Month: December 2010

Thinking back over the year

One of my favorite blogs out there is All & Sundry, written by Linda.  She’s funny and smart and wise and manages to make me both laugh and cry with many of her posts.  She writes an annual recap that for years I’ve pondered doing, and this year I’m going for it.  Thank you, Linda, for the inspiration (here, and frequently).

1. What did you do in 2010 that you’d never done before?

Took the summer off.  Took the children to Storyland and to Legoland.  Signed with a literary agent.  Parted ways with that literary agent (she is wonderful, I just wasn’t ready).  Wrote a draft of a book.  Began taking a writing class (probably in the wrong order, those two!).  Watched one child turn 8 and the other 5.  Watched my husband turn 40.  Went to BlogHer.  Hosted the class gecko for a week and unexpectedly found him totally adorable.  Saw Wicked.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve also never chosen a Word of the Year, though one is presenting itself to me somewhat forcibly right now and I’m considering that.  

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes.  Four of my closest friends from college (three #2s and one #3).

4. Did anyone close to you die?

My great-aunt.  She was not close to me on a daily basis but she represented something substantial and her death made me reflective.  The grandmother of my oldest friend, who was a signficant part of my childhood (and of my life now since she lived in the same town).

5. What countries did you visit?

None.

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?

More forward motion towards writing a book.  Or else clarity that I should give it up.  A more even keel with my children (this is improving, but I have a long way to go).

7. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

July 31-August 4, the trip of a lifetime to Legoland.  December 24, another Christmas Eve in the ER (now at a 33% lifetime average) for Whit.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Nothing comes to mind, which makes me really sad.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Progress towards my book.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

What feels like non-stop colds, sore throats, sniffles.  I want my immune system to grow stronger (and my Swedish fish, chocolate, Diet Coke and white wine diet surely is a culprit here).  Also, a bum right hip that bothers me when running.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Several books: Devotion, by Dani Shapiro, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison, The Geography of Love by Glenda Burgess, and Hand Wash Cold by Karen Maezen Miller.

12. Where did most of your money go?

Into the bank.

13. What did you get really excited about?

My summer off with Grace and Whit.  Several books that I read (see #11).  Working with Dani Shapiro and meeting Katrina Kenison.

14. What song will always remind you of 2010?

California Girls by Katy Perry and Hey Soul Sister by Train were the soundtrack of a summer that I’ll never forget.

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:

– happier or sadder? Happier.
– thinner or fatter? The same.
– richer or poorer? Probably have marginally more money in the bank.

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Written.  Really looked at my children.  Sat on the floor with Legos or American Girls.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Stressed.  Had insomnia.  Cried.

18. How did you spend Christmas?

At home.

19. What was your favorite TV program?

The only TV show I watch is Gossip Girl, which I mostly watch through iTunes on plane rides.  I’m addicted.

20. What were your favorite books of the year?

See #11.  For fiction, Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout and Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian.

21. What was your favorite music from this year?

Nothing really new, other than Annie Lennox’s Christmas CD.

22. What were your favorite films of the year?

I hardly ever go to the movies other than with the kids.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I took the kids to day one of a new camp and then spent the day mostly alone.  My parents took me out for lunch.  Matt had dinner with a friend in Cambridge (I was at the beach with the kids).  I was 36.

24. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

More moments where I slowed down and just paid attention.  

25. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?

75% Juicy Couture sweatpants, 25% skinny jeans and heels with sequins thrown in.

26. What kept you sane?

Running.  Reading.  Writing.  My family.

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010.

Praying is saying thank you.

What if my sensitivity is the road home?

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston

I was thinking this weekend of the universality of sadness, of the inescapable fact that the sunshine of every life is mottled with shadow. I think the thing that varies is our sensitivity to the shadow. Some of us are just feel more keenly the loss that is always part of the deal. Some of us are more prone to shadow than sun. Some of us have a narrow but deep moat of loneliness around our hearts which is uncrossable by anyone else.

I love Pam Houston’s confident assertion that this awareness of loss lends itself to strength, compassion, and grace. I spend a lot of time worrying about what I have bequeathed to my children, through example and heredity. Pam Houston’s words offer a stunning change of perspective and I can imagine – momentarily – that this inheritance is a gift and not a burden. What if, as Adrienne Rich said, “her wounds came from the same source as her power”? What if what seems like great weakness is the source of great strength?

I fret about the message I’m sending my children by not hiding from them my occasional sweeping sorrow. Sure, there are days I act happy when I feel blue. And of course there are genuinely joyful days, many, many of them. But there are also days where my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears and when they ask why I explain, quietly, that the world is making me sad. I just re-read my words about a particularly sad weekend Grace had last winter and cried, again, struck by the fact that already, at seven, she has the self-awareness to say “I’m just sad, Mum.” Actually it’s more than the awareness that strikes me: she has the propensity to be just sad in the first place, and this is clearly part of the legacy I leave her. I often feel soggy with guilt about it.

Grace and Whit both witness and inherit my melancholy leanings, though so far Grace exhibits them much more frequently. I have decided, personally, that to teach them to honor and accept all of their feelings, even the difficult ones, is more important than to put on a happy face all the time. Of course, I am not sure I’d actually be able to fake it, so it might be convenient to call this a “decision.” But I do believe that helping my children to recognize their strong emotions, even sadness and anger, is an important thing for me to do. I also think there is great power in learning that one can be thoroughly tossed around in emotional whitewater and still come out the other side, spluttering, maybe, with sand in your pants, but still, standing.

In fact the words I wrote in July (in my musing on whitewater) seem to echo Pam Houston’s gorgeous lines (though less elegantly):

I know the terms I want to live my life by start with compassion and empathy and kindness, and that they include a deep need to honor the reality, savage and beautiful as it is, of my life.

It makes me sigh with comfort to weave together my own definition of what matters most and Pam Houston’s belief that awareness of loss can contribute to a fully-lived life. It only comes in passing, this profoundly reassuring sense that my sensitivity, which marks how I approach everything, could be, in fact, my road home. But in those moments I feel grateful and calm: maybe Grace and Whit can take what they learn from me and use it to be strong, and compassionate, and full of grace.

I do want my children to learn that the best lives are full of love, and that loss is part of the deal – I believe both of those things as firmly as I believe anything. If I can do anything to help Grace and Whit believe this, through my example, my genetic material, or my direct teaching, then I will have done some good in the world. Of that I am sure.

Originally written in October 2010

How sheer the veil is between this world and another

Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new.

M died last night. She was 39 and left two children in their early teens. It was entirely unexpected.

I feel sad today, for her, for her family, for the abrupt loss of someone who had so much ahead of her. I feel as though something chilly has brushed past me in the dark, something I can’t see but something I can feel. Yesterday, I spoke to her. Today, she is gone. Where? My mind still struggles with this truth, which is maddeningly abstract and painfully concrete at the same time.

I also feel keenly, shiveringly aware of how close we all tread to the line of our worst nightmares every single day. The yawning terror of what might be, of that we most dread, exists just off to the side of our lives, and though we skirt it and forget it it still threatens. We live on the precipice, walk on a tightrope, exist in a world where the boundary between normal and tragedy is far more gossamer and fragile than we ever let ourselves imagine.

Death has actually been on my mind since my Aunt E’s funeral, actually, and since a dear friend lost his mother unexpectedly in July. As I sat in the pew at my aunt’s memorial service, I thought about how there are many more funerals ahead of me than behind me. And when my friend’s mother died I had an eerie sense of what is to come as the generations fold and my peers and I take our place at the head of the line. Both of these thoughts give me goosebumps, and not in a good way.

I’m sorry for this not-at-all-upbeat post. It seems incongruous, as I sit here on vacation, waiting to pick my boisterous, tired, and sunburned children up from the bus that bears them back from summer camp. But that is the point, I guess: to remember, always, how sheer the veil is between this life and another, between good news and terrible, between just another regular day and the day it all grinds to a halt.

There’s only one way to honor those who have stepped through this veil, one way to turn this tragic reality that flickers at the edges of our experience: to use the awareness of what might be, and of the proximity of the chasm, to heighten our awareness and celebration of the days that we remain safe. To remember, always, those trite sayings that are also so achingly true: today is all we have. Seize it. Take nothing for granted.

I’ll be hugging these two extra hard when they get off the bus today.

Originally written in August 2010

An endless alleluia and a constant goodbye

I know I write all the time about the powerful and perilous ways that Grace reminds me of myself, about how she seems to have a core of sensitivity, emotion, insecurity, and sentimentality running through her that I intimately recognize. Similarly, I’ve written before of Whit’s predilection towards lightness, his surprising humor, his lack of instinctive subservience to authority. I wouldn’t blame any of you for feeling I’m a one-note violin on this score.

Never let it be said, however, that these children rest in their neat categories. Tonight, after reading several pages of Star Wars Heroes (another post: the Jedi emphasis on controlling your emotions – I’m fascinated that this may be taking real hold of the minds of our young boys, given the wild passion for Star Wars), I tucked Whit into bed. He was unusually clingy, consenting to snuggle in my lap while I rocked him, listening to a lullabye, a tradition that is all but gone now. I kissed him good night and went downstairs to read Harry Potter to Grace.

A page or two into the terrifying scene at the Quidditch World Cup where the Dark Mark hovers over the eerie forest (Grace: “Mummy! I’m scared! Can I hold on?” = her gripping my upper arm with two hands, so hard she left white finger marks) I heard Whit’s door open and his snuffling, tearful voice. “Mummy?” he called plaintively. “Yes, Whit?” “I’m sad.” I asked Grace if it was OK for me to go check on her brother and (surprisingly) she agreed easily.

Whit was in the bathroom. Looking at the floor, he kicked at the tile by the tub idly. He said, without looking at me, “I don’t want to talk about it.” “Oh, Whit, please?” He looked at me and dissolved into more tears. I picked him up and carried him back to the rocker. He was limp in my arms, his tearful face nestled wetly against my neck.

“Whitty, what’s wrong?” He was crying hard, speaking in short bursts between his hiccupy sobs. “I don’t want to be a kid, Mummy. It’s hard to be a kid.” “I know, sweetheart, I know.” “Mummy, I want to be a baby still.” We launched into a fairly detailed conversation about how he didn’t want to grow up and it was all going too fast and he wanted to still be a baby and be carried around. I was somewhere between shocked and blown away. Has he been reading my blog? Reading my mind?

Grace tiptoed into Whit’s room and he let her come over and stroke his hair back from his forehead. He looked right at her and told her why he was sad. “Oh, Whit, I know that feeling. I get sad about that too,” she said sincerely. What? Do my children feel the same contraction and expansion in their chests that I do, that same echoing sadness that seems to pulse with the closing of each moment?

I thought about how their bodies seem to be longer and leaner every single day; a similar growth must be happening in their hearts and spirits. That growth, sudden, overwhelming, must be scary and disorienting. I thought fiercely: I always want them to be able to talk to me about this.

Blinking back my own tears, I took the children on a quick tour through their babyhoods. I showed them the tiny hats they had each worn in the hospital, the doll-sized newborn diapers (I saved a couple of clean ones), the plastic bracelet I wore during each labor & delivery stay. Whit dug deep into his sock drawer to unearth a pair of 3-6 month socks with robots all over them. “These were mine, right, Mummy?” he asked urgently. He wore them to bed tonight.

We then went to the family room and leafed through the two photo albums that covered the first nine months of Whit’s life. He alternated between giggling and crying as we pored over the pictures. One in particular, of him lying on the floor, curled up, asleep, still a newborn, he exclaimed, “I think that’s on this very rug, Mummy!” He was right. He looked at the rug with an expression in his eyes that I recognized deeply: this place, here, was there, then, and it’s here now, and it’s the same and yet not… where did that moment go? Is it here? How could it not be here?

We talked some about how it is normal to feel sad sometimes about things that are over. About how it is hard to be a kid. Also, about the things that they can do now that they couldn’t when they were babies (Storyland, playdates, pizza, scootering, TV). Whit wisely said, “But I didn’t know about those things then, so I didn’t care that I couldn’t do them.” Hard to argue with that.

I finally got both my children settled and on their way to sleep, but now I sit here, lost in memories of those years of new babies and new horizons. I was a different person then, something I was reminded of when I saw the pictures with Whit as a newborn. I’m aware, as I am often, of the ways that minutes and hours and days add up to years, but with very irregular contents. The days stretch like taffy, sagging in the middle, the moments crystallize like glittering gems, the years pile up haphazardly, and what is built is a life.

Parenting – life itself! – is an endless alleluia* and a constant goodbye.

And, I am 100% biased, but I admit that tonight’s little exercise reminded me of how utterly adorable I thought Whit was as a baby.



*attribution to Newman and Hank for the best Christmas card message ever.

Originally written in June 2010

The ER, old friends, snow, and good books

So.  Christmas Eve.  Everybody is dressed, ready to go to church.  This is without question my favorite church service of the year.  I holler, “Coats on, everyone!” and am met, unexpectedly, with a howl of pain from Grace’s room.  I amble in, expecting bickering over whose pen is whose or something equally critical.

Instead, Whit is clutching his face, which is bloody.  I pry his hands from his eye, and see that blood is gushing out of a cut.

“Jumping on the bed?” I ask him sternly.  He nods at me, putting his hands back up to the flood of blood.

Instantly I know we’re going to the ER.  I wanted to send Matt and Grace to church and just take Whit, someone had to hold the towel to the gushing forehead as we drove, so it turned out we all went.  At Children’s I spent a couple of hours with a very nice doctor.  Whit was given some numbing cream, some anti-anxiety medication and then stitched up.  Attentive readers will note that he also spent his very first Christmas Eve at the Children’s Hospital ER; he’s now averaging 1/3 of his Christmas Eves on earth there.  I think he’s fine with his batting average.  I am not.

The trip to the hospital, while costing me my favorite church service of the year, was almost worth it, because of the sheer comedy that Whit provided while on the medication.  He was basically ragingly drunk all night.  I knew he was ready for stitches (ie fully “relaxed”) when he turned the TV in the room to a show in Spanish and watched, attentively.  When I asked if he wanted to watch something in English he looked at me as if I was stupid and shook his head fiercely.  He turned to me, mid-stitches, with a guffaw, telling me that this was the most fun Christmas Eve ever.  After we left, en route to my parents, he proclaimed  that “this popsicle rocks!”  I wish I had videotaped him.  And yes, I did ask the doctor if I could have some of what he was having.  She said no.

When we arrived at my parents’ house for our annual Christmas Eve with our dearest family friends, I was quite ready for a glass of wine.  Fortunately, it was flowing.  As has been the case in recent years, we sang carols after dinner.  I love this tradition.  The blurry picture above is me flanked by my oldest friend-brother, Ethan, and his father (I’ve written about Ethan’s mother’s death in 1997. It remains a seminal experience for me).  This is as old as friends get, and I adore being with them.

Christmas Day was very mellow.  My parents came over for breakfast and presents, and then Grace, Whit, Matt and I spent the rest of the day together.  We went for a walk, we went to the playground, we played with presents, we read our books.  It was, honestly, quite divine.  As was, in my opinion, my centerpiece (see above).

On Boxing Day, the kids and I drove Matt to the airport early (he was headed to Florida to visit his parents) and then spent the day trying to do as many errands as we could before the snow came.  We walked down to a favorite neighborhood restaurant for an early lunch.  By mid afternoon we were watching various movies and snuggling under blankets as the snow began to flutter from the sky.  My parents came over for an early dinner of (leftover) turkey quesadillas.  Another lovely, mellow day.

And we woke up to 18 inches of snow.  The kids both popped out of bed at 7:00 on the dot, eager to see how much snow there was.  I shoveled out two cars and all around our house.  And we spent the morning sledding.  It’s hard to remain aggravated by the inconveniences of the snow in the face of Grace and Whit’s contagiously sparkling wonder about it.

Tonight I am overseeing their writing thank you notes, in my pajamas, drinking wine on the rocks.  Yesterday, Hilary sent me an email with a link to the New York Times review of Poser, by Claire Dederer.  She noted that after reading the review, and thinking that I’d like the book, she saw that Dani Shapiro had written it, so maybe I had heard of it.  I then took this picture of my bedside table to send to her.  What’s better than a beloved sister who knows me that well?  Also, the book is great.  Can’t wait to crawl into bed with it tonight.