nostalgia

The first day of kindergarten, 2.0

Dear Whit,

Today you start kindergarten. I’m astonished, in a way both cliched and powerful, that we are here.

For three years you didn’t say much of anything. Your first preschool teacher, in fact, urged us to have you evaluated by a speech therapist. She even gently suggested that you might have cognitive delays. Within months your speech therapist (an adorable blonde woman that you thought was fabulous) had you talking a blue streak, and within weeks she had ascertained that there was definitely nothing cognitive going on. You do speak with a distinctive accent, which we like to joke is from Pawtucket. You may not have spoken for three years, but you haven’t stopped since.

You say the funniest, most observant things, often causing me to pull over to jot them down for posterity (or use on this blog). You, Whit, are just downright hilarious. I’m not sure where that came from, since neither your Dad nor I is particularly funny. But you make me laugh out loud every single day, which is an enormous gift.

This was the summer you really became comfortable in the water. You can reliably – though inelegantly – swim laps and stay afloat for a long time (which is kind of amazing because you have no body fat and generally sink like a stone). In June you decided you wanted to learn how to dive and you have. The way you hurtle yourself off a diving board is a good metaphor for the unbridled enthusiasm and fearlessness you bring to life. You shout, “I’m going!” to make sure all around you are watching and then you take off at a run, not even hesitating before plunging into the water. I’ve yet to meet a diving board high enough to give you pause.

You love Legos and robots and trucks. You are always looking to understand how things work. As a three year old you crept under the toilet, put your hand on the pipe after flushing, and said to me, awestruck, “There’s water running here, Mummy!” And just last week at Basin Harbor I couldn’t find you for a minute on the beach. I finally noticed you crouching near one of the paddleboats, looking underneath it, trying to understand how it moved and steered. I am eager to watch where this curiosity takes you, and hope I will always nourish it, even when being asked “why …” every three minutes all day long gets old.

Whit, you are the definition of marching to your own drummer. One evening this summer I went in to kiss you goodnight to see that you had stripped down and were sleeping naked on the floor, lying flat on your back on top of the sleeping bag that you’d found in the closet, with your small fan blowing right on your face. Decked out in mardi gras beads this summer after Magic Night with Hadley and family, you announced from the back seat of the car, “I could be an international pop star with all of this jewelry!” Where you learned that I have no idea.

Your presence in my life pushes and challenges me every single day. We see the world so differently, Whit, you and I. You approach every day as a wide open canvas, never assume that there are limits until you physically meet them, and need to have the reason for rules proven to you before you follow them. You inspire me, in this way, because the automatic way I stoop before authority has held me back so much in my life. Where I see a closed door, you see a hurdle to find your way around. You are wily and bright and as a baby we called you Houdini for the infinite ways you found to wriggle out of your pajamas and then your crib. I tried everything, eventually winding up with too-small footie pjs on backward with the feet cut off and a crib tent with the zipper carabinered to the side of the crib.

Two years ago I wrote a letter to Grace on her first day of kindergarten. Reading it always makes me cry. Now here I am, even more sentimental, even more raw, surprised once again at the speed with which the days pass by. You, the baby who healed so much for me, whose arrival showed me I could fall in love with a newborn, who made me believe that maybe, just maybe, I was cut out to be a mother after all. You, who gave back to me all that I missed the first time around. You aren’t easy, Whit, with your stubborn outbursts and steadfast refusal to accept “because I said so” as a reason.  But it is so worth it.  I learn so much from you. You make me question so many of the things I’ve always taken for granted, and watching you operate in the world both bewilders and dazzles me. You are so immensely sweet at your core, and so, so funny: this morning I woke up to a soft kiss on my cheek and turned to see you standing there in your pajamas and sunglasses, cocking your finger at me and smiling, as though to say “Hi there, lady!”

Happy first day, Whit. I am so excited for you about all of the adventures that lie ahead, and I know I’ll never, ever stop laughing as I travel them alongside you. I’m so grateful to be your mother.

I love you.

Whispering good night

The universe has a way of timing things just right. Just days ago I was sad about summer ending, about the closing of this magical time with my children, these three months dotted with highlights and plenty of tiny moments in between.

And then they became monsters. Oh, wow, is it time for school. Something just flipped this past weekend and they are cranky and exhausted and thoroughly sick of each other’s – and my – company. Suddenly the return to school, routines, and some time when they are not around sounds just lovely.

So, in short, it’s been a long couple of days. And yet all of that fell away instantly tonight when I tiptoed into their bedrooms to kiss them goodnight. Whit in sleep till has the scent of baby-toddler wafting off of him, that freshly-bathed smell, something from the past drifting up to tug me back to those long-ago days when I rocked babies in that very same room.

I whispered to them both tonight, into the curled, flushed-ivory shells of their ears, about how sorry I am about my short temper these days, about how I regret the times I’ve snapped, about how I understand that they too sense change hanging around the edges of these days and that that makes them anxious. I thanked them for all of their energy and enthusiasm this summer, for their patience and their adventurous spirits that took us so many places, near and far, together. I pressed my lips to their cheeks, feeling the peachfuzz of their skin, closing my eyes to try, once again, to freeze time.

And then I murmured, to each of my children in turn, of how I loved them, always, always, no matter what. Of how I know them and I honor them and I witness them and I love them. I tried, as I do often, to pour my love into their sleeping selves, to fill them with it so there’s less room for doubt and fear. I want to erect armor around their hearts so that they will always know that someone – maybe just this small person, but someone – loves them. I wish I could infuse their very bloodstreams with my love, so that they will never, for a single second, doubt that they are worthy, known, seen, loved.

And yes, I realize, this is what I want for myself too.

porous, Fix You, and simply witnessing another

I listened to Fix You by Coldplay on repeat yesterday morning on my commute to work. It was my second to last day in the office, and my fear of change is really taking root. As I’ve written before, I’m not good at change. I’m especially not good at endings, which feel like they’re piling up right now. I know intellectually that what lies ahead is going to be good, but emotionally I’m still fearful. Because of this I’m in a state even more porous than usual, reflective, melancholy, thoughtful.

I listened to Fix You, over and over, remembering a post I’d written about it last summer. I thought about the notion of being fixed, of needing to be fixed in the first place. I remembered Bindu Wiles’ beautiful post that asserted, in no uncertain terms that constructive critiscim … is a scam. I recalled Kelly Diels’ powerful essay about how we are not put on earth as a corrective action. And I thought about how the idea of wanting to fix someone implies unavoidably that they are broken.

I find myself returning to one of Kelly’s sentences: I am going to meet you where you are. I am not going to try to force you into what I think you should be; instead, I am going to witness you as you are. I am going to try to remember that people are who they are mostly because that is who they are, not because of anything to do with me. I am going to try harder to accept the light and the dark that exists inside everyone – most of all, myself – because to do otherwise is frustrating for me and hurtful for them.

I wonder, though, where the line is between useful, productive self-improvement and accepting the self. I know few things better than that expansive, hopeful feeling of: yes, that is a good point, thank you for seeing me so clearly, let me do a better job with X and Y. I’m not saying we should not listen to others’ input and strive to be better and more mature. In fact I think “self-acceptance” can often be code for not trying to overcome our flaws or redirect bad patterns of behavior. And I know I have learned things from others that have essentially changed how I think about myself and the world – for the better. But how to remain open to this while retaining a fundamental commitment to my self-worth? That is the tension I don’t quite know how to navigate.

One of the myriad reasons I read is to learn about people seeing, knowing, and loving others for their fundamental truth. One of my favorite stories about this is The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book that is, to me, a beautiful meditation on accepting people for who they are, limitations and all. It is about loving someone and being willing to embrace all of the things about them that make them who they are, even the uncomfortable and inconvenient ones.

I suppose, really, all of this focus on relationships with others is just a prelude to working on the relationship with self. As Jung said, the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Maybe my working to accept others fully, to honor their complexities, is a first step towards offering myself that kind of forgiveness and love. Not an easy thing for me to do. I am as bad as the next person at clinging to my hopes of how someone else will react to me, of stubbornly wanting them to behave a certain way, rather than simply meeting them where they are. I realize what this implies in terms of my expectations of myself.

Maybe this time of flux, when it feels like the ground beneath my feet is heaving around, is the perfect time to address some of these challenges. I feel reminded, in a visceral way, of the fact that I am simply not in control of the world around me. May this serve as a reminder also that I am not in control of other people either.

It is, really, very simple. Compassion. Remembering that people are, mostly, doing their best. That behavior that hurts and stings me usually comes from somewhere deep in the other person that has nothing to do with me (I know, shocker, right?). In many cases, in fact, I should feel privileged to be exposed to the molten core of all that is unresolved and difficult for another person. And perhaps I can turn some of that gentleness onto myself. And see that maybe, just maybe, I don’t need fixing myself.

The spaces that hold our memories

I’ve been thinking today about the places in our lives that hold our rawest and most treasured memories. Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a place that hosted an important moment in my life, I can feel that moment, hovering, bumping into me, invisible to the eye but not to the spirit.

The Exeter chapel is one such space for me. The chapel was a place that provided solace and comfort during what were rugged and lonely years for me. There were two specific times each week that I went to the chapel, often alone. I viscerally remember walking in the rough stone door, my sadness leaking from me, and sitting quietly in the dark wooden pews.

Each Thursday morning Exeter had a period called “meditation,” during which a member of the faculty, staff, or senior class read a personal essay in the chapel. The tradition was that seniors wrote their meditations in English class and a select few were chosen to read during our senior spring. Mr. Valhouli, my beloved English teacher, was an ardent lover of this tradition and when he read his personal comments in 1991, I was lucky enough to be there.

I’ve often thought that it took guts for a school that is so heavily judged on quantitative measures like test scores and college admissions to defend the value of the personal story with a tradition like this. It has taken me many years to parse through the legacy of Exeter, beyond that most obvious one, Mr. Valhouli’s teaching. The meditation tradition has had a deep impact on me, for the way it privileges the individual telling of experience, for its high valuing of the learning inherent in telling and hearing stories.

The other weekly time I went to the chapel, like clockwork, was Tuesday night’s evening prayer service. This was the exception to the nightly curfew, and at 9:30 (I think) students filed into the chapel, always lit just by candlelight. “Prayer” is a misnomer for this decidedly secular event: someone would perform a couple of songs, acapella or accompanied, and then read poems or quotes. This was probably my favorite half hour of the week at Exeter. I remember those evenings so vividly, though not the specific songs or readings. I just remember the fullness that I would feel in my chest, the tears that often spilled down my face, the swelling sense of being both entirely alone in this place and somehow part of something larger than myself.

Unfortunately the chapel at Exeter was not open the last time I was on campus. I expect in that space I’d have the feeling I described, of sensing the past in the present. I’d like to go back there and see if I can see, either with my eyes or my heart, the 16 year old me. I feel like she’s there, somehow, in some way. She’s sitting quietly, shoulders hunched, eyes glossy with tears and feelings. I’d like to go back to this chapel which was and is a sacred space for me, one that held some of the most whole and emotional moments of my time at Exeter.

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.