oh this is hard

An endless alleluia and a constant goodbye

I know I write all the time about the powerful and perilous ways that Grace reminds me of myself, about how she seems to have a core of sensitivity, emotion, insecurity, and sentimentality running through her that I intimately recognize. Similarly, I’ve written before of Whit’s predilection towards lightness, his surprising humor, his lack of instinctive subservience to authority. I wouldn’t blame any of you for feeling I’m a one-note violin on this score.

Never let it be said, however, that these children rest in their neat categories. Tonight, after reading several pages of Star Wars Heroes (another post: the Jedi emphasis on controlling your emotions – I’m fascinated that this may be taking real hold of the minds of our young boys, given the wild passion for Star Wars), I tucked Whit into bed. He was unusually clingy, consenting to snuggle in my lap while I rocked him, listening to a lullabye, a tradition that is all but gone now. I kissed him good night and went downstairs to read Harry Potter to Grace.

A page or two into the terrifying scene at the Quidditch World Cup where the Dark Mark hovers over the eerie forest (Grace: “Mummy! I’m scared! Can I hold on?” = her gripping my upper arm with two hands, so hard she left white finger marks) I heard Whit’s door open and his snuffling, tearful voice. “Mummy?” he called plaintively. “Yes, Whit?” “I’m sad.” I asked Grace if it was OK for me to go check on her brother and (surprisingly) she agreed easily.

Whit was in the bathroom. Looking at the floor, he kicked at the tile by the tub idly. He said, without looking at me, “I don’t want to talk about it.” “Oh, Whit, please?” He looked at me and dissolved into more tears. I picked him up and carried him back to the rocker. He was limp in my arms, his tearful face nestled wetly against my neck.

“Whitty, what’s wrong?” He was crying hard, speaking in short bursts between his hiccupy sobs. “I don’t want to be a kid, Mummy. It’s hard to be a kid.” “I know, sweetheart, I know.” “Mummy, I want to be a baby still.” We launched into a fairly detailed conversation about how he didn’t want to grow up and it was all going too fast and he wanted to still be a baby and be carried around. I was somewhere between shocked and blown away. Has he been reading my blog? Reading my mind?

Grace tiptoed into Whit’s room and he let her come over and stroke his hair back from his forehead. He looked right at her and told her why he was sad. “Oh, Whit, I know that feeling. I get sad about that too,” she said sincerely. What? Do my children feel the same contraction and expansion in their chests that I do, that same echoing sadness that seems to pulse with the closing of each moment?

I thought about how their bodies seem to be longer and leaner every single day; a similar growth must be happening in their hearts and spirits. That growth, sudden, overwhelming, must be scary and disorienting. I thought fiercely: I always want them to be able to talk to me about this.

Blinking back my own tears, I took the children on a quick tour through their babyhoods. I showed them the tiny hats they had each worn in the hospital, the doll-sized newborn diapers (I saved a couple of clean ones), the plastic bracelet I wore during each labor & delivery stay. Whit dug deep into his sock drawer to unearth a pair of 3-6 month socks with robots all over them. “These were mine, right, Mummy?” he asked urgently. He wore them to bed tonight.

We then went to the family room and leafed through the two photo albums that covered the first nine months of Whit’s life. He alternated between giggling and crying as we pored over the pictures. One in particular, of him lying on the floor, curled up, asleep, still a newborn, he exclaimed, “I think that’s on this very rug, Mummy!” He was right. He looked at the rug with an expression in his eyes that I recognized deeply: this place, here, was there, then, and it’s here now, and it’s the same and yet not… where did that moment go? Is it here? How could it not be here?

We talked some about how it is normal to feel sad sometimes about things that are over. About how it is hard to be a kid. Also, about the things that they can do now that they couldn’t when they were babies (Storyland, playdates, pizza, scootering, TV). Whit wisely said, “But I didn’t know about those things then, so I didn’t care that I couldn’t do them.” Hard to argue with that.

I finally got both my children settled and on their way to sleep, but now I sit here, lost in memories of those years of new babies and new horizons. I was a different person then, something I was reminded of when I saw the pictures with Whit as a newborn. I’m aware, as I am often, of the ways that minutes and hours and days add up to years, but with very irregular contents. The days stretch like taffy, sagging in the middle, the moments crystallize like glittering gems, the years pile up haphazardly, and what is built is a life.

Parenting – life itself! – is an endless alleluia* and a constant goodbye.

And, I am 100% biased, but I admit that tonight’s little exercise reminded me of how utterly adorable I thought Whit was as a baby.



*attribution to Newman and Hank for the best Christmas card message ever.

Originally written in June 2010

Moment of truth by the tub

On our last day in Sanibel, Grace and Whit were horsing around in the pool. She dunked him aggressively and he was very upset. My mother immediately reprimanded her, asking her to get out of the pool for a few minutes. Grace, in classic form, dissolved into tears. She sat on a chair by the pool, wrapped in a towel, hot pink goggles pushed up onto her forehead, forlorn and in full-blown pout mode.

Finally I asked her to come back to the condo with me and we walked, hand-in-hand but in silence, through the parking lot. She was sniffling and, I could tell, making a real effort to calm herself down. Often she asks for “deep breaths,” where she sits on my lap or we hug and take deep breaths together – this has been effective but I am now thinking she needs to figure out how to calm herself down without me. Anyway, she was trying hard and I could tell.

We got to the condo and I turned on the tub for her, because she was freezing and her purple lips were chattering. As she stood in the bathroom, naked and shivering, I looked at her suddenly all-grown-up body. She is so tall now she comes up to almost my chest. She seems startlingly unfamiliar, lean and lanky, with endless limbs, though I can still see that faint birthmark, more texture than color, on her left hip. I remember noticing that birthmark for the first time when she was mere days old.

She turned to me and I could see she was still crying. Overcome with identification and empathy, I crouched down in front of Grace, realizing that she is at that awkward height where standing I’m too tall but crouching I’m too small. I looked up at her tremulous face. “Gracie?” she looked at me, a tear spilling over her right eyelid onto her cheek. “It’s hard to be the older one, I know. Isn’t it?” she nodded at me. “I was that, Grace. I know. Everybody expects you to be grown up all the time. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

Her face just crumpled. She leaned into me, hugging me awkwardly as she was now taller than I was. “It’s so hard, Mummy. Sometimes I just get carried away and I lose control,” she choked on her words, crying hard now. I pushed her away only so that I could look her in the eye. “I know, Gracie. I know,” I said, firmly, “sometimes what you feel is really strong, isn’t it?” She nodded mutely, tears flooding down her face. “I know, love, I know.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I folded her body, all angles and long, skinny bones into my arms. We stayed like that for a long moment until she broke the embrace, wiping her eyes. She looked at me and I could tell she felt embarassed. “Grace.” I looked at her, almost sternly. “I know. And I know what a good, good girl you are, and how hard you try. I know. I promise. And I can tell you that your feelings, for the rest of your life, will be really strong. I still feel like I lose control sometimes. And it’s scary.”

She stared at me, a combination of fear and thanks in her eyes, and I could see how much she wanted to believe that I was being sincere. I think we both felt we’d revealed a lot, so she stepped into the tub and we moved on to other matters, but something essential happened in that bathroom. I saw a young version of myself and she saw that the strength of her emotions was going to be a lifelong battle. Yes, Gracie, I know what it is to feel out of control. I know what it is to feel pressure to be the “good one” and to do as others want you to do. I know all of those things. I wish I could teach you how to stop those feelings, but i can’t. I honestly have no idea. I wish I did.

Retrospective repost from March 2010

Moving towards the solstice

We are moving towards the solstice.  In only a few days the world begins its slow revolution back towards the light.  And yet, even with that knowledge, this feels like a complicated, dark time.  There are so many feelings tangled inside of me.  In the last two days two of my very best friends lost a grandparent (and one of those was my almost-grandmother who went along with my other-mother, who has also passed away).  Our Christmas plans have substantially changed to accomodate the illness of a family member, which is unnerving and scary.  Grace continues to be challenged by things that I know I’ve personally handed down to her.

Days of feet slipping on ice, of progress made haltingly, if at all.  And there is so much here I still do not understand.

If I could make sense of how my life is tangled with dead weeds, thistles, enormous burdocks, burdens … Life today contains already its share of ghosts, woven through my experience, and I know there will only be more.  The folding of the generations is happening before my eyes, and my peers and I stand up to take our place as the robust center of families, step into the middle place.  Many of us have learned to say yes, and learned to say no, and learned to say hello.  Now we learn to say goodbye.  Of course these lessons happen out of order for some, painfully, but for me they are unspooling conventionally.

I am trying to hold in one steady glance all the parts of my life. And I never knew this would be so hard.  This is a lesson of midlife, this holding of paradox, this acknowledgement that containing multitudes makes me, instead of inconsistent, a mature adult.  The gaze that contains all of these divergent and, occasionally, more problematically, contradictory truths hardly feels steady, though.  It feels thready, weak, throbbing with an erratic pulse.

To ease the hold of the past upon my life. Along with letting go of my sometimes-frenetic focus on the future, this is another of my central tasks now.  To embrace memory, to own the girl I was, to know that all of those versions of me exist inside me still, but to trust that a lighter grip is enough.

We continue spinning.  Spinning and spinning, returning again to the same motifs and metaphors as we strive to understand our experience, to the same people and places as we mine our memories, to the same truths about who we are.  Just as the earth spins on its axis so too do our lives spin, linear progress becoming less relevant as we understand more and more the fluid and cyclical nature of what really matters.  The seasons beat forward and so do we, trusting that the light will come back, that the work of our lives is no more and no less than this: surrendering to the rotation.

The texture that discomfort brings

Big Little Wolf wrote beautifully yesterday about home. In her trademark eloquent prose she wrote about the consequences when “home” shifts, the difficulty of feeling really at home in a place or with a person, what it means to be homeless, whether or not you can “go home again.”  Then I read Christa’s thoughtful post based on Ram Dass’s observation that “we are all just walking each other home” which reminded me of how “home” is both fluid and complicated for me.

I’ve written before about my stubborn sense of not really belonging. Big Little Wolf’s words accessed this same seam of feeling, reminded me of my feeling of having a foot in many words but a home in none. This feeling runs deep in my soul, and always makes me sad when it bubbles to the surface. It animates many of my actions and habits.

There is no point in wallowing in it, that much I do know. And today I am interested in its source. Where does my persistent feeling of not really fitting in come from? It would be easy to point fingers at my nomadic childhood (I lived in three countries by the age of 12 and moved consistently across an ocean every 4-5 years). But I think that is an overly simplistic answer. My slippery but inescapable sense of being outside rather than in is more fundamental than that. I think the restlessness of spirit that keeps me from fully engaging in any one world, from fully embracing a single identity is innate. It courses through my bloodstream as surely as platelets and plasma.

Is it some kind of defense mechanism? Why is it that I refuse to fully let go and surrender to one clearly-defined life? What am I afraid of? Of being seen? I write all the time about the human need to be seen, but I wonder if I’m actually afraid of the vulnerability that goes with this kind of being known. If I skip around between worlds, never fully engaging in or identifying with one, do I hope to innoculate myself from this scary vulnerability? Am I scared of what someone who really sees me will see?

Or is it a basic unease in my own skin? For some reason that I cannot articulate yet, maybe I am not wholly sure of where I fit because I am not entirely sure who I am yet. Maybe I have met so few native speakers because I am still fumbling around with my own language. I do like people, and I am lucky to have many friends; the fact remains, though, that there are very few with whom I feel truly at home.

The shadow of this discomfort about belonging follows me around, its size and darkness varying by the day. It feels like the oblong shadow of a balloon floating above me whose string keeps changing length; some days it is far ahead of me, and I walk in light, and at other times it is positioned just right so that my entire face is obscured by the penumbra.

It makes me oversensitive and insecure, for sure, but I think it also makes me empathetic. I am hyper-aware of other peoples’ comfort or discomfort in situations. I am compassionate and identify with those who do not belong. I also have a faint but undeniable suspicion towards those who exhibit an easy sense of belonging. Are they real?

This sense of not being fully at home anywhere is so essential to my being in this world that I can’t imagine a more secure and simple feeling of belonging. It is ingrained in my spirit, and it colors the lens through which I see and experience everything. In this holy season of darkness and light, may I turn my empathy and compassion on to myself. My vague discomfort in any single home rises like pentimento from underneath of the painting of every day, regardless of how beautiful the scene I manage to draw. May I forgive myself for this, and may I embrace it for the texture that it brings to the art that is my life.

(a repost from exactly a year ago… Christa’s post based on Ram Dass’s wonderful quote made me think about this again)

The internal ocean

I read Katrina’s beautiful words about the unclear, uncertain path that is writing last night and my tears fell freely.  Not eyes welling up with tears.  No, these were tears rolling down my faces, unabashed.  Full-fledged crying.  I wiped my face with the sleeves of my tee shirt but I couldn’t keep up.  Tears fell onto the pages of my friend Tracy’s essay, which I was reading for my writing group.

When I pulled myself together enough to look back down at Tracy’s work the page was speckled with the splotches of darkness where my fat tears had fallen.  A few words were blurred with the wetness.

I thought about how often tears blur things for me.  They blur my vision when my eyes fill with tears for the unexpected, unanticipated reasons that each day – each hour – seems to offer up.  They blur words on the page, either literally, as today, or as I read, when the writing of others, in blogs or books, moves me to tears.  This happens daily too.

I cry every single day.  And those tears cause a blurring at the edges, literally and figuratively, of my life.  My world suddenly swims; all at once my view of the light on trees, or the black and white words of a sentence, or the expression on Whit’s face dissolves into a swirl of wet saltwater emotion.

Last year, the tears blurred the white lights on our Christmas tree into streaks of light in a dark room.  This happened in a moment when I felt the presence of something far greater than myself.  This is a moment I’ve come back to again and again in my head, a moment when I instinctively assumed the posture of prayer, when I felt “infinitely big and infinitesimally small at the same time.”  What I don’t know is whether the blurring was a result or a cause of that fleeting, powerful feeling.

There are so many tears in my life.  Just as I return to the sea for my metaphors and my meaning, I cry an ocean from my very own eyes.   The ocean is inside of me as surely as it is outside.  Maybe this internal ocean has something to teach me.  Let me learn to sit with it and learn from what I see in the blur.