musings

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of homesickness.  It is an emotion I’m familiar with, but when I ponder the feeling more deeply, I find myself confused: what is home for me?  I’ve written at length about my peripatetic childhood and the slipperiness that engenders in my own sense of home.  Now, I’m crystal clear: home is the small house Matt and I moved into 15 years ago July, to which we brought home both of our babies, in whose walls Grace and Whit have grown up.

Of course home isn’t a place, though, at all.  It’s people. It’s family, the one I was born into and the one I have made.

The truth is I didn’t feel homesick much as a child.  At least I don’t remember that.  I know that I came home at midnight from my very first sleepover, in Paris, and I was homesick then.  I know I did not like my first camp, which I went to when I was 9, and was homesick.  But for the years after that, when I went to camp on Cape Cod (where Grace and Whit go now) and then to boarding school, I don’t recall feeling homesick. I don’t say that as a criticism, by the way – I know that I was a securely attached child who was confident of her relationship with her parents and my lack of homesickness did not reflect something nefarious.  Whit, for example, isn’t homesick.  And I know he loves us and vice versa.

This is part of why I’ve been thinking about the idea of homesickness, lately.  I think it’s more complicated than simply missing home.  Grace was homesick at camp this summer, which surprised all of us a little since she’s been to camp for many years, and confidently so. I suspect what she’s homesick for is me, but more than anything, I think she’s preemptively homesick for right now.  In some deep-seated way Grace is aware that the days when I can solve problems for her and when I’ll be an uncomplicated source of security are numbered.  It’s not that we won’t always have a close bond; I hope we do and trust we will.  It’s just that she’s a young woman and her relationship with me is necessarily changing.  I know it will and already is.  I studied this and now I’m living it.

This is as it should be.

But it’s not easy. It’s scary to know what’s coming, to look independence and young adulthood in the eye and it’s also sad to glance back at all that will never come again. It won’t surprise any of you who know how frequently I glance back to know that Grace does the same.  Often.

So I understand this latest surge of homesickness in Grace this way: a prescient awareness of what is coming, a preemptive sorrow, a clinging to what is because what is on the horizon is scary and exciting in equal measure.  Maybe she’s just wired this way, aware of the light and the dark, attuned to the shadows that hover around a lot of life’s experiences, sensitive to loss even before it arrives.  If so, she’s just like her mother.

I have been thinking a lot about this question of who we are.  Possibly precipitated by these these quotes which presented themselves to me over and over again this summer (reminding me, yet again, that there’s some inchoate logic behind what we think of when we think of it).

Tell me who you love and I will tell you who you are – Arsene Houssaye

Maybe that’s who you are, what you remember. – Orson Scott Card

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are – Jose Ortega y Gasset (from A First Sip, Instagram here)

Are we those we love, our memories, or our passions?  These all feel right to me. Perhaps we are all three.  Surely we are so much more, too.  I’ve been thinking about how I would personally answer these questions but also about the way that each of these quotes touches on external indicators of something truly internal.  Can we ever really know who we are?

Or are we always looking for hints, or clues, or the shimmer of that self, like a thread in a woven fabric or something glinting in the ocean?

I suspect it’s more the latter, and that’s why quotes that at who we are are so powerful.  Of course I am not certain.  What I do know is that some combination of what we love, what we remember, what we pay attention to feels like as good as any as a way to ascertain who we are.  That all resonates.

For now, that means that who I am lives somewhere in two tall teen and tween children, one gimp husband crutching around, sunsets, books, poetry, friends whose loyalty is deep and wide, the sky at all times of day.

That sounds about right to me.

Who are you?

out the window last week (shared on Instagram)

I read my friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley’s post last week with great interest.  I love what Aidan has to say about permission and privilege and playing if safe.  She was moved, as I was not long ago, by Tara Sophia Mohr’s powerful book, Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead.  I encourage you to read both Aidan’s post and Tara’s book.

I texted Aidan to tell her I liked her piece.  And I shared one tiny typo I found in it (aside: those people who email me to let me know of my typos here – and there are usually at least one per post – THANK YOU!).

Then my heart stopped.  She had misspelled “scared” as “sacred.”

sacred

scared

But aren’t those things close to each other? How have I never noticed before that they are the same word?  What is sacred scares us?  So we should listen to and pay attention to what scares us, as it might point us to what is sacred?

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this.  It reminds me of the way that longing lives inside of belonging.  Words carry so much power, so much meaning, don’t they?  I don’t have much brilliant insight today other than the awareness that scared and sacred are the same word, intertwined in an inextricable way, two sides, perhaps, of the same coin.  I vow to pay more attention to what scares me.

Last weekend at the beach.  Grace and two cousins swimming to the raft on an overcast day.  I was preoccupied with the work call I had to do, but for a few moments, I was just there, too.

I met an old, dear friend for a walk early on Monday morning.  As I headed out of my house to meet her, the air was cool.  I walked down the steps and breathed in, enjoying the fresh air for a moment.  Then, of course, thoughts flooded in: fall must be on the way.  Snow comes next.  This season I love best is almost over

It’s July 12.

What if I could just welcome the moment that is without allowing it to be occluded by fear of what comes next?  What if my experience was just that, a moment-by-moment life, rather than a harbinger of what’s to come?

What if indeed.

Teach me how to live this way.

Experience, without all the associated emotions.  That’s what I’m after, right?  But I have no idea how to do that, how to unhook my day to day living of this life from my instantaneous emotional flinging, both forward (what’s coming) and back (what I’m reminded 0f).  Of course the way that the past and the future are animate in the present serves to enrich my life, but it also takes away from it.

Still, a little less of that echo might sometimes be nice.  I think of TS Eliot’s line, “teach us to care and not to care,” and think that’s what I’m really saying.  I want to care – be present, be awake, be engaged, but not too care too much – to release my white-knuckle hold on what was and sometimes-paralyzing fears of what will be.

Yes.  Teach me how to live this way.