Grace: success and sadness

Grace’s school report arrived yesterday. I was not aware that they were coming out, and as usual the detail and granularity of the teachers’ comments and insight impressed me. Grace is having a great year. Forget her very good marks – what I was proudest of was the number of times different teachers (Jesus I had no idea how many special subjects she takes now – good God) commented on how she is thoughtful, aware of others, generous, and a good friend. As far as I’m concerned that goes a lot further than being good at counting by 10s.

One of the few places that Grace had a lower ranking was in “leadership instincts.” This made me sad, because I think it reflects a growing timidity that I’ve observed, a certain muffling of her voice by anxiety. It also reminded me, of course of my own issues with taking charge and formally leading.

I told Grace that I was proud of her because her teachers said she was working hard. I mentioned how glad I was to hear that she was a good friend and she was kind and great at both listening and helping others. This praise did not change the fact that she was sad this weekend. I was reminded again that my little girl is as sparkly and as fragile as spun glass.

It was an ordinary Sunday. Grace, Whit and I took Matt to the airport mid-afternoon and then embarked on an afternoon of random errands that I tried to spin as an adventure. We took some change to the Coinstar machine (mysteriously, an absolute laser light show of excitement for my children). We went to the drycleaner (free lollipops help make this an ever-anticipated stop). We bought some lettuce and some bread. We took a ride on the subway (and then rode home, without exiting the station. This is one of my favorite activities with G &W, and I love that they are so easily entertained).

On the subway, Grace seemed quiet, and on the way home, she burst into tears. I asked her what was wrong. She shrugged and said, tears rolling down her face, that she just felt sad and didn’t know why. My heart ached with identification, guilt and the desire to make her not sad anymore. At home she crumpled into a mournful little heap at the bottom of the stairs. The rest of the day she was quiet and tearful, repeating over and over that she was “just sad” and “didn’t know why.”

I reassured her that I knew this feeling (and how) and that I was quite sure it would pass. She clung to me as I tucked her in, thanking me for always cheering her up and making things better. The whole afternoon made me feel heavy with guilt about her “just sadness.” There’s no question in my mind this is my bleak influence; what I don’t know is if it’s a learned behavior from watching me or a trait inherited from the very fabric of my DNA. I don’t think it matters much.

Once again I felt aware of the way I am a mother who is more shadow than sun, the way my complicated ambivalence plays occasional discordant notes into the song of my relationship with my children. My poor, poor daughter, tugging behind her the heavy freight of my moody melancholy. I imagine her pulling Whit on the sled up a snowy hill, her body bent forward with the effort of pulling such heavy weight, her feet slipping on the snow, her progress halting and excruciatingly slow.

Oh, Gracie. I am so sorry. I wish I could lift the weight of this birthright that I gave you unwittingly (but also, perhaps, inevitably). Your sensitivity is so familiar and so keen that I flinch to witness it displayed, as I did today. I have long believed in telling you the blunt truth (like when Whit asked if a shot was going to hurt and I hesitated before saying, quietly, “yes”) so I won’t pretend that there won’t be many more “just sad” days. There will be.

There is much sadness, Gracie, much inexplicable darkness, and I too know the feeling of a wave of unanticipated and inchoate anguish sweeping you off your feet. When you thanked me for “making everything better” before bed, I told you firmly, fiercely, that it was my job to do that. It is my job to hold you during the sorrowful days, reminding you that at least you are not alone. It is also my job, maybe more importantly, to remind you of all the stunning joys and blinding light that exist alongside the gloom. There is so much more light than dark, Gracie, of that I am certain. I promise to help point it out to you.

Oxbow lake of the soul

I spent four years in school in England growing up. Throughout all of our ceaseless back-and-forth across the ocean, my parents remained committed to educating us in the local systems. So a French preschool taught me to read, and the British system taught me a lot of stuff which culminated in ten GCSE exams at the end of 10th grade.

One of the subjects I took for GCSE (the old O Levels) was Geography. This was not, as you might assume, the study of maps and the world’s order. Anyone who’s spent any time with me, and observed me arguing my firm belief that Peru and Tibet are right next to each other can vouch for this. No, Geography was more a tour of totally random subjects loosely connected to the natural world – rain, different climate systems, oil rigs in the North Sea, city planning. Pretty random stuff, but I found it oddly fascinating.

One of the subjects that has really stayed with me is the study of how, over time, a river meanders. Meander is both verb and noun here: the meander of a river refers to its bends, which gradually grow more and more concave (or convex in the other direction). Over time, the quality of the moving water (differences in speed, suspended silt) carves a once-straight river into the swooping arcs we have all seen. Eventually the river cuts itself off, returning to a straight passage and stranding the arc into a now-lonely oxbow lake. These movements are driven by tiny differences in the amount of sediment suspended in water, or in the speed that water moves. Such massive, permanent engraving on the face of the earth is driven by such miniscule things.

This metaphor rings through my mind all the time. How small things, things we don’t even notice, add up to huge changes. How without even realizing it, as we move through our days of small mundane actions, we are carving permanently into the soil of our lives.

Yet water doesn’t always carve. Witness sea glass, edges smoothed from a sharpness that could slice into soft, perfect roundness by the power of water’s passage. The water of the ocean tumbles sharp things, wearing them smooth. So, moving water has the power to either cut us or to sand us to smoothness.

Water is time. Time, whose passage thrums with the same irrefutable, unavoidable urgency as does a river’s flow or the ocean’s tide. I can’t reconcile why sometimes we wind up a smooth, beautiful piece of sea glass and sometimes we end up an abandoned oxbow lake. I just know that in both cases, the movement to that reality is made up of a million imperceptible things. As moving water marks the earth, so does time mark our spirits. Minutes add up to months, and months add up to our lives. And as they do, they indelibly shape and mark us.

You must always remember this: what you’re doing matters

This is so, so wonderful. Thank you, Katherine Center.  Watch this.  Please.  It’s worth it.  I’m sitting here with tears running down my face.

You have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.

The truth is, being a woman is a gift, tenderness is a gift, intimacy is a gift, and nurturing the good in this world is nothing short of a privilege.

That is why I have to love you this way. So I can give what I have to you, so that you can carry it in your body, and pass it on.

You are writing the story of your only life every minute of every single day.

And my greatest hope, sweet child, is that I can teach you how to write a good one.

Linear and cyclical

I love this picture that I took a few days ago of the heartbreakingly clear blue sky with the moon and a plane. I love it. I’m moved by seeing man’s boldest, bravest gamble (to fly!) juxtaposed with the moon, which represents (to me) the timeless, ever-turning nature of the universe. By the contrast between the linear motion of an airplane and the cyclical motion of the moon and the planets. Straight lines and circles. Forward and around and backward: time folding in on itself, time present echoing time past and foreshadowing time future. All in the cornflower blue sky that is probably my favorite color.

*****

It has been a quiet few days for me, without a lot of sleep. The sadness and loneliness that walk with me every day are a persistent undertow, and I struggle to stay upright. I walked with Grace and Whit down to the drycleaner today in the afternoon’s full sunshine. It strikes me that the same tension existed in that moment as I see in the photograph above. As my children ran straight down the street, straight into their futures, their laughter seeming to echo off of the barren trees I was painfully aware too of the unrestricted, repetitive circling of my own mood, my own thoughts clear standing water to muddied, restless eddies. As we walked, the straight, irrevocable line of time scraped against the circular, non-rational loops of my spirit. As is often the case, there was pain in the scraping, and a little bit of blood drawn.

*****

On Monday afternoon I ran in what can practically be called a monsoon. It was pouring. The kind where you are soaked to the skin just in the walk from your car to your door. It was also warm, which meant that the snow had been melting and there were deep puddles. I was ankle-deep in dirty water by the time I’d hit a quarter mile. The sidewalks were murderously slippery: a few tenacious strips of snow, packed to a dirty translucence that resembles ice, hid under the running water. I almost wiped out several times. Once again, my body moved forward in a straight line, my breath and footsteps both beating a regular cadence, but my mind ran its endless, convoluted circles.

The contradiction between time’s relentless linearity and the irregular, swooping arcs of my heart and mind is a theme of my life.  They even exist, held together in their opposition and duality, in the body of every woman: we are defined by the arrow-straight path from birth to death and also by the cyclical nature of the various bodily processes that allow us to bear life.  The challenge for me is not letting there be too much tension between the two rhythms, but learning to let them coexist as peacefully as possible.