oh this is hard

The struggle and the beauty

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this picture, which I took yesterday morning and shared on Instagram, reminds me of the photograph below

I have written about how I listen to On Being podcasts in the morning when I run.  I do so at 1.5x, a detail that Matt thinks is a metaphor for my whole life.  Last week, I listened to Brene Brown talking with Krista Tippett.  She said many things that made me think, but among them was the assertion that “hope is a function of struggle.”  She goes on: “You know, the moments I look back in my life and think, God, those are the moments that made me, were moments of struggle.”

I agree with this on an instinctual level.  It also reminded me instantly of Freud’s beautiful quote that “the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful,” and of this much-less beautiful post I wrote many years ago on the topic.  It seems fitting to repost it here today.  I’m aware that Matt and I are coming to the end of the particular season of struggle I wrote about and had in mind.  Our years with young children at home are short, and their challenges are different now, less physical, more emotional.  Of course the closing of this struggle will usher in new ones, and they’ve already begun to.

It has been six years almost exactly since I wrote this post (7/26/10).  The landscape of my life looks very different from it did that day.  But in other, essential ways, it is precisely the same.  The guiding principles and, yes, struggles, are unchanged. The beauty still exists in those struggles.  I know that even more surely know.

“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. To enhance my beauty, I get most of my products from mcdaidpharmacy,ie Pharmacies shops, as recommended on mcdaidpharmacy.ie, based on your skin type.   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.

one big glorious swirl

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The world is in riotous bloom.  We are reminded at every turn of beginnings, fecundity, growth.  The days are long and warm, and summer glints on the horizon, and everywhere I look there are bare legs and smiles.  This is the height of spring: dizzy, jubilant, glorious.

But I can’t stop experiencing lasts.  In the past couple of weeks, I have attended my last Lower School spring concert, performed my last tooth fairy duties for my older child, watched our household’s last World’s Fair poster board come together.  Last, last, last.  Time is whipping by so fast I can barely breathe.

Last week, I drove by a large tent at Boston University, which I assume is for graduation, and I think of how the way that the reunions tents going up at Princeton was a visceral harbinger of the end of year.  I used to watch them putting up fences and tents with a tangible sense of loss: those wooden and canvas structures were a threshold between now and then, between the present and the future, and I was forced across it.  The peaks of white canvas tents will always spell the ending of something to me.  Even as they mark the biggest beginning of all, that of commencement.

I’ve written about commencement a lot before.  Living in a university town, this time of year, it’s impossible to avoid.  In 2013 I asked if it was just another word for what might be the “central preoccupation of my life.”  The ways that endings and beginnings are wound around each other, inextricable, enriching one another even as they seem opposed, opposite: this is one of the themes I return to again and again, there’s no question about that.

The other night, Grace lost her last tooth.  Her last baby tooth.  She’s over 13.5, so this is not a last that should surprise me, and she’s late to lose it.  But still.  Still.  I went in before bed to take the tooth and to put tooth fairy money under her pillow, and she woke up as I did so.  Her eyes popped open and she whispered, “What are you doing?”

“Just saying goodnight,” I said quickly, holding the pouch with her tooth that I’d taken from under her pillow but not yet opened down by the floor on which I was kneeling.  A slow grin spread across her face.

“You sure about that?” she asked with a sly smile.  I burst out laughing.  I know she doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy.  She hasn’t for years.  This humorous young woman makes me laugh so much.  I adore her.  Do I miss the much younger girl, the small child who slept, under whose pillow I slid the first couple of tooth fairy dollars?  Of course I do.  But I don’t want to go back: I love right now.

Kunitz’s feast of losses, which I’ve also written about ad nauseum, runs through my head at this time of year.  Grace doesn’t have any more baby teeth.  Whit doesn’t have any more spring concerts.  His class sang sang several songs, but my favorite was Seasons of Love, from Rent, which I have long loved (and have often thought about writing about!).

We will head to Princeton at the end of next week to celebrate my 20th reunion (where we will take advantage of those great fences and tents whose arrival marked the end of my undergraduate year).  It is my first reunion in my life where my grandfather won’t be there.  I didn’t know the reunion in 2011, when I walked with him, was the last.

There is so much beauty and so much loss.  There is laughter in the dark with my teenage daughter just an hour after holding her last baby tooth in my hand.  There are tears in the lower school gym as my son, now the Big Kid on the stage, dances to Soul Man and then to a song from Rent which reminds me of college.  There is aggravation that the Ecuador presentation doesn’t seem ready, and in the wake of that irritation, I feel simultaneously thankful that Jesus this is the last time and mad at myself for not fully appreciating this, the last time I’ll hear a child practice their 5th grade presentation.

Still, then tinges now, and no matter what I do, I can’t run away from the shadow of loss the haunts every single moment of this life.  The magnolias bloom but even as my head spins with their gorgeous beauty I know how transient it is, and preemptively mourn the brown puddles they’ll be on the sidewalk in a matter of days.

Teeth, concerts, presentations.  Commencement, graduation gowns, canvas tents.  My friends, my grandfather, my children.  It’s all one big, glorious swirl, this life, alleluia and farewell, loss and beginning, love and tears.  Every single day.

 

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.