Grace

Praying means saying thank you

Sunday morning dawned clear and very cold.  Winter has swept in in Thanksgiving’s wake.  I took Grace and Whit to one of my favorite places, Mount Auburn Cemetery.  My children love it there as well; I imagine they pick on the same sense of peace as I do.  Plus, there is a great circular tower (reminding me vividly of a childhood book I read about a castle keep) that is fun to climb and that offers a terrific view of Boston from the top.  There is a little trickling fairy stream, around which magic feels tangible.

Both Grace and Whit really like exploring the cemetery, and their senses seem on high alert there.  They notice the details on the gravestones, the red berries aflame on one bush, the drifts of crunchy brown leaves at the base of another, and the play of the light on the trees.  They have learned through my repeated exhortations to be quiet and respectful in such a sacred space.

It was cold on Sunday, and we did not last long.  My fingers were cold from taking pictures, and because Whit wanted to hold my hand (and I did not have gloves).  I’d let my fingers freeze before I denied him that.  We were walking back to the car when I heard Grace sigh. “What’s up, G?” I asked the back of her head, following behind her on a narrow path.  Whit was right behind me, gripping my icicle-fingers.

“Well, I love this place, Mummy.  But it also makes me sort of sad.”

“You know, Gracie, I know what you mean.  But for some reason I don’t find it creepy, even though it’s a cemetery.”

“Oh, I don’t mean creepy.  Just sad.  You know, that all of these people have died.  And some children too.”

“Well,” I swallowed.  “Sometimes being aware of death can make you really grateful for the life you have.  Right?”

“Yes, you are right.”  She turned to look at me, thoughtful.

As we drove out, we passed the chapel near the front gate.  I mentioned that sometimes I liked to go sit in the chapel.  “What do you do in there?” Whit asked, curious.

“Well, I like to sit and think.  It’s quiet and peaceful.  And to pray.”

“What does it mean, exactly, to pray, Mummy?” Whit pressed on, and I caught his eye in the rearview mirror.  I remembered last year’s discussion of holiness, and had the same sensation of something animate in the car with me, bigger than me.  I wanted to live up to this feeling.  I hesitated.  What does it mean, to pray?

“What do you think it means, Gracie?”  I punted.

She didn’t miss a beat.  “It means, Whitty, saying thank you to God for all the things you are thankful for having in your life.”

I fought a surge of feeling.  Just this weekend I was thinking about how prayer should be about thank you, not about please give me.  About how often we all seem to have it backwards.  And without a shadow of a doubt, my eight year old expressed this more beautifully than I ever could have hoped to.  I looked in the mirror and saw her smiling at him, saw him reach across the backseat to clutch her hand, his faded red-and-blue mitten curling around her bare fingers.

Thank you.

Parent-teacher conferences, again

Another year, another set of fall parent-teacher conferences.  I look at the pictures in last year’s post and I’m struck by how little Whit seems.  I see him every day so the growth is imperceptible.  It’s only when I look at images and details from a year ago, like this, I realize how startlingly he’s growing.  All of his little boy summer blond was just cut out of his hair, and he’s now the height when he stands in front of me that I still think his sister is.  That is, he’s what I think of as the height of my older child.  Not anymore.  Grace is growing too.  A mouthful of holes has grown into a set of big, adult teeth.

Grace and Whit continue to be their very own selves, growing more and more into the personalities that they’ve been exhibiting since they were very small.  They are distinct individuals, with strengths and weaknesses now showing like flags.  Also becoming clear are the ways that their repeated bumping into each other is shaping them.

Grace continues to be a conscientious perfectionist and an over-achiever.  She loves to read but Math is her favorite subject.  I especially loved hearing about how she is a generous friend who is quick to help anyone who needs it, and who is aware of those who are alone and/or sad in the classroom or playground.  She is eager to perform and to please her teachers, for better or for worse.  I can sense that she’s taken, either by choice or default, the “straight man” role to Whit’s comedian.  I can tell that this sometimes frustrates her.

Already she can feel the weight of expectation on her shoulders; my reaction to this is ambivalent, both an intense identification and a deep guilt that this heavy cloak is part of the legacy of being my daughter.  She also inclines towards shadow, as do I – whether this is innate or learned I can’t know.  “My poor, poor daughter, tugging behind her the heavy freight of [the] moody melancholy” she inherited from me, I wrote a while ago, and days like today I’m keenly reminded of it.

Whit is different from Grace in so many ways.  He is laughter to her seriousness, rebellion to her rule-following, light to her cloudiness.  He is beginning to sound out words and demonstrating facility with numbers, but continues to struggle with paying attention and sitting still.  Some of this is, naturally, age-appropriate for a five year old boy.  Some of it, I’m beginning to see, is a way of deflecting attention from a task he’s not comfortable with.  If he just acts out, changing the subject by making people laugh, he can avoid having to do things he’s not confident about.  I think this is a reaction, too, to his older sister, a way of claiming his own territory.  What I feel about this behavior in Whit is very different from the dizzying self/other vertigo Grace gives me: I feel a combination of abject horror and complete respect at the way he challenges authority.

Whit has, however, occasionally demonstrated the same raw vulnerability that I recognize so personally in Grace.  He misses places, people, and times of his life with an fierceness that reminds me of my own.  He has, acutely and specifically, bemoaned the passage of time.  These moments remind me that my children are not as simply and neatly categorized as it’s tempting to think.  Whit, too, inherited my sensitivity; he just handles differently than Grace does.  I believe that his default to humor, to being a clown, is also a way to escape his own moods: by making others laugh, he is lifted himself.  Isn’t this true of many of the funniest people you know?

I’m humbled tonight, again, by the complicated, nascent human beings I live with.  I’m certain, as I’ve always been, that they do not belong to me – they are just passing through, and it is my honor to shelter them as I share these magic years.  What multi-faceted people my children are, resilient and fragile at the same time (the same is true of most adults, I’d posit).  My mind is swirling tonight, full of images of their babyhoods, more recent moments, disbelief at the speed with which it’s all flying, all set to the soundtrack of the lullabyes they each still listen to as they go to sleep.  Which I can hear faintly from their rooms now; somehow it feels like the familiar words are floating from years past, when they were babies, from the years we have already spent together.

Tea with the High Mistress

Though I live mere blocks from the house I was born in, the story of my childhood isn’t that simple.  My family hopscotched around the globe, from Cambridge to Paris to Cambridge to London and back to Cambridge.  There were enormous gifts and privileges from this childhood, some immediately obvious and others that took longer to manifest.  There were also costs, which have mostly been in the longer-flowering category.  When Michael Ondaatje writes “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” I nod my head mutely, tears running down my face.  Yes, yes I do.  I understand the sadness and beauty of a childhood spent in the pursuit of new geographies, of adventures and cathedrals and experiences.

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” Pat Conroy’s words ring inside me too, with a painful familiarity.   In this flux of my childhood years there is an anchorage, a place I learned to hook the boat of my identity; I am from here, where I live now, but that’s not always been clear to me, and I’ve spent many pages, more hours, and even more tears trying to figure that out.  The only steadiness I knew as a child was change, and we moved with a fluidity as rhythmic and inorexable as the tides.  It’s no wonder that the ocean is an important metaphor for me now.  It’s also not a surprise that I’m anxious about farewells, haunted by the fear of abandonment, and terrified of ambiguity.

The point of this post, though, is the photograph above.  When Hilary and I lived in London we went to a school called St Paul’s Girls’ School.  It was an intimidating place, whose grand mahogany hall with a towering organ and black-and-white checkerboard marble floor still loom large in my memory.  The head of school was called the High Mistress, and she was a figure of authority and grandeur who inspired an admiration bordering on fear in her students.  We were supposed to curtsy when she walked by.  I’m not kidding.

Anyway, there was a tea recently with the current High Mistress in Cambridge.  I was sick at home with a fever, but Grace went with Mum.  Based on the photograph above (the High Mistress is in the middle), I’d say she’s almost ready to enroll?

Pictures from a birthday and ordinary life

A few images from Grace’s birthday and life around here …
Birthday morning: Grace’s favorite breakfast, cinnamon rolls
After an all-day field trip at Plymouth Plantation (which I chaperoned) we had birthday cupcakes at school.  I drove to the field trip with two other mothers from Grace’s class, and I think I may have scared them off permanently when I mentioned that I sometimes walk and sit in the local cemetery and then also referred to my dislike of music, strong tastes, smells, etc.  I think it is possible they think I’m a tiny bit weird.
After school Grace and I took our second-annual birthday pilgrimage to Barnes & Noble.  She had a couple of gift cards (fabulous birthday gifts!) and I’m eager to help her develop the passion I feel for bookstores, so off we went.  She now thinks of this as what we do to celebrate her birthday, and as far as I’m concerned that’s great.
I bought these lilies over the weekend because they were from a local farm.  I’ve never really had lilies before, and their flashy beauty struck me as they unfolded just in time for the birthday.  One small thing I’m proud of: from Memorial Day until late September I didn’t buy fruits or vegetables from anywhere other than local farmer’s markets.  It is kind of killing me to go back to Whole Foods, so I’m trying to stretch the local focus as long as I can.  Hence the new flowers.
After dinner of take-out sushi (Grace’s choice, but cucumber rolls are as far as she will go) we had her now-traditional birthday cake, which is half chocolate and half vanilla (both cake and frosting).  Yes, I’ve been baking up a storm.  Yes, I’m ready for my kitchen not to be awash in leftover sugar, sugar, sugar, but ooops, now it’s Halloween.

And also, a couple of photographs of our resident comedian, Whit.
Even Captain Rex gets tired out after a long day of lightsaber fighting.
Real men aren’t afraid to waltz with their buddies (note that Whit’s friend, the same age as him, is a full head taller … oh my poor wee little guy).
It’s good to fly before bed.