oh this is hard

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.  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.

Keeping my eyes open

This is how life is right now. Gossamer, luminous, delicate.  I am as swollen and as fragile as that bubble.  If you look closely you can see my reflection on its surface, but I feel as though I’m also contained within it: floating above the world, looking down, my perch about to vanish at any moment.

The beauty of any given moment is as evanescent as it is startling.  It’s all so extraordinary, and short-lived, and stunning, that sometimes I feel like just hiding in the house rather than taking it in.  Because this bubble burst moments after I took the picture of it, and what had been there, a floating, hovering embodiment of gorgeousness, was just as quickly, and as completely, gone.

Sometimes the truth of the grandeur of my everyday life flashes in front of me, as beautiful as this bubble or as bright as phosopherescence, and as fleeting. Like the sheer shimmer of a soap bubble, the unexpected, bright swirls of glowing light in a night sea, the knowledge of life’s holiness leaves an imprint on the back of my eyelids, a reminder of something witnessed, something important from a place beyond rational thought.

The bubbles – the moments, with their sudden, shining beauty, and their abrupt, final end – break my heart.  Today I’m walking around with a broken heart.  There is so much beauty and so much sorrow.  So much grandeur and so much terror.  But I’m learning to keep my eyes open for the bubbles, even when what I see makes them sting.  At least there’s that.

Feast of losses

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.