musings

Summer 2013

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Spring is the only season that I experience without an undercurrent of sorrow, because there is so much that lies ahead, but it is in summer that I feel I most fully live.  In June, July, and August, life is swollen with family moments, studded with the rituals that have come to mean so much to my children, and lit with bursts of fireworks both real and figurative.  For the last few years I’ve reflected on the summer that was: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

In late August, I kept hearing Sophocles’ words, over and over again in my head: one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.  And that is true of this most marvelous, rich, joyful season, too: it is really after Labor Day that I can really see how extravagantly wonderful our summer was.

This summer went by faster than ever.  Oh, what a cliche this is.  And yet it is so true.

In June, for the fourth year, Grace, Whit and I marked the end of the school year with a trip to Storyland.  Their mild agreement that perhaps they were getting too old for Storyland turned by the end of the day into stringent pleading to promise we could come back.  They love our tradition and so do I.

The weekend at the end of June that we spent with Hilary and her family was so humid that my computer shut itself down.  But it was wonderful nonetheless: swinging on swings over a big muddy puddle of rainwater, my father blowing out candles surrounded by his found grandchildren, those children lined up on the edge of Brea as we sailed, four feet dangling towards the splashing water.

Our hydrangea bush exploded into glorious bloom.  Once again I was reminded of the metaphors that are all around us: by late July I had to cut hundreds of past-their-prime blooms in hopes that we might get another round of new flowers.

We spent the Fourth of July with Matt’s family in Vermont.  The children loved being with their cousins.  Later in July we went to Legoland for the fourth time.  This is an extravagant tradition, to be sure, and maybe a silly one, but I can’t express the pure joy that descends on all three of us the minute we walk out of the airport in California.  I have no doubt that the three days in July we spent at Legoland will be among my most cherished of this entire year.

Coming home was hard, but we had a short but sweet visit with Whit’s godmother, my dear friend Gloria, to look forward to.  She came through on her way from Maine to Beijing, we all remembered how fiercely we adore this friend of my heart that I’ve known for 23 years.

Grace and Whit both went to sleepaway camp.  For the first time in 10 1/2 years Matt and I were alone for 10 days.  Saying goodbye was hard, mostly because of the reflection that it forced on time’s heartbreakingly swift passage.  Then, in August we had two weeks alone with Whit.  I spent my birthday with one of my oldest and dearest friends, at the place where we met and where our daughters how flourish.  It was marvelous.

We spent a week by Lake Champlain as a family, for the fifth year in a row, and it was pure magic.  Grace and Whit love it there, and Matt and I do too.  We swam and ran and water skiied and laughed.  The vacation, just like the end of August time that holds it, was tinged by end-of-summer pathos.

I read All That Is and A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, The Engagements by Courtney Sullivan, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld, Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, Early Decision by Lacy Crawford, Ready for Air by Kate Hopper, Looking for Palestine by Najla Said, & Sons by David Gilbert.  I spent long hours revisiting some of my favorite poetry books.

Grace and I were deep in Harry Potter 7 while Whit and I were on 4.  They both remain entranced by Harry’s world.  Grace and I read Little Women at the same time in August: she marked the pages she read before bed and then left the book for me, and I’d read the same passage.  The next day we talked about it.  We read A Wrinkle In Time (my favorite book from childhood) the same way last year.

We managed to fit some of our favorite rituals into the last week of the summer.  We went to the beach for an end-of-summer day, we swam at Walden Pond, we visited the tower nearby and built stone cairns near the fairy stream.  We spent Labor Day in town for a change, because Grace had a soccer tournament.  It was calm, mellow, and surprisingly wonderful.

There was plenty of yelling and exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed by all kind of small things.  And I’ve already forgotten those moments, as the summer slides into memory, crystalline, shimmering.  And how I miss it, already.

 

Identity

Of the pieces I’ve written recently, This is 38 is one of my favorites.  Some of the Huffington Post comments stung, though honestly they mostly rolled off my back.  But there’s one that I can’t stop thinking about.

The commenter noted that my post was all about my kids, and criticized me for having such a narrow life.

I was totally taken aback by that.  I have always been very aware of and invested it (overly so?) the other aspects of my identity beyond motherhood.  I work full-time.  I write.  I aspire and always have to raise children who know that while they are the most important thing in my life, they are not the only thing here.  And the truth is that I never really thought much about motherhood when I was growing up.  I’ve written before about how I never thought of myself as maternal.  I never babysat, I never daydreamed about my future children (or my future wedding, incidentally), I neither breathlessly anticipated motherhood nor expected it to be the missing piece that made my life whole.

And then.  Then I had Grace, passed through a season of darkness and bewilderment, and had Whit.  Once I finally caught my breath I looked around and I had two children.  As I wrote last year, I have been a mother over 10 years now and it is undeniably true that this is the central role of my life.  (I feel the need to acknowledge that I am both aware of and grateful for my good fortune in conceiving and bearing healthy children).  I have been changed in countless, indelible ways by becoming a mother.  One essential way is not a change so much as a return, to the page, to writing, to something I had forgotten I needed.  My subject chose me, and while that subject is not specifically “motherhood” it certainly arrived in the hands of my blue- and brown-eyed children, announced itself slowly but insistently as their lives unfurled with dizzying speed in front of me.

Over the last 10.5 years I have sunk into motherhood slowly but irrevocably and I feel a sense of relief whose gradual arrival doesn’t diminish its depth.  It seems this is something I always wanted and I love my children more than anything else in the world.

But still.  Motherhood is not some kind of missing puzzle piece, it does not render cohesive my diffuse sense of self and purpose, and it does not solve in one grand, sweeping answer all the questions that have always plagued me.  No.  And I always thought of myself as someone who has many other facets, kaleidoscope that I am: writer, wife, daughter, sister, friend, runner, nail-biter, redhead, reader, lover of the sky, hater of shellfish, insomniac, worrier.  I could go on.  In fact I struggle mightily to write bios because of this, I think: it’s hard to describe myself, to find the right adjectives.  Everything seems both too definitive and not complete enough.

The comment on the Huffington Post has burrowed into my brain.  Is it true that I’ve let the other parts of myself atrophy and wither, so that all that’s left is my identity as a mother.  Honestly, I don’t think so, but I need to consider that that’s how it may be coming across.  Surely that subject that chose me is focused on my children, though not exclusively.  I know both Grace and Whit are aware of the other aspects of my life, and they are accustomed to having to wait for my attention when I’m engaged in something to do with work, writing, or with their father or a friend.  This week they both go to sleepaway camp.  For the first time in 10.5 years I will be without either child for 10 days.  I know I’ll miss them desperately, there’s no question of that.  I guess whether or not I feel lost, and as though my identity has been lopped off, will tell me all I need to know about this particular issue.  Stay tuned …

Do you fret about your identity being too focused in one area of your life, whether that’s parenthood or career or something else?

Sturdy joy

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Dusk, July 4th, Vermont.  Can you see the holiness?  Actually, how can one not see the holiness?

It has taken me so long, with this lengthy waking-up process and this endless circling around the spiral of the same questions, the same heartbreak, the same wound, but I am occasionally aware of a sense of joy so sturdy I think I have to call it contentment.  The truth is I’m unaccustomed to this kind of happiness.

Untrammelled joy is just not a part of my normal range of emotion.  Spikes of overwhelming happiness alloyed with a breathtaking wonder at this world?  Yes.  Dark moments of despair and equally overwhelming awareness of all the ways in which this life cuts me?  Yes.  But this sense of steady pleasure at my life?  That is new.

And it’s not constant.  Far from it.  Oh, sadness will always be a part of me, an undeniable part of my personality.  I’ve written about the seam of sorrow that runs through me and it is stitched through every moment of my life.  But there was a morning recently where I woke up, noticed the particular grey of the sky (it has been a hideously horrible summer for weather here), sipped my coffee, read some blogs I love.  As Grace and Whit were having breakfast, before I drove the to farm camp, they started bickering.  And it aggravated me, but somehow it felt different.  It didn’t disrupt the current of my morning, did not dislodge the sense of contentment that had floated over me in the morning.

Something fundamental has shifted.  Daily, I am overcome with the sheer outrageous privilege of living on this earth.  That’s not new, but perhaps the accumulation of days has finally come to something, built a base of joy on which I now stand.   I’m the same person, and I still cry every single day, and I get snappy and short and frustrated and aggravated.  But there is something more rooted, something firmer, as though some essential contentment that has spread over the soil of my soul.

I keep thinking of Annie Dillard’s quote that “Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”  It’s as though I have finally learned to see that holiness, and now I can’t stop seeing it.  No matter how bad a day I have, that holiness is always there, and it buoys me.

Do you know what I’m talking about?  I feel as though my connection to the world is gradually deepening, and this tether feels firm, solid.  I can hold onto it.  On the worst days, when all i can do is whisper “thank you” and try to remember that I mean it, when Whit comes to me and looks at my face and asks me if I feel like Temple Grandin (he was very affected by that movie, and immediately understood that the ways in which the world overstimulates her were similar for me), when everything makes me weep, I can hold onto that tether and know that it will bring me back to center eventually.

Waking up

The universe is always speaking to us.  That, I believe.  I’ve written before about the various themes and totems that have emerged at various points in time: bird nests in bare trees, the moon rising in the late-day sky, hearts all over the place.  I also think there is a subconscious message in the quotes and lyrics and poems that come to mind at different moments, as well as in the particular memories we recall.

Right now, what I keep on thinking about, prompted by cues both literal and figurative, is waking up.

I think I am waking up.

Annie Dillard’s line that “we wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery” has pushed itself insistently into my head, over and over again.  It’s running across my thoughts like a banner advertisement lately.

And then I read Katrina Kenison’s beautiful words about waking up, prompted by David Whyte’s poetry.  I was in tears reading her reminder that “…I can wake up.  I can pay attention to the subtle currents of my life, and allow them to carry me in a new direction.  I can feel my feelings, rather than avoid them.  I can be fully present, rather than half here.  I can wake up to the challenges of the journey, the conversation I don’t want to have, my fears about where I’m headed, the truth of who I am, the gifts and and losses of my life as it is.”

Those were the two prompts that established waking up as a theme right now for me, and in their wake it was was Roethke I couldn’t stop hearing: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”  Yes, there is no question I’m taking my waking slow.  It’s been a process of years, hasn’t it?  Slow, with many returns to sleep, but here I am, unequivocally awake, with all the undeniable joys and horrors that that entails.

But I am waking up.  And there’s no going back to sleep.

The ability to course correct

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A random photo, both recent and unrelated.  Though, really, don’t hydrangeas meet what is in their path and, with mute implacability, correct their course?  They wind around looking for light, they change color, and they live on.

I am increasingly convinced that the key to happiness and success in this life is the ability to course-correct.  Last weekend, we were in Vermont at a (wonderful) family reunion.  I was putting Grace and Whit to bed in sleeping bags on the floor and Grace was tired and cranky.  She gave me attitude and was pissy, and, exhausted from a long drive and day, I didn’t have the slack to be generous with her.  I snapped back and, with a genuine but short “I love you,” left the room.

About 30 minutes later Matt came down and whispered to me that Grace wanted to see me.  He had gone upstairs to get something and had talked to the still-awake children when he was in our room.  I walked upstairs and crouched by their sleeping bags.  Grace’s face was wet with tears, and Whit looked anxious and somewhat upset.

“Everything okay?” I leaned over Grace and hugged her.  Hiccuping, tearful, she told me she was sorry, she felt bad, and she did not want to go to bed angry.  She wanted to clear the air, she said.  She was sorry and it was the Fourth of July and she did not want to mar it with an argument.

I am not sure I’ve ever hugged her harder.  I owed her an apology, too, and I offered it.  But I thanked her for having the ability to say hey, let’s put that behind us, let’s not hold a grudge, let’s move on.  And I meant it.  We hugged and she went to sleep and I went downstairs and all was well.

I thought about the maturity it took for her to say: I am sorry, let’s let go.  I thought about the days I’ve ruined by attaching to my own failure to concentrate or to my own wounded ego or emotions.  I am sure we’ve all had the experience of something going poorly and of deciding well, hell, it’s all lost.  I’m equally sure that the key to success and to happiness – hell, to life – is in the ability to say: you know what?  That sucked.  I’m doing X or Y badly.  But I’m going to let go of that disappointment, hurt, or dismay, and try to move on with a light heart and an open mind.

This is one of those insights, muted rather than blinding but absolutely essential, that this season of my life has held for me.  Learn how to let go of our failures rather than to let them bring us down and to let go of how we wanted it to be so that we can have it as it is.  Because I don’t want to ruin these days by attaching myself to all the ways that they – and more importantly, I – disappoint me.  If I do that I miss their extraordinary, astonishing brilliance.

Really, I think what I’m saying, is that we need to learn to begin again.  Every day.  Over and over.