Grace

A Day With Grace

Yesterday was Gracie’s birthday party. 22 six and seven year old girls, each with a favorite doll (in all but one case, an American Girl doll) in tow, had tea. It was surprisingly under control and pleasant.

Today Grace and I spent all day together. This morning she wrote all of her thank you notes in the kitchen while I baked her birthday cake (half chocolate and half yellow, as requested) and also some Halloween cupcakes.

After lunch at home, Grace and I went to our first mother-daughter book club. We read the most wonderful book, The Boy Who Grew Flowers. I really recommend it. Grace read it to me once, and I read it to her once. As we drove into town we talked about what the story was about. Grace was tired, I think, and thoughtful. We talked about difference, and empathy, and the importance of getting to know someone before you decide what you think of them.

The conversation segued into general talk about friendships. She told me two things she had learned in kindergarten that really struck me. The first was that “you should think before you say something” which struck me as a life adage we should all abide by (including me). Then she told me how her kindergarten teacher had said that sometimes you should just keep what you were going to say inside. She made some analogy – twice, trying to explain it to me – about how it is like when you squeeze too much toothpaste onto your toothbrush. She said firmly that you should keep mean things you want to say inside your body rather than saying them. Toothpaste notwithstanding, I think there’s wisdom in that too.

At the book club, Grace was uncharacteristically quiet and reserved. She felt very shy and clung to my leg most of the day. She did not know any of the other girls except for one well, and she was clearly intimidated. At one point, curled on my lap, she whispered in my ear that she “felt like Rink” today. Rink is the shy protagonist of the Boy Who Grew Flowers. Her statement brought tears pricking to my eyes, but I also felt proud of her.

From book club I drove her to a friend’s house to go to a Halloween party. We talked about a sleepover she wants to have. She wants to have a certain friend who has had her over for the night to sleep over. I mentioned a possible date and she was enthusiastic about it and then, abruptly, said she was not sure. I asked her why. She explained that she was embarrassed that she still falls to sleep listening to music, and asked if we could just not play the music that night.

Despite whatever message she took from The Boy Who Grew Flowers, the desire to be the same and to fit it is still overpowering. Oh Gracie girl, on the eve of your seventh birthday, if only I could find a way to show you that the things that make you different are the ingredients of your own personal magic.

Weekend in photographs

Despite forecasts calling for a Two Day Nor’Easter, Saturday dawned bright and clear and cold. Soccer for all. Whit spiced up his soccer outfit with his usual flair.
Grace and I headed to the Common, where the Orange Frogs played the Teal Something or Others. I confess I was not paying super close attention and I don’t know what the score was.
Later that afternoon, my dear friend Jeri came to take pictures of the kids. We went to a nearby park and just played. I was sent to the sidelines to watch and told to stop telling me kids “no!” – harder than it sounds!
Grace demonstrated her weird upper body strength
Whit developed an enormous crush on Jeri. I have never seen him be so cooperative or downright flirty with anyone (yes, Jeri, I realize he was not that cooperative, but believe me, this was some kind of record). I think he wants to be a photographer now.
Saturday night Grace and I started reading the book for our first Mother Daughter Bookclub, the inaugural meeting of which is next weekend. The Boy Who Grew Flowers is a charming story and I highly recommend it.

Sunday brought the promised storm. The children bundled up to go watch a regatta with Matt. It was freezing and pouring rain. Going Outside No Matter What is a kind of mantra around here.
Then in the afternoon I took Grace and Whit to see Where the Wild Things Are. Spectacular.

Girls and boys and doors open and closed

Mama at the Elmo Wallpaper wrote a lovely, achingly honest post today about the thought of saying goodbye to the dream of the daughter she had hoped to have. Aidan responded with her own musings on the children we imagine and those we actually have, on the collision between our dreams and our reality.

Both have made me thoughtful. I have one girl and one boy. I admit: I always, desperately wanted a daughter. I am one of two girls, I wrote my thesis on the mother-daughter relationship, I think my own mother is pretty damned awesome…. in short, I really wanted to have a girl. And I think I always suspected that I’d have boys, feared that somehow the universe would screw with my blatant desires. I did not find out the gender of my babies in either pregnancy. But when I was pregnant with Grace I had a strong, visceral sense that she was a girl. Everybody had a point of view, from strangers on the street to my closest friends. Everybody claimed I was carrying a boy. I kept my firm conviction to myself, worried that by voicing it I’d be jinxing myself.

And then she arrived, like a hurricane, and she was a girl. And despite digging my fingernails into the rocky edge as hard as I possibly could, I slid far and fast over the precipice into despair. I remember thinking, in the midst of the deep darkness of depression, that it was crazy that I was sad. I had what I had always wanted: daughter. How could I be sad?

When I was pregnant the second time I had absolutely no idea what gender the baby was. I made the joke about hermaphrodites and said “I just don’t want to have to make a call in the delivery room!” about a thousand times. When he was born, though, I was honestly shocked. That instinctive reaction made me realized I had, somehow, subconsciously assumed he was a girl. My Phoebe was not to be. So he was – and is – my little boy.

My experiences of my children, of course, are wildly different. They were different from the outset. I was so afraid of what would happen after Whit was born that I set up a triple-reinforced belt-and-suspenders set of support systems. I had drugs, shrinks, and baby nurses. Hot and cold running help. And through the blessing of that, and whatever else was different the second time around, I truly enjoyed Whit’s infancy. The truth is that Grace’s babyhood and my ambivalent, conflicted reaction to motherhood gouged deep wounds into me. Though those scars strained when Whit was born, they did not rip open. My experience of Whit as a baby was inexpressably healing. I am still working out the nuances of both experiences and how they shifted, subtly but profoundly, my sense of myself.

To this day, Grace and Whit are very different and my feelings about being a mother to each of them are likewise distinct. I cannot, of course, disaggregate gender from birth order and basic personality and all of the inputs into the particular equation that spits out How We Feel About Motherhood. Of course not. But Mama and Aidan’s posts made me think about it.

I feel very lucky to be able to have the particular experience of being mother to a girl and to a boy. I do have some sadness, however, that Grace will never have a sister. This reared its head for me when my sister had her second daughter. My own sister is so important to me that I grieve the fact that Grace won’t have that particular experience. Of course she will have a different one, and I hope it will be equally, though differently, wonderful. We are off to a mixed start, though when things like this come home I feel hopeful. (an aside: Bouff, this is why you have a second one)
What really struck me about my friend’s posts, though, was the notion of final decisions. Of closing doors and of coming to terms with the ways that the life we have may not live up to the life we imagined. I am terrible at finality. I hate closing off options. You could argue that my professional life is where it is because of I am so damned allergic to actually choosing something. It is clear to me now that a set of choices designed to maximize options does not, in fact, maximize joy and fulfillment. I did not realize that for a long time. Of course when you don’t know what DOES maximize joy or fulfillment for yourself, it’s an easy algorithm by which to make decisions.

As I move inexorably forward towards middle age I am realizing that, despite my adamant efforts, there are plenty of doors that are firmly shut. Plenty of roads that are no longer available. There is definitely sadness in this, but is there also some sense of relief? Some of this is active choice, some of it is sheer chance, much of it is in the murky area that lies between those two polarities. As I’ve written before, my life is exactly as I planned it and also nothing like I imagined it would be.

I believe that every day the individual we are confronts the self we wanted – and still want – to be. There is both intense grief and huge potential in the friction between those selves. This holds true for every manifestation of our selves: lives, careers, families, things fundamental and things frivolous. I think that to accept status quo without challenging it or aspiring to more is a sad fate, but I also think that to chafe constantly at the differences that exist between what is and what might have been is a short road to misery. So there has to be something in the middle. There has to be a way of honoring our lives, in all their kaleidoscope color of joy, beauty, pain, disappointment, humor, love, and challenge, while also remembering that which we dreamed of. May we all find it.

The thoughtfulness of friends

My friend Kara wrote the most incredibly thoughtful email to me after reading my post about Grace’s anxiety and loneliness. She makes so many points that made me think that I want to include excerpts here.

but your blog about Gracie and her birthday party makes my heart ache–I remember being that age having private heartaches that overwhelmed my whole world that got so much better after telling my mom.

How can you tell a child that age–when all they want to do is blend in–how special she is and that these pains now are growing pains/a rite of passage and that she should just stay her own unique self bc all the adults in her life see her for who she is and love her for it? And that the things that make life so hard for her right now ultimately may stand her in good stead as an adult?


This is so exactly how I see Grace right now. She wants so clearly to be part of the group, and I know she will eventually find her “home,” whatever it looks like, but I also actively celebrate the things about her that make her a little different right now. I personally spent so long fitting in that I never really noticed that it didn’t actually quite fit – that’s one of the things that I’m struggling with now. So I honor Grace’s inability or unwillingness to mold herself.

Since the post she has told me that one friend, a boy in her class, likes to swing as much as she does. She tells me that they talk on the swings, and this is clearly very reassuring to me. I asked her tonight what they talk about and she thought for a minute before shrugging and saying, “Well, we don’t really talk. We just kind of swing together.” I was utterly charmed by this image, and felt a new wave of certainty that my independent and thoughtful child will eventually find friends with complimentary rhythms in their spirits, friends whose desires for closeness and space echo her own.

I ate lunch by myself on the back stairwell of my first day of Lawrenceville bc I was so intimidated.

This made me smile a faint smile, both of knowing exactly how that feels, and of being so touched that Kara would reveal such a detail. It reminded me of Katherine Center’s moving blog post about how stories can save us. Katherine says many wise things, but the one that I am thinking of right now is that when her son skins his knee she doesn’t tell him about how blood clots. She tells him about how she skinned her knee once. And with this single detail, as with my friends, the other person’s loneliness is swept far away.

I guess the lesson G teaches is to have faith that there’s always a reason for what can seem like bratty behavior–child or adult

This is Kara’s third point that made me nod. Yes. This is hard to remember, isn’t it? But we would all be happier people, I think, if we reminded ourselves that whenever anyone acts badly they are probably demonstrating hurt or fear or another genuine emotion. I don’t think I’m very good at this yet, often because I get caught in my own emotional maelstrom in reaction to the other person, but Kara’s message is a good prompt and reminder.

Thank you, dear one.

Grace, Whit, gifts, hilarity

I spent the last two days at my firm’s annual meeting. There were lots of presentations, long dinners, and a big canvas bag with some huge slide decks and two gifts in it. The gifts were a baseball with one company logo and a watch with another company logo.

Grace got the watch and Whit got the baseball. All was well in the world.

Until breakfast today. When Whit was jealous of Grace’s watch (why, I’m not sure, as I could not figure out how to set it so it was flashing random numbers and dangling on her wrist like a big plastic bangle).

He began howling that he wanted the watch. Grace, reasonably, said he could have the watch if he gave her the baseball. He pondered this for a moment before grinning maniacally at her and saying, “Fine. You won’t be able to hit it, since the baseball bat is mine.”

Grace’s turn to howl.

Short of patience, I finally said stop it, we are both keeping our presents, we’ll maybe share later, now please eat your cereal.

Whit sighed a melodramatic sigh and leaned his chin on his hand, elbow on the table.

“I’ll just wait until Grace goes to heaven.”