oh this is hard

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.

Ease

As I sat in pigeon the other day in yoga, listening to my breathing, the familiar mindfulness meditation language rose up in my head: may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be calm, may I live with ease.  (enormous apologies to Dani, Karen, Katrina, and all of you who can tell me how wrong I have it… that’s how the words come to me, so I’ve decided not to fight it!)

It occurred to me that that was really it: Ease.

That’s what I want.  Everything else I say I want can be folded into this single thing.  I want to live with ease.  To let the clouds of my emotions and reactions skid across the sky of my spirit without overly attaching to them.  To let the weights of sorrow and joy, which are part of my life in near-equal measure, slide off my shoulders rather than staggering under them.

I grimaced as my hips screamed (pigeon is without a doubt my least favorite yoga pose, and equally unquestionably the one I need the most) and tried to return to my breath.  Calm, health, peace, trust, light.  They are all captured by ease.  There was nothing easy about the discomfort – okay, fine, pain – I felt sitting there, my forehead sticky against my mat, my hip burning, my eyes shut as I tried to simply breathe.  This is not ease, I thought, teeth gritted. But it is, almost surely, the path to ease.

I don’t know that I can untangle that paradox yet, but it posits an unavoidable truth: to achieve the life I want – a life with at least some quality of ease – I must head straight into the discomfort and learn to sit there.  Only by facing that which causes pain can I dissemble it, reduce its power, learn to live without such ferocious reactions.

Which brings me back to the breathing and the mantra.  Following those things, hand over hand like palming a rope to lead me through a dark room, seems the only way through.  Through to what I truly, deeply, essentially want: ease.

Hurtling towards the end

We are now hurtling towards the end of the year, towards the end that exists at the midpoint of a year.  I wrote about it last week.  Both the calendar and the natural world speak of fullness, of the bright, raucous beginnings of the most swollen season of the year.  And yet everything in me aches with endings right now.  Why am I am so finely tuned to this cadence whose beat I cannot hear but nevertheless feel undeniably in my bloodstream?

The flowers of early spring – peonies, rhododendrons, countless others whose names I do not know – are all brown and faded, either drooping from trees or already fallen and ground into mush on the pavements.  Every day I seem to walk through another puddle of brightness on the sidewalk, underneath another tree that has let its petals go under the weight of too much lush beauty.

The tree outside my window is now dense with leaves.  They have transitioned from the first, tentative shoots of bright green to the deep, shiny green color that will fill my window until mid August.  Last week people in caps and gowns swarmed around my town, and Grace and Whit and I had the same conversation we had the year before about academic regalia, about the orange hood I wore when I graduated from business school, about how isn’t it hard to keep those flat hats on your head?

School ends this week, and I know that event is the central note of the painful drumbeat of farewell to which every day is set.  As I did last year, I will take my tear-stained face and camera full of photographs of my children in white and escape immediately to Storyland.  We will hide out in a place that means a lot to all three of us.  A place where I say yes.  A place where magic blunts the loss that limns every moment.  I don’t know many more years Grace and Whit will be charmed by Storyland’s small rides and fairytale attractions, but as long as they are, I will take them.

I can’t run away from the endings, but I can at least take myself – and my children – to a place where for a bit we forget about the closure of another chapter, about the turning forward of our time on earth.  Of course when I’m there, I have to try not to wonder if this will be the last time.  My deep and fundamental awareness of life’s transience comes with me no matter where I go.  The challenge is to not let it overshadow the moments of extraordinary joy.  Like when I hear Grace and Whit squeal with delight at the gate of Storyland.  So I won’t.

Letting go of something big

From the outside, my life looks entirely the same as it did in January.  But inside, a lot has changed.  Assumptions I had about stability and the path forward have been jostled around, and the pieces are still settling into their new pattern, like the shards of sparkle inside a kaleidoscope in motion before they decide on their positions.

One thing I did is let go of something big in my writing life.  I let go of my commitment to and focus on publishing a book.  This was a long time coming.  You see, two years ago, I signed with a fabulous agent.  Then I parted ways with that agent because I realized I needed to write this book before I tried to sell it.  So I wrote a memoir.  The manuscript sits in a box on the floor of my office.  Three dear, brilliant, loyal friends read it (you know who you are, and thank you, again).  It is 350 pages long.  I queried a few agents.  I was rejected by all of them, mostly kindly and often using the excuse that memoir was an incredibly difficult category right now.  Whether that was the truth or a gentle way to let me down, I’ll never know. What I know is I didn’t sign an agent.

And you know what?  I let go.  In my querying I realized I didn’t truly believe in my memoir.  My story is quiet, and unremarkable, and while I think it has a universal message, I also very much doubt the validity of it to be published into a book.  So I put it away.

The relief was palpable.  Almost instant.  When I really sat still and thought about what kind of writing I want to do, I always come back to this place.  This is what I want to write.  I want to blog.  I have several essays I’m trying to place, so I like that kind of work, too.  I am working on a novel, and I enjoy that process, mostly because I am immensely fortunate to get to do it with Dani Shapiro‘s wise and excellent instruction.  But increasingly, I suspect that what I am is a blogger. I love this form, I love this community, and I am hugely enriched by the thoughtful input of those lovely spirits who read what I write here.

Once I let go of the goal I had attached myself to so ferociously, I felt both sorrow and liberation.  Commingled grief and relief, as I wrote to a friend.  It is hard to accept that I probably won’t publish a book.  But it is also a wonder to realize that this, right here, this, that I’ve been doing for almost five years, this is the writing my heart leans towards.

Two honest and lucid posts about this very topic inspired me to put this into words:  Nina Badzin’s post about how she’s not an aspiring novelist, at least for now and Erin Murray’s post that reminds me of Anne Lamott’s assertion that the writing itself is the reward.  Thank you to Nina and Erin for providing much-needed companionship on an often-lonely road, and for helping me articulate something that i realized several months ago but hadn’t yet put into words.