Whitman

Trapeze

Matt was away this weekend, and Grace and Whit and I faced the luxury of an almost entirely empty Sunday.  I knew I wanted to do something adventurous, and a few days ago I signed the three of us up for trapeze school.

Trapeze school.  One of my friends texted and asked if we were skiing on Sunday and I answered that no, we were going to trapeze school.  She responded that wow, she didn’t realize we were a circus family. Okay, fine, it was random.

We showed up on Sunday morning at 10am.  Well, we got there 25 minutes early because of my chronic earliness problem.  But the class started at 10.  With very little preamble, we were strapped into safety harnesses and climbed a seemingly endless set of rickety metal stairs.  We faced a carpeted platform, a smiling helper, and a trapeze.  Grace went first.  I couldn’t believe her courage as she stood on the edge of the platform, grabbed the trapeze, and jumped.  My eyes filled with tears and my hands gripped Whit’s tiny shoulders as we stood and watched her flying through the air.

I was pretty sure Whit would refuse to go.  This child, remember, won’t even go on the spinning teacups, let alone even the slowest of roller coasters.  I was shocked, then, when he gamely stood at the platform edge.  The woman standing there had to hold him off the ground so that he could reach the trapeze.  And then he, too, flew.

The thing I was most afraid of was stepping off the platform.  You hold onto the trapeze, lean way forward into empty space against the weight of the helper who is holding your waist belt.  The ground yawns far, far below.  And then you just have to jump into thin air with only the trapeze bar and your faith to keep you off the ground.  The thing the children were most afraid of was the coming down, which involves letting go of the bar and trusting the belt and safety ropes to help you float down to the net, rather than plummet.

We went over and over again, culminating in being caught by another person on another trapeze.  It was flat-out amazing.  My hands are bleeding and callused and my children are exhausted and smiling.  At one point, after Whit had finally figured out the knee hang and let go, he smiled up at me and said, “Are you proud of me, Mummy?”

Oh, yes, my little man.  I was and I am.  Later Grace told me that she realized how good it felt to do something even when it seemed scary.  I expected an adventure, but I did not realize that once again my children would astound me and that they – and I – would learn yet another lesson about what it is to live this life.

Courage, bravery, trust, and letting go.  Being sure that something will catch you.  Stepping off into thin air with faith that you will fly.

Everyday life is a practice and a poem

Everyday life is a practice and a poem.

These words came to me on Friday in a yoga class.  My first yoga class in more months than I can count.  My body remembered the poses like some deeply known but forgotten language.  My mind ran and ran, occasionally settling into a thought, and this one came back, over and over: every day life is both practice and poem.

A practice and a poem.

Dinner with two old, dear friends.  Drive home in the icy darkness.  Say goodbye to Matt as he leaves for a weekend with his father and brothers.  Refill three heavy humidifiers, lug them up flights of stairs, watch the steady stream of moisture puffing into the darkness of the childrens’ rooms.

Kiss Grace and Whit good night.  Linger over my newly-minted six year old, his face more chiseled and boy-like every day, all traces of babyhood now gone.

Saturday morning, get the children dressed, go to Starbucks, the drycleaner, the grocery store.  Drop the groceries off at home.  Slip on the icy snow bank that lines the sidewalk as I try to bring bags of groceries into the house, the kids still in the car, the exhaust pipe billowing white into the crystalline, cold air.  Stop.  Breathe.

Drive to Whit’s birthday party.  Unload drinks, birthday cake, camera.  Several trips from car to Jump On In.  Grace whines because she wants a chocolate bar from the vending machine and I say no.  One of the other boys at the party’s father buys him a chocolate bar.  I still say no.  She threatens tears, crosses her arms across her chest, glares at me, stomps her foot.  I shake my head.  Stop.  Breathe.

25 boys run wild in a paradise of indoor blow-up jumpy castles.  Grace’s finger gets slammed and she cries, this time for real.  We awkwardly wrap and ice pack around it and watch the finger swell.  I wonder if the afternoon will hold another ER visit.  Stop.  Breathe.

Grace asks me to go down the tallest blow up slide with her.  I agree and climb up, clumsy on the unsteady inflated steps.  Grace holds her ice pack in one hand and my hand in the other.  We fly to the bottom, laughing, laughing.

Drive home.  The sky, which was cornflower blue when we arrived at the birthday party, is beginning to fade to pale gray, that winter whiteness that holds everything and nothing in its color.

I carry several loads of bags of presents into the house.  Do I ever arrive anywhere without a car trunk full of things that need unloading, unpacking, putting-into-place?  Whit pounces on the pile of presents and begins to rip into one.  I raise my voice, “Stop!  Wait for me to get in here!” He slinks into the couch to sit and wait, chastised.  Finally, with pad of paper and pen in hand to record the gifts for thank you notes, I let him loose on the bright pile of boxes.

I fill the recycling bin with wrapping paper, wondering how I will fit in all of the boxes and plastic that the toys will shed once actually opened.  When I open the lid of the recycling bin a cascade of snow falls down my front, and my wrists are suddenly freezing.  I’m wearing a pair of Matt’s sneakers, untied, because they were by the door, and I can feel cold wetness around my heels.  The children are shouting about something just inside the door.  I close my eyes for a minute, inhale, my foot poised above the top step.  Sometimes the work of this life is so daunting.  Breathe.

The children watch the Nancy Drew movie.  I put in a load of laundry and sit down at my desk to upload the pictures from the party.  After several minutes I look in on them, sitting close to each other on the couch, and feel a tidal wave of love break over me.  They both sense me staring and look at me, and two faces split into happy smiles.  I return a smile, through tears.

A practice and a poem.

Six Years Old

Dear Whit,

Today you are six.  It is so appallingly cliched of me, but let me just say that I cannot believe it.  Six years ago you arrived, your birth in the middle of the night the complete opposite of, and antidote to, your sister’s long, arduous labor.  You were not, in fact, as they’d scared me with late-stage ultrasounds and fear-mongering about my not having gained enough weight, a dwarf (I had been told at 38 weeks there was a 25% chance you had dwarfism).  No, you were 6 days early and weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces.  Two things about you immediately shocked me: your white-blond hair and the fact of your boyness.  We hadn’t found out the gender in either pregnancy, but I realized when you arrived that I had assumed you were a girl.  You were going to be Phoebe, and, I imagined, a colicky baby with a shock of black hair like your sister.

Nope.

Your personality was as different from Grace’s as was your hair color.  My father has always maintained that children are about 95% nature, and I didn’t believe that until I had a second child.  You were a calm, mellow baby, easy to be around, quick to sleep, delighted to cuddle all day long.  You healed many of the wounds I hadn’t even known I was carrying from your sister’s infancy.

From the very beginning, we all adored you.  This photograph of the first time Grace met you reminds me of William Blake’s famous line that “we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.”  You’ve been loved, fiercely, every single minute of your life.   Your father wept when you were born, taken aback by the intensity of his reaction, never having acknowledged to himself how much he wanted to have a son.  Your sister was passionately attached from the first minute; one of my early memories is of her coming in the front door, being handed her favorite doll to play with, and wailing, “But I want to play with the REAL BABY!”  And me, well, I fell in love with you from the first moment I saw you.  With you I enjoyed, for the first and only time in my life, that blissful bonding with a newborn.  Thank you for giving me that experience, for showing me that it wasn’t out of my reach, that I could, in fact, be overwhelmed by the instinct to mother.  Maybe I could do this after all.

These days you are less placid, less quiet, but no less amenable.  You’re game for any adventure.  You are physically bold, something I was reminded of this past weekend when we skiied.  Helmet covering your two-sets-of-stitches scar, you pointed downhill and simply took off.  You are fast and limber and flexible.  You are absolutely fearless.  You love to run and climb and kick and roll and shout and dig; you are, to use another cliched expression, “all boy.”  Sometimes I joke that you need to be run every day, like a dog.  And you do.

You’ve been growing into the sense of humor that we glimpsed early on.  You are just plain funny.  You remember things and bring them up months later, weaving them into a joke or a question, often startling me with your recall and with how closely you are paying attention.  You make puns and are often laugh-out-loud clever.  One thing I worry about, Whit, is making sure that you know there are many things about you other than your sense of humor that are wonderful.  People love and esteem you for far more than just being funny.  I promise.  Please don’t hide behind being the clown – don’t ever stop making me laugh, my beloved, but at the same time please know I adore all the other facets of your personality too (well, most of them).

Whit, you can be remarkably sensitive, and your keen memory for detail serves you well here.  You have demonstrated an awareness of what’s going on in a room, with other people, that’s often taken me aback.  You have wept for missing friends, places, and stages of your life, your tangible heartbreak seeming to emanate from a much older and more mature person.

You are loyal and loving towards your sister, even though you aggravate her, break her Lego contraptions, and draw on her pieces of paper almost daily.  One of my favorite things the two of you do is speak to each other through the heating vent that goes through the walls; each of your rooms has a grate that opens into the vent.  When you’re in your rooms alone, you often whisper to each other, and it makes my heart swell, the way you just want to make sure the other is there.  You always wake up before Grace does and your very, very favorite thing to do is to wake her up by crawling into her bed and snuggling next to her, whispering “I love you, Grace” into her tousled dark hair.

It takes a while to earn your trust, but once that is done it is tenacious and sturdy.  Your favorite person in the entire world is  Christina, who was your teacher last year.  You knew one of your two Kindergarten teachers, Miss Greene, before this year because you knew she was a friend of Christina’s.  The other teacher was new to you.  In November, this other teacher pulled you aside and asked you why you had trouble listening to her; apparently you were much more open to input and direction from Miss Greene.  You looked right at your teacher and said, “I don’t know you yet.  I need to know you before I can listen.”  While I think you need to learn that teachers and other authority figures should be treated with respect, I appreciate very much that you don’t automatically assume that those in “power” are right, and I also value the way your esteem for someone is built over time.

Whitman, I adore you with all of my heart.  You are a comedian with a deep sensitive streak running through you, and that combination both endears and entertains me.  I look forward to many more years of adventures together, and hope you will never lose your unique outlook on the world, informed by both wonder and practicality, equal parts convention and ostentatious individuality.

Happy sixth birthday, my only son, my favorite boy in the whole wide world.  I love you.

Tucking in a 5 year old for the last time

I just tucked this guy in for the last time as a five year old.  I came upstairs for goodnight to see that he’d accessorized his pajamas with this sweatband (which has been a favorite for a long time).  That’s his monkey that he sleeps with every single night, who is (creatively) named Beloved Monkey.  He allowed me to hug him in his bed, because “snuggling is usually better in the bed,” before moving to a sleeping bag on the floor, which is how he prefers to sleep these days.  He also sleeps naked most of the time.  But that headband?  Tonight, he kept it on.

It’s hard to cry, which is my instinct on a night like this, when he makes me laugh so hard.

Goodbye, five year olds.

xo

An endless alleluia and a constant goodbye

I know I write all the time about the powerful and perilous ways that Grace reminds me of myself, about how she seems to have a core of sensitivity, emotion, insecurity, and sentimentality running through her that I intimately recognize. Similarly, I’ve written before of Whit’s predilection towards lightness, his surprising humor, his lack of instinctive subservience to authority. I wouldn’t blame any of you for feeling I’m a one-note violin on this score.

Never let it be said, however, that these children rest in their neat categories. Tonight, after reading several pages of Star Wars Heroes (another post: the Jedi emphasis on controlling your emotions – I’m fascinated that this may be taking real hold of the minds of our young boys, given the wild passion for Star Wars), I tucked Whit into bed. He was unusually clingy, consenting to snuggle in my lap while I rocked him, listening to a lullabye, a tradition that is all but gone now. I kissed him good night and went downstairs to read Harry Potter to Grace.

A page or two into the terrifying scene at the Quidditch World Cup where the Dark Mark hovers over the eerie forest (Grace: “Mummy! I’m scared! Can I hold on?” = her gripping my upper arm with two hands, so hard she left white finger marks) I heard Whit’s door open and his snuffling, tearful voice. “Mummy?” he called plaintively. “Yes, Whit?” “I’m sad.” I asked Grace if it was OK for me to go check on her brother and (surprisingly) she agreed easily.

Whit was in the bathroom. Looking at the floor, he kicked at the tile by the tub idly. He said, without looking at me, “I don’t want to talk about it.” “Oh, Whit, please?” He looked at me and dissolved into more tears. I picked him up and carried him back to the rocker. He was limp in my arms, his tearful face nestled wetly against my neck.

“Whitty, what’s wrong?” He was crying hard, speaking in short bursts between his hiccupy sobs. “I don’t want to be a kid, Mummy. It’s hard to be a kid.” “I know, sweetheart, I know.” “Mummy, I want to be a baby still.” We launched into a fairly detailed conversation about how he didn’t want to grow up and it was all going too fast and he wanted to still be a baby and be carried around. I was somewhere between shocked and blown away. Has he been reading my blog? Reading my mind?

Grace tiptoed into Whit’s room and he let her come over and stroke his hair back from his forehead. He looked right at her and told her why he was sad. “Oh, Whit, I know that feeling. I get sad about that too,” she said sincerely. What? Do my children feel the same contraction and expansion in their chests that I do, that same echoing sadness that seems to pulse with the closing of each moment?

I thought about how their bodies seem to be longer and leaner every single day; a similar growth must be happening in their hearts and spirits. That growth, sudden, overwhelming, must be scary and disorienting. I thought fiercely: I always want them to be able to talk to me about this.

Blinking back my own tears, I took the children on a quick tour through their babyhoods. I showed them the tiny hats they had each worn in the hospital, the doll-sized newborn diapers (I saved a couple of clean ones), the plastic bracelet I wore during each labor & delivery stay. Whit dug deep into his sock drawer to unearth a pair of 3-6 month socks with robots all over them. “These were mine, right, Mummy?” he asked urgently. He wore them to bed tonight.

We then went to the family room and leafed through the two photo albums that covered the first nine months of Whit’s life. He alternated between giggling and crying as we pored over the pictures. One in particular, of him lying on the floor, curled up, asleep, still a newborn, he exclaimed, “I think that’s on this very rug, Mummy!” He was right. He looked at the rug with an expression in his eyes that I recognized deeply: this place, here, was there, then, and it’s here now, and it’s the same and yet not… where did that moment go? Is it here? How could it not be here?

We talked some about how it is normal to feel sad sometimes about things that are over. About how it is hard to be a kid. Also, about the things that they can do now that they couldn’t when they were babies (Storyland, playdates, pizza, scootering, TV). Whit wisely said, “But I didn’t know about those things then, so I didn’t care that I couldn’t do them.” Hard to argue with that.

I finally got both my children settled and on their way to sleep, but now I sit here, lost in memories of those years of new babies and new horizons. I was a different person then, something I was reminded of when I saw the pictures with Whit as a newborn. I’m aware, as I am often, of the ways that minutes and hours and days add up to years, but with very irregular contents. The days stretch like taffy, sagging in the middle, the moments crystallize like glittering gems, the years pile up haphazardly, and what is built is a life.

Parenting – life itself! – is an endless alleluia* and a constant goodbye.

And, I am 100% biased, but I admit that tonight’s little exercise reminded me of how utterly adorable I thought Whit was as a baby.



*attribution to Newman and Hank for the best Christmas card message ever.

Originally written in June 2010