musings

with my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, 1974

with my mother and my daughter 2002

I recently read – devoured, more like – Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book, Unfinished Business.  There are a great many points swirling around in my head but one of the foremost ones is in the acknowledgements. Slaughter mentions her first meeting with her editor at Random House. “Tell me about your grandmothers,” the editor asked. Reading that made me gasp.

Tell me about your grandmothers.

I had two simultaneous thoughts.  The first, of Virginia Woolf’s famous quote that “we think back through our mothers, if we are women.”  Indeed.  The second, of my repeated assertion that I come from a formidable matrilineage and of the power of saying the names of the women who came before us.

It’s not a secret that I desperately wanted to have a daughter.  We didn’t find out the gender of either baby before they were born, but I had a strong sense that Grace was a girl.  I didn’t want to say it aloud, though, because I was somehow afraid of jinxing myself.  I wanted a girl for many reasons – I am one of two girls, I adore my own mother, I studied the mother/daughter relationship closely in college – but one of them was certainly wanting to continue what feels like a strong history of women in my family.

And then on October 26, 2002, after a long and difficult labor, she arrived.  And suddenly I had a daughter.  I was a daughter and I had a daughter.  It’s become a familiar thing, at this point, watching my mother with my daughter, but it never gets old.  I do think back through my mother, as Woolf says.  I have written many times of my mother’s expansive warmth, of her magnetism, of how “she has always attracted people to her, and, like a sun, is surrounded by more orbiting planets than I can count.”

I have written often of an afternoon soon after Grace’s birth when Mum came over to sit with her while I tried to nap.  Grace was asleep on the third floor of our house, I lay in my bedroom on the second floor, and Mum puttered in the kitchen on the ground floor.  As I lay in my dark bedroom I felt a tangible cord connecting me both up and down, ahead and backwards in time, my place in the generational line firm, determined.  I will never forget the extremely vivid sensation I felt that afternoon of being ensconced between my mother and my daughter.

My grandmothers were formidable too.  Each bright and principled and very different but equally compelling.  I suspect both of my grandmothers would have had careers, if that was more common in their day.  Both graduated from impressive colleges (Middlebury and Wellesley), read voraciously, supported causes they cared about (both my grandmothers were very active in their local chapters of Planned Parenthood), and provided for me terrific examples of strong women who supported husbands and families while having minds of their own.  I feel fortunate to have had such women in my own lineage, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I think of them every day.

I can feel the matrilineage that I come from – that I’m a part of – throbbing in my veins.  It is a very real, almost tangible part of my life.  Sometimes I sense my grandmothers, and others who were dear to me who are now gone, somewhere just beyond the horizon. I know they’re there.  I think back through them, as Woolf says, on a daily basis, the women whose names I can recite reverently:

Susan, Janet, Priscilla, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor.

And, of course, Grace.

Tell me about your grandmothers?

  A flashback photo for this post: me in 6th grade after a road race.  I see so much of Grace in this photo!

I’ve written before about the metaphor that cross-country is and has been to me for parenting.  As Grace’s second season comes to a close, I’m thinking about another analogy that the sport presents, this time to life itself.  There are two particular ways that – in my opinion – cross-country metaphorically represents life itself: pacing and peer groupl.

One thing you learn as you become a cross-country runner and experience racing is how to pace yourself.  Do you start out in the front of the pack, and try to stay ahead of others for the whole race?  Do you start slower and trust that you can gain?  How do you gauge how much gas is in your tank, and how fast you can go, and for how long?  I asked Grace these questions recently and found myself a bit surprised that she had fluent answers to them.  She’d clearly thought about these things.  Her answer, in case you’re wondering, is not to lead but to stay with the front group and then feel like she has enough in reserve to sprint to the finish.

I had the great privilege of attending a small breakfast with Anne-Marie Slaughter at the end of October.  There were a great many things that moved me in her comments, but one in particular feels resonant here.  She said that she thinks people – not women, notably, but people – should view their careers as interval training.

This of course brought cross-country to mind.  So much of life is about pacing – how fast you go, how long you can keep going, when you push and when you ease up. The interval training analogy presupposes that life has seasons, and that sometimes are more flexible than others.  I believe this fiercely.

Secondly, so much of life is about who you run with, isn’t it?  Who do you want to follow as your pace-setter, who do you want to accompany into the woods, who do you trust to lead you out of them?  Who do you want to hear breathing at your shoulder, who do you want to push you, who do you maybe want to lose to?

Two themes in my writing – and in my life itself – are metaphors and running.  The former is how I understand the world and the latter is an important mechanism to help me live in it.  You are probably growing weary of both.  If so, I apologize!

Grace warming up before the race last Saturday.  I love this photo of her, in her own world even with hundreds of people around, and in flight.

I love Jeanette LeBlanc‘s writing.  All of it.  I particularly adored a piece of hers that I read recently, Start With What You Know.  She evokes so powerfully the writing life, the tension and urge and essence of the white hot need to come to the page.  I was inspired to share my own list of what I start with, of what I know.

this, the sunset out of my office window, is something I know to be true

I think most clearly in the morning, and I like to start my day before the sun is up.

I like my coffee with coconut milk and coconut sugar.  Hot, and more than one cup of it.

Life is messy and most people carry some scars and wounds with them.

Drinking alcohol doesn’t really work for me most of the time anymore.

I’m more attuned than most people to aches and pains and changes in my body.  This only makes me a hypochondriac if I act on every discomfort.  It makes me aware and sensitive if I remember to sit tight and wait.  Most things pass.

Writing is an essential part of almost every day for me.  I need to write what I see, what I think, what I feel.

I feel a lot.  Good and bad and everything in between.  I ride roller coasters inside my emotions every single day.  The challenge is creating more space between the feeling and the reacting.

My spidey sense about other people is rarely wrong. I need to trust it more.

Nothing puts me more quickly and firmly in touch with the ineffable, deeply reassuring energy that throbs through the universe than being outside.

When you write what you know, what do you start with?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s contentment that I’m after.  Not happiness, simply, but contentment.  It’s taken me a long time to get to this, but the truth is that “happiness” has never felt like my goal.  Furthermore, it seems impossible to attain.  I could never wish for a permanent smoothing out of my emotional terrain, because I think some (maybe a lot of) sorrow is part of the deal for me.  But I’ve written about a new, sturdy sense of joy that underpins my life in the last year or two, and the best way to describe it is, I think, as contentment.

It was with interest that I read What Selfie Sticks Really Tell Us About Ourselves in the New York Times this summer.  I had recently written my own thoughts on selfie sticks here, after all.

The sentence I kept coming back to was this one:

Interestingly, nonarousing emotions like contentment are negatively associated with sharing selfies or other content.

I love the image of contentment as a “nonarousing emotion” and that is entirely resonant for me.  What I’m after, at this point in adulthood, is a life defined by being peaceful and placid, something I recognize would seem boring to a younger person.

I am on Instagram, I love Twitter, and I’m on Facebook.  I’m certainly not against social media and in some cases it brings me joy.  So I’m not sure how I feel about the assertion that sharing content is associated with “arousing” emotions.  I’m not a big selfie fan (or sharer) but I do share photographs (often of the sky) and tweets.  I also know that nonarousing emotions are what I seek.

Is this inconsistent?  Maybe it is.  After all, I’ve written many times about the famous Whitman lines, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”  I do like some aspects of social media, though not selfies.  I have also never really struggled to put my phone down, in literal and metaphorical ways.  I don’t have a hard time turning away from the online world to engage with the real one, on the whole.  I could definitely do this better – I reckon almost all of us could – but it’s not a source of major tension for me.  Maybe this is part of why I don’t feel super emotionally conflicted about this point.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to this post, but I’m curious about what you think.  Do you agree with the statement that sharing content online – particularly selfies – is negatively correlated with nonarousing emotions?  Do you think being on social media by definition means one leads a less contented life?  I’m not sure, and I’d love to hear your reactions.

It feels like yesterday I wrote about the song Landslide, but it was years ago.  Over six years, in fact.

Wow.  This life takes my breath away.  It really does.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Fleetwood Mac song that I so fiercely love – it has a claim to be my favorite song, and if not, certainly in the top five – headlined another morning.  It was the first morning back from my magical but exhausting annual reunion with college friends.

I was not, suffice it to say, my best self.

Finally, after some fireworks over breakfast, Grace, Whit and I were in the car to head to school.  I exhaled loudly and buckled my seatbelt.  Sometimes those first 45 minutes of the day feel like a marathon.  I turned the key in the ignition and as I pulled away from our house, the opening notes of Landslide came on the radio.  “Oh, I love this song!” I said loudly as Grace’s fingers approached the radio to change the station.  She left it.

Our drive to school is about 4 minutes and so we drove the entire song.  Unusually, both kids were silent.  I like to think they were listening.  I sang along, and as is true of songs that are so familiar, different words jumped out at me this time.

Children get older, I’m getting older too…

But the song’s theme – change is life’s only constant, and that fact is both sad and scary – is the same.  Tears ran down my face as we drove in silence.  My eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and I saw Whit in the back seat, looking out the window.  His hair is really long and shaggy, but I am loath to cut the summer blond out of it.  He is so big now, so tall, nearing 11.  Grace sat next to me, the mere fact of a child in the passenger seat speaking of Old Kids, of Time’s Passage, of how quickly the years run through my fingers.  I reached up to wipe my wet cheeks and felt her eyes on me.  I kept looking through the front window, singing, driving.  The tension that had filled the car just minutes ago dissapated all at once.  I felt my shoulders loosen, and sensed that happening with both Grace and Whit.

We pulled onto the block where school is as the song finished.  I parked the car.  “I love you guys,” I said quietly, resting my cheek against the seat’s headrest.  They both murmured that they loved me too, and Grace reached for the door.  “Have a good day,” I spoke quickly.  “I’m sorry this morning was rough.”

“It’s okay, Mummy,” Whit said from the backseat.  “That song helped.  We’ll have a better night.”  I watched Grace nod.  They each climbed out of the car, pulled their backpacks onto their backs, and one at a time gave me our secret signs for “I love you.”  Grace jogged across the street into the middle school shuttle, and Whit walked past me into the gates of the lower school.

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

It often feels like the answer to these questions is no, but then I look around, and the evidence says yes.  I sighed again and turned the car on again to drive home.