oh this is hard

I just have to run away

Grace has been having some challenges at school lately with friends and belonging.  Last night she dissolved into tears, for no reason at all, and when I asked her if something was on her mind her fears and hurt just spilled out of her.  I sat next to hear, listening, holding her little hand in mine.  I asked who she played with at recess, knowing that the playground, with its Lord of the Flies-esque lack of rules, was often where these issues manifested.  She looked at me, cheeks wet with tears, and said, without hesitating,

“Well, recess is actually okay.  I usually play tag, so I don’t have to worry about anyone else hurting me or being mean.  I just have to run away.”

My own tears rose and, coughing, I excused myself so as not to scare her with the ferocity of my identification, response, empathy.  In the bathroom, door closed, I wept.  For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face.  That kept running through my head.

I know, Gracie, I know, how seductive it is to run away.  Oh, I know.

What if my sensitivity is the road home?

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston

I was thinking this weekend of the universality of sadness, of the inescapable fact that the sunshine of every life is mottled with shadow.  I think the thing that varies is our sensitivity to the shadow.  Some of us are just feel more keenly the loss that is always part of the deal.  Some of us are more prone to shadow than sun.  Some of us have a narrow but deep moat of loneliness around our hearts which is uncrossable by anyone else.

I love Pam Houston’s confident assertion that this awareness of loss lends itself to strength, compassion, and grace.  I spend a lot of time worrying about what I have bequeathed to my children, through example and heredity.  Pam Houston’s words offer a stunning change of perspective and I can imagine – momentarily – that this inheritance is a gift and not a burden.  What if, as Adrienne Rich said, “her wounds came from the same source as her power”?  What if what seems like great weakness is the source of great strength?

I fret about the message I’m sending my children by not hiding from them my occasional sweeping sorrow.  Sure, there are days I act happy when I feel blue.  And of course there are genuinely joyful days, many, many of them.  But there are also days where my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears and when they ask why I explain, quietly, that the world is making me sad.  I just re-read my words about a particularly sad weekend Grace had last winter and cried, again, struck by the fact that already, at seven, she has the self-awareness to say “I’m just sad, Mum.”  Actually it’s more than the awareness that strikes me: she has the propensity to be just sad in the first place, and this is clearly part of the legacy I leave her.  I often feel soggy with guilt about it.

Grace and Whit both witness and inherit my melancholy leanings, though so far Grace exhibits them much more frequently.  I have decided, personally, that to teach them to honor and accept all of their feelings, even the difficult ones, is more important than to put on a happy face all the time.  Of course, I am not sure I’d actually be able to fake it, so it might be convenient to call this a “decision.”  But I do believe that helping my children to recognize their strong emotions, even sadness and anger, is an important thing for me to do.  I also think there is great power in learning that one can be thoroughly tossed around in emotional whitewater and still come out the other side, spluttering, maybe, with sand in your pants, but still, standing.

In fact the words I wrote in July (in my musing on whitewater) seem to echo Pam Houston’s gorgeous lines (though less elegantly):

I know the terms I want to live my life by start with compassion and empathy and kindness, and that they include a deep need to honor the reality, savage and beautiful as it is, of my life.

It makes me sigh with comfort to weave together my own definition of what matters most and Pam Houston’s belief that awareness of loss can contribute to a fully-lived life.  It only comes in passing, this profoundly reassuring sense that my sensitivity, which marks how I approach everything, could be, in fact, my road home.  But in those moments I feel grateful and calm: maybe Grace and Whit can take what they learn from me and use it to be strong, and compassionate, and full of grace.

I do want my children to learn that the best lives are full of love, and that loss is part of the deal – I believe both of those things as firmly as I believe anything.  If I can do anything to help Grace and Whit believe this, through my example, my genetic material, or my direct teaching, then I will have done some good in the world.  Of that I am sure.

Truly remarkable to be seen

I was surprised and pleased by the response I got to Friday’s post, which honestly felt to me like a bit of a cop-out when I wrote it.  “Wrote” being a euphemism, of course, because I did more photo uploading than anything.  No big aha or any insight at all, even.  Just a couple of snapshots – literally, from my iphone – of my ordinary life.

And then Tanya wrote this in her comment:

What you have just managed to do here, and what your readers are clearly connecting with, is that joy is everywhere. And it is a worthwhile exercise to take stock. Now. Not later. Now.

I responded to her and said thank you, that her words made me cry.  And she wrote right back with these words, whose kindness is so tangible I feel it radiating off the page even now:

The way you find the time and space to notice joy IS joy to me. And YOU are joy, because you are love.

And I replied, again, saying “The thing is I’m not really aware of noticing it until people (like you) point it out. Thank you.”  And Tanya, ever wise, ever steady, ever there, answered:

Truly remarkable to be seen, isn’t it?

Yes, yes, it is.  I’ve written about this over and over, I realize.  Some themes just emerge, gradually and of their own volition, from the morass of my writing.  Others come to me in a single flash of awareness, like shook foil or lightning, and they are suddenly so true it’s impossible to imagine living without them. 

Being seen, known, acknowledged is a central desire of mine.  Feeling safe is an aching need, deep inside me, one that I’ve only recently realized has gone largely unmet.  As recently as last week I mused on this: “A critical task of our lives is to truly see those we love for who they are, even when that means accepting that there are mysteries inside of them that we will never understand.  To release them from the cage of what we so desperately want them to be, so that they may flourish into who they are.”

Tanya’s words reminded me of all of this, over again.  I feel so intensely grateful for those few people in this world who have really seen me.  Who have seen me and met me with compassion instead of expectation or an agenda of their own.  Who have seen me in my sometimes-contradictory confusion and recognized it for what it is: the kaleidoscope of a person.  Who have patiently walked beside me, often in silence, as I traverse these roads.

I’m incredibly privileged to have known a handful of these people, and they know who they are.  Thank you.

A mosaic of tiny broken pieces

in and out,

up and down,

over and over.

she wove her strands of life together,

patching hole after hole.

eventually she saw it was more than the threads that gave her strength,

it was in the very act of weaving itself

that she became strong.

-Terri St Cloud

I read this last night on Wholly Jeanne‘s beautiful blog and it jumped off the screen at me.

Yes.  I do this, all day long: I weave, stitch, try to patch the holes.  I am nothing more than a collection of tiny scraps. I often feel overwhelmed by a sense of frantic chaos at my core, often grieve the way I completely lack an animating principle, central passion, or unambiguous direction.  Instead I am a mass of loose ends, a kaleidoscope, a mosaic of tiny broken pieces.  I want so badly for the pieces to make sense, for a meaningful whole to emerge out of the pile of shards.

How deeply reassuring it is to imagine that there might be meaning in the weaving itself.  That it’s not the result but the act.  That even if I don’t ever piece myself into whole cloth – even if the fragments don’t add up to anything – the effort is worth something.  This is a balm.

I don’t feel strong these days, nor whole; I feel broken a lot of the time, and afraid that I am not moving towards the wholeness I so desperately desire.  There are moments when a surpassing calm floats over me, a feeling of peace and sureness in whose embrace I cannot imagine ever doubting again.  But that passes, and I’m back to the self I know so well, to all the jagged pieces, the frayed edges, the endless holes that appear as fast as I can patch them.

What can I do but weave on?

The slow turning forward of my time on earth

I’ve written almost incessantly about my particular struggle to live in the present, about the way my near-constant preoccupation with both yesterday and tomorrow quite often entirely obscures today. On Saturday morning I felt a simultaneous impatience for fall to arrive and a desperate sorrow that summer was ending, and the moment perfectly captured all of this agita: push-pull, hurry-slow, there-here.

There are lots of reasons that I’m this way. I’m just wired that way, sure. I’m sensitive and I cling and I fear farewells and abandonment and things cut me deeply even when they are not about me.

I recently decided, too, a connection might exist between when I was born and my difficulty with living now: I think my late-summer birthday may contribute to my sense of myself as liminal, to the automatic way that I lean forward or back, turn the page sooner than I need to, generally feel frantically unable to just be here now.

I think my childhood of hopscotching across the Atlantic may also be part of this: I was always in constant motion, always either anticipating a goodbye or getting over one.

But something hit me hard this morning. This is true Captain Obvious territory, I realize that even as I write it, but it was insight to me. I was at my parents’ house in Marion, which represents summer to me, sitting still for a moment, windows open. I listened to the cicadas outside (which always remind me of summer nights spent at my father’s parents’ house in Long Island, lying in a narrow twin bed at 90 degrees to Hilary’s, summer wafting in through the screens). I watched the light flicker on the trees and thought of Lacy, whose hair is like mine and of whom the turning-to-fall light always reminds me, and suddenly it occurred to me why it is that I’m so impatient, so forward-focused, so quick to dwell in the past.

It is often simply too painful for me look this moment in the eye. Doing so requires me to accept the loss inherent in every minute of my life. To recognize the red leaf in the green grass is to really live with the fact that summer turns to fall, that life cranks forward and I walk closer and closer to the end of it every day.

Suddenly, this morning, I understood. I’m hurrying into the future and hiding in the past to avoid staring into the sun of my life. To escape the reality that every minute is gone as I live it. To pretend that it’s not true that I can never have any of those moments back, ever. My life’s single most painful truth is the slow turning forward of my time on earth and the inherent loss that that represents.

It hurts to stare into the sun. I blink and my eyes water and sting. But that’s not a reason to hide. I know that in my head, and even in my heart. Making it so is harder, though. The impermanence of this life is truly heartbreaking to me. Every single day contains goodbyes and I find fact the of that nothing less than brutal.

But what is my option? I will be a lucky woman if I have another 36 years ahead of me. May I not squander them in the same fear that so eroded many of the first 36.