The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.
– Pierre de Coubertin

Grace and James before skating this morning. It was the dads and me today: Robert, Abner, and myself. I spent at least half of the class holding Whit onto the potty waiting for him to produce. Excellent morning.

One of my favorite lines in Loving Frank is between Mamah and her oldest, dearest friend, Mattie. Reunited after a long separation, Mattie comments on how much Mamah’s daughter, Martha (named after Mattie) looks like her. Mamah replies:

“Nature has settled a score,” Mamah said. “I’m raising myself.”

Oh how this is true with Gracie. She has been oscillating wildly between horrifying and wonderful lately, in a way that’s chillingly familiar to me! This morning we had a really lovely time, though, just walking and doing errands. She was whiny and tantrummy and frantic about absolutely nothing and so Matt informed her she was not welcome on the playground trip with Whit. She sat on the steps and sniffled and cried and I decided we’d just walk it out. We walked down to the drycleaner at Porter Square, which was not open yet (does 9am strike anyone else as incredibly late to open on a Saturday morning?) then walked several more blocks to Starbucks, then back to Zoots, and then home. We walked and chatted for about a full hour. She began whining about her legs being tired early on but I shut that down with a promise of a lollipop from the drycleaner if she didn’t say a word again about that. Amazing how bribery works. She was frankly fantastic company and we have vowed to have more walks. Maybe there’s some truth to that notion of firmly changing contexts when children are misbehaving.

I’ve had the notion of capacity for love on my mind lately. I know I’m a verbally effusive person: I share my feelings easily and without reservation. I remember as a child always wanting my parents’ last words to me (and vice versa) whenever we said goodbye to be “I love you.” This was “in case I never see you again.” How desperately macabre that seems now, coming from a 7 year old. Nevertheless, that was what I wanted. Someone recently told me that I have a lot of love in me, which I think is indisputably true. But the person’s tone there wasn’t entirely positive, and I’ve been thinking about that. Does having a lot of love somehow lessen the love one feels for a single person? Does the fact that the well is deep mean that the water offered is less meaningful? I don’t think so, personally, but I’m grappling with the faint assertion that that may be so by a friend. I’m emotionally open and quite warm but I also know I deeply love only a few people. It is easy to become my friend but hard to get very close. And one thing that surprises people is that I am not that interested in being touched; I’m not wildly physically affectionate.
I re-read Peggy Noonan’s achingly wonderful op-ed on the final messages people left for their loved ones on 9/11. I was looking for affirmation that having a lot of love – and expressing it openly – is a good thing. The key line in her piece is an articulate description of how I choose to go through life:

We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

The Beginners were making Stone Soup today. We got exactly one day of notice that we had to have our child bring in a vegetable today. Grace had her heart set on a green pepper. This morning I scavenged in the fridge and found only this wrinkled, pathetic specimen. She would not take no for an answer, though, so I tried to ameliorate the sadness of the offering by also making her take this yellow pepper. Don’t know how the combination was received. I did see at least two of my fellow mothers this morning, though, rushing off to find a vegetable somewhere.