musings

Happiness and sadness as they arise

Be open to your happiness and sadness as they arise. – John M. Thomas

I love this (also yet another sky photograph). As my Landslide post described, happiness and sadness arise for me out of thin air sometimes, swamping like an unanticipated wave. At other times they come up with a steadier drumbeat, reaching a more conventional crescendo.

This is, I believe, one of the major tasks of my life: to learn to ride these various swells and ebbs without fear, to honor each moment as it comes, to trust that sadness will eventually make way to happiness again as firmly as I already know that joy will fade away to melancholy.

And after all, the happiness means nothing without the sadness. That is another of the few things I know for sure. I don’t much care for The Prophet, finding it slightly hackneyed, but one of Gibran’s lines encapsulates this more perfectly than I ever could: The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Landslide

The first 90 minutes of my day today perfectly illustrate the potent combination of randomness and emotion that defines my current life.

Whit emerged from his room wearing his Tonka tee shirt, shorts, a plastic Police helmet, and wielding a paper towel roll that had clearly been repurposed as a gun. He leapt out into the hall (I was sitting at my desk, right there) with the kind of energy and frantic gun-pointing that I associate with the Law & Order folks breaking into an apartment that the dangerously armed perp might still be hiding in.

After Eggo waffles, Whit begs to bring his paper towel roll gun to camp and I refuse. “But it’s just cardboard, mummy!” he pleads. I give him a “don’t BS me” glare and he huffs, “Okay, fine! But I want it here when I get home!” before throwing it down by the door.

Grace made her own fashion statement today in pink madras bermuda shorts and a size 2T Elmo tee shirt (both short and snug). Adequately sartorially styled, the three of us piled into the car to go to Starbucks and then camp. I almost don’t need to mention, so regular an occurence has it been this summer: it is pouring.

As Whit is climbing into the car, slipping around in his too-small hand-me-down rainboots (I encouraged him to wear crocs, he insisted on the boots, more on that later) I scooped out of his seat a handful of puffy My Little Pony stickers that had been favors at last weekend’s birthday party. I shoved them into the pocket of my raincoat to surreptitiously throw away, gambling that he had forgotten about them.

After Starbucks and the drive-through ATM, we head to Grace’s camp. She is singing along with alarming comfort to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.” I asked her how she knows every single word and she shrugs, “We sing this at camp.” When did she turn into a teenager? Glancing in the rearview mirror, I see her long, tanned legs dangling towards the floor and feel as though I can see her fourteen year old self in her six year old body.

“Gracie, you know how we are going out for a special dinner tonight at the American Girl Doll store? With Caroline and her mummy?”

“Yes, today is the day!” (she had been counting down, no joke, on an hourly basis since I told her about this plan on Monday).

“Well, do you mind if we go a few minutes early and you do one errand with me?”

“Oh, mummy, I’d be delighted!” Again with the mini adult language.

After we drop Grace off, Whit and I head over to his camp. This is across town and takes a surprisingly long time in the rush hour traffic. As we sit at a red light, Landslide comes on the radio. I am flooded with emotions, and tears fill my eyes. Thoughts run through my head about change, people growing older, life moving ahead, and how much I fear uncertainty and the unknown. I reach over and pull on a pair of big shades (I always have one at the ready, part of my wrinkle mania), never mind the pouring rain.

Whit is happily oblivious to my little emotional attack in the front seat. I am navigating through back streets like the local I am, avoiding as many lights as possible, peering through my tears and my dark glasses, when I hear, “Hey, Mummy! Good way to go!” This causes a laugh to break through my sudden gloom. My son is opining on the best way to snake through Cambridge so as to avoid traffic and lights. For some reason this strikes me as hilarious.

When we arrive at camp, Whit pitches a small fit that he doesn’t have his crocs on. He whines, loudly, “Oh, mummy, you are just not a good mummy! You forgot to bring my crocs!” I grit my teeth and continue pulling him by the hand through the crowded parking lot, choosing not to even rise to the bait. They know how to pull the strings, these children of mine! Moments after arriving at the purple room he is happily scampering around in sock feet. Fine.

And now I am staring out the window at the downpour, thinking about how every hour of my life seems to contain an amalgam of puffy stickers, venti nonfat lattes, and crashing waves of emotion and melancholy.

What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Nude Olympics

And now for something a lot lighter …

You know how certain songs just instantly transport you back to a moment in time? At least they do for me, which is kind of funny given that I am totally tone deaf. Music is not, shall we say, a strength. Still, certain songs come on the radio and I am swiftly and completely immersed in a particular memory. Recently “Under the Bridge” has taken me back to the Exeter grill and “Glory Days” to Princeton graduation. Today “Jesse’s Girl” was playing when I was driving on Storrow Drive and suddenly it was January, 1994, and it was snowing.

Not everyone was back at school after winter break. Princeton has that great tradition of exams after Christmas, which kind of takes away from the holidays. But it means everyone’s on campus for three weeks in January. Which is often when the first snow comes in New Jersey. And we all knew what that meant …

Only three of us were back in our tiny rooms in the Forbes attic. K was still in Florida. The morning dawned gray and cold, and the sky spat rain and sleet all day. The rumors ran through campus all day long … It’s tonight! It’s not tonight. It’s tonight! It strikes me how differently decisions like this must get made in an era of cell phones and email. We had to talk about it at the library and call each other from our land line phones. Anyway, by the time night fell there was a crust of ice on the ground and it was sleeting/snowing heavily.

This was it. It was our night. It was the Nude Olympics. Any sophomore who lived in Holder that night, site of where the run would take place, wound up hosting a party. I don’t remember much about the specifics other than my active decision not to drink alcohol. Not because I was a teetotaller but because I wanted to be sober to run on this slippery surface. What a great decision that turned out to be!

I remember as the parties wore on and midnight drew closer, somehow it just seemed natural that people started shedding their clothes. I remember that the gesticulations of smokers were suddenly really dangerous (it seems amazing to me that people just smoked at parties in those days – that is impossible to fathom now). I had cigarette burns on my arms, actually. And I remember that someone took a sharpie and wrote on my back “No longer Jesse’s girl.” (hence the song reference). I had indeed just broken up with my boyfriend, but I’m still not sure who wrote that on my back or why at that particular moment it was relevant. Despite my sobriety a palpable air of mischievousness and play coursed through the night and certain details are blurry.

At midnight groups of sophomores burst out of various Holder rooms and started running. It was slow going, and groups formed. There were a lot more guys than girls. There was a huge crowd watching and some flashbulbs going off (but no cellphone cameras – thank God). I have in my mind one picture that I saw later of several of my friends right in the front of the pack. My memory tells me someone was holding some kind of flag but I don’t know if I am right – it’s hard to imagine running with an American flag, so maybe it was a class of 1996 banner?

We did slow laps around Holder and out into other quads as well. I have no memory of being cold. And then it happened. I fell. I slipped on the sheet ice and wiped out. I stood up and remember thinking: I just broke my leg. Like the responsible young adult I was, I finished my lap with my friends, limping badly, and then went back to the Holder hallway where I had stowed my clothes. I recall how much it hurt to pull my pants over my hiking boot. I then limped to the infirmary.

I walked into the infirmary and started crying. My leg hurt so damned much and I could not believe what a graceless klutz I was (and still am). I told the nurse my leg was broken and she told me, somewhat coldly, that no way it was not and I had to wait until the morning when I could get an x-ray at the local hospital. I asked why I could not go to the ER for an x-ray. And I was told that was because my leg was most likely not broken. The hours that ensued were not fun. I remember C was there, though don’t recall if anyone else was.

I remember calling my mother and sobbing. I was in pain and I felt incredibly stupid for falling. I remember the nurse pulling me aside and asking me if I needed to talk to someone about an abusive relationship. I was flabbergasted by the question and then realized she was referring to the cigarette burns on my arms.

When morning finally dawned, I went to the hospital, got my x-ray, and found out my leg was in fact broken. I remember that my being glad I was right and the b*&%3 nurse wrong almost outweighed my dismay at … well, having a broken leg.

I was back in my room midafternoon with a thick, heavy cast on when the landline rang. It was K, from Florida. “Hey! I can’t believe I missed the Nude Olympics! Oh my God! And I heard someone broke their leg! Can you believe it?” Umm, yeah. I can.

When I crutched into the dining room of Forbes that evening a hush fell over the room. All eyes turned to me. Someone said, “That’s her!” I was mortified. To think I wasted my 15 minutes of fame on that.

Susie

I read a chapter of Raising Cain last night that is about Susie’s death. Susie was my mother’s best friend, and a second mother of sorts to me. My sister and I grew up very close with three other families, of whom Susie’s family was one. Her sons Tyler and, in particular, Ethan are as close to brothers to me. I knew from Mum that Michael Thompson had worked with Susie and the boys, but I did not realize he had been a part of their lives when she was dying.

The chapter stunned me, bringing me instantly back to those intense days in 1997. Susie died in the fall of 1997 and I will never forget the months leading up to that. For one thing, my grandmother died of the same kind of cancer in June. Pancreatic cancer suffused those months. My mother, even more surrounded by illness and death than I was, was intimately involved in Susie’s caretaking. There were a group of women who circled around her, supporting both her and her sons, in a way that I think of often now.

“Women do not leave situations like this; we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, “What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.” I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.” – Elizabeth Berg

This quotation, which I invoked recently to friends involved in similar caretaking, really captures what those months were like. I was nowhere near as intensely involved as my mother was, but I was still a part of the experience. Ethan, Susie, Mum and I had countless dinners on Susie’s sun porch. We sewed square for quilts. We attended caretakers meetings.

Experiencing Susie’s death was an exquisite, once-in a lifetime privilege. I learned more about death and, perhaps paradoxically (but maybe not), about life from her in those months than I think I have since. Susie faced death with extraordinary grace. Somehow she was able to say to those of us near to her: Yes, I am dying. But see, I am not afraid. And so we were not afraid. And though the crushing sadness remained, without fear, it was more manageable.

Susie was able to rise above her own emotions to provide solace and strength to those around her. She spoke honestly about her fears, her experience, her pain. But she also honored the great good fortune of her life and was able, somehow, to put her own need away so that she could reassure those close to her, take care of her boys, until the end. I can neither imagine nor fathom the strength it took for her to do that, to put her own need for reassurance behind her desire to comfort those around her. We were supposed to be taking care of her, but in fact it was the other way around. Hers was an amazing act of generosity; to this day I am humbled when I remember it.

Hilary shared with me a prayer that was said at one caretaker meeting that I did not attend. The closing line was: I believe all of our paths are perfect. I think of this often. If a woman who died before 50, leaving two young sons with everything in front of them, can find a way to feel at peace with that, I owe it to her memory to recognize the perfection – or at least the beauty in the imperfection – of my own path.

Susie, you will never be forgotten. And Ethan, I love you.

Flickering faith

… embracing a view of the world that welcomes people who dare and refuses to punish those who are willing to be confused and disoriented in pursuit of something tender, something honest, something true.

I love that passage, and in fact Jen Lemen’s whole post about faith.

I think about this a lot, aching with how much I want to trust, how much I want to have faith. In my deepest heart I do believe there is some order, some design so vast, I really do. But how abstract that seems, in the moments when all seems dark and confusing.

I wonder if my affection for patterns is part of this deep longing for faith: by seeing reassuring, repetitive order in the world I can trust that it is also there beneath the surface. That underneath what may look like chaos there is some scaffolding that makes sense. This likely underlies my affinity for symmetry, for the way the New York skyscrapers look reaching into the sky. Also, my teeth-clicking counting off of things by 8s: cars in a parking lot, bottles of nail polish at the manicurist, window panes across a waiting room. All of these things can be categorized and understood, and I am comforted by what that implies about the greater world.

But at the same time, my favorite images are those of the sky and of clouds. And these have, almost by definition, no symmetry. There, the design is truly so vast as to be not at all obvious to the naked eye. Somehow, the beauty of the sky is in its very randomness and it is this utter lack of pattern that summons my weak faith. Looking at the blue sky streaked irregularly with clouds, I feel as though I can believe.

I suppose it is obvious, then, that it is when the pattern is inscrutable that we must call on faith. When things look messy and confusing, our only option is to trust. In fact, if I could let go of my desperate desire to wrestle the world into an understandable and predictable set of equations and probabilities, I would likely be a lot happier. Of course the reason I cannot let go easily is precisely because my faith is so weak. It is in that space, that free fall between order and disorder that faith catches us. And I’ve never liked the feeling of falling.

Of course, the disorder in the wide world is nothing compared to the disarray inside us. There is no counting off in groups of 8 my feelings, no way to categorize and subdue the instincts and fears that roar in my head. It is here that I need faith most of all: belief that the determined pursuit of emotional truth will take me where I need to go, conviction that getting lost is the only way to be found, trust that I am still safe even when hopelessly lost and buffeted by reactions so powerful they scare me. The sad realization that sometimes even my very best effort is far from good enough lurks around the corners of my consciousness, but I see no option but to continue to try to both understand and manage my reactions.

So I will hope that my flickering faith will strengthen and not go out. I will renew my efforts to let go and believe. I will try to not be afraid of my feelings, to parse the difference between where I can manage my reactions better and where I must just experience them in order to understand. I will welcome the swell of comfort and well-being that sometimes crashes over me like a wave, whether it’s looking at a glorious sky, speaking in unison with other people in church or yoga class, or running my hand through my sleeping son’s hair. I will be grateful for the faith that I do have.