Whitman

Firsts and lasts

Whit lost his third tooth this weekend.  As usual, I cried as I hugged him, celebrated one of life’s passages even as I mourned it.  Is there a more tangible marker of growing up than teeth falling out?  I don’t think so.

Later that day, Grace and I were driving home from her soccer game and talking about Whit’s tooth.

“Does it make you sad, Mummy?”

“Well, yes, sort of, Grace.  I mean, you know that.”

“But it doesn’t make you sad when I lose my teeth, right?”

I glanced back at her in the backseat, tousled from her season-ending soccer game, cheeks pink.

“Well, Grace, not really.  It’s always the first time when something like that happens for you.  And so it’s exciting.”

“And you know that Whit still has those things ahead, right?  He’s your baby.”  She was looking out the window.

“Well, yes.”  Was she upset?  I couldn’t tell.  We drove in silence for a few moments.

“I get to have all the firsts.  And Whit gets to have all the lasts.”

Of course, predictably, my eyes swam with tears behind my sunglasses.  I nodded and swallowed.  She’s right.  And how immensely fortunate I am that my life contains so many of both.

Looking out the window

One day last week I was puttering in the kitchen and it occurred to me I hadn’t seen Whit in a while.  “Whit?” I hollered up the staircase.  Our house is very up-and-down and we have a terrible habit, all of us, of shouting up and down the stairs.

“Yes?” I heard him answer from upstairs.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just looking out the window.”

Oh.  I stood in the kitchen, a potholder in my hand, stunned, still, thinking about that.

Later that afternoon I was folding laundry on our bed while Whit sat in the upholstered chair in our bay window talking to me.  The late-afternoon sun streamed in, viscous, gold, like maple syrup.  I shook out pajama bottoms and folded them, smoothed little boy underpants printed with robots and sailboats with my hand, piling them neatly.

“Mummy?” Whit said from his perch, and I turned to see that he was gazing out the window.

“Yes?”

“Admire the light of this hour.”

I gaped and looked at him, at the back of his head which glowed, burnished blond, in the late-afternoon autumn light.  I had just recently reminded my children about looking at the light of every hour, about the power of really noticing things.  Still, I hadn’t realized how fully he had internalized this.  I dwell so often on the myriad ways Grace is, often uncomfortably, like me but for some reason reminders that Whit too has a seam of sensitivity and awareness running through him tend to take me aback.  I find it particularly moving that my Lego-worshiping, lightsaber-wielding six year old son can also spend long minutes looking out the window.  I’m not sure why this surprises me: I guess that Whit, like his mother and many people I love, contains multitudes.

These are the years they will remember

Most mornings, I walk Grace and Whit into their respective school buildings.  Occasionally, if I have to make it to an early meeting or something, I do “live drop off” instead, letting them hop out of the car while I idle at the curb.  For some reason this always brings tears to my eyes.  There’s something about their backpacks bobbing away from me, their independence, their resolve, their enthusiasm for school – all of it mixes up into a cocktail that brings tears to my eyes as surely as onions on the chopping board or Circle Game on the radio.

The other morning was no different.  I drove away, blinking back my tears, and suddenly I thought: these are the years they will remember as their childhood.  We had driven to school all belting out Edge of Glory together, and then we had sat in the car near school singing along until the song ended.  I looked in the rear view mirror to catch them grinning at each other, overwhelmed again with the realization that tiny things can bring sheer joy for them.

I remember when Grace turned four thinking: okay, this really matters now.  That is because my own memories of childhood begin when I am about four.  I actually don’t have that many memories of my childhood, and those I do exist in a slippery kind of way: am I remembering the actual event, or the picture I’ve seen so many times of the event?  I wonder if part of why I write things down so insistently now is to address this very fact, this inability to remember when I so desperately wish I could.

My flashes of memory, as limited as they are, begin in the second apartment we lived in in Paris.  I was four-ish.  So, my assumption was that Grace and Whit would start remembering things from the same general time period.  Certainly, they will remember these days.  The power of the most mundane moments and experiences – something I’ve long believed fiercely in – was probably particularly on my mind after reading The Long Goodbye last week.  For sure, O’Rourke’s memoir had me thinking particularly of the memories of our mothers that endure.

And so I drove into Boston, my eyes still blurry with tears, watching the outrageously beautiful trees that line the Charles, the river that throbs through the heart of my home, wondering what it is that Grace and Whit will remember of these days.  We are “deep in the happy hours,” as Glenda Burgess put it in her stunning memoir The Geography of Love, and one thing I’m certain of is that it will be the small moments that most sturdily abide.  Will they remember the notice things walks, the trips to the tower at Mount Auburn, trapeze school, and chocolate cake for breakfast?  Will they remember the hundreds of nights that I read to them, tucked them in, administered the sweet dreams head rub, did the ghostie dance, turned on their familiar lullabies?  Will they remember Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving, and their birthdays?

I have no idea what specific events and experiences will be the ones that rise up for my children, out of the dust of the years, some surprising, some familiar.  I could easily drive myself insane trying to make sure every single day is stuffed with memories.  But I choose not to do that, because, as I’ve written before, the memories that I come back to, rubbing them over in my mind like a hand worrying a smooth stone in my pocket, are almost all from days and moments that were utterly unremarkable, unmemorable, as I lived them.  I assume this will also be true for Grace and Whit.  So I suppose all I can do is try to be here, paying attention, to the vast expanse of ordinary days we swim in.  And to remember, every single day, what an immense privilege each one is.

Look at the light of this hour.

I try to protect Wednesday afternoons to spend with Grace and Whit.  This past week Wednesday was sunny and warm: classic Indian summer.  I walked to school to pick them up and we walked home, stopping at the playground on the way.  After a stop at home to finish Grace’s homework, we went to one of our favorite places, the tower at the back of a cemetery in our town.  We like to climb it in all seasons, survey the world that we live in spread out all around us, admire the changing foliage and quality of the light, feel the wind on our faces.  The kids also like to race up the stairs, counting them as they go. The last time we went up there was in May, on a stormy day that became a tornado-warning evening.

As we climbed the stairs to the base of the tower, Grace stopped suddenly.  I was ahead of her, following Whit.

“Mummy!  Look!”  She pointed at something in between two of the stone steps.

“What?”  I admit I was a little impatient.  Whit was running ahead of us.

“Look.  Just look.”  I climbed down a few stairs and saw what she was pointing to.  A heart.  My little soul mate: she sees and feels things in the very ether just like I do.

As he so often does, Wordworth ran through my head:

With with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

At the top of the tower we admired the deep green of the leaves on the trees all around.  Grace and Whit found the playing fields of their school’s upper school, and watched tiny figures running up and down.  The breeze was cool but the sun was still warm.  The green was spotted in a few places with autumn’s red and orange, and Grace asked if we could come back up someday soon when all the leaves had turned.  Of course.  Of course.

After we descended the tower we visited the fairy stream.  That my children remain enchanted by the small, still place makes me happier than I can describe.  As we left it, Grace cartwheeled ahead and Whit slipped his hand into mine.  “Do you think there are really fairies, Mummy?”

“Yes,” I said firmly.  “Yes, I do.  Do you?”

“Yes, yes.  I was just wondering where they went when we arrived.  Do you think they hid under the rocks or flew away?”

Pondering this, we walked around a bit in amiable silence.  I told Grace and Whit about my very favorite headstone, though I couldn’t actually find it.  “It’s very simple,” I said.  “I just love the words.  It says: look at the light of this hour.”

The kids walked on, quiet, for a few steps.  Grace then turned to look at me.  “You mean, well, that means, to really pay attention, right?”  I nodded at her.  “So, like the way you take pictures of the sky all the time?”  I smiled and nodded again.  She turned back to her walking, thinking.  A moment later, “I was doing that when I noticed the heart, right, Mummy?”

I hugged her and said, “Yes, Grace.  Yes, you were.”

Look at the light of this hour. It is golden, and it contains the life of things.

Tilting and shifting, yet abiding

At the end of every summer, my children become wretched.  They are also lovely, and we do special things like our spontaneous outing to Crane’s Beach.  But without fail, they are difficult.  I swear it’s the universe making it more bearable to go back to school, back to fall, back to the routines and strictures of Regular Life.  Right on schedule, the last week of summer, Whit had a terrible day.  He was talking back.  He was ignoring me.  He was misbehaving.  He received a warning, failed to heed it, and I sent him to bed at 5:30, without dinner.  I know.  I’m a witch.

In his bed, he cried on and off for an hour.  I sat in my office, right down the hall, remembering all of those nights that I waited out a wailing infant.  Every few minutes, he’d crack the door, tiptoe out and tell me quietly “I’m going to the bathroom.”  In the bathroom he would blow his nose and then creep back his room with a look at me.  Each time, I would say, “I love you, Whit,” and he would shuffle back to bed, tearful.

Finally, at about 6:45 I went in and sat on the edge of his bed.  He was red-faced and upset, but placid, quiet.

“Can we make up?”  He asked me, looking in my eyes.

“Of course we can.”  I hugged his little shoulders, feeling how warm he was, how damp his face and hair.

“I am sorry.” He said, muffled, into my neck.  I rocked him a little. “Mummy?  I’ll do anything you want if you will let me go play Legos.”

“No, Whit,” I said firmly, “You can’t.  This is a consequence.”  I felt, as I do so often, how much easier it would be to just give in.  But I didn’t.  We talked about why he’d been sent to bed.  About not talking back, about listening, about eating his dinner.

“Sometimes when I misbehave I don’t know it.”  His voice was soft, hiccupy.  “Can you sometimes tell me so you don’t have to do this to me again?”

“Yes, Whit.  That’s what the warning was for.”  I hugged him again.  “I will make sure I’m really clear with you.  But I think you do know some of the things you are not supposed to do.”  Sheepish, he looked down at the bright robots on his sheets.

“Are we really made up now?”  Looking up at me through his long eyelashes, he held out his hand as though to shake.

Trying not to laugh, I said, ” I think we should make up with a hug and a kiss, don’t you?”  He nodded, and sat up to hug me hard.  I kissed his cheek and asked if he was ready to go to bed.  “You’ve been really upset in here, haven’t you?”

He nodded again, more vigorously this time. “I’ve been talking to myself, angry at myself that I’m not listening.”

“Well, it’s good to figure out how you can do a better job at that.”  He clutched his Beloved Monkey even closer to him and looked at me.  “We’ll figure it out together, Whit.  I promise.”  I brushed his hair back from his forehead, thinking of all the times I’ve said goodnight in this room, of how often I’ve smoothed my palm across a brow right here, of how often I’ve heard the lullabies that drift from the small CD player.

The specifics of each moment tilt and shift constantly but the central emotions abide, unchanged, sturdy.