oh this is hard

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.

A day in the life

See this charming boy delivering flowers to his mother? Oh he was very dear this morning, for about an hour or two. Slept until 8 (after a 5:15 am wakeup crying that I had forgotten to put him to bed – so exhausted was he last night that apparently he blacked out during the extended prayers/ghosts-go-away-dance/repeated requests for water, etc, etc, etc that I did in fact perform).
As you can see by lunchtime things were going downhill precipitously. Whit and Grace played “dog” for a while, including putting Whit’s Halloween costume from 2006 on him (which still, alarmingly, fits). I was making lunch and I could hear her ordering him around upstairs, and I asked, “Gracie? Are you playing dog?” And she answered cheerfully, “Yes! Whit likes this game!” Okay. I had some flashbacks of similar bossing around I did of Hilary – Hils, I’m sorry!
During “quiet time” I just wanted to read my excellent book. The children kept on emerging from their rooms with requests and issues, each one smaller and more ridiculous than the last. I kept getting more and more annoyed. I was reminded of a woman my parents knew when we lived in Paris. Every afternoon she took to her bed to read for a while. During that time she kept a wet washcloth in a basin by her bed. If any of her children ventured into her room, interrupting her reading, she would smack them in the face with a cold, wet washcloth. I thought this was horrifying for a long time and now think it’s somewhat genius (in much the same way “you must be mistaking this for a democracy” has gone from statement that makes me cry to rallying cry)

After quiet time, while Matt played tennis, I took both kids out on their bikes. They wanted to go to the “dog park” which has a big paved circle to ride around. They quickly ditched their bikes in favor of climbing the tree. Whit began to scream randomly at Grace every few seconds. I told him if he yelled again we were leaving. He yelled again. We left. I walked down the street trailing a crying, screaming 4 year old, face red and wet with tears. It was awesome. I gave him one more chance at another playground nearby, which he promptly forfeited by screaming/whining/crying (who knew such a fantastic hybrid existed? oh believe me, it does). I then dragged him by the hand, pulling his bike with the other hand, down the street to the car.

I’d say he conservatively wailed “Mummy!” about 400 times in less than an hour. As I was getting dinner ready and he whined my name yet again I finally snapped on him. “Whit!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, “If you say my name one more time I am going to go absolutely apeshit on you!” He was visibly startled at my screaming (which makes it seem like more of a rarity than it sadly is). But then I could see the little wheels turning and he said, “Mummy?” He continued right through my blowing up, “Argggghhhhh!” asking, “What is apeshit?“

He ate almost nothing at dinner and then screamed some more. Finally he fell into a spellbound stupor in front of Scooby Doo and was asleep in his bed by 7. He regained a little ground with me tonight by choosing “Goodnight Moon” as his bedtime story. Oh that book makes me ache with nostalgia and awareness of how fleeting it all is. Plus now he is sleeping which we all know is my absolute favorite state for children.

Still, not my finest day or his. Am hoping those catlike, land-on-all-fours-after-jumping-from-roof, Darwinesque reflexes kick in tomorrow. The ones where he throws me a bone when I think I can literally take no more. I imagine those of you reading this who are moms know what I mean. After four straight nights of hourly waking he’d suddenly sleep from 10 to 4. After days of screaming (like today), he’ll be an outright charmer for a day or two and make me forget the incessant whining. I chalk it up to sheer survival instinct.

Happiness and sadness as they arise

Be open to your happiness and sadness as they arise. – John M. Thomas

I love this (also yet another sky photograph). As my Landslide post described, happiness and sadness arise for me out of thin air sometimes, swamping like an unanticipated wave. At other times they come up with a steadier drumbeat, reaching a more conventional crescendo.

This is, I believe, one of the major tasks of my life: to learn to ride these various swells and ebbs without fear, to honor each moment as it comes, to trust that sadness will eventually make way to happiness again as firmly as I already know that joy will fade away to melancholy.

And after all, the happiness means nothing without the sadness. That is another of the few things I know for sure. I don’t much care for The Prophet, finding it slightly hackneyed, but one of Gibran’s lines encapsulates this more perfectly than I ever could: The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Gracie girl

Gracie girl,

No matter what, despite my mistakes big and small, spectacular and mundane, I adore you.

I always will.

Stomping around

It has been a difficult parenting week for me. Grace and I have been at each other’s throats, each crying on and off and yelling at each other. I have thought for ages about this old topic, mothers and daughters, since my college thesis. My 21 year old self surely thought my 35 year old self would have it figured out better by now. More control over her reactions, more maturity (ah how many realms of life that is true for, not just parenting my daughter!) Despite all of my thinking and all of my efforts I still don’t have answers as to how best to navigate the eddies and slipstreams of this particular river.

But one of my favorite bloggers has sage words today that, while not providing solutions, reassure me that I’m not alone. (Jenn of Breed ‘Em and Weep). This is not the first of her columns that has spoken to me like this. I am so grateful for writers out there whose words console, comfort, and create community. I know so profoundly the feeling of screwing up, sometimes spectacularly, and then of picking myself up and trying again. Thank you Jenn! Please keep sharing your journey – I am learning much from you.

“Today was a hard day for Sophie. Today was a hard day for me and for Sophie, together.

She raged. She pouted. She stomped. She ran. She howled.

I raged. I growled. I yelled. I chased. I threatened.

This is the way.

*****

In the end, as we usually do, we wind up sitting on her bed, working it out. It is never easy. We lurch, she and I. We interrupt each other. We raise our voices, and hiss at each other in blame—always! The blame! Bouncing off pink walls!

But: I have been a daughter before; she has not. I know that mothers and daughters, even the most loving, hiss more than snakes. There is always hissing, posturing, growling. It’s an animal relationship. The first step to surviving it is to entering the deal knowing there will be battles. This is how I see it.

Sophie is still deciding how to see it, this mother-daughter relationship of ours. I hate that occasionally it must come to this, but somehow, I am sure it must. There is something to this cycle of love-hate-love-hate-love that makes me sure I am doing something right.

I tell her I am sorry we had one of our rough days, but that it’s my job to teach her responsibility, to show her that the sun does not revolve around her and the moon will not pick up her laundry.

I tell her it is my job, as her mother, to teach her rules and limits, and to expect—no, demand—more of her, when it comes to her role as citizen of the world….

At bedtime, I smush my face against her cheek in an exaggerated mushy kiss. I freeze like this. She first ignores me, then sets her book down.

“You’re giving me a bruise,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“I’m giving you love. So you can’t miss it. So you can’t say your mother didn’t love you.”

Grudgingly, she smiles.

I like to think that I am giving her a safe place to duke it out. I like to think that our squawking has a purpose. That our fighting teaches her that love can endure fighting, a good scrap now and then.

So I will take grudging smiles, the eye rolls, the heavy sighs, the “everybody elses” and the “nobody elses” that plague her already ruined existence (if you listen to her).

I can take grudging. I can bear grudging, if the conclusion—eventually—is a grudging, “My mom was nuts, but she loved me. She does love me.” I don’t know that that is what the conclusion will be, but my gut tells me—in spite of everything, the “other things” of which my father spoke—my gut still tells me that something of my intuition, my instinct, has remained intact.

So I wait. I watch. I holler my head off. I am mother. Hear me roar, then hear me soothe. Watch me screw up, marvelously. Then watch me try, try, always try, to make it better.

Take it from the top, Maestro Mama. Again. Again. Again.”