To honor our dreams and to honor our loved ones and to honor our rituals and our lives is precisely what literature is endlessly trying to teach us.
– Allan Gurganus
Thank you to my friend Glenda Burgess, on whose beautiful blog I first found these perfect lines.
I dislike talking about being busy. I’ve said this before. We are all busy. Everybody’s life is full. I know this is true, and discussion of being busy feels like both an excuse and, frankly, a bit of a bore.
Lately, however, my own life feels particularly abundant, as it were, with demands, responsibilities, and, yes, joys.
Every single day it feels like I step into a slipstream in the morning and am carried along all day. Sometimes I am unable to take a breath. The truth is I can’t decide if this is good or bad feeling. Sometimes the whitewater of my life makes me feel out of control, and that I definitely hate. Other times, I’m aware that I truly love everything I’m doing, or at the very least I value all the responsibilities. Furthermore, I choose them. While I still feel somewhat overwhelmed, it’s hard to feel unhappy or complain in this situation.
I chose this.
Remembering our agency is a quick way to gratitude. It’s an effective way to stop feeling victim-y and overwhelmed, too. Busy is not bad. Busy is not unique. Busy does not have to be the end of the world. How fortunate we are to have so many things that want our attention! (this reminds me of a piece I wrote a long time ago, about how the work-home tension is one of deep privilege).
Even so, it’s sometimes hard to maintain our – my – equilibrium when life is rushing at me like whitewater. Still (continuing), I want to be still (not moving).
Years ago I wrote about stillness, and how I realized that it was never going to arrive, but instead be something I needed to actively seek amidst the activity of my full life. I think all the time – daily, at least – of TS’s Eliot’s lines from Four Quartets, We must be still and still moving. Being still in the middle of the busy-ness, that’s the goal, at least for me. Finding ways to breathe and to be here, mostly because without doing that I miss my life. And as I remind myself, over and over again, I chose this, this manifold set of responsibilities and identities which unfurl, shimmering, piling upon each other, beautiful and daunting at the same time.
More and more I’ve been instagramming with my made-up hashtag of #everydaylife, and I think in part that’s a way I force myself to stop and notice. Sometimes those posts are the sky, sometimes they are the chaos of my kitchen island while the kids do a Chemistry project, sometimes they’re the scene as we head out the door in the morning. When I stop and take a picture, and think to myself this is my everyday life, I am still.
For a brief moment, only, but still. Still.
Dear Grace,
Yesterday you turned twelve. It seems incomprehensible that you’re this old, and at the same time I can’t imagine you not being the right-now you. That day that you arrived on your due date, in a driving rainstorm after a long, long labor, seems like a lifetime ago. Many lifetimes.
For a few years I’ve been describing you as liminal, and maybe, in fact, all children are. Childhood is, after all, evanescent, and as I’ve said before every single day holds both new vistas and losses both big and small. It’s all an endless halleluia and a constant farewell. This moment feels particularly precarious, more on-the-edge than ever, though, as though we’re teetering on a fulcrum, about to plunge into a new world. And I’ll be honest: there’s a lot I fear about what’s to come. I worry our closeness will fray and never recover. I am trying to trust the red thread, even as I let it out, knowing that letting you go is my primary task right now. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel fears about your impending teenagerhood and sorrow about already being here in this moment of parenthood.
This was your fourth year at sleepaway camp but the first time you were homesick. I can’t help thinking this was the last gasp of attachment before you push off for the other shore, for adolescence and young adulthood, for good.
You are already a young woman in so many ways. You are over 5 feet tall and I can wear your flip-flops. The physical changes of adolescence loom ever closer, and I’m watching puberty sweep through your peers. You are still all angles and planes, your body a symphony of sharp edges and long limbs. You have long, long legs that I like to joke you inherited from your godmother. You have thick brown hair and olive skin that tans on contact with the sun. The only features you inherited from me are your deep mahogany eyes and your cleft chin.
You have a wary, cautious demeanor and are always extremely aware of the world around you. You are sensitive and thoughtful and prone to take things too personally (I have no idea where you get this trait from). Despite my desire to focus on what your body can do, not what it looks like, and to protect you from society’s emphasis on female appearance, I can see in you a newfound understanding of how the world evaluates you by how you look, and it stirs panic in me.
This fall you started running cross-country for the first time. I wrote about your first race and someone wise commented that watching a cross country race is a good metaphor for parenting. I get to watch the start from an intimate distance, watch you run away, and then you disappear for a big chunk of the race. And then I stand there, vigilant, eager, proud, my heart fluttering as I wait for your return. You are very fast; when we run together, which we occasionally do now, I can’t keep up with you. Another metaphor: I trail you, watching as you take flight.
You are a true introvert. A few weeks ago a friend who is also on your soccer team came over after school to do homework, have dinner, and I took you together to practice. As I tucked you in that night you burst into tears and admitted that you were exhausted from the day. I asked what you meant and you explained that while you’d really enjoyed the visit, you realized you really needed the downtime alone between school and practice. Oh, how I relate to this need, this preference, and this tendency.
These are complicated social years, and I know you worry about friendship, loyalty, and what it really means to be popular. Though my goal isn’t to be your “best friend,” I’m deeply grateful that you still talk to me. I can’t protect you from the world., but I can make sure that home is your safe place.
You wear camouflage leggings and gold ballet flats, an orange down coat, jeans with flowers printed all over them, and dark brown Uggs. Your bed is your haven, as mine is for me, and you sleep on sheets printed with peace signs and clutching the two teddy bears you’ve slept with since birth. You need a lot of sleep and are quickly reduced to tears and frustration when you’re tired. You make your bed every single morning with a dedication that reminds me of, well, me. I asked you recently if it made you feel like your life was under control and you nodded knowingly. “I just have to make it,” you said. Me too.
You sometimes leave me notes on my bedside table, on April Fools’ Day you and Whit short-sheeted our bed, and I have framed the painting of two people sitting by a lighthouse watching a sunset that you made for me while at camp this summer. You love to read though I’ll admit to disappointment that certain classics that I have eagerly foisted on you have failed to capture your imagination. Some of my very favorite times are when we sit in my bed together, reading side by side. We just finished Harry Potter #7, reading aloud together, and I felt a wave of real sorrow that it was over. We started reading #1 together when you were in first grade. Something big is over.
Every year of your life I have loved you more. It just keeps getting better and better. The reason I exist in a thick fog of loss and mourning about time’s passage is precisely because I love these years so much. The consolation prize for this sadness is, of course, that I get to be your mother always, even as the particulars of and landscape within which that relationship takes place change.
On Saturday night, as I put you to bed, you were sad. You didn’t want to turn 12, you said, you didn’t want to inch closer to being a teenager, it’s all going to fast, you want life to slow down, you don’t want to grow up. I ached as I listened to you, something deep inside me of course recognizing this sensibility, this sensitivity. I wish you could just feel pure joy and simply rejoice at what comes next every day. But I know I can’t, and I know now that you can’t either. So I’ll just say that I swear, with every bone in my body, that as life gets more complex it also gets deeper, more rewarding, and more joyful. I can’t tell you not to feel that sorrow that’s so inextricably wound around every transition, but I can tell you that there’s just as much breathtaking beauty and head-spinning happiness. I promise.
I love you, Gracie girl, I always have, and I always will. Happy 12th birthday. It’s been a breathtaking, glorious, sometimes dizzying ride so far, and I’m looking forward to what lies ahead. I just hope you will keep holding my hand.
To the girl who made me a mother, my first baby, my only daughter, I love you.
Mum
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
~Rilke
I found this short passage on Jill’s beautiful blog, A Thousand Shades of Gray, which is a daily read for me.
In the last week of each summer, we traditionally spend a day at a beach north of Boston. Lately, these outings have felt like encounters with the tide. Last year we stood on a sand bar, marveling at the way it shrank under our feet as the tide came in. This year my children built a sand wall and watched it disappear under the onslaught of the rising tide.
Eleven is like this. It is the last visible piece of childhood’s sand as the tide of adolescence comes in, inexorable, welcome, but bringing anxiety in its wake, too. That tide whose approach we watch with both wonder and fear will change the landscape forever. It will dismantle many things even as it makes space for new ones.
Eleven oscillates between closeness and the distance I know she is supposed to be pushing for. Mothering an eleven year old is bringing to life all the academic study I did years ago about the mother-daughter relationship. I’m living that which I studied so closely, and though I understand what’s happening intellectually, it is still emotionally difficult.
Eleven walks a neighbor’s puppy by herself. She is responsible and organized, and lets herself into the house I have never seen, collects what she needs, and returns the same way. It is a small universe that she controls by herself. She also sleeps with four stuffed animals, all of which are dogs. She wants to be a vet.
Eleven can beat me in a set of tennis and can always, every single time, get a soccer ball past me. This summer we went for a run together for the first time and she left me in the dust.
Eleven can wear my flip-flops and is almost my height. She runs a six minute mile and is fluent with technology in a way I will never be. She doesn’t have her own phone yet but I know that’s coming soon. She still sleeps with the two teddy bears she’s had since infancy. She likes to snuggle before bed and still says prayers that include “thank you for giving me everything I need and most things that I want.”
Eleven started running cross-country for her school this year, and I can’t watch a race without tears in my eyes. There’s something about watching her go, seeing her take flight, cheering for her sprinting towards the finish line, that makes me cry. A wise reader pointed out the metaphor that I can’t stop thinking about: she’s running away from me, and I’m cheering for her, on her team no matter what, even when I can’t see her. Though I can’t see the part of the race that happens in the woods, I can imagine it, based on my own experiences (of running cross-country as a high schooler, myself, but also of being an adolescent girl). Her path and my own feel interwoven, but that identification is largely in my head. The woods she’s running in, and the tracks she makes through them, are hers and hers alone.
More and more, Eleven is in the woods. Her world is her own. I have less visibility into what she is doing at school and the use of email and instagram has allowed her to develop friendships I don’t know as much about. I trust Eleven and we still have a lot of rules about internet access and social media, but I’m aware of her autonomy and growing privacy. This is just another manifestation of the separation that I know is healthy and right.
This was Eleven’s fourth year at sleepaway camp but the first she was homesick. In the sagging middle week of her 3.5 weeks at camp, there were tearful phone calls and sad letters. Then, as the days towards pickup shortened, the mood brightened, and equilibrium was restored. I can’t help thinking this was the last gasp of attachment before eleven pushes off for the other shore, for adolescence and young adulthood, for good.
For now, I will curl up next to Eleven at bedtime and listen to her stories about her day and cherish every minute of time she wants to spend close to me, both physically and emotionally. I can see the tide coming in, and I know what it will bring with it. I’m still looking forward to what is ahead and trying to trust, that like on the cross-country course, though she’s about to disappear into the woods, she will circle around and come back towards me. She will have a smile on her face as she sprints towards the finish line, and she’ll see me standing there, and I hope that will make her glad.
