Grace

A word after a word after a word is power

Grace tonight told me that they were studying poetry at school, and asked if I still had the poems she had written for me ages ago. I did, I said. As she was getting into bed, she caught a glimpse of this framed poster on her wall, and stared at it for a minute. I wondered what she was thinking. “Is that a poem, Mummy?” she asked me. “Why yes, Grace, it is,” I answered, a smile wrestling with the tears the sprang to my eyes.

A poem I’ve long loved, in fact. A poem that was the epigraph to my college thesis. A poem that I wrote on a poster that I printed for her after she wrote her name for the first time. A poem that’s been hanging, large and framed, on her wall for over 3 years.

I thought of that choice, 14 years ago, to include this poem (with a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe‘s naked breasts and hand) in my thesis, which was about the mother-daughter relationship.  Thought of the ways in which I was then anticipating now, this very girl at my feet, this moment when I was the mother, and I had that dizzying experience where time kaleidoscopes into a single radiant moment.

“Will you read it to me, Mummy?” she asked, settling down into a cross-legged position on her floor, looking up at me beseechingly.

“Of course I will, Gracie.” And I began. And more than once, I had to pause to regain my composure and to swallow back the tears. Reading this poem to my eager daughter while looking at pictures of her writing her very first word. Pictures of her first word, her name. Grace. grace. Dear, dear universe. Thank you. Words, poetry, pen on paper, names, spelling, grace.

Gracie, my grace.

Spelling (Margaret Atwood)

My daughter plays on the floor
wit plastic letters,
read, blue, & hard yellow.
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

*

and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

*

A child is not a poem,
A poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.

*

I return to the story
of a woman caught in the war
& in labor, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.

*

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.

*

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky, & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

Her own library card.

Grace has strep. Again. Putting aside my worries about what the since-January roller coaster of strep-mono-strep means, I enjoyed a day with her yesterday. She feels basically fine but could not go to school until she’d been on the antibiotics for 24 hours (this time I was more forceful with the nurse and asked that she not prescribe the antibiotic that could kill Whit if he ingests it – so Grace is on zithromax). Grace’s one request for the day was to go to the library and get her own library card.

So, just after 9:00, we walked into the doors of the library. Up to the third floor we went.

Grace filled out her very first form. Other than her zip code, she knew it all herself. This was the first time she ever signed her own name. We talked about that for a while. Admittedly, her signature looks an awful lot like her regular writing at this point.

As you can see.

Grace had a specific book she wanted to look up, and so she did. I marveled, again, at how intuitively children seem to interact with computers (most of all with Apple products, in my experience). As she searched for the book she wanted, I walked up and down the aisles, my finger trailing along the book spines, seeing so many familiar titles. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Tuck Everlasting. Terabithia. The House with the Clock in its Walls. Little Women. The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Phantom Tollbooth. Jacob Have I Loved. A Wrinkle in Time.

Oh … I could have spent all day there. I was seven again, and falling into a new world every time I opened a book, discovering the magic of fiction, beginning what has become a life-long love affair. I could practically remember where I was when I read each of the books, on my stomach on the floor by my childhood bedroom’s bay windows, curled on the off-white couch on my grandparents’ screened-in porch, on the creaky backyard swinging bench at my other grandparents’ house. I finally stopped exclaiming “Gracie!” and making her look at the book that was triggering my memories at that moment, because her eye-rolling reaction showed me I was just interrupting her personal agenda.

On our way downstairs, we stopped on the second floor for me to grab a book, and we had an impromptu lesson on the Dewey Decimal System. I was surprised that I remembered anything, but it came right back, and Grace seemed fascinated. All of my library love flooded over me as I stood in the silent, sunlit stacks, pointing to small white labels with typewritten numbers, explaining to Grace in a whisper how knowledge itself is categorized.

Grace checked out all by herself. I’ve decided on a general rule of four or five books at a time, and she also picked out two Star Wars books for Whit.


And she proudly carried her stash out into the day. I couldn’t help welling up with tears, looking at this so-old-and-so-young face, knowing that her own library card, signed in her own hand, is in her pocket. I felt as though she had just gotten her own personal key to the grand carnival of knowledge. She walked out of that building having had her own independent introduction to this universe, whose neat Dewey decimal categorization, as she would someday learn, belies its sheer complexity and depth.

We went immediately home and she pulled on yoga pants and got into bed with her books. Is this child a mini me or what? A day of reading and libraries is a great day. She can stay.

Things I do not want to forget

Easter morning.  Always, they are walking away.

The way Whit’s shoulder blades feel like little wings, jutting gently out of his back, with its clearly articulated string of pearls of a spine.

Grace kneeling on the floor by her orange-canopied American Girl doll bed, tucking Samantha and Julie into bed next to each other. The way she earnestly changes them into their pajamas before bed and back into clothes in the morning.

Reading picture books to Grace and Whit over breakfast in the morning, sitting between them at the little square kitchen table, the way just the offer of reading is able to defuse the rowdiest sibling argument.

Whit dragging a kitchen chair over to the island and standing on it, stirring a bowl of cookie or brownie batter. His careful cracking of eggs into the bowl.

The way Grace’s face lights up when I take the time to turn, look at her, and join her in singing along to a song on the radio.

The “ghostie dance” that Whit demands that I do every night, to make sure that no ghosts bother him while he’s sleeping. Similarly, the way my patented “sweet dreams head rub” can help either child back to sleep when nightmares wake them up.

The view from my office, the beloved square of the world that I gaze on for hours a day. Today the big tree across the street is covered in pale green blossoms, and casting faint shadows onto the slate mansard roof of the house across from us.

Hearing Grace and Whit talking to each other through the heating duct in the wall between their rooms. They figured out this was a way to communicate, an in-wall tin can telephone of sorts, and hearing them stage whisper to one another from their enforced personal “quiet time” makes me both laugh and cry.

The afternoons that we dance to Miley Cyrus in the kitchen, when I gave in to an all-too-rare giggle and abandon myself to the sheer joy that both Grace and Whit seem to inhabit hourly.

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.

First grade open house

Yesterday morning, I went to Grace’s class’s “open house.” This was basically 30 minutes for the parents to sit in teeny chairs or kneel on the linoleum floor (oh, 35.5 year old self – NOT nice. getting up: hard) and have the children show us their latest work. There was pride and sheer delight on Grace’s face as she showed me her journal, her drawings of the Iditarod, and other pieces of work. Totally worth the sore knees.

I have a dream that everyone recycles. Good dream, this one. She recently asked me, totally seriously, “Mummy, can we start composting?” with the same kind of enthusiasm previously reserved for questions like, “Mummy, can we go to the American Girl store?” I told her I’m thinking about it.

This is the “word of the year” that she selected for herself. Good choice, Grace. My daughter is an old soul. And wow do I adore her.

I am special because I make cupcakes. I’ll take it.

Finally had to creakily get up off the floor and go sit in the circle time area.

A valiant effort at spelling “mononucleosis.”

Oh, and this bozo? Showing off his new sneakers for our trip to Florida. He was wearing his pajamas when I asked him to try them on. Moments later he showed up, interrupting Grace and my Harry-a-thon, prancing around buck naked in his sneaks. Ah, Whitty.