musings

You become

I’ve written before of how I love this passage from the Velveteen Rabbit.  Of how it makes me cry.  It is true, isn’t it: it takes a long time to become who we are, to grow into ourselves, to learn to inhabit every inch of our spirits, to become Real.

This has obviously been on my mind lately: just last month I wrote about how “most of life happens in the current of dailiness, whose slight and invisible variations are nevertheless enough to carve enormous swooping oxbows into the terrain of our souls.”  About the ways that many of life’s critical roles are made up of small, daily occurrences.

What I’m thinking about today is how true this is of becoming a mother.  You have a child, and you also become a mother.  The thing is, for me at least, those things didn’t really happen simultaneously.  Well, obviously I was a mother, technically, the moment I delivered Grace myself and pulled her onto my chest.  But the meaningful, emotional inhabitation of “mother” took a lot longer.  I wish I had known that at the time.  I think knowing that would have made me much gentler and kinder to myself about the rocky traverse from one sense of self to the other, which I expected to be immediate and instinctive but which was instead slow and soaked in tears.

May I have patience as I continue to become, and trust about what I am becoming.

Perfect

One day last week I changed the school drop off routine a little.  Whit walked halfway across campus with us and then waited, sitting on the bottom step of a building in the middle, while I took Grace the rest of the way.  She whined a little about this change (Whit didn’t join us at all in the past), insisting that her brother would intrude on our “special time.”  She glared at me as we pushed our way through the double doors to the playground.  I wanted badly to snap at her that she was being a brat, but I bit my tongue.  Moments later, they were walking ahead of me, heads bent together, murmuring about something I couldn’t hear.

It was perfect.

Saturday morning broke clear and cold, cold, cold.  I watched Grace’s soccer game hunched over, with my hands jammed into the pockets of my down coat.  It was so cold my eyes teared behind my sunglasses.  I had a lovely conversation with another Soccer Mom (gah!) and was taken aback when, mid-chat, Grace came running over, face flooded with tears.  “Mummy!  I just scored and you missed it because you were talking to Sophia’s mom!”  She crossed her arms across her chest and stamped her foot, the very picture of righteous indignation.  I hugged her instead of blowing up, guilt and irritation swamping me at once.  With her face pressed against my coat she couldn’t see the emotions at war on my face. How can I possibly live up to this standard? rang in one ear and Oh my God I misssed seeing her score a goal shouted in the other.

“I won’t score again today and you missed it,” she wailed against my parka.

She did score again, and I saw it.  I also observed her cheering on a teammate who tore down the field and scored her own goal, which made me far prouder than anything else (and I told her that).  I kept remembering: it won’t be long until she doesn’t want me to watch her anymore.

It was perfect.

After soccer, I took Whit to make good on a promise from his birthday.  He received several duplicate Legos so I told him I’d take him to the Lego store and he could choose anything he wanted (within reason).  He was overwhelmed by the Lego store, and spent long minutes walking its perimeter, eyes wide, finger trailing across the various boxes.  He could not make up his mind.  I urged him to pick something already, fretting to myself that if we didn’t get to Johnny Rocket’s before noon we’d have to wait for a table.  I chewed a fingernail, impatience swelling inside me, and told him again that it was time to choose.  Let’s be honest: I rushed him.

He decided on a Lego, we went to lunch, there was no wait, and he was utterly charmed by the faux-retro-diner details.  Then, at J Crew he picked out a pirate sweatshirt and was given this enormous, Willy Wonka-esque lollipop.

It was perfect.

I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away.   These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all.  This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life.  And I won’t let them.  I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins.  But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.

Thank you, Katrina, for the exact words I needed at the precise time I needed them.  As usual.

This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart.  Every day.

Song and memory

This weekend was glorious: finally, full sunshine, open windows letting in soft spring air, children biking and running until they were exhausted, and dinner at a restaurant so nearby that Matt and I could walk there through the dusky spring evening.

Saturday I spent five hours in the car scanning unfamiliar radio stations.  I’ve written before about the power that songs have in triggering memory for me; for hours, it was like spinning an old-fashioned rolodex and seeing what was written on the card that it fell open to.  In many cases the words to songs rose up out of some deep reservoir of memory: the words seemed to be carved indelibly on some scroll hidden deep in my consciousness.  I had no idea I knew the words to a song, often, until I was singing along to it.

I’ve realized that my years at camp are full of musical memories.  I wrote about how Like a Prayer will always remind me of being 16 years old and dancing down the dusty dirt aisles of the camp theater, the sheer joy of movement overtaking me.  That song will always, every single time I hear it, remind me of a special, influential friendship and of the fact that I used to love to dance.  One camp tradition that I loved was that each Sunday one unit would perform a song that they’d practiced all week.  These were themed and though I can’t be sure I’m remembering right, I think there were also poems and quotations read aloud.  One year my bunkmates and I sang Landslide, and yesterday, The Logical Song by Supertramp came on and I remembered that that was one too.  Then the Go-Gos came on, and I remembered my Assistant Counselor year, when my 11 peers and I got up during one camp assembly and sang Our Lips Are Sealed.

I just cannot wait for Grace to experience camp, and I hope that the place is as important to her as it was to me, magical and grounding at the same time.

The Soup Dragons came on, singing I’m Free, and I thought about another time when dancing was important to me.  Senior year at Exeter I participated in the dance concert instead of doing a sport.  My dear friend C, a rare real, substantive friend in those years, and I did it together.  We choreographed several pieces, one of which was to I’m Free. In the annals of embarassing photographs, here’s one from another piece (for I’m Free we wore cut-offs and tie-dyed shirts, and I do not have a picture of it).

And then a couple of songs sent me back to college, specifically to my little quad in the sky.  The Freshman, by Verve Pipe, Lightning Crashes, by Live, and Whenever I Call You Friend, by Kenny Loggins, each carried specific and visceral memories.  Whenever I Call You Friend, in particular, reminds me of when I had a broken leg and my wonderful roommates took it upon themselves to dance and sing to entertain me.  In the photograph below they are serenading me, and I remember leaning over to grab my camera, and taking the picture, remember how I was laughing so hard that I could barely hold the camera straight.

And then REM’s Night Swimming brought me back to a spring evening, not altogether unlike this one in Boston, when I walked from my freshman dorm to meet a boy for a first date.  The air was thick with the smell of magnolias, the sky perfect, hydrangea blue; we were in the weeks when Princeton is at its most beguiling.  I walked through the junior and senior dorms, gothic facades on either side of me, feeling vaguely intimidated to even be in these spaces that were still foreign to me.  As I approached the room where I was going, the lead-paned windows were all open and REM’s Night Swimming wafted out into the early evening.  I felt anticipation and nerves, was somehow aware, deep in my consciousness, that I was about to step into a relationship that would be one of the most important of my early adulthood and most formative of my life.  I’ve never heard that song since that night without thinking of that walk, and that sense of promise, the tangible presence of the future right in front of me.

And then, as I neared home, poetically, Southern Cross came on.  I’ve always loved CSN(Y), and this song is one of my favorites.  I thought instantly of the summer of 1998, when Matt and I spent 6 weeks in Africa.  We had known each other only a month or two when we planned the trip; I think my parents probably thought I was coming home in a bag.  We climbed Kilimanjaro and on night before the summit ascent it was crystal clear and gorgeous (not so the night we summitted – white-out blizzard conditions).  We could see both the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper in the sky which, our guide told us in his lilting, accented voice, was very rare.  Only possible right near the Equator.  We both looked up, spellbound at the enormous sky above us, at how far we were from everything we knew.  And yet, at that moment, I’m certain we both felt at home.  “For the first time you understand … why you came this way.”  And we did.

What songs trigger important memories for you?

Seuss and Doty

Sometimes I can be dense.  Sometimes the universe needs to scream at me to get me to hear something.

I wrote a while ago about the Annie Dillard line that I believe says it all: What you see is what you get.

And I practice that, at least most of the time.  Last night, walking with Grace and Whit in the very-early-spring evening, Grace stopped short in front of a dense bush that was still mostly sticks and twigs, no leaves.  She looked, hushed, into it.  I stood next to her and followed her gaze.  She whispered, “Look!” and all three of us witnessed a flock of small, dun-colored sparrows deep inside the bush.  I have no idea how she noticed them, but I’m glad she did.

I guess I had flagged in my paying attention, though, because I was forcefully reminded of the need to do so this week.

This weekend I read Mark Doty’s beautiful short meditation on creativity, art, and life, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon.  The book itself is an exercise in looking closely, an exaltation of the wonders that can result.  It evinces, simply, “A faith that if we look and look we will be surprised and we will be rewarded.”

And then last night I read Whit the book that Grace took out of the library for him (one of her new and more endearing habits).  It is a Dr Seuss book that’s new to both of us, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut.  And Seuss’s voice joins with Doty’s, in a different kind of poetry, “If you keep your eyes open, oh the stuff you will learn!  The most wonderful stuff!  …you’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

Okay, universe.  I’m paying attention.  Eyes wide open here.  What I see is what I get.

The meaning of the sky

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature – Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s no secret that I ache to believe in God.  The truth is I ache to believe in something.  What’s also true is that slowly, with almost infinitessimal steps, I’m finding myself doing so, in my own way: beginning to trust in the vast design, to believe that I can let go, to trust.

I see this shaky but growing belief, most of all, in the sky.  I recently paged through my zillions of photographs and realized how awfully many I take of the sky.  I simply adore the sky and am often moved to photograph it.  Though, of course, no photograph can capture the sky.  The assortment of clouds, the searing gorgeousness of a clear cornflower blue sky, the subtle depths of a vista of changing grays.  I take pictures looking up at the sky, mostly, and once in a while I take a picture out of an airplane window looking down at it.

In particular this winter I have been downright obsessed with the beauty in the way black winter branches net the often steel-gray sky.  I see poetry in the patterns that the bare branches, often ice-slicked, make against the winter sky.  I have dozens and dozens of photographs of different designs like this, and my children have taken to mocking me when I stop, stock-still, in the middle of going somewhere, often in the middle of the street, and fumble for my iPhone.

I’m realizing that my preoccupation with time and its passage informs this close observation of nature and the sky.  The changing quality of light as we move through the seasons speaks of the earth’s ceaseless rotation.  The sky’s meaning is found in its simultaneous permanence and momentary-ness and in the subtle, complex shifts in its light.  There is a tree outside my window, about which I’ve written before, and this winter many mornings I was stunned into a brief moment of silence by the light on its barren branches.  I tried and I tried and I tried to capture it, usually to no avail.

The seasons turn, the light changes, the branches swell with life and then burst into flower and then drop their leaves again.  Just like I like Walden Pond most during the barren months, I am most drawn to winter’s vistas and landscapes.  And it’s winter’s skies that I find the most beautiful.  Somewhere, in those erratic patterns of black against blue, I see … what?  Something.  God.  Something I can believe in, lean into.  I sense the vast design for which this blog is named. 

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

– Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace)