Whitman

Pictures from a birthday and ordinary life

A few images from Grace’s birthday and life around here …
Birthday morning: Grace’s favorite breakfast, cinnamon rolls
After an all-day field trip at Plymouth Plantation (which I chaperoned) we had birthday cupcakes at school.  I drove to the field trip with two other mothers from Grace’s class, and I think I may have scared them off permanently when I mentioned that I sometimes walk and sit in the local cemetery and then also referred to my dislike of music, strong tastes, smells, etc.  I think it is possible they think I’m a tiny bit weird.
After school Grace and I took our second-annual birthday pilgrimage to Barnes & Noble.  She had a couple of gift cards (fabulous birthday gifts!) and I’m eager to help her develop the passion I feel for bookstores, so off we went.  She now thinks of this as what we do to celebrate her birthday, and as far as I’m concerned that’s great.
I bought these lilies over the weekend because they were from a local farm.  I’ve never really had lilies before, and their flashy beauty struck me as they unfolded just in time for the birthday.  One small thing I’m proud of: from Memorial Day until late September I didn’t buy fruits or vegetables from anywhere other than local farmer’s markets.  It is kind of killing me to go back to Whole Foods, so I’m trying to stretch the local focus as long as I can.  Hence the new flowers.
After dinner of take-out sushi (Grace’s choice, but cucumber rolls are as far as she will go) we had her now-traditional birthday cake, which is half chocolate and half vanilla (both cake and frosting).  Yes, I’ve been baking up a storm.  Yes, I’m ready for my kitchen not to be awash in leftover sugar, sugar, sugar, but ooops, now it’s Halloween.

And also, a couple of photographs of our resident comedian, Whit.
Even Captain Rex gets tired out after a long day of lightsaber fighting.
Real men aren’t afraid to waltz with their buddies (note that Whit’s friend, the same age as him, is a full head taller … oh my poor wee little guy).
It’s good to fly before bed.

Wonder

“Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.”
– Diane Ackerman

A night or two a week these days we go for a walk after dinner.  Grace and Whit get to go in their pajamas, which they find both thrilling and hilarious.  I’m struck by how aware they are, as we walk, by how much they notice, by how they – and, correspondingly, I – swell with wonder at the ordinary world. 

Wonder.

I think my most devout wish for Grace and Whit is that that they never lose this ability to see the magic and enchantment in their lives.

Goodbye to Doctor Rick

In March I received a letter that made me cry.  It was from our beloved pediatrician, writing to let his patients know that he was leaving his practice in the fall.  He had decided to go work full-time in palliative care with pediatric cancer patients, something he had been doing a day or two a week in recent years.  In March “the fall” seemed awfully far away, and while the news made me very sad, it felt remote.

Flash forward to Thursday last week, to Grace’s eight year check up.  When I’d spoken to Dr. Rick over the summer about our transition to another pediatrician in his practice, he urged me to make Grace’s appointment a few weeks before her birthday so we could have one last visit with him.  I didn’t realize that our appointment, on September 30th, was the very last day he was seeing patients.  I didn’t realize we were the third or fourth to last patient he ever saw in the practice he’d lovingly led for years and years.

Yikes.  I learned this when I got the office’s confirmation call on Wednesday.  Startled, I realized that the distant fall had arrived and my eyes filled with tears.  He was really leaving.

So it was with great sadness that I watched Dr. Rick interact with Grace with his usual blend of warmth and humor.  What I didn’t expect, though, was the intense gratitude I felt.   This man, I realized, was the person who had held the door to motherhood open for me.  I think of him in those first few weeks and months, when he was much more of a presence in my life as a mother than he will probably ever know.  I remember the call, when Grace was 2 weeks old, when I told him, through sobs, that I had just been diagnosed with post partum depression.  I don’t know exactly what he said to me, but I remember vividly feel calmed and comforted when I hung up the phone.

Just like that, from the very start, Dr. Rick made me feel I could do this.  He didn’t ever pathologize my initial, frankly violent feelings about motherhood, and he patiently waited as they subsided into the more regular, gentle throbbing of mother-love that I’d expected from the start.  He seemed to have anticipated this arc, and somehow that felt reassuring to me rather than condescending.

Over the years Dr. Rick has been an important supporter of my approach to parenting, whose commitment to not over-scheduling or over-indulging my children often makes me feel out of step with everyone around me.  I’ve felt his quiet but steady approval bolstering me when I feel insane or different, and have more than once called on him for advice in matters that have very little to do with my childrens’ physical health.

Dr. Rick has been a calm and non-reactive doctor, who responded to a call at 11pm about a fever fever with the soothing and nonchalant advice to administer motrin and call in the morning.  He examined Grace after she fell out of a Whole Foods shopping cart onto a concrete floor at 14 months, advised on flu shots (not a fan), and diagnosed dozens of ear infections.  All without batting an eyelash.  His relaxed approach, which evinces a fundamental faith in the sturdiness of our children and in the goodness of the world, certainly informed my own.  As I’ve written before, I’m a far more laid-back mother than I ever expected.  The lion’s share of credit for this surely goes to my mother, whose own laissez-faire approach incubated mine, but some of it belongs to Dr. Rick.

That said, Dr. Rick knew when to be concerned, and he has been, once for each child.  And in each case, he delivered his concern to me calmly but seriously, and because of his generally easy demeanor, I took his input and advice directly to heart.

Rick has been the perfect pediatrican.  I feel great sadness at his moving on, and know that all of us will grieve his absence in our lives and those of our children.  Just a few weeks ago, driving to the “procedure” about which he was very concerned, Whit asked me, voice wobbling, “this doctor is a friend of Dr Rick’s, right?”  When I said yes I felt him relax slightly, still scared but at least sure that he was in good hands.  Anyone who is a friend of Dr Rick’s is inherently to be trusted.  I feel the same way.

I am sure that the patients Rick will be treating now need him much more than we do.  I am equally certain that he is pursuing his dharma, following his path, which takes him towards incredibly difficult and important work.  I am grateful beyond measure for his consistent support, which was always gentle and firm at the same time.  As I told him on Thursday, leaving our final appointment, with tears in my eyes, he was the first person who really made me think I was capable of being a mother.

And that is an extraordinary gift.

Thank you, Dr. Rick.  We will miss you.

The first day of kindergarten, 2.0

Dear Whit,

Today you start kindergarten. I’m astonished, in a way both cliched and powerful, that we are here.

For three years you didn’t say much of anything. Your first preschool teacher, in fact, urged us to have you evaluated by a speech therapist. She even gently suggested that you might have cognitive delays. Within months your speech therapist (an adorable blonde woman that you thought was fabulous) had you talking a blue streak, and within weeks she had ascertained that there was definitely nothing cognitive going on. You do speak with a distinctive accent, which we like to joke is from Pawtucket. You may not have spoken for three years, but you haven’t stopped since.

You say the funniest, most observant things, often causing me to pull over to jot them down for posterity (or use on this blog). You, Whit, are just downright hilarious. I’m not sure where that came from, since neither your Dad nor I is particularly funny. But you make me laugh out loud every single day, which is an enormous gift.

This was the summer you really became comfortable in the water. You can reliably – though inelegantly – swim laps and stay afloat for a long time (which is kind of amazing because you have no body fat and generally sink like a stone). In June you decided you wanted to learn how to dive and you have. The way you hurtle yourself off a diving board is a good metaphor for the unbridled enthusiasm and fearlessness you bring to life. You shout, “I’m going!” to make sure all around you are watching and then you take off at a run, not even hesitating before plunging into the water. I’ve yet to meet a diving board high enough to give you pause.

You love Legos and robots and trucks. You are always looking to understand how things work. As a three year old you crept under the toilet, put your hand on the pipe after flushing, and said to me, awestruck, “There’s water running here, Mummy!” And just last week at Basin Harbor I couldn’t find you for a minute on the beach. I finally noticed you crouching near one of the paddleboats, looking underneath it, trying to understand how it moved and steered. I am eager to watch where this curiosity takes you, and hope I will always nourish it, even when being asked “why …” every three minutes all day long gets old.

Whit, you are the definition of marching to your own drummer. One evening this summer I went in to kiss you goodnight to see that you had stripped down and were sleeping naked on the floor, lying flat on your back on top of the sleeping bag that you’d found in the closet, with your small fan blowing right on your face. Decked out in mardi gras beads this summer after Magic Night with Hadley and family, you announced from the back seat of the car, “I could be an international pop star with all of this jewelry!” Where you learned that I have no idea.

Your presence in my life pushes and challenges me every single day. We see the world so differently, Whit, you and I. You approach every day as a wide open canvas, never assume that there are limits until you physically meet them, and need to have the reason for rules proven to you before you follow them. You inspire me, in this way, because the automatic way I stoop before authority has held me back so much in my life. Where I see a closed door, you see a hurdle to find your way around. You are wily and bright and as a baby we called you Houdini for the infinite ways you found to wriggle out of your pajamas and then your crib. I tried everything, eventually winding up with too-small footie pjs on backward with the feet cut off and a crib tent with the zipper carabinered to the side of the crib.

Two years ago I wrote a letter to Grace on her first day of kindergarten. Reading it always makes me cry. Now here I am, even more sentimental, even more raw, surprised once again at the speed with which the days pass by. You, the baby who healed so much for me, whose arrival showed me I could fall in love with a newborn, who made me believe that maybe, just maybe, I was cut out to be a mother after all. You, who gave back to me all that I missed the first time around. You aren’t easy, Whit, with your stubborn outbursts and steadfast refusal to accept “because I said so” as a reason.  But it is so worth it.  I learn so much from you. You make me question so many of the things I’ve always taken for granted, and watching you operate in the world both bewilders and dazzles me. You are so immensely sweet at your core, and so, so funny: this morning I woke up to a soft kiss on my cheek and turned to see you standing there in your pajamas and sunglasses, cocking your finger at me and smiling, as though to say “Hi there, lady!”

Happy first day, Whit. I am so excited for you about all of the adventures that lie ahead, and I know I’ll never, ever stop laughing as I travel them alongside you. I’m so grateful to be your mother.

I love you.

Whispering good night

The universe has a way of timing things just right. Just days ago I was sad about summer ending, about the closing of this magical time with my children, these three months dotted with highlights and plenty of tiny moments in between.

And then they became monsters. Oh, wow, is it time for school. Something just flipped this past weekend and they are cranky and exhausted and thoroughly sick of each other’s – and my – company. Suddenly the return to school, routines, and some time when they are not around sounds just lovely.

So, in short, it’s been a long couple of days. And yet all of that fell away instantly tonight when I tiptoed into their bedrooms to kiss them goodnight. Whit in sleep till has the scent of baby-toddler wafting off of him, that freshly-bathed smell, something from the past drifting up to tug me back to those long-ago days when I rocked babies in that very same room.

I whispered to them both tonight, into the curled, flushed-ivory shells of their ears, about how sorry I am about my short temper these days, about how I regret the times I’ve snapped, about how I understand that they too sense change hanging around the edges of these days and that that makes them anxious. I thanked them for all of their energy and enthusiasm this summer, for their patience and their adventurous spirits that took us so many places, near and far, together. I pressed my lips to their cheeks, feeling the peachfuzz of their skin, closing my eyes to try, once again, to freeze time.

And then I murmured, to each of my children in turn, of how I loved them, always, always, no matter what. Of how I know them and I honor them and I witness them and I love them. I tried, as I do often, to pour my love into their sleeping selves, to fill them with it so there’s less room for doubt and fear. I want to erect armor around their hearts so that they will always know that someone – maybe just this small person, but someone – loves them. I wish I could infuse their very bloodstreams with my love, so that they will never, for a single second, doubt that they are worthy, known, seen, loved.

And yes, I realize, this is what I want for myself too.