nostalgia

I left a piece of myself there

Last week I read Amy at Never True Tales’ words on The Witching Years.  She writes about the years that her children were young, with a combination of regret, loss, gratitude and wonder that I recognize intimately.

It’s clearer here, on the other side. In the light. With kids who brush their own teeth and do their own homework and get their own snacks. I know now that being a mom of young children, staying in the house day after day, parenting solo 80% of the time…well, it is what it is. (Oh, is it ever.) I know that I did my best.

I also know I’ll never get those years back, as much as they often make me shudder: those years that passed so slowly as to nearly grind backward. Those years so long I measured my children’s ages in months instead. And that’s a travesty, because I left a piece of myself there. Something raw, and unmeasured, and instinctively maternal. Something sacrificial.

Those years were also, for me, a time that felt removed from the rest of my life.  It’s absolutely true that it’s clearer here, and also that this feels a bit like the “other side.”  In retrospect those dark years were a kind of slow, dark traverse, like the hours-long slog to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro where all I can remember is step, breathe, pause.  Step, breathe, pause.  In a white-out ice storm.  For eight hours.  All the while wanting it to be over, and then the minute I’m through it I want to go back.

Hurry up, slow down, faster, slower, the interplay of impatience and of regret.  This is the music to which my life is danced.  When my children were little I used to talk wistfully – everyone used to talk – about “getting my life back.”  And yes, I have my life back now.  But it’s not the same life.  And furthermore, I feel nothing short of anguish that I wished over some of the most tender, raw, and special days of my life.  I will never revisit that unique interval of time when your regular life – that life I wanted back so fiercely – recedes.  I will never have that wild magic back.

And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.  What I can’t stop thinking about is the notion of I left a piece of myself there. Oh, yes.  My first few months of motherhood were a crucible, so hot that I emerged made up of a totally different alloy.  In those dark weeks it rained and snowed constantly, we waited for Matt’s father to come through surgery, I woke up every morning from deep, soggy sleep and swallowed a white pill, believing desperately that it would help me?  Beyond those initial weeks, the first few years were also their own country.  Set to the drumbeat cadence of the needs of a toddler and an infant, the demarcations between day and night eroded, the very earth beneath my feet tilting perilously.   My sense of self adjusted slowly, creakingly, to this new forever-after reality?

What did I leave there?

I left my body swollen with childbirth, with milk, with life.  I left eyes so tired that they felt like they had sand in them; I’d press my fingers to my eyelids and see stars exploding faintly in the blackness.  I left behind the powdery smell of newborns, a bottle drying rack by the sink, mint green coils of diaper genie wrapped diapers, sterling silver rattles dented from being thrown on hardwood floors, and all sizes of white onesies. I left behind the explosive and extraordinary experience of natural childbirth, though it reverberates to this day through my sense of self.

I left my naive but absolute belief that motherhood was my birthright.  That shattered like a lightbulb exploding and left behind questions and doubts as numerous as those shards of glass.  One of the tasks of the last few years has been to see the beauty in the doubts, the tremendous richness in the questions.

Most of all I left behind my certainty.  My certainty that I knew what I was doing, that my path was assured, that I was safe.  That was lost forever in those weeks where my sense of solid ground shifted; the tremors of those days reverberate still.  Nothing feels safe, but the uncertainty holds a dangerous, fearful promise that I never anticipated.  The impact of those years is carved onto my soul as indelibly as a scar would be on my skin; the difference is it is invisible to others.

I grieve those old, surer, more confident versions of myself, though in retrospect I can see in each of them the buried seam of doubt, rising occasionally to the surface, disturbing the apparently smooth, clear surface like a pebble dropped into a lake.  That’s what I left there, most of all, in the autumn of 2002: who I was sure I was, what I was certain the world was, and the future I saw unfurling in front of me so vividly and assuredly.

Nothing has ever been sure again.  And what an immense, outrageous, terrifying blessing that has been.

Thanks to Denise for the link that sent me to Amy’s beautiful essay.

A memory framed in magnolias

Memory. Where to start? I’ve written so much about it. About the mysterious alchemy whereby small moments, inconsequential as we lived them, become significant, weighty memories, full of recollected details. About the way that certain songs can transport me back, instantly and vividly, to the past. About the occasional awareness of the memory of a moment even as I live it, the experience of present and future recollection colliding, the sparks of that collapse flickering in my mind. Also, about the way that I am losing my memory, my mind, the ability to juggle twenty things simultaneously that used to come so easily to me.

Today, I’m thinking about a specific memory, one that is framed in magnolia petals, flat beer, and laughter. My college senior spring. These weeks shimmer in my memory, so full are they of feeling, laughter, sadness, and promise. They are saturated with the impending farewell we all lived with: every single day was a step closer to leaving the campus we’d grown to love so much. We turned in our theses, the reunions fences and tents went up, and we marched inexorably towards our forced exodus from that sheltered and sunny place we’d spent four years.

Of course there was much of college that was not sunny or happy. There were difficult times, experiences that hurt me, and heartbreak. But when I think of April and May 1996, I’m hard-pressed to remember anything but the joy. It was, perhaps, my first taste of that special kind of joy, the kind that is haunted by the promise of loss, that has become so central to my experience now. This now-familiar happiness was thick with feeling, the reminder that an end was coming a viscous swirl through the fluid of every day.

What were those days like? I sit at my desk now and I can close my eyes and be back there, my mind a kaleidoscope of details recalled with startling lucidity. I turned in my thesis two weeks early, and I forgot to include my middle name on the cover and frontispiece. The entire campus seemed to burst into bloom at once, the magnolias riotous in their celebration of spring. The soundtrack included The Tide is High, Killing Me Softly, and Glory Days. Mission Impossible had just come out in the theaters, we all went to see it, and then spent many nights trying to dance to the main instrumental song from the soundtrack (very difficult). There was a heat wave and we set up baby pools on the back lawn of our eating club, sitting in them and running through sprinklers in the oppressive humidity.

At our eating club’s annual alumni dinner, some male alumni stood up and toasted the days before the club was coed. That was nice. Not. My friend wrote a thesis called I Love the Freedom of It about water imagery in Virginia Woolf’s novels, and we mocked her incessantly for that title. We studied for the final comprehensive exams in our respective majors and then sat for long hours in those beautiful lecture halls, writing in putty-colored exam booklets. As I sat in a wooden chair bolted to the floor, wracking my brain to identify a piece of prose on the exam, I looked at the shafts of sunlight coming in through the windows, watched the dust dance in the light, and felt aware of the centuries of life that this room had held.

Reunions arrived, ringing the bell that our time was truly almost up. On Thursday night we started at Forbes, at the Old Guard reunion, because they had good alcohol. We then made our way through all of the tents, visiting them all before the crowds arrived on Friday. Saturday’s P-Rade was hot and beautiful, and we stood for hours outside of Cuyler Hall, cheering ourselves hoarse. In our matching orange Gap t-shirts we drank warm cans of beer from ripped-open cases stashed on the lawn behind us. When it was our turn to fall into line, we marched across Poe Field field together, arms flung around each others’ shoulders, tears rolling down our faces as President Shapiro welcomed us to the alumni body. That night, wearing blue shorts, a cream J Crew wool cable-knit sweater, and flip-flops I bumped into a long-lost face and unexpectedly rekindled a relationship that had been dormant for two years and that I had presumed dead.

We spent a week driving all over the tri-state area for graduation parties. One night, Quincy and I decided impulsively, around midnight, to leave the party where we were. We drove through the night from the Hamptons to her parents’ house on the Jersey shore, singing Bob Marley the whole way. The next day, we made possibly the most labor-intensive recipe I’ve ever made, artichoke soup. Hand-scraping every single leaf of ten artichokes. Another night, Kathryn‘s mother hosted us, hungover, and we ate vegetables and chugged water, all swearing we would never drink again (right).

Our rooms slowly disappeared into brown moving boxes. Our parents arrived for several nights of celebratory group dinners. We ran from a restaurant in town to the Senior Arch Sing, and because we were late we wound up sitting on the bottom step of Blair Arch, belting out “Eye of the Tiger” with our class as though our lives depended on it. My instinctive use of “we” to describe this time reminds me of The Virgin Suicides, and underlines how critically important my friends from this time of my life were and are. We really were a we then, and while that we has receded to secondary status, it is still a group identity that I draw strength and solace from.

We knew we were coming to the end of something, but also knew we were about begin something. Our real lives. “We prepared our hearts for something drenching and big,” writes Lorrie Moore in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and those words always reminded of these weeks of my life. We were liminal creatures, still in college but peering at the great wide open that lay just beyond the threshold that we were barrelling towards. We drank and danced and laughed and loved and left. I am so grateful that my memory has kept such a detailed, fully-dimensioned account of those once-in-a-lifetime weeks.

Originally written in May 2010

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day

When our family lived in London, Hilary and I attended a school called St. Paul’s Girls School.  The school had enormous, intimidating brass handles on the front doors, a High Mistress we were supposed to curtsy to, and a grand mahogany assembly hall where we gathered every morning.  Each morning we stood up from our rows of narrow caned chairs to sing a hymn, turning our little red hymnbooks open to the specified page.  You can see my red hymnal above, and see how well-worn it is, its binding taped, my name and class year carefully noted in the frontispiece in the fountain pen that we all used then.

When I go to church, which is not particularly often (though I always love it when I do), I am almost always surprised by how the hymns are familiar.  The words, and the tune, bubble up from some deeply buried memory.  These hymns are engraved on the core of who I am.

One song, more than any other, carries a huge freight of memory.  It’s Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, which I love so dearly that I want it sung at my funeral.  The staccato opening notes, the specific, almost peculiar cadence of its verses, and the final soaring descant all invoke a powerful nostalgia for me.  The song represents nothing less than the heart of St. Paul’s, and of that time in my life, for me.

St Paul’s had an annual holiday concert, and Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day was always, always the last song of the night.  I’m not the only person for whom the song is special.   I remember one particular year, though I don’t know which one.  Many of my classmates and I were in one of the classrooms that lined the assembly hall as the imposing organ began the notes of Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.  Our parents all stood.  As the song soared to its chorus, a group of us leaned out of the door of the classroom, craning towards the music like a plant towards light, singing our hearts out.  The music crescendoed and we all rode its wave, joining our voices in the swelling song.

I can close my eyes and be back there, in the long-ago days of my own life, in the dark London night. The past feels animate in my present when I think about that concert, that hymn, that well-worn red book; the 13 year old me is dancing inside the 36 year old me still.  Dancing and singing: may we all dance tomorrow.

The women who hold my stories

I’m off this morning to Florida to spend the weekend with my friends from Princeton.  There are a couple of notable absences, but there will be a large group of us and I am eager for two days in such familiar and joyful company.

We all knew each other when we were becoming who we are now.  Knew each other before we were mothers and wives and partners at McKinsey.  Before we had real responsibilities, a smattering of wrinkles, and the occasional designer purse.  We’ve shared a lot in the 14 years since we graduated: marriages, divorces, the perfect macaroni and cheese recipe, births, deaths, book recommendations, surprises both joyful and heartbreaking.  We’ve visited each others’ brand new babies in the hospital and we have stood next to each other when we buried parents.  We were and are each others’ bridesmaids and childrens’ godmothers.

We hold each others’ stories, and that is a unique and privileged position.

I’m still struck dumb, honestly, by the fact that women as fantastic as these would hold me dear.  These are strong and intelligent and compassionate and beautiful and gentle and deeply human women, every single one of them.  I respect the choices they’ve made, whether they are similar to mine or different, and I know I can trust them to be gentle with my decisions.   With these women, I am as comfortable as I am anywhere else in the world.  In their light, I am brave, not shy.

I think, again, of the powerful Adrienne Rich (who these women remind me of, because I wrote my college thesis on her) and of the line “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”  We sit down together, we weep, we laugh, and we are all warriors.  All in our own way.  But we are safe together.

One of our favorite things to do is to sit around and look at old pictures.  Pathetic, maybe.  Entertaining, absolutely.  Just a few of the many moments we’ve shared; I’m sure there will be hundreds of pictures from this weekend to add to the pile.  I can’t wait.

I wrote this several days ago … and while my loyalty to and love for my friends has not waned, remotely, I felt a wave of trepidation wash over me this week.  I’m feeling fragile, and raw, and my instinct is to hole up under my covers.  I’ve never had thick skin but in the last few months I feel as though it’s gone entirely; it’s not easy or particularly fun to go through my days without any shield between me and the world.  My true safe havens are few.  Here’s hoping the company of old friends this weekend is one.

Four of us in a boat

I am back from an evening of old and new friends, listening to the rain, wistful and thoughtful.  I met my dear friend Trintje for a glass of wine.  I don’t see her nearly enough but when I do we slip right back into the comfortable rapport of old friends.  We know each others’ backstories, and can pick up where the story left off with ease.  Once again I found myself swearing that we’d see each other more, find a way to reconnect our children, who were each others’ first friends.  I hope we do.  We went together to hear Katrina Kenison read, which was, as always, a pleasure that it’s hard to put into words.  It was especially wonderful to see Trintje, arguably my first mother friend, hearing Katrina’s words about motherhood for the first time.  I felt past and present – and future – overlapping like soft waves on a beach.

The tide goes in, the tide goes out.

One minute we are leaving sleeping infants in pack and plays to skinnydip, and the next minute we are cheering those same children as they swim to the dock all by themselves.  Those children, rounding the corner to 8 years old, each others’ first friends. Though they don’t know each other anymore, their bonds endure, even if only in my mind: it makes me irrationally happy that they are, unbeknownst to each other, being Harry Potter and Hermione Granger for Halloween this year.

There are few people who embody the passage of time for me the way Trintje does; we were friends in the early days, when we were so tired we felt we had sand in our eyes, when we were so disoriented and shell-shocked we thought we would never stand upright again. And now that we are, we find ourselves nostalgic for the wild magic of those days.

Then I came home and went to tuck Whit in, curling up behind him on his bottom bunk, running my hand along the string of pearls of his spine.  I feel such intense sadness about time passing, such a frantic need to grab hold of right now, and sometimes I can’t imagine how others don’t feel that.  How do you walk through a day without every single minute being shadowed by its own passing?  Whenever I kiss my children goodnight my breath catches in my throat: they will never be this exact age again.  I can never have this moment back.  Ever.  Sometimes I find this poignancy of this absolutely unbearable.

As I lay next to Whit I looked around the yellow-walled room.  It’s such a cliche, but so powerfully true: I can close my eyes and be back in this same room, rocking infant Grace to sleep in the rocker, wondering when she will ever stop crying.  This third floor room under the roof with the slanting ceilings holds so many memories.  Its carpet has absorbed buckets of my tears as I cried wondering if I could do this.  Its walls have absorbed my wails as well as those of both of my children, and the same lullabyes over and over for almost eight straight years.  This is the room in which I became a mother.

And Trintje, you were by my side as I made that perilous passage.  You were there cheering me on when I feared I might not make it across.  Remember these two?  They were there with us.  We were four in a boat.  And it was turbulent, and I was seasick.  But you know what?  I’d go back every single time.  Every time.  Thanks for seeing me across.