oh this is hard

Prayer flags

When I’m at home I almost always run the same loop.  A creature of habit through and through, I am.  The route takes me past the used bookstore that I used to go to as a kid with my sister and father, past a kid-friendly restaurant where I ate when both of my children were small, and past a front porch festooned with prayer flags.

It’s those prayer flags that are on my mind today.  They are tattered from from being whipped around by the wind, bleached out from the sun and rain.  Yet every day they recommit to the same task, snapping around according to the wind’s whimsy.  Even with their faded, worn-out fabric they continue to transmit their hopes, their prayers, to the world.

I feel similarly buffeted by the wind, likewise faded from the elements.  It’s been, as I’ve written, a summer full of wind and sunshine, memories and joyful moments, but also one that has bruised my heart and made me feel tired in a bone-deep way.  The reasons are personal and I’m aware of and sorry for being a broken record.

Still, the prayer flags snap away as their edges fray and their colors fade.  I’m not sure I have the same conviction about my prayers and hopes as do those small squares of colorful fabric, though I wish I did.   I picture them in my mind’s eye, take a deep breath, try to inflate my exhausted heart, and steel myself for more winds ahead.  May I keep waving.

How sheer the veil is between this life and another

Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new.

M died last night. She was 39 and left two children in their early teens. It was entirely unexpected.

I feel sad today, for her, for her family, for the abrupt loss of someone who had so much ahead of her. I feel as though something chilly has brushed past me in the dark, something I can’t see but something I can feel. Yesterday, I spoke to her. Today, she is gone. Where? My mind still struggles with this truth, which is maddeningly abstract and painfully concrete at the same time.

I also feel keenly, shiveringly aware of how close we all tread to the line of our worst nightmares every single day. The yawning terror of what might be, of that we most dread, exists just off to the side of our lives, and though we skirt it and forget it it still threatens. We live on the precipice, walk on a tightrope, exist in a world where the boundary between normal and tragedy is far more gossamer and fragile than we ever let ourselves imagine.

Death has actually been on my mind since my Aunt E’s funeral, actually, and since a dear friend lost his mother unexpectedly in July. As I sat in the pew at my aunt’s memorial service, I thought about how there are many more funerals ahead of me than behind me. And when my friend’s mother died I had an eerie sense of what is to come as the generations fold and my peers and I take our place at the head of the line. Both of these thoughts give me goosebumps, and not in a good way.

I’m sorry for this not-at-all-upbeat post. It seems incongruous, as I sit here on vacation, waiting to pick my boisterous, tired, and sunburned children up from the bus that bears them back from summer camp. But that is the point, I guess: to remember, always, how sheer the veil is between this life and another, between good news and terrible, between just another regular day and the day it all grinds to a halt.

There’s only one way to honor those who have stepped through this veil, one way to turn this tragic reality that flickers at the edges of our experience: to use the awareness of what might be, and of the proximity of the chasm, to heighten our awareness and celebration of the days that we remain safe. To remember, always, those trite sayings that are also so achingly true: today is all we have. Seize it. Take nothing for granted.

I’ll be hugging these two extra hard when they get off the bus today.

No one gets wise enough to truly understand the heart of another

I was at BlogHer this past weekend. Honestly, the weekend was kind of underwhelming, but I don’t want to go into that here. What is on my mind is the reaction that several of the people I was most excited to meet had to me. I’ve heard more than once since the weekend that people were disappointed in me and that I didn’t seem to be the “same person” as on my blog. This from people who never actually talked to me.

How did I feel this weekend? Lonely. Awkward. Intimidated. As though nobody really wanted to talk to me. Not invited to lots of various events. And then, surprised by the reaction I heard about after the fact (and sensed in the moment). Startled that anyone who reads my blog expected that I would be outgoing, confident, and self-assured in person. I feel upset at my own inability to convey how I actually feel. I can try harder, and I will, but I worry that the enormous difference between how I feel and how I seem represents some deep and fundamental lack on my part.

The thing is, my words and writing here do represent the authentic me. This is the place where I really AM open and true. So to know me here is actually to know the contents of my mind and heart. I’ve heard from more than a few acquaintances, from all phases of my life, who stumbled on this blog, and every single one noted that knowing me in passing they never knew I thought about this stuff. This is the real me, and I’m struggling to inhabit her in my day to day life. Not the other way around.

I am lost, again, in the whitewater that fills the perilous lacuna between perception and reality. I feel disheartened to have alienated people who have come to mean a lot to me in this space. And I feel frustrated by the speed with which people seem to jump to conclusions about me. Disappointed in myself for a few assumptions I made, too.

We should not presume to walk the terrain of the hearts of others without guidance. We stumble on our own paths, so how can we imagine that we would be able to navigate those of others without finding surprising contours, confusing switchbacks, darkness and light that flicker and disorient us? This is true even for those we know best, and it is certainly true for those with whom we have limited interaction and small amounts of information.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to truly understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our lives to try.
– Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

I think this is easy to forget. It is easy to assume, to conclude, to extrapolate from tiny experiences and infinitessimal indicators. Let’s not. I recommit myself to remaining open, and I urge you all to do the same thing. In the meantime I promise and swear that any lack of warmth perceived this weekend was about my own insecurity and awkwardness and nothing else, but I am still sorry if I caused any hurt.

On being mothered

I love Kelly Rae Roberts’s post on being mothered, mothering, and becoming who we are meant to be. She writes beautifully about her own journey towards motherhood, the heartfelt progress of which I’ve enjoyed following. But the part that I’ve been thinking today is her reflection that ” i am mothered by so many people and friends in my life and that i soak in these moments as my favorite moments.” She writes about how she can’t get enough nurturing and mothering lately and that she is trying to “be present for these offerings” rather than dismissing them, as she might have in the past.

Kelly’s words summon two strong feelings for me: a familiar and tinged-with-sadness awareness that I feel a similar need for support now, and a deep gratitude for the people in my life who have provided the nurturing friendship she describes.

I relate intensely to Kelly’s description of a heightened sense of wanting to be taken care of. What I don’t understand is why.

I’ve been focusing this summer on my mothering, trying to be as engaged as I can be with my children. I’ve been trying to offer them special experiences some of which I hope will become the glittering gems of memory that stud our recollection of certain times in our lives (in this case, their childhoods). Despite all of this summer’s joyful adventures, though, I’m struggling. I ache to be nurtured, for the kind of gentle witness and patient holding that Kelly describes receiving from her friends on a weekend away. It’s easy to assume that I am tapped out from the effort of this active mothering, drained, but I know that interpretation is simplistic, and that the weather inside of me has a more complex source.

Some of this is just my baseline, and reflects both my persistent difficulty in receiving help and my discomfort with true vulnerability. But more than ever, I find myself feeling lonely, and un-seen, un-known, and I am unsure about the rising volume of this need. As I change and grow, are some of those sources of support I counted on the most falling away? Am I walking through a valley that I need to cross alone, before reentering a more comfortable, familiar world?

Though I am in a fallow period, on a lonely passage, I still feel tremendously thankful for the people in my life who do support and take care of me. My parents (and let me be clear that when I talk about being “mothered” I speak about that broadly, Mum, I am not speaking about you!), my sister, and some very special friends, the native speakers of whom I have spoken before. This small group of people, a handful or fewer, have made me feel not alone and not crazy more times than I can count. I am deeply grateful for their patience with me, who can be so difficult and dark.

I recognize this as a time of transition, so perhaps this sensation of chill is just that my native speakers are changing, new teachers emerging. My deep longing for nurturing likely has almost nothing to do with those people doing the supporting and everything to do with me. I am so very raw right now, for reasons both known and unknown to me, and I guess it makes sense that this is accompanied with a persistent sense of being alone. And I am acutely aware of the tremendous gifts that this rawness and sensitivity brings with it; I can feel them showering over me, even on my sad days.

In the midst of this ache for being known, which rises and falls from potent to vague, I still feel certain that I am headed in the right direction. Even in the darkest moments there is a shimmer of truth and of calm that is new. I am, I know, becoming who I am meant to be. I cling to this, and hold it close as evidence that this too will pass. It always does. “That is life’s greatest sorrow and greatest solace. It goes on.” (Mary Pipher, Seeking Peace)

The struggle and the beauty

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. It rises more slowly, over time, asserting itself in memory rather than in the vivid moment. The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.