Grace

Did the shadow of what was coming cast its darkness over the light of a moment?

Reading A Double Life reminded me vividly the weeks and months after Grace’s birth, which were the darkest of my life.  As she recounts it in her memoir, Lisa Catherine Harper’s depression seems considered, thoughtful.  I plunged back into my own, remembering how inelegant my complete and utter collapse was, how inchoate the roaring of desperation in my ears.  I had no idea what was happening to me, but I knew firmly that I’d made the biggest and most permanent mistake of my life.

For years I’ve wondered if I could have somehow known what was coming.  As I’ve mentioned, I think the seeds of my depression were sown in my surprise pregnancy, and in how out of control I felt of the endeavor from the absolute beginning (fair question: is there ever a way to feel in control of such a fundamentally uncontrollable enterprise?).  There are two places I go to look for clues, wondering if with the wisdom of perspective I can see the shadow of what was coming casting its darkness over the light of a moment?

One is in my photographs.  It’s no secret that I take pictures of everything.  These photos do not become a silent, untouched mausoleum on my hard drive.  No, they are a living, breathing record: I return to the photos over and over, revisiting experiences, remembering moments.  I’ve done that a lot with the pictures of the days surrounding Grace’s arrival.  I can see a certain tentativeness in myself, but other than that I don’t think I see any concrete evidence of what hovered ahead of me.  I’ve looked at the pictures of her first weeks on earth an awful lot too, and those make me mostly sad.  I see a shell-shocked woman, overcome with a numbness so complete I don’t remember very much from that time.  I realize how that that numbness was sheer survival instinct – I was so deeply wounded that I think experiencing the raw feelings all at once would have swamped me utterly.  The picture above, moments after I delivered Grace with my own two hands, is the last one where I think I look like myself until many months later.

The other place I can pick up crumbs that show me the path I was on at a given time is my quote book.  In the specific quotes that moved me enough to hand-write them into my books I can decode something of where I was emotionally at a specific time.  In these books I see more clues than I do in the photographs, a deeper, subconscious anticipation of what lay ahead.  One week to the day before Grace’s birth I entered the James Baldwin quote that has come to be so incredibly important to me: “Trust life and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”

Two days before her birth, I added these lines from William James: “I am done with great things and great plans, great institutions and great successes.  I am for those tiny, invisible, loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets…”  It’s as though I knew I was moving to a world whose focus was small acts, deep individual love, and a power beyond sight.

And then, three days after Grace was born, the day after we brought her home from the hospital (incidentally, those photographs terrify me – my eyes are both blank and blazing, full of what I recognize now as abject terror), I wrote this: “One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life … and that word is love.” (Sophocles).

It took me many, many long months to learn what I can see now so brightly in these specific quotations and in their chronology.  I’m grateful that I now understand how the path unfolded, though I remain bruised by the experience of walking it.  In some strange way being able to revisit the woman I was then, through words and photographs, allows me to extend compassion to her, to attempt to heal in some out-of-time way the wounds I still carry from those days.

Do you have places – written, photographic, filmed, or otherwise – that you can return to, looking for a record of who you were at a specific moment in your life?  Places where you can see threads of your life glinting through, even when you weren’t aware of them at the time?

Trapeze

Matt was away this weekend, and Grace and Whit and I faced the luxury of an almost entirely empty Sunday.  I knew I wanted to do something adventurous, and a few days ago I signed the three of us up for trapeze school.

Trapeze school.  One of my friends texted and asked if we were skiing on Sunday and I answered that no, we were going to trapeze school.  She responded that wow, she didn’t realize we were a circus family. Okay, fine, it was random.

We showed up on Sunday morning at 10am.  Well, we got there 25 minutes early because of my chronic earliness problem.  But the class started at 10.  With very little preamble, we were strapped into safety harnesses and climbed a seemingly endless set of rickety metal stairs.  We faced a carpeted platform, a smiling helper, and a trapeze.  Grace went first.  I couldn’t believe her courage as she stood on the edge of the platform, grabbed the trapeze, and jumped.  My eyes filled with tears and my hands gripped Whit’s tiny shoulders as we stood and watched her flying through the air.

I was pretty sure Whit would refuse to go.  This child, remember, won’t even go on the spinning teacups, let alone even the slowest of roller coasters.  I was shocked, then, when he gamely stood at the platform edge.  The woman standing there had to hold him off the ground so that he could reach the trapeze.  And then he, too, flew.

The thing I was most afraid of was stepping off the platform.  You hold onto the trapeze, lean way forward into empty space against the weight of the helper who is holding your waist belt.  The ground yawns far, far below.  And then you just have to jump into thin air with only the trapeze bar and your faith to keep you off the ground.  The thing the children were most afraid of was the coming down, which involves letting go of the bar and trusting the belt and safety ropes to help you float down to the net, rather than plummet.

We went over and over again, culminating in being caught by another person on another trapeze.  It was flat-out amazing.  My hands are bleeding and callused and my children are exhausted and smiling.  At one point, after Whit had finally figured out the knee hang and let go, he smiled up at me and said, “Are you proud of me, Mummy?”

Oh, yes, my little man.  I was and I am.  Later Grace told me that she realized how good it felt to do something even when it seemed scary.  I expected an adventure, but I did not realize that once again my children would astound me and that they – and I – would learn yet another lesson about what it is to live this life.

Courage, bravery, trust, and letting go.  Being sure that something will catch you.  Stepping off into thin air with faith that you will fly.

No distance at all

I’ve written about Jessica before.  She is one of my oldest and very best friends.  If I have a soul sister she is it.  We met at Cape Cod Sea Camps in the summer of 1988 and after a few days we were inseparable.  After an interval where we fought about something that neither of us remember, CCSC worked its magic yet again and put us as co-counselors in a cabin together in the summer of 1993.  From that moment on our lives have remained twined together, despite the fact that Jess lives in North Carolina.  As Carly Simon says, we’re so close that in our separation there’s no distance at all.

And then there are our girls.  Julia was born in August 2002, 12 weeks before Grace.  The picture above is from the summer of 2002, when, shocked, delighted, and more than a little awestruck, we celebrated that we each had a baby on the way.  That they were both girls was a special joy.

That they’ve become friends is a fact that makes my head explode with happiness.  And this summer, in July, Julia and Grace will be cabinmates at CCSC.  I honestly cannot believe it, and at the same time it feels as though my whole life has been unfurling to this moment. The picture above was taken in August 2010, on the front lawn at camp, the very place I first met this woman who has become so essential to my life.  Our girls are with us.

It’s impossible to overstate how much CCSC means to me.  First and foremost, it brought me Jessica.  But it was also the still point of my childhood. I left every single school early or arrived late, but at camp I was just regular.  I wasn’t different.  I was a long-timer, and there aren’t many places on earth I can remember being so comfortable.

Camp brought me many gifts, some slow to open but now fully revealed. It was fun, of course, but more importantly it was in many ways the ballast that kept my wildly heeling life from capsizing.

I cannot wait for Grace and Julia to experience camp.  I recently reconnected with another close friend from my CCSC days, with whom I’d totally lost touch.  I’m thrilled that her daughter, too, will be there with Julia and Grace.  I feel immensely moved as I watch the light of the past shine through the present and the present fold into the past.  There’s no distance at all, either, in between me and those cabins on the shore of Cape Cod.  My adult life circles back to a place and a person who fundamentally informed who I am today.  The last photograph is of Julia, Grace, and Whit on the beach at CCSC at low tide this past summer.  Lydia was still too small to join them, but she will.

Long may they run on those tidal flats.

Everyday life is a practice and a poem

Everyday life is a practice and a poem.

These words came to me on Friday in a yoga class.  My first yoga class in more months than I can count.  My body remembered the poses like some deeply known but forgotten language.  My mind ran and ran, occasionally settling into a thought, and this one came back, over and over: every day life is both practice and poem.

A practice and a poem.

Dinner with two old, dear friends.  Drive home in the icy darkness.  Say goodbye to Matt as he leaves for a weekend with his father and brothers.  Refill three heavy humidifiers, lug them up flights of stairs, watch the steady stream of moisture puffing into the darkness of the childrens’ rooms.

Kiss Grace and Whit good night.  Linger over my newly-minted six year old, his face more chiseled and boy-like every day, all traces of babyhood now gone.

Saturday morning, get the children dressed, go to Starbucks, the drycleaner, the grocery store.  Drop the groceries off at home.  Slip on the icy snow bank that lines the sidewalk as I try to bring bags of groceries into the house, the kids still in the car, the exhaust pipe billowing white into the crystalline, cold air.  Stop.  Breathe.

Drive to Whit’s birthday party.  Unload drinks, birthday cake, camera.  Several trips from car to Jump On In.  Grace whines because she wants a chocolate bar from the vending machine and I say no.  One of the other boys at the party’s father buys him a chocolate bar.  I still say no.  She threatens tears, crosses her arms across her chest, glares at me, stomps her foot.  I shake my head.  Stop.  Breathe.

25 boys run wild in a paradise of indoor blow-up jumpy castles.  Grace’s finger gets slammed and she cries, this time for real.  We awkwardly wrap and ice pack around it and watch the finger swell.  I wonder if the afternoon will hold another ER visit.  Stop.  Breathe.

Grace asks me to go down the tallest blow up slide with her.  I agree and climb up, clumsy on the unsteady inflated steps.  Grace holds her ice pack in one hand and my hand in the other.  We fly to the bottom, laughing, laughing.

Drive home.  The sky, which was cornflower blue when we arrived at the birthday party, is beginning to fade to pale gray, that winter whiteness that holds everything and nothing in its color.

I carry several loads of bags of presents into the house.  Do I ever arrive anywhere without a car trunk full of things that need unloading, unpacking, putting-into-place?  Whit pounces on the pile of presents and begins to rip into one.  I raise my voice, “Stop!  Wait for me to get in here!” He slinks into the couch to sit and wait, chastised.  Finally, with pad of paper and pen in hand to record the gifts for thank you notes, I let him loose on the bright pile of boxes.

I fill the recycling bin with wrapping paper, wondering how I will fit in all of the boxes and plastic that the toys will shed once actually opened.  When I open the lid of the recycling bin a cascade of snow falls down my front, and my wrists are suddenly freezing.  I’m wearing a pair of Matt’s sneakers, untied, because they were by the door, and I can feel cold wetness around my heels.  The children are shouting about something just inside the door.  I close my eyes for a minute, inhale, my foot poised above the top step.  Sometimes the work of this life is so daunting.  Breathe.

The children watch the Nancy Drew movie.  I put in a load of laundry and sit down at my desk to upload the pictures from the party.  After several minutes I look in on them, sitting close to each other on the couch, and feel a tidal wave of love break over me.  They both sense me staring and look at me, and two faces split into happy smiles.  I return a smile, through tears.

A practice and a poem.

Grace will lead me home

Amazing Grace (John Newton)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

I’ve written before about my intense sensitivity, about how porous I am to the world, about what a generally difficult friend I am because I take everything so ridiculously personally.  I’m certain that this sensitivity, in particular that to the passage of time, is my wound.  Whether it is also a strength remains less clear to me.

It’s all mixed in with Grace.  And, of course, grace.  Grace announced herself to me on the day after my father-in-law was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and those two lines on the pregnancy test shocked me so completely I almost fainted.  I had not anticipated being pregnant – in fact if I’m honest, I hadn’t wanted to be.

When I was 20 weeks pregnant I went to a new prenatal yoga class.  I didn’t love prenatal yoga, finding most classes to be too much breathing through our chakras and not enough vinyasa.  This class was small, just me and three other women.  At the end of class, as we lay in savasana, our teacher asked us to “go inside and communicate with our baby.”  I swear I rolled my eyes behind my eyelids.  Lying there, trying to figure out how I could leave without offending the teacher, I heard an unfamiliar but distinct voice in my head.  It said, “grace.”  I sat up, startled, and looked around the room.  Just three domed-bellied women, eyes shut, and one teacher in lotus position.  I lay back down, willing the voice to come back.  It didn’t.  But I’ve never forgotten that moment.  She was always Grace.  Always my grace.

And then she arrived, and she broke my heart.  The postpartum depression that I plunged into after Grace’s birth terrified me, completely dissolved me, and in its wake I was reformed into a new person.  She taught my heart to fear, and then, slowly, gradually, but surely, she relieved my fears.

She is leading me home.  Of that I am certain now.  And when I sang Amazing Grace last week at a funeral, I burst into tears at that last line.  My daughter pushes every single button I have.  She infuriates me and hurts me and sends me to a shouting, tearful mess faster than anyone else on the planet.  She demonstrates keen sensitivity and an astonishing ability to take things personally, and both of these things annoy me and hurt me in equal measure.  As I lose my patience with her, stumble, and get up again, hugging her against me, my tears dropping wetly into her thick brown hair, I am trying to tell myself, as much as her, that everything will be okay.  To reassure the child – and adult – me as much as my daughter that we will be safe.

In parenting Grace I am confronting, over and over again, my own flaws, my own weaknesses, the deepest reaches of my own self.  What if that sensitivity that I’ve so often bemoaned is not an obstacle on my path but the road itself?  I’m beginning to suspect it is.  And, holding my daughter’s hand, the hand of my grace, my Grace, I’m finding my way home.  She might think she’s following me, but, the truth is, I’m following her.