oh this is hard

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.

Things whose days are numbered

Things whose days are numbered:

1. The Sweet Dreams Head Rub and Ghostie Dance being enough to assure happy slumber for both kids

2. Sitting on the floor of the gym, a child on my lap, singing our hearts out at the Pre-K, K, and 1st grade holiday sing-a-long at school

3. Whit wearing little briefs printed with robots, dinosaurs, and boats

4. Carrying Whit to bed after taking him to the potty at 10pm.  His legs already dangle alarmingly near my knees

5. Grace happily holding my hand walking down the street

6. Buckling carseats

7. Two children in the bath together

8. Shopping for clothes at Baby Gap

9. Whit picking Goodnight Moon for me to read to him before bed

10. Grace’s sheer wonder at a visit from the tooth fairy

Honestly, the truth of this makes my heart throb.  Makes it ache as though it might split open, like an overripe peach.  How do others handle this, the irrefutable drumbeat march of time?  There’s no question this is my rawest wound.  It is a cord of feeling that vibrates painfully inside me and a shadow that haunts the edges of even the sunniest day.

Adrienne Rich asserts of Marie Curie that “her wounds came from the same source of her power.”  I’m still trying to ascertain exactly how my deep hurt about the impermanence of things might also be a strength.  I am not at all clear on how the source of this  churning well of feeling to which I return again and again could also be a source of power, strength, confidence.

I want my heart to dwell here, in the rooms of my days.  I can only recommit, every single day to trying to remember that, to tugging myself back to now.  I do that even knowing full well my own tendency to mourn an experience even as I’m still in the midst of living it.  I wish I could stop grieving that which will be soon gone, but I’m not sure I can.  Most of our last times happen without us knowing, slipping into the past tense in the narrative of our lives almost unnoticed.  I am more aware than many of this, but even so I fail to mark these transitions all the time.

So, here I go, into the season of white lights and carols, paperwhites and holiday cards, eyes and heart wide open.  This may be the last year that Grace believes in Santa Claus.  May be the last year Whit wears a Baby Gap sweater.  May be the last year they both cite that baking cookies with me is their very favorite thing to do.  More numbered days.  They all are, though, aren’t they?

A foot in two worlds

In September I saw my words in print for the very first time.  The Princeton Alumni Weekly published an essay of mine called “A Foot In Two Worlds.” The essay explores one of my most fundamental and lingering fears, which is that by choosing to work part time and ‘stay home’ part time I’ve in fact done a poor job at both.  By refusing to let go of either “world” I have failed at both.  It is worth noting that I think the bifurcation between “home” and “work” is a bit antiquated, and that that categorization is simplistic and fails to capture what is in most cases a complex dance rather than a binary distinction.  Still, the fact remains that I have chosen to work part-time in business settings since my children were born, and I’m full of doubts about this path.

My friend Lacy wrote me a thoughtful, provocative email yesterday responding to the essay, full of her classic sensitivity and intelligence.  She posited that in fact the point I make isn’t about a choice at all but about being present and really surrendering to whichever experience I’m in at a given time.  And I think she’s right.  After all, I do say this:

I think it’s about my wiring, my frantic restlessness, the way I struggle to be fully engaged in one thing at a time.

I’ve been thinking about Lacy’s comments, and about the distress I feel about my work/home choices are maybe, in fact, a red herring.  Maybe I just regret not really immersing myself in anything, fully, for the last many years.

This summer, being home full-time with Grace and Whit for the first time, was nothing short of a revelation.  My part time schedule meant that I have always been able to do the random Tuesday afternoon birthday parties, and the doctor’s appointments, etc, but the day-in and day-out participation in the mundane details of my children’s lives was new.  It was only when I capitulated to what I might have previously called monotony that the divinity revealed itself.  And now, somehow, the details of this domestic life are newly bright to me.

I hope I can likewise find myself fully present and committed to a professional challenge.  My new job, maybe, a book, maybe, who knows.  I frankly ache to feel in the professional realm the same sort of deep peace, combined with a fundamental opening, that I’ve felt towards my life with my children.

I’ve heard from many readers of my Alumni Weekly piece, and am happy to know that others relate.  I’m sorry, though, that the note that we seem to resonate on is one of malaise, of fundamental restlessness.  I find myself wondering if this is not about the work/life balance mothers are aiming for, but instead about some profound truth about the human condition.  Surely the challenges of working and mothering, of meeting the needs of myriad people, of trying to navigate the choppy waters of identity, personhood, and fulfillment contribute to this sense of frustration and unhappiness.  But maybe they aren’t actually its fundamental source.

I don’t know – I am thinking through this as I write it.  I sense something greater here, in the debate about work/life “balance,” a grander theme.  The topic is fraught and complicated, for sure; Lacy called it “volcanic” and I agree with her.  But the reason it’s so charged, I think, is because it probes at our innermost fears about how we are living our lives.  These fears are projected onto the scrim of professional/personal choices, but I suspect they run even deeper than that.  These fears are about the way we engage with the world and with those we love best, and about the way we spend our only true wealth: our time and our attention.