Thirteen

Dear Whit,

This weekend you turned thirteen.  A teenager!  My second teenager, my first teenage boy.  The door has definitely closed on your young childhood, and with it a chapter of my life I have truly adored.  And you are, of course, a huge part of that.

I love the young man you are becoming, but maybe more notably, I like you so much.  I’ve had the same observation about your sister, but today’s about you.  You are funny, and thoughtful, and empathetic.  You don’t miss anything, and you don’t forget anything, either.  Lately you do a lot of accents, notably Indian and Russian, and it’s a rare family dinner when Dad and I don’t laugh so hard our stomachs hurt. I can feel you stretching, trying on different aspects of the man you are going to be.  Will you be funny?  Sincere?  Smart?  Dedicated?  I know you’re one and three.  Hoping two and four stick, also.

This has been a difficult fall.  You bid goodbye to your sister when she went to boarding school in early September, and then, in the space of two months, you lost both of your grandfathers.  The fact that you are still at home gave you a front-row seat to Dad’s and my grieving which I’m sorry you always had to see. I am confident that you have excellent male role models in your life, but given this autumn’s feast of losses, I’m even more grateful that you are at an all-boys school, and it feels particularly right and valuable right now that you are in a place where everyone is focused on boyhood and young manhood.

The last year held a lot of good things, in addition to the two overwhelmingly bad things that hit us at its end.  I struggle to remember this, but it’s important.  You love your new school, and I love that you love it.  You weren’t sure, to be honest, about leaving the safety of the school where you had been since you were four.  It was the revisit day that changed everything, and when I picked you up that afternoon, you looked at me with a grin and said, “I’m in.”  And you’ve been all in since then.  This despite showing up on the first day in shorts because I told you they were allowed.  And … they’re not.  You handled that speedbump with grace.  You were elected president of your class, threw yourself into soccer and your classes, did tech for the fall play.  You’re still finding your stride, but I am sure you are in the right place and I love seeing you challenged and supported in equal measure.

You stopped playing hockey this year, which was a big change.  For the first time in many years I’m not spending hours a week at the cold Cambridge rink, and you aren’t on a team with many of the boys you’ve played with since you were 8.  But you have enthusiastically taken up squash, and it’s been fun to watch.

You are full of joy.  You loved sailing and camp last summer, and plan to return to both this year. You tie a tie with ease, and lately you’ve been wearing some that belonged to my father.  He taught you how to tie a bow tie, and every time you wear one, I think of him. You love pugs, sleep with a stuffed one called Lil Pug, and sometimes say things like, “on a scale of one to pug, how cute is it?”  It’s hard to earn your trust and esteem, but once that happens, you are deeply loyal.  You are fascinated by space travel (Andy Weir’s The Martian is a favorite book, and Artemis is on your bedside table now) and by how things work.  You want to be an architect when you grow up.

One of the things I think about most as you grow into a young man is protecting the seam of sensitivity and emotional awareness that runs through you. You are definitely a Myers-Briggs “F,” and a strong one. I’m aware that the world can send a message to boys that they ought not talk about their feelings, but I also feel very strongly that it doesn’t have to be that way.  Last week you and I were home alone for several nights, and one dinner we got to talking about Grandpa and Poppy, and about your dear friend’s mother who died at the end of last year.  All three had died abruptly, and in none of the cases did you or I get to say goodbye.  “I’ve been thinking about it,” you said thoughtfully as you chewed your ranch dressing coated chicken (ranch dressing and buffalo sauce are two of your great loves).  “I just want to always be sure to say what I feel, so nobody ever wonders.”  You swallowed.  “You know, just in case something happens and I don’t get another chance.”  I stood up and hugged you, hiding the tears that ran down my face as I did so. I’m sorry you are so aware of this risk, but I’m grateful that your reaction, at least so far, is to stay open to the world and to love.

May it always be so.  Stay funny and stay sweet, my dear boy, my last baby, my only son.  It feels like you and me against the world in some ways right now, since Grace is away and Dad is often traveling.  I love your company; you make me laugh and you make me think, and I simply adore you.  I’m prouder than I can express of you, and I so look forward to what lies ahead.

Happy thirteenth birthday, Whit. I love you.

 

Things I Love Lately

My Year of No Shopping – I love Ann Patchett’s piece about the year she gave up shopping.  I already do very little shopping (and literally cannot remember the last time I shopped for myself in an in-person store), and so many of her reasons resonate.  Shopping has always struck me as one of the behaviors people engage in to fill some deep void (that’s not about things, of course) and this article supports that view.

Child’s Pose – This piece by Molly Blaauw Gillis struck every chord for me.  Gillis writes about “bowing down both in awe and dismay at the joy and the devastation of 2017” and I shook my head and felt my eyes fill with tears.  Yes, yes, and yes.  Awe and dismay.  Joy and devastation.  All of it.

8 Resolutions to Be a Better Parent – I’m not much of a resolution person, and I don’t gravitate towards writing about parenting.  This, however, is worth a read.  I particularly like the one about being more laissez-faire about some things and less about others.  The items in each list make great sense to me (as someone who is and has always been very focused on sleep and somewhat less focused on other things, for example).

Bookclique – I read a bunch of books over break, of which My Absolute Darling was my favorite.  I look forward to reviewing it on Bookclique, a new site whose ranks I’m thrilled and honored to have joined.  Please check it out!

When Things Go Missing – My sister sent me this gorgeous New Yorker article about loss and the death of a parent, and I read it in one breathless, tearful gulp.  So, so true, and so, so beautiful.  There are so many lines that resonated.  This: “What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights.”  And the last paragraph, which felt so true that it settled into my skin, my being: “All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”

What are you reading, thinking about, and loving lately?  Please tell me!

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can see them all here.

the shifting plates … your precious life

Faultlines
by Rev. Robert Walsh
 
Did you ever think there might be a fault line
Passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived
In meeting and in separating, wondering and telling,
Unaware that just beneath you
Is the unseen seam of great plates that strain through time?
And that your life, already spilling over the brim,
Could be invaded, sent off in a new direction,
Turned aside by forces that you were warned about but never prepared for?
Shelves could be spilled out,
The level floor set at an angle in some seconds’ shaking.
You would have to take your losses, do whatever must be done next.
When the great plates slip and the earth shivers
And the flaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most,
Look not to more solidity, to weighty slabs of concrete poured
Or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order.
Trust more the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch
To hold you in the web of life that’s often torn but always healing.
There’s your strength.
The shifting plates, the restive earth, your room, your precious life,
They all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together.
Thank you to my friend Sarah, who shared these beautiful words with me after my father’s death this past month.

Word of the year 2018

Well, my word came to me.  After last week’s convoluted and unstructured thoughts on a new year, and a freezing cold week with lots of snow, I know what my word is.

Simple.

I thought it might be peace, calm, or grace, but the word I keep coming back to is simple.

This word featured in this year’s first weekly quote here, which no doubt helped frame it as a word for me.  “I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” Laura Ingalls Wilder said this and oh, yes, it’s true.

I know what matters to me – that’s only become more clear in the last, dark months. I referred to radical perspective on Instagram, and I want to keep hold of that even as life returns to a more normal cadence (although, truthfully, one thing I’ve realized in the last several months that there is no such thing as “normal”).

My very clear sense of what I prize most has been a beacon in the last few months, and I want to honor that this year.  I want to keep that simplicity of focus and that determination to pare away what doesn’t matter.  I want to focus on those I love most and, after that, on my work and my writing.

I want to keep it simple.  There’s no use in anything else, I think I already knew that, but the last months of pain and sorrow have certainly brought it home.  So in 2018 I will be focusing on the simple things.  They’re what matters, as Laura Ingalls Wilder says and as I already knew.

What’s your word for 2018?