oh this is hard

The struggle and the beauty

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. It rises more slowly, over time, asserting itself in memory rather than in the vivid moment. The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.

This was originally posted exactly 2 years ago, and it’s still all true.  Today I am dropping Grace off at sleep away camp, at the camp I went to for 10 years, with the daughter of my best friend from camp.  I miss her already, and she’s not even gone yet.  It will surely be a day full of both struggle and beauty.

Transition

My childhood was punctuated by a series of transitions as regular as a drumbeat.  They were not easy, thought they were an integral part of the rich and complex terroir in which I grew up.  I learned, early on, about the deep bittersweetness of goodbyes.  My family’s moves, back and forth across the ocean with a metronomic every-four-years cadence, engraved into me a deep fear of change.  Transitions, farewells, and endings all cause me deep discomfort and often tears.  This truth is an essential part of who I am (and I know I’m not alone in this).

A couple of weeks ago in a yoga class, I realized something new about myself and transitions.  As I moved through a sun salutation, the poses as familiar as a long-known language, my breath carrying me like a stream, it occurred to me:

The transition between poses is as important as the stillness within them.

I’ve been practicing yoga, with varying degrees of regularity and commitment, for over 13 years.  And for every one of the thousands of practices those years have held I’ve thought that what I was learning was a lesson about stillness, about holding, about enduring, about breath.

And of course I was learning that.  I’ve learned so much about those things – mostly, about abiding, with myself and others – both in class and in my life.  But suddenly that day I saw, with a flash of insight that almost embarrassed me because it was so obvious, that the moving between those poses that I held was equally as important.  I’ve always liked the vinyasa part of yoga, probably because the being still is so hard for me.  But if I’m honest, “liking it” has manifested mostly as moving quickly through the poses, and I realize that is not the point of the vinyasa.  Instead I need to pay equally close attention as I move my body, my breath, and my mind, up and down and around and through.

I need to honor the transitions just as I do the holding.

I’m sure it’s not an accident that this realization comes right as I feel I stand on the threshold of another transition with my children.  They are so incredibly lovely right now, so full of the golden life that is, to me, childhood incarnate.  And yet I see the end of these days like the storm clouds we watched on the horizon as we drove to Storyland (I hope not for the last time).  I know something else wonderful exists on the other side of that horizon, I promise I do – my own childhood of goodbyes taught me that – but I still dread the change.

And yet.  And so.  The lessons keep coming.  Breathing, breathing, into another transition.

 

Redefining Success, Celebrating the Ordinary

Recently my friend, teacher, and mentor Katrina Kenison shared an article with me from The New York Times.  She was quoted in a thoughtful piece called Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary, which explores a topic that feels both current and thorny: our intense need to be – or, more dangerously, for our children to be – exceptional.

I feel a simple and intense identification with the values espoused in the article.  When Katrina is quoted as saying “…there’s a beauty in cultivating an appreciation for what we already have,” I nodded so vigorously my husband looked over at me, wondering who I was suddenly talking to, but found me staring at my phone, reading.  Celebrating the ordinary, most mundane moments of every day is perhaps the central task of my life.  This blog is, you could say, a poem to the wonder and beauty, and to the heartache and pain, that exists in my extremely regular existence.

The article talks about how today’s parents all think their children are above average.  We know this is statistically impossible.  The extreme emphasis on exceptionalism feels familiar and familiarly uncomfortable to me.  One of the main tenets of my parenting is that I strive to praise my children for their effort, not any innate “specialness.”  Of course I love my children beyond reason.  But I don’t think they are in any way geniuses, or more remarkable than a million other children.  And maybe most importantly:  I don’t want them to think that they are.  I want them to know that I love them for who they are, of course, but I admire and esteem their effort, their dedication, their hard work.  This is the way to success, however we define it, and to joy.

Of course that small phrase, “however we define it,” is at the core of the article.  And this is where this topic gets tricky for me.  On one hand, I feel like a hypocrite.  I have certainly faced my share of critics who say it’s “easy” for someone who went to Exeter and Princeton and Harvard to disavow society’s focus on performance and achievement.  I feel a slippery sense of unease about this, sometimes: do I really, truly believe this, that ordinariness is extraordinary, even though I know I spent so many years valuing achievement and validation above all else?  Do my actions match what I say is my philosophy?

Well, yes.  Who is better positioned that someone who has lived that life to really understand at a deep level how incompletely achievement leads to joy?  Nobody.  And as I’ve written before, all of my frantic success was actually a way to avoid engaging with my own truest desires.  It is only when I let go of that map, released my reliance on an life shaped by external validation, that I began to experience real contentment.  And that was found – yes – in the most ordinary things.  In my children’s instinctive hush when they walked around Walden Pond.  In my observation of how light changes in fundamental ways as we wheel through the year.  In the quiet words of poets that whisper insistently in my head.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in my view, with achievement, and I plan to keep teaching my children that hard work and goals are critically important.  But this has to be coupled with learning to listen to what Robert Browning called “the low voice my soul hears.”  I want to celebrate my children’s ambition and give them many opportunities to taste the wonder of ordinary life.  Surely it’s possible to do both?  I’m certainly going to try.  When their deepest desires come up against what the world wants them to do, though, I hope they’ll choose the former.  It took me 30 years to have the strength to do that, and I’ve never looked back.

How do you think you measure success?  How do you walk this line in your own life, and, if you are a parent, as you help your children navigate theirs?

 

Having it all

A snapshot of my version of “it all”: hydrangeas (one of our wedding flowers) grown by my husband, in our small front garden, on the kitchen island.  In the back you can see a construction paper garland that Grace recently made for father’s day.

Like everyone else in the blogosphere and real-world-o-sphere, I have been participating in many conversations about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cover story in the Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.   While I certainly don’t have a clearly-articulated response to Slaughter’s comprehensive and thoughtful examination of working motherhood today, I do have a profound emotional response.  By the third page of the article my eyes were full of tears, the words having touched some reserve of emotion in me as inarticulate as it is endlessly deep.

Most days I feel pretty good about my choices regarding work and family.  Sure, I wonder sometimes what would have happened had I not “leaned back,” as per Sheryl Sandberg, before I was even pregnant.  And yes, I do wonder what it would be like not to work, mostly whether I’d be a more relaxed and less distracted parent to my children.  But on the whole I feel pretty good about the decisions I’ve made and about the trade-offs I make every day (I hate the word and notion of balance when it comes to this topic).  My emotional reaction – quiet, but intense – when I read articles like Slaughter’s, however, suggests that something deeply buried in me still grieves, hurts, and wonders.  About and over what, I am not entirely sure.

Mostly what Slaughter’s article has me thinking about, though, is what “it all” really means.  My friend Kathryn, who is one of those can’t-live-without-her-friends that are for me a big component of feeling like I have anything like “it all,” emailed me to say she was at home because her nanny was out, sitting on her bed with her laptop working while her children lay on either side of her watching TV.  Is this “it all,” she mused?

For me, the answer to that is yes.

I am certain this is a deeply personal equation, and one that changes every day.  For me there are some elements of “it all” that are non-negotiable.  Downtime with my children most days.  A happy relationship with my husband.  Work that I find challenging with colleagues I respect and learn from.  Not missing any – or almost any – school events, plays, concerts, assemblies.  My handful of dear friends, those native speakers whose companionship I cherish.  Time, several days a week, to think and write about this divine and devastating life.  Time to read.  Eight hours of sleep most nights.  Time, several days a week, to run by myself.  The calculus of how each day’s hours are allocated is ever-shifting; I think having “it all” is something we ascertain over the arc of weeks and months, not in a single day.

The point of Slaughter’s piece with which I agree with most vociferously is that flexibility is absolutely essential to making this particularly rich, and demanding, phase of life work.  There’s no question that that is true for me.  I’m certain that my ability to be present for events both big and small in the lives of my children while working full-time has a lot to do with my job’s flexibility.  Of course I’ve made compromises though, and I have written before about how my life over the past years has simultaneously narrowed and widened.  What I’m not totally clear on is where the line is between a mature acknowledgement of the need for compromises and a defeatist acceptance of “not having it all.”

There is lots I don’t have.  Lots.  Tons of children.  A book published.  A fancy house.  A perfect figure.  Extravagant vacations.  Sound sleep every night.  A marathon under my belt.  A high profile CEO job.  A real yoga practice.  Unbitten fingernails.  A yard for my children to run in.  A king size bed.  A red-headed child.  A basic orientation towards calm.

But I think I would say that in the ways I care about, I do have it all.

What is your definition of “it all”?

Closing a door

Last Thursday were Grace and Whit’s school closing ceremonies.  As he leaves 1st grade, Whit leaves the Morse Building, the part of the school for the very youngest children.  It’s where both of our children started at this school, at age 4, as Beginners.  The Morse Building will always be the first place I dropped my first baby off for her first day of school, and its halls, lined with large bright drawings and full of the clamor of small children, will always bring nostalgic tears to my eyes.

I sat in Whit’s closing ceremony, my husband on one side of me and one of my very dearest friends on the other, fighting tears as small voices songs from Free to Be You and Me and the theme from Greatest American Hero.  It was just moments ago that Whit was cross-legged on the mats on the floor while Grace sat on the stage, a member of the 1st grade, the “big kids” of the Morse Building.  Again, as it does so often lately, time collapsed and the radiance and sorrow of everyday life collided, sparks flying.  I fought to be here now as the past exerted itself like a riptide, dragging me down the disorienting corridors of memory.

Then the Morse Building children sang their traditional last song, Now It’s Time to Go, and I began to cry in earnest.  This year has not been any more full of lasts than any other, but my last child leaving this deeply special place has made them feel especially poignant.  The last Morse Building holiday concert, with a child curled on my lap on the floor as we all belt Snow Pants and I Am a Latke.  The last 1st grade assembly.  The last harvest festival.  I remembered Grace’s observation that she gets the firsts and Whit gets the lasts.  I swam in a morass of lasts, of endings, of farewells.

Once more, in that same small gym where so many transitions have been made and celebrated, the air was thick with both wonder and loss.  Wonder and loss, which are inextricably wound around each other, are the central notes of my life.

Then Grace celebrated the end her school year with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades.  Grace’s music teacher, who was also my music teacher, rushed over to me before the ceremony began and showed me a mimeographed page of the 1982 class lists.  My name appeared there, under IIS, with a star next to it to show I had been new that year.  The past clanged in my head and I held the back of the metal folding chair to keep my balance as that dizzying, familiar vertigo rose up: between past and present, between my daughter and myself, that this moment somehow contains all the moments that have come before.

And then it was over and we left.  We walked out through the Morse Building, through the doors I’ve pushed open with one hand so many hundreds of times, the other hand clasped by a small child.  Through the lobby where I’ve sat for hours, waiting for classrooms to open in the morning and for lines of children to emerge in the afternoon.  Past the nurse’s office where I’ve picked up children with strep, with stitches that have reopened, with mono, with sore collarbones.  Into the sunshine, blinking, through the playground where we’ve spent countless hours playing.  I can squint and see 4 year old Grace propelling herself around on the push tricycles, smiling at me across the yard while I sat on the faded wooden bench trying to restrain a wiggly toddler Whit from hurling himself into the fray.  The memories blinked in my mind like fireflies; they were brilliantly bright but I couldn’t make them stay.

And the heavy green door clicked shut behind us.  And we followed them out of the gate, which Whit is finally tall enough to open himself, and down the street.  My children leading me home and simultaneously walking away.

Radiance and sorrow.  Wonder and loss.  This one precious, devastating life.