nostalgia

20 years

Recently I went back to my high school 20th reunion.  And, again, I experienced that collapse of time, where years fold in on themselves and and a lifetime and a minute twist together in an disorienting spiral of memory and emotion.  It’s not a secret that I wasn’t particularly happy while I was at boarding school, but it’s also true that with every year that passes I respect my alma mater more.  I respect it for giving children credit, for holding them to an incredibly high standard, for asking a lot of young people because it knows that they are able to deliver it.

My memories of my time there are few, but vivid.  They revolve around cold, dark mornings and nights, running in the snowy woods, wet hair at late afternoon classes frozen into icicles, hours upon hours of homework, the senior play, and oval mahogany Harkness tables.

It was wonderful to be back.  Perhaps because my time on campus was not marked by particularly strong social bonds, returning is mostly devoid of the anxiety that revisiting this time in life holds for many.  There were, absolutely, joyful reunions with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.  And happy conversations with people I didn’t know on campus but have come to since.  Perhaps most of all, it was powerful to watch my children with the children of my friends, all so much closer than we are to the age we were when we met, a fact that is dizzying, unbelievable, and irrefutable in equal measure.

There were a couple of places I was disappointed not to be able to get into, like Phillips Chapel and the indoors of the English classroom building, so I missed seeing them.  But otherwise, the day was jammed with special moments.

For instance, my daughter standing in front of the building where my love for words caught fire.  Those first two windows to the right of the front steps were where my favorite teacher taught.  It was in Mr. Valhouli’s classroom, and in the light of his kind, probing pedagogy that I first sensed my passion for reading and writing throb inside of me.  My daughter standing in the intersection of the quad across which I ran, holding my acceptance letter from Princeton (the first line of which said only, in bold all-caps, “YES!”) to hug my dear friend who was also going to Princeton.  The friend who is now Whit’s godmother, a true friend of my heart.

The new science center is downright awe-inspiring, and we wandered around it, agape, aghast, awe-struck.  The whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, the large, professional-looking labs filled with shiny equipment, the walls filled with photographs, equations, and samples of bridge-building projects all drew Grace and Whit’s attention.  Mine was captured by this piece of paper, a photocopy of one of Mary Oliver’s poems, stuck on the wall of a Physics lab.  That right there tells you a lot about my high school.  And a lot about why I respect it so.  There’s a place for poetry even inside the world of Physics.  This is how I grew up, and it remains how I see the world.

The Academy Building in full sunshine, against a cornflower blue sky, reminds me most of all of my graduation day from this place.  It was a hot, early June day in 1992, and all four of my grandparents, my two parents, my sister, and my two godmothers were all there.  I am bewildered now to fathom the depth of this showing of support, and while I know I basked in love and family, I wish I could return there to look each of those people in the eye (three of them now gone) and tell them how much I love them, how often I thought of their counsel, how much I valued the ways they had shaped me as I grew into a young adult.

It has been 20 years since that day.  It feels like these 20 years flew by in a heartbeat, but I know that each year was lived thoroughly, to its depth and its width.  As I grow into my  middle-aged skin, inhabiting these years at the top of the ferris wheel, these years in the early afternoon of life, I reflect with nostalgia on a time when I was so young, so mutable, so filled with both promise and sorrow.  I feel deep compassion for my long-haired, confused, emotional adolescent self.  With the perspective of years, it is simple to identify those two years in New Hampshire as the ones where I learned how to learn, where my intellectual self took flight, where my passion for all the central cerebral interests of my life began.  And it is impossible to convey my gratitude for that gift.

A constant transition

This is a time of transition.  I can feel us moving to another phase, another season, in every sense of the word.  I am aware of that deep in my body and my spirit.  I dislike change with every fiber of my being, and I wish I was able to let go more.  I’m really more of a holder-onner.  Still, I continue to remind myself that this is futile effort, and that my white knuckle grip on every day is only serving to exhaust me.  I wear a reminder over my heart.

We are shedding skins around here.  Spring is slowly creeping around the edges of our hours, and with every day it seems more inevitable, though I think there is snow forecast for this weekend.  It’s still raw and chilly, though, and we all shiver like the brand-new, slender crocuses.  Grace and Whit are re-adjusting, slowly, to the school routine after two weeks off; I’m waking them out of sound sleep in the mornings, yet finding them unwilling to go to sleep at night.  There have been some reminders in my life of how near the precipice is, always, and of how we tread, every single day, on the line between divinity and disaster.

And then I read these beautiful words by Rebecca at Altared Spaces, about the ultimate parenting transition.  I read this post on Tuesday and by halfway through I was literally sobbing – not just the standard tears-rolling-down-my-cheeks that happens every day, but full-on gasping for air, actively crying.  The line that gouged itself into me was this one: “I came here to let her go.”  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Isn’t this, ultimately, the story of what we all came here to do, as parents?  Aren’t we letting to every single day?

Even knowing that, I’m chilled and stunned by the idea that someday – perhaps as soon as 7 or 8 years from now, if she goes to boarding school – I will hug and kiss Grace and watch her walk away.  I remember hugging my mother on the grass lawn in front of a dorm in New Hampshire in September 1990.  That was an particularly draconian farewell: she drove to Logan and got on an airplane to London.  Talk about far away.  I didn’t know until years later that she cried in the car driving away.  I went up to my little teeny closet of a room and sobbed my heart out.  I was scared and lonely and excited, and on the edge of something big.

There are certainly major, notable goodbyes and transitions in parenting, the ones that we all anticipate: kindergarten, high school, college, weddings.  But there are also tiny little goodbyes every single day.  Parenting is a constant farewell.  It’s replete with joyful hellos, too, of course, but it’s undeniable that every day holds an ending.  Every night before I go to bed I carry Whit to the bathroom, his blond head heavy on my shoulder.  Every single night I wonder if this is the last time.  I haven’t read Good Night Moon since I wondered if I ever would again.  The truth of that chokes me up, sits like a stone in the heart of me, a core of loss I simply can’t ignore.  Every day, infinitessimally but inexorably, they move further away from me.

I commented on Rebecca’s blog, letting her know how much her words touched me.  And she emailed me back and said this:

You are so passionate in the way you love your children. Sometimes I think you taste letting them go regularly. You live WIDE awake. At times that overwhelms you.

And I read her words, crying fresh tears, thinking: yes, yes, yes.  The big goodbyes will submerge me in emotion, fear and grief and pride all mixed together, of that I am sure.  But the little ones are in many ways harder for me, since they are so slippery, so difficult to note.  And I do taste them regularly.  I hope she’s right about living wide open; truthfully, I often doubt that.

And now, off to another bedtime.  More pages of Harry Potter, another turn at the Ghostie Dance, the Sweet Dreams Head Rub, and a full-body hug before bed.  Another night when my attention, my kiss, my hug can fix any problem at all.  How many more nights will it be my privilege to do, and be, this?  I don’t know, and that not knowing haunts me.  But tonight, it is.  I try to focus on that.

A repost from exactly a year ago.  And guess what?  It is still a time of change.  The realization that is seeping slowly into my bones is this: life is a constant transition.

The story I can’t stop telling

On Friday night Grace was sleeping over at a friend’s house and Matt was out, so Whit and I had dinner together.  He picked a single daffodil from our back yard (the single daffodil in our back yard) and put it in a small vase for a centerpiece.  We sat down to a table set for two, with napkins and silver, and ate some lasagna that Grace had made the night before.

“This is good,” Whit said between bites.  “But if you made it would be better.”

“Why?”

“Well, it would be full of love.”  He chewed.

“I think Anastasia and Grace put love into this lasagna, Whit.”

“Yes,” he looked me right in the eye, and said without a hint of guile,  “but your food has more love than anyone else’s in it.”

Saturday morning, before hockey practice, Whit was milling around our room in his long johns.  I was still lying in bed.  He climbed in next to me, nestling under the covers and curling his body against mine.  I reached out and pulled him to me, noticing again how lean he is now, all long planes and sharp angles.  I could smell the back of his neck, could see the pale blond fluff where his hair ends and his skin begins.  Matt looked over at us.  “What are you doing?”

“Snuggling with Mummy,” Whit answered.

“Whit, you can bet Zdeno Chara doesn’t cuddle with his mother before he practices.”

I glared at Matt.  “Who cares?  I bet he used to.”

“Yeah, Daddy,” Whit mumbled.  “Who cares?”

Still, my eyes blurred as I held my son against me, my awareness of how numbered these days are so piercing I couldn’t have spoken without sobbing.  It won’t be long until my 7 year old son wouldn’t be caught dead snuggling, much less seeks my embrace out.  Before I know it a Friday night dinner with his mother won’t be the cause of major excitement.  I am sure I will remember that single daffodil, leaning in its overly big vase, with heartache.  It’s still fresh and yellow down there in the kitchen, and I’m already mourning it.

There’s no question I’ve found the story I can’t stop telling, the drum I’ll beat for the rest of my life.  Yes, as I’ve said, my subject chose me.  This way heartbreak and joy are woven into every moment of every day.  They are the two walls of this hall we walk down, one at a time, this life, these years.  When I stare at the back of Whit’s neck I fall into the chasm of memory.   Images of his infant neck and all the years in between telescope and I feel a kind of vertigo.  The speed with which it passes is simply breathtaking, and the immensity of the miracle of another human being overwhelms me utterly.

“It’s time to go, Whit.  Let’s get your pads on.”  Matt called over his shoulder as he left the room.  I glanced one final time at the back of Whit’s neck, squeezed his still-birdlike shoulders, and I let him go.

 

May: moments of wonder

Last night I folded up a big Target box and put it in the recycling bin.  The box was covered in sharpie words and crayon drawings, and has been a major focus of this house for several days.  As I took it out, noticing that the air is positively swampy with spring as I did so, I thought how thrilled I am that Grace and Whit still find a cardboard box to be a thrilling thing to play with.   The arrival of a big cardboard box is met with celebrating, and provides days of fodder for playing together or alone.  I love this.

It reminded me of the night, a few weeks ago, when I decided to make a chocolate fudge cake that I’d first made for Whit, on his request, last summer.  I surprised the kids with the cake in the morning, and gave them each fat slices for breakfast.  They looked at me, bewildered wonder on their faces, suspecting, I think, that I was going to announce that I was joking and snatch the plates away.  I wasn’t, and I didn’t.  They were thrilled beyond all reason at this tiny surprise.  Grace even told me recently that she had written a “whole page” in her journal at school about this, and I groaned at her that she wasn’t making me look very good in front of her teacher.

I get the same sense of awed pride when I asked Whit recently what his favorite part of spring break was.  He said, without hesitating, “Disney,” but then he went on, “but close after that, our trip to Walden.”  Or when, after a dinner full of rowdy, obnoxious bickering, they calm down, within minutes, when we go for a pajama-clad ‘notice things’ walk.  Furthermore, that they ask, over and over again, for these walks.

I know for sure that this is one of the things I most want to pass on to my children: the propensity for delight, the willingness to be amazed, an openness to the hugeness of small things.  Whether it’s a trait or an inclination I’m not sure; I don’t know that it matters.  I do know, however, that it is one way to assure a life full of joy.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be great sorrow, too.  As far as I can tell they are often twined entirely together.  If there’s one thing I want to do as a mother, it is to help Grace and Whit hold onto their capacity for wonder.

I noticed, as I tried to find a link, that I have more than a few blog posts with “wonder” in the title.  All of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe that’s what this blog is about: the wonder of ordinary life.  The wonder of that design, of which we sometimes glimpse the contours, though never the whole.  The wonder of human relationships, the sky, the turning of the seasons, poetry, the power contained in the light of a day.  The wonder of living in the slipstream of time, whose eddies are both utterly unique and totally universal.  That’s what this blog has been, for almost five years: a record of my moments of wonder, both in their thunderous joy and their swelling sadness.  And a love letter to those two small guides who have shown me the way here.