Grace

Love and instinct

The long, coltish legs of an almost-young-woman

A few weeks ago, in a beautiful post called Pretty, Kelle Hampton wrote this about parenting: I don’t have all the answers, but I have good instincts and I love my kids something fierce.

I’m not sure that I have ever heard a lovelier description of what I believe parenting is.  Instinct and love.  That’s all I have ever had.  As Grace’s tenth birthday nears, what parenting means to me has been on my mind.  I’m not entirely sure why.  What I do know is that in the last several months we have crossed a line, Grace and I.  We have walked into a new season together.

I have never had all the answers.  Far from it.  But lately the questions are different, and I don’t feel like I have any of the answers.  I am daunted by decisions about technology, boys, body image, confidence, and identity.  For the first time, I confront closed doors and eye rolls. The issues that rise up feel newly fraught, and I’m ever more aware that the patterns she and I set now will take us through into the teenage years.

But, for now, I still get hugs at bedtime and requests to snuggle.  Grace continues to love simply being with me, whether we are reading or doing errands or working on a puzzle.  I know these days are likely numbered, and I’m sure this is why I hold each afternoon chatting idly as I cook and she draws at the table more and more tightly.  My awareness of how fleeting this time is is so keen as to be painful.  Every minute contains an ending, as well, of course, as a thrilling beginning.

The mothering ground is shifting under me in a particularly dramatic way right now and I’m trying to find my footing.  I have no choice but to trust that the instincts that have always been strong will continue to guide me through.  There’s no question that the ferocious love is undimmed.  Just as I figured out how to coax a colicky baby towards sleep (though it took me a while, and an ocean of tears) I will figure out how to parent a nascent adolescent.  Right?  I have to believe this is true.

Love and instinct.  Instinct and love.  Here we go.

If you have children in the 9, 10, 11 year old range, does this sense of transition feel familiar?  Any tips, advice, or words of wisdom are most welcome.

 

I hope you dance

Yesterday morning, Grace and I drove Whit to camp.  This week is lacrosse camp for him, and she is home because she heads to sleepaway camp on Thursday morning.  En route, “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack came on the radio.  I turned it up.  “Listen to this, guys!  No, really.  Listen.  This is the best summary I know of what I want for you both, as your mother.”

I glanced back in the rear view and saw that they were both listening.  Each was turned, looking out of the window on their side of the car.  Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance, sang Lee Ann.

“Well, we do that, Mummy.”  Grace chimed in.

“We do?” I smiled.

“Yeah, we look at the sky all the time!”  Whit added.  We fell silent again, listening.

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean came out of the radio.  “I know what that feels like!” Whit laughed.  “When I swim out to the raft, or when we jump off the boat into the ocean, I feel tiny!  Sometimes it’s sort of scary!”  Grace nodded with a faint smile on her face.

When the song came to an end, I turned the radio off.  “What do you guys think that means, I hope you dance?”

“I think maybe it means doing big things, having experiences.  Right?” Grace said.

“Also, taking risks?” Whit offered.

“Yes.  I think it means living life, you know?  Jumping in.”

“Like we do off the boat, or we did at Walden that day?” Whit asked.  I remembered the two of them hurtling headlong into the clear, still water of Walden Pond early in the morning, remembered the peals of their laughter in the morning stillness.

“Yes.  Exactly.”  I blinked back tears.  “And you know, the other line I really, really love in that song is I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.”  The brake lights in front of me blurred.  I peered in the rear view mirror again.  They were both staring out their windows.  I started to say something and then I stopped myself.  I focused on the lights in front of me and I drove.  Grace and Whit were quiet in the back.

After a couple of minutes of silence, I finally said, “I really do hope that, you know.  Probably most of all.  Never lose your sense of wonder.  There’s magic everywhere, and I hope you can always see it.”

They went really fast

We spent several days last week at my parents’ house by the ocean.  It was a wonderfully fluid kaleidoscope of activities and groups; we all wheeled through various permutations from all together to alone.  It was just a lovely few days.

About halfway through, Grace and I were walking alone and talking.  “We still have three days here,” I told her.  “Isn’t that great?”

“Oh, yes,” she sighed and grabbed my hand.  I adore that both of my children still hold my hand when we walk down the street. We admired the range of hydrangea colors at the next house we passed.  And then Grace said, “You know, it does feel like we have been here a long time already.”  I nodded.  “But also not long at all.”

“I know what you mean.”

“When you’re in them, days take a long time.  But then when you look back they went really fast.”  We walked for a few steps.  “Do you know what I mean, Mummy?”  She looked at me, and I stared back into my own brown eyes, blinking back tears.

“Yes, Grace.  I know exactly what you mean.”

 

Early morning at Walden

Last week Grace and Whit weren’t in any camps, because of the 4th of July and our plan to spend the second half of the week with my sister and family (just back from Jerusalem) at my parents’ house on the ocean.  So we had a couple of unscheduled days to play with.  One morning we went, early, to Walden Pond.  That raw March morning when the three of us walked around the pond was almost a year and a half ago.  It is a day that they both still refer to.  It’s funny how that decision, made on a whim, to seek out the quiet of Walden and to trust that my children would respond to its calm yielded one of our most enduring recollections.  A reminder that for me at least it is hard to predict which moments will crystallize into cherished memories, turned over in our minds like touchstones in our pockets, worn smooth with caressing.

We woke to a clear blue early July morning and headed immediately west, hoping to beat the crowds that I know swarm Walden Pond on warm days.  Arriving just before 8, we were almost alone.  The children immediately walked into the water, marveling at how clear it was, and how warm.  All three of us ducked under the first line and swam out, noticing that the water quickly grew darker, debating why this was.  It got deep quickly, Grace noticed.  And it did.  After a bit of a swim we turned around and returned to where they could stand.

Then they played in the shallows chasing schools of almost translucent yellow fish.  Their laughter rang in the quiet air.  I hung back and watched them, hearing Thoreau in my head.  I almost called the children over to quote the famous lines, to make sure they understood the importance of the place we stood.  And then I caught myself.  I didn’t need to point it out to them.  They knew.  They know.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

 

Closing a door

Last Thursday were Grace and Whit’s school closing ceremonies.  As he leaves 1st grade, Whit leaves the Morse Building, the part of the school for the very youngest children.  It’s where both of our children started at this school, at age 4, as Beginners.  The Morse Building will always be the first place I dropped my first baby off for her first day of school, and its halls, lined with large bright drawings and full of the clamor of small children, will always bring nostalgic tears to my eyes.

I sat in Whit’s closing ceremony, my husband on one side of me and one of my very dearest friends on the other, fighting tears as small voices songs from Free to Be You and Me and the theme from Greatest American Hero.  It was just moments ago that Whit was cross-legged on the mats on the floor while Grace sat on the stage, a member of the 1st grade, the “big kids” of the Morse Building.  Again, as it does so often lately, time collapsed and the radiance and sorrow of everyday life collided, sparks flying.  I fought to be here now as the past exerted itself like a riptide, dragging me down the disorienting corridors of memory.

Then the Morse Building children sang their traditional last song, Now It’s Time to Go, and I began to cry in earnest.  This year has not been any more full of lasts than any other, but my last child leaving this deeply special place has made them feel especially poignant.  The last Morse Building holiday concert, with a child curled on my lap on the floor as we all belt Snow Pants and I Am a Latke.  The last 1st grade assembly.  The last harvest festival.  I remembered Grace’s observation that she gets the firsts and Whit gets the lasts.  I swam in a morass of lasts, of endings, of farewells.

Once more, in that same small gym where so many transitions have been made and celebrated, the air was thick with both wonder and loss.  Wonder and loss, which are inextricably wound around each other, are the central notes of my life.

Then Grace celebrated the end her school year with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades.  Grace’s music teacher, who was also my music teacher, rushed over to me before the ceremony began and showed me a mimeographed page of the 1982 class lists.  My name appeared there, under IIS, with a star next to it to show I had been new that year.  The past clanged in my head and I held the back of the metal folding chair to keep my balance as that dizzying, familiar vertigo rose up: between past and present, between my daughter and myself, that this moment somehow contains all the moments that have come before.

And then it was over and we left.  We walked out through the Morse Building, through the doors I’ve pushed open with one hand so many hundreds of times, the other hand clasped by a small child.  Through the lobby where I’ve sat for hours, waiting for classrooms to open in the morning and for lines of children to emerge in the afternoon.  Past the nurse’s office where I’ve picked up children with strep, with stitches that have reopened, with mono, with sore collarbones.  Into the sunshine, blinking, through the playground where we’ve spent countless hours playing.  I can squint and see 4 year old Grace propelling herself around on the push tricycles, smiling at me across the yard while I sat on the faded wooden bench trying to restrain a wiggly toddler Whit from hurling himself into the fray.  The memories blinked in my mind like fireflies; they were brilliantly bright but I couldn’t make them stay.

And the heavy green door clicked shut behind us.  And we followed them out of the gate, which Whit is finally tall enough to open himself, and down the street.  My children leading me home and simultaneously walking away.

Radiance and sorrow.  Wonder and loss.  This one precious, devastating life.