Grace

Almost all days have rainbows in them

On Saturday morning Grace and I were puttering around the house.  She was in her room and I was folding laundry, and I could hear her humming “Rainbow Connection” to herself.  They are learning it in music to sing at an all-school assembly that is obviously designed to make me break down in hysterics.  After a few minutes she trotted in and offered me this piece of paper.  My first reaction was to correct her spelling but I bit my tongue and let delight at this wonderful sentiment wash over me.

“Oh, Grace, thank you!  It totally brightens my day.”

“I had rainbows on my mind because of the song,” she explained.

“I know.  I could hear you singing.”  She smiled.  “Do most days contain rainbows, Grace, do you think?”

She glanced out the window at the sleety, defiantly gray late-March day.  Of course she knew I was speaking metaphorically.  “Yes.  Almost all days have rainbows in them.”  She looked right at me, her mouth set.  “Don’t you think?”  I nodded.  “You just have to pay attention to notice them.”

Amen.

The grubby intimacy of siblings

 

Last week, we watched Tin Tin.  I mostly watched Grace and Whit.  At one point her leg was slung over the arm of his seat, and his hand rested on her foot.  Sometimes this kind of intrusion results in a loud explosion of bickering, with some shoving.  But at other times it falls unnoticed into the rich swamp of shared childhood that they are crossing together.  I thought of the intense, often grubby intimacy of siblings, the way they are each other’s morning and night, the only other person growing in this unique terroir.

I missed my sister then, who is halfway across the world in Jerusalem.  I’ve written before about the opinion, held by some, that our most formative relationships are with our sibling(s).  And I have written reams about my particular sibling, my adored sister Hilary, the adventurous one, the brilliant one, the brave one.

Watching Grace and Whit – every day, but especially inside the hothouse of a week of vacation – I think of Hilary constantly.  They are each other’s first peer relationship, the person with whom they share these essential early experiences, to whom they will announce excitement and heartbreak, against whom they will probably always measure themselves.  They witness together the messy reality of our family life, both its raised voices and its enthusiastic embraces.  I admit perhaps too readily that my desire to have a second child was secondary to my desire to have a sibling for Grace (of course, that faded the instant Whit arrived, when I immediately loved him as much as I’ve loved anyone else on earth).  But my impulse was right, of that I’m certain.  I am intensely thankful when I observe their closeness, striated as may be with arguing.

After all, I would not be who I am today without Hilary.  In the simplest terms, her influence pushed me to explore further and to try harder.  There’s no better example than that we would never have gone to Jerusalem last December if she and her family had not chosen to live there for a year.  I watch my children bounce off of each other, their sharp corners gouging into each other and  their arms providing comfort when it is needed, and I think of Hilary.  And I am overwhelmed with gratitude.

The holiness in housekeeping

I love empty, unprogrammed weekend days.  Sometimes we have adventures and fly through the air.  Sometimes we simply hang out at playgrounds.  But most often, a wide-open Sunday contains some mix of errands, laundry, walks around the neighborhood, skating, work email, bill-paying, packing of lunches, and cooking for the week ahead.

And you know what I’m realizing, lately?  Very often, the days full of these chores, of life’s most prosaic tasks, are my very favorites.  Grace and I were walking to the drycleaner and bank last Sunday morning, holding hands as we admired the cloudless blue sky when she sighed and said, “Mummy, I love just hanging out with you.”

“I do too,” I said, squeezing her peace sign patterned fleece glove.

We walked on in amiable silence.  Often, on the weekends, we fall into pairs, with Matt and Whit playing hockey or starting a big Lego project and Grace and I being the errand brigade.

“You know, Grace,” I said as we waited for the light.  “I think it’s great if you can really enjoy these little things.”

“Why?  You mean because if we can think something as regular as a chore is fun, then something big like” she hesitated.  “Like … Legoland, well, something big like that is even better?”

I thought about this for a minute as we crossed the street.  What did I really mean?  I guess it’s that the ability to find authentic joy in the grout I keep writing about seems like a very strong predictor of a life filled with contentment and cheer.  When I see my daughter evincing pleasure in such basic, quotidian tasks I feel immense pride and also a flicker of hope that she will have a happy life despite being freighted by having a mother who’s more shadow than sun.

I suspect this is also about my growing conviction that there is a deep holiness in this housekeeping, this elemental life-keeping.  It doesn’t seem like an accident that in recent years some of the basic burdens of keeping a family going – packing lunches, folding laundry – have become things I do, often, with reverence.  I can’t explain what’s changed, but there’s no question that the most ordinary details of my life seem shot through with meaning, charged with a shimmer of the spirit.

And, finally, just as I exhort my children to simply notice things, I’m grateful for any signs of their sinking into their lives, of their learning to lean into the truth of whatever is, at any moment.  Even when it’s boring, even when it means standing in line at the post office or scrubbing dishes.  There is divinity in that drudgery.  I know there is, and it is a source of grand, enormous pride that my daughter may as well.

 

Liminal

Grace is such a liminal creature right now, straddling girlhood and tweendom, the baby she was and the young woman she’s becoming at warp speed both visible in her bottomless brown eyes.  I look at her and it takes my breath away, the dizzying identification, the breakneck pace with which almost 10 years have rushed by, the inevitability, somehow, that she and only she would be my daughter.

I read two posts over the weekend that brought me to breathless, gasping tears with their evocation of what lies ahead of me.  Of us, Grace and me.  Launa’s essay, On Heartache, reminded me how very much growing up of my own I have to do before I am able to effectively mother Grace through the next several years.  I know I am not up, yet, to the challenge that Launa elucidates:

Because this is what it means to be a good teacher, and a good mother, to adolescent girls.  It means to hold your own self together, to endure and be strong and be both firm and loving, so that you can be the adult they need you to be.  Even when it stings the most, we mothers and teachers have to be stalwart and certain in the boundlessness of our love and the firmness of our boundaries.

Oh, oh, oh.  I am still so immature myself, as a woman and a mother, and this strength and firmness seems far out of my grasp.  The boundlessness of my love, that part, I’ve got down.  The rest of it, I need to work on, and I am immensely grateful for Launa’s wise and articulate counsel as I move, just behind her, through the myriad stages, each full of an amalgam of heartbreak and wonder that I had never imagined, of mothering a daughter.

And then I read Katrina’s stunning post In Awe, about watching her son in his element, about observing the flowering of the innate skills and passions that she glimpsed in him early on, when he was a two year old toddler.  Katrina’s a mothering role model for me, there’s no question, and each and every piece of her writing moves me to tears as it shifts something heavy and essential inside my chest.  She puts into words the challenges and glories of this road, of the effort to remain steadfast and of the need to believe in what we know to be true of our children better than anyone else I know.

And what is our real job as parents, if not first to nurture the beings entrusted to our care, to have faith in their inchoate processes of growing and becoming, and then to show up, again and again, for as long as we are able, to bear grateful witness to their unfolding destinies?

It is this faith, and this showing up, that is central to my life now.  I watch Grace and Whit as they stretch into the beings they have always been, leaning into what I know of them, even when they behave in ways that I dislike or as they begin to explore where the limits are.  They still look back over their shoulder to make sure I’m watching them, and as much as this can feel like a burden – I have to watch everything – I also know these days are precious, and numbered.  What Launa and Katrina remind me, though, is that even when Grace and Whit roll their eyes and push me away, I need to keep watching, witnessing with forbearance, trusting, loving, even – perhaps most of all – when I doubt that they notice or care.

I’ve written before about my conviction that my children do not belong to me, shared how deeply I’m honored to be the passage they chose to come through on their way to the great wide open of this world.  It’s a privilege beyond expressing to watch them flower, to watch them grow, and while I know that there is more shocking bittersweetness ahead, it’s all worth it.

Some days I can do nothing other than kneel, press my forehead to the cold window, watch the setting sun turn the sky orange and pink, and whisper my gratitude.  My gratitude for these children of mine, for this ordinary and painful and startlingly lovely life, for these friends and sages – today, and often, Launa and Katrina – whose words give me solace, comfort, and inspiration.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I love you.

I have long disliked Valentine’s Day, have often derided it as the ultimate Hallmark holiday

But now that I have children, suddenly, I love it.  It’s not just my abiding passion for the combination of red and pink.  It’s also that I love having a day so focused on telling my children I love them.  I don’t believe it’s possible for me to tell them that too much.  As firmly, fiercely, as I agree with Jenn Mattern’s wise and beautiful description of why she refuses to teach her daughters that the world revolves around them, I also want Grace and Whit to know deep in their spirits that they are loved by me without exception, without pause, without end.

This reminds me of Peggy Noonan’s wonderful editorial after the 9/11 attacks, where she asserts something I believe deeply: expressing how we feel frequently doesn’t cheapen the words, but allows them to sink into the object of our affection’s very marrow. We are often told the opposite, that we ought not say “I love you” too much, as though somehow we might wear it out or drain it of meaning.  I simply don’t agree with that.  Noonan summarizes her point:

We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

So I’ll take today, this day of lunchboxes packed with sandwiches cookied cuttered into heart shapes, backpacks bursting with homemade Valentines, and red velvet cupcakes with whipped cream frosting to tell my children I love you, again, always, no matter what.  I think we should all take the time to tell somehow we love that we do.  Don’t wait, and don’t hesitate.  You can’t say it too much.