musings

Transition

My childhood was punctuated by a series of transitions as regular as a drumbeat.  They were not easy, thought they were an integral part of the rich and complex terroir in which I grew up.  I learned, early on, about the deep bittersweetness of goodbyes.  My family’s moves, back and forth across the ocean with a metronomic every-four-years cadence, engraved into me a deep fear of change.  Transitions, farewells, and endings all cause me deep discomfort and often tears.  This truth is an essential part of who I am (and I know I’m not alone in this).

A couple of weeks ago in a yoga class, I realized something new about myself and transitions.  As I moved through a sun salutation, the poses as familiar as a long-known language, my breath carrying me like a stream, it occurred to me:

The transition between poses is as important as the stillness within them.

I’ve been practicing yoga, with varying degrees of regularity and commitment, for over 13 years.  And for every one of the thousands of practices those years have held I’ve thought that what I was learning was a lesson about stillness, about holding, about enduring, about breath.

And of course I was learning that.  I’ve learned so much about those things – mostly, about abiding, with myself and others – both in class and in my life.  But suddenly that day I saw, with a flash of insight that almost embarrassed me because it was so obvious, that the moving between those poses that I held was equally as important.  I’ve always liked the vinyasa part of yoga, probably because the being still is so hard for me.  But if I’m honest, “liking it” has manifested mostly as moving quickly through the poses, and I realize that is not the point of the vinyasa.  Instead I need to pay equally close attention as I move my body, my breath, and my mind, up and down and around and through.

I need to honor the transitions just as I do the holding.

I’m sure it’s not an accident that this realization comes right as I feel I stand on the threshold of another transition with my children.  They are so incredibly lovely right now, so full of the golden life that is, to me, childhood incarnate.  And yet I see the end of these days like the storm clouds we watched on the horizon as we drove to Storyland (I hope not for the last time).  I know something else wonderful exists on the other side of that horizon, I promise I do – my own childhood of goodbyes taught me that – but I still dread the change.

And yet.  And so.  The lessons keep coming.  Breathing, breathing, into another transition.

 

Redefining Success, Celebrating the Ordinary

Recently my friend, teacher, and mentor Katrina Kenison shared an article with me from The New York Times.  She was quoted in a thoughtful piece called Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary, which explores a topic that feels both current and thorny: our intense need to be – or, more dangerously, for our children to be – exceptional.

I feel a simple and intense identification with the values espoused in the article.  When Katrina is quoted as saying “…there’s a beauty in cultivating an appreciation for what we already have,” I nodded so vigorously my husband looked over at me, wondering who I was suddenly talking to, but found me staring at my phone, reading.  Celebrating the ordinary, most mundane moments of every day is perhaps the central task of my life.  This blog is, you could say, a poem to the wonder and beauty, and to the heartache and pain, that exists in my extremely regular existence.

The article talks about how today’s parents all think their children are above average.  We know this is statistically impossible.  The extreme emphasis on exceptionalism feels familiar and familiarly uncomfortable to me.  One of the main tenets of my parenting is that I strive to praise my children for their effort, not any innate “specialness.”  Of course I love my children beyond reason.  But I don’t think they are in any way geniuses, or more remarkable than a million other children.  And maybe most importantly:  I don’t want them to think that they are.  I want them to know that I love them for who they are, of course, but I admire and esteem their effort, their dedication, their hard work.  This is the way to success, however we define it, and to joy.

Of course that small phrase, “however we define it,” is at the core of the article.  And this is where this topic gets tricky for me.  On one hand, I feel like a hypocrite.  I have certainly faced my share of critics who say it’s “easy” for someone who went to Exeter and Princeton and Harvard to disavow society’s focus on performance and achievement.  I feel a slippery sense of unease about this, sometimes: do I really, truly believe this, that ordinariness is extraordinary, even though I know I spent so many years valuing achievement and validation above all else?  Do my actions match what I say is my philosophy?

Well, yes.  Who is better positioned that someone who has lived that life to really understand at a deep level how incompletely achievement leads to joy?  Nobody.  And as I’ve written before, all of my frantic success was actually a way to avoid engaging with my own truest desires.  It is only when I let go of that map, released my reliance on an life shaped by external validation, that I began to experience real contentment.  And that was found – yes – in the most ordinary things.  In my children’s instinctive hush when they walked around Walden Pond.  In my observation of how light changes in fundamental ways as we wheel through the year.  In the quiet words of poets that whisper insistently in my head.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in my view, with achievement, and I plan to keep teaching my children that hard work and goals are critically important.  But this has to be coupled with learning to listen to what Robert Browning called “the low voice my soul hears.”  I want to celebrate my children’s ambition and give them many opportunities to taste the wonder of ordinary life.  Surely it’s possible to do both?  I’m certainly going to try.  When their deepest desires come up against what the world wants them to do, though, I hope they’ll choose the former.  It took me 30 years to have the strength to do that, and I’ve never looked back.

How do you think you measure success?  How do you walk this line in your own life, and, if you are a parent, as you help your children navigate theirs?

 

Summer solstice

Today is the summer solstice.  It is the longest day of the year.  The day out of 365 that holds the most light.  And from here we turn towards darkness again.

I have always felt a connection to the solstices, surely in part due to my family’s long tradition of celebrating December 21st.  But something even deeper than this tradition beats in me.  My soul vibrates with the ever-shifting balance of light and dark and recognizes the importance of its brief, teetering pinnacle (and nadir) on the summer and winter solstice.  I asked my husband recently which was the happier day for me, the summer solstice or the winter solstice.  It was a little quiz.  He got it wrong.

The answer is the winter solstice.  From there we are turning towards the light, moving in the direction of longer days, out of the dark days that takes the most faith.  The summer solstice comes at the very beginning of a season I love so dearly, with its swollen days and evenings of slow-arriving dusk, fireflies and popsicles, sandy toes and children worn out from wonder and the ocean.  But I do find June 21st tinged with sadness.  It reminds me that we are commencing our revolution towards fall and winter again.

I wish – desperately, wholly, wildly – that I could just sit and enjoy a day of my life.  One day.  I wish I could sit by a pool, giggling at my children jumping off a diving board, a glass of white wine in my hand and a dear friend at my side.  And if you were at that pool, that’s what you would see.  That’s what it looks like from outside.  But inside there is an essential crack in my spirit that yawns open, more narrowly or more widely depending on the moment.  This crack – this wound– is always there.

I promise I’m not a hugely depressing person.  I’m not even depressed.  I’ve been there, believe me, and this isn’t it.  I’m actually a fairly happy person. My husband has even noted that I’m funnier in person than anyone would imagine from my writing here.  I guess I try to keep my heartbreak to myself.  But the truth is that even on days like today, a day as gorgeous and perfect a summer day as I can imagine, the longest day of the year, there is a kernel of sadness buried deep inside my experience that I can’t ignore.

And there is still so much here I do not understand.  These are my favorite lines in Adrienne Rich’s deeply moving poem that I publish every winter solstice.  No matter how much I struggle and think and unpack and write, there is still so much that is unclear to me, both within and without, so much that I find perplexing, sad, complicated.  Also, yes, there is also so much that I find devastatingly beautiful, radiantly joyful, and deeply satisfying.  What I am beginning to see is that it is in these knots of tangled meaning that my life actually exists.  I’m slowly realizing that my hope that someday I’ll be sailing smoothly down some clearly-defined path is simply naive.

Last year I said this:  “I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.”  Reading this avowal reminds me that for all the uncertainty, there are things I do absolutely know.  On a day like this when I want to simply enjoy, it is easy to forget these commitments I make, to myself, to my family, to those I love.  But I won’t.  I will pull out my camera, take some pictures of this glorious day, of my alarmingly tall and lanky and funny and sad children, surrender to the knot of sadness that will gather in my heart as the sun sets, and acknowledge this is what it is to be me in this world.  It just is.

Parts of this post were originally shared on this day last year.  And they are still so true, as I continue my spirals through the same questions, the same concerns, the same sadnesses, the same joys. 

Staying near

I have written before about how my life is laced through with goodbyes, and about my deep-seated fears of abandonment.  This truth sits uneasily with my enduring desire to be alone, but there it is.  I contain multitudes.  I suspect it has something to do with wanting to be able to choose to be alone.

My anxiety about departures and being left behind continues to manifest in new ways.  In the last several years I have noticed an almost frantic reaction to being left alone, and a correlated respect for the power of simply staying.

Let me explain.

Last summer a close family member was in the hospital.  I visited often.  Others would visit and then leave, but for some reason my instinct was to stay.  We would talk and catch up, and then I’d open a book or a laptop.  For long stretches at a time I’d sit there – at least as much as I was able to – and we didn’t talk.  I was just there.  I can’t explain it, but I had a very strong sense that this was the right thing to do.

I have also noticed that when we are leaving the house and Matt walks out before me I feel a pulse of something akin to panic: wait!  don’t leave me behind!  I get this same feeling during meal times when Grace and Whit are eating slowly, and I’m puttering around the kitchen.  We often aren’t always even talking, but I am there.  When Matt or others leave the room I feel a that same pulse of feeling: don’t leave.  Someone should be there while the children eat, my impulses scream, though I can’t precisely articulate why.

I see the other side of this impulse in the way Grace and Whit’s are drawn, always, to a space near the one I occupy.  They choose to read in the room I’m in, for example, or to be on the floor of the house where I am.  I know these days are numbered: surely before long there will be slamming doors and barked orders to stay away.

Maybe it as simple as that in my midlife I am developing a respect for the power of simply staying near.  Of enduring.  Of not leaving.  Of abiding.  I guess more and more I value presence, even when it is mild and not laser-beam-focused.  Our presence is the purest manifestation of our love.  And to be with someone is to say: I appreciate you enough that staying near is a priority for me.  Because I love you.

Right?

 

Maternal

This is within the first hour of Grace’s life. I am bewildered.

That my article on The Huffington Post, 10 Things I Want my 10 Year Old Daughter to Know, resonated with readers was immensely, heart-fillingly gratifying.  I am hugely honored and deeply humbled.  I was buoyed all last week and weekend by the knowledge that my words – the deepest wishes of my mother heart, at this particular point in my daughter’s life – had burrowed into the thoughts and feelings of even perfect strangers.

And the comments on the piece blew me away.  I realized there are things in that piece I passionately wish I’d said differently.  Many of the comments were kind, and I cried as I read them, sad for the people who said they wished they’d had parents who had spoken to them like this and deeply touched by people who told me I was a good mother.

See, the thing is, I was never really thought of myself as a mother.  Early on in our childhood, my sister and I took on roles within our family.  I’m not sure exactly how this “taking on’ occurred, because I am certain it was subconscious on the part of all involved.  But as stories and beliefs about a child sink into family lore they likewise seem to saturate our very cells.  I was not particularly maternal, it seemed.  I never babysat.  I wasn’t very interested in dolls.  I had literally never changed a diaper until I changed Grace’s.  The fact that I adored being a camp counselor belies the assertion that I wasn’t especially interested in children, though it’s true my charges were teenagers and not in fact that much younger than I was.

An endocrine specialist told me when I was 23 that I would never get pregnant without significant intervention.  I remember that last experience vividly: I walked away from the appointment feeling grateful to finally understand what was going on with my body, but also with a chilling sense of an emotional instinct being confirmed by my physical body.  I wasn’t focused on being a mother, and now it seemed that my body didn’t know if it ever wanted to be one anyway.

And then I got into business school and at age 24 threw myself headlong over the cliff towards the world of Career.  It’s not that I didn’t want kids, not at all.  I did always assume I would have children, but truthfully I never thought very much about it.  I never defined myself through the future children I would have, never planned for that life.

And then.

Those 2 lines on February 15, 2002 changed everything.  They blew a hole through that endocrinologist’s certainty that I’d never get pregnant on my own, for one thing.  But they also indicated that I’d stumbled onto a new path, one that would meander through dark cul de sacs and swamps before eventually coming out into a light so bright and vivid I still find myself blinking into it, like Plato coming out of his cave.

My embrace of motherhood was not immediate.  Oh, no.  In fact my put-aside memoir was mostly about that, about the slow and treacherous passage from the moment I delivered my daughter myself to falling in love with her as I’d been told I would.

And yet here I am, a mother almost 10 years, and it is absolutely, 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 one 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, I recently observed, and while that subject is not specifically “motherhood” it certainly arrived on the backs of my blue- and brown-eyed children, announced itself slowly but insistently as their lives unfurled with dizzying speed in front of me.

The truth is that I feel like a fraud, sometimes, like I’m not a “natural” mother, both because my entry into this role was so fraught and because for so long I was not one of those women whose whole self was oriented towards eventual motherhood.  I suspect this is why the supportive Huffington Post comments meant so hugely much to me, because there I still contain a reservoir of insecurity about my mothering, my motherhood.  I actually believe that many mothers share this deep rooted uncertainty and anxiety, for a host of reasons not necessarily the same as mine.

I have written before, and continue to believe, that most of our suffering in this life comes from our attachment to the way we thought it was going to be.   My experience growing into the role of mother, an identity I hadn’t thought much about that has nevertheless come to define my sense of myself, shows me that letting go of those attachments can both relieve suffering and show us great, unexpected joy.  Let’s keep letting go of how we thought it was going to be.  Who knows what startling joys and surprises lie ahead.