musings

The introverted Connector

I read Jonathan Fields’ post about trusting the pendulum over the weekend with interest. I feel this swing inside myself, from extroversion to introversion, on a regular basis. I’m not sure it’s quite the same as the person he describes, but I have long felt tension between how I am perceived on this particular topic vs how I actually feel. I’ve written about this “perilous gulf” before, and, at least for me, it exists in so many dimensions of my personality. This is just one of them.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a little quiz that I found on twitter to ascertain if you are a connector (Malcolm Gladwell style). To my surprise, I apparently am. This reminded me of the ways that I am very often a resource for people on myriad, random topics: do you have a pediatrician to recommend, do you have a book I would like, can you put me in touch with a babysitter, hey thanks for sending me the name of that person in my new town, she is my new best friend, thanks for referring me to that professional connection, I have a new job.

What I felt when I read about being a connector was both surprise and vague unease, which I think speaks to my turmoil about this whole topic. The truth is, I most often choose to spend my free time alone. I like to read, and write, more than anything else. I don’t even really like the telephone, preferring to be in touch over email, text, or IM. There are very few people whose company I would choose for extended periods of time. How to square this with my apparent ‘connector’ self and the fact that many people have told me I appear “social” and “extroverted”? I am not sure.

What’s more interesting to me about this lack of inside/outside congruence, though, is the indistinct but inarguable internal discomfort I feel about it. Where does this come from? It’s not from a judgment of more-social vs. less-social people, I don’t think. What it is, I am concluding after a day of mulling it, is a frustrated feeling of being inaccurately labeled. To be told I’m one way when I don’t think it’s that simple is aggravating, and makes me feel reduced to categories that don’t quite fit. The labels don’t capture the nuance, the tensions, the tradeoffs. The description of me fails to notice the ways that my interest in solitude or company shuttles back and forth sometimes with the regular, metronomic click of those office toys with swinging silver balls that hit each other.

Maybe I am simply a connector who very much appreciates time alone. Maybe I’m a loner who happens to know a lot of people. Maybe I’m a crazy schizophrenic! I don’t know. What I do know is this is just one more way that I feel misunderstood by the world. I know, I now, this anguish is just so adolescent: even as I write it I sort of cringe. But it is true that I chafe against the way that the world seems to see me regularly and with more agitation than many people I know. It is true that I am apparently easily reduced to simplistic, caricatured qualities in the eyes of others.

My mind flits, again, to the wonderful Walt Whitman line, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”  There are innumerable dimensions of humanity, and I think most of us have at least several on which we refuse simple categorization.  I think both the desire to fit people into these categories in order to more simply understand them is as innate and natural as is the frustration on the receiving end of this forced classification of people.  It seems to me this is just another manifestation of way that the paradoxes at the heart of life and people are both unavoidable and discomfiting.

Susie’s courage

Courage. I’ve been thinking about this word, this concept, this idea, all weekend. Trying to figure out what to share for this inaugural Five for Ten post. Certainly I don’t feel I have much, so that was easy to dismiss. I kept coming back, over and over again, to Susie. Susie was like a mother to me, and I mean that literally. My sister and I grew up in the loose net of extended family known as the “Four Families,” something that to this day I am immensely grateful for. Susie was an integral part of this community, one of the four mothers who formed the corners of the tent under which we all sheltered.

Susie died at 49 of pancreatic cancer, and the way she faced her death is the most human and intimate experience of courage I’ve ever seen. I am still unfolding the immense wisdom she passed on to me – and everyone around her – in those last months. As her body withered, her face grew as luminous as it did bony. I see now that her physical body was just reflecting her passage towards the spiritual world.

I will never forget the months leading up to Susie’s death in the fall of 1997. For one thing, my grandmother died of the same kind of cancer in June. Pancreatic cancer suffused those months. My mother, even more surrounded by illness and death than I was, was intimately involved in Susie’s caretaking. There were a group of women who circled around her, supporting both her and her sons, in a way that I think of often now.

“Women do not leave situations like this; we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, “What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.” I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.” – Elizabeth Berg

This quotation, which I invoked recently to friends involved in similar caretaking, really captures what those months were like. I was nowhere near as intensely involved as my mother was, but I was still a part of the experience. Ethan, Susie, Mum and I had countless dinners on Susie’s sun porch. We sewed square for quilts. We attended caretakers meetings.

Experiencing Susie’s death was an exquisite, once-in a lifetime privilege. I learned more about death and, perhaps paradoxically (but maybe not), about life from her in those months than I can express. Susie faced death with extraordinary grace. Somehow she was able to say to those of us near to her: Yes, I am dying. But see, I am not afraid. And so we were not afraid. And though the crushing sadness remained, without fear, it was more manageable.

Susie was able to rise above her own emotions to provide solace and strength to those around her. She spoke honestly about her fears, her experience, her pain. But she also honored the great good fortune of her life and was able, somehow, to put her own need away so that she could reassure those close to her, take care of her boys, until the end. I can neither imagine nor fathom the strength it took for her to do that, to put her own need for reassurance behind her desire to comfort those around her. We were supposed to be taking care of her, but in fact it was the other way around. Hers was an amazing act of generosity; to this day I am humbled when I remember it.

Hilary shared with me a prayer that was said at one caretaker meeting that I did not attend. The closing line was: I believe all of our paths are perfect. I think of this often. If a woman who died before 50, leaving two young sons with everything in front of them, can find a way to feel at peace with that, I owe it to her memory to recognize the perfection – or at least the beauty in the imperfection – of my own path. To look at our lives, baldly and without pretense, to see the beauty even in the barrenness: this is courage.

Motherhood is both enormous and tiny

Despite my general disinterest in mother’s day, even my dug-in heels are slipping against the tide of forwarded emails, blog posts, and essays I’m reading this weekend. Let me be clear: I have no problem with beautiful, heartfelt words about motherhood – in fact I adore them. I just find the packing of them into a single weekend a little weird. I think we ought to celebrate this every day, and in my view random celebrations mean more (big, huge massive exception: my birthday). I also share all of Anne Lamott’s aversions to Mother’s Day, so lucidly and wisely expressed in her essay here. I have always disliked this day but it wasn’t until I read her words that I really understood why.

Still, as Anne says, being a mother is among the richest experiences of my life, and I’m thinking about it this morning. Motherhood is is both enormous and tiny. It is made up of emotions so unwieldy that I can’t put them into words, and of moments so small I would miss them if I blinked (and I’ve surely missed millions). Sometimes the feelings are so giant I feel swollen with them, taut, tight, very much like I was in the last trimester of pregnancy. Sometimes the minutiae is so small that it seems impossible to hang any meaning onto it, and every time I am surprised when somehow, the hook actually holds. I’m not sure whether it is one facet of the human experience or a prism through which that experience may be seen.

In my struggle to experience the moments of emotion so overwhelming I feel as though I’m jumping off a tall pier into the ocean, or ducking through the heavy downpour of a waterfall, I turn to the words of others. It is in Anna Quindlen’s essays, Kelly Corrigan’s videos, and a million quotations that I have pulled out of books that I find myself nearest to understanding. I reach, grasping, for the ways that those far more eloquent than I have described and captured this experience.

For the tiny, the minute, I don’t have to look any further than right here. The moments flutter like magnolia petals around my feet, stunning, short-lived, and quickly turning to brown mush. When I write about them I’m trying to memorialize them in their pink beauty, their spring perfume wafting off of them in waves. In this way, motherhood is running upstairs to change my shirt before a meeting because Whit pressed his peanut-buttery face against my belly when he hugged me goodbye. It is instinctively holding out my hand to receive a chewed-up maraschino cherry as soon as I see Grace grimacing with not liking the taste of it. It is cooking the same zucchini chocolate chip muffins every single week because it’s the only vegetable Whit will eat, ever. It is driving around to four stores at rush hour because Grace was sad one day in preschool that everyone else had cartons of milk in their lunch and she did not (not easy to find small cartons of soy milk for my dairy-allergic daughter).

Big and small. Tiny and huge. Overwhelming and underwhelming. Tears and laughter. All of these tensions, some of them cliches, exist in every single day for me. Happy mother’s day to you all, regardless of who or how you mother. It is universal, this feeling, and spans far beyond the most traditional definitions of “motherhood.” Of that I am certain.

One Way or the Other

So, I read a lot of blogs.  We’ve established that.  Still, I have my very favorites, those that I treasure and hold dear, whose words routinely speak straight to my heart.  Heather’s blog, The Extraordinary Ordinary, is one of those very favorites.  It has been such a joy to get to know her in the past year, to have her insightful answers to Present Tense, and to call her my friend.  I feel very much as though I’ve met a kindred spirit in Heather, and look forward to reading many more of her magical words.

I’m honored to share one of her posts with you today.  I adored this post when I first read it, and I’ve returned to it more than once.  I’m sure it will touch you as it did me.

One Way or the Other

There are dust bunnies. So many. They are under the bed and in me, scurrying across the wooden floors of my home and my heart. They are moving much too fast through the empty, bumping into toys and crayons and dried up play-doh, then coming to a weary stop.

It seems no matter how we try to keep up with them, they are winning. So we sweep up only the ones that are out in the open and then we leave the house, coming and going with the living of everyday life.

We could hold them out in the palms of our hands to show that we have them, but the bunnies float and they spin and we can’t seem to catch them. We push them under the rugs to hold them still.

We ignore them.

We force them to unnoticed parts of our cluttered minds, and move on to do the easier, the more manageable and mundane things. We go through the motions.

This thinking I’m doing about dust bunnies and life began the other day when Ryan was playing with the boys on our bed, wrestling. Arms and legs were flailing and there were giggles and shrieks.

Then Ryan’s coffee mug was knocked to the floor by one of those flailing feet or hands. It fell with a crash, shattering off the nightstand and splashing into a large puddle under our bed. Coffee covered the floor and chased the bunnies.

So we stopped the easier things we were doing and lifted the bedside table, we wiped clean the unseen places, sliding as far as we could across the wood floor under the bed, on our bellies, reaching. It seemed like a gallon of coffee under there, dripping down the walls and oozing into the floorboards.

I sighed and sat back as I saw all the other things that needed cleaning while I was there. Something sticky, dog hair, and those dreaded dust bunnies.

The more I look, the less I want to do this, I thought.

We did not rot the floorboards by leaving that mess that seemed too big. Instead, we were knees to the floor, uncovering the darkest places so long ignored. And then the stubborn bunnies rose in protest, making it even harder. Oh, how they hurried and hunkered with each reach of the broom or rag. They fought to find their way back to the darkest corners, annoyed at being forced out and up.

So we tried harder, we took to chasing them down and wiping them out.

We were cleaning up the dark places, together.

It needed to be done.

It’s much easier to walk away from those same kind of ignored places between us, the ones that itch at the subconscious and tug at the heart, the ones swept under rugs. But even when that goes on too long, unexpectedly but certainly, a destructive wind of change will blow in. The kind of blast that forces us to look under the bed and into the dark corners, because of all that shattered glass.

Then we lift up the rugs, letting up the dusty air, revealing what we’ve told ourselves is just fine the way it is when it’s not.

It breaks the quiet that’s not really peace after all.

It pulls the bunnies from under the rug and puts them in the palms of our hands where we cannot deny them, where we have to grasp them and then take them away from our home, from ourselves.

Sometimes we remember to keep working at a clean house, belly crawling and then grasping and releasing before it all gets out of hand.

At other times, we find ourselves strangely thankful for spilled coffee and broken glass, for the overwhelming messes that pull us down to the dark places, to take a look and make a change.

Archeologist of the soul

For some reason I’ve had an image from one of my kids’ books, a Magic Schoolbus book about archaeological digs, in my head today. It’s a picture of an archaeologist crouching in the sand, sifting materials through one of those flat trays with a fine mesh bottom. Looking for pieces of treasure, fossils, messages from centuries ago.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been that archaeologist. Spurred on by my sense that something major was missing, I have been on a on a journey into my past to try to understand how I got here. To see how the tiny little choices, explicit and not, have led me to where I am now. When I think of the ways that tiny little things, each seemingly insignificant, can amount to the formidably immovable mass of a life, I always think of snowflakes: each so fragile, but together so powerful.

I have been sitting in the sands of my life, looking through piles of recollections both tangible (letters, photographs, old school papers) and intangible (memories). I sift carefully, shaking the tray side to side until most of the silt disappears through the mesh like water through a colander.  I wonder how it is that I choose the areas to sit and mine carefully; it seems random, but I imagine it is, like all things that seem coincidental, guided by some hand that I cannot see.

Most of the time all of the materials sifts through the tray, leaving nothing there. Sometimes I am startled by what remains, by a memory or a moment whose importance and power I had not realized. Other times I am not at all surprised to see the heavy lump of something there, in my hands, reminding me again of its impact on the shape of my life.  Some of the pieces, of fossil or of treasure, are anticipated, and some are not.  I take them carefully out of the sieve and place them in my bag.

As I proceed down the roads of my childhood and life until now, the bag grows slightly heavier, weighted with pieces that have made themselves meaningful enough to save.  The next task, I think, will be to read the code in these fragments, to piece them together and see the whole that is far larger than the sum of their disparate parts.  I’m nowhere near done on the dig site though.  There is much more sand to sift through, many more pieces, each of which allows a small part of the past to speak in the present, to find.