Whitman

Praying means saying thank you

Sunday morning dawned clear and very cold.  Winter has swept in in Thanksgiving’s wake.  I took Grace and Whit to one of my favorite places, Mount Auburn Cemetery.  My children love it there as well; I imagine they pick on the same sense of peace as I do.  Plus, there is a great circular tower (reminding me vividly of a childhood book I read about a castle keep) that is fun to climb and that offers a terrific view of Boston from the top.  There is a little trickling fairy stream, around which magic feels tangible.

Both Grace and Whit really like exploring the cemetery, and their senses seem on high alert there.  They notice the details on the gravestones, the red berries aflame on one bush, the drifts of crunchy brown leaves at the base of another, and the play of the light on the trees.  They have learned through my repeated exhortations to be quiet and respectful in such a sacred space.

It was cold on Sunday, and we did not last long.  My fingers were cold from taking pictures, and because Whit wanted to hold my hand (and I did not have gloves).  I’d let my fingers freeze before I denied him that.  We were walking back to the car when I heard Grace sigh. “What’s up, G?” I asked the back of her head, following behind her on a narrow path.  Whit was right behind me, gripping my icicle-fingers.

“Well, I love this place, Mummy.  But it also makes me sort of sad.”

“You know, Gracie, I know what you mean.  But for some reason I don’t find it creepy, even though it’s a cemetery.”

“Oh, I don’t mean creepy.  Just sad.  You know, that all of these people have died.  And some children too.”

“Well,” I swallowed.  “Sometimes being aware of death can make you really grateful for the life you have.  Right?”

“Yes, you are right.”  She turned to look at me, thoughtful.

As we drove out, we passed the chapel near the front gate.  I mentioned that sometimes I liked to go sit in the chapel.  “What do you do in there?” Whit asked, curious.

“Well, I like to sit and think.  It’s quiet and peaceful.  And to pray.”

“What does it mean, exactly, to pray, Mummy?” Whit pressed on, and I caught his eye in the rearview mirror.  I remembered last year’s discussion of holiness, and had the same sensation of something animate in the car with me, bigger than me.  I wanted to live up to this feeling.  I hesitated.  What does it mean, to pray?

“What do you think it means, Gracie?”  I punted.

She didn’t miss a beat.  “It means, Whitty, saying thank you to God for all the things you are thankful for having in your life.”

I fought a surge of feeling.  Just this weekend I was thinking about how prayer should be about thank you, not about please give me.  About how often we all seem to have it backwards.  And without a shadow of a doubt, my eight year old expressed this more beautifully than I ever could have hoped to.  I looked in the mirror and saw her smiling at him, saw him reach across the backseat to clutch her hand, his faded red-and-blue mitten curling around her bare fingers.

Thank you.

How about you love me the same amount as you love yourself.

Our mornings, now that I do drop-off every day, go like this: we drive to school, inevitably finding “rockstar parking” (as per Grace) because of my chronic earliness problem.  We walk through the Morse Building, where the youngest classrooms are, (beginners, kindergarten, 1st grade) and then proceed through the playground to the area where Grace waits with the other “big kids” to go into the building at 8:10.  She gives me a big hug, Whit a grudging one, and heads off, her enormous backpack strapped to her back, to find her friends.

Whit and I then head back, hand-in-hand, to the Morse Building.  We sit in the lobby, on the little bench outside the nurse’s office.  Many times, we’ve had this conversation:

“Whit, my preference would be to sit with you until 8:10 and then to walk into your classroom with you.”

“Mummy, my preference is to go to Early Dropoff with Peter.”

Until Peter arrives, though, I get a few precious minutes sitting next to Whit.  We talk about school, his friends, whatever is on his mind.  This is the spot where last year he asked about my feelings and then revealed he was interested in the feeling of pain he gave me when he kicked my leg.

This morning we sat in companionable silence for a few moments, Whit curled up next to me, leaning into my side.  I squeezed his shoulder with my arm, leaned down to kiss his ever-so-short hair, and whispered, “I love you, Whitty.”  He looked up at me, an intent look in his eyes.

“Do you love me more than you love yourself?”

“Well, I don’t know about that, Whit.  Maybe,” I chewed my lip.  What do I actually think about this?

“That’s pretty selfish, don’t you think, Mummy?”

People were beginning to fill the lobby.  The subculture of dropoff (whose costume is Lululemon yoga pants, Tom Ford sunglasses, a venti Starbucks cup, and a big designer handbag) was in full effect.  This suddenly felt like a very personal conversation to be having.  Whit has a way of plunging from the surface to the deep depths of a topic with little warning.  It can make you dizzy.

“Well, Whit, I do think we have to love ourselves before we can love anyone else.”

He leaned back against me, his brow furrowed, obviously thinking about it.

“How about this,” he looked back up at me, poking my shoulder to make sure I was meeting his eyes.  “How about you love me the same amount as you love yourself?”

“Deal,” I said, giving him a hug.  Peter walked into the doors at that moment and Whit fled, barely giving me a backward look, following his best friend into the Early Dropoff room.

It made me think, though.  Certainly Erica Jong’s interesting WSJ piece last weekend, which so lit up the blogosphere, implied that the current cultural norm is to put our children above all else.  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  I would not describe myself as terrifically good at self-love, or as having particularly strong self-esteem, and I also have a great deal of anxiety about and a profound desire not to be selfish.  At the same time my instinct is that Whit’s proposal is probably about right.  What do you think?

Parent-teacher conferences, again

Another year, another set of fall parent-teacher conferences.  I look at the pictures in last year’s post and I’m struck by how little Whit seems.  I see him every day so the growth is imperceptible.  It’s only when I look at images and details from a year ago, like this, I realize how startlingly he’s growing.  All of his little boy summer blond was just cut out of his hair, and he’s now the height when he stands in front of me that I still think his sister is.  That is, he’s what I think of as the height of my older child.  Not anymore.  Grace is growing too.  A mouthful of holes has grown into a set of big, adult teeth.

Grace and Whit continue to be their very own selves, growing more and more into the personalities that they’ve been exhibiting since they were very small.  They are distinct individuals, with strengths and weaknesses now showing like flags.  Also becoming clear are the ways that their repeated bumping into each other is shaping them.

Grace continues to be a conscientious perfectionist and an over-achiever.  She loves to read but Math is her favorite subject.  I especially loved hearing about how she is a generous friend who is quick to help anyone who needs it, and who is aware of those who are alone and/or sad in the classroom or playground.  She is eager to perform and to please her teachers, for better or for worse.  I can sense that she’s taken, either by choice or default, the “straight man” role to Whit’s comedian.  I can tell that this sometimes frustrates her.

Already she can feel the weight of expectation on her shoulders; my reaction to this is ambivalent, both an intense identification and a deep guilt that this heavy cloak is part of the legacy of being my daughter.  She also inclines towards shadow, as do I – whether this is innate or learned I can’t know.  “My poor, poor daughter, tugging behind her the heavy freight of [the] moody melancholy” she inherited from me, I wrote a while ago, and days like today I’m keenly reminded of it.

Whit is different from Grace in so many ways.  He is laughter to her seriousness, rebellion to her rule-following, light to her cloudiness.  He is beginning to sound out words and demonstrating facility with numbers, but continues to struggle with paying attention and sitting still.  Some of this is, naturally, age-appropriate for a five year old boy.  Some of it, I’m beginning to see, is a way of deflecting attention from a task he’s not comfortable with.  If he just acts out, changing the subject by making people laugh, he can avoid having to do things he’s not confident about.  I think this is a reaction, too, to his older sister, a way of claiming his own territory.  What I feel about this behavior in Whit is very different from the dizzying self/other vertigo Grace gives me: I feel a combination of abject horror and complete respect at the way he challenges authority.

Whit has, however, occasionally demonstrated the same raw vulnerability that I recognize so personally in Grace.  He misses places, people, and times of his life with an fierceness that reminds me of my own.  He has, acutely and specifically, bemoaned the passage of time.  These moments remind me that my children are not as simply and neatly categorized as it’s tempting to think.  Whit, too, inherited my sensitivity; he just handles differently than Grace does.  I believe that his default to humor, to being a clown, is also a way to escape his own moods: by making others laugh, he is lifted himself.  Isn’t this true of many of the funniest people you know?

I’m humbled tonight, again, by the complicated, nascent human beings I live with.  I’m certain, as I’ve always been, that they do not belong to me – they are just passing through, and it is my honor to shelter them as I share these magic years.  What multi-faceted people my children are, resilient and fragile at the same time (the same is true of most adults, I’d posit).  My mind is swirling tonight, full of images of their babyhoods, more recent moments, disbelief at the speed with which it’s all flying, all set to the soundtrack of the lullabyes they each still listen to as they go to sleep.  Which I can hear faintly from their rooms now; somehow it feels like the familiar words are floating from years past, when they were babies, from the years we have already spent together.

Good Night Moon, Spanish moss frost, and heart break

Last night Whit picked a book for me to read to him before bed, as he does every night.  Uncharacteristically, he brought me Goodnight Moon.  “A good night book,” he said, plopping into my lap.  He is tall and angular now, in a way that only Gracie used to be.  He curled up against me and I read Goodnight Moon to him, saying the words by heart.  He was quiet, unusually still, and when I was finished he whispered to me, “Can you read it again?”

Of course I did.  Rocking in the yellow chair that held me as I nursed two babies.  In the nursery that held Grace, exactly eight years ago.  The nights are long, as they were then, the the light feels limited, though full of feeling, emotion and elegy, when it is here.  I read Goodnight Moon again, voice cracking at parts, and I could tell Whit was exhausted because he lay limply against my chest, not looking up to wonder at my tearful voice.

I wondered if this was the last time I’d rock a child reading Goodnight Moon. I thought about how often we do something for the last time without knowing it; the importance of a moment, its heavy significance, is so often clear only in retrospect. I wonder if part of this is self-protection: if I knew every time something was a last, I don’t think I could bear it.  As it is, the possibility of that, the unavoidable truth of loss, hangs around every moment of my life, Spanish moss twining around the branches of my consciousness, falling in elegant loops that sometimes occlude the sun.  That is hard enough.

This morning the fields were covered in silver frost (the color of Spanish moss, in fact, which is what made me think of it).  It was really quite spectacular, and take-your-breath-away cold too.  Grace and Whit wanted to run across the field at school (see photo), marveling at their own footprints in the rime.  Leaving their marks.  I stood and watched them, wistful.  As we do every morning, Whit and I walked Grace to the 2nd grade playground.  We say goodbye to her always at the same point, at a remove far enough from her friends that Grace feels comfortable throwing herself into a real hug in my arms.

After watching her run towards her friends, her brand-new birthday backpack bright on her parka-ed back, Whit and I turned to walk back to his building.  He reached up and held my hand, his nubby woolen mitten curling around my fingers.

“Whit?” I said to him, leaning down.

“What?”

“I like that you still like to hold my hand.”

“I like it too,” he said, squeezing my hand.  “It makes me feel like my heart will never break.”

Oh, my sweet boy.  If only.