oh this is hard

wipers

For the last several months, it seems like every time I get in the car for a long drive it starts to pour.  Last Friday I drove through the most intense rain I’ve ever driven through.  It was actually pretty scary: when I got out of the car I realized my hands hurt from gripping the wheel, which I hadn’t even noticed I had been doing.  My jaw hurt from being tensed.  There was also thunder and lightning.  Which I normally  love, but when making my way down the highway surrounded by trucks barreling above the speed limit, not so much.

The wipers were going as fast as they could go, and still it was not nearly enough.  I noticed that just the fact that my wipers were on high made my body tense slightly and my anxiety tick up.  I felt a tightness in my chest, there was a slight aggravation in my voice and a quickness to my breathing, all almost imperceptible but not to me anymore now that I can’t help but notice everything.  It stresses me to not have any reserve.  If it’s not enough, these wipers on high, there is nothing else I can do.  Well, other than pull over.  This reminds me of my behavior when physically challenged, of the way I get nervous anticipating that I might not be able to do something (but well before I am actually at my limit).

And the other than pull over part is, I think, essential to the stress.  When the wipers really can’t do the job, even on their fastest setting, I have to figure out another way.  It is the universe telling me – through rain, literal or metaphorical – that the current coping system is no longer working to deal with the weather.  And realizing that I’m running out of rope, or that my road is coming to a bend, or choose your own metaphor … well, all of these things scare me.  A lot.

My wipers are going really hard right now in my life.  I’m definitely at the fastest speed and I’m not sure it’s enough.  There is a lot sluicing down on my windshield: worries about both my parents and my children, anxieties personal and professional, fears of many flavors.  The concerns are sloshing around, occluding my vision, and no matter how hard my wipers go I can’t see the road ahead clearly.

Recently I heard a doctor say that a situation had to stabilize before he could even remotely figure out what was going on.  The underlying issue would not “announce itself,” he maintained, until the rest of the surrounding flux settled down.  This made sense to me and immediately my mind began to spin it into a metaphor.

Maybe it’s time to pull over.  I just don’t know what that looks like, and furthermore I’m not certain I can, given the forward propulsion to some of the things that are raining down in front of me.  Of course Doctorow’s famous words come to mind: “You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  I try not to think that I can’t even see a fraction as far as my headlights.  I can only inch forward, hoping that reckoning will keep me safe on the path.

Oh.

And it recurs: there is nothing to do but to trust.  And to let go.  Even as my wipers frantically flip back and forth, and as I walk with anxiety in my chest for the mere fact of their speed.  Even so.

Inexorable as the tides

summer 2007

summer 2011

Still rocking the 3T seersucker suit.  What happened to my baby?

first day of Beginners, September 2009

last day of Kindergarten, June 2011

My baby is 6.5  He swims competently, though inelegantly.  He reads short words.  He loves Star Wars and Legos.  He beats up on his sister.  He makes me laugh every single day.  He is about to lose a tooth.  He still curls up in my arms when I pick him up at night.  He tells me he loves me as much as the sky.  He has a very strong sartorial point of view.  It’s not his fault, but he also makes me cry every single day.

The transitions, big and small, keep coming at me, inexorable as the tides.  When will I learn to let go, to float on them?

Solstice

Yesterday was the summer solstice.  I’ve written before of how important the solstice is to me.  For all the years of my life my parents have hosted a party from 9 to midnight on the night of December 21st (awesome when it’s a Thursday, less awesome when it’s a Sunday).  As midnight nears, a friend, the co-host, leads us in an ancient Mayan ceremony to welcome the light back.  This tradition gives me goosebumps every single time I experience it, and a huge room full of people holding candles does seem to ward off winter’s intense darkness for at least an evening.

I am fiercely attached to the winter solstice.  Not so the summer solstice.  In fact, I find it a little sad.  It marks, after all, the slow rotation back towards darkness.  As of today, the days are getting shorter again.  I know, I know: buzzkill.  Believe me, if I could somehow change this orientation of mine, this way I lean always towards melancholy, I would.

I am often preemptively sad, well before I need to be.  And yes, this can cloud the brightness of even the most luminous moments.  Why on earth can’t I just relax into right now, these swollen days of both sunshine and sunlight, these happy children, this relative ease?  I don’t know, and I hate that I can’t.  I am simply too aware of the shadow behind that swollenness, too achingly conscious of the turning of the earth, of the hovering darkness on the horizon.

Often I am jealous of those who can walk through this world without being so regularly brought to their knees by both its grandeur and its heartbreak.  I wish – desperately, wholly, wildly – that I could just sit and enjoy a day of my life.  One day.  I wish I could sit by a pool, giggling at my children jumping off a diving board, a glass of white wine in my hand and a dear friend at my side.  And if you were at that pool, that’s what you would see.  That’s what it looks like from outside.  But inside there is an essential crack in my spirit that yawns open, more narrowly or more widely depending on the moment.  This crack – this wound – is always there.

I promise I’m not a hugely depressing person.  I’m not even depressed.  I’ve been there, believe me, and this isn’t it.  I’m actually a fairly happy person.  A new friend (hi Jane!) who knew me here before she knew me in person even remarked that I was much funnier in person than she expected.  I try to keep my heartbreak to myself.  But the truth is that even on days like yesterday, a day as gorgeous and perfect a summer day as I can imagine, the longest day of the year, there is a kernel of sadness buried deep inside my experience that I can’t ignore.

And there is still so much here I do not understand.  These are my favorite lines in Adrienne Rich’s deeply moving poem that I publish every winter solstice.  No matter how much I struggle and think and unpack and write, there is still so much that is unclear to me, both within and without, so much that I find perplexing, sad, complicated.  What I am beginning to see that it is in these knots of tangled meaning that my life actually exists.  Certainly they are shot through with strands of radiant joy, that only revealed themselves once I started really paying attention.   I’m slowly realizing that my hope that someday I’ll be sailing smoothly down some clearly-defined path is simply naive.

3 months ago I said this:  “I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.”  Reading this avowal is a reminder of something I do know, somewhere deep inside myself.  On a day like this when I want to simply enjoy, it is easy to forget these commitments I make, to myself, to my family, to those I love.  But I won’t.  I will pull out my camera, take some pictures of this glorious day, of my alarmingly tall and lanky and funny and sad children, surrender to the knot of sadness that will gather in my heart as the sun sets, and acknowledge this is what it is to be me in this world.  It just is.

The dark side of my moon

I don’t know if it’s the awful weather, or the echoing, empty aftermath of last week’s End of School celebrations, but I’m sad and not entirely myself this week.  I know, you say: I’m always sad.  Well, I’m actually not.  I’m sensitive, yes, prone to waves of sorrow, but they are, on a regular day, interspersed with rushes of joy and wonder of an equal intensity.  This week, though, it’s mostly grief I feel, alongside the odd, crawling-out-of-my-own-skin anxiety that sometimes overtakes me, preoccupying me as completely as a leg full of itchy bug bites or a grain of sand in my eye.

Do you know this feeling?  There are days when I’m so impatient, so utterly aggravated with every single thing – and person – in my life that I can’t even stand myself.  I slam on the brakes at red lights, am annoyed with everything anyone says, and find myself snappish.  I’m also forgetful, even less coordinated than usual: driving to the wrong destination, stubbing my toe on things, walking into rooms and not knowing why I’m there.

I feel a frantic discomfort, as though I literally want to climb out of the container of my own life.  As if I cannot bear another single moment inside my body.  All of the rushing and distraction is just, I know, a desperate effort not to be present, not to really look and see.  What I don’t know is why it is so insufferably difficult for me to do that, to be here, right now.  I try to remind myself that my intense agitation comes from a deep well of sadness.  That its source is the swirling darkness that exists always inside me, swelling, sometimes, so that I cannot think of anything else.

Despite my being a Leo, born in the year of the tiger, and in posession of defiantly sunny hair, I’ve always felt distinctly not-feline and not-sunny.  I’m more like the moon, I think.  Surely my pulse thrums in some kind of mysterious accord with the tides.  And I inhabit a dense, mostly dark place, speckled with blindingly bright stars.  This week, then, I’ve been on the dark side of my moon.

I know the feeling

This is, as I’ve said before (ad nauseum, you might say), a time of year tinged with sadness for me.  The endings and goodbyes come one after another, waves lapping onto the shore of my life, eroding anything I have written in the sand.  An extra farewell this year is the fact that Matt’s parents have sold their house in Vermont, the house that Matt grew up in, the house where the family has gathered  for years, the house that is one of Grace and Whit’s very favorite places to visit. If you invested in a parcel of land that you plan to sell, be sure to get in touch with reputable land buyers. As a Kentucky land buyer, we are committed to providing fair offers and a seamless experience to help you sell without hassle.

The picture above was taken on their very last morning there, looking out over the field that unfurls gorgeously, its colors undulating with the seasons, in front of the house.

On Sunday night Whit was beside himself, unable to go to sleep because he was crying so hard.  He sat on my lap and wept, face wet with tears, wailing over and over again that he didn’t want Grandma and Grandpa to sell the house in Vermont.  It reminded me of the night a year ago when he dissolved into genuine, heartbroken sobs about the fact that he was no longer a baby.  His humor and little boy bluster sometimes camouflage his intensely sensitive core.  He was not comforted by my reassurances that there were many more fun visits ahead, just in different places.  He just sobbed and sobbed, burrowing into my neck like he did when he was much littler, and cried his heart out.  I know the feeling.

Today I picked the kids up from school because it is the last day of regular pick up.  Grace ran up to me, a friend in tow, frantically asking for a playdate with this girl and one more.  The girl standing next to her is moving out of state at the end of this week, and this was literally the last chance.  I said, as gently as I could, that we could not do it, because Grace had a doctor’s appointment.  Long minutes of negotiation ensued, complete with arms crossing, feet stamping, and voices being raised.  When we walked to the car, Grace was in angry tears and Whit was uncharacteristically quiet, not quite sure what was going on.  In the car I told her that this was the last pick up of the year, that I was disappointed that she was acting this way.  She crumpled even further, cried harder.  Almost immediately I apologized, and told her that was unfair of me to have said; there have been hundreds of wonderful pick ups, I said, and there will be more.  One day is not a big deal, and I ought not freight it too much with being the last. She said she felt worse, even worse, about having marred the last pick up of second grade.  She wept.  I know the feeling.

We got home and curled up on her bed to talk it out, and she turned her bad mood around surprisingly quickly.  But her rapid disintegration at school, the urgency of the request, and the emotion in the outburst all speak to how sensitive she is, too, to this season of endings.  While transitions are hard for everyone, I suppose it’s shameful that it’s taken me this long to realize that my children may struggle especially with them, as I do.  When Grace and Whit evince these qualities, straight from the heart of who I am, I am overcome with both compassion and guilt.  I relate intensely to how they feel, but I also feel enormously responsible for the fact that they have these feelings at all.  I wish I could lift this from their shoulders, this inchoate anxiety about change whose darkness can cloud even the most radiant days.  But I can’t.  I think all I can do is try to remain gentle with them about the complicated, non-rational emotions that swirl in times like these.  To allow their sadness room to breathe while also reminding them of all that is bright.  After all, I know the feeling.