Grace

Business travel

IMG_7425

Dawn breaking through the airplane window

I don’t travel much for work, but occasionally I do. I haven’t experience travelling on a private aircraft like the ones at Jettly so I hope I can try it soon! Last week I went to New York for the day.  As I was getting ready to leave at 5 am, I heard Whit’s door creak open and his feet pad to the bathroom.  He must have seen the light on downstairs because I heard him calling quietly to me.  “Mummy?  Is that you?”  I went upstairs, following him into his room, marveling again at his narrow, bird-like shoulders, his pale skin, the two freckles on his back.

I leaned over to tuck him back in, explaining that I was on my way to Logan.  He wasn’t totally awake and, nodding, he rolled over and clutched his monkey, Beloved.  I tiptoed out of the room, trying not to let my heels click on the hardwood floor. I heard him murmur something sleepily.  I turned, went back in, and crouched by his head.  “What?”

He turned his head and his eyes gleamed in the dim light.  “I just said I miss you already.”

The whole way to the airport I felt that moment inside my chest, like an ember.  I felt warm, heavy, grateful, sad.  One surprise of parenting for me has been the amplitude and speed with which my feelings oscillate: during an afternoon of meetings I desperate ache for my children and then, five minutes after returning home, I’m overcome by their noisy demands.

All through the bumpy flight I thought of Whit’s quiet voice, his nightlight-lit room, his beat up Beloved monkey, that he still, at eight years old, is happy to express love towards me.

Around 7am we landed and I opened my email.  I found two emails from Grace that said good morning, and was it okay for her to stay after school so that she could attend an extra session with her Math teacher?  Of course, of course, I typed, feeling both organized and aggravated that I was orchestrating these details from the runway at Laguardia.

Then, another email:

Grace Russell

Feb 7 (1 day ago)
to me

(This is Whit writing!) help me Grace is really annoying and I can’t survive please I beg you.

I burst out laughing.  This is parenting, at its essence, right here, isn’t it?  So heart-wrenchingly sweet you feel like you can’t breathe and then, an hour later, so hilarious you laugh out loud.

A Pebble For Your Pocket

One recent weekend morning Grace, Whit and I were puttering at home (I know!  What else is new!?).  I was doing laundry and they were in Grace’s room, next to mine, and they started to bicker. Suddenly, without a plan, I called, “Hey, guys!  Let’s get in my bed and read.”  Why not get into bed at 10:30 in the morning?  My bed is, after all, a refuge for both of them and, in truth, for me.

To my surprise, Grace and Whit agreed.  I thought at first we were going to read Harry Potter and then, out of blue, I noticed the stack of library books on the edge of my bureau.  A Pebble For Your Pocket, a book of “mindful stories for children and grown-ups,” by Thich Nhat Hahn, was sitting on top.  Ah, thank you, universe, I thought, grabbing the paperback before clambering into the middle of my bed between Grace and Whit.

As I opened the book I hesitated.  I thought, for a moment: I wonder if they are going to go for this.  Well, one way to find out, I thought as I cleared my throat and opened to the first story, called “Who is the Buddha?”  Just as it had in the library, a gossamer veil of quiet descended on the room.  It seemed as though all of our breathing slowed down.  I felt as though something brushed past me in the dark, touching me so barely I might have imagined it.  The last time I felt this sensation was in May, in the ER with Grace, and I described it thus: “I felt the feathers of holiness brush my cheek, the sensation of something sacred descending into the room, as undeniable as it was fleeting.  There have been a few moments like this in my life – more than a handful, but fewer than I’d like – when I am conscious of the way divinity weaves its way into our ordinary days.  This was one.”

I think that feeling is grace.

We read two stories and put the book away and the current of our day took us all with it.  It wasn’t until the next morning, when Grace and Whit were sitting at the kitchen table working on their classroom Valentine’s, that either of them mentioned Thich Nhat Hahn.

“Mum?”  Grace was looking down, concentrating on the glitter she was shaking onto a card.  “Can we read more of those pebble stories?”  I run upstairs to get the dogeared library book, and then, sitting between them on our battered wooden kitchen chairs, read several more stories.  As I read I remembered the first time I read Thich Nhat Hahn.  Peace is Every Step was an important book for me in college, a reminder of what mattered, what I wanted, to keep breathing, to live here.  As you can tell, I’m still working at this, still learning the same lesson, and I keep flubbing it.  Over and over again.  But what is there to do but to keep my eyes open, to take a deep breath, to love this life of mine, in all its flawed, real, glittering beauty?

The hermit is inside of you.  In fact, all the wonderful things that you are looking for – happiness, peace, and joy – can be found inside of you.  You do not need to look anywhere else. – Thich Nhat Hahn, A Pebble For Your Pocket

Tears at hockey

IMG_7101

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.

 

Oh the places you’ll go

IMG_7032

A couple of weeks ago, we had one of those empty Sunday afternoons that I have come to prize above all others.  But in the moment, I was not prizing anything.  Everybody was cranky, pissy, annoyed.  The sky was spitting rain.  I asked Whit and Grace what they wanted to do, because the only thing that was non-negotiable was that we had to get out of the house. They didn’t want to do anything.  They certainly didn’t want to do anything together.

Fine.  I made an executive decision.  Whit needed some more Rotten School books to read anyway, so off we went to the library.  Luckily the main branch is open on Sunday afternoons.  We rode up the elevator to the third floor and I watched in wonder as the library worked its magic.  Extraordinary.  They were almost immediately calm, engrossed.  We had just been talking about the Sheep in a Jeep picture books and Whit wanted to see them, so we headed to the picture book section.

These days, we don’t usually set up shop in the picture book section.  But that day we did.  We found Sheep in a Jeep, read it, and then Grace and Whit both turned to the shelves.  Whit pulled out a stack of Dr. Seuss books, and Grace found several old favorites to revisit.  We sat together at a small round table and leafed through books.  I looked up.

IMG_7038

And instantly found myself blinking away tears.  Oh, the places you’ll go, my newly-minted eight year old.  Yes, the places you’ll go.  I can imagine them, can see them beginning to shimmer on the horizon, those places, away from home, away from this moment, away from me.  You’re going, and I am waving, and I couldn’t be prouder.

We stayed at the library for a long time.  I personally adore picture books and am glad to see that Grace and Whit still wanted to immerse themselves in them.  There was no scoffing about “baby books” or impatience or frustration.  There was just the quiet, suffused with contentment, the flipping of pages, the whispers of parents and squeaks of babies and mumbles of toddlers.

Then we went to the playground outside the park to play for a bit before heading home for dinner.  The rain had stopped and the sky was a thick, dense plane of gray cloud.  Grace and Whit played together, laughing, making up games.

IMG_7045

I sat on the swings and watched them play.  They leapt from rock to rock, chased each other around the deserted playground, and made up games together.  I’ve written before about my intense pride when I watch my children playing in creative, unstructured ways, about how I’m probably more thrilled by creative play than I am by conventional accomplishments.

I swung and watched them, and before I knew it my cheeks were wet with tears again.  How much longer will they want to spend a Sunday afternoon with me, at the library, at the playground?  Sure, not long.  The familiar awareness of how short this time is gripped me, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  Somehow my keen sense of the fleeting nature of this moment is both immensely familiar and, still, so powerful that it brings me to my knees.  My nostalgia for this time in my own life – even as I live it – is nothing short of overwhelming.

I swung back and forth, watching them laugh and jump, unable to hear what they were saying to each other, feeling tears run down my face.  Oh, the places they’ll go.  Oh, the places they are already going.

I hope so too

It’s been an odd couple of days.  I am still floating on that disorienting current of grief and gratitude and guilt that I mentioned yesterday.  I’m experiencing Grace and Whit in high definition, and my awareness of their every detail of is at an all-time high; I’m dazzled, and overcome, by the physicality of their bodies, their presence in a room, their noise, their sheer being-ness.  I look at them and think, again, they are tenaciously sturdy and incomprehensibly fragile at the same time.

Since our conversation on Sunday about what happened, there have been very few references to it in our house.  Grace asked me at bedtime yesterday if the sick and angry man was really dead, and I said yes.  She asked me how many children had died and I told her.  She asked me how old they were and I told her.  She was quiet then, for a long minute, and then opened her book, curled closer to me on the couch so that she was flush against my side, and started reading.

Tonight, as I tucked her in, she said her usual prayers (“thank you for this amazing world” being the line that always slays me).  I kissed her on the forehead and began to stand up.  “Wait,” she whispered.  “I want to say another prayer for those kids.”  I sat back down on the edge of her bed and nodded in the nightlight-lit dimness of her room.

“I hope those kids know they are loved, and know how much their families miss them,” she looked at me, her mahogany eyes huge, shining.  “I hope they are settling into their new lives in heaven.  I really hope they are with Pops and Helen.  Maybe they are going swimming with Helen and talking about airplanes with Pops.”  I swallowed hard, struck by her conflation of her late-summer loss with the deaths of these children.  The deaths are of course as different as you can imagine, but I think that conceptually, they each feel both near and far to Grace.  Her great-grandfather, beloved, but old, in a stage of life so foreign as to be a different country.  These children, strangers, but her close contemporaries, the girls and boys she sits next to at assemblies and walks by in halls.   I love that she imagines them drawing comfort from each other.

I leaned down to kiss her again, and felt her arms clasp my neck and pull me tight.  “I hope so too, Grace.” I whispered against her ear, feeling my tears trickle into her hair.  I hope so too.