oh this is hard

Not that kind of mother

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I grew up in a decidedly “the more the merrier” environment.  For starters, at the very heart, my family of four was sort of a family of sixteen.  The other three families were a part of our daily life in the loose, everyday way that I understand now reflects true intimacy.  Each of those six other children is stitched through my childhood memories so tightly as to be a part of the very fabric.  Each of them remains a part of my life today.

Moving outward in concentric circles from this center, there were always lots and lots of people around.  Hilary and I used to joke that it wasn’t Thanksgiving without a foreign student or two whom we’d never met around the table.  My memory of my family (and my continuing experience of it, actually) is of a roving, magnanimous extroversion that manifests itself in a million friends, a phone that’s always ringing, a lot of plans, dinner parties, coffees, and people stopping by just because.  One of my mother’s many gifts is her immediate and expansive warmth, the genuine way she welcomes everyone into her life.  She has always attracted people to her, and, like a sun, is surrounded by more orbiting planets than I can count.

I am not that kind of mother.  It’s no secret that I am an introvert.  I am also very sensitive and also shy (two traits that Susan Cain’s marvelous Quiet helped me understand are separate from, though highly correlated with, introversion)  Perhaps because of this trifecta of qualities, I am much more closed-off with our family time.  I treasure and guard fiercely our time the four of us (or the three of us, as in the case of Legoland or Storyland).  I worry often about what impact this will have on Grace and Whit.  It is vitally important to me that they grow up firm in their knowledge that I view our foursome, our nuclear family, as holy.  I am fairly sure they get this message.

What I can’t stop thinking about lately is the shadow of my instinct, the dark side of this particular aspect of my nature.  What do they lose without the extended net of people coming and going, without the example of constantly welcoming friends new and old? Will they grow up to be exclusive, or clannish, or closed-minded?

We do have “family friends,” about whom I’ve written a lot, and other friends too.  Certainly.  It would be inaccurate to paint a picture of the four of us alone in a dark room, never going out.  But when I took Grace and Whit on an outing to celebrate the end of school, we bumped into legions of their classmates, all there together, herded around by a few parents who had clearly organized this outing.  I had not heard anything about it.  And when there’s a random day off of school, or an open weekend date, I admit that my immediate and powerful instinct is that we do something as a family.  It’s not: hey, let’s bring some friends along.  These are just examples, but that day after school did make me fret.

Am I protecting something that I cherish – time as a nuclear family – to a point that harms Grace and Whit?  I don’t know.  There are so very many ways I wish I was more like my own mother, and this is surely one of them.  I think I was on to something when I noted earlier this year that the fact that most my closest friends are strong, sparkly extroverts must reflect a deep-seated desire to surround myself with models of my mother.  I wish I could take on some of that confidence, that inclusion, that warmth.

Wonder women, all alone: where feminism went wrong

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I read Deborah Spar’s article Where Feminism Went Wrong (sent to me by HWM, of course, thank you!) eagerly.  The first time I read it, I wept, though I wasn’t sure why.  Once again I was reminded that this subject, this lumpy, hard-to-define tangle of emotions, expectations, and raw desires touches a deep vein of inchoate emotion in me.  Then I read it again.

“Yet it was feminism that lit the spark of my generation’s dreams—feminism that, ironically and unintentionally, raised the bar for women so high that mere mortals are condemned to fall below it.”

This line rang so true that I sent it to HWM with exclamation marks.  Yes.  I relate to every word of this.  Am I a perfectionist?  Yes.  Are a great many of us?  Yes.  I imagine this is something we can all relate to.  And I do sometimes stumble, overwhelmed, exhausted.  More than once I’ve leaned my forehead onto the marble of my kitchen island, tears in my eyes, feeling angry and insufficient, disappointed in myself for being unable to do everything while simultaneously unclear on how it came to be that I felt I had to.  Spar writes that even as new professional opportunities opened to women, “none of society’s earlier expectations … disappeared. The result is a force field of highly unrealistic expectations.”  I live in this forcefield, and I know that it has equal power to seduce (we can do it all) and to destroy (oh my God I really can’t.)

And I’ve written before of how conscious I am of my mother’s and grandmothers’ struggles.  Of knowing how hard the generations who came before me – those who actually had to battle for rights and equal opportunity – fought, and of not wanting to squander that.  I call myself a feminist, enthusiastically and without apology.  This awareness underscores certain decisions I’ve made, and contributes to my deep desire to do what Spar would call “it all.”

Spar’s article’s main point (and I’m about to read her book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, so I don’t yet know if it’s the central theme there as well – see my favorite wonder woman at the top of this post) is that because women have realized how difficult it is to effect change on these topics in the broad theater of society they have turned the laser beam of that intention onto themselves.  Instead of focusing on the many, and all the women who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, women instead pour their prodigious energies into perfecting their individual selves.  This makes a great deal of sense to me.

“Yet because these women are grappling with so many expectations—because they are struggling more than they care to admit with the sea of choices that now confronts them—most of them are devoting whatever energies they have to controlling whatever is closest to them. Their kids’ homework, for example. Their firm’s diversity program. Their weight.”

Narrowing the lens to the entirely personal and controlling our own lives rather than focusing on the larger picture has enormous ramifications, of course.  One of them is the pressure many of us feel to be perfect, to be superwoman, which I’ve described as hugely, uncomfortably familiar for me.  Another is a pervasive, insidious feeling of loneliness which is ameliorated, at least for me, only in those rare conversations with a kindred spirit in which we can say: “You too? I thought I was the only one” (CS Lewis).  The much-discussed, much-maligned over-investment of many mothers in the lives of their children must also come from this retraining of our energies into the sphere that we can control.

In my view this behavior has another result, perhaps the most complex and charged one. Though Spar doesn’t say it point-blank in her article, I couldn’t help wondering if the judgement and negativity that so many women feel from each other has its roots here.  Doesn’t the kind of ferocious internal focus that Spar describes breed a brittle solipsism and a certain inability to empathetically cooperate?  In our quest to justify our own choices, which are paramount in a world where we too-tightly focus on our own selves, don’t we have to at least implicitly deride those of others? (I use the royal we here, because this is something I don’t believe, and try not to do, though I’m sure I sometimes fail)

I don’t have any answers here, but I am grateful for continued thoughtful discussion of the topic (see my friend Kathryn’s wonderfully interesting and intelligent take here).  The only thing I’m certain of is that there’s no single answer, and that at the end of the day all we can do is make the best decisions we can at any given moment with the information we have.  As Spar says, “women’s paths to success may be different and more complicated than men’s, and … it is better to recognize these complications than to wish them away.”  This is hard for many of us, and I’ll admit that I’m among them.  I often wonder how things would be different had I “leaned in” to my career upon graduation from business school, for example.  I don’t talk often about my professional life here, but I did write about these particular tensions for a website targeted at MBAs last month.  Spar’s piece reminded me of my own difficulty identifying the vanishingly narrow border between not trying hard enough and being realistic.

It does feel like something essential, something shiny, has been lost, though, if all we can say is we did the best we can.  I appreciate Kathryn’s acknowledgement that working full-time with children is difficult, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that (and I’m not commenting on other models here; I haven’t lived them, and I’m certain each has its own difficulties).  I wish we could recapture the joyful, hopeful feminism that Spar mourns in her article: “the feminism … about expanding women’s choices, not constraining them. About making women’s lives richer and more fulfilling. About freeing their sexuality and the range of their loves.”

Spar ends her piece with a call to action and to arms, an invocation of all that we can be together (her use of “we” is powerful) if we released our stranglehold on our individual selves.  I’m not entirely clear on the path from here to there, but I wholeheartedly agree with and embrace her vision of where we should go:

“We need to struggle. We need to organize. And we need to dance with joy.”

 

 

I love right now more than I have any other moment in my life

afterlightIt was an emotional ride to go from the 24/7 togetherness of Legoland to dropping Grace and Whit off at camp last Thursday.  You could view it as I spun it to them: so many memories to sift through while we’re apart!  So much water in the well of closeness!  But you could also say to yourself: wow that was a tough transition.  And the truth is I’m still reeling from it.

On Wednesday night I could sense that both kids were apprehensive; they were unusually quiet.  Even though this is Grace’s third year at camp, it’s the first time she’s gone for 3.5 weeks.  And it is Whit’s first time.  I read them both Harry Potter, one at a time (Grace is on #7 and Whit is on #4 and I am still not bored of Harry’s world, even after a third complete read).

I tucked Whit in first.  He asked me to lie down with him, and so I did.  He stared up at the bottom of the bunk above him and asked me, out of the blue, “If I went through a black hole and was still alive on the other side, would I end up in another universe?”  After a soft chuckle I told him I didn’t know, but I’d prefer he not try that, at least not yet.  I turned my head, next to his on the robot-print pillow, and looked at him.  He kept staring up at the slats above him, which I noticed recently are covered with stickers.

We lay in silence, and I looked at the curves of his face, as familiar to me as my own hand.  His profile hasn’t changed from when I first saw it on a cloudy ultrasound screen, and it feels like only a few heartbeats ago that I lay in that darkened room, a technician swirling a wand over my just-beginning-to-bulge belly.  After a couple of long minutes, during which I swam through the swirling waters between then and now, which are both infinite and instantaneous, and which are full of phosphorescence, I leaned over and kissed his cheek.  “Good night,” I murmured.  “I love you.”

“I love you too.”  He didn’t turn to look at me, and I could see his that his eyes were glistening.

I sat up and looked at him.  “I love you as much as that universe, Whit, or that black hole.”

“I love you as much as all the universes, Mummy.”  I left the room before I began to cry.

I pulled it together before walking downstairs to Grace’s room.  I stood in the door and watched her reading in bed.  The small clip-on lamp on her headboard cast a pool of light around her, and I could see the shadows of her eyelashes on her cheeks.  Her legs looked impossibly long.  It was a full two years ago she stopped me in my tracks, this same night, before camp, when she told me sternly that my life was full of magic.  I have never forgotten that, because it is.

The next day we got up early to drive to camp.  Matt told me later that as the children were eating breakfast, he overheard Whit tell Grace quietly that he was “feeling kind of anxious.”  She apparently reassured him.  When we arrived at camp I was flooded all over again with memories and with an intense gratitude that Grace and Whit now share this place that meant (and still means) so incredibly much to me.  Grace’s best friend, the daughter of my best friend from camp, arrived, and the whole planet seemed to click into place.  All was well.

I helped Grace settle into her top bunk in the cabin that I lived in in the summer of 1991, met her counselors, and watched her happy reunions with a few familiar faces.  She did not cry, but she kept asking me to stay.  I finally told her firmly that I had to go and left her with a long hug and our secret sign that means “I love you.”

In Whit’s cabin I encountered a wall of broad-shouldered blond young male counselors whose names I promptly forgot, settled Beloved on his pillow, and heeded his vociferous insistence that he did not want to unpack his underpants.  He said he was ready for us to go and my saying “I love you” out loud made him flush.  He looked at me sternly, making it clear that was not okay.  But then, as we left, his eyes eyes followed us to the door and, before we were out of sight, he gave me our private sign for “I love you.”

And then we drove away.  I cried on and off for the whole ride home.  I am not sad because I have any single inkling of doubt about how wonderful this experience will be for Grace and Whit.  I don’t.  I am sad because I miss them; being alone for 10 days makes abundantly clear how much time I spend with my children in a normal day, and reminds me of how much I love their company.  It’s not that I forget that, exactly, but I am definitely more aware of it when they’re gone.

But most of all I cried because 10 years of my life with small children at home is already gone.  I was, and am, sad for all that’s over, for the years that have fled, for all that I can never have again.

There’s no question that I love right now more than I have any other moment in my life.

But that doesn’t erase the anguish I feel over all that is over.  I wish it did.

As we crossed the Sagamore Bridge it began to rain lightly.  The familiar, beautiful, astonishing world was blurred and refracted through the raindrops on the windshield.  I thought of Grace and Whit, of the sandy wooden floors of their cabins, of the low voices of the JCs singing Taps at the end of an evening assembly, swaying, arms linked around each others’ shoulders, of the dunes that slope down to the beautiful sailboat-spotted bay.  I thought of all that changes and all that stays the same, and gratitude swelled alongside sorrow in my chest.  It kept raining, and we drove home.

 

 

 

The ability to course correct

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A random photo, both recent and unrelated.  Though, really, don’t hydrangeas meet what is in their path and, with mute implacability, correct their course?  They wind around looking for light, they change color, and they live on.

I am increasingly convinced that the key to happiness and success in this life is the ability to course-correct.  Last weekend, we were in Vermont at a (wonderful) family reunion.  I was putting Grace and Whit to bed in sleeping bags on the floor and Grace was tired and cranky.  She gave me attitude and was pissy, and, exhausted from a long drive and day, I didn’t have the slack to be generous with her.  I snapped back and, with a genuine but short “I love you,” left the room.

About 30 minutes later Matt came down and whispered to me that Grace wanted to see me.  He had gone upstairs to get something and had talked to the still-awake children when he was in our room.  I walked upstairs and crouched by their sleeping bags.  Grace’s face was wet with tears, and Whit looked anxious and somewhat upset.

“Everything okay?” I leaned over Grace and hugged her.  Hiccuping, tearful, she told me she was sorry, she felt bad, and she did not want to go to bed angry.  She wanted to clear the air, she said.  She was sorry and it was the Fourth of July and she did not want to mar it with an argument.

I am not sure I’ve ever hugged her harder.  I owed her an apology, too, and I offered it.  But I thanked her for having the ability to say hey, let’s put that behind us, let’s not hold a grudge, let’s move on.  And I meant it.  We hugged and she went to sleep and I went downstairs and all was well.

I thought about the maturity it took for her to say: I am sorry, let’s let go.  I thought about the days I’ve ruined by attaching to my own failure to concentrate or to my own wounded ego or emotions.  I am sure we’ve all had the experience of something going poorly and of deciding well, hell, it’s all lost.  I’m equally sure that the key to success and to happiness – hell, to life – is in the ability to say: you know what?  That sucked.  I’m doing X or Y badly.  But I’m going to let go of that disappointment, hurt, or dismay, and try to move on with a light heart and an open mind.

This is one of those insights, muted rather than blinding but absolutely essential, that this season of my life has held for me.  Learn how to let go of our failures rather than to let them bring us down and to let go of how we wanted it to be so that we can have it as it is.  Because I don’t want to ruin these days by attaching myself to all the ways that they – and more importantly, I – disappoint me.  If I do that I miss their extraordinary, astonishing brilliance.

Really, I think what I’m saying, is that we need to learn to begin again.  Every day.  Over and over.

 

The bitter part of my life’s bittersweet core

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I can close my eyes and be back in this afternoon, exactly 7 years ago, June 2005, with baby Whit, 2 year old Grace, and my grandfather, who is no longer with us. 

It’s not a secret that I struggled with my entry into motherhood.  Grace’s infancy was not my finest hour.  I remember large swaths of time as only a blur of tears and a wailing baby that occurred in a permanent twilight that wasn’t day and wasn’t night.  But, somehow, I remember with crystalline clarity one comment that I received over and over again from kindly, well-intentioned people, friends and strangers alike:

“Make sure to enjoy this moment.  It goes so fast!”

Just like everybody else I know, I heard this more times than I can possibly count.  And every single time, through the haze of my exhaustion and despair, I recognized a kernel of truth.  This sentence pierced my gloom over and over again.  But the truth is it made me want to scream; this is probably because the sentiment cut close to the bone.  As with all statements that are uncomfortably true, I did not like hearing it.  And I swore to myself I would never tell a mother with a newborn to enjoy this time.

And yet I have.  More than once, I’ve looked at a mother with a tiny baby, or a mother with a baby in a Bjorn and a two year old by the hand, dark valleys under her eyes and a slightly wild, exasperated expression, and longed to be back there.  The way I express this longing is to say: “Oh, those were the days.  They go fast. Enjoy them.”

Every time I kick myself: Ugh, Lindsey, you swore you’d never say that.  I can remember vividly my own negative reaction to those comments.  But I realize now that the people who said that were just sharing their own nostalgia the only way they knew how.

Even now, aware as I am of not wanting to squander these moments with my children at home, I find myself – daily! – wishing time away.  I am sore from the cold bleachers under my legs at soccer try-outs, I am listening to a detailed story about a 2nd grade bus ride that is being told in real time, I am tired myself, just want to get into bed with my own book, and this third glass of water is going to put me over the edge.  I have realized this is simply the nature of parenting; the adage that the days are long but the years are short is so powerful precisely because it is true.

I am much better at appreciating my experience than I used to be.  There’s no question about that.  But even when I really AM there, even when I’m fully open and appreciating all the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of my particular life with my particular children at this particular moment, it still goes by too fast.  And this is the bitter part of my life’s bittersweet core: nothing I do, no paying attention and being here now can slow the drumbeat march of time.  No matter how present I am I cannot alter the hasty onrush of this life.

Sometimes that truth feels unbearably bitter.  Of course, yes, I do know that it’s bitter in direct proportion to the sweetness.  The presence I have worked hard to cultivate over many years has left me with very rich memories of this season of my life.  I’m grateful beyond expression for the way this blog has chronicled much of my life with my children.  I have thousands of photographs and dozens of letters.  But nothing I can do, neither white-knuckled hanging on nor meditative letting go, will make these days and years last longer.  I guess when I say the thing I swore I’d never say to new mothers, I’m trying to communicate that.  But I should stop, because I know it doesn’t help.

I’m pretty sure that my grandfather, in the photograph above, told me with a sigh that these days would go fast.  I know he handed me some notes that my grandmother had written about observing the development of boys (she should know: she had four).  But I also know that I probably shook my head, worrying about getting Whit down for a nap and making pasta for Grace, grimaced at the ugly plastic toys in my kitchen, and told him in a way that was both heartfelt and dismissive: I know, I know.

I thought I knew what he meant.  But I didn’t.  I do now.