I have two empty shelves! Hooray.

Late morning, the three of us headed to Grace’s gymnastics lesson. Whit watched his favorite cartoon, Avatar, on my old iphone while I watched Grace (she looked over to make sure I was watching her with a frequency I found both touching and disconcerting). It’s amazing to me that after only three classes she can already do a competent cartwheel. Amazing, mostly, I think, because it reminds me of how old and competent my child is. When did this happen? As I’ve said before, I often find myself wondering when the real mother is coming home.

A huge treat: Burger King chicken nuggets for lunch. Wow does that make these children of mine happy! They are still playing with the plastic toys they received with their meals.

After a short rest we went to the Museum of Fine Arts to meet one of my dearest friends and her two boys. We sang along to Kiss 108 songs on the way there (top 40) and Grace awed me with her every-single-word knowledge of every single song. When does she learn this stuff? I don’t spend enough time with her in the car for it to be from that. She clapped and exclaimed when the Kings of Leon song “Use Somebody” came on and my first thought was: my daughter is cooler than I will ever be. I watched her in the rearview mirror, gazing out of her window and mouthing the words, and I swear I could see her 15 year old self in her 7 year old face. My heart tugged.

Then the true genius of Fake Mommy me made itself apparent. I parked in a parking lot right across from the MFA entrance I have always used, and urged the children to leave their coats in the car so “we” (read: I) didn’t have to carry them around inside. But then I took us out the stairway right by the car and exited onto a totally foreign street. “Let’s go back inside!” cried Whit, already shivering in his tee shirt in the 31 degree day. I tried the handle. Locked. Awesome.

We finally figured out, after a couple of tries, where we were. We had to walk around a long block to get to the museum. I swear I was winning Mothering Gold Stars from every car that passed, as I wandered aimlessly with two coat-less children on a frigid day (so cold that the friend I was going to meet had deemed it too cold to go skiing – where they would have presumably worn coats). Relieved, I steered the kids to the entrance by the parking lot (now that we had reached it through 10 minutes of walking). Oops. I guess that entrance is now closed.

Another long city block later, we finally stumbled into the museum lobby. Both kids were absolutely breathless with laughter about what a silly mother they had. I laughed with them, grateful that such small things bring such joy, amazed by their pink cheeks and good cheer. We explored the museum for a solid hour and a half, which is about the limit of both a four year old’s attention span and, incidentally (and not impressively), my own.

The highlight of the museum visit for the children was no doubt the sweet snack they enjoyed in the basement cafeteria. We braced ourselves for the cold and jogged back to the parking lot, one child holding each of my hands. They giggled so hard we had to keep stopping. Who knew that a coat-less run on a winter day had the potential for such hilarity? I’m glad I found out.

Driving home, Whit noticed that the Charles River was frozen solid. He stared out his window at it in and his visible amazement made me smile. Then Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game came on, which both kids know because it’s on the (short) list of songs I play (all the time). I listened as they both sang along, quietly, and felt a huge swell of gratitude and sadness. A quote rose to my mind, popsicle-stick-like:  Everyday life is laced with miracles.  My eyes filled with tears and I thought: this is it. This is what I keep writing about. I am here now.

And I was.

Snow falling, sticks rising, in a new year

I don’t like New Year’s. I never have. It’s not for the same reasons that most people complain about – the pressure to have a good time, the overwrought celebrations, etc. For me it’s the same reason that I dislike birthdays: this day marks the passage of time in an unavoidable way. I generally go to bed before midnight and try not to think about moving from one year to another. The anxious feeling of being balanced on a fulcrum haunts the days before New Year’s for me, and in the same way that I feel a hundred pounds lighter the day after my birthday, dissipates immediately after it.

Despite this anxiety, I love the time between Christmas and New Year’s. The week hangs like a slack hammock between the two holidays. The days feel removed from reality, and in the last few years they have been brilliantly lovely for that. A respite from regular life, some time to breathe, think, sleep, wonder. I haven’t come to any meaningful conclusions, or made any decisions, but the week held some joy, some space, and that is a gift.

I don’t make resolutions. Maybe this is all part of my dislike of what feels like an obnoxiously loud transition to another year, a maudlin and inescapable reminder of another year gone. Maybe it is a lack of commitment to self-betterment. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I don’t have resolutions to share.

I told a friend a story recently that comes to mind often when I think of the way things bubble up in my mind. When my sister and I were little, we often visited my dad’s parents on Long Island. They lived near the beach, which had a long pier that extended into the water. At the end of the pier floated a wooden dock. Hilary and I, along with other kids, used to play a game with our popsicle sticks. After we had sucked all of the sweet ice off of the sticks, leaving only the stained wood to remember what flavor we had had, we headed to the dock. One of us, wooden stick clasped in his or her hand, would dive as deep as we could. The other children would stand lined up along the edge of the dock. The first person to notice the stick rising from the deep water would dive in and grab it, and thus win the round.

This is how I often think of thoughts and truths coming to my mind: slowly, bobbing irregularly, swayed by invisible currents. Sometimes I think I see the paleness of the stick deep in the murky darkness, and it’s not really there; other times I am surprised by its sudden, obvious appearance and can’t believe I didn’t see it on its way up. Either way, there are things percolating in the ocean of my head. Not resolutions, not answers, but truths. Unavoidable feelings. Perhaps it is my spirit, turning over in its sleep, waking slightly only to fall back into slumber. Whatever it is, there is something under my breastbone, something in my head, making itself known.

I look forward to welcoming these truths in 2010. To making the space to feel and know them. To learning of how to trust them. For now, I sit and watch the snow outside the window, falling softly, like grace. Rendering the world new. White, and quiet, and peaceful. And, for now, it is enough.

Change, and Christmas lights

I had Sarah Jarosz’s “Long Journey” in my head yesterday.

I have just begun
A long journey that will run
The length and width of summertime
And the cool fall air will blow me home

I had one of those tender and tentative afternoons, gradually tiptoeing my back from a night and morning of feeling positively terrible. Before bed, Grace wanted to write a note to her beloved Mr. Hove, the intern teacher in her classroom who is moving on after this term. She is really sad about saying goodbye to him and has been talking about it all week.
She wrote him the note above. Totally earnestly, she asked me if she could include a dollar in the note. She has eleven dollars saved up, from losing teeth and a couple of other random things, and she sincerely wanted to give him one. She was so sweet, so genuine when she asked this, and I had to stifle a giggle. It was hard to explain why that was probably not the right way to show him how much she appreciated him.

Ultimately we decided she would give him her very favorite Magic Treehouse book. This is a treasured item in her life, and I am impressed at the fact that she gives it away freely. As I tucked her into bed, Grace was noticeably sad.

“Are you okay, Gracie?” I asked

“Yes, I’m just sad tonight.” She didn’t meet my eyes, instead concentrating on her hands as she fiddled with her teddy bear’s ears.

“Why?”

“I am so sad about Mr. Hove leaving.”

“I know, sweetie. It’s hard to say goodbye.”

“Why do things have to change? I don’t like that. I want them to stay the same.” She shook her head fiercely, pursing her lips and visibly fighting back tears.

Oh, Gracie. Me too. Oh, me too.
After both children were in bed I went downstairs to the kitchen. I passed through the living room on my way back upstairs, pausing to look at the Christmas tree, lit up and sparkling in the dark room. I felt a wave of emotion wash over me, fear about change, sadness about farewell, a grown up version of the same things Gracie had just elucidated.

I knelt on the floor and rested my elbows on the coffee table, hands folded. This is not a position I have ever found myself in before. Ever. I stared at the tree in the darkness, resting my chin on my hands, feeling an unfamiliar mixture of intense anxiety and deep peace. I closed my eyes and heard my own breathing and felt infinitely big and infinitesimally small at the same time. Again, again, I heard Wordsworth’s familiar lines in my head:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.

I was suddenly, startlingly aware of the presence of something in the room with me. The fragility of the day, my daughter’s sagacious words, the glimmering lights in the near-solstice darkness all combined into a potent cocktail that seeped into my marrow. I feel I am perched on the edge of something big, and new, and scary. Neither those fears nor the desperate, anxious sadness of saying goodbye to a comfortable status quo are new. But what is new is the undeniable current of calm I felt, that sense sublime that throbbed like a bass note under the melodic and deafening descant of my far more verbal and outspoken fears. I don’t know that it will always be there, but it was last night, and I hope it will again.

Talking about religion on a rainy car ride. All things holy.

I was driving the children home yesterday evening when they started asking me about Christmas. It was a dark, rainy night and the car felt like a little self-contained universe, moving through space. Grace and Whit wanted to know all about Christmas and why we celebrate it when we do. I floundered with some general answers about the virgin Mary and the manger. Grace told Whit confidently that Christmas was “When baby Jesus was born.”

He then asked, “So why are there presents?” Grace immediately replied, a withering note of duh! in her voice, “Because it’s a birthday celebration.”

Whit thought about this for a moment. And then, “But why do we get presents if it’s his birthday?”

He managed to stump both of the wiseass women in his life with that question. I don’t know. Do you? I did change the subject to remind them that Santa has nothing to do with the official religious meaning of Christmas.

Then Grace took Whit’s question and with a blinding ability to switch sides that will likely make her a great debater, said, “Well, Jesus can’t really have presents anyway, since he is not alive. He’s up there,”

“Where?” Whit asked.

“Up there,” I took my eyes off of the winding, wet road to glance back and saw her shrug her shoulders and cast her eyes heavenward.

“Well, he’s not really dead, though. A lot of religion is about waiting for him to be reborn,” I offered, immediately wondering why I said that (and remembering my friend who famously told her daughter about the birds and the bees at length. When the story was finished, the daughter hesitated and asked if there were other ways to make a baby. The mother plunged into a description of IVF. The daughter furrowed her brow in thought and said she thought that sounded like a better way to do it). I think bringing up Christ’s resurrection was akin to mentioning IVF. Factually true but unnecessary to bring up at this level of inquiry. Damn.

Grace began peppering me with questions from the backseat. What is resurrection. What do you mean he will come back? (I had “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end” running through my head – oh years of weekly church you did your work!) How do we know? When?

This is far from an area of expertise for me. I talked about how he was not “really human” but “divine” (necessitating a sideline into the definition of “divine”). Grace finally interrupted me, saying with finality and no trace of irony, “Something smells fishy about this, Mummy.”

Um, yeah. I fought back a giggle, thinking about how in this humorous conversation we were tackling some of the biggest questions of faith and religion. The conversation paused and you could hear Josh Groban singing “Oh holy night” in the background.

Grace asked, “What is holy?”

I answered, “It is like divine, anything to do with God,” thinking as I spoke how insufficient this answer was. Thinking: this moment is holy.

Grace responded, “Like the night I was born.” Where that came from I have no idea. Out of the blue, a searing bolt of truth.

“Yes, Gracie. That was a holy night.”

Violence and Glory. Ends and Beginnings.

(Whit at 38 weeks)

I can’t get Kelly’s post, Years That Ask and Years That Answer. Stories, Ends, Beginnings, Fire, Moon out of my head. I cannot get her voice out of my head, the images and tropes that are some of my own most favorite (years that ask questions, Bertha, Eve, seasons, cycles). I keep hearing, over and over again, this phrase: the flesh poetry of experience.

A secret language traded between intimates of the violence of birth and glory of delivery. The wrenching of asunder and the joy of embrace. A story beaten in the pulse of mundane responsibility and cosmic love. Goddesses and bitches and sisters and women. We know this story. It is the story of generation.

This paragraph makes me think of the births of my two babies. Of the violence and glory of their deliveries. Two of my most cherished life experiences. I still struggle to put into words what those nights were like. They were not just moments of my life that I recall with stunning, crystalline detail. They were also passages from one world to another, and somehow in the passage I was able to glimpse through the seam of this reality to something bigger and more breathtaking. What I saw and sensed changed me forever.

Even seeing the photograph above brings tears to my eyes. It is almost impossible to remember being swollen like that with life, to remember the feeling of feet in my ribs and of seeing the spine as a glowing string of pearls on a flickering ultrasound screen. I look at the picture as tangible proof, but when I search for the correlated sense memories they are weak.

What is more miraculous than the female body’s ability to create and bear life? Seriously, what? We take it for granted, in many ways, and perhaps we have to because otherwise the blinding truth of it would be too much to bear.

Grace’s birth was the story of resistance. It was about my gritting my teeth and stubbornly laying in for the stay. Part of the resistance was that she was posterior, but it was also about my own fears, anxieties, and utter lack of preparation to be a mother. I was in battle against myself, I know that now: I was holding on, not ready to embrace a new life (mine, not hers) and identity. I was not ready to face the end of a phase of my life, the multiple deaths that are contained in birth. The inexorable force of a baby descending the birth canal went to war against my own quite powerful subconscious, and I was in labor for over 36 hours, at 9+ centimeters for 3 hours.

I cried and I screamed and I begged to be put out of my misery: I distinctly recall telling my midwife, completely seriously, that I’d like her to put a bullet in my head and just cut the baby out. The pain was both incendiary and incandescent. It was a crucible through which I had to pass, the heat so extreme that I was rendered molten. It was an animal experience, a raw, passionate, and terrifying introduction to a ferocity I had never imagined I possessed.

I delivered Grace myself. At my midwife’s instruction, I reached down and put my thumbs under her armpits when she was half born and pulled her onto my own chest. I am more grateful than I can express for photographs of this moment. Little did I know I had months of darkness ahead of me before the grace that I had just brought into my life would be made manifest.

Whit’s birth was the story of acceptance and surrender. It was as I imagined birth would be. I labored alone for an hour or two at home, reading Ina May and swaying back and forth with the contractions. It was late at night, Grace slept in her new bedroom next door, and Matt was at work. I labored alone and felt undeniably in the presence of something much larger than myself. I felt a surpassing peace that somehow did not surprise me in the least. I was not afraid of what I imagined was another 24 hours of labor.

After 3 short hours of labor Matt insisted that we go to the hospital. I fought him tooth and nail but finally, after running to crouch on the dining room floor to muffle my screams in the rug (so as not to scare Grace, who was being picked up by my mother), I conceded. Whit was born 40 minutes after I walked in the doors of the hospital. The experience of pushing Whit out was nothing short of transformational. In the moment I was afraid of the intensity and the searing pain, but in retrospect I can see that my entire body reformed itself in those minutes, making itself into a channel for him to come through, a passageway between a murky and unknown place and this brightly-lit world.

The truth is, I don’t often feel an overwhelming sense of this-is-what-I-am-here-for about mothering. But during my two labors there was a keen and irrefutable drumbeat of certainty: this – delivering – is what my body was made to do. There’s no question in my mind that a barn burned down while I labored with Grace. Sometimes I think of the depression that swamped me almost immediately after her arrival as the time it took for me to sort through the ashes, to make sense of this new landscape. And yes, from here I can see that even in those dark days there was a clear moon, that truths were washed clean by icy white light.

This post is in honor of my friend whose due date with her first baby approaches. This is a magical moment. You are poised on the threshold of something so enormous and so dazzling that there are no words to describe it. No matter how you end up making the passage to motherhood, you will be irrevocably changed on the other side. You will have given birth. You will be expanded, empowered, enlarged, altered in ways that will reveal themselves gradually to you over time. I can’t wait to share the experience with you.