Whitman

Perfect

This past weekend was difficult.  Tensions ran high, nerves were frayed, voices were raised.  I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, that Matt and I are Grace and Whit’s weather, and though they exhibit it differently they are both keenly aware of our moods.  It’s a big responsibility, being someone else’s sky: when I’m stormy, that has a huge impact on them.  Still, still, I had my camera out, and I was able to unearth a few gems from a weekend otherwise filled with a slurry of sorrow and frustration.

Grace let me braid her hair.  This reminded me of my own childhood, spent often in two uneven braids.  This was the result of several tries; I’m not a good hair-doer.  Still, the braids were perfect.

Matt got home late on Friday night so I took Grace and Whit to our local pizzeria for slices for dinner.  As we waited I turned to shush them and saw that they were (loudly) dancing around the empty room.  My voice, raised to tell them to be quiet (oh, irony, I know) stilled in my throat and tears sprang to my eyes.  It was perfect.

Saturday night Whit would not go to sleep.  He was wired and tired, bouncing off the walls with a frantic energy.  Everything was a chore: trying to get him to brush his teeth, clean up his room, put on his pajamas.  My defenses were (and remain) paper-thin: the mere sight of his big top teeth coming in, where so recently there was a gaping gap, made me cry.  And still, amid all of that, I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this in the mirror.  It was perfect.

Late on Sunday afternoon Whit and I dropped Grace off at a friend’s house and, needing an escape from the house, drove to the cemetery nearby.  We arrived at our tower to discover that they had just closed it.  Crestfallen, we got in the car, and then Whit asked me to pull over so we could climb down to a pond at the bottom of a ravine.  I did, and followed him as he skipped ahead of me down the narrow path.  The end of the day grew dusky, and I waved away mosquitoes as I watched Whit watching a pair of ducks and a small, silent turtle at the edge of the pond.  Moments of calm descended on me, but I also felt aggravated, and impatient, and aware of an internal thunder whose rumbling I could not quiet.

Finally we turned to head back to the car and made our way back up the path.  Whit trailed me, carrying his “walking stick.”  “Mummy?” I heard him say behind me.  I turned.  “Yes?”  “I really like when we spend time just you and me.”  It was perfect.

One year and one day ago I wrote these words:

I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away.   These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all.  This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life.  And I won’t let them.  I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins.  But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.

This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart.  Every day.

And my emotional sky remains full of clouds, and it’s all still perfect.

Raising a boy

I read this extraordinary list of 25 Rules for Moms With Sons on The Good Men Project.  And I cried, and then I read it again.  There’s such a turbulent sea of feeling under the surface when it comes to my children.  It doesn’t take much to pierce me at my core, to bring tears, to unleash floods of nostalgia and emotion and regret and longing.

It’s no secret that I was shocked, when Whit was born, that he was boy.  Well, at first I imagined I would have only boys.  I imagined the universe would refuse me that relationship (that between mother and daughter) I’d studied so closely and cherished so dearly.  Why I imagined that is surely fodder for another post.  But then I delivered Grace, and after that I assumed I’d have all girls.  After all I was one of two girls, and most of my dearest friends were one of two girls, and well, I just figured that was the plan.

Though we did not find out the gender of our baby either time, when I was pregnant with Grace, I just knew she was a girl.  This despite the firm conviction of every pharmacist, cab driver, and little old lady I encountered that I “looked like” I was having a boy.  With Whit, I had no idea at all.  I joked “I’m just hoping we don’t have to make a call in the delivery room, you know, hermaphrodite style” so many times that Matt finally told me to cut it out.  But then Whit was born, and he was certainly not the Phoebe I’d imagined, and the rest is history.  His blond hair and vivid blue eyes shocked me almost as much as the fact of his boy-ness.  Only his cleft chin, so much like mine and Grace’s, was familiar.  Everything else was foreign, and has been ever since.

My boy.  It shocks me, to this day, to note that I have a son.

How he beguiles me.  While Grace is so much like me the identification sometimes gives me vertigo, Whit is so absolutely other I often wonder where he came from (and when I ask him he always says, immediately, and deadpan, “Texas.  I come from Texas.“) It is not just gender, of course.  But that is some of it.

He amazes me every day, and he also infuriates me most of them.  When I think about my son becoming a young man in this world, I am overcome with an intense sense of responsibility.  I want to contribute, in whatever way I can, to my son being a good man.  I want him to be a man who is not afraid: not of his feelings, not of his strength, not of the moments that feel like startling weakness.  I want him to respect women and men alike, for all the ways they are similar and also for all the ways that they differ.  I want him to know how to express the emotions of his heart, no matter how strong or ugly or passionate.  I want him to know that his mind and his soul and his body all have important claims to this life, and that he must respect the needs and calls of each.

My father has always held that children are 95% nature.  I didn’t believe him until I had two, so that I could compare.  And of course I cannot disaggregate gender, birth order, and basic personality when I parse the ways that Grace and Whit are different.  But how can I not ascribe some of their more bald distinctions to gender?

Whit has an indestructible sense of wonder and indefatigable hunger to understand how things work.  He crouches under the sink and puts his hand on the pipes, he unscrews the bolts on his lamp, he builds a 900 piece Lego in two hours.  He is an engineer at heart and I know just where he gets that from.  He is funny beyond all description but this humor can mask a deep seam of sensitivity that often startles me when it glints through.  I hope that I help him cultivate these parts of himself, but I also hope I can help him live in a world that I know may well shame him for them.  He is affectionate and loving, and I dearly hope that these instincts don’t fall prey to the world’s insistence that “real men” ought not hug their mothers.  In a recent “choose a biography” unit in 1st grade he chose Amelia Earhart and was mystified when I cried, openly, when he presented me with a book about her.  I have taught him to write thank you notes and to look adults in the eye, but I also wait patiently while he is rowdy and noisy, while he works through his fascination with guns, while he fake boxes me and says, “Bring it, Goldilocks” and I dissolve into laughter, asking him where the hell he learned that.

Read these 25 Rules for Mothers With Sons.  They will make you weep.  They remind me of the kind of mother I want to be to Whit

Call for your help: Close to the Surface

I’m honored to be a semi-finalist in the Notes & Words essay contest.  I would be so, so grateful if you’d click here and like my piece.

The short essay, Close to the Surface, is actually based on a blog post I wrote here recently.  One input to being chosen as a finalist is the number of Facebook likes each essay receives.

Thank you so much for your help!

 

 

The story I can’t stop telling

On Friday night Grace was sleeping over at a friend’s house and Matt was out, so Whit and I had dinner together.  He picked a single daffodil from our back yard (the single daffodil in our back yard) and put it in a small vase for a centerpiece.  We sat down to a table set for two, with napkins and silver, and ate some lasagna that Grace had made the night before.

“This is good,” Whit said between bites.  “But if you made it would be better.”

“Why?”

“Well, it would be full of love.”  He chewed.

“I think Anastasia and Grace put love into this lasagna, Whit.”

“Yes,” he looked me right in the eye, and said without a hint of guile,  “but your food has more love than anyone else’s in it.”

Saturday morning, before hockey practice, Whit was milling around our room in his long johns.  I was still lying in bed.  He climbed in next to me, nestling under the covers and curling his body against mine.  I reached out and pulled him to me, noticing again how lean he is now, all long planes and sharp angles.  I could smell the back of his neck, could see the pale blond fluff where his hair ends and his skin begins.  Matt looked over at us.  “What are you doing?”

“Snuggling with Mummy,” Whit answered.

“Whit, you can bet Zdeno Chara doesn’t cuddle with his mother before he practices.”

I glared at Matt.  “Who cares?  I bet he used to.”

“Yeah, Daddy,” Whit mumbled.  “Who cares?”

Still, my eyes blurred as I held my son against me, my awareness of how numbered these days are so piercing I couldn’t have spoken without sobbing.  It won’t be long until my 7 year old son wouldn’t be caught dead snuggling, much less seeks my embrace out.  Before I know it a Friday night dinner with his mother won’t be the cause of major excitement.  I am sure I will remember that single daffodil, leaning in its overly big vase, with heartache.  It’s still fresh and yellow down there in the kitchen, and I’m already mourning it.

There’s no question I’ve found the story I can’t stop telling, the drum I’ll beat for the rest of my life.  Yes, as I’ve said, my subject chose me.  This way heartbreak and joy are woven into every moment of every day.  They are the two walls of this hall we walk down, one at a time, this life, these years.  When I stare at the back of Whit’s neck I fall into the chasm of memory.   Images of his infant neck and all the years in between telescope and I feel a kind of vertigo.  The speed with which it passes is simply breathtaking, and the immensity of the miracle of another human being overwhelms me utterly.

“It’s time to go, Whit.  Let’s get your pads on.”  Matt called over his shoulder as he left the room.  I glanced one final time at the back of Whit’s neck, squeezed his still-birdlike shoulders, and I let him go.

 

The grubby intimacy of siblings

 

Last week, we watched Tin Tin.  I mostly watched Grace and Whit.  At one point her leg was slung over the arm of his seat, and his hand rested on her foot.  Sometimes this kind of intrusion results in a loud explosion of bickering, with some shoving.  But at other times it falls unnoticed into the rich swamp of shared childhood that they are crossing together.  I thought of the intense, often grubby intimacy of siblings, the way they are each other’s morning and night, the only other person growing in this unique terroir.

I missed my sister then, who is halfway across the world in Jerusalem.  I’ve written before about the opinion, held by some, that our most formative relationships are with our sibling(s).  And I have written reams about my particular sibling, my adored sister Hilary, the adventurous one, the brilliant one, the brave one.

Watching Grace and Whit – every day, but especially inside the hothouse of a week of vacation – I think of Hilary constantly.  They are each other’s first peer relationship, the person with whom they share these essential early experiences, to whom they will announce excitement and heartbreak, against whom they will probably always measure themselves.  They witness together the messy reality of our family life, both its raised voices and its enthusiastic embraces.  I admit perhaps too readily that my desire to have a second child was secondary to my desire to have a sibling for Grace (of course, that faded the instant Whit arrived, when I immediately loved him as much as I’ve loved anyone else on earth).  But my impulse was right, of that I’m certain.  I am intensely thankful when I observe their closeness, striated as may be with arguing.

After all, I would not be who I am today without Hilary.  In the simplest terms, her influence pushed me to explore further and to try harder.  There’s no better example than that we would never have gone to Jerusalem last December if she and her family had not chosen to live there for a year.  I watch my children bounce off of each other, their sharp corners gouging into each other and  their arms providing comfort when it is needed, and I think of Hilary.  And I am overwhelmed with gratitude.