Month: March 2011

The big transitions and the little ones

This is a time of transition.  I can feel us moving to another phase, another season, in every sense of the word.  I am aware of that deep in my body and my spirit.  I dislike change with every fiber of my being, and I wish I was able to let go more.  I’m really more of a holder-onner.  Still, I continue to remind myself that this is futile effort, and that my white knuckle grip on every day is only serving to exhaust me.  I wear a reminder over my heart.

We are shedding skins around here.  Spring is slowly creeping around the edges of our hours, and with every day it seems more inevitable, though I think there is snow forecast for this weekend.  It’s still raw and chilly, though, and we all shiver like the brand-new, slender crocuses.  Grace and Whit are re-adjusting, slowly, to the school routine after two weeks off; I’m waking them out of sound sleep in the mornings, yet finding them unwilling to go to sleep at night.  There have been some reminders in my life of how near the precipice is, always, and of how we tread, every single day, on the line between divinity and disaster.

And then I read these beautiful words by Rebecca at Altared Spaces, about the ultimate parenting transition.  I read this post on Tuesday and by halfway through I was literally sobbing – not just the standard tears-rolling-down-my-cheeks that happens every day, but full-on gasping for air, actively crying.  The line that gouged itself into me was this one: “I came here to let her go.”  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Isn’t this, ultimately, the story of what we all came here to do, as parents?  Aren’t we letting to every single day?

Even knowing that, I’m chilled and stunned by the idea that someday – perhaps as soon as 7 or 8 years from now, if she goes to boarding school – I will hug and kiss Grace and watch her walk away.  I remember hugging my mother on the grass lawn in front of a dorm in New Hampshire in September 1990.  That was an particularly draconian farewell: she drove to Logan and got on an airplane to London.  Talk about far away.  I didn’t know until years later that she cried in the car driving away.  I went up to my little teeny closet of a room and sobbed my heart out.  I was scared and lonely and excited, and on the edge of something big.

There are certainly major, notable goodbyes and transitions in parenting, the ones that we all anticipate: kindergarten, high school, college, weddings.  But there are also tiny little goodbyes every single day.  Parenting is a constant farewell.  It’s replete with joyful hellos, too, of course, but it’s undeniable that every day holds an ending.  Every night before I go to bed I carry Whit to the bathroom, his blond head heavy on my shoulder.  Every single night I wonder if this is the last time.  I haven’t read Good Night Moon since I wondered if I ever would again.  The truth of that chokes me up, sits like a stone in the heart of me, a core of loss I simply can’t ignore.  Every day, infinitessimally but inexorably, they move further away from me.

I commented on Rebecca’s blog, letting her know how much her words touched me.  And she emailed me back and said this:

You are so passionate in the way you love your children. Sometimes I think you taste letting them go regularly. You live WIDE awake. At times that overwhelms you.

And I read her words, crying fresh tears, thinking: yes, yes, yes.  The big goodbyes will submerge me in emotion, fear and grief and pride all mixed together, of that I am sure.  But the little ones are in many ways harder for me, since they are so slippery, so difficult to note.  And I do taste them regularly.  I hope she’s right about living wide open; truthfully, I often doubt that.

And now, off to another bedtime.  More pages of Harry Potter, another turn at the Ghostie Dance, the Sweet Dreams Head Rub, and a full-body hug before bed.  Another night when my attention, my kiss, my hug can fix any problem at all.  How many more nights will it be my privilege to do, and be, this?  I don’t know, and that not knowing haunts me.  But tonight, it is.  I try to focus on that.

What are you reading?

It’s not a surprise that I love to read.  I go through phases, though, where I don’t read much.  I’m not sure why.  Last summer I read mostly magazines and Mary Oliver poems.  For the last month or so I’ve read very little, probably because I’ve been so consumed with work.  I’m slowly starting to reengage, though, and am turning my attention back to my stack, which has continued growing.  I’d love to hear what you are reading and what’s on your bedside table.  This is what’s on mine:

This Life is In Your Hands – Melissa Coleman
Halfway to Each Other – Susan Pohlman
Cost – Roxana Robinson
One Thousand Gifts – Ann Voskamp
The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart – Deborah Digges
And I Shall Have Some Peace There – Margaret Roach
Schoolgirls – Peggy Orenstein
Enoughwater – Maya Stein

What are you reading?

“We are made whole
by books, as by great spaces and the stars.”
– Mary Carolyn Davies

Two wheels

On Saturday Whit asked to try biking without his training wheels.  He’s a cautious fellow, uninclined to try something new until he’s fairly sure he can do it.  In the past he has been adamantly opposed to trying to bike on two wheels.  So we though we ought to jump on his new interest.  And we did.  Matt unscrewed the training wheels and off we went, two blocks up the street, to our park.

We decided to use the basketball courts because of how flat they are.  Matt stood behind Whit, helping him balance, and breaking into a slow jog, pushing Whit on the bike.  And like millions of parents before him, he let go. And Whit biked away.

He flew.

He biked on his own the very first time he tried.  When he slowed to a halt, disembarking inelegantly by letting the bike clatter to the ground, his face was lit by a huge, radiant smile.  He wanted to try it over and over again.  And so we did.  I stood back, my shadow vivid on the cement basketball court from the sun overhead, and I watched.  My eyes filled with tears.  This, so soon after Grace had pierced my heart with the heartbreakingly familiar I-want-to-be-littler comment.

Finally, we walked home.  Whit wanted to bike down our street to home.  I ran ahead and waited for him in front of our house.  As Matt got him started at the top of the street, I noticed a neighbor walk out onto her front porch on her way to her car.  She paused, watching Matt and Whit.  Her children are probably 5 years older than mine.  Watching her watching us, I thought: this is it.  This is one of those moments.  I had that powerful sense of observing myself even as I lived, that awareness, uncomfortable in its intensity, that I was passing over a threshold.  And then I turned to watch my youngest child pedal towards me down the street on two wheels.  And to hug him, fiercely, blinking back tears, after he made it all the way to me.

With special thanks to Kathleen Nolan, who reminded me of this poem:

To a Daughter Leaving Home
(Linda Pastan)

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

I want to be your little girl

Saturday morning dawned clear and cold.  I took Grace and Whit out to breakfast at our favorite diner while Matt slept in.  Later, we went to meet some friends to walk around the reservoir in our town.  Our friends have a five year old son and an 18 month old daughter.  Slowly, we circled the reservoir.  The big kids on bikes and so were our friends, with their toddler in a bike seat.  Matt and I walked.  The children biked out ahead of us, that raveling red string unfurling towards the horizon, stretching, as it does, but never breaking.  It was windy and we all walked hunched over, hands jammed into pockets.  I looked up, almost desperately, at the branches against the crystal clear sky, looking for buds.

Eventually my friend’s daughter, C, got cold in the bike seat so we took her out to walk.  As she wandered along the path, crouching to investigate every small dried leaf or blade of new grass, we joked about how toddlers are the ultimate in people who Stop and Smell the Flowers.  Everybody else got cold, waiting for C to amble along, so I picked her up, surprised by how light she was in my arms, and held her against my hip as I walked, talking to my friend, who walked her bike beside me.

Suddenly I noticed Grace biking urgently back towards me, and when she got close I saw that her cheeks were wet with tears.  “What, Gracie?” I asked, wondering if she’d fallen.  She was crying so hard it was hard for her to get the words out, and she gestured me over so we could speak privately.  I leaned down so that I could hear her, my forehead clunking into the chilly plastic of her helmet.

“Mummy,” she wiped ineffectually at her tears with her mitten, “I want to be your little girl.”

“Oh, Grace!” Instinctively I knelt, still cradling C against my side, and wrapped my other arm around Grace.  I hugged her and then pulled back, looking right into her eyes.  “Grace.  You will always be my little girl.”

“But I’m not as little as she is,” Grace nodded towards C, who was watching all of this with interest.

“I know, Grace.  But it doesn’t matter how big you get.  You will always be my little girl.  You will always be my first baby.”

Appeased, she biked away, and I stood up and resumed walking, but now it was my cheeks that were wet.

Where does this come from?  Whit, too, has broken down, sharing through sobs how own sadness at time’s passage.  Do they pick this up from my talking about it?  The thing is, I don’t actually do that in front of them.  More likely, I suspect, sensitivity about time throbs in their bloodstreams as surely as it does in mine.  I feel so ambivalent about this; what a weight they carry, and it’s all because of me.  I don’t think very much about whether I’d rather be wired differently, because I know I can’t change my leaning toward melancholy or my skinlessness, can’t escape my sometimes-exquisitely painful awareness of life’s beauty and loss.  But I don’t like reminders like this one from Grace, of the high costs of having a mother who is more shadow than sun, whose gaze is often through tears, who loves and hurts in equal, fierce measure.

Oh, I worry about them.  I want what all parents want, in unison, and with the force of a tide: I want them to be happy.  I want joy and ease and as much wonder as they can bear.  And then maybe more.  I hope the sheer basic fact of my being their mother has not precluded this already for them.

The meaning of the sky

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature – Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s no secret that I ache to believe in God.  The truth is I ache to believe in something.  What’s also true is that slowly, with almost infinitessimal steps, I’m finding myself doing so, in my own way: beginning to trust in the vast design, to believe that I can let go, to trust.

I see this shaky but growing belief, most of all, in the sky.  I recently paged through my zillions of photographs and realized how awfully many I take of the sky.  I simply adore the sky and am often moved to photograph it.  Though, of course, no photograph can capture the sky.  The assortment of clouds, the searing gorgeousness of a clear cornflower blue sky, the subtle depths of a vista of changing grays.  I take pictures looking up at the sky, mostly, and once in a while I take a picture out of an airplane window looking down at it.

In particular this winter I have been downright obsessed with the beauty in the way black winter branches net the often steel-gray sky.  I see poetry in the patterns that the bare branches, often ice-slicked, make against the winter sky.  I have dozens and dozens of photographs of different designs like this, and my children have taken to mocking me when I stop, stock-still, in the middle of going somewhere, often in the middle of the street, and fumble for my iPhone.

I’m realizing that my preoccupation with time and its passage informs this close observation of nature and the sky.  The changing quality of light as we move through the seasons speaks of the earth’s ceaseless rotation.  The sky’s meaning is found in its simultaneous permanence and momentary-ness and in the subtle, complex shifts in its light.  There is a tree outside my window, about which I’ve written before, and this winter many mornings I was stunned into a brief moment of silence by the light on its barren branches.  I tried and I tried and I tried to capture it, usually to no avail.

The seasons turn, the light changes, the branches swell with life and then burst into flower and then drop their leaves again.  Just like I like Walden Pond most during the barren months, I am most drawn to winter’s vistas and landscapes.  And it’s winter’s skies that I find the most beautiful.  Somewhere, in those erratic patterns of black against blue, I see … what?  Something.  God.  Something I can believe in, lean into.  I sense the vast design for which this blog is named. 

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

– Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace)