Grace

My little soul mate

Last Thursday we dropped Grace off at camp.  My heart was still soggy from the night before, but I put on my sunglasses and got in the car and off we headed.  As we drove the familiar roads on Cape Cod, turned into the driveway with the archery range and sun-bleached grassy front fields, I was flooded with memories.  The smiling, white-clad Junior Counselors looked so young, and I choked up inside.  I was trying to reconcile the fact that I was just them with the knowledge that that was more than half my lifetime ago.

After a check-in at the infirmary (we passed the lice test, yay!) off we went to Cabin 50.

Cabin 50 is directly across from Cabin 54, the place where I first laid eyes on Jessica and commenced a lifetime friendship.  I’m not sure Julia and Grace were as moved by this detail as Jess and I were, but we both noted the proximity of the place where it all began, and smiled, eyes glistening.  We helped the girls unpack, Grace on the top bunk and Julia on the bottom.  Then they put on suits and we headed up to the pool, with the other new Juniors, for their swimming test.

The daughter of another dear friend of mine from camp was also in the girls’ cabin.  Three of them!  My head swims looking at this picture, remembering when we were 10 and when we were 16 and when we were 21, of all the experiences we shared in this very same place.  And we all have girls, and hopefully they are embarking on a similar road, together.  I had tears in my eyes the whole time we were there.

There was no good time to leave so we did so, somewhat abruptly, at the pool.  They were waiting for their test and we were the only parents still there.  I can’t get the way Grace looked at me out of my head: her eyes were filled with wild surprise, nearing panic, and sadness swamped her entire face.  I hugged her and kissed her and walked away.  Their JCs and counselors swarmed around the crying girls, their white backs blocking them.  So we couldn’t see, as we walked, if they were still crying, but we sure were.  I don’t like the way I left her, but I’m not sure if any moment would have been better.  At least this way, my friend said, they had something to focus on immediately, a task to dive into, both literally and figuratively.

I was utterly shocked by how sad I was, all day long.  It pains me to admit that – what mother didn’t expect to miss her child? – but it’s true.  I knew I’d miss her, but I didn’t really think through the visceral, physical missing: the tears that wouldn’t stop, the ache in my chest, the way I winced every time I glanced back at her empty booster seat.  I know this kind of independence is precisely what I want for my child, and it’s impossible to overstate how completely I trust this camp to take care of her.  I know she will have a wonderful time.  But still.  Her face, the tears, the abandonment: they rise up in my head, over and over.  I guess this is her first experience of Pema’s timeless wisdom about being thrust out of the nest.

I emailed a close friend later that day, expressing the way sorrow had startled me, sharing how much I missed my daughter.  She responded immediately with this: “Not surprising. She’s your soulmate in many ways.”  These lines stunned me with their truth.  This isn’t the first time this friend has knocked me back with her insight and support.  My soul yearns for its little partner.  Of course it does.

And still, I believe absolutely that this experience will be excellent for her.  I hope she makes sturdy, possibly lifetime friendships, I hope she tries new activities, I hope she develops confidence in her own ability to be in the world without me, and I hope she internalizes the camp motto, emblazoned above the outdoor theater:

Full of magic

Last Thursday morning we dropped Grace off at sleep-away camp (is it sleepover camp, or sleep away camp, and is there a hyphen?  I cannot figure this out) for 10 days.  Her anxiety about going had been mounting for the week or two prior to July 21st, and I was expecting some tears, and then some fireworks, at bedtime that last night.

Instead, she was calm, and quiet, though visibly sad.  We read several extra pages of Harry Potter, with Grace curled up close to me, rapt as we heard Hagrid’s story of his summer tangling with the giants.  I stopped reading after our normal amount, she looked at me with saucer eyes, endlessly deep and shining with tears, and I didn’t even say a word before turning back to the book to finish the chapter.

Then I took her to her room, and tucked her in.  I lay next to her on her narrow pink bed, as I do many nights.  “Sing me your favorite song from camp, Mummy,” she asked.  And so I did, whispering Christopher Robin to her, our heads leaning together, foreheads almost touching.  She had to have been breathing my breath as I sang.  I rubbed her back through her pajama top, singing the song twice through. When I was finished I heard her murmur, “I love you, Mummy.”

“It’s time for you to go now, isn’t it?”  she lifted her head up and looked at me.  I nodded.  My own eyes were glassy.  To miss ten days of this?  What was I thinking?  She swallowed and glanced over at her yellow and brown bears.  Then, back to me.  She nodded.  “Okay.”  She lay back down and twined her arms around my neck.  “I’m going to miss you,” she started to cry softly and I felt her tears on my skin.

“I’m going to miss you too, Gracie.”  I pressed a kiss to her forehead.  She pulled back to look at me.

“You will?”

“Oh, yes.  Grace,” I began, haltingly.  “One thing to remember is that you will be at camp, having all of these new experiences, new friends, and adventures.  Singing that song, for example!” A small giggle erupted out of her at that.  “And I’ll be here in my ordinary life.”

“Mum!”  Grace sat up suddenly.  Her cheeks shone in the dusk of her room, dark except for the light that slanted in from the hall.  Her voice was practically stern.  “Your life is not ordinary.  Your life is full of magic.”

Why, yes it is.

Fireworks

Last Friday night was the annual fireworks display in Marion.  For a number of reasons I was having one of those evenings where I felt like Grace and Whit were the only true, steady things in my life.  We walked down to the dock at the end of the street to watch the fireworks hand in hand.  Whit has this new thing he does when he’s walking and holding my hand, where he turns my wrist to his face and kisses it.  He kept doing that, so often that I felt my heart expanding in my chest, filling (some of) the space that had felt so echoingly, clangingly empty just moments ago.

We sat and watched the fireworks. The show ended and everyone around me stood up to go, but I sat and watched the wisps of smoke in the sky.  Where there had been flashes of brilliant light, now there were traces of faint grayness, fading gradually to black.  The space held the memory of what had been, but tenuously, and only if you paid attention.

Grace tapped my shoulder and looked down at me.  “Are we going to go?”  I stared up at her, at her angular face, so full of her galloping years, and I blinked.  She looked confused, wondering, no doubt, what I was doing.  Shaking my head, stunned at the traces of babyhood that were still, but barely, visible in her face, I got to my feet.

We walked slowly back to the house, Grace holding my hand.  Whit was walking with Matt, and they and my parents and other people moved near us but I felt like Grace and I were alone in the world.  She gripped my hand and I glanced over at her head, her braids messy from a day in and out of the water, and noticed that it is at my shoulder now.  “Will you always watch the fireworks with me, Mummy?”  She spoke quietly.

“Yes, Grace, of course.”  I dropped her hand to squeeze her shoulders against my chest, marveling at how solid she seems, when she used to be so birdlike.  “Until you don’t want me to, of course,”  I laughed.  “Like when you’re a teenager.”  I smiled at her but she was looking straight forward with a scowl on her face.

A beat passed and we walked in the full-blown summer evening, hydrangeas everywhere.  “I don’t want to be a teenager, Mummy,” she said firmly.  I looked over at her, surprised.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t.  It’s going too fast.”  She stopped walking and faced me.

What I said next surprised me.  “Grace, you know how right now you are so excited about summer, and then at the end of summer you are ready for it to be over, and to go back to school?”  She nodded.  “And remember how at the beginning of December Christmas is so exciting, and then by the time it’s New Year’s you just want to pack away all the decorations and start back to regular life?”  She nodded again, but clearly wondered where I was going.  “The point is,” I said, swallowing as I realized where I was going.  “Everything happens at just the right time.  I promise.”  My eyes welled with tears.  Do I even believe this?  I don’t know.

“No.”  She looked right at me, her own eyes glassy, wet.  “I don’t ever want to lose you.”  I wrapped my arms around her and she buried her face in my chest.  I could feel tears through my thin cotton t-shirt.

“You won’t ever lose me, Grace.  You won’t.”  I closed my eyes and saw the gray streak of where the fireworks had been against the night sky, heard the whisper of moments that had passed, said a silent thanks for the fact that I can see the vestiges of smoke that remain after the showy brightness of life’s fireworks.

wings

I always think of their shoulder blades as wings.  Their wings, poking through their skin.  And his little back has two freckles on it now, marks marring his white, skim-milk skin, my skin.  Life beginning to make its mark on my child.

The wings, though, are on my mind today.  The wings.

This past winter Whit went through a phase when he slept every night with his hand clasped around the little compass my parents gave him in his stocking for Christmas.  I always wondered, when I went in to kiss him goodnight, where his dreams were taking him.  Where was he flying, in his sleep, guided by the true north he could always check in his palm?

May they have both a compass and wings, my children.  Oh, please, please: never let them lose that physical sensation of wonder, that feeling that I always associate with wings beating in my chest.  And please, please: let me help them each find their own internal compass, that needle that tugs north.  That internal compass which can be trusted to orient us, no matter what whitewater we tumble in.

I’m still looking for both my compass and my wings, and, oddly enough, my children provide them for me better than anything else in my life.  They seem to have both already.  Maybe we’re born with our wings and our compass, and the task of our lives, at once simple and enormous, is not to lose them.

Welcoming what is to come

Recently, Whit, Grace and I spent the afternoon at a water park.  Whit doesn’t do water slides (note: this may change soon, as he didn’t do rollercoasters until last week, when he suddenly tried one and is now a Huge Ride Guy) so we spent a lot of time in the wave pool.  We headed into the waves, Grace and Whit erupting into giggles as the water splashed up our legs.  When got to the deeper water, where the waves were big, both kids started thrashing around.  I grabbed them both, holding one against each hip, marveling at how enormous, lean, and knobby their bodies are now.  Because we were in water I held them easily, feeling slippery skin against skin, looking back and forth at their smiling faces.

“So the thing, guys,” they leaned their heads towards mine, listening above the roar of the waves, “Is to just float in the waves.  Let them bob you around.  Don’t fight them.”  I saw Whit’s eyebrows raise skeptically.  “No, really, Whit.  I know it sounds crazy.  But try to just drift in the waves.  You’ll see.”

I let go of them and Grace immediately flipped onto her back, trying to float in the undulating water.  Whit plummeted again below the surface and came splashing up, panic and delight mixing in his eyes.  He grasped for me, water splashing everywhere.  I took his arm.  I put my arm around his waist and held him against my side, watching Grace in the waves.  It was not lost on me that this is how I held him, all the time, when he was a baby and toddler.

A few moments later I noticed that Whit was pushing away from me, trying to pry my fingers off of him.  “Mummy!”  I looked at him, surprised.  “I’m trying to drift!  Let me go so I can try to bob!”  Laughing, I let go of him and smiled as I watched him, trying to relax his body, trying to trust the rising and falling water.

After a minute or two both kids came back to me, tired, tethering themselves to my body.  Whit said, “Let’s hold hands! Let’s make a family circle!”  And so we did, my feet firmly planted on the floor, both kids bobbing up and down in the water as it moved around them.  Johnny Cash’s voice, singing “…will the circle be unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by..” sprang into my head my head and stayed there for the rest of the evening.

Grace and I took another few trips down the water slides and I wrapped up in some towels and gave them the five minute warning.  They wanted to go back into the wave pool so I sat on one of the faded yellow plastic chairs, watching, as they stepped tentatively into the splashing water.  When they got deep enough that Whit couldn’t touch anymore, I watched them both trying to float.  And then I noticed that Grace held Whit in her arms, helping support him in the roiling waves.  Tears sprang to my eyes as I noticed how her arms reached instinctively for him, how he clasped her with complete trust, their dark heads next to each other as they looked away from me towards the source of the waves.

Whit started to wade out of the water.  Close to shore, he grinned at me and then suddenly turned back again towards the pool.  He held his arms up above his head, open, walking back into the waves.  Startlingly, I thought of the minister at his christening, a tall, imposing man who had held his arms up like that while I cradled Whit above the font.  His arms open in benediction, he’d boomed, “Welcome, Samuel Whitman Russell.  Welcome, all of us.”

Arms spread, Whit walked back into the waves.  Welcoming what is to come.  Without fear.  May I do the same.