oh this is hard

What do you prioritize and what do you let slip?

I love this post by Mom 101 about The Myth of Doing It All.  Yes, this is a topic we’ve all been over.  It is not new.  What I hadn’t thought about before, though, is what she shares, paraphrasing an essay by Tina Fey in the New Yorker:

When you ask a working mom about how she does it all, it either puts her in the position to say something disparaging about herself (check) or deliver an answer that makes the questioner feel somehow inadequate for doing less.

Honestly this sentence was a huge AHA.  I simply had never realized that this was why this question made me so uncomfortable.  And it does: my skin crawls and I launch into full-on shoulders-slumping, mumbling, deflecting mode as soon as someone asks me this.  The truth is none of us do it all.  Everybody makes choices and prioritizes.  The other truth is that no matter what the reality is of what our days look like, pretty much everybody I know experiences their lives as busy.  It’s what you do within that that speaks of what you prize: I think that you can look at how you spend the hours of your day as a map that reflects what you truly value.

I have a seemingly endless appetite for truthful conversations, like the one started at Mom 101, about the details of others’ personal juggles.  Everybody has their own tricks and their own private calculus about what can be de-prioritized.  I have shared some of my own “secrets” before, none of which are particularly insightful.

One of my key decisions is that it takes a lot to get me out of the house in the evening (here: an example of something I’ll go out for). I remember a few years ago at a dinner party explaining to the man on my right that when evaluating potential plans I measure everything against the other option of being home in bed reading. I could see the sheer horror on his face when I said this, and it deepened into something more like terror when I allowed that very few plans make it past this screen.  I often get criticized for being anti-social (especially by my husband, the E to my I) but I have chosen to protect the few hours that are mine.

What else do I let slip?  I never watch TV, so I am woefully out of loop on a lot of conversations, blogs, and emails.  I let my children sleep until the last bitter moment in the morning, believing as I do in the supreme importance of sleep, and so they often eat breakfast in the car.  I do laundry in a – ahem – casual way, which is to say that I do not separate lights and darks.  I do not iron.  I cook simple food, and Grace and Whit are not, as a result, adventurous eaters.

Please chime in here – what are your strategies for juggling your life?  What do you prioritize and what do you let go of?

I want to be your little girl

Saturday morning dawned clear and cold.  I took Grace and Whit out to breakfast at our favorite diner while Matt slept in.  Later, we went to meet some friends to walk around the reservoir in our town.  Our friends have a five year old son and an 18 month old daughter.  Slowly, we circled the reservoir.  The big kids on bikes and so were our friends, with their toddler in a bike seat.  Matt and I walked.  The children biked out ahead of us, that raveling red string unfurling towards the horizon, stretching, as it does, but never breaking.  It was windy and we all walked hunched over, hands jammed into pockets.  I looked up, almost desperately, at the branches against the crystal clear sky, looking for buds.

Eventually my friend’s daughter, C, got cold in the bike seat so we took her out to walk.  As she wandered along the path, crouching to investigate every small dried leaf or blade of new grass, we joked about how toddlers are the ultimate in people who Stop and Smell the Flowers.  Everybody else got cold, waiting for C to amble along, so I picked her up, surprised by how light she was in my arms, and held her against my hip as I walked, talking to my friend, who walked her bike beside me.

Suddenly I noticed Grace biking urgently back towards me, and when she got close I saw that her cheeks were wet with tears.  “What, Gracie?” I asked, wondering if she’d fallen.  She was crying so hard it was hard for her to get the words out, and she gestured me over so we could speak privately.  I leaned down so that I could hear her, my forehead clunking into the chilly plastic of her helmet.

“Mummy,” she wiped ineffectually at her tears with her mitten, “I want to be your little girl.”

“Oh, Grace!” Instinctively I knelt, still cradling C against my side, and wrapped my other arm around Grace.  I hugged her and then pulled back, looking right into her eyes.  “Grace.  You will always be my little girl.”

“But I’m not as little as she is,” Grace nodded towards C, who was watching all of this with interest.

“I know, Grace.  But it doesn’t matter how big you get.  You will always be my little girl.  You will always be my first baby.”

Appeased, she biked away, and I stood up and resumed walking, but now it was my cheeks that were wet.

Where does this come from?  Whit, too, has broken down, sharing through sobs how own sadness at time’s passage.  Do they pick this up from my talking about it?  The thing is, I don’t actually do that in front of them.  More likely, I suspect, sensitivity about time throbs in their bloodstreams as surely as it does in mine.  I feel so ambivalent about this; what a weight they carry, and it’s all because of me.  I don’t think very much about whether I’d rather be wired differently, because I know I can’t change my leaning toward melancholy or my skinlessness, can’t escape my sometimes-exquisitely painful awareness of life’s beauty and loss.  But I don’t like reminders like this one from Grace, of the high costs of having a mother who is more shadow than sun, whose gaze is often through tears, who loves and hurts in equal, fierce measure.

Oh, I worry about them.  I want what all parents want, in unison, and with the force of a tide: I want them to be happy.  I want joy and ease and as much wonder as they can bear.  And then maybe more.  I hope the sheer basic fact of my being their mother has not precluded this already for them.

Sadness

Last week I read Susan Piver’s beautiful writing about the importance of sadness and sighed, nodded, and cried at the same time.  She was expressing exactly what I was trying to say, unsuccessfully, the other day.  I wasn’t having a bad day, though several friends called me and asked if I was OK after reading the post.  I don’t think I have a desperately tortured approach to the world, though perhaps others differ.

I was simply trying to describe what it’s like to be me in the world.  I feel intense joy and grief in equal measure, and it is safe to say that both emotions mark every single day of my life.  If the definition of a broken heart is feeling things, including sadness, overwhelmingly, then I have one.  Every single day.  It’s just another way of saying I’m porous.

I love, too, what Susan has to say about the instinct to turn sadness into one of the less uncomfortable emotions: bitterness, anger, helplessness.  Even defensiveness can be a place to hide from sadness.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last years for me have been a journey that is in large part about accepting my own fundamental sadness.  Resisting the impulse to run from the discomfort that true sadness brings.  Instead, leaning into it.  This is not easy, and for sure, a lot of the time it hurts.  Though there are many things that cut me to the quick, my essential sadness is time’s swift passage; that is the black hole at the center of my life, the unavoidable truth around which all the planets of my being orbit.

Virginia Woolf said “The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder” and I could not agree more.  In accepting the sadness I’ve seen so much more of the joy; in acknowledging my innate broken-heartedness I’ve also learned to be open to soaring moments of inspiration and even to belly laughter.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s gorgeous Kindness addresses also the ways that sadness is inextricably linked to sweeter emotions.  Her lines remind me of my thoughts about gentleness, another word that has been in my mind of late.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth/
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

And so I supposed the message is not to shirk our own sorrow and not to bolt to safer harbors whose emotions are less painful.  At least if you’re wired like me, the path is paved with sadness, but that doesn’t mean the sky isn’t filled with glory.

Busy

I am cruising headfirst into a very busy few weeks, mostly because of my real job.  This week alone has involves a trip to California (round-trip in one day) and a long day in New York (6am shuttle down, 9pm shuttle back) on Friday.  The days I’m in town are crammed too.  I am missing a few kids’ school things here and there, but I am mostly comfortable with it.  This is important.  And I do like the people I work with a lot.

Still, I worry.  I often feel anxious in this anticipatory way, sense that familiar old preemptive emotion coming in to swamp me.  When I graduated from business school I worried constantly about finding a job that would allow me to pursue my new but passionate yoga practice.  There’s no question this helped shape my choice.  Was this wise, or was this a capitulation to the immature fear of something that had not happened yet (the consumption of my life by my job)?

People always tell me that I am busy.  And yes, absolutely, I do have lots of things going on every day.  I rarely have long stretches of uninterrupted time without claims on it.  For a long time I definitely bought into this – I was busy, busy, busy.  But at some point over the last few years I started resisting that ever-offered excuse for why someone didn’t do something/didn’t call/didn’t show up/was late … “I’m so busy!”  Come on.  Everybody is busy, tired, fighting their own battles.

I realized I wanted to stop making this excuse.  Busy is a state of mind, and a relative term, quite uncorrelated with the subjective truth of how crowded one’s hours are.  Furthermore, “busy” as an excuse asserts a lack of choice and control that I think is inaccurate.  Somehow, we all find time to do the things we really care about.  As Anne Lamott asserts, the time is there: just find it.  Choose it over something else.  Remember what Annie Dillard says: how you spend your days is, in fact, how you spend your life.

So, mostly, since then I have stopped claiming busy-ness, and what I found is I – delightfully! – mostly didn’t inhabit that space anymore.  Still it remains true that there are undeniably times when the demands on me feel heavier than usual.  There are times when I feel at risk of being frenzied and out of control, when I worry about not having time for the things I love most: reading, writing, sleep, running, yoga.  I feel that way now: I am concerned that the next month won’t allow for as much of these things as I’ve grown accustomed to.  I’m worried about time to write this blog: how can I expect you all to be here if I am not?  And this community has come to mean so much to me.  I also worry about what it says about my priorities if I find myself unable to come here.  Am I failing to prioritize my writing and nascent creative life or am I simply being realistic about short-term unavoidable realities?

Overall, what I wonder, nervously, is this: am I falling back into the patterns where things felt busy, busy, busy?  Does this creeping slipperiness under my feet, this slight but noticeable tightening of every minute of my day represent a backslide into old habits? Part of me thinks yes – the faint shadow of panic is so familiar – but another part of me thinks no.  I am so keenly aware, now, of how much I prize quiet.  Of how much I value time alone.  Of how much certain practices mean to me.  I never knew those things before, and the reason I feel anxious about the encroaching busy-ness is because I know now what I need.  This knowledge and this reason are new, and I hope that they can be a bulwark against the encroachment of busy-ness.

I read Jena’s (always, always, always) stunning blog and learned that the Chinese characters for “busy” also mean “heart-killing.” It has been a long road for me to realize that there was part of my heart that was dying in all the busy-ness.  Actually, I think a better way of saying it is that part of my heart was never allowed to live.  I still fear a return to that, when I launch into a period of intensive commitments.  But I return again to the same word, circling to the same place, a needle tugging north: I have to trust that I’ll come through this phase and return to what I now know I prize.  I have to trust that I won’t lose my heart in the busy-ness.   And, most of the time, I do.

Give yourselves to what you cannot hold

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

-Ranier Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1,4

More beautiful and thought-provoking words from the lovely blog, A Year with Rilke.  Isn’t Rilke, in his characteristically simple but powerful imagery, talking about growing up, letting go, trusting – all of my favorite themes?  Isn’t this, in essence, what I was looking for when I jumped off a high platform into thin air?

I love Rilke’s assertion that the “trees” from childhood, those epitomes of rooted, solid stability, are too heavy to carry into adulthood.  In midlife I have begun to realize that the tools I used to understand and navigate my earlier life simply did not work anymore.  Furthermore, I’ve started to understand that the resolute permanence on which my worldview was built is evanescent anyway.  The trees are too heavy now.  Maybe they were never real, though that I don’t dwell there.  That they are not now is what matters.

And so into midlife I walk, trying, every single day, to let go of those illusions of certainty.  To release my hold on the tree branches that so effectively sheltered me for many years.  What is left is the open air, something ineffable and beyond logic: the deep trust that something will catch me, keep me from harm.  Trying to have faith in what I cannot hold.  In a contradictory way the more effort I exert here the more this elusive faith evades me.  So, yet another truth of right now: it is in loosening my grip that safety lives.

Once again I will remember that life itself lives in the open air, in the surprising buoyancy of the trapeze, in the untrammelled, unasked-for joy in my children’s smiles, in the startling incadescence of a blaze of light in the cloudy sky.  Life is in the design so vast it cannot be seen up close.  Life is in the space that dwells beyond the power of my rational mind; it cannot be categorized and beaten into submission by the intellect. It is as insubstantial and essential as air.

I will remember that I must give myself over to that which I can neither hold nor understand.