musings

Preemptive regret clouds the riches of the moment

I’ve been thinking about my post yesterday, and dwelling more in my memories of the dark period after Grace was born. It strikes me that in many ways that episode of PPD was a microcosm of the problem that’s plagued my whole life. It was about the past and the future occluding my ability to see the beauty heaped at my feet in my present. This is the task of my life, that is becoming clear. And not just my life: I think this is a universal struggle.

As I panicked about my future as a mother, about the fact that I would never sleep again and my colicky baby would never stop crying, preemptive regret clouded the riches of the moment. I am so quick to assume that the difficulty of a moment will endure forever and ever. I did that, in the dark nights of Grace’s infancy, and to this day when I think about it I am overcome with despair that I can’t remember her first bath, when her cord stump fell off, of the seductive newborn smell of her hair.

It is as though I cannot allow myself to feel the glory of right now. What am I afraid of? Of staring into the sun? I seem to believe that by anticipating fear, regret, sadness, I feel I innoculate myself against it. Of course I see rationally that this is absolutely wrong. These sad emotions are knit into my experience inextricably, but by assuming that they are coming I allow them to permeate even the moments that they do not own.

My postpartum depression was an exaggerated version of a struggle that has shaped my whole life. It was, I hope, the universe throwing cold water in my face and asking me to stop. To look around, see the truth and gorgeousness available in my ordinary life, and to live it.

And there is so much glory in this life! So much grandeur. Just this morning as I drove my children to school I pulled over to photograph the sunlight glinting off of the snowy trees. It was breathtaking. I must allow that more. I know that sadness is coming to me, as surely as a tide returning to shore. I must learn not to fear this, but to enjoy the times when that tide is out. I am certain my life contains as many moments of pure joy as anyone’s. My problem is not recognizing them, but allowing myself to relax into them. To feel a moment’s beauty, even with the certainty that clouds will return.

The push and pull of light and shadow inside my spirit will continue for the rest of my life, I know that. I don’t want to keep missing the light for anxious anticipation of the shadow. The grace of Grace’s arrival was my first big lesson in that, and there have been others, and there will be more. My brain must get out of my heart’s way.

The Weepies’ All This Beauty is playing in my mind today – I think it gets at this point.

Light and shadow: a triptych

When I ran yesterday I was struck by the vivid difference between the side of the street in the sun and that in the shadow. In the darkness of the shadow, the sidewalks were still covered in a crust of ice with powdery snow on top (ideal ankle-breaking conditions), while the other side of the street was awash in running water. It sounds so obvious but this difference seemed really stark to me. And I thought about how for me, inquiry and writing are like sunshine: in that light, under their direct power, the ice and snow and slippery, sharp things melt away. Their form changes, their power to hurt dissolves. This is, maybe, why I write about and muse on the darker things that bother me: by focusing my attention on them, I can change the form of their matter (though I can’t make the matter disappear altogether).

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On my sunniest days, I am still the mottled pattern of light through a leafy tree. Even the brightest rays of sunshine are partially occluded by shadows. I love the pattern that these shadows make, and find fascination in their order and disorder, but I realize this is personal taste. Some prefer a more direct beam of light. I myself side with Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” There is contrast and life in the interplay of light and shadow that reminds me of the texture of my spirit.

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Grace is olive-skinned, dark-haired, with brown eyes just like mine. I can already see that she struggles under some of the same emotional storm clouds that I do. Her light is marbled with shadow, which makes it intimately familiar to me. Whit has skim-milk skin like mine, blond hair, and bright blue eyes. He is a free spirit through and through, he is sunshine without boundaries, he is a splash of bright yellow light against a red barn in the height of summer. Even as I write these characterizations, I am aware of their overly reductive and simplistic nature. Of course my children are more than these caricatures, their personalities each combed through with light and dark in individual, complex ways. But today this is how they seem to me, standing silhouetted against the setting sun of another day, their shadows lengthening behind them.

Flickering Faith

It is my distinct privilege to be guest posting at Motherese today. I am so glad to have found Kristen and as I said when I featured her words here last Thursday, she writes beautifully about questions of identity, politics, parenting, and living in this world. Her posts are shot through with personal reflection and every single day she makes me think. (quoting myself: perhaps a new low?)

My essay at Motherese today is called Flickering Faith, and is a meditation on what faith means to me. Please go read my words, and then click around and enjoy Kristen’s thoughtful, lucid writing. Kristen, thank you for having me: it is a true honor.

Live the Questions

Two things have been in my head all weekend: Devotion, and the line “funny how falling feels like flying, for a little while” (from Crazy Heart – a wonderful movie).  I’m still reflecting on Dani Shapiro’s luminous, beautiful memoir, and will write a longer review.  But for now, I am thinking of how the book and the movie are about the process of asking questions, the process of an adult continuing to grow.  And of how in both cases the person asking ends up with at least as many questions as he or she started out with.

At Dani’s reading in Boston, people kept asking her what the answer was.  I felt like over and over she called on raised hands to a version of the same question: “you had all these questions.  What did you find for an answer?  What do you tell your son now?”  And Dani was frank when she responded that there wasn’t a single answer.  The thing she said that stuck with me was that even at the outset of her search, she was less interested in an answer than in living deeply in the questions for a while.  I was struck by the audience’s persistent desire for a single answer, for resolution, for the closure that Dani posits so humorously and wisely may not actually exist.

Crazy Heart is likewise ambiguous, and ambitious, in its denial of a simple conclusion.  Of course there is the beautiful rendering of a woman’s redemptive love, but then there is the end, which is undeniably complicated.  A man’s life saved, returned to him.  But oh, at what cost!  As he watches the dust of one of his closely-held dreams fall through his fingers, he sees the big questions that remain in his palms.  The ending, though happy, is laced with loss and echoes with the lack of resolution.

I needed to hear both of these messages right now.  I’ve written before about my profound discomfort with uncertainty, but  I am starting to believe that living through the unknown is the only way to truth.  It is actually much more difficult for me to sit with the ambiguous and unknown, to peer over the edge of the precipice into the future and not know what it holds.  I have, many times, grabbed at the nearest firm answer, regardless of whether it was the right one.  I’m determined not to do that now. 

It is harder for me to live with maybe than to jump to yes or no, but I must.  I need to give myself permission to sit and feel this discomfort.  I need to remember that both falling and flying involve a loss of control, the thing I fear most, and they may be indistinguishable for a while.  And to remember that beyond the questions there are just more questions.  Paul Farmer’s voice comes to my head: beyond mountains there are mountains.  Certainty has been my crutch for far too long.  Off into the murky gray yonder.

(thanks to Ronna for the thought-provoking – dare I say renegade! – conversation)

Pain engraves a deeper memory

I can’t put Devotion down. Run, don’t walk, to buy it. To say I’m obsessed is an understatement. I feel as though Dani Shapiro is speaking straight from my heart, albeit far more elegantly and eloquently than I ever could.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through and I have underlined at least a big chunk of most of the pages.  I love Dani’s voice, she writes about the same things that are utterly preoccupying me right now, and I just don’t even have words yet for the way this story is touching me.  I am sure this will be the first of many posts about this book.

But one passage in particular is on my mind today.  I’ve been thinking for weeks that I needed to write about how this is my blog.  Not my life.  Not my spirit.  I get a fair number of inquiries, from people in person and through email, people I know personally and people I don’t, asking if I am okay.  These people mean well, I’m sure of it.  And I am often taken aback by the question because I am more than okay.  I am well.  I realize that people are responding to what they read here, and I know this is a public forum and that of course I choose what I write and publish.

This is what I read in Devotion that brought this recent issue to mind:

“The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects: Pain engraves a deeper memory was her response.”

I love Anne Sexton, wrote my thesis in college on her, and any mention of her makes me feel instantly connected.  I’m surprised, actually, that I had never heard this sentence.  “I look for uncomplicated hymns, but love has none,” is one of my favorite quotations of both hers and all time.  This one goes on that list.  I think there is power and truth in those five words.

Yes.  I have long responded to those who, from their experience on this blog, express concern that I seem gloomy and sad that that isn’t true – it’s just that I find in the more complicated thoughts more fertile ground for exploration.  The grayer parts of my heart and head are where the interesting stuff to write about is, at least to my mind.  I am not particularly interested in reading anyone writing about how fantastic and perfect their life is, least of all me.  And, while my life is absolutely, inarguably rich and full and tremendously blessed, it’s not true that I experience every day as unmitigated sunshine.  I don’t.

I’ve written before about how I “incline towards melancholy.”  There’s no question about that.  But I also firmly believe that this tendency to feel things deeply also allows me to experience a surpassing joy that might not be available to me without the darkness.  I still don’t know if this connection is about capacity or contrast; I’m not sure it matters.  I think I lean towards capacity, though: because of the deep scars that pain has engraved into my spirit, there is a deep repository for joy, when it comes, to fill.

The introspection on this blog is definitely part of my personality, and there is nothing inauthentic here.  But the blog is also not a comprehensive representation of my life; far from it.  I understand the confusion that occurs there and know that it comes from a place of support and love.  I guess I just felt compelled to say, in the echoing voices of two of my literary idols, that my choice of topics is just because pain engraves a deeper memory.