Today is the last day of school. If history is any indication I will be crying by 8:40 (the end of year assembly starts at 8:30). Full report tomorrow.
For now: my two favorite pictures of the first day of school, September 2009. Seems like a lifetime ago and yesterday at the same time.
Grace had two friends over after school today. They were rowdy, and I may have possibly raised my voice just a wee bit. They were just being excitable seven year olds. But our house is small and they were rambunctious and I was annoyed. Anyway, I let Grace have it. She knew I was not pleased with her behavior.
We then went to school for the end-of-year picnic dinner. Just as the pizza arrived a massive thunder and lightning storm began. It was absolutely pouring. Grace found a different friend and they ran around in the rain. When her friend slipped and skinned her knee badly, Grace came streaking through the rain to find her friend’s mother and me. When the three of them – Grace, her friend, and my friend (the friend’s mother) reappeared in the school building, Grace had a plan. She took her friend’s mother to find a bandaid (which she knew the location of), leaving her friend with me. Later, my friend told me – in front of Grace – how well she felt Grace had handled the situation and I could see my daughter swell up with pride.
As I was tucking Grace in tonight, she was uncharacteristically quiet. “What’s up, Gracie?” I asked her as I rubbed her back. She looked at me, fixing me with her gaze. “Well, Mummy, you know I’m always trying to be good, right?” I looked back at her, feeling vertigo as I stared into her eyes, my own eyes (one of the very few physical characteristics, along with her cleft chin, that she inherited from me). I had a flashing moment of intense identification, that experience where my own child self and my daughter simultaneously collapse into one and burst into a million kaleidoscopic fragments.
My heart broke a little. I leaned down and kissed her forehead, stroking her hair back as I did so. “You don’t always have to be good, Gracie. I love you no matter what.” I whispered that I was incredibly proud of how she had handled the situation with her friend, that she was a good friend, and that that mattered most of all. And then I said again, helplessly repeating myself, “I love you no matter what. You are good just by being you.” How to do this right? How to make her know that she doesn’t have to please me – and everybody else around her – to be loved and worthy?
Oh I am heavy tonight, thinking about this terrain, so familiar to me and yet so foreign at the same time. How different the perspective is when I’m watching someone else embark on it, rather than doing so myself. I want so desperately to walk these hills with her in a way that helps her know how deeply loved she is, and how fundamentally valuable, worthy, and love-able she is, just by being herself. I’m afraid I’m already doing it wrong. The sky has cleared tonight but there’s thunder and lightning in my heart. How do I help someone who is so much like me grow into herself without falling into all of the same painful ruts?
Yesterday was just another ordinary day. A day of my life, bracketed in the morning and the evening with reminders to open my eyes and to appreciate what is right here. It’s amazing, now that I see these nudges, how many of them there are. I wonder how myopic I must have been, all those years with my eyes focused on that next thing, to have missed so many messages from the universe. Well, were the messages from out there or were they from in here, the most intimate place there is? From my spirit, my soul, my very life?
Early in the morning I set off to take the subway (the T) to a meeting. I was walking down the familiar street to the T stop, a walk I’ve made hundreds of times in the nine years we’ve lived in our house, my nose buried in my iPhone. I literally stopped dead in my tracks when I stepped onto a carpet of pink petals.
You can see I had made my way onto the edge of this gorgeous drift of pink petal snow before I woke up, literally. I stood there and took pictures, breathing in the faint smell of the blossoms, their perfume spring incarnate. (not quite Princeton’s magnolias, but close). I looked up and saw the cerulean blue sky through the pink branches. And I was ashamed, truly, that I would have missed this.
I tucked Whit into bed tonight hugging Jimmy, the class teddy bear who spent the weekend with us. Every weekend Jimmy visits a different classmate in Whit’s Beginner class, and this was ours. Grace and I were just starting to read about Hermione and Harry’s vociferous defense of Sirius Black when I heard a strange sound from upstairs. I paused. “What’s that, Gracie?” We both listened. Nothing. I started reading again. The noise started back up. It was Whit, weeping
After a few moments where I tried to figure out if he was posing – yet another new trick to postpone bed? – she and I went upstairs to check on Whit. He was lying in bed, face awash in tears, clutching Jimmy. I sat on the edge of his bed and asked him what was wrong. His words were punctuated with sobs as he choked out how upset he was to say goodbye to Jimmy tomorrow. “Oh, Whitty,” I said. My heart felt like it leaned over in my chest, angling towards him. Deep in my chest I recognized his pain, the brutal symmetry of love and loss, so much on my mind lately. I told him I know how hard it was to say goodbye to things we love.
A few minutes later, Grace and I were reading again when I heard Whit ask quietly, “Will you snuggle me?” I looked up to see him standing forlornly on the stairs, Jimmy held against his chest. “Of course,” I answered. After I kissed Grace goodnight, I went upstairs and lay down on Whit’s bottom bunk.. I curled behind him, singing along in a whisper to his lullabye CD’s version of You Are My Sunshine, listening to his sobs grow slower and quieter. After days of being all bravado and bluster, he had dissolved back into my emotional son, my little boy with big feelings, and I thought about how often he will shuttle between these two poles over the next few years.
“Are you ready for me to go?” I murmured against his neck. “No,” he said quickly, quietly, and so I lay with him for another song. And here I am now, at my desk, eager to get going on a new essay idea I have. But first I have to put pictures of Jimmy’s visit into the class album, with narration of his weekend activities. I’m not annoyed that I have to do that before my “real” writing. This is also writing, in its own way, the writing of my ordinary life.
Grace, pensive at the library on Sunday.
I like the Hopper-esque light.
Sometimes I think I give the erroneous impression that Grace is serious all the time. She can be serious, yes, and she is certainly, more than anyone else, my clanging gong of truth and clarity, bringing me back to awareness.
But she’s also a seven year old girl. Who likes a good giggle, Judy Moody, Taylor Swift, and, well … shoes. I came downstairs after putting Whit to bed the other night to find this. You can’t really see that she is also draped with several sparkly necklaces she had hand-selected from my closet. And the shoes, which she had also picked out herself (from a fairly large set of options, I confess). Good taste, no? This child never met anything sparkly, spangly, or sequined she did not love. She may have been a Vegas showgirl (with an old soul and an introspective streak) in another life.
What strikes me most is how huge her feet are. She can wear these pretty soon.
And, this guy. Where Grace is my grace, Whit is my wit. I didn’t have any idea when I named them how they would come to embody these traits (well, Whit/wit, go with me, please). He is my clown (not the creepy kind), my reminder, always, to look at the hilarity that is there in every situation. His young soul and joyful spirit is such a nice counterpart to my more melancholic leanings.
On Tuesday night I took both the children out for pizza. After we sat down, the waiter arrived, asking for our drink orders. I’ve been encouraging them to place their own orders, because I think it’s a good way to practice such important and incredibly difficult (why?) life skills such as looking someone in the eye. Grace ordered water. We all turned, expectantly, to Whit.
“A Lone Star, please,” he said. The waiter’s head snapped to look at me. He was clearly appalled and, simultaneously, trying not to laugh. I did a double-take at my own child and said, “He’ll have a chocolate milk.” My first reaction, I admit, was to be proud that he had said please.
But, a Lone Star? Where did he get this? We have never, to my knowledge, had Lone Star beer at home. Neither Matt nor I drink it. I have no idea. I immediately thought of the day that I asked him, shaking my head in resignation, “Where did you come from, Whit?” and he answered, point blank, “Texas.”
Maybe he really is from Texas. Grace, as a baby, was nicknamed “Gracie Big Pants” because of the photograph below. To this day I still call her GBP. I have an LL Bean bag monogrammed “GBP.” I’m thinking Whit From Texas needs one with “WFT” on it.
“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
-Ernest Hemingway
I’ve loved this quote for a long time. And ever since Saturday night I’ve been thinking about it in light of Margaret Atwood’s provocative poem, Spelling. There are so many lines of that poem that echo in my head, but the one I’ve been mulling specifically is “I wonder how many women/denied themselves daughters…/so they could mainline words.” She beautifully refers to the age-old tension between creativity and procreativity that defined women artists for centuries. As recently as 1899, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier walked into the sea as a way of avoiding the choice she could not make.
I feel so grateful to live in a time with more room for women to be both mothers and artists. Even more, for women to be both mothers and not-mothers, mothers and someone-other-than-a-mother at the same time. So glad because, ultimately, the subject that chose me clearly has a lot to do with my having had children. I don’t know that I would have come to the place that I am today, where my old way of being in the world simply does not suffice anymore, without them. It’s not precisely that my “subject” (if there is such a defining thing running through these diffuse musings) is my children, though clearly they are a big part of it. It’s more that the insistent awareness that I was missing something critical in this singular, short life of mine came only after I was a mother.
Of course it is not always simple, trying to mother and to write. Of course not. Adrienne Rich’s famous line that “Poetry was where I existed as no-one’s mother” speaks to the eternal trading-off of time, attention, and identity that we all engage in. But for me, one sphere enriches the other in ways I cannot yet fully articulate. They provide ample material, Grace and Whit do, but it’s actually more than that. It was they who woke me up to the sleepwalking way I was moving through my life, they who shook the foil in my eyes, they who said “Right here! Right now” loudly enough that I finally listened.
They, Grace and Whit, brought with them noise and sleeplessness and worry and chest-tightening love and most of all, a keen, bittersweet awareness of the fleetingness of it all. They brought stuffed animals and soccer balls and exercise pants and Harry Potter and sleepy whispers of love and a handful of dandelions offered with grubby hands and proud eyes. They brought my attention to my life, to a thousand million tiny moments, some of which glitter brilliantly, most of which blend into the slurry of memory. They brought me my subject. And how wildly, extravagantly fortunate I am that I don’t have to choose.