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.

All my Beginners are gone

It is most certainly the end of the beginning.

I don’t have a Beginner anymore. And I no longer have both children in the Morse Building, where the very youngest children are. Sob. Gracie moves up to 2nd grade in September, for which I have to drop her off at the gate. And Whit goes to kindergarten. How is this possible?

Last night Whit decided he wanted to write a note to his beloved teacher. He told me what he wanted to write, I dictated the letters for each word, and he wrote them. Spidery, and all over the page, but legible. He wrote: “Christina. Teddy (her dog). I love u. Whit.”

This morning at the closing ceremony we clapped for all of the Morse Building teachers, as the principal called them each by name, and my eyes of course welled up with tears. I feel such intense gratitude towards these people who have taken such great care of my children, whose love and attention and wisdom and intelligence has so wildly benefited Grace and Whit.

And then I really lost it when Grace’s class sang the song that the 1st grade sings every year at the closing ceremonies. It’s about how it is “time to go” and I just sat there, camera in my lap, unable to take pictures because I was unabashedly crying. I could see Grace watching me, aware of my tears, and she gave me a small wave once their song was over. Once again, my daughter taking care of me. Oh, she should not have to be the grown-up. At least not yet. I thought about last year, when at this same ceremony she held my hand walking out and whispered to me, “Mummy, your sunglasses aren’t fooling anyone.”

I feel as though the ferris wheel of life has turned another revolution, and it is spinning so fast I can’t quite catch my breath. I am aware that the days that Grace and Whit will want to hold my hand tightly on this ride are numbered. And that makes me ache. Ache for all the squandered hours, for the nights that slipped away in a blur of Star Wars and Harry Potter without my really truly appreciating them. Ache for the drop-offs that I didn’t cherish, ache for the hundreds of mornings that the children trailed me into Starbucks and stood with me in line, ache for the hug and kiss that Grace gave me each morning before vanishing into her classroom, ache for Whit squirming in my arms as I tried to get him to read the “morning message” with me. Ache for the red folder of work that Grace brought home every Sunday which I sometimes only cursorily glanced through. Ache for the Sundays that I didn’t take the time to help Whit pick an item for the “letter of the week” (though I remain proud of the ice cube in a ziploc he brought in for “I,” which hung, a forlorn baggie of water, all week on the wall).

All those days are gone now.

All my Beginners are gone now.

A foreign and familiar terrain

Grace had two friends over after school today. They were rowdy, and I may have possibly raised my voice just a wee bit. They were just being excitable seven year olds. But our house is small and they were rambunctious and I was annoyed. Anyway, I let Grace have it. She knew I was not pleased with her behavior.

We then went to school for the end-of-year picnic dinner. Just as the pizza arrived a massive thunder and lightning storm began. It was absolutely pouring. Grace found a different friend and they ran around in the rain. When her friend slipped and skinned her knee badly, Grace came streaking through the rain to find her friend’s mother and me. When the three of them – Grace, her friend, and my friend (the friend’s mother) reappeared in the school building, Grace had a plan. She took her friend’s mother to find a bandaid (which she knew the location of), leaving her friend with me. Later, my friend told me – in front of Grace – how well she felt Grace had handled the situation and I could see my daughter swell up with pride.

As I was tucking Grace in tonight, she was uncharacteristically quiet. “What’s up, Gracie?” I asked her as I rubbed her back. She looked at me, fixing me with her gaze. “Well, Mummy, you know I’m always trying to be good, right?” I looked back at her, feeling vertigo as I stared into her eyes, my own eyes (one of the very few physical characteristics, along with her cleft chin, that she inherited from me). I had a flashing moment of intense identification, that experience where my own child self and my daughter simultaneously collapse into one and burst into a million kaleidoscopic fragments.

My heart broke a little. I leaned down and kissed her forehead, stroking her hair back as I did so. “You don’t always have to be good, Gracie. I love you no matter what.” I whispered that I was incredibly proud of how she had handled the situation with her friend, that she was a good friend, and that that mattered most of all. And then I said again, helplessly repeating myself, “I love you no matter what. You are good just by being you.” How to do this right? How to make her know that she doesn’t have to please me – and everybody else around her – to be loved and worthy?

Oh I am heavy tonight, thinking about this terrain, so familiar to me and yet so foreign at the same time. How different the perspective is when I’m watching someone else embark on it, rather than doing so myself. I want so desperately to walk these hills with her in a way that helps her know how deeply loved she is, and how fundamentally valuable, worthy, and love-able she is, just by being herself. I’m afraid I’m already doing it wrong. The sky has cleared tonight but there’s thunder and lightning in my heart. How do I help someone who is so much like me grow into herself without falling into all of the same painful ruts?

porous, Fix You, and simply witnessing another

I listened to Fix You by Coldplay on repeat yesterday morning on my commute to work. It was my second to last day in the office, and my fear of change is really taking root. As I’ve written before, I’m not good at change. I’m especially not good at endings, which feel like they’re piling up right now. I know intellectually that what lies ahead is going to be good, but emotionally I’m still fearful. Because of this I’m in a state even more porous than usual, reflective, melancholy, thoughtful.

I listened to Fix You, over and over, remembering a post I’d written about it last summer. I thought about the notion of being fixed, of needing to be fixed in the first place. I remembered Bindu Wiles’ beautiful post that asserted, in no uncertain terms that constructive critiscim … is a scam. I recalled Kelly Diels’ powerful essay about how we are not put on earth as a corrective action. And I thought about how the idea of wanting to fix someone implies unavoidably that they are broken.

I find myself returning to one of Kelly’s sentences: I am going to meet you where you are. I am not going to try to force you into what I think you should be; instead, I am going to witness you as you are. I am going to try to remember that people are who they are mostly because that is who they are, not because of anything to do with me. I am going to try harder to accept the light and the dark that exists inside everyone – most of all, myself – because to do otherwise is frustrating for me and hurtful for them.

I wonder, though, where the line is between useful, productive self-improvement and accepting the self. I know few things better than that expansive, hopeful feeling of: yes, that is a good point, thank you for seeing me so clearly, let me do a better job with X and Y. I’m not saying we should not listen to others’ input and strive to be better and more mature. In fact I think “self-acceptance” can often be code for not trying to overcome our flaws or redirect bad patterns of behavior. And I know I have learned things from others that have essentially changed how I think about myself and the world – for the better. But how to remain open to this while retaining a fundamental commitment to my self-worth? That is the tension I don’t quite know how to navigate.

One of the myriad reasons I read is to learn about people seeing, knowing, and loving others for their fundamental truth. One of my favorite stories about this is The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book that is, to me, a beautiful meditation on accepting people for who they are, limitations and all. It is about loving someone and being willing to embrace all of the things about them that make them who they are, even the uncomfortable and inconvenient ones.

I suppose, really, all of this focus on relationships with others is just a prelude to working on the relationship with self. As Jung said, the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Maybe my working to accept others fully, to honor their complexities, is a first step towards offering myself that kind of forgiveness and love. Not an easy thing for me to do. I am as bad as the next person at clinging to my hopes of how someone else will react to me, of stubbornly wanting them to behave a certain way, rather than simply meeting them where they are. I realize what this implies in terms of my expectations of myself.

Maybe this time of flux, when it feels like the ground beneath my feet is heaving around, is the perfect time to address some of these challenges. I feel reminded, in a visceral way, of the fact that I am simply not in control of the world around me. May this serve as a reminder also that I am not in control of other people either.

It is, really, very simple. Compassion. Remembering that people are, mostly, doing their best. That behavior that hurts and stings me usually comes from somewhere deep in the other person that has nothing to do with me (I know, shocker, right?). In many cases, in fact, I should feel privileged to be exposed to the molten core of all that is unresolved and difficult for another person. And perhaps I can turn some of that gentleness onto myself. And see that maybe, just maybe, I don’t need fixing myself.

Earthquake of the soul

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am terrible with endings. Equally terrible with change. The school year draws to a close, the air fills with humidity and the thick, sweet smells of spring moving into summer, and I start to cry. This isn’t even the “end of the beginning” anymore – we are well past that now. My baby is graduating from Beginners. My older child is moving out of the very youngest building at school. Sob. I am already aware of how few days are left in this school year, and I wake each morning with a tangible sense of loss hanging on the horizon of my awareness.

But this year, along with the traditional end-of-school year melancholy, there are other things ending. Our beloved nanny of 5 1/2 years, who joined us right when Whit was born, is leaving. This is her last week. I am leaving the job I’ve been at for 3 1/2 years. I will have the summer without work for the first time in 10 years. There are numerous tiny ways in which I feel like the life I know is about to shift irrevocably, and I do not have steady footing for this ride. The terrain of my life is beginning to move around, I suspect there is an earthquake coming, and I don’t know what to do to keep myself safe. Where is the doorframe, in which you are supposed to seek stability, in an earthquake of the soul?

My parents are sailors. Growing up on boats I encountered my share of those frayed, brittle lines whose protruding roughness can cut your hands. You grab them wrong and you can wind up with a sliver of fiberglass embedded in your palm. That’s how this feels right now: all of these losses, all of these endings, are wound together in a knotty rope whose power is undeniable but whose touch on my hand stings badly. I don’t even want that rope near me, but I can’t get away from it.

These changes flicker at the edges of all of my hours now, and like flames eating a piece of paper they consume them from the outside in. I don’t know how much is left in the middle, so voraciously do these endings seem to take over my thoughts, my feelings, my very life. I know intellectually that the anticipation of a change has often been worse than the reality for me, but this knowledge cannot possible compete with the roaring fear in my spirit. And so I go out into the glorious spring day, trying to keep my hands from being cut by the rope I cannot avoid, trying to keep my eyes on what is in front of me, trying to keep my heart from leaping out of my chest. It’s not simple, this part, for me.