oh this is hard

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.

 

Lonely

I’ve learned via a couple of channels that my post last week about friendship made some others lonely.  This makes me feel terrible, because one thing I am – extremely often – is lonely.  I know the emotion intimately, and I hate knowing that I have contributed to others feeling it.  I am so familiar with loneliness, in fact, that I wrote a post a few years ago called Flavors of Loneliness.  Sometimes the reaction people have to what I write here makes me feel misunderstood, and this is one of those times.

How is it that I can be certain that I am hugely blessed with wonderful friends and, at the same time, often, profoundly lonely?   It’s actually not only not a paradox, it is absolutely at the root of what I consider the most toxic and icy kind of loneliness: loneliness when surrounded by people.  It is true that in the last many years (and even since November 2009, when I wrote Flavors of Loneliness) I’ve become increasingly aware of how wonderful my friends are.  For sure.  I would go further: I am more aware of everything.

But I still feel lonely.  Very.  Often.  I still gaze out at the sumptuous riches of my ordinary life and feel like I’m staring at them through glass, from a cold place where the temperature is turned down too low.  Yet, somehow, maybe because the glass is clear, nobody else can tell how isolated I am.  I suspect that this loneliness has its roots in my cognizance of our essential unknowability, which, while I believe it firmly, I continue to agitate restlessly against.  I want to be known – don’t we all?  I also want to really know those I love best.

I am writing this post sitting in an airport alone on a Saturday evening, after having gotten up at 4:30 to start my day.  I can assure you I feel lonely.  But as I’ve noted this kind of loneliness is precisely because of the fullness of my life; if I didn’t feel so much love and joy (and, sure, pain) in my regular life I wouldn’t ache for it when I was away.  While I dislike this loneliness, it’s nothing compared to that sense of being alone even when surrounded by people, to that creeping, shadowy consciousness of how fundamentally alone I am that follows me through my days.  That loneliness is corrosive, and, unfortunately, for me it’s also a relatively common feeling.

As I’ve mentioned, lately I’ve been particularly noticing the moon.  Specifically, the shadow of the rest of the moon in the night sky, even when only a sliver is bright.  Maybe that’s what this is – the changingly visible but omnipresent remainder of the whole, even when only part is bright.  It’s part of the deal.  Loneliness is an integral part of my life, simply one manifestation of the dark that is both inextricable from the light and crucial to its meaning.

Liminal

Grace is such a liminal creature right now, straddling girlhood and tweendom, the baby she was and the young woman she’s becoming at warp speed both visible in her bottomless brown eyes.  I look at her and it takes my breath away, the dizzying identification, the breakneck pace with which almost 10 years have rushed by, the inevitability, somehow, that she and only she would be my daughter.

I read two posts over the weekend that brought me to breathless, gasping tears with their evocation of what lies ahead of me.  Of us, Grace and me.  Launa’s essay, On Heartache, reminded me how very much growing up of my own I have to do before I am able to effectively mother Grace through the next several years.  I know I am not up, yet, to the challenge that Launa elucidates:

Because this is what it means to be a good teacher, and a good mother, to adolescent girls.  It means to hold your own self together, to endure and be strong and be both firm and loving, so that you can be the adult they need you to be.  Even when it stings the most, we mothers and teachers have to be stalwart and certain in the boundlessness of our love and the firmness of our boundaries.

Oh, oh, oh.  I am still so immature myself, as a woman and a mother, and this strength and firmness seems far out of my grasp.  The boundlessness of my love, that part, I’ve got down.  The rest of it, I need to work on, and I am immensely grateful for Launa’s wise and articulate counsel as I move, just behind her, through the myriad stages, each full of an amalgam of heartbreak and wonder that I had never imagined, of mothering a daughter.

And then I read Katrina’s stunning post In Awe, about watching her son in his element, about observing the flowering of the innate skills and passions that she glimpsed in him early on, when he was a two year old toddler.  Katrina’s a mothering role model for me, there’s no question, and each and every piece of her writing moves me to tears as it shifts something heavy and essential inside my chest.  She puts into words the challenges and glories of this road, of the effort to remain steadfast and of the need to believe in what we know to be true of our children better than anyone else I know.

And what is our real job as parents, if not first to nurture the beings entrusted to our care, to have faith in their inchoate processes of growing and becoming, and then to show up, again and again, for as long as we are able, to bear grateful witness to their unfolding destinies?

It is this faith, and this showing up, that is central to my life now.  I watch Grace and Whit as they stretch into the beings they have always been, leaning into what I know of them, even when they behave in ways that I dislike or as they begin to explore where the limits are.  They still look back over their shoulder to make sure I’m watching them, and as much as this can feel like a burden – I have to watch everything – I also know these days are precious, and numbered.  What Launa and Katrina remind me, though, is that even when Grace and Whit roll their eyes and push me away, I need to keep watching, witnessing with forbearance, trusting, loving, even – perhaps most of all – when I doubt that they notice or care.

I’ve written before about my conviction that my children do not belong to me, shared how deeply I’m honored to be the passage they chose to come through on their way to the great wide open of this world.  It’s a privilege beyond expressing to watch them flower, to watch them grow, and while I know that there is more shocking bittersweetness ahead, it’s all worth it.

Some days I can do nothing other than kneel, press my forehead to the cold window, watch the setting sun turn the sky orange and pink, and whisper my gratitude.  My gratitude for these children of mine, for this ordinary and painful and startlingly lovely life, for these friends and sages – today, and often, Launa and Katrina – whose words give me solace, comfort, and inspiration.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Trust your struggle

I’ve seen this image several times, all over the place, and finally I downloaded it because I love it.  I love the font, I love the gray and white, and I love the message.

Trust your struggle.

These words honor that we all have struggles, and they contains within them trust that all the effort and difficulty is in service of something.  That we’re all where we are supposed to be, doing what we’re supposed to be doing, no matter how painful or pointless it might seem.

I’m doing both right now.  Struggling, and trying to trust.

 

Fissures in the dark

Sometimes I stagger under the weight of my own feelings.  This season has turned so swiftly from one of relative calm to one of choppy seas and brand new changes, and I am still struggling to find my balance.  On a daily basis, both my anxiety and my good fortune overwhelm me.  How to take the measure of each?  I can’t.  I can only seesaw back and forth between moments of panic and those of intense awareness of how good my life is.  Maybe it is precisely this gratitude that makes the uncertainty feel so perilous.

There are moments when I am literally brought to my knees by a sharp reminder of something that is lost or by a breathtaking pang of fear about what may come.  But then, often, in the wake of those powerful emotions comes the world, weak but undeniable in its insistence that I open my eyes.

Yesterday, Julie Daley tweeted a beautiful line by Rumi: “I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.”  This is so right, and so true; while I am occasionally swamped by bleakness, almost always there are faint fissures in the dark through which light, and reminders of goodness, can creep.

The suddenness with which this has become an uncertain and unstable time cautions me, again, not to ever grow too attached to the way things are in a specific moment.  It all changes.  I’m thrashing around in these suddenly stormy waters, but trying to keep my eyes on the light, on the cracks, on the sunrises where I can still see the moon (the picture above was taken on the way to Jerusalem, when we landed in Madrid at dawn).  There is so much loss, and so much fear, and it is easy for me to lose sight of the beauty all around.  It doesn’t make up for some of the heartbreak, and certainly doesn’t take away the roiling anxiety, but it can ameliorate it.  Some of it.