oh this is hard

The more I know, the less I understand

It’s no secret my life is running into a headwind right now.  I’m still walking, but it is slow going, and I feel like I’m facing big waves and a strong current.  I know enough about the tides of my own emotions to know this will ebb, and probably soon.  But what won’t change, I don’t think, is my ever-firmer conviction that adulthood is about uncertainty.  The adages about this fly fast and furious: the central gist is that as children we think we know everything and as adults we know we know nothing.

Trite, maybe.  Cliched, certainly.

But it is also true.  I wrote a while back about the pieces of myself that I left in the land of newborns, in those weeks and months steeped in exhaustion and milk and a dizzying sense that the world had just shifted on its axis.  “Most of all I left behind my certainty,” I wrote, and I think that’s utterly true.

But it didn’t stop there.  Instead, I seem to shed certainty every year.  Things I thought I knew for sure have been upended and challenged in more ways than I can count.  The universe does many things well, but one of the best is presenting me with opportunities to realize how erroneous my assumptions and certainties are.  So many times I’ve been absolutely – obnoxiously! – sure about something and I’ve come face to face with the unassailable evidence of my own idiocy.

What’s interesting to me is that as the questions and the not-knowing at the heart of my life grows so, too, does my faith.  By faith I mean my sense that there is something sacred and holy out there, simultaneously much bigger than I am and an intimate part of me, throbbing in my veins right alongside my own blood.  I use “faith” to describe a constellation of emotions, some amalgam of trust, belief, religion, and wonder.

What do I make of these seemingly-opposed developments inside my spirit?  Is my deepening faith a necessary survival response to the terrifying ambiguity of the world?  I don’t know.  I can’t believe these two tracks – my sureness unraveling just as my beliefs grow firmer – are unrelated.  All I know is the very real comfort I feel in the words of others much more brilliant and wise than I, who speak of something similar.

The more I know, the less I understand. – Don Henley

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. – Anne Lamott

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. – Alfred, Lord Tennyson  (thank you, Ronna Detrick)

What do you think?  Is my developing faith just my subconscious trying to cope with the fearful uncertainty of the world?    Do either of these resonate with you?

Begin again

Everyone has moments – weeks, months, seasons – of sadness, fear, grief, anxiety.  That’s the human condition, right?  And we walk through the darkness, because, really, what choice do we have?  I can’t count the number of times in my life where I’ve felt like throwing up my hands, giving up, burrowing under the covers.  But then a child needs a glass of milk or help with brushing their teeth, or the work phone rings and I really have to take it, or laundry pile finally threatens to overflow the hamper.

And so I get up and deal with what needs to be done.

But the truth is that slogging through one of these valleys – even when I can see the other side, and know it’s bright – is tough and tiring.  Sometimes I feel like screaming up at God, or whatever the greater power out there that I hope I believe in is, “Okay!  Enough with the learning!  Enough with the tough love!”  Sometimes I just want to lie down and coast.

But I can’t.  I don’t know if others can; I really don’t.  A lot of people look better at dealing with the sine curve of life, at least from where I sit.  A lot of people – and I envy them, let me be clear – seem to experience fewer moments of spirit-shaking emotion than I do.  A lot of them can describe what Easter means to their children, or admire the clear, extraordinary blue of an April sky, or witness a christening, without bursting into tears.  Hell, a lot of people don’t burst into tears every single day.

I do.

Somehow that intense emotion, that wound at the very core of my being, is bearable most of the time.  Right now, though, it feels like too much.  I am bone-tired, my emotions are worn paper-thin, my is patience frayed.  I know my life runs close to the surface, that’s not news to me.  And this isn’t news, either, this sense of being deep in the weeds and of each step being a struggle.  It is so not-new, in fact, that I have a theory as to its cause: I suspect this exhaustion occurs when I’m letting go of something, even though I’m not sure what it is yet.  Right now I’m overly aware of the cracks in everything, and I can’t see the light they’re letting in.  Many days I feel a tightness in my chest and tears pricking my eyes and a general sense of sorrow that is, for now, as powerful as it is inarticulate.

But the children need their teeth brushed, and the work phone is ringing, and the laundry needs to be done.

What’s my choice, but to get up, to keep going, to begin again?

Adrienne Rich

I remember one shadowy afternoon in the winter of 1996 in college, sitting across from my thesis advisor talking about my work on three 20th century poets.  I picked up a sort of convoluted slinky thing made of cardboard that sat on her desk.  In my hands it morphed, rotating in and out and folding in on itself and out again.  It was a science experiment, a shell, a marvel of simplicity and complexity in a desk toy.  I couldn’t stop playing with it.

“Adrienne Rich gave me that,” my advisor said casually.

“She did?” My eyes grew wide and I looked down at the cardboard spiral in my hand.

Years later, I attended a reading Adrienne Rich gave at Harvard.  I dashed down to the front after she was finished to meet her, and was struck by how tiny and bowed she was.  And yet her miniscule person emanated a power I’ve rarely experienced.  Her eyes crinkled when I told her I’d written about her, and she managed to make me feel that she cared even though she’d surely heard that a zillion times before.

Adrienne Rich’s poetry has been important to me for a long time, some of her words so familiar they have become incantations, stones worn smooth with my mind’s constant turning over and rubbing of them.  She is one of a handful of poets – the others are William Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stanley Kunitz – who I literally hear inside my head on a daily basis.

I’ve written about her here before, many times.  I consider her poem Towards the Solstice, which contains the lines “and there is still so much here we do not understand” a totem: to a person like me for whom light and dark and the turning of the earth are literal, visceral parts of my human experience it is among the very greats.  Power, her poem about Marie Curie makes me believe that my aching, painful sensitivity might somehow also be an asset: “her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

My mind is flooded with Adrienne Rich’s images, the great dark birds of history and the book in which our names do not appear and poetry being a land where she wasn’t anyone’s mother.  Yes, she was angry, filled with what the New York times called “towering rage,” but she was also brave and honest, a woman pursuing authenticity even when it meant howling into the darkness and rejecting the known.  I am familiar mainly with her poetry and with the prose of Of Woman Born, a book about “motherhood as experience and institution” (from its own subtitle).  In this part of her canon, the theme of creation, and its inextricable, complex relationship with procreation is central.  The female body is heavy and present, haunting almost all of her poems.

After I learned of her death I went back to my thesis and reread the chapter on her, but, even more importantly, I went back to the texts I read for the first time as I wrote it.  There are volumes of poetry and prose, all underlined and full of marginalia.  I can easily close my eyes and be back in my small study carrel in Firestone Library, reading these words and feeling them sink in, aware of something enormous turning over inside of me for the first time, an animal part of my spirit that was never quiet again after that initial awakening.  Rich herself midwifed that birth of a part of me, and remembering those days is bittersweet.

I don’t know how to adequately describe how vital this woman and her words are to me.  I grieve her loss while knowing that her words will live on, for me and for generations more, their incandescence undimmed.  I’ll just end with one of my favorite passages – resonant because of many things, but not least because I relate to the idea of reconstituting something, with no extraordinary power – from the last stanza of her poem Natural Resources:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

A constant transition

This is a time of transition.  I can feel us moving to another phase, another season, in every sense of the word.  I am aware of that deep in my body and my spirit.  I dislike change with every fiber of my being, and I wish I was able to let go more.  I’m really more of a holder-onner.  Still, I continue to remind myself that this is futile effort, and that my white knuckle grip on every day is only serving to exhaust me.  I wear a reminder over my heart.

We are shedding skins around here.  Spring is slowly creeping around the edges of our hours, and with every day it seems more inevitable, though I think there is snow forecast for this weekend.  It’s still raw and chilly, though, and we all shiver like the brand-new, slender crocuses.  Grace and Whit are re-adjusting, slowly, to the school routine after two weeks off; I’m waking them out of sound sleep in the mornings, yet finding them unwilling to go to sleep at night.  There have been some reminders in my life of how near the precipice is, always, and of how we tread, every single day, on the line between divinity and disaster.

And then I read these beautiful words by Rebecca at Altared Spaces, about the ultimate parenting transition.  I read this post on Tuesday and by halfway through I was literally sobbing – not just the standard tears-rolling-down-my-cheeks that happens every day, but full-on gasping for air, actively crying.  The line that gouged itself into me was this one: “I came here to let her go.”  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Isn’t this, ultimately, the story of what we all came here to do, as parents?  Aren’t we letting to every single day?

Even knowing that, I’m chilled and stunned by the idea that someday – perhaps as soon as 7 or 8 years from now, if she goes to boarding school – I will hug and kiss Grace and watch her walk away.  I remember hugging my mother on the grass lawn in front of a dorm in New Hampshire in September 1990.  That was an particularly draconian farewell: she drove to Logan and got on an airplane to London.  Talk about far away.  I didn’t know until years later that she cried in the car driving away.  I went up to my little teeny closet of a room and sobbed my heart out.  I was scared and lonely and excited, and on the edge of something big.

There are certainly major, notable goodbyes and transitions in parenting, the ones that we all anticipate: kindergarten, high school, college, weddings.  But there are also tiny little goodbyes every single day.  Parenting is a constant farewell.  It’s replete with joyful hellos, too, of course, but it’s undeniable that every day holds an ending.  Every night before I go to bed I carry Whit to the bathroom, his blond head heavy on my shoulder.  Every single night I wonder if this is the last time.  I haven’t read Good Night Moon since I wondered if I ever would again.  The truth of that chokes me up, sits like a stone in the heart of me, a core of loss I simply can’t ignore.  Every day, infinitessimally but inexorably, they move further away from me.

I commented on Rebecca’s blog, letting her know how much her words touched me.  And she emailed me back and said this:

You are so passionate in the way you love your children. Sometimes I think you taste letting them go regularly. You live WIDE awake. At times that overwhelms you.

And I read her words, crying fresh tears, thinking: yes, yes, yes.  The big goodbyes will submerge me in emotion, fear and grief and pride all mixed together, of that I am sure.  But the little ones are in many ways harder for me, since they are so slippery, so difficult to note.  And I do taste them regularly.  I hope she’s right about living wide open; truthfully, I often doubt that.

And now, off to another bedtime.  More pages of Harry Potter, another turn at the Ghostie Dance, the Sweet Dreams Head Rub, and a full-body hug before bed.  Another night when my attention, my kiss, my hug can fix any problem at all.  How many more nights will it be my privilege to do, and be, this?  I don’t know, and that not knowing haunts me.  But tonight, it is.  I try to focus on that.

A repost from exactly a year ago.  And guess what?  It is still a time of change.  The realization that is seeping slowly into my bones is this: life is a constant transition.

The story I can’t stop telling

On Friday night Grace was sleeping over at a friend’s house and Matt was out, so Whit and I had dinner together.  He picked a single daffodil from our back yard (the single daffodil in our back yard) and put it in a small vase for a centerpiece.  We sat down to a table set for two, with napkins and silver, and ate some lasagna that Grace had made the night before.

“This is good,” Whit said between bites.  “But if you made it would be better.”

“Why?”

“Well, it would be full of love.”  He chewed.

“I think Anastasia and Grace put love into this lasagna, Whit.”

“Yes,” he looked me right in the eye, and said without a hint of guile,  “but your food has more love than anyone else’s in it.”

Saturday morning, before hockey practice, Whit was milling around our room in his long johns.  I was still lying in bed.  He climbed in next to me, nestling under the covers and curling his body against mine.  I reached out and pulled him to me, noticing again how lean he is now, all long planes and sharp angles.  I could smell the back of his neck, could see the pale blond fluff where his hair ends and his skin begins.  Matt looked over at us.  “What are you doing?”

“Snuggling with Mummy,” Whit answered.

“Whit, you can bet Zdeno Chara doesn’t cuddle with his mother before he practices.”

I glared at Matt.  “Who cares?  I bet he used to.”

“Yeah, Daddy,” Whit mumbled.  “Who cares?”

Still, my eyes blurred as I held my son against me, my awareness of how numbered these days are so piercing I couldn’t have spoken without sobbing.  It won’t be long until my 7 year old son wouldn’t be caught dead snuggling, much less seeks my embrace out.  Before I know it a Friday night dinner with his mother won’t be the cause of major excitement.  I am sure I will remember that single daffodil, leaning in its overly big vase, with heartache.  It’s still fresh and yellow down there in the kitchen, and I’m already mourning it.

There’s no question I’ve found the story I can’t stop telling, the drum I’ll beat for the rest of my life.  Yes, as I’ve said, my subject chose me.  This way heartbreak and joy are woven into every moment of every day.  They are the two walls of this hall we walk down, one at a time, this life, these years.  When I stare at the back of Whit’s neck I fall into the chasm of memory.   Images of his infant neck and all the years in between telescope and I feel a kind of vertigo.  The speed with which it passes is simply breathtaking, and the immensity of the miracle of another human being overwhelms me utterly.

“It’s time to go, Whit.  Let’s get your pads on.”  Matt called over his shoulder as he left the room.  I glanced one final time at the back of Whit’s neck, squeezed his still-birdlike shoulders, and I let him go.