oh this is hard

Thank you

Thank you.

I feel intensely aware lately of how grateful I am that anyone’s reading here.  I mean that.  It’s been a difficult few months – that’s not a secret – and the steadfast comments here often make my day(s).

Thank you, thank you.

If you ever doubt that small actions make a huge difference, don’t.

I’m writing this the day after getting home on a redeye flight.  I don’t sleep well in general, and I really don’t sleep well on planes.  For example: Matt and I flew to Bali for our honeymoon and I didn’t sleep a wink (I wrote all of our thank you notes instead).  So, I’m tired.  It’s gray out, and rainy, and I’m exhausted, and feeling spent all around.

And yet.  And still.

There’s the beauty of the world, yes: the budding trees, the song of a sparrow in a bush, the smudge of orange on the horizon at sunset, the laugh of a child.  But there’s also so much kindness here, so much that reminds me that life is good, and that’s what I’m particularly thankful for today.

Every single message from someone who reads that lets me know that something I said resonates means so much to me.  I mean that.  Every comment, every retweet, everything.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I’m more thankful than I can express for the solidarity and the I’m-not-alone feeling I get from every gesture.  It always means a lot to me, but even more right now.

I appreciate you.  Thank you.

 

The second half

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There is so much beauty in my front yard.  No, this metaphor doesn’t escape me.

Last Friday morning, I spilled an entire cup of coffee on my laptop.  It died immediately.  I spent the next several hours at the Apple store, then, once home, on the phone with Apple customer service because setting up the new computer did not work as smoothly anticipated.  And by that I mean it was not smooth at all.  I was particularly panicked because the computer’s hard drive was shot and the only chance I had at recover 25,000 photos and two books and a zillion essays was my external hard drive.

Thankfully, it worked eventually, but it was a long, emotional day, made harder because I was so furious at myself for knocking over the coffee in the first place.  Stupid and careless, yes.  Human, yes.

And let me say I’m aware of my great good fortune in even letting this be an issue.  Yes, I could go buy a new computer, and this is hugely lucky.  I know.  This is the definition of a first world problem.  All of what’s going on with me right now is a first world problem.

But somehow the computer, and the stupidity, and the unanticipated expense, and the overwhelming terror that I had lost so many things that matter to me just broke through some final, gossamer-thin reserve.  I lost it.

I’m just really tired. The truth is this has been a difficult half-year.  Since January there have been a parade of health concerns and unanticipated stresses in our lives.  I’ve struggled to sleep and we all know that makes everything more difficult. Everything is fine.  Yes.  Everything is fine.  But it’s felt like a slog, more than any other year I can recall.

There is still so much beauty.  I see it every day (which you can see on Instagram).  I hear poetry and quotes in my head on a daily basis, too, and they remind me powerfully of how extraordinary and rich my every day life is.  These observations buoy me; I described them in aggregate once as a sense of sturdy joy, and that’s what they are.  I bob on these swells of awareness every day.  What I’ve learned is that this can be true and I can still feel not-great.  I try not to complain, and I’m aware how miniscule my concerns are in the grand scheme of things, but the truth is I’m really worn out.  This has been a challenging 6 months.

And yet it is just life, isn’t it?  All of this.  The obstacles and the difficult days, the tiredness and the bickering children and all the ways adult life has wound more circuitously than we’d imagined.  This is life itself, and if I know one thing it’s that waiting for the challenging stuff to be over is the ticket to wasting your days.  These obstacles are life.  And as long as I can see the beauty, and bury my nose in the hydrangeas, and gasp out loud at a sunset, well, then I think I’m still doing fine.  I read my friend Tara Sophia Mohr’s post yesterday with a deep, settling feeling of recognition, identification, and thank-goodness-me-too.  This incarnation is not for the faint of heart.  No.  No, it is not.

Still, I wish a few days of ease, a few nights of sound sleep, some rest and peace.  That’s what I hope for now.  Today is the first day of the second half of 2015, and I’m ready.

Through the looking glass

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my sixth grade graduation, May 1986.  Sorry for the shadow and poor photo; the picture was so thoroughly glued to the page that I couldn’t take it off to scan it, and I wanted to include my father’s handwriting, because the carefully composed and annotated photo albums that he made are among my most-cherished things. 

Tomorrow, Grace graduates from sixth grade.

I remember the day that I graduated from sixth grade, in the same school, in the same building, better than I recall yesterday.

I’ll sit in the gym that I’ve picked her up from for many years, and once again, my own memories will collide with reality and I’ll fall down the telescope into that disorienting place where I am not sure what’s now and what’s then, what’s me and what’s her.  But even in this vertigo-like swirl of memory and emotion and time, something essential endures, the sturdy presence of my love for my daughter, a cord whose strength I’m trusting more and more.

I almost worry about saying that out loud, because I fear jinxing myself.  I’ve written at length (ad nauseum, even) about my fear of the distance that I know must mark these adolescent and teen years, and about what will happen to my relationship with Grace as we make our way through this time.  I know the red string that ties our hearts needs to stretch, and it will, but more and more, I’m also trusting that it will come back eventually.

We are again in the season of endings and beginnings.  Of commencement.  I feel like a broken record, but I find myself aghast, awestruck, frankly shocked by the velocity of time.  Life’s whistling past my ears ever faster, just as I was told it would.  Even as I join in the celebrations, which are bigger this year than ever, because graduation from 6th grade is a big passage at our school, I’m sorrowful in equal measure, and Stanley Kunitz’s feast of losses echoes in my head.

Last night was the sixth grade graduation party, and I was proud to watch Grace dance all night long, singing enthusiastically to everything from Journey to Katy Perry.  The moment I won’t forget was when all the parents were dancing with our sixth graders, belting out the words to I’ve Had the Time of My Life.  Once again, then and now collided, and I found myself blinking away tears.  Time is confoundingly elastic, and the past – in the song, in the memories, in the dizzying blending of then and now – felt animate, tangible, in the present.

At our sixth grade graduation, in 1986, we sang Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All, and that night I co-hosted a graduation party with some friends at a local tennis club (I went on to celebrate my engagement to Matt, my 30th birthday, my mother’s 60th birthday, and a host of other meaningful occasions in the same space).  It was a sunny and beautiful day and my conviction that the future spread in front of me, glittering, assured, was tempered substantially by my parents’ recent announcement that we were moving to London after Christmas.  I recall sitting on the sidewalk outside of the tennis club crying about the departure, though I can’t recall if that was before or after the party.  I also remember that one of our longtime babysitters DJed and that the last dance was Phil Collins’ Separate Lives, played twice.

The full photograph above, which I cropped, includes the faces of three of my closest friends from lower school.  I’m grateful to still be in touch with all three of them.  I look around at Grace’s friends and wonder who she’ll still count dear in 29 years.

While it feels like only weeks ago that I stood there, it was almost 30 years ago.  Wow.  Tomorrow I’ll go through the looking glass again, into the place where time and memory and love and loss swirl together into a heady mixture whose power can bring me to my knees.

Only one thing I can do.  Blink back my tears, look at my only daughter, my first child, and be here now.

Everything is changing

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Grace at my 15th year business school reunion on Saturday, sitting in my 1st year classroom, in my 1st semester seat. She’s closer to the age I was when I sat there than I am now.

I’ve long been a huge fan of Kyran Pittman‘s writing.  I loved her book, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life, and I also follow her blog.  A few weeks ago she shared a Humans of New York post on her Facebook feed.  It was a picture of a man with his teenage daughter, and what he said was:

“I’m supportive of anything that keeps her focused and moving forward. All I can do is try to clear away as much bullshit as possible so that she can access her future. The older she gets, the less I can control, and the less I can protect her from. It’s a bit nerve-wracking. I did get her a Swiss Army Knife last week. Because you never know when you’ll need one of those.”

Kyran’s introduction was:

This is as great a teen parenting philosophy as I’ve ever heard. Getting them to adulthood with as many choices intact as possible, and the wherewithal to choose well–that’s what it’s about now for us.

And then she added:

Or as Asha Dornfest so aptly put it, we’re parenting with the end game in mind now. When they’re little the whole object is to keep them safe. And then one day it hits you, that was just a temporary assignment.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these lines. Parenting with the end game in mind now.  Yes.  And the object is still to keep them safe, but the definition of safe has changed entirely.  It doesn’t feel accidental that I have this stop-and-go vertigo right now, that I feel a little unsteady on my feet, that the world feels like it’s whirling around me in a way a little more unnerving than usual.

Everything is changing, and the truth is it’s hard to catch my breath or find my footing.

Grace is sprinting towards 13, and her entire body and self are leaning towards the future in a way that I find both deeply reassuring and frankly terrifying.  She’s a young woman, and suddenly parenting feels different.  Of course I’ll be her mother until the end of time, even when we’re both gone, but the definition of motherhood has changed, and it feels a bit like an ill-fitting garment.  Certain things that I had just gotten used to are gone and others which I somehow thought I had more time to prepare for have arrived.

I’ve always, from my very first days of motherhood, believed that my children do not belong to me.  I’ve written that very sentence point-blank (as an aside, in searching for that link, I discovered that I wrote my daughter, who’s about to graduate from sixth grade, a letter on this blog on her first day of kindergarten – wow).  Grace and Whit are passing through me on their way to the great wide open.  They are not mine; it is my distinct honor and privilege to share these years with them.  But still, the realization that I’m in the second half – probably the final third – of this season jars me.  The losses pile one on top of each other. I’ve said before that while motherhood has contained more surprises than I can count the central one is probably how bittersweet it is.  I ferociously love my children, and the emotion I feel for them is the central guiding tenet of my life.  But even almost 13 years into being a mother, I’m staggered, over and over again by the losses that this ordinary life contains and by how frequently my eyes fill with tears.

My role these days with my tween is about abiding, knowing when to bite my tongue, being patient, and trusting that our bond will survive this passage.  It is making sure she has a soft place to land when she needs it but also gently encouraging her to step outside of that familiar circle to challenge herself.  It’s in that space beyond what is known that growth happens, even though it’s scary.  For us both.

It’s keeping the end game that Kyran and Asha mentioned in mind.  It’s knowing that what I want is an independent, brave, autonomous child.  After all, so many years ago, when I put 5 year old Grace on a plane alone, I said confidently that only a child secure in her attachments can venture away.  I still believe that.  I just didn’t realize how much it would hurt.

 

A weekend with Whit, and vertigo

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Whit turned ten in January, but we finally celebrated his birthday with a party (ish) on Saturday.  His best friend slept over on Friday night and we went indoor skydiving and surfing on Saturday at Sky Venture in Nashua, New Hampshire.  The boys had a blast.  The photos and video I have of Whit’s face in the skydiving chamber are priceless.

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After skydiving they went surfing.  This was really fun too.  I thought about the surfing camp I went to, in 2000, right before graduating from business school.  I found surfing really difficult.  Nevertheless, they were undaunted and unafraid.

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On Sunday, Whit’s baseball team had their first scrimmage.  For the first time in his life, he pitched.  I watched him on the mound and tears pricked at my eyes.  He has a long way to go but I’m proud of him for standing there alone, for trying, for opening himself up to failure like that.  It’s a lot of pressure, pitching.  I have a new respect for everyone who has taken the mound, whether in the World Series playoffs or on a Little League field.

Monday morning I woke up out of breath, the room spinning around me.  This has never happened to me before.  I had felt a bit off for days, truth be told: vaguely dizzy and just plain strange.  The best way I can describe how I felt last week is as though I was floating above myself, but not entirely inside my own body.  Monday I knew why.  I couldn’t stand up without falling over and the room kept spinning.  Thankfully Matt was able to stay home with me Monday and took me to the doctor who did some basic neuro tests and confirmed that this seems to be a garden variety episode of vertigo.

I’m writing on Tuesday morning and I still feel terrible.  Perhaps slightly improved over yesterday (I am sitting at my desk, but my head is hurting and spinning at the same time) but definitely not okay.  I still don’t want to drive.  I really just want to lie down.  There’s a limit to how long I can put my day job on hold.  I’m trying to accept the very loud message from the universe that I don’t control it – or anything.  This is both unpleasant and scary though, if I’m honest.

I keep thinking about Whit leaning forward into a tunnel of air or stepping onto a surfboard or the pitching mound.  I need some of his courage now.

Note: I was not compensated by Sky Venture for this post in any way.  This is just my personal experience.