A Design So Vast

This beautiful world, and the power of traditions

June 19, 2013

SL mirror

Last week, on our fourth annual trip to Storyland to celebrate the end of school, I learned several things.

I learned that my children are as smitten with tradition as I am. I had told them weeks ago that I knew they were getting old for Storyland, and this might be our last trip. Halfway through our day at the park, Grace turned to me, eyes filled with tears, and asked, “Do you think this is our last trip, really?” I hugged her to me and said of course not, it was up to her, as long as they wanted to come, I wanted to take them.

Every aspect of this trip has ossified into ritual. We stay at the same hotel, we go to the same water park, we eat dinner at one restaurant and breakfast at another, we start and end our day on Bamboo Shoots. I love our breakfast spot for many reasons, including that it’s called Priscilla’s, which was my grandmother’s name. There was an unexpected wait (the place was jammed with Harley Davidson bikers, one of whose shirts resulted in a long conversation on why you’d have a shirt with b&^%@ on the back) and so we sat on the porch, deciding what to do. “Let’s just go somewhere else, guys,” I said, glancing at my watch.

Whit looked at me, absolutely scandalized. “But that would mess up our tradition.” He folded his arms and sat down. And so we waited.

I learned, again, that our family’s traditions form a scaffolding on which our life is draped. I need to write more about this, but the older the children get, the more important some of our rituals, both big and small, seem to be to them. They provide a reassuring rhythm to life, I think, as well as a space for them to still be children in a world that seems to be pushing them to young adulthood faster than they might want to go.

I learned that Grace is the voice of reason in my life. As we drove home we talked about what would happen when we got home. Maybe we can skip showers, I mused. “Mummy, I think we need showers,” Grace chimed in from the backseat. “I mean, after a full day at an amusement park? Don’t you think?” Good point, I admitted. Showers it was.

I learned that Caramel Bugles are troublesomely good.

I learned yet again of the wisdom in Storyland. I take a picture of this sign every single year. And it just gets increasingly true.

I learned that every year the edge of time’s passage cuts me more sharply. My favorite part of the (long!) drive up involves 14 hilly and twisty miles through the woods with glimpses of Crystal Lake on the right. It’s absolutely beautiful. As we passed the landmarks we know so well (the raft in the lake! the archery targets! the stilled ski lift!) I felt a pang of grieving this trip, even as we set out on it. As I watched Grace and Whit barrel down the water slides, their laughter echoing off the cavernous roof, I felt the familiar prickling up and down my arms that I’ve come to think of as the physical sensation of total presence, as well as the somatization of my distress about time passing. Even as I lived the moment I’d so anticipated, I was already mourning it.

As we walked through the doors of Storyland, leaving on Friday afternoon, I felt a tightness in my chest. I looked back over my shoulder and the park’s bright colors blurred because my eyes were full of tears. I blinked quickly but could not hide my emotion. The sting of sorrow at the end of something we had looked forward to took my breath away. I feel this way every year, but it keeps getting stronger. Surely the day is coming when I’ll sit down outside the gates of some activity or place and simply refuse to leave. Life’s endings bring me to my knees, face to face with all that is transient. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my heart regularly breaks open at the constant reminders that these moments I so thoroughly love are flying by. They will be over soon, and I am not ready.

I learned that I do still remember some college Chemistry. Whit brought one book on our trip, an introduction to the periodic table. As we drove up he talked about different elements, and more often than not I remembered the abbreviations, or their color, or their basic state. He was impressed and I was proud (fun fact: if I hadn’t majored in English at college, I would have chosen Chemistry). One thing is true, for sure: the conversations with these two just get more and more interesting.

I learned that my children are aware of this life’s poignant beauty in a way I never used to be. As we drove home through the outrageously glorious dusk light, I said several times, “Oh, guys, look: what a beautiful world this is.” I pointed out smudges of clouds at the horizon or the way that the dark green trees flared against the hydrangea blue of the gloaming sky. Not one single time did they shush me, or ask me to turn up Katy Perry. They always looked, and noticed. At one point, unprompted by me, Whit sighed from the backseat, “It is so beautiful, Mummy.” And yes. It is.

It is an astonishingly beautiful world. How grateful I am that Grace and Whit can see it.

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The bitter part of my life’s bittersweet core

June 17, 2013

Jun05

I can close my eyes and be back in this afternoon, exactly 7 years ago, June 2005, with baby Whit, 2 year old Grace, and my grandfather, who is no longer with us.

It’s not a secret that I struggled with my entry into motherhood. Grace’s infancy was not my finest hour. I remember large swaths of time as only a blur of tears and a wailing baby that occurred in a permanent twilight that wasn’t day and wasn’t night. But, somehow, I remember with crystalline clarity one comment that I received over and over again from kindly, well-intentioned people, friends and strangers alike:

“Make sure to enjoy this moment. It goes so fast!”

Just like everybody else I know, I heard this more times than I can possibly count. And every single time, through the haze of my exhaustion and despair, I recognized a kernel of truth. This sentence pierced my gloom over and over again. But the truth is it made me want to scream; this is probably because the sentiment cut close to the bone. As with all statements that are uncomfortably true, I did not like hearing it. And I swore to myself I would never tell a mother with a newborn to enjoy this time.

And yet I have. More than once, I’ve looked at a mother with a tiny baby, or a mother with a baby in a Bjorn and a two year old by the hand, dark valleys under her eyes and a slightly wild, exasperated expression, and longed to be back there. The way I express this longing is to say: “Oh, those were the days. They go fast. Enjoy them.”

Every time I kick myself: Ugh, Lindsey, you swore you’d never say that. I can remember vividly my own negative reaction to those comments. But I realize now that the people who said that were just sharing their own nostalgia the only way they knew how.

Even now, aware as I am of not wanting to squander these moments with my children at home, I find myself – daily! – wishing time away. I am sore from the cold bleachers under my legs at soccer try-outs, I am listening to a detailed story about a 2nd grade bus ride that is being told in real time, I am tired myself, just want to get into bed with my own book, and this third glass of water is going to put me over the edge. I have realized this is simply the nature of parenting; the adage that the days are long but the years are short is so powerful precisely because it is true.

I am much better at appreciating my experience than I used to be. There’s no question about that. But even when I really AM there, even when I’m fully open and appreciating all the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of my particular life with my particular children at this particular moment, it still goes by too fast. And this is the bitter part of my life’s bittersweet core: nothing I do, no paying attention and being here now can slow the drumbeat march of time. No matter how present I am I cannot alter the hasty onrush of this life.

Sometimes that truth feels unbearably bitter. Of course, yes, I do know that it’s bitter in direct proportion to the sweetness. The presence I have worked hard to cultivate over many years has left me with very rich memories of this season of my life. I’m grateful beyond expression for the way this blog has chronicled much of my life with my children. I have thousands of photographs and dozens of letters. But nothing I can do, neither white-knuckled hanging on nor meditative letting go, will make these days and years last longer. I guess when I say the thing I swore I’d never say to new mothers, I’m trying to communicate that. But I should stop, because I know it doesn’t help.

I’m pretty sure that my grandfather, in the photograph above, told me with a sigh that these days would go fast. I know he handed me some notes that my grandmother had written about observing the development of boys (she should know: she had four). But I also know that I probably shook my head, worrying about getting Whit down for a nap and making pasta for Grace, grimaced at the ugly plastic toys in my kitchen, and told him in a way that was both heartfelt and dismissive: I know, I know.

I thought I knew what he meant. But I didn’t. I do now.

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Surrounded by mystery

June 14, 2013

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick

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This is thirty eight

June 12, 2013

I loved our This is Childhood series this winter. I loved writing This Is Ten about my first child, my pioneer, my grace, my Grace.

I keep thinking of things that describe my now, and thought I would write my own grown-up version.

So: this is thirty eight.

Thirty eight is solidly in the middle of my life. Thirty eight is realizing that there are likely as many years behind me as there are ahead. It is acknowledging that life is no longer a green field, that certain doors are closed, that some choices are irrevocable, and that many of the big what-ifs that haunted my childhood have been answered. Thirty eight is also realizing that despite these answers, there are far, far more new questions.

Thirty eight is new lines at the sides of my eyes and mouth. From smiling, maybe, but still.

Thirty eight is wearing my wedding ring all the time though my engagement ring rarely. Thirty eight is not knowing which band was my wedding band and which my husband gave me on the day our daughter was born, because they are identical. I don’t think it matters. Thirty eight is wearing my mother’s wedding ring for a time, when she was unable to. Thirty eight is knowing that one of my favorite pictures from our long-ago wedding shows that I wore my grandmother’s ring on my right hand when I walked down the aisle.

Thirty eight is realizing that certain shorts and skirts are now just too short. Thirty eight is wondering if this is the summer to put away the bikinis.

Thirty eight is thirteen years of marriage. It is knowing all the ways that marriage is both less and more than I thought it was, when I walked into a church wearing white and hearing thunder. Less score-keeping, less candlelight, less drama. More small acts of kindness, more forgiveness, more abiding. Fewer flowers, but more cups of coffee made exactly how I like them, without being asked, brought to me in bed in the morning.

Thirty eight is realizing that my lifetime passion for peonies probably has something to do with their life span, which is as short as it is spectacular. It can’t be an accident that I love best of all the flowers that blaze more brightly and most briefly.

Thirty eight is not having any more grandparents. It is hearing about the illness and death of my friends’ parents. It is going to funerals, and also christenings, more often than weddings. Thirty eight was leaving my injured mother’s side before surgery a couple of years ago to run home to my daughter, who was crying that I wasn’t spending enough time with her. Thirty eight is the middle place.

Thirty eight is knowing who your friends are, for real, for certain. It is understanding that though there will be a small handful of true native speakers, it is okay for many friends to access only certain parts of you. These friendships, while different, can offer great joy, deep laughter, and tremendous companionship. Thirty eight is still learning that not everybody will like you, no matter what you do.

Thirty eight is drinking homemade green juice and Diet Coke most days. It is developing a taste for kombucha, and drinking coffee with coconut milk and xylitol. It is drinking wine still, but not as much, because I’d rather sleep and I’ve realized that alcohol interferes with that.

Thirty eight is finding that each year she grows more sensitive, more aware of life’s beauty and pain, more attuned to the world around her. Thirty eight cries every single day, and laughs that much too (see: lines on my face).

Thirty eight is in the heart of the grand love affair that is motherhood, both smitten by and exasperated by her daughter and son. Thirty eight is watching, awestruck, as these children develop into people in whom bloom traits uncomfortably familiar and absolutely foreign in equal measure. Thirty eight reads Harry Potter aloud, packs lunches, drives to and from soccer and hockey and baseball practices and games (see photo), plans surprise adventure outings, and can still make a bruised knee feel better with a kiss.

Thirty eight is its own kind of phosphorescence. Different than ten’s ephemeral incandescence, but no less dazzling and no less fleeting. Just like ten, just like life itself, thirty eight is bewilderingly beautiful, maddeningly confusing, achingly bittersweet, and vanishingly transient.

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It’s not all shiny

June 10, 2013

Receiving comments and emails from people who read my words here is among my very favorite things in the world. Once in a while, however, the contents of those messages can make me uneasy. Sometimes people comment that it seems I have a “perfect” life. Other times I get adulation about my “perfect” children. And, lest you think everything I hear is nice, sometimes I get slapped down for being unaware of how good I have it.

The truth is my life is very far from perfect. My children are far from perfect. Nothing here is perfect, and I know also that nothing anywhere is perfect.

It’s not all shiny here. It’s not all wonder and noticing the streak of an airplane across the evening sky and reading poetry aloud. Those things exist, absolutely: usually every single day. But there is also shouting, and impatience, and tears. Years ago I remember someone telling me in a disgruntled tone that they couldn’t possibly be “present” for every moment of their life. They had a job to do, and dishes to wash, and on and on and on.

I was taken aback by that, and realized I was not communicating what I meant by “being present” clearly enough. I meant, and mean, it quite literally: being awake, being aware, paying attention. That does not mean loving everything. There is plenty that I don’t like in this life of mine. There is no question that the rooms of my days and of my heart contain mold and dust and there are regrets piling up in the corner.

But there is also so much good. And I sincerely hope that one thing I am is aware of and grateful for my good fortune. I don’t enumerate my blessings because I suspect that would be boring, and because it feels like gloating. But I am incredibly, intensely conscious of how fortunate and privileged I am.

This awareness often adds to my guilt about the melancholy that hovers over me much of the time. How can I possibly feel sorrow, and these prickly emotions, when I have so very much to be thankful for? But I do. And even in the wake of my oft-churning sadness comes a reminder of all the blessings that surround me. At my saddest and bleakest I still can’t forget all that is beautiful about this life. In fact I suspect it is precisely my sorrow – which comes directly from my awareness of how fast this life passes – that makes me so aware of loveliness and joy. They come from the same source, and perhaps are even just sides of a single coin. This experience, this life: sadness and joy, light and dark, beginnings and ends. It’s all one.

But back to my point. And I do have one: my messy, noisy, imperfect life.

Years, ago, I remember Katrina Kenison joking that her husband would “love to be married to the woman who writes the books.” How this resonated with me, then and still now. Sometimes when I am rushing everyone out the door in the morning, asserting that we are going to be late, late late!!! (despite the fact that I have literally almost never been late), Matt will turn to me and say: remember, Linds, live every moment.

Bedtime is a good example. I know how sacred bedtime is, how much I love these moments, how desperately I wish I had back all the bedtimes I wished away over the years. And yet, still, sometimes I trip up and snap at a child who is dallying before bed. Always, almost immediately, I am overcome with guilt. I wasted this bedtime, I think.

Daily, I demonstrate in myriad ways my distraction, aggravation, irritation, impatience. All of those emotions throb through my life, and I know I’m far from alone. In fact my friend Aidan wrote about this very topic recently. I know this frustration, this sense of falling down over and over and over again, is human. I also know others who feel misunderstood, though I’m not familiar with many who have been directly accused of misrepresenting themselves (as I have). I don’t, and I am not. This is my life. It is imperfect, and it is chaotic, and it is full of disappointments and regrets and mistakes, of raised voices and hurt feelings and tears. It is also full of brilliance and beauty and joy. I just choose to write about the latter more than the former. But I assure you: it’s all there.

Have you ever stumbled in the perilous gulf between perception and reality? Have others ever made assumptions about your life that don’t feel right? Do you get aggravated, short-tempered, and irritated?

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The path to heaven

June 7, 2013

Of course! The path to heaven
Doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
With which you perceive
This world,
And the gestures
With which you honor it.

- Mary Oliver, The Swan

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Narrow and deep

June 5, 2013

One of my favorite posts on this blog, My life has simultaneously narrowed and widened, written 18 months ago, still runs frequently through my mind. I wrote then of how I had radically cut away my external commitments in order to focus on a few things, most of all our family. I ended with a exhortation to look closely at how you spend your time, because I believe it is the truest reflection of what you genuinely value.

I have been thinking about this lately, because since writing that piece my life has continued to narrow. It has also kept surprising me with its expansion. Last year I took Grace and Whit to an iMax movie about cavers at the Science Museum. That’s what my life feels like sometimes: as I funnel through a small hole into a darkness that I can’t see my entire world shrinks to the circumference of my body. And then, suddenly, after passing through the fear of the unknown, an enormous, echoing cavern opens up, visible only to me, lit by the headlamp I’m wearing.

From the outside, my life might look small. I often feel like I have to defend it to others. We have a strict one-night-out-per-weekend rule. I don’t do a lot during week in the evening. I say no to an awful lot of stuff, mostly for myself but also for the children. I feel guilty about these decisions all the time, by the way. I feel constantly that I am disappointing friends and family. Our weekends are consumed with sports games and around the edges we go for family walks, play board games, read books, sit around the dining room table and laugh and talk. I’m not willing to give these things up.

And yet our lives feel wide and expansive at the same time. We walk out to Crane’s Beach on a narrow wooden boardwalk, rickety above the sea grass, and then, at once, the ocean yawns open in front of us: that is life. The vista grows small and then startles me with its sudden breadth.

I’m doing so much less on almost all dimensions of my life. I have far less help. I have almost no non-profit and school-related commitments. I suspect I’m often simply not invited to things because I’ve said no so often. And I am doing so much more in a couple of arenas: I’m working a whole lot more, and I’m spending a lot of time with Grace and Whit. There is no extra time. There is only this.

And while I do feel a persistent sense of letting people down, and a need to defend our choices, I also know that I am happy with the values that my choices reflect. I am spellbound by the sparkling universe I have glimpsed, by the glitter-lined geode I can now see. I can’t look away.

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In the crucible

June 4, 2013

I am richly blessed with marvelous friends. I laughed when I read an article recently that debunked myths about introverts. “Introverts hate people,” it argued, is absolutely untrue. It’s just that it takes a while to earn an introvert’s true trust, and once you do, you have a loyal friend for life. This is unquestionably true of me. My beloved native speakers, who sail beside me through rain and sun, are among the most important parts of my life.

I was honored, therefore, when the team at the HerStories Project asked me to write for them. And my post is up there, now, about a once-and-always dear friend, the woman who was closest to me as I tiptoed into motherhood and traversed the rocky waters of the first few months. I hope you’ll read my piece, A Friendship Forged In the Crucible, and explore the other work on HerStories while you’re there. I love what they’re doing.

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Let go … again, still, more

June 3, 2013

let go

I adore this piece about 15 Things You Should Give Up to be Happy. Loved. And it made me think of how often I write about letting go. I write about it a lot. A search for “let go” in my archives yielded 26 pages of results. I could do a favorite-posts-post JUST of “let go” posts. But I won’t. Right now, at least. I do wear a necklace that says “let go” which probably tells you a lot about how much this phrase means to me.

Maybe that’s actually what this life is all, and essentially, about. Is that possible? Just letting go of things, releasing, letting ourselves float through life as lightly as the spring petals fluttering to the ground, dying as they go, but beautiful?

So much of this modern life seems about holding on and grabbing. It is true when it comes to material things, and I already know I have an aversion to this, to the the piling-up of possessions. That letting-go I have already done: the illusion that there is any deep, true contentment to be found in things.

But this orientation towards acquisition also applies to more abstract things, and there I’m as guilty as anyone. I spent the first 30 years of my life madly racking up degrees and achievements and accolades. In fact my first, rejected memoir was all about that: about the realization that that way of navigating the world is fundamentally broken. When there is no next obvious brass ring to grab for, what do we do? Well, fly into the abyss is one thing. But as we fall, we need to figure out another map to follow, one less defined by external validation and achievement and more delineated by the internal voice of our soul. That letting go I am working on, though I think I’m moving towards it.

But there’s a third way I – and we – lean towards holding on, and that is the trickiest one for me. It’s the letting go of what we thought our life was going to be. That is inextricably correlated, for me, with letting go of my grief about the passage of time. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully release that, but I know that right now I’m bound in its net, tangled in the cords of sorrow that tighten around me every time I kick. My life is exactly as I planned it and nothing like I expected. That sentence, which I use over and over again is fundamental, painful, and true. What I have is here. Now. And to really live it, I have to let go of my white-knuckle grip on both yesterday and tomorrow. That letting go: still a long, long way to go.

As firmly as I know I need to let go, as fiercely as I’m convinced that that is the lesson I was put on earth to learn, I know I am also, simultaneously, incredibly attached. I am attached to people, to places, to outcomes. In fact I’ve often questioned the whole notion of hope, because it is very hard for me to feel hope in the abstract. It always comes wound around a specific future or thing that I want to be true.

I have said before and still believe that almost all suffering comes from our attachment to how we thought it was going to be. But I don’t want – and I don’t think I could, anyway – to be less attached to those I love.

Maybe I can parse attachment, and divide it carefully into two groups, the way Grace painstakingly divides her Perler beads by color. Let go of what I thought life would be like? Absolutely. Yes. I must. Let go of those I love? I don’t think so.

What are you letting go of right now? Do you think it’s possible that learning to let go is life’s basic and most important task?

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Give me your hand

May 31, 2013

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

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