musings

At the top of Notre Dame, Paris, March 18th.  My memories of this moment include the sight of Paris spread below us, as well as the awe-inspiring, echoing sound of the bells and the uneven, centuries-worn stones under my feet.  I was there.

Tomorrow marks the last day of Aidan‘s Here Year, in which I was honored and delighted to participate alongside her.  I’ve been thinking about what the big lessons or takeaways from the year were, either for me or in general, and the truth is I’m not sure I have any.  I think the lessons of spending a year thinking about presence, in a bunch of different specific spheres (marriage, friendship, time) are quieter, somehow both more urgent and less headline-y than they might be.

More than anything, The Here Year reinforced something I’ve known for a while, and around which I’ve been circling, in both my writing and in my living.

Being present is the central task of my life.

Several years ago I began to orient in the direction of being engaged with, and aware of, my own days.  It has changed everything.  This shift is documented on this blog, whose early days included a series called Present Tense about all the challenges and rewards of presence. Over the years I’ve run into difficulty when people interpret my discussion of “presence” as a way of asserting that everything is perfect.  Let me be really clear: I am not saying that being present transforms everything into wonder and smooths out all the rough edges.  Far from it.  As I’ve said before, being aware of my own life opens me up to more joy and more sorrow simultaneously.  I assure you that there’s plenty of frustration and yelling and disappointment and irritation in my life.

I am far from a zen person.  I’m still often impatient, distracted, and snappy.  Sometimes I’m on my phone when I shouldn’t be.  Now and then I check my voicemail, listen to a series of messages, and realize when I hang up I can’t remember who half of them were from, because I wasn’t really paying attention.  But the thing is, I’ve improved a lot.  A lot.  When I started blogging, and writing about presence and awareness, I was pointing myself in the direction I wanted to go.  I can see that now.  Writing here helped me identify, and then pursue, something I desperately needed.

I suspect that anyone who knows me in real life would say I’m someone who speaks and moves fast and who doesn’t always pay as close attention as she should. Hopefully anyone who has known me for a while would also say that they’ve seen a change on this dimension in me (any of you who fit this qualification and are still reading, I’d welcome your observations).

Blogging is a practice.  A daily and weekly effort, one that I keep at because over time it has made such enormous changes in my life. I think of the Tolkien quote I saw yesterday, “Little by little, one travels far” (thanks, Dina Relles).  It seems so small, a gradual effort to pay attention, to put down my phone, to listen carefully, to look at the sky, and to record what I observed.  And yet, as over years the silt in a river carves an oxbow into the land, so the very contours of my own life have changed.

The Here Year helped me to see the fruit of these years of effort, and reminded me of the fundamental importance of the work required for me to be present.  To be here now.  These choices – to sit with a child and read a book, to look a friend in the eye, to listen to the birds in the bushes, to stand still and watch a sunset – small in the moment, maybe, but there’s nothing more important.

Paying attention allows me to fully inhabit my own life.  It doesn’t, however, slow time down.  It was a bitter realization for me that no amount of being present changes the fact that time flies by me, that moments sift through my fingers even as I grasp at them.  I routinely mourn experiences even while I am still living them.  I hate feeling so keenly aware of how fast it’s all going by, and of so fiercely missing things that are over.  But I also know it’s simply the only way I want to exist in this world.  I loved thinking about and talking about and writing about what it means to be here this last year with you, Aidan, and I don’t plan to stop any time soon.

Beautiful morning moon, last week, on the way to school.

Through the comments on my post last week about vulnerability, I met a new writer whose work I’m enjoying.  In particular, this post, Dear Lonely Moms of Older Kids, really resonated with me.  It made me think about the fact that if parenting is an exercise in being vulnerable, perhaps as our children get older the challenges on the vulnerability front get harder.

This is turning out to be true for me.  I was telling someone recently about the single choice for which I received the most judgment as the parent of a young child.  That was the decision to let Grace, at 5, fly alone.  I felt comfortable with the decision, Matt felt comfortable with the decision, and Grace herself felt comfortable with it.  I have no regrets.  But for weeks and months after, I faced judgment from other moms on the playground which varied from thinly-concealed to outright and almost-hostile.

That was a long time ago, though, and it was an isolated incident.  Somehow the parenting decisions I make now feel more complicated, more fraught.  They have to do with what media I allow and messages about body image and technology and control over sleep and time.  I find myself saying with a metronomic regularity, “different families make different choices.”  The risk of judgment if I make a choice different from those the parents around me are making seems higher than ever.  And while I know that judgment comes from a place of deeply-held wanting to do the right thing by our own children, it can still sting.

Vulnerability is closely tied with judgment and loneliness, both of which almost instantly make me feel “unable to withstand the effects of a hostile environment,” which is the definition of vulnerability I’m working with these days.

So I feel more judged these days, mostly because I think the decisions feel bigger and more important.  Maybe also because I am increasingly aware of my identity as a working mother, and the more I own that, the more I open myself up to feeling judged about it (some of which I’m entirely willing to admit may be in my head).

I also feel more lonely in general these days now that my children are older.  Lonelier because I’m working more, which is happening for a million reasons.  One of those reasons is that they’re busier, so I have more time to work.  Lonelier because the intensity of new-friend-making that marked the first years at school has abated.  The moms have their friends.

But I also feel, and it’s hard for me to admit this, lonelier for my children.  They’re busier, and, more importantly, they’re doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is separate from me.  This is more pronounced with Grace, who’s older and plunging into adolescence with a speed that makes my head spin.  But still, there’s a marked change in degree of daily intimacy with my children and the truth is I mourn this development.  They also have to judge me as they separate, there’s no question about that.  Again, it’s something I’m seeing more with Grace than with Whit, but there’s some withering scorn sent my way these days that is new.

All of these factors combine to make me feel more vulnerable now that my children are older.  In those first months of parenting Grace, when I was more depressed than I have ever been in my life, when I was reduced to a shell of a person, I couldn’t have imagined another experience would ever disassemble me so entirely.  Yet here I am.

But maybe this isn’t about my children at all?

Some of this may just be being in a vulnerable moment in life.  I feel buffeted by the hostile environment, often, these days.  A friend called me recently with “news” and I told Matt I honestly didn’t know if she had cancer or was pregnant.  Joyfully, it was the latter.  But we’re perched on a knife edge, it feels like, in this middle place, with peril all around us and still, so much heart-shattering joy.

Maybe this increasing sense of vulnerability is just that as I age I grow more comfortable with my own porousness, let down my well-development defense mechanisms, and let more of life – the startling beauty as well as the bitter loss and pain – in.  As much as it slices me, this shift, I don’t think I’d want it any other way.