Grace

Moment of truth by the tub

On our last day in Sanibel, Grace and Whit were horsing around in the pool. She dunked him aggressively and he was very upset. My mother immediately reprimanded her, asking her to get out of the pool for a few minutes. Grace, in classic form, dissolved into tears. She sat on a chair by the pool, wrapped in a towel, hot pink goggles pushed up onto her forehead, forlorn and in full-blown pout mode.

Finally I asked her to come back to the condo with me and we walked, hand-in-hand but in silence, through the parking lot. She was sniffling and, I could tell, making a real effort to calm herself down. Often she asks for “deep breaths,” where she sits on my lap or we hug and take deep breaths together – this has been effective but I am now thinking she needs to figure out how to calm herself down without me. Anyway, she was trying hard and I could tell.

We got to the condo and I turned on the tub for her, because she was freezing and her purple lips were chattering. As she stood in the bathroom, naked and shivering, I looked at her suddenly all-grown-up body. She is so tall now she comes up to almost my chest. She seems startlingly unfamiliar, lean and lanky, with endless limbs, though I can still see that faint birthmark, more texture than color, on her left hip. I remember noticing that birthmark for the first time when she was mere days old.

She turned to me and I could see she was still crying. Overcome with identification and empathy, I crouched down in front of Grace, realizing that she is at that awkward height where standing I’m too tall but crouching I’m too small. I looked up at her tremulous face. “Gracie?” she looked at me, a tear spilling over her right eyelid onto her cheek. “It’s hard to be the older one, I know. Isn’t it?” she nodded at me. “I was that, Grace. I know. Everybody expects you to be grown up all the time. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

Her face just crumpled. She leaned into me, hugging me awkwardly as she was now taller than I was. “It’s so hard, Mummy. Sometimes I just get carried away and I lose control,” she choked on her words, crying hard now. I pushed her away only so that I could look her in the eye. “I know, Gracie. I know,” I said, firmly, “sometimes what you feel is really strong, isn’t it?” She nodded mutely, tears flooding down her face. “I know, love, I know.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I folded her body, all angles and long, skinny bones into my arms. We stayed like that for a long moment until she broke the embrace, wiping her eyes. She looked at me and I could tell she felt embarassed. “Grace.” I looked at her, almost sternly. “I know. And I know what a good, good girl you are, and how hard you try. I know. I promise. And I can tell you that your feelings, for the rest of your life, will be really strong. I still feel like I lose control sometimes. And it’s scary.”

She stared at me, a combination of fear and thanks in her eyes, and I could see how much she wanted to believe that I was being sincere. I think we both felt we’d revealed a lot, so she stepped into the tub and we moved on to other matters, but something essential happened in that bathroom. I saw a young version of myself and she saw that the strength of her emotions was going to be a lifelong battle. Yes, Gracie, I know what it is to feel out of control. I know what it is to feel pressure to be the “good one” and to do as others want you to do. I know all of those things. I wish I could teach you how to stop those feelings, but i can’t. I honestly have no idea. I wish I did.

Retrospective repost from March 2010

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me

I am downright obsessed with my annual holiday card.  I spend as much time choosing the message as I do the photographs and design.   When I look at the messages I’ve chosen over the last several years, a distinct theme emerges:

2005 – Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me
2006 – Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime
2007 – Dona Nobis Pacem (grant us peace)
2008 – Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me
2009 – Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine
2010 – May the wind be always at your back

Imagine my delight when, this week at Grace’s school holiday assembly, they sang both Dona Nobis Pacem and Let There be Peace On Earth.  I was thrilled, and my heart soared with the high-pitched voices of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders.  I’ve been singing Dona Nobis Pacem under my breath all week and Grace excitedly told me a few days ago that she recognized it as a song that was going to be in the concert (it was not the one her class sang).

This has been a season of quiet, house-bound afternoons and evenings for us.  I’ve been spending a lot of time with Grace and Whit, not going out hardly at all, doing my work in the hours that they are in school. One morning this week Grace’s advent calendar said “sit by the tree and watch the lights while drinking hot chocolate.”  And so we did.  After dinner she, Whit and I curled up on the yellow couch with mugs of hot chocolate and admired the tree.  Grace dashed upstairs to get a small comforter to pull over the three of us, and then we read several Christmas books (and the defiantly non-Christmas pop-up book about dinosaurs that Whit chose).  It was pretty divine.

The night of Grace’s concert we made pizza.   As they were eating, the children decided they wanted to hear “Let There Be Peace On Earth.”  So I youtubed a version of it, and then another, and pretty soon it was on repeat in the kitchen and Grace and Whit were spellbound by the music and the images that accompanied each rendition.  Whit said to me, “This song reminds me of What a Wonderful World, Mummy.”

And how.  What a wonderful world it would be if everybody chose peace.  Wouldn’t it?

It’s impossible for me not to think of Saint Francis’s iconic prayer.  And of last year’s haunting video of Sarah McLachlan singing it.  I urge you to listen to it: it’s gorgeous, calming and inspiring at the same time.  It makes me want to work harder to be worthy of this blessed, brutal, beautiful life, and of my children’s instinctive orientation towards goodness and peace.  So, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

And let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

Trying to say thank you

In keeping with Grace’s startlingy wise observation recently, that praying is saying thank you, I’m trying to infuse this holiday season with as much gratitude and as little materialism as possible.

Results are, I think, mixed.
For the last several years the children have shared a LEGO advent calendar.  This year I made Grace her own advent calendar. I bought a calendar with empty pockets on etsy, and filled each with a directive for something to do. I got this idea from Ali Edwards, though I wrote most of my own suggestions.  The daily directives include selecting some toys she doesn’t play with anymore for goodwill (something we do approximately monthly anyway), writing a thank you note to someone just because, reading a Christmas book to her brother, and the one she worked on this week, creating a list of ten things she’s thankful for this year.
As you can see, “the world and being alive” just makes the list, under her ipod touch and “all her toys.”  Hmmm.  I suppose there’s some solace in the fact that her friends and four healthy grandparents are above her things.  Still, I think we might need a refresher course that without #10, #1-9 would not exist at all.

My children constantly bemoan the fact that I do not decorate enough for holidays.  They wish I was more like one of my best friends, who celebrates everything with tremendous vigor and enthusiasm.  It’s one of her very best qualities.  This year I’m making an effort.  We have a wreath, hung up with a thick gold ribbon, in the kitchen over the sink.  And we have this garland, which I had made, showcasing some of my favorite Christmas carol lyrics, over the kitchen table.  And there is, like every year, a big boxwood wreath on the front door.  I’m trying!

I had these silhouette ornaments made of each child for our tree.  Grace loves hers.  I also have their silhouettes on pendants that I happened to be wearing today when the ornaments came.  I highly recommend Le Papier Studio‘s work.  I have a big framed silhouette of the children walking away – always, they are walking away – on the wall by my bed.The kids’ school has a new rule that doesn’t allow parents to buy teacher gifts at the holidays.  Instead, Grace and Whit are hand-writing notes to their teachers and decorating them with black and white ink stamps.  Grace’s are neat paragraphs full of her favorite things about her teachers.  Whit’s are more minimalist but no less charming, in my view.

That’s the update from the land where we trip and fall, often, in our efforts to say, adequately, thank you.

The drum and the descant

(one of my favorite pictures, ever)

I really only listen to music when I’m driving.  And I tend to listen to the same song over and over again.  I know, normal!  On any given day a different song is preoccupying me.  Coldplay’s Fix You, U2’s Kite, and Matt Nathanson’s Come On Get Higher have all played on repeat in my car (and in my head).  A few years ago, December 2004 specifically, it was Shawn Colvin singing Love Came Down at Christmas.  I remember it vividly.  It was freezing, I had a two year old toddler, and I was pregnant with Whit.

The song is on my very favorite Christmas CD, which I listen to all year round but constantly during this month. Last Friday the familiar notes of Love Came Down at Christmas came on as Grace, Whit, and I were driving to school.

“Whit,” I said, turning around to look at him, wearing his new wool hat with robots on it.  “I listened to this song over and over and over again when you were in my tummy.”

“I remember that,” Grace chimed in authoritatively, though I’m certain she does not.  He smiled.  Both kids, for some reason, love stories of when I was pregnant with them and of when they were babies.

“You used to kick whenever it came on,” I mused, remembering the feeling of feet in my ribs, the eerie, powerful sensation of another person turning over inside of me.  The kind of feeling you couldn’t imagine until you experience it.  And one that fades; I can hardly remember that sensation any more, so unique in its joint visceral physicality and overpowering spirituality.

“Maybe I was trying to be the drums,” Whit offered casually from the backseat.

Oh, Whit.  Yes.  You are the drumbeat of my life, steady, underlying everything, a constant presence.  Your humor and stubbornness, intractability and lovingness twine together into the rhythm to which my life is set.

Grace, you are the soaring descant.  Sometimes your notes are there, lifting me to the rafters with their beauty, sometimes not, their absence as keenly felt as their presence.  A sound less steady, higher at its highs and lower at its lows.

Together you two are creating every day the music of my life.  The song that I, who is tone deaf and woefully unskilled at all things musical, hear in my head every single hour.  The tune to which I walk, stumble, and dance.

Things whose days are numbered

Things whose days are numbered:

1. The Sweet Dreams Head Rub and Ghostie Dance being enough to assure happy slumber for both kids

2. Sitting on the floor of the gym, a child on my lap, singing our hearts out at the Pre-K, K, and 1st grade holiday sing-a-long at school

3. Whit wearing little briefs printed with robots, dinosaurs, and boats

4. Carrying Whit to bed after taking him to the potty at 10pm.  His legs already dangle alarmingly near my knees

5. Grace happily holding my hand walking down the street

6. Buckling carseats

7. Two children in the bath together

8. Shopping for clothes at Baby Gap

9. Whit picking Goodnight Moon for me to read to him before bed

10. Grace’s sheer wonder at a visit from the tooth fairy

Honestly, the truth of this makes my heart throb.  Makes it ache as though it might split open, like an overripe peach.  How do others handle this, the irrefutable drumbeat march of time?  There’s no question this is my rawest wound.  It is a cord of feeling that vibrates painfully inside me and a shadow that haunts the edges of even the sunniest day.

Adrienne Rich asserts of Marie Curie that “her wounds came from the same source of her power.”  I’m still trying to ascertain exactly how my deep hurt about the impermanence of things might also be a strength.  I am not at all clear on how the source of this  churning well of feeling to which I return again and again could also be a source of power, strength, confidence.

I want my heart to dwell here, in the rooms of my days.  I can only recommit, every single day to trying to remember that, to tugging myself back to now.  I do that even knowing full well my own tendency to mourn an experience even as I’m still in the midst of living it.  I wish I could stop grieving that which will be soon gone, but I’m not sure I can.  Most of our last times happen without us knowing, slipping into the past tense in the narrative of our lives almost unnoticed.  I am more aware than many of this, but even so I fail to mark these transitions all the time.

So, here I go, into the season of white lights and carols, paperwhites and holiday cards, eyes and heart wide open.  This may be the last year that Grace believes in Santa Claus.  May be the last year Whit wears a Baby Gap sweater.  May be the last year they both cite that baking cookies with me is their very favorite thing to do.  More numbered days.  They all are, though, aren’t they?