oh this is hard

Tilting and shifting, yet abiding

At the end of every summer, my children become wretched.  They are also lovely, and we do special things like our spontaneous outing to Crane’s Beach.  But without fail, they are difficult.  I swear it’s the universe making it more bearable to go back to school, back to fall, back to the routines and strictures of Regular Life.  Right on schedule, the last week of summer, Whit had a terrible day.  He was talking back.  He was ignoring me.  He was misbehaving.  He received a warning, failed to heed it, and I sent him to bed at 5:30, without dinner.  I know.  I’m a witch.

In his bed, he cried on and off for an hour.  I sat in my office, right down the hall, remembering all of those nights that I waited out a wailing infant.  Every few minutes, he’d crack the door, tiptoe out and tell me quietly “I’m going to the bathroom.”  In the bathroom he would blow his nose and then creep back his room with a look at me.  Each time, I would say, “I love you, Whit,” and he would shuffle back to bed, tearful.

Finally, at about 6:45 I went in and sat on the edge of his bed.  He was red-faced and upset, but placid, quiet.

“Can we make up?”  He asked me, looking in my eyes.

“Of course we can.”  I hugged his little shoulders, feeling how warm he was, how damp his face and hair.

“I am sorry.” He said, muffled, into my neck.  I rocked him a little. “Mummy?  I’ll do anything you want if you will let me go play Legos.”

“No, Whit,” I said firmly, “You can’t.  This is a consequence.”  I felt, as I do so often, how much easier it would be to just give in.  But I didn’t.  We talked about why he’d been sent to bed.  About not talking back, about listening, about eating his dinner.

“Sometimes when I misbehave I don’t know it.”  His voice was soft, hiccupy.  “Can you sometimes tell me so you don’t have to do this to me again?”

“Yes, Whit.  That’s what the warning was for.”  I hugged him again.  “I will make sure I’m really clear with you.  But I think you do know some of the things you are not supposed to do.”  Sheepish, he looked down at the bright robots on his sheets.

“Are we really made up now?”  Looking up at me through his long eyelashes, he held out his hand as though to shake.

Trying not to laugh, I said, ” I think we should make up with a hug and a kiss, don’t you?”  He nodded, and sat up to hug me hard.  I kissed his cheek and asked if he was ready to go to bed.  “You’ve been really upset in here, haven’t you?”

He nodded again, more vigorously this time. “I’ve been talking to myself, angry at myself that I’m not listening.”

“Well, it’s good to figure out how you can do a better job at that.”  He clutched his Beloved Monkey even closer to him and looked at me.  “We’ll figure it out together, Whit.  I promise.”  I brushed his hair back from his forehead, thinking of all the times I’ve said goodnight in this room, of how often I’ve smoothed my palm across a brow right here, of how often I’ve heard the lullabies that drift from the small CD player.

The specifics of each moment tilt and shift constantly but the central emotions abide, unchanged, sturdy.

Atopy

A couple of years ago I realized that the annual, persistent cold I got in the spring was seasonal allergies.  Odd, I thought: I’ve never had these before.  My doctor told me that it’s actually common to develop them in midlife.  Okay.  So now I take Allegra for a while in the spring and all is well.  Last year, I noticed that on long runs I coughed a lot towards the end.  During my second half-marathon, in June, this was pronounced: I hacked and hacked all the way through the second half, never able to fully clear my throat or get a deep breath.  It finally dawned on me that maybe I’ve developed exercise-induced asthma?  I need to go see the doctor again to find out and, if so, what my options are.

Then this spring I started getting ugly red patches on the backs of my legs.  They came and went, grew and ebbed.  No big deal.  Over the summer they grew, started itching, and got really pronounced.  Matt noticed and said I needed to get them checked out.  My legs were raw from the knee down.  I saw my dermatologist in August and she took one look at me and asked, “Do you have seasonal allergies or asthma?”

Knock me over.  What?  Well, yes, I think I have both, and they are both new, I told her.  Why?

She told me about a syndrome called atopy.  For anyone who has this, or is a doctor, I apologize in advance for my butchering of the medical specifics.  As far as she told me, it’s basically a group of symptoms that demonstrate acute sensitivity to the world.  I am reactive to the air, to the very stuff of everyday life.  Just living in the world is a stress on my system.  This seems like a physical manifestation of my emotional porousness.

Why does this not surprise me at all?

You can and you can’t go back again

When I decided to go back to Legoland with Grace and Whit this summer, I worried that maybe it was wrong to try to revisit and recapture one of the most glorious memories of my time as a mother.  Perhaps we would all be disappointed, inevitably, and I’d regret the decision.  Ultimately I couldn’t resist the clarion call of those happy moments, and decided to risk a return.

And it was just as wonderful.  Different, but marvelous.  The whole four days we were there I was struck by the proximity of the past, felt last year’s four days right alongside this year, keenly aware of the ways in which things are the same and the way they are different.  Some combination of familiarity and maturity meant that the children felt masterful at Legoland.  Remembering the routine at the hotel and navigating the park, they knew what they were doing.

Whit went on the rides, Grace seesawed wildly between adorableness and surliness, and I had a blackberry to check.  This was all new.  There was sheer joy in their faces on the safari ride, they careened ahead of me down the hall from the room to the 5pm wine-and-snacks lounge, I took the elevator down while they raced me on the stairs.  This was all the same.

So much new, so much the same.  The children change with blinding speed and yet there’s a permanence to my bond with them, some eternity that beats in its core.  I found myself falling into the black hole of regret about all that has changed, mourning the younger children Grace and Whit were and the year that I’ve lost in the interim.  And then, just as quickly, I shook my head and tried to reimmerse myself in the moment I was living, knowing as I did that within weeks I’d be nostalgic for it.  As I walked through the park, a child’s hand in each of mine, I knew, vividly and viscerally, that immediately I’d wish I had that minute back.

I’ve sworn and promised that we’ll return to Legoland again next summer.  And I know that when we do I will slide back in the slipstream between now and then.  And I can’t wait.

I don’t want to leave

We got home from Legoland at 11 at night, so the kids’ clocks were all screwy.  I woke Whit up the next day at 10am, and he’d fallen asleep in the car that afternoon, something he hasn’t done in years.  I put him to bed early, a little surprised but very glad when he curled up with his new animals from Legoland without complaint.

A few minutes later I heard him crying.  His sobs escalated and finally he burst through his door, face crumpled, streaked with tears.  I was sitting at my desk, right near his room, and he flew down the hall into my arms.

“I don’t want to leave!” his face was wet against my shoulder.

Me neither.  I nodded in silence.

“No, Mummy, I really don’t.”  I pulled him up onto my lap, where he fits only awkwardly these days, feet dangling down and knocking against my shins.

“I know, Whit. It’s hard to come home from something like Legoland. It’s hard when something we have looked forward to for so long is over.”

He snuffled against my shoulder and then leaned back, looking me right in the eye.  “No, Mummy,” his voice was clear.  “I wish we hadn’t gone because then I wouldn’t miss it.”  My heart stopped.  Oh, how I know that feeling.  Much like my conviction that we have to accept the risk of everyday life and still, admire the blue sky, I know this to be true: you can’t skip experiences you know you’ll miss in fear of that missing.  No, no, no.

“Oh, Whit, no.  Don’t say that!  You can’t live like that.”  He frowned at me.  “I promise you we will go back,” I said, my voice fervent.

He bounced off my lap, suddenly, wiped his face and said, “Will we take direct flights?”

What? I was confused.  We connected in Dallas last year and this year flew on Jet Blue, with no stops, and he loved the TVs and was riveted the whole way in both directions.   I shook my head, laughing inside at the random skipping of his mind.  What a fascinating terrain the inside of his head must be.   I thought of one of his stock answers when I react to his random, funny interjections: I ask “Whit, where are you from?” exasperated and laughing at the same time.  He always answers, deadpan, “Texas.”  He is so funny, that guy.

Whit’s flare of humor quickly subsided, though, and he started crying again.  I picked him up and carried him to his bed where we sat for a long while, his tears slowly easing as I rubbed his back and kept whispering promises that we would go back.  Finally he went to sleep, his arm thrown over the green bear, Lego, that he won last year.

I can’t stop thinking about his words, though.  I am as certain as I am of almost anything that we can’t avoid doing things we love just to assure that we don’t have the heartbreak of missing them after the fact.  Right?  I do, however, know the seduction of this notion, and am intimately familiar with the moments when the intensity of the missing is so strong it feels unbearable. Pam Houston’s gorgeous words rise in my mind, shimmering with their truth.  Whit reminds me that this is a lesson I am learning over and over and over again; somehow I never seem to fully learn it.  It never stops hurting, either, that missing.  But that’s okay.  That is living fully.  I longer aspire to not miss things.  Instead, I hope to accept the missing as the other side of joy, the loss as an integral part of life.

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston

My little soul mate

Last Thursday we dropped Grace off at camp.  My heart was still soggy from the night before, but I put on my sunglasses and got in the car and off we headed.  As we drove the familiar roads on Cape Cod, turned into the driveway with the archery range and sun-bleached grassy front fields, I was flooded with memories.  The smiling, white-clad Junior Counselors looked so young, and I choked up inside.  I was trying to reconcile the fact that I was just them with the knowledge that that was more than half my lifetime ago.

After a check-in at the infirmary (we passed the lice test, yay!) off we went to Cabin 50.

Cabin 50 is directly across from Cabin 54, the place where I first laid eyes on Jessica and commenced a lifetime friendship.  I’m not sure Julia and Grace were as moved by this detail as Jess and I were, but we both noted the proximity of the place where it all began, and smiled, eyes glistening.  We helped the girls unpack, Grace on the top bunk and Julia on the bottom.  Then they put on suits and we headed up to the pool, with the other new Juniors, for their swimming test.

The daughter of another dear friend of mine from camp was also in the girls’ cabin.  Three of them!  My head swims looking at this picture, remembering when we were 10 and when we were 16 and when we were 21, of all the experiences we shared in this very same place.  And we all have girls, and hopefully they are embarking on a similar road, together.  I had tears in my eyes the whole time we were there.

There was no good time to leave so we did so, somewhat abruptly, at the pool.  They were waiting for their test and we were the only parents still there.  I can’t get the way Grace looked at me out of my head: her eyes were filled with wild surprise, nearing panic, and sadness swamped her entire face.  I hugged her and kissed her and walked away.  Their JCs and counselors swarmed around the crying girls, their white backs blocking them.  So we couldn’t see, as we walked, if they were still crying, but we sure were.  I don’t like the way I left her, but I’m not sure if any moment would have been better.  At least this way, my friend said, they had something to focus on immediately, a task to dive into, both literally and figuratively.

I was utterly shocked by how sad I was, all day long.  It pains me to admit that – what mother didn’t expect to miss her child? – but it’s true.  I knew I’d miss her, but I didn’t really think through the visceral, physical missing: the tears that wouldn’t stop, the ache in my chest, the way I winced every time I glanced back at her empty booster seat.  I know this kind of independence is precisely what I want for my child, and it’s impossible to overstate how completely I trust this camp to take care of her.  I know she will have a wonderful time.  But still.  Her face, the tears, the abandonment: they rise up in my head, over and over.  I guess this is her first experience of Pema’s timeless wisdom about being thrust out of the nest.

I emailed a close friend later that day, expressing the way sorrow had startled me, sharing how much I missed my daughter.  She responded immediately with this: “Not surprising. She’s your soulmate in many ways.”  These lines stunned me with their truth.  This isn’t the first time this friend has knocked me back with her insight and support.  My soul yearns for its little partner.  Of course it does.

And still, I believe absolutely that this experience will be excellent for her.  I hope she makes sturdy, possibly lifetime friendships, I hope she tries new activities, I hope she develops confidence in her own ability to be in the world without me, and I hope she internalizes the camp motto, emblazoned above the outdoor theater: