oh this is hard

Om Nama Shivaya

Last night in yoga class the teacher (wonderful, jivamukti-trained Alanna) spent a while talking about sound, vibrations, e=mc2, listening, and being open to the universe. She asked us to think about someone who could benefit from our being more present, from our listening more carefully. I thought immediately of Grace. No hesitation: her little face with tangly hair falling in her eyes popped into my head.

At the end of practice Alanna turned the lights off and did a little bit of singing with the room lit only by candles. I would not normally describe this as my thing, but somehow I was porous to it last night and found it very moving. We did a call-and-response chant of Om Nama Shivaya (again, not my thing, but Alanna was singing it rather than chanting it, with acoustic guitar accompaniment … really just a hop away from some of my favorite music!). She asked us to put our hands over our heart and to think of the person we had dedicated our practice to. Tears streamed down my face as I imagined Gracie sitting next to me. My awareness of my own limitations was a physical ache, and I felt the desperate desire to be a more present, patient mother for her running through my veins in a visceral way.

I was reminded, then, of an experience I had while pregnant with Grace. When I remembered it I can’t believe I’ve spent so many hours whining about how her name was going to be Eloise. I was 20 weeks pregnant and at a new prenatal yoga class (that I actually never returned to, because there was a little too much breathing through our chakras and not enough downward dog). After a long shivasana, the instructor asked us to “go inside” (what does this mean, really?) and to “feel our baby” (and yes, I rolled my eyes here). We were supposed to listen for a single word, a message from our child, and to share it with the room. I was skeptical and, frankly, trying to figure out how I could leave the room without getting busted. And then this happened: a voice in my head said, clearly, “grace.” Her name has always been Grace.

Incidentally, these two experiences, separated by a wide gulf of years and many, many not-very-spiritual moments, make me think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk. Yes, I am biased, because I love Elizabeth Gilbert. But still. I find her premise fascinating, and compelling: that creativity should be thought of as an external force that visits us (with frustrating inconsistency) rather than something inherent to an individual. This, she posits, is a way to release some of the pressure to be inspired every single day. She also supports her theory with interesting data points from Big Name Philosophers.

This notion is central to a Philip Pullman’s extraordinary trilogy, His Dark Materials (which I could not recommend more highly). In Pullman’s beautiful books, both quick, enthralling reads and dense explorations of religion, identity, and the soul, children are accompanied by “daemons,” companions who are an external embodiment of their creativity. When we are children, our daemons shift between the shapes of various animals. As adults, they take a firmer form and settle into their final shape. Pullman seems to be claiming that children are comfortable with the fluidity of creativity and identity, and that as we get older this relationship grows more static, the exchange less easy. I find this idea fascinating and it clearly has the same root as Elizabeth Gilbert’s argument about artistic inspiration and whether its locus is internal or external to the artist himself.

If you agree with Gilbert and Pullman, which I think I do, I guess whatever we believe that spirit is visited me last night. And reminded me, in no uncertain terms, that Gracie deserves better from me.

Instinct vs doubt

Last week, an email popped up in my inbox outlining all of the afterschool activities available at my children’s private school. As I read about karate and hip hop and book club and chess, a familiar anxiety gnawed at me. Once again, I wondered if, in my rabid opposition to over-scheduling I have overcorrected and am depriving my children .

My daughter is allowed one after-school activity a week. My son has only just begun to show interest, but I will offer him the same choice. I remember when Grace was a baby I fretted to the pediatrician that while my friends were at Mommy and Me music, gymnastics, etc, I mostly took my baby to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. He reassured me, “Don’t worry, she just wants to be with you.” Then he said, “you think this is hard now? Wait until she starts asking for activities.” And he was right. Grace is almost seven, and she regularly asks to participate in more afterschool activities than I am prepared to okay. My response, repeated so often if feels like a chant or a hopeful prayer, is that “Different families make different choices.”

My active limiting of my children’s “programming” goes hand in hand with a general philosophy that refuses to build them up into exceptional geniuses. I wonder, again, if this has negative repercussions. Will they doubt that I love them? If adulatory motherhood is now the norm, will I seem cold and not proud in comparison? This could not be further from the truth. I am proud of them every day, with an intensity that continues to amaze me after almost seven years; I am proud watching my son struggle to stay afloat in the swimming pool and watching my daughter painstakingly sound out words in a Berestain Bears book as she resolutely, slowly, learns to read. I don’t think I would describe either of my children exceptional on any dimension, and that does not make me any less proud. In fact it might make me more so. I aspire to raise happy, well-adjusted children who know how to listen to themselves, something I am admittedly weak at myself (it occurs to me that perhaps much of the intensity behind my belief is aspiring to give them something I wish I had more of). I want them to be able to entertain, make choices for, and trust themselves.

But I do feel guilty when I hear other parents talk about their child’s early reading, particularly impressive physical coordination, or early language acquisition. I simply don’t speak of Whit and Grace in those terms. Maybe I should? Am I dooming them to a life of mediocrity by refusing to extol virtues that I don’t really see? Don’t get me wrong: I love my children dearly, and because of that I think they are both downright terrific. I believe, however, that to focus on their exceptional promise and prowess at X or Y is to saddle them with both expectations and limits. I also view a lot of this exceptional-izing as competitive and I simply refuse to parent that way, because it undermines our tremendously strong common purpose: to support our children as best we know how.

But I do find myself wondering whether both my stubborn refusal to let my children fill their free hours with “enriching” activities and my disinclination to laud them as little prodigies is in some way harmful. I fear that I am letting them down by not being more flowery in my praise of them, and yet I keep bumping into my fundamental instincts that point in another direction. Even in an area where I feel relatively confident about my biases, doubt creeps in, mingling with my intuition; perhaps this combination of fear and sureness is the definition of motherhood. Is it driven by anything external, or is it just my own lack of confidence speaking? Is it inescapable, this essential uncertainty? I think it is this insecurity that underlies the comparisons and the effusive, designed-for-public-consumption praise. So for now I’ll keep following the intuition that howls loudly in one ear while trying to answer the doubts that whisper in the other.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters


A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. – Adrienne Rich

Cherish your wilderness. – Maxine Kumin

It’s thesis day around here, clearly, with Anne Sexton this morning and Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin this evening. I know I have both monsters and wilderness in me, and I know I share Sexton’s view that there is nothing uncomplicated about love.

Have been sort of heavy-hearted today, feeling an inarticulate and undefined cloud of vague sadness hovering around my head. I find myself wondering if I am even capable of happiness untouched by this melancholy that is just part of who I am. Actually, I know I’m not. So what I wonder, I guess, is whether I care. Of course this thought exercise is not very practical since I can’t change it, even if I wanted to, but it is interesting.

I am incapable of experiencing joy unlimned with loss. I am always, achingly aware of the imminent farewell that hovers around any happy moment. I am simultaneously in the moment and already grieving its passage. I am a palimpsest whose first layer is one of deep sorrow, and no matter how much paint I apply on top, that orientation towards sadness always shows through. This is okay with me: some of my favorite expressions of beauty, like the deep blue of a hydrangea or the fire of a summer sunset, seem to share, somehow, this underlying sense of joy’s intractable connection with loss.

Despite my endless ruminations, I have actually accepted this part of who I am rather peacefully. I struggle to relate, in fact, to people whose outlook on life is more simply sunny. These people are often a breath of fresh air to me, and a positive influence, but I am fundamentally unable to understand the way they are wired. Surely my life would be simpler if I was able to live my life without preemptively mourning the fact that every day will pass, without dwelling on my inability to capture and hold the things I love most dearly. But it would not be my life. So instead of wishing I was someone else, I will try and try, as summer fades into fall and the world again reminds us so viscerally of loss and time’s passage, to embrace my own complicated, squirrel-like mind.

Less Obvious Free Ranging

LinkI very much like this essay about “free ranging in less obvious ways” on Free Range Kids (an excellent blog I highly recommend). The author, Leah R. Weiss Caruso, discussed the less visible side of free range parenting. She describes a variety of ways that children need to be let to fail in order to learn to pick themselves up.

I could not agree with this more strongly. I have often lamented my own lack of resilence and perhaps as a result of my own insufficiency with this vital trait, I desperately want to help you both develop it. I think this is exactly what letting children fail accomplishes: it develops self-sufficiency and the ability to recover from setbacks.

This is, for me, a tremendous parenting challenge. When I hear Grace and Whit starting to bicker I am quick to jump in, shushing them and asking them to stop fighting. I think what I should probably do is leave the room and assume they will figure it out (hopefully, though not certainly, without an ER visit ensuing).

It is about letting my children be, even when there is conflict between them. It is about letting them lose at games and sports. It is about not shielding them from the world’s ugly and hard edges, not coddling them when things are going to hurt. It is about sticking with rules even when they cause disappointment or, more likely, screaming tantrums. It is, fundamentally, about teaching children that the world – and my world – does not revolve around them. This is a hard lesson to impart, full of discomfort and sadness. But it is also probably the most important thing I can teach Grace and Whit.

Puzzles

What complex, multi-layered animals humans are. I am melancholy tonight, thick in the fog of free-floating sadness that follows me around, hovering nearby and descending regularly to envelop me. Thinking about the legions that are contained in each single person, the layers of emotion, memory, defenses, and biology that make us who we each are.

A fascinating article in the Atlantic describes a study of 268 men for 72 years. The study’s lofty goal is to understand happiness. The article about Vaillant, the originator of the study, makes many salient points – it is long but well worth reading. But the one that stuck with me is the assertion that the key determinant of both personality and happiness is how one responds to challenge. The article is thought-provoking as it describes the array of defense mechanisms available to people. Calling this behavior important is not provocative; claiming it is the most important contributor to whether a life is happy or not is. Other than causing me to feel bleak about my own immaturity, I found myself wondering how much of these defenses are hard-wired, and from where and when. Is it possible to, with hard work and effort, retrain these grooves in our head? If so, how? Can someone teach me?

I find it hard to read the article without suspecting that a lot about how things turn out is somewhat random. Yes, self-awareness is important, and there is much to be learned about how we – and those we love – respond to stress or perceived attack. But some of what happens is just chance, luck, fate. The study also makes crystal clear the notion that you must not assume from someone’s outside what their inside looks like – some of those with the most charmed looking lives are the least happy, and vice versa.

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

We can only scrape the surface of those we know. As I’ve written before, we all leap to conclusions based on the sparsest of information, but in truth we simply cannot know what happens in the head and heart of other people. And how sad it makes me that we all judge so quickly – I myself am just as guilty here as anyone else. All human beings want, I think, is to be known. We all want someone to say to us: I see you. That somehow in being seen – and maybe not until then – we become real.

I believe the highest goal we ought to have for our relationships is to honor the hall of mirrors that we find inside the hearts of those we care about. To see both the beautiful and the ugly and to reflect both back without judgment. Of course this is hard work; how we react to others is, ultimately, about us. And the flip side: to reveal ourselves honestly, without any filters or screens. This is, maybe, harder yet.

For someone who craves clarity and struture as much as I do, who enjoys puzzles and laundry and tetris and all sorts of expressions of creating order out of chaos, this deep and essential unknowability is destabilizing and scary. I must accept that I simply cannot fully understand anyone else and that I cannot be fully known. It may seem inconsistent, but this craving for organization coexists (and may sometimes be masked by) with an exquisite, occasionally irrational sensitivity.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. – Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

When I think of myself, I know how many Lindseys there are. There are many facets to me, and they do not always agree. In fact it is the tension between some of these parts of my heart and head that animates much of this blog. And it is so so rare for me to be in a place or with a person who accesses every layer of me. I think this is the root cause of the vague loneliness that accompanies me everywhere I go, of the haunting sense that I don’t seem to quite fit anywhere. Surely it contributes to my difficulty being present in the moment. Sometimes the loneliness is breathtaking and threatens to swamp me. What will it take for me to feel seen? Known?

Much of the time it is surprisingly easy for me to just fire on one cylinder, to just be one part of me. I hate the ease with which I can be just Mother Lindsey or Professional Lindsey (well she’s pretty JV and doesn’t come out much anymore) or Friend Lindsey or Grew up in Cambridge Lindsey or Princeton Lindsey or etc etc etc. You get the drill. I’ve always held contradictions in my hand, participated in wildly different worlds. But shouldn’t it be harder for me to be just part of me?

It’s as though I am made up of a bunch of little thin slices of a person and have not figured out what the unifying theme is, the way they all work together. Once in a while, in a particular moment (the analogy of finally getting a manual car into gear, the instant transition from jerky to smooth – something I have only done once or twice in my life – comes to mind) or with one of a handful of people I glimpse the unified whole and I think: Yes, oh, okay. I am not crazy. It doesn’t escape me, by the way, that most of the moments when I’ve felt that were with other people and that this implies I cannot find wholeness without a mirror, without being reflected by someone else.

Anne Patchett described this the best way I’ve ever seen in Truth and Beauty: “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

How truly blessed I am to have the handful of friends who speak the same native language. Unfortunately those conversations are the exception, not the rule, so I must learn to live with the tensions that this sense of myself as refracted though a prism creates. Maybe I am just being melodramatic (it wouldn’t be the first time). Maybe this sense of multiple selves, this difficulty identifying entirely with one world, is universal. Maybe it is totally fine and normal. Or maybe it is not. All I know is I struggle with it.

I feel deeply saddened by both my inability to fully understand anyone else and my sense of being very rarely fully known myself. I suppose there is nothing to do other than to be aware of it, to celebrate those few people who do make me feel seen and known, and to ask for their gentleness and empathy as they show or tell me about the morass of things, both flaws and features, that I know they see.