nostalgia

The Five Year Plan

Five years ago we celebrated Thanksgiving with my parents and my father’s whole family (picture above taken after I had bathed the children and was about to put Whit, in his red fleece footy pajamas – sob – into the car for the drive home).  Grace had just turned 4 and Whit was not yet 2.  I was still working at the consulting firm I spent almost 7 years with after business school.  We lived in this house.  One of my nieces was a baby, and the other was not born.

Where will I be in five years?  I really have no idea.  I will be 42.  Eek.  Grace will be 14 (EEEK!) and Whit will be 12.  It is possible Grace will be considering leaving home for boarding school.  I don’t know where we’ll be living, but if I had to guess, I’d say still in this little house (the “two years, three years, max” house we moved into in 2001).  I hope I am still working in search, which is a profession I finally really like.  I really, really, really hope I have written a book or articles or somehow more fully inhabited the mantle of “writer” that remains so elusive.  Most of all, I hope fervently that my family remains healthy and safe, my nuclear family and also my parents, sister, and extended family of blood and of choice.

If the last five years have taught me anything at all, however, it is about the futility of a five year plan.  I know how quickly the best plans can unravel.  Furthermore, and more importantly, I know how even a life that unfolds exactly according to plan can still be missing something essential.  That was the lesson I was just beginning to learn five years ago.  When I reflect on five years ago it feels both like yesterday and like a hundred years ago (as is true of all major things I remember).  Most of all, though I cannot believe the rocky, sometimes vertiginous emotional terrain I was about to embark upon.  Emerson said that the “years teach us much the days never know,” and it is certainly true that now, with the perspective of years, I can look back and realize how very much I’ve learned in five years.  How much I’ve learned about who I am and about what I want.  I’ve mourned certain things that are lost as well as some that will never be true.  I’ve celebrated other things I never dreamed I would.

And here I am.  “There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote.  It has been a series of intense years, full of both questions and then, quickly, often startlingly, answers.  I’m not naive enough to imagine that the next five years won’t hold their own set of challenges and delights, of heartbreak and sudden joy.  I would like to believe that the woman the last five years have helped make me is more sturdy, less sensitive, but I actually suspect that the reverse is true.  I anticipate further switchbacks, more confusion, and a continued need to trust my headlights, even if they can only see a few feet into the fog.

And so we drive on.  Or beat on, boats against the current.  After all, what choice do we have?

I’m adding my voice to the chorus, sharing thoughts on five years ago and five years hence, and honoring, in so doing, those whose next five years are not assured.  Big Little Wolf started this, and my friends Kristen and Aidan have both participated.  This effort is in support of Ashley Quinones, the “kidney cutie,” who is raising money for a life-saving kidney transplant.  Please click here to learn more.

Commencement

A month or so ago, I was writing (incessantly) about the end of the school year and the way it triggers a cascade of sadness for me.  I was thinking about it even more unremittingly, I assure you.   One detail that kept popping up in my mind was the fact that graduation, one of the most official markers of an end in our culture, is called commencement.  I started writing about that several times, but never really figured out what I wanted to say.

I guess another month of life, with my baby losing his first tooth and my daughter slipping into flip-flops that sometimes get confused for mine has made it clear.  Isn’t this fact, on the surface odd, just a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  Commencement.  You end and you begin, on the very same day.

As something ends something new begins.  Even though I never, ever embrace the endings, I am often surprised with joy at the beginnings.  You’d think after 36 years I might have figured this out.  You might imagine that I would have learned to lean into the certainty that there is sunshine around the corner.  Unfortunately, you would be wrong.  My sentimentality and melancholy is nothing if not tenacious, and it refuses to yield to logic.

Yes, I know all of the trite sayings: when a door closes, a window opens.  Etc.  I even know they are true.  But still.  But still.

One thing I know I write over and over here is the basic, simple tenet of begin again.  I stumble, I fall, I mess up, I yell, I shout.  I regret.  Oh, wow, do I regret.  I am sometimes so suffused with regret I can’t see anything else.  But what else is there to go other than to begin again?

Other than to commence?

(PS Commencement is the title of J. Courtney Sullivan’s first book, which I read and enjoyed.  I highly recommend also her new novel, Maine, which I read last week.

Inexorable as the tides

summer 2007

summer 2011

Still rocking the 3T seersucker suit.  What happened to my baby?

first day of Beginners, September 2009

last day of Kindergarten, June 2011

My baby is 6.5  He swims competently, though inelegantly.  He reads short words.  He loves Star Wars and Legos.  He beats up on his sister.  He makes me laugh every single day.  He is about to lose a tooth.  He still curls up in my arms when I pick him up at night.  He tells me he loves me as much as the sky.  He has a very strong sartorial point of view.  It’s not his fault, but he also makes me cry every single day.

The transitions, big and small, keep coming at me, inexorable as the tides.  When will I learn to let go, to float on them?

Solstice

Yesterday was the summer solstice.  I’ve written before of how important the solstice is to me.  For all the years of my life my parents have hosted a party from 9 to midnight on the night of December 21st (awesome when it’s a Thursday, less awesome when it’s a Sunday).  As midnight nears, a friend, the co-host, leads us in an ancient Mayan ceremony to welcome the light back.  This tradition gives me goosebumps every single time I experience it, and a huge room full of people holding candles does seem to ward off winter’s intense darkness for at least an evening.

I am fiercely attached to the winter solstice.  Not so the summer solstice.  In fact, I find it a little sad.  It marks, after all, the slow rotation back towards darkness.  As of today, the days are getting shorter again.  I know, I know: buzzkill.  Believe me, if I could somehow change this orientation of mine, this way I lean always towards melancholy, I would.

I am often preemptively sad, well before I need to be.  And yes, this can cloud the brightness of even the most luminous moments.  Why on earth can’t I just relax into right now, these swollen days of both sunshine and sunlight, these happy children, this relative ease?  I don’t know, and I hate that I can’t.  I am simply too aware of the shadow behind that swollenness, too achingly conscious of the turning of the earth, of the hovering darkness on the horizon.

Often I am jealous of those who can walk through this world without being so regularly brought to their knees by both its grandeur and its heartbreak.  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.  A new friend (hi Jane!) who knew me here before she knew me in person even remarked that I was much funnier in person than she expected.  I try to keep my heartbreak to myself.  But the truth is that even on days like yesterday, 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.  What I am beginning to see that it is in these knots of tangled meaning that my life actually exists.  Certainly they are shot through with strands of radiant joy, that only revealed themselves once I started really paying attention.   I’m slowly realizing that my hope that someday I’ll be sailing smoothly down some clearly-defined path is simply naive.

3 months ago 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 is a reminder of something I do know, somewhere deep inside myself.  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.

I know the feeling

This is, as I’ve said before (ad nauseum, you might say), a time of year tinged with sadness for me.  The endings and goodbyes come one after another, waves lapping onto the shore of my life, eroding anything I have written in the sand.  An extra farewell this year is the fact that Matt’s parents have sold their house in Vermont, the house that Matt grew up in, the house where the family has gathered  for years, the house that is one of Grace and Whit’s very favorite places to visit.  The picture above was taken on their very last morning there, looking out over the field that unfurls gorgeously, its colors undulating with the seasons, in front of the house.

On Sunday night Whit was beside himself, unable to go to sleep because he was crying so hard.  He sat on my lap and wept, face wet with tears, wailing over and over again that he didn’t want Grandma and Grandpa to sell the house in Vermont.  It reminded me of the night a year ago when he dissolved into genuine, heartbroken sobs about the fact that he was no longer a baby.  His humor and little boy bluster sometimes camouflage his intensely sensitive core.  He was not comforted by my reassurances that there were many more fun visits ahead, just in different places.  He just sobbed and sobbed, burrowing into my neck like he did when he was much littler, and cried his heart out.  I know the feeling.

Today I picked the kids up from school because it is the last day of regular pick up.  Grace ran up to me, a friend in tow, frantically asking for a playdate with this girl and one more.  The girl standing next to her is moving out of state at the end of this week, and this was literally the last chance.  I said, as gently as I could, that we could not do it, because Grace had a doctor’s appointment.  Long minutes of negotiation ensued, complete with arms crossing, feet stamping, and voices being raised.  When we walked to the car, Grace was in angry tears and Whit was uncharacteristically quiet, not quite sure what was going on.  In the car I told her that this was the last pick up of the year, that I was disappointed that she was acting this way.  She crumpled even further, cried harder.  Almost immediately I apologized, and told her that was unfair of me to have said; there have been hundreds of wonderful pick ups, I said, and there will be more.  One day is not a big deal, and I ought not freight it too much with being the last. She said she felt worse, even worse, about having marred the last pick up of second grade.  She wept.  I know the feeling.

We got home and curled up on her bed to talk it out, and she turned her bad mood around surprisingly quickly.  But her rapid disintegration at school, the urgency of the request, and the emotion in the outburst all speak to how sensitive she is, too, to this season of endings.  While transitions are hard for everyone, I suppose it’s shameful that it’s taken me this long to realize that my children may struggle especially with them, as I do.  When Grace and Whit evince these qualities, straight from the heart of who I am, I am overcome with both compassion and guilt.  I relate intensely to how they feel, but I also feel enormously responsible for the fact that they have these feelings at all.  I wish I could lift this from their shoulders, this inchoate anxiety about change whose darkness can cloud even the most radiant days.  But I can’t.  I think all I can do is try to remain gentle with them about the complicated, non-rational emotions that swirl in times like these.  To allow their sadness room to breathe while also reminding them of all that is bright.  After all, I know the feeling.