oh this is hard

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.

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.