musings

My patron saints

I adore this post by Gretchen Rubin in which she names her patron saints.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who my patron saints are.  I find this exercise quite difficult!  A few who come to mind quickly:

Annie Dillard – observant, grateful, wise

Anne Lamott – funny, irreverent, prolific

Georgia O’Keeffe – fierce, brave, celebrator of femininity and of the sky

Joan of Arc – intrepid, heroic, certain

Marie Curie – brilliant, fearless, possessed of power and wounds that came from the same source

Who are your patron saints?

All at once

I’ve written before that parenthood has contained more surprises than I can count.  This is true.  There’s no question that the most startling thing for me is how loss is contained in being a mother.  I did not at all anticipate how bittersweet parenting would be.  Every single day makes me cry.  Every single day also makes me laugh, and smile, and ride waves of joy.  The oscillation between these two poles – and their occasional co-existence in a single moment – takes my breath away on a regular basis.

Another of motherhood’s big surprises for me is the number of thing that happened all at once.  There were many parts of childhood that I assumed would be gradual processes that were, instead, totally overnight events.  For example:

Walking.

Riding a bike.

Reading.

All of these things I figured would happen slowly, with fits and starts, in spurts.  Two steps forward, one step back style.  Instead, in all of those cases, it was basically binary.  One day Grace was rolling from one side of the kitchen to the other in her determination to get somewhere, the next she was standing wobbily next to the couch, holding on with two clutched fists, and the next she was off to the races.  The same with biking.  And with reading.

By the way, this works in reverse, too.  Some things I thought would be instantaneous – notably, feeling like I was a mother, and, frankly feeling like I was an adult – were instead gradual.

Time is playing its fast-slow-instant-slow motion tricks on me right now, too.  All at once I have a teenager.

Grace will be thirteen three weeks from today.  It’s such a cliche, but man, it’s also the true-est true thing: how is this possible?  She was a colicky newborn five seconds ago, and now she’s almost my height, wears bigger shoes than I do, and is turning into a young woman so fast my head is spinning.  There’s nothing gradual about this moment.  Even as I write that, I sense how ludicrous it is: after all I’ve hard thirteen years to prepare for having a thirteen year old.  Yet it happened when I blinked.  As Gretchen Rubin says, the days are long but the years are short.  Another true-est of the true adage.

Do you know what I mean?  Are some things that you thought would be slow in fact sudden, and vice versa?

The Uncrossable Swamp

When I was in sixth grade, a school unit on orienteering culminated in an afternoon field trip to a local nature preserve.  Both classes rode together on the battle-scarred yellow school bus.  When we arrived we were split into teams of two, each of which was given a laminated map and a compass.  Our map was marked with seven spots.  A teacher was stationed at each spot, ready to stamp the card each pair carried.  The winning team would make it to all seven spots and return back to where we started first.

My memories of the day are somewhat blurry – I don’t recall who my partner was specifically, for example – but what happened I recall with crystalline clarity.

My partner and I blazed through the first six marks and were, according to the teacher there, the first to reach it.  As the sun blazed its late-fall glory overhead, he and I discussed how to get to mark seven and assure our victory.  In contrast to the slurry of my memory of this day is how vividly I recall the cornflower blue of the sky and the quality of the late afternoon’s light.  We huddled together, heads touching over our laminated map, and saw two options.  The first was a long, circuitous path.  The second was much shorter, as the crow flies.  The only hitch was it was through an area of cross-hatching marked as “uncrossable swamp.”

There was very little debate.  We were sure we could cross the swamp.  Surely it couldn’t really be uncrossable.  We set off.  The reeds were tall, and it quickly felt like they closed above our heads.  A long time later a teacher, complete with flashlight and bell, had to come and find us in the swamp.  We emerged red-faced and embarrassed and came in last.

I never ignored the map again.

*****

I share this (the story of which was the first chapter of a long-put-aside memoir called A Country Without Maps) today because Grace is doing a seventh grade field trip that includes some work with a compass.  It feels awfully similar.  With a now-familiar sensation, time plays tricks and I tumble down the telescope of memory.

I have not told Grace about the uncrossable swamp.  If there is one, today or any other day, she needs to learn that lesson herself.

A new year

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Sunset on our last evening walk to the harbor, August 29, 2015.  This is the place where we celebrated our wedding, (15 years ago Wednesday!), and I love that we so regularly visit it during the summer with our children.

I loved Jena Schwartz’s post about her Blue Moon Vows.  Truthfully, I have never been a New Year’s resolution-maker.  New Year’s itself makes me sad, mostly, with the bald way to highlight’s time’s forward motion.  Undeniably, despite this undercurrent of sorrow, there is something new-start-ish about January, and while I don’t make resolutions I feel that surge of energy, that blank-slate sense of possibility.

This time of year always feel like a new beginning to me, too. Something in my spirit will always beat to the academic calendar, and as such the start of a new school year feels both sad and promising.  Summer, my favorite season, is over, and we’re entering something new.  And this year I’m feeling the impulse to say some things out loud.  Less, perhaps, about making promises to change and more about things I now know to be true that I don’t want to lose track of.

1. I will keep protecting my quiet time with my children.  This summer reminded me with punch-in-the-gut force of how limited is the time I have left with both Grace and Whit living with us.  I want to soak it in, to be here.  That has a variety of implications for how I live my life.  Because it’s my most essential priority it is easy to line everything up to support it.

2. I will remember the list of things that are non-negotiable for me to love my life. Sleep, quiet, exercise, time with my dearest friends and my family. It’s a short list, and every item on it is essential.

3. I will remember that I am the sky, and my emotions are just the clouds.  This is so so so so true.  I tell this to my children, and of course it rarely sinks in, at least not in the throes of moments of heartbreak or fury, but I need to keep remembering it too.

4. I will remember to be here now.  Nothing is more important.  This is all we have.

5. I will remember not to eat too much bread or sugar.  It fills me up and I always feel badly after.

6. I will tell the people I love that I love them.  A lot.  See #4.

What are you focusing on this fall?  Do you feel the same sense of a new beginning as I do at the outset of a new school year?

Boys and girls

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May 2005

There’s one thing I totally failed to say in my post about the World Cup.  It is that one of my very favorite things about the phenomenon I observed of people falling in love with the US women’s soccer team was how it happened to both boys and girls.  Whit was as excited to watch the games as Grace was.  I loved seeing both men and women, adults and children both, commenting on the powerful example those US women set.

And I think that is crucial.  I want Whit to admire female athletes as much as I want Grace to esteem men’s sports. As long as girls only root for girls and vice versa, I think we’re missing something essential.  But when everybody celebrates everybody else, for their particular grace and grit, then, I think, we’ve achieved what we aim for.  I loved watching that around me in this summer’s World Cup soccer matches.

This transfers over into other realms, too.  It is specifically resonant, for me, in the realm of working motherhood. Quite often people comment on what it is like to be working mother to a daughter.  They say that I must be pleased to be a role model for Grace.

As an aside, I feel the need to be crystal clear here: there are many successful and elegant paths through the forest of motherhood and work, and everybody finds the one that works for them and their family.  Mine happens to be working in a full-time professional setting, and so that is what I comment on for myself.

And I am proud of the example I’m setting for Grace.  There’s no question about that.  But I’m equally cognizant of setting an example for Whit.  It’s as simple – and as complicated – as that.  I think both girls and boys need to honor and appreciate the various ways that both men and women can be in the world.  I think both boys and girls need to recognize the efforts of all adults in their family.  I have never thought equal meant precisely the same, and I don’t here – men and women are different in a million ways, but they are equivalently important (in my opinion).  I sense Whit’s gaze on me as I stumble my way through working motherhood just as heavily as I do Grace’s.