Grace

Perfect

One day last week I changed the school drop off routine a little.  Whit walked halfway across campus with us and then waited, sitting on the bottom step of a building in the middle, while I took Grace the rest of the way.  She whined a little about this change (Whit didn’t join us at all in the past), insisting that her brother would intrude on our “special time.”  She glared at me as we pushed our way through the double doors to the playground.  I wanted badly to snap at her that she was being a brat, but I bit my tongue.  Moments later, they were walking ahead of me, heads bent together, murmuring about something I couldn’t hear.

It was perfect.

Saturday morning broke clear and cold, cold, cold.  I watched Grace’s soccer game hunched over, with my hands jammed into the pockets of my down coat.  It was so cold my eyes teared behind my sunglasses.  I had a lovely conversation with another Soccer Mom (gah!) and was taken aback when, mid-chat, Grace came running over, face flooded with tears.  “Mummy!  I just scored and you missed it because you were talking to Sophia’s mom!”  She crossed her arms across her chest and stamped her foot, the very picture of righteous indignation.  I hugged her instead of blowing up, guilt and irritation swamping me at once.  With her face pressed against my coat she couldn’t see the emotions at war on my face. How can I possibly live up to this standard? rang in one ear and Oh my God I misssed seeing her score a goal shouted in the other.

“I won’t score again today and you missed it,” she wailed against my parka.

She did score again, and I saw it.  I also observed her cheering on a teammate who tore down the field and scored her own goal, which made me far prouder than anything else (and I told her that).  I kept remembering: it won’t be long until she doesn’t want me to watch her anymore.

It was perfect.

After soccer, I took Whit to make good on a promise from his birthday.  He received several duplicate Legos so I told him I’d take him to the Lego store and he could choose anything he wanted (within reason).  He was overwhelmed by the Lego store, and spent long minutes walking its perimeter, eyes wide, finger trailing across the various boxes.  He could not make up his mind.  I urged him to pick something already, fretting to myself that if we didn’t get to Johnny Rocket’s before noon we’d have to wait for a table.  I chewed a fingernail, impatience swelling inside me, and told him again that it was time to choose.  Let’s be honest: I rushed him.

He decided on a Lego, we went to lunch, there was no wait, and he was utterly charmed by the faux-retro-diner details.  Then, at J Crew he picked out a pirate sweatshirt and was given this enormous, Willy Wonka-esque lollipop.

It was perfect.

I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away.   These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all.  This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life.  And I won’t let them.  I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins.  But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.

Thank you, Katrina, for the exact words I needed at the precise time I needed them.  As usual.

This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart.  Every day.

my Gracie girl

This was one of the most special days of my life.  One of our days at Disney, Grace and I snuck away to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  We were both spellbound.  I have never been somewhere more crowded – honestly.  Harry Potter made walking through the Magic Kingdom seem like an amble on a deserted beach.  But still…. still.  It was absolutely magical.  We walked around Hogsmeade, bought a wand, drank Butter Beer, explored Hogwarts castle, and rode twice on the Flight of the Hippogriffs (above, photo taken from car in front of us).  I don’t like roller coasters and neither do either of my children (coincidence?  perhaps not) but this was a nice, not-scary ride that we went on twice.

In this photo I see sheer joy radiating from Grace.  And from me.  We were both enchanted by the world of Harry Potter brought to life, but I know that part of the happiness was sharing it with each other, and only each other.

I’m extra aware, lately, of how short the time grows in which Grace will always, without question, choose my company.  She wants to be with me all the time.  This past weekend, after a Friday sleepover she was tired and weepy on Saturday evening.    When Matt and I left she clung to me, crying, asking me not to go.  To assuage her, she asked me to list how many nights in a row I’ll be putting her to bed starting on Sunday night.  These moments can be intensely frustrating for me, but I try to remember that soon enough I will miss them.  I’ll be nostalgic for the time – now – when I am a balm for all of her troubles. For the time – now – when a kiss genuinely helps a bruised knee and an extra cuddle truly does chase away bad dreams.

Sunday morning Grace and I sat in her room and played with her American Girl dolls.  From across the room, she said, out of the blue, “Mummy?  Did you know that if you don’t use your imagination you lose it?”  I was startled and then agreed with her, thanking my own mother and instinct and whatever other influences have contributed to my distinctly under-programmed, free range parenting style.

Then we walked down to the stores a few blocks from us, doing errands, and she happily bounced down the street with her hand in mine.  I don’t know how much longer this will last, but I know it’s not that long.  In the afternoon, at the park, she kept calling my name, wanting to be sure I watched her do the monkey bars or launch herself into a full flip above the swings, holding the chains.  Sometimes it feels like Grace needs me witness something for it to be real.  She’s got a wicked, uncanny sense for when my attention wavers, too, and always, always calls me on it.  Often with tears.  This, too, can be daunting: I try to focus on her as much as I can, but sometimes I do falter.   Watching her react, I always feel a wash of emotion, guilt mixed with aggravation.

And then, just as quickly, the reminders come flooding in.  This will pass.  These days are numbered.  It won’t be long til she doesn’t want my attention at all, and I’ll want to go back and relive every single park afternoon when Grace’s voice, calling my name, echoed in the early spring air.

As I write this I hear two things in my head: Grace and Whit’s giggles, from next door, and these lines from Ben Folds:

Life flies by in seconds
You’re not a baby Gracie, you’re my friend
You’ll be a lady soon but until then….

One day you’re gonna want to go
I hope we taught you everything you need to know
Gracie girl

And there will always be a part of me
Nobody else is ever gonna see but you and me
My little girl
My Gracie girl

I want to be your little girl

Saturday morning dawned clear and cold.  I took Grace and Whit out to breakfast at our favorite diner while Matt slept in.  Later, we went to meet some friends to walk around the reservoir in our town.  Our friends have a five year old son and an 18 month old daughter.  Slowly, we circled the reservoir.  The big kids on bikes and so were our friends, with their toddler in a bike seat.  Matt and I walked.  The children biked out ahead of us, that raveling red string unfurling towards the horizon, stretching, as it does, but never breaking.  It was windy and we all walked hunched over, hands jammed into pockets.  I looked up, almost desperately, at the branches against the crystal clear sky, looking for buds.

Eventually my friend’s daughter, C, got cold in the bike seat so we took her out to walk.  As she wandered along the path, crouching to investigate every small dried leaf or blade of new grass, we joked about how toddlers are the ultimate in people who Stop and Smell the Flowers.  Everybody else got cold, waiting for C to amble along, so I picked her up, surprised by how light she was in my arms, and held her against my hip as I walked, talking to my friend, who walked her bike beside me.

Suddenly I noticed Grace biking urgently back towards me, and when she got close I saw that her cheeks were wet with tears.  “What, Gracie?” I asked, wondering if she’d fallen.  She was crying so hard it was hard for her to get the words out, and she gestured me over so we could speak privately.  I leaned down so that I could hear her, my forehead clunking into the chilly plastic of her helmet.

“Mummy,” she wiped ineffectually at her tears with her mitten, “I want to be your little girl.”

“Oh, Grace!” Instinctively I knelt, still cradling C against my side, and wrapped my other arm around Grace.  I hugged her and then pulled back, looking right into her eyes.  “Grace.  You will always be my little girl.”

“But I’m not as little as she is,” Grace nodded towards C, who was watching all of this with interest.

“I know, Grace.  But it doesn’t matter how big you get.  You will always be my little girl.  You will always be my first baby.”

Appeased, she biked away, and I stood up and resumed walking, but now it was my cheeks that were wet.

Where does this come from?  Whit, too, has broken down, sharing through sobs how own sadness at time’s passage.  Do they pick this up from my talking about it?  The thing is, I don’t actually do that in front of them.  More likely, I suspect, sensitivity about time throbs in their bloodstreams as surely as it does in mine.  I feel so ambivalent about this; what a weight they carry, and it’s all because of me.  I don’t think very much about whether I’d rather be wired differently, because I know I can’t change my leaning toward melancholy or my skinlessness, can’t escape my sometimes-exquisitely painful awareness of life’s beauty and loss.  But I don’t like reminders like this one from Grace, of the high costs of having a mother who is more shadow than sun, whose gaze is often through tears, who loves and hurts in equal, fierce measure.

Oh, I worry about them.  I want what all parents want, in unison, and with the force of a tide: I want them to be happy.  I want joy and ease and as much wonder as they can bear.  And then maybe more.  I hope the sheer basic fact of my being their mother has not precluded this already for them.

I want to fill them up with poetry

Grace, Whit and I went to Walden today.  Over the years I have been there often, pulled by something beyond me, and I always go in the winter.  I like it empty and quiet.  I like to be the only person (people) there.  I like it when I can feel the spirituality crackling in the air.  I could today.

As we made our way around the pond Grace and Whit took detours to explore the woods and paused to wonder at the fact that the pond is still mostly covered with ice.  It is definitely not warm here yet, even though it is officially spring.  The trees are still defiantly bare, and their black branches net the sky.  Today that sky was gray, with occasional beams of sun breaking through the thick ridges of white-gray clouds.

As we walked I told Grace and Whit about Thoreau, about how he chose to live simply, to focus on the natural world around him.  Our adventure quickly turned into a Notice Things Walk, and each called out when they saw something worth sharing: a peculiar knot on the side of a tree trunk or the pattern of stones leading down to the water that looked like stairs.  When we arrived at the site of Thoreau’s cabin, we saw this sign and a pile of rocks.
As Grace read the lines, so familiar to me, and I felt my chest tighten.  They both had questions about the last line.  We talked about what meant to live a life so full that you felt sure, at the end of it, that you’d truly lived.  I had sunglasses on so neither child could see that my eyes brimmed with tears.  Then they busied themselves building a cairn in the rock pile, as others had done before.
Whit was very curious about the cairns and he moved carefully among the stones, examining the various piles.  I imagined what those who erected these monuments were commemorating: the example of a life thoroughly-lived, the commitment to art, the desire to immerse oneself in nature.
And then we were off again.  The trail wound its way around the pond, a multi-season combination of dead leaves and tenacious patches of snow and ice.  We walked in companionable silence, Whit’s hand in mine.  He announced, apropos of nothing, that when he went to college he still wanted to live at home.  “Why?” Grace piped up from ahead of us.  Whit didn’t answer right away, just squeezed my hand.  “I want to live at college for sure,” she averred confidently as she danced, occasionally skidding in her tractionless Uggs, along the path.

“Well,” Whit said, not looking at me, “Being with Mummy makes me feel safe.  And I want to stay safe.”  I gulped, remembering the time he told me that holding my hand makes him feel like his heart would never break.  I desperately wish I could keep his heart from breaking and keep him safe forever, but I know that neither of those things is in my control.

I gripped Whit’s little fingers and kept walking, breathing the piney Walden air, hearing Thoreau’s words in my head.  Ahead of us Grace’s red and white parka bobbed up and down.  The air was still, the bracing cold of winter mitigated by the promise of spring.  The only sound was our footsteps.

I want to make sure my children know the feeling I get at Walden, the soaring in the chest that speaks of a similar expansion in the spirit.  I want to encourage them to engage with life and to learn what it has to teach.  I want to fill them up with poetry.  Even more, I want to help them see the poem that lives in every day of their lives.

Lightning in a jar

My children are 8 and 6.  It is life’s biggest cliche and most painful truism that just yesterday they were babies.  This week my friend Kris pointed me to Julie’s post about watching her children play in the ocean and I gasped, remembering watching my own children in the Massachusetts coast waves this past summer.  They were 5 and 7, she towered over him, he was just learning to swim.

Admittedly, I am tired, having been away from home and not sleeping very much.  I’m even more porous than usual.  But I sat at someone else’s desk in my firm’s New York office with tears rolling down my face as I read Julie’s gorgeous words.  “… I’ve caught lightning here, in these slender vessels …” Julie writes, and my heart tightens with identification.  It’s all so astonishing, so baffling and overwhelming at the same time, and I feel awash, often, in the swarming wonder that is parenting.  My own children, growing tall and lanky in front of my eyes, their childhood passing in one swift swirl of color, the brilliance of their being here flashing intermittently like a firefly in the dark.

Julie’s photographs remind me of ones I took last summer and posted here.  There is something both profoundly moving and absolutely apt about children – the definition of liminal beings – playing along the border where earth becomes water.  Threshold-dwellers dancing at an essential threshold.

I suppose I’m just extra-aware right now, after long days away, of the piercingly poignant reality of Grace and Whit’s lives.  I feel abundantly grateful for their health and in frank awe of the basic fact of them.  It’s all such a gift, this opportunity to be in the presence of nascent human beings, to witness them step through these never-to-be-revisited halls of childhood, to watch their minds and personalities form.  They are as sturdy as they are evanescent, corporeally present even as they seem to waft by me, evading capture.