oh this is hard

Discomfort

Last week I had an email exchange with my friend Jessica about the five years I spent living in London (ages 12 to 17).  It was a rich, irreplaceable interval of time, full of the number 9 bus and Fruit Pastilles and Doc Marten boots and weekends riding in the Cotswolds and signing our names on the Berlin Wall.  I still have dear friends from those years.

But there’s no question that the five years that I lived in London, the fifth of which I spent at boarding school in New Hampshire, were bracketed by deep discomfort.  I can close my eyes and stand in the doorway of my Upper Fourth classroom on a cold January day, when my future friend Stephanie threw open the doors and announced, “this is the new girl” before disappearing into the mass of foreign girls speaking in rapid, accented English.  I have rarely wanted to disappear more keenly (and trust me, that’s an emotion I experience a lot).

My childhood was as full of farewells as it was of blindingly bright experiences.  I saw countries and cathedrals and I also cried my eyes out, missing friends in Cambridge, in Paris, in London.  I went back and forth across the ocean so many times I wasn’t really sure, for several years, where home was.  I would never trade my childhood, and the unique terroir in which I grew (shared only by my sister).  But it was certainly full of dislocation, threaded through with a fundamental sense of discomfort.  I was always new somewhere, or about to leave.  The fabric of my life was woven through with departures.

I don’t know why this has been on my mind lately.  Maybe it is because I am particularly cognizant of how comfortable my adult life is, how different Grace and Whit’s childhoods are from mine.  After our trip to Jerusalem last year, I reflected that my sister and I had had seemingly opposite responses to our shared childhood.  I am the unadventurous one.  I have always chosen safety and comfort.

And yet.  The thing is, I still feel uncomfortable a lot of the time.  It’s not the same uneasiness that comes with being in an unfamiliar country: different coins (oh, how many times have I offered a palm full of foreign money to a bus driver and asked them to take what they need?), different names of dish soap, different kinds of foods.  But it is a vague sense of discomfort in my own life.  There are not that many people who feel like native speakers of my language.  There are not many places that I feel entirely accepted.  I long to belong.

I used to think that it was my childhood of constant goodbyes that created this feeling of fundamental otherness.  Years ago I described the way all those “departures remain within me, hard little kernels of sadness that the rest of my experience flows around, but not undisturbed.”  But maybe that’s not it.  Maybe it is actually the other way around.

Perhaps for too long I’ve incorrectly ascribed responsibility for the way I am to my peripatetic childhood.  Maybe this is my essential self, this nose-pressed-against-the-window sensation simply my way of being in the world.  It’s the reason I take the pictures.  It’s the reason I am often misconstrued as aloof and chilly.  I guess it is just part of who I am, for better or for worse.

Numbered Days

Cranes10

Right now I feel incredibly keenly aware of how finite these particular days are.  I’m already more than halfway through my years with Grace living at home.  How is this possible?  I’m already seeing Whit blush when I kiss him goodbye on the playground.  They still hold my hand when we cross the street, but for how much longer?  Mere minutes.

A while ago I wrote a post about things whose days are numbered.  Almost all of those things are gone now, and even reading that piece brings hot tears to my eyes and a tightness to my throat.  These days are sliding through my hands even as I try to grasp them.

The truth is that all our days numbered.  Every hour is running out as we revel in it.  Isn’t that the very definition of life?  So maybe the intensity with which I long for these days even as I live them is about the fact that I so passionately adore this season of my life.  The aching loss that’s threaded through every hour is simply the flip side of the deep love I feel for right now.  I have never had one without the other, and they seem to be directly correlated.  The more joy I feel in a moment, the more pierced I am by my knowledge of its swift passage.

I’ve made some difficult decisions lately that reflect this growing sense of how limited are these sunlit hours.  What I want is more days at Crane’s Beach, more long notice-things walks, more evenings reading Harry Potter with my children curled beside me, listening raptly. I want to be here right now, this ten year old, this eight year old, this very early spring.

But I can’t have this without letting go of other things.  It is hard for me to admit that I have to choose.  This is the difficult, unavoidable truth of something I have long maintained: our only true zero-sum resource is time, and how we allocate this, our true wealth, is a direct representation of what we most value.

And I choose those three people in the picture.  Above all else.

Doubt

winter branches

Winter morning light on bare, snowy branches: one of the things that makes me feel most powerfully a sense of mingled doubt and faith.

I think I’ve decided that I won’t have a word this year.  But if I was going to have one, it’s pretty undeniable what it would be.  The word doubt has been presenting itself to me for the last several weeks.  Insistently, even.

There was this quote, which I saw on the wall of a dear friend’s house right before Christmas:

“Who never doubted never believed; where doubt, there truth is.  It is her shadow.” – Philip Festus

Naturally, these words reminded me of Anne Lamott’s famous line, which I think of at least daily:

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” – Anne Lamott

And then Ronna Detrick, long a spiritual guide and teacher to me, wrote about doubt recently.  Her words reverberated around my head and heart with an undeniable familiarity, with the clanging echo of something I should listen to.

I keep returning to one image, which is of the way I can navigate my house in the dark.  Whether it’s going to the bathroom in the middle of the night or walking around the basement when the lights flicker off by accident, I know exactly where things are.  I know how many steps it takes to get here, where to put my hand, when I need to duck.  This house, where I’ve lived for eleven and a half years, is as familiar as the back of my hand, its contours and lengths so well known I can move among them with my eyes closed.

I always thought of that as some kind of manifestation of my comfort with doubt, that sense of familiarity with the dark, of being able to navigate without clarity.  Doubt, which I know so well, which fits me like a well-worn shirt.  Doubt, which keeps presenting itself to me these days, over and over.

But maybe that is just the other side of faith?

Life is beautiful

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I walked through Boston the other morning and marveled at what the heart of my city looks like in deep snow.  It was sunny but cold, and everything felt more difficult than usual: streets narrower, hands cold, wind whipping.  I crossed Beacon Street and headed into the Public Garden.  I passed a bush, empty of branches but full of clumps of snow, and the suddenly-deafening song of sparrows stopped me in my tracks.  Every time I notice a bush full of birds, singing their hearts out, I wonder at all the people around me, rushing past, heads down, apparently oblivious to the sound.  Am I the only person who notices this music?  Sure, it’s not symphonic.  But still: it is there, and reminds me of all of life that is invisible to the eye and yet still, asserting itself, going on, making beauty, making its mark.

A smile played on my face as I remembered the early-winter day with Whit, when he’d commented on the song of sparrows in an altogether different (but similarly barren) bush near our house.  A sensitivity and awareness whose source I know well throbs through my son’s veins, there’s no question about that.

I kept walking.  The sun glinted off of the frozen pond where the Swan Boats float in summer.  Snow dusted the back of the statue that marked the gate to Arlington Street.  Boston’s most natural season is winter.  This is the season of my city’s soul.

Life is beautiful.

The next day was difficult, and I had an overwhelming impulse to sit down to write this.  I think I wanted to remind myself that even amidst tears there is so much beauty.  As I sat at my computer, writing, dusk fell.  I looked out the window and sprang up, moved by the color of the late-day sky.  I took pictures and remembered: I am smitten by this world.

I leaned my forehead against the cold window, noticing the pinkish-white streak of an airplane across the gloaming, and thought: thank you.  No matter what, this life is beautiful.

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Working mom snow day

snow day picnic

This is what happened a few weeks ago, during Nemo: Friday, snowday.  Monday, snowday.  Tuesday, conference day.  I work full time.  I do not have anywhere near full time childcare.  Put these things together and you create a difficult brew with the potential for raised voices, frustration, and hurt feelings.  I think of the witches at the start of MacBeth, even.

Because I had known all along we weren’t going to have school on Tuesday, I’d booked Monday solid.  From 8am to 4:30 I had phone calls in 30 minute increments.  Sunday evening, the phone rang and the school’s number came up on caller ID.  I picked up, my stomach sinking.  The familiar automated voice began … Another snow day.

As my friend Christine says, I love when I can be relaxed and roll with a snow day.  I love when – and this is sometimes true – I’m able to reschedule things and spend the day sledding, baking cookies, and just hanging out.  But at this particular moment, I couldn’t be that mother.  I was just grateful that my office is in my house, so I could at least be in the building with Grace and Whit.  I know a lot of people don’t have this luxury.

All morning long I ran back and forth between my office and the family room.  I set the kids up with a big game of War with my grandfather’s old orange and black cards before capitulating and letting them have their screens.  Whit played Minecraft and Grace played games with cartoon dogs on her itouch.  It was mostly calm.  But I could hear them talking when I was on my work calls, and could see my email piling up during the minutes I stayed with them.  The strands of my life, which mostly keep me steady, upright, pulled at me from all sides.

I had already packed lunch before the snow day call came, so we brought down a blanket, spread it out on the kitchen floor, and the kids had a picnic with their lunchboxes.  They were slow to eat, and finally I had to go upstairs for an interview on the phone, and Grace sat on the floor, arms crossed, crying, angry that I was abandoning them during lunch.  A few minutes into my call I heard their quiet footsteps on the hardwood floor outside my closed office door, and then the soft click of the family room door closing behind them.   Throughout that phone call I was distracted, heavy with sorrow, aware of all the things I am not doing well enough.

That night, as I tucked her in, Grace said her prayers as usual.  These prayers vary slightly day to day, thought they are always a simple list of thanks.  This is so without my ever having coached her; it’s just her instinct. The impulse to say thank you must run in our family.

That night, my day of imperfect juggling of their needs and those of work, Grace said, “Thank you for so much screen time.”  Oh, great.  But then she said, “Thank you for letting Mummy work from home.”  My eyes filled with tears.  And then she continued, “And thank you for getting to live in this awesome world,” and I felt a rush of something like gratitude, something like forgiveness, something like grace.

Few things reveal the cracks and crevasses in a life like a snow day when you’re a working parent (particularly the one who has primary responsibility for the children that day).  I’ve noted before that my family’s life spins fast, and that we all, and me especially, keep a lot of balls in the air.  Most of the time this works for us.  But on a snow day the tightrope that I walk every day feels tauter, less forgiving, and a fall seems more likely, more perilous.  I remind myself, always, firmly, that this is a conflict of privilege, that having both work and children I love is a tremendous blessing.  I think of my childless 26 year old self, boldly saying this to a roomful of much older women, all mothers.  What I’ve learned, though, is I can be aware of my good fortune and still exhausted by the demands it brings, still sliced – to ribbons! – by the sharp edges of my commitments, my promises, my loves.