musings

It’s Saturday morning, 6:24.  I’ve been up since 5:00.  Woke up and just could not go back to sleep.  Matt got home very late from a trip and so he’s sleeping.  Whit just got up and despite my entreaties that he go back to bed, he’s sitting at his desk, down the hall from mine, working on homework.  Grace will probably sleep until we wake her up (see: teenager).

We had the most wonderful dinner with my parents, aunt and uncle, and beloved favorite cousin and her fiance last night.  Grace and Whit adore my aunt and uncle, who came to the Galapagos with us, and my cousin and her fiance.  It was a lovely, lovely evening and I left feeling replete with love and family.  Family was running through my veins, you could say.

We were all up late.  I expected that we’d sleep in this morning.  Instead, I found myself lying in bed at 5am, wide awake, my head racing through various topics big and small.  It occurred to me that this – this behavior, this place of being, this racing mind early in the morning – might be the opposite of ease. It’s ironic that I chose ease as my word of the year when 2016, so far, doesn’t feel like it’s full of ease.  Maybe it’s not ironic at all, of course. Maybe it’s precisely right.  Maybe some deep part of me knew that this would be a year of transition and in-between-ness, and that I needed to remember the value of ease as I journeyed through it.

When I think of ease, the words that come to mind are relaxed, calm, comfortable.  The only one of those I feel right now is calm. In the midst of right now’s shifting sands, in all the uncertainty that occludes every day, in the fog of the not-knowing that permeates every day, I feel calm.  I can feel my breath entering and leaving my chest.  I can close my eyes and see certain images – the ocean at my parents’ house south of Boston, the flickering of candles in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the setting sun from the tower at our nearby cemetery that I love – to which I return, over and over.

Maybe this is ease.  This allowing, this honoring, this breathing, this listening.  This being here.  That’s all I can do, today and, really, every day.  I haven’t written much about this year’s word of the year, though I think about it a lot. Maybe it’s taking root in my soul and in my cells in some kind of quiet, slow way.  As ease does, right?

The ocean. The candles. The sunset.

Breathe in.  Breathe out.

I can hear Whit typing away.  I can see the texture of the light changing on my tree, outside my window, as the sun comes up.  Here comes another day.  What an outrageous, incandescent blessing that is, isn’t it?  I have never lost sight of that.  I hope I never do.

I almost wrote my thesis on Georgia O’Keeffe.  I wanted to do a joint thesis between the English and Art History departments, focusing on O’Keeffe’s work (primarily her bone paintings) and the poetry of hd.

I didn’t.  I ended up, as I’ve covered at length here, writing about the topic of the mother-daughter relationship in the lives and work of three 20th century poets (Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Adrienne Rich).  I addressed the ways in which writing and motherhood both enrich and challenge each other.  The photograph above, which Alfred Stieglitz took of Georgia O’Keeffe, was the frontispiece of my thesis.  I liked the way it captured – to my 21 year old mind – the interplay between creativity (the hands) and procreativity (the breasts – the fact that O’Keeffe never had children notwithstanding).

In the mid 1990s, my parents, sister and I went to Santa Fe after Christmas.  I don’t remember much specific about the trip – my memories are mostly a haze of freezing cold and of lanterns sparkling in the early winter darkness – but I do vividly recall our trip to Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu.  I can close my eyes and be back there.  There were stones and small bones on each windowsill, and the entire house was filled with a hush that even almost 20 years later I recall as holy.

I recently read Dawn Tripp’s beautiful Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe with great interest.  It’s such a lovely book – compelling, entertaining, gorgeously written.  Tripp powerfully captures the interiority of an artist, both in Georgia’s feelings about her own painting and in her reactions to Stieglitz’s photography.

… when you make a picture – whether that picture is of a chair or a bird or a canyon – you have a chance to say something about what life is, and what it means to you.

This sentence took my breath away.  This is what writing is – and reading, too – to me.

Georgia also touches on complicated topics like motherhood and art (O’Keeffe did not have children) and the ways in which gender plays into both the making and marketing of art.  Certain parts of Georgia reminded of Lily King’s stunning Euphoria, in particular the exploration of subjectivity and the ways that male mentors/advocates were (are?) able to delineate how the public sees a female figure.  Initially, O’Keeffe experiences Stieglitz’s immediate, intense belief in her talent and future as galvanizing.  Over the years, however, his view of the artist she is diverges from her own identity, and what had been an inspiration becomes limiting, and O’Keeffe chafes at the strictures of this man’s strong vision of who she is.

For many years Georgia’s identity is defined by Stieglitz’s early (nude) photographs of her.  Despite her enormous power as an artist, she is first and foremost the images of her body, taken by a man.  This is a double insult: the female artist is reduced to her own physical self, and to one captured through the eyes of a man.  The male gaze dominates, and frames the women it sees.  Even in the 20th century.  Even now?  I don’t know.

I loved Georgia and I highly recommend it.  I closed the book with a sigh, sorry to have my visit into the mind and soul of an artist I so hugely adore and esteem over.  Tripp renders Georgia O’Keeffe, who is a somewhat distant, reserved, grave character, into a complicated, humane person, full of emotions and passions and loves and disappointments. That I feel like I know Georgia O’Keeffe personally now is a testament to the beautiful writing in Georgia. Additionally, Tripp’s prose about the American southwest is particularly spectacular, perhaps because I’m so fresh off our own trip to the Grand Canyon. I highly recommend this book, and wish I could go back to Abiquiu myself now.

I am a sensitive person.  I have sensitive children.  None of this is news.

I have often in my life felt as though I have to get a grip, get over it, be less sensitive, be less intense, stop taking things personally.  These admonitions to myself are deeply embedded in my self-conscious, and I am frustrated with myself on a nearly daily basis.  I feel like my reactions are my fault.

Often, this is true.  I know it is.  When I wrote 10 Things I Want my Daughter to Know, to and for Grace, I included a specific point on this:

8. It is almost never about you.  What I mean is when people act in a way that hurts or makes you feel insecure, it is almost certainly about something happening inside of them, and not about you.  I struggle with this one mightily, and I have tried very, very hard never once to tell you you are being “too sensitive” or to “get over it” when you feel hurt.  Believe me, I know how feelings can slice your heart, even if your head knows otherwise.  But maybe, just maybe, it will help to remember that almost always other people are struggling with their own demons, even if they bump into you by accident.

It did not to take me long to realize I was writing to myself as much as I was writing to Grace.  These ten things – life lessons, central points about the human experience – were things I wanted to know, too.  This one for sure.  And I’m still struggling to learn it.

I’ve written before that parenting is an exercise in coming face-to-face with our own demons and flaws animate in another person.  Also, of course, our gifts and our deepest joys.  But it’s the demons and flaws that are on my mind right now.  When Grace and Whit come home with bruised feelings, I often feel torn about how to react.  I want to honor their reactions and sensitivities while not playing too much into them.  Does that make sense?  I don’t want them to develop the internal voice that I have, the one that says get over it already (not saying my parents gave this to me: they didn’t.  I’m not sure where it came from).  I do want to honor their feelings. And I do want to help them develop the coping skills not to be buffeted by their every reaction.

Sometimes I worry that responding too emotionally to their hurts will actually create anxiety for them – oh, wow, wait, there is a real reason to be worked up here!  I also fret that if they engage with me mostly or exclusively around hurt feelings, they’ll think that that’s the best way to get my attention.  But I know instinctively that telling them to not worry about it is dismissive and doesn’t validate what I know are authentic feelings.

What I try to do is to say I get it, I know that this hurts, and I would feel badly too, but you have to remember that it really isn’t that big a deal. Try to remember that it is likely not about you (again, a lesson I’m still learning, at 41).

I haven’t figured out how precisely to honor Grace and Whit’s feelings while simultaneously helping them learn to manage them.  Just one of parenthood’s many liminal areas, places where what I think is the right answer lies in a gray, murky zone.  Or maybe it’s not murky at all! Maybe saying I refuse to dismiss your feelings is crystal-clear.  And maybe saying you can feel something and at the same time choose to not be gutted by it is also entirely straightforward.  It doesn’t always feel that way, but maybe what’s muddying this matter for me is my own sometimes-intense empathizing.

I don’t know.  But I’ll keep trying to figure it out.

I have written at length about the Myers-Briggs, about my own type (INFJ), about how recognizing my introversion helped me understand my behaviors and preferences.  Susan Cain’s Quiet was an important book for me in that realization (and, as an aside, writing for her site, The Quiet Revolution, is a huge honor).  At the end of last week, I had a fascinating exchange with my friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley about introversion and understanding what that really means.

The topic was on my mind all weekend.  I’ve always been an introvert, I know that now, though for years I masqueraded as an extrovert.  That’s something I’ve heard many times from other I’s who function in the world as E’s.  My professional life requires me to be quite E, which means that when I’m not working I am even more I.  I am often quite spent by the end of the day, worn out from many hours of interacting with others.  That explains at least in part why I’m so loath to make social plans and why evening usually find my in my pajamas, with a book or my children (or both).

I admit it was an aha for me to realize that the various MBTI types are not proportionately represented in the world.  I assumed that each accounted for the same percentage of the population.  It was surprising – and confirming of a deep sense of other-ness that has suffused my experience as long as I can remember – to learn that INFJs are only 1.5% of the population.  I know three in my “real life,” and a great many more online.  It’s one of the great gifts of blogging, to be honest, that I’ve connected with so many kindred spirits in the ether, here and elsewhere.

Last summer Grace and Whit each did their first MBTI tests (simple, free on-line ones).  I was irrationally thrilled that I guessed both of their types 100% correctly before they did them.  They are quite different from each other (though both NF, as am I) which was not a surprise.  Whit is, like my mother, a roving extrovert.  I’ve written about her before, said that “she has always attracted people to her, and, like a sun, is surrounded by more orbiting planets than I can count.”  Many of my closest friends are also extroverts, and it took me a long time to realize that I was trying to replicate my mother, I think, getting close to another sun, familiar with that energy and that warmth.  Whit is like that too.

I know that not everyone is as smitten with the MBTI as I am, and that not everyone finds the introvert/extrovert distinction as  illuminating.  For me, though, the tool is hugely powerful.  It helps me understand myself and the ways that I respond to various environments and experiences.  Susan Cain’s description of the business school I attended was particularly helpful; I see now how I’ve compensated for my own natural predilection over the years.  I also understand the ways that my professional life affects how I behave in my personal life.

Another thing I learned, once I started reading about this topic, is that introversion, sensitivity, and shyness are three separate things.  They are correlated, and I am all three, but not everyone is.  Both shy extroverts and outgoing introverts exist.  I know some of each.  This was an incredibly helpful distinction for me to understand.

Are you an introvert?  Or are you an extrovert?  Do these terms help you understand yourself and how you experience the world?

I am in between.

Everything right now feels tentative, uncertain, transitional.  It’s not fully spring yet, but we’re basically out of winter.  I’m a full time professional but I am also a writer.  My children are tweens and teens, and their departure from my daily life looms on the horizon, but they are still here and they still need me (they need me even as they separate, and yes, sometimes it hurts a lot).  Everything feels like it’s in flux, though even as I write that I realize it almost always feels that way.

The one constant is change, no?  Like all cliches, that one has roots in deep truth.

I’ve never been fond of change.  And transition and the in-between is a place of discomfort for me. I’ve written before about my attraction to liminal worlds – the borders between light and dark, sea and land, day and night, child and adult.  Is it inconsistent for me to like those edges, and to acknowledge, for example, that it is dark that gives light its meaning, but to dislike change?  I don’t know.  Perhaps both of those things can be true.  Many years ago I was talking to someone who was talking about how she knew she’d be happy when X or Y was true.  Even then – I was in my early 20s – I recognized the fallacy of this way of thinking, and swore never to adopt it. Postponing living until some X or Y are achieved is a recipe or unhappiness and torment. I knew that then, and I know that now.

One thing I’m certain about is that the in-between is where life is lived. There is no arrival.  There is only getting there. It’s in the whitewater after a wave crashes that we see pieces of mica glittering. The tide is always going in and out. We are always in between, and so I wonder why some times feel more that way than others. I don’t have an answer for that. Right now is such a time for me. Learning to live with that truth, the fundamental instability of this human experience, is one of our central tasks.  That I know.

I know all that, and I still find it difficult.