Whitman

As Much As the Sky

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“And in between those days and now there yawns an enormous gulf, an eternity of bathtimes, so many of which, if I’m honest, felt like a chore that I had to suffer through, a final slog before the relief of bedtime. How did I not value every single one? Splashing in the water, tickling Whit’s neck, I want them all back. The truth that I can’t—the basic fact of time’s swift passage—stands between me and the sun. My whole life is lived in its shadow. I blink back tears.”

Click here to read more of As Much As the Sky.

I’m honored to have my first piece up on Mamalode today.  I’d so appreciate if you would click over and read it – I have long admired Mamalode and it’s a privilege to be published there.  Comments here are closed but I would be very grateful to hear from you there!

A Walk With Whit

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We awoke on Sunday morning to full, glorious spring sunshine.  Matt and Grace headed off to an early soccer game, and Whit and I had the morning together.  After a slow start to the day (Survivor, his current obsession, and an extended breakfast) we went for a walk.  As we strolled towards the library I thought about how many times I’ve walked these streets with Whit.  More than I can possibly count.  The first paragraph of the introduction to the memoir I decided not to write described walking past the park where I spent so many hours with my children.  Whit and I, hand in hand, walked past that same park and the lines rose in my head:

… I felt a pang so acute of all that was gone I had to stop and catch my breath. That time, when empty days unfurled in front of me, seems like another country. While my children still play on playgrounds, I know those days themselves are numbered.

I gripped Whit’s hand harder, wondered to myself when will he stop holding my hand?, shook my head to clear my eyes, and kept walking.  We walked past the bush whose sparrow population must number hundreds and stopped in front of it, listening.  We have been stopped in our tracks before by the birdsong emanating from this bush.

“This past week, Mummy, one morning, I was on my way to touch typing before school and I had to stop and sit and listen to the birds,” Whit offered.

“You did?”

“Yes.  It was just so beautiful.  I sat down on one of the stone walls by the building and listened.  I looked up at the sky.”

“Wow, Whit.  That’s great.”

“I felt like I didn’t have a choice.  I just wanted to take it in.”

We kept walking, my heart tumbling around in my chest.  Sometimes he dazzles me with his sensitivity and thoughtfulness, Whit does (rest assured he is far from perfect; he also drives me insane with his stubbornness).  I am fiercely familiar with the overwhelming need to sit, look, listen, to simply observe and in so doing worship the world.

Wstanding

As we walked Whit gave me a detailed account of the movie The Odd Life of Timothy Green (which he saw ages ago; I’m not sure why it was on his mind that day).  He described Timothy standing, arms outstretched soaking up the sun, and demonstrated it for me.  Then we walked by another bush full of sparrows and Whit’s mind hopscotched to Still, the bird who spent months living under the eaves of our porch.

“It feel like the hours of the day go so slowly but then you look back and it has been two years since Still lived at our house,” Whit observed, walking next to me.  I stared at him.  Yes, yes, it does, my dear.  I swallowed hard so that I didn’t start crying.

We walked on.  Whit pointed out a spray of magnolia petals across the sidewalk, the budding green on all the trees, the chirping of birds.  I watched him as he noticed the world around him, compelled to simply observe and, in so doing, to worship.

 

Firsts and lasts

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My first baby and my last baby, February 2005

Years ago Whit remarked, in his now-classic casually offhand yet startlingly insightful way, that while Grace gets to have all the firsts in our family, he gets to have all the lasts.

And they just keep coming, firsts and lasts, piled on top of each other in a pile that grows so high it teeters and sometimes threatens to swamp me.

Last week at bedtime Grace was wistful and sad.  I scooted into her bed next to hear and leaned back against her pillow.  I asked her what was wrong.  She looked at me and let her tears come.  “Why does it have to go so fast?  I don’t want to grow up.  There are only one and a half years left of my childhood.”

“Wait a second!” My breath caught in my throat.  “What?  Why do you say that?”

“Well until I’m a teenager.”

Holy shit. I looked at her face, speechless.  I smoothed her hair behind her ear and watched her big, deep brown eyes as they studied me.  How many first are left?  I know there are so many ahead but there are also so many behind us.  So many firsts we’ll never have again.  I looked up at a self-portrait she made at age 3 in nursery school, when she was in the Yellow Room, which hangs over her bed.  Time telescoped and collapsed on itself.  I felt dizzy as all the hours, nights, weeks, and years that I have spent in this room with Grace, and all that we will never have back sudden filled the room, pressing in on me, and I couldn’t breathe.

The next morning I woke Whit up, and as I do every morning I knelt next to his bed and watched him for a few moments.  His entire life was visible in his sleeping face.  The scar by his eye from stitches on Christmas Eve 2010, which marked his second Christmas Eve in the Children’s Hospital ER in six years.  The blond hair that had so surprised me when he arrived.  The profile which I recognized from his ultrasound image, so many years ago.

So many lasts.  When I got Whit a new pair of sneakers last week I cried getting rid of the old ones, thinking: I won’t ever buy size 1 Nikes again.  In nine months I won’t have any children in the single digits.  Whit’s years as a Mite in hockey are over now.

The lasts are especially poignant because he is the last last.

I know.  I know.  There are so many new horizons to explore, so, so many firsts, experiences and adventures to share.  I know.  But still.  There are also so many lasts.  So many hours, days, weeks, and years that I can never get back.

This is truly the story I can’t stop telling, the song I can’t stop singing, the ringing bell whose echoes I can’t stop hearing.

Can’t have one without the other

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We had a spectacular spring break.  The trip to the Galapagos was more magical than our everyday life, of course, and Grace and Whit, sponges that they are, soaked it all up.  As we headed home, on the last morning, Grace was tearful. In the airport lounge (as we embarked on what would be a full 24 hours of travel) she looked at me with mournful eyes.  “I don’t want it to be over,” she said, hugging me hard.  I nodded, my own eyes filling with tears.

“Why does it have to end?  Why does it have to be so sad?” she asked me, her voice muffled against my shoulder.  A wry smile flitted across my face, though she couldn’t see it.  Why does it?  This is something I ask myself every single day.

“Oh, Gracie.  You can’t have one without the other,” I said.  She pulled away and looked me in the eye, a question in her face.  “You know, the amazing experience is part of it and then being sad it’s over is the other part.”  She nodded silently, chewing her lip.  We sat in silence, the huge ceiling fans in the Guayaquil airport spinning slowly overhead.  I watched Grace’s knee jiggle as I thought of the two edges of this world, of the joy and the sorrow, of the beauty and the pain, of how inextricably linked they are, of how ambivalent I feel that my daughter is learning this lesson already.

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The last night of break, Whit came out of his room a few minutes after I had tucked him in.  I walked him back into his dark room and sat down on the edge of his bed.  “What’s on your mind?”  His cheeks were wet and he had clearly been crying.  He shook his head and I waited.

“I want to go back to the Galapagos, Mummy.  And I am just sad.  Sad about everything that’s over.”  I stroked his blond hair off his forehead.  “I’m sad we’re not going back to Legoland.”  I nodded.

“I know, Whit.  It’s always sad when things are over.”  I had a lump in my own throat as I spoke.  Over and over again, Grace and Whit seem to go straight to the heart of all the things I find the most difficult.  This is what they do: they drag me to confront the emotions with which I most struggle.

“So many things,” he hiccuped, “that didn’t seem that much fun at the time, like the hot slow bus to the turtle farm, or the long layover in Guayaquil, or the flight where we didn’t sleep…” his voice trailed off.

“Or that lunch in Puerto Ayora when you were so cranky,” I offered, and a small smile cracked his face.

“Yeah.  All of those things.  They didn’t seem that much fun when we were going them, but now I miss them all.”

Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember. – Oscar Levant

I read this quote the day after that bedtime conversation with Whit, and I think it’s saying what he was, too.  So often things take on the sheen of joy after the fact, their memory burnished with something that wasn’t necessarily there as we lived it.  I don’t think this is a bad or a sad thing, though it does make me more aware that the experiences that feel like a slog (and Whit is right, that long bus ride back and forth across Santa Cruz qualifies) often become cherished memories.

It’s all connected, all of it: the delight and the sorrow, the experience and the memory, the difficulty fading into the background as the joyful center of an experience moves to the front.  You can’t have one without the other, of any of these dualities, of that I’m sure.  It’s a bittersweet thing, to watch my children learn this, and they both did on our trip to the Galapagos and in its wake.  And it’s something I’m still learning, too.

 

Grit and heart

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I write all the time about the confounding, mysterious nature of memory, and of how it is the smallest, most minute moments that often endure the most sturdily for me.  Once in a while, though, there is an experience that trumpets its power even as I live it.

Whit’s championship hockey finals were one such moment.  His team (Mite AAA) made it to the finals in their league.  I can’t speak for the other parents, but I know that this team came together in a way that I never imagined back in September.  The playoffs occurred over the middle weeks of March, and lots of kids were out on spring break.  Whit missed the two semifinal games, in fact, because we were in the Galapagos.  But he was back for the championship game, albeit basically fresh off a 24 hour trip home and a redeye flight.

At full strength, our team has 12 players.  The day of the finals, we had 8.  One was a goalie, which left 7.  That means only two subs.  The other team had fully three times as many subs as we did.  They were favored.  We lost to them the last time we faced them.  I admit I watched our boys – who seem simultaneously so little and so big when they are on the ice – with a vague sense of trepidation.  This might be ugly, I thought to myself.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Those boys – and I say boys because our female member was not there – skated with more grit and heart than I have ever, ever seen.  They were absolutely exhausted; the lack of subs took a major toll.  But the other team never led and with 5 minutes to go we were up 5-3.  When the third period ended we were tied 5-5.  This led to a 5 minute sudden death playoff, and somehow, with determination I’ve never seen before, the boys kept it tied.  Nobody scored.  We screamed ourselves hoarse, and a wild hope – we could actually win this – galloped in my chest.

Next came a shoot-out.  I’ve never seen a shoot-out before, but basically the teams take turns skating from the middle of the ice and shooting on the other goalie.  The first round is 5 players each.  We were down one goal by the time it was Whit’s turn.  I knew – and he knew – that it came down to this.  It was up to him.  He had to score or the entire game was lost.  I can’t imagine the pressure that he felt on his tiny shoulders, and my eyes filled with tears as I watched.

He did not score.  36 minutes of regular play, 5 minutes of overtime, and 4 rounds of shoot-outs came to an end and the other team flooded the ice, jubilant.  I could see from my perch in the stands, through Whit’s mask, that he was crying.  By the time they came off the ice I saw that most of the team was.

Whit was irate and upset all the way home and we let him rant.  But by the time he went to bed, he was sorrowful.  “I let my team down, Mum,” he told me in a whisper.  I lay next to him in his bed and talked about how proud I was of him and his whole team.  I told him I had rarely seem him dig deep like that.  I told him he had been tenacious and brave and strong in the face of long odds and deep exhaustion.  I told him that sometimes things don’t go our way, and this one didn’t.  I told him I understood that it felt like it was his fault, though of course it was not that simple.  I told him I was wildly, incredibly impressed with how his team played and held off the #1 seed who so outnumbered them.  They had been the underdogs and while they didn’t win, I’m pretty sure everybody in that rink was impressed by their play.

Matt came in to tuck Whit in and offered that it was way better to have gotten to the finals, and to face that disappointment, than not to have gotten there at all.  Right?  Whit thought about this for a moment before grudgingly agreeing.  I considered it too: not making the championship and not having lived through that white-knuckle game would have hurt less.  But what an achievement that game was.  Just before bed we’d gotten an email from Whit’s coach sharing the image of Whit lying on the ice after being checked into the boards, with 3 minutes of time left, doing everything in his power to keep the puck from going down towards our goal.  “What else could a coach ask for?” he has asked, and reading that, I cried.  All eight of those boys gave it everything they had.

Matt left and I lay with Whit for a few more minutes.  “It was a really great season, Whit, and an absolutely remarkable game today,” I told him in the hushed darkness.  He sighed and I felt him nod on the robot-print pillow next to me.  He rolled on his side, pulling his monkey, Beloved closer to his neck.  “I’m really, really proud of you.  And I think you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.”

And so will I.