nostalgia

I didn’t have the best Easter I’ve ever had.  On Saturday afternoon I began feeling sick, a nausea that intermittently escalated and ebbed.  By 7 I was in bed with a fever, trying hard not to throw up.  Sunday I woke up feeling somewhat better, though I remained vaguely carsick all day long.  This made me short with the children and with Matt in the morning, barking at them when I felt frustrated, annoyed at myself that I could not avoid this behavior.  Everything felt frayed and difficult by 8:30 in the morning.

At church, ease floated down to rest on my shoulders.  Sitting there, in a place that has held so much of my history – my sister’s marriage, both Grace and Whit’s christenings (each, actually, on Easter weekend)  – I exhaled.  I sang the songs I know by heart, their lyrics rising from some deep, hidden reservoir of memory, from the years at St. Paul’s Girls’ School.  My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the three grandparents I have lost, particularly Nana, my maternal grandmother, who always cherished Easter above all holidays.  I sank deep into the familiar cadence of the prayers before communion.  I felt gladness enter my heart, and in its wake, gratitude.

But as soon as we left the church, into the almost startling brightness of the day, into the sudden full-bloom of spring, the grace I’d felt in the pew sloughed off and my agitation rose to the surface again.  I felt nauseous, I felt tired, I felt cranky.  We had a lovely egg hunt at my parents’ house, with both my godsister and her family and my cousin and her boyfriend.  And then we had a relaxed, comfortable lunch at our house, my father and mother full of fascinating stories and observations from the trip to Jerusalem from which they just returned yesterday.

The day was nothing short of delightful, with only a couple of whiny kid moments to mar its gleam.  And I felt the person – the mother, wife, daughter – I want to be floating in the room, sometimes within reach, sometimes not.  The presence and peace that I grasp for so clumsily was just in my palm and then jerked away again, replaced by an unease of the soul that manifests as physical discomfort.

After lunch my nausea rose up in my throat again, threatening, and I climbed back into bed.  I felt demoralized, frustrated: after so many years, after so much trying, how can I still stumble, fall back into these traps, these old ways of being?  Didn’t I just write, a few days ago, that the black emotions can blow through, like a squall, and still leave me with the memory of a beautiful day?  I know what this agitation is about, I think: it is hiding, it is refusing to stare into the sun.  It is my attempt to evade the pain that is an inextricable part of truly engaging in my life.

But oh, what irony there is in this, I see now.  The pain I feel in knowing how much I’ve missed, in realizing how much these avoidance behaviors have cost me is so much keener than the pain of looking my life in the eye.  I know this as well as I know my own name.  Many days now, like last week, I can acknowledge the irritation that comes as regularly as a tide, and let it pass.  On Easter I could not: I got tangled in it.

“Healing,” Pema Chodron reminds us, “can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.” I read this last Easter, on Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous blog, and the words returned to me today.  The pain of living my life, of accepting the passage of time, of embracing my own wounded heart: these are the kinds of pain that Pema speaks of.  The awful, toxic pain of regret, however, carries no tenderness.  There is no healing in avoidance, in the way I felt for big swaths of Easter Sunday.

What is Easter if not the day of renewal, rebirth, resurrection?  Yes, I squandered a lot of it being crabby and irritable and short-tempered.  Yes, I drove myself to sobs alone in my room thinking: I will never have another Easter egg hunt when Grace is 8 and Whit is 6.  I don’t know exactly why I felt this way on Easter, a day I’ve always loved deeply.  I know that instead of attacking myself for this waste, lying in the dark, crying, as my stomach roiled as though I’m at sea in a storm, I should instead embrace what Easter means, believe in the return of my peace.  I am trying.

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.

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.