musings

Change

The moment of change is the only poem. – Adrienne Rich

Once again, a time of change. Oh, the change makes music. – James Taylor

I am living in a poem, in a time of glorious music.

Everything is changing. Grace and Whit are both going to new schools after 8 and 10 years respectively at the school around the corner. Grace is leaving for boarding school.  Matt and I are both in new jobs, and mine is in a brand new company.

Literally nothing is the same as it was last year.

And of course so much is the same. Our parents are healthy, as are our siblings. We are surrounded by love and immense good fortune. We still live in the same house, on the same street, and the same tree across the street that I’ve watched for 16 years now is in full-on summer bloom.

We have each other.

But I’ll be honest: what’s new is more present for me than what’s constant. I feel buffeted by change and upheaval, most of all by Grace’s impending departure but by everything else, too. I struggle with change.  I always have.

But now and then there are glimpses of another way of being, and they are as fleeting as they are seductive. Like a bicycle slipping into gear, once in a while I have a sensation of freedom, as I can briefly embody the be-here-now philosophy I wish so desperately was mine all the time. It is as though for a passing moment, I feel permission to just live the moment I’m in, without being paralyzed by my concerns about what is coming. To be clear: even these glimpses are new. I am accustomed to traveling through my experience with a white-knuckle grip on each day, my desire to inhabit the moment frankly equaled by my inability to release my worries about what’s coming.

So it feels like a benediction, or a blessing, to let go of this for a fleeting moment.  Is this what life in the moment really feels like? Maybe this is what sports psychologists refer to as flow. It does remind me of the sudden, startling ease of hitting a ball with a tennis racquet’s sweet spot: everything feels smoother, simpler, easier.

I have no doubt that these moments are grace.

What I don’t quite know is what brings them to me, or whose permission I’m receiving to simply enjoy my 14 year old as she is, rather than fretting overwhelmingly about her moving out.  I wish I could figure out what triggers these moments, since I want to live more that way. Somehow, I suspect that working hard to figure out what it is that allows this grace to pass through me is a lost cause, though, or a fool’s errand.  If anything, these moments of fleeting being-here-now seem to whisper that the secret is in letting go of my grip, not tightening it.

My practice this summer – a brief, shining window before our new formation this fall – will be to simply allow these transcendent experiences to descend, and to welcome them as they come.  I will try not to worry about when I’ll next be allowed to peek into life without the penumbra of what’s coming looming.

I will hear the music of the change.

 

Matrescence 2.0

December 2002

I loved reading The Birth of a Mother in the New York Times, and not just because that photograph reminded me of one of my favorite photos of Grace when she was a baby (see above, December 2002).  I read the article, which asserts that matrescence (the process of becoming a mother – a word that I had never known and which struck me because it acknowledges that that is, indeed, a process) is important and under-examined.  I share this view.

What I’m living right now is not so much my own first matrescence – that took place a long time ago, and being a mother is firmly at the center of who I am.  It’s more the transition of my motherhood into a new phase, but it feels as material and as jarring in its own way.  I’m struck by how I read about maternal ambivalence and postpartum depression (which was very much a part of my own matrescence) and those feel long, long ago.  I’m entirely, absolutely, head-over-heels in love with my own children now, and don’t feel much – any – apprehension about those being the central relationships of my life (along with their father). Those early, complicated days, which I can recall vividly, but with effort, have faded into the background entirely.

The future, however, is full of uncertainty.  This moment may be defined by my own full-fledged embrace of motherhood, but I can’t escape the shadow of what’s coming. My reality is taking on a new shape. Grace is going to boarding school and our family life is about to change in a major way.  There is no question this is the end of something.  I realize this is the most first world of first world problems (and when I read books like The Bright Hour, I’m reminded to Get A Grip).

As soon as I got my feet under me as a mother, it feels like, this season is about to end. I know, I know, this is just another reminder that life’s only constant is change.  My children, at 12 and 14, are such entertaining people.  I love them, but I also truly like them. They’re my favorite human beings to be around, and they easily make me laugh, think, and, sometimes, yell and also cry.

Life’s ordinary rhythms have taken on an almost unbearable beauty.  The routine of morning wakeups, breakfast, and driving to school (3/4 of a mile so it doesn’t take long!) makes me cry every single day and I have to actively try not to count how few mornings like this we have left.  I am trying to be here now, I really am, but wow, it’s hard.

I realize that it is impossible that this transition is as much of an earthquake as Grace’s arrival, but it feels almost commensurately big. I think of Jon Kabat-Zinn, of his line that “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf,” I take a deep breath, I try not to look into Grace’s room where the folded piles of laundry I put there remind me that she still lives here, for at least a little bit more.  I try to appreciate the gorgeousness around me. No matter what happens, I will always be their mother. She isn’t going that far. I believe in the depths and fibers of my soul that this is the right next step for her.  I always said I wanted to raise a brave and a smart daughter, and here I am, watching her take flight. She is brave and smart. Everything is as it should be. I just didn’t know how much it would hurt.

April 2017

In Between

April 16, 2017

Right now our family is living in between.  In between making decisions and those decisions becoming the fact of our lives.  In between being here and going.  In between the present and the future.  This applies mostly to Grace and Whit, both of whom will be going to new schools in September, but also to Matt and to me, because the texture of our daily lives is going to change.

Every season of life has its own rhythm and this one is jerky and discordant. I am trying to hear the music that exists in the dissonance, because I know it’s there, but I’m struggling. We’re all a bit more explosive then usual, unexpectedly grumpy or surprised by our own emotions at different moments. The shadow of what’s coming is occluding the radiance of right now, there’s no question about it.

I am finding this moment difficult to live in.  I walk into Grace’s room and hug her, just because I can, and then start crying without being able to stop. I set the table for Saturday night family dinner and have to sit down and weep, because I am aware of how few dinners like this lie ahead.  Grace and Whit are squabbling even more (way more) than usual and I’m not handling the bickering well.

I am definitely someone who experiences the cliche that the anticipation is worse than the reality.  Almost always.  It’s why I can’t really stand roller coasters: that endless ascent at the beginning?  I cannot bear it.  And this anticipation, this click-click-click rise to the top, with an inevitable swooping, heart-stopping descent on the other side, is longer than any I’ve ever lived.

These changes are all good.  I know that. But what’s coming is new, and it marks the undeniable end of something. Neither newness nor endings rank high on my list of favorite things, and to combine those with a wait under the cloud of what’s coming creates a phase that is not easy for me. I am breathing. I am taking photos. I am trying my best to be here now. That is all I can do.

Control is overrated

I love all of Courtney Martin’s writing on On Being.  I highly recommend you check her out.  But this piece, The Right Decision Is the One You Make, ripped me to shreds.  I’ve read and re-read it, and I urge you to do so.

Because of her gorgeous words about parenting, yes: “I’ve been on the steepest learning curve of my entire life, and madly, viscerally in love, and totally out of control. I never could have made a different decision. It feels as if it was made for me on so many levels. I am humbled, so completely and totally humbled by it all.”

But most of all, because of her wisdom about control. Her beautiful writing about how becoming a parent strips you of the illusory sense of being in control (and how it’s a false feeling, no matter whether you are a parent or not).  Martin calls life itself “terrifying and magical” whether you have kids or not, and that’s my impression, too.

I’ve written at length about my own often-crippling need to feel in control.  I’ve described the way I have “white knuckled” my way through much of my own life. But the truth is becoming a parent shifted that, and something fundamental inside of me, and because of that I relate in an almost-uncomfortably keen way to what Martin writes.

Grace’s arrival in our lives was unplanned.  That’s not news to anyone who knows me (or to her).  I wrote a whole book, in a drawer now, about those unexpected two lines on a pregnancy test and the way that they knocked my world off balance.  For someone who had planned her entire life, frankly, it was a pretty big shock.  The deep postpartum depression that followed after Grace’s birth had its roots, I’m convinced, in the unplanned aspect of my pregnancy.  Of course I recognize now the tremendous gift that this turn of events was; sometimes I wonder if I would have ever had babies, had I been fully in charge of the decision.  It’s never the perfect time, after all.

And the lessons that my experience of those couple of years – we are not pulling the strings of our lives, at all, the darkness can hold tremendous gifts, and the unanticipated path can be the most beautiful – continue to echo through my days now. The years of my pregnancies and with infants and small children at home, while some of the most exhausting and difficult of my life, were also the richest. With a decade and a half of retrospect now I can see that some of the themes that would shape my midlife took root.  I’m so grateful for that, and for having lived through an experience that was harrowing and beautiful, frighteningly dark and disorienting, yes, but also glorious.

Terrifying and magical, you might say.

your days are short here

I have had Adlai Stevenson’s line about “your days are short here” in my head recently. I love his whole speech, in particular those last lines, and have written about them before.  But it’s specifically the notion of something drawing to a close that feels salient to me right now.

I can’t get the line out of my head.

Our days are short here.

There are surely fewer days with all four of us under one roof ahead than behind us.  So many years have gone, rippling behind us in a blur of bathtimes and walks and hockey games and car rides.  I’m so thankful for the details I’ve recorded, here and in my enormous photo albums, but still, there’s so much I wish I could do over again.  Of course I can’t, and that’s the very essence of life: you get one go around.  It’s in my essential wiring to be struck dumb by the heartbreak of that, but the flip side of that characteristic is, I believe, how fundamentally open I am to receiving joy and beauty in the most ordinary experiences.

Our days are short here.  This season, which broke open with a colicky newborn and a rainstorm in late October 2002, which felt, for so long, endless, is drawing to a close. Grace is almost my height and Whit is catching up fast.  They’re independent in so many ways, strong and opinionated and funny.  They can cook dinner for us, walk home from school and let themselves in, put themselves to bed.  I can see the adults they are becoming. I love them, a lot, but I also like them.

I considered a book project several years ago that focused on the “new season” of parenting kids in their adolescence.  The first paragraph was this:

In between conference calls last Tuesday I walked to the mailbox a few blocks from my house. I passed the park where I had strolled with both of my children, spent countless hours watching them learn to navigate the slides and then the monkey bars, coached micro-soccer on Saturday mornings for years. I looked at the mothers crouched in the sandbox and at the toddlers making their clumsy way around the structure and felt a pang so acute of all that was gone I had to stop and catch my breath. That time, when empty days without school or commitments unfurled in front of me, seems like another country. My children still play on playgrounds, but I know those days themselves are numbered.

Even that already feels like a different country of its own now!  I feel as though I have taken an extremely long flight and have lost track of what day it is.  I’ve emerged from the terminal into the bright light of a foreign land and I’m blinking into the sun, trying to get my bearings.  I am staring at empty nesters and children who are getting close to driving age.  All these years have through my fingers like so much sand, and no amount of grasping slowed their passage.

Tonight I’m struck by the sorrow of that, though I’m aware, also, of the deep, gorgeous, messy joys that have filled every day in the enormous gulf between my first days as a mother and now.

My days are short here.  And while my children still want to come sit next to me in bed to read,  I’m going to wholeheartedly enjoy it, trying not to wonder if it’s the last time.