Things I Love Lately

Finishing a Memoir with Months to Live – I adored The Bright Hour, and this piece about the book’s writer, Nina Riggs, just took my breath away. Nina is so brilliantly captured in these reflections by Tita, and her vivid, generous approach to life leaps off the page.  Read the piece, and read the book, I urge you.

Dear Girls, Life is Too Short for Crappy Friends – This contains wisdom whether you’re a teeanger or a mid-life adult (or, probably, beyond). Grace is thick in the heart of figuring out what friendships means, and I am remembering all the angst of those years. I keep promising her she will find her people, and I know she will.

Locating Happiness – Thank you to Amanda Magee for drawing my attention to this gorgeous piece.  “What is it about middle age? I do not seek out happiness as a goal or object and yet it comes to me in innumerable small ways, as long as my eyes are open and my heart is pliable.”  Yes.  This.  Exactly this.

My favorite chocolate chip cookies – I know I’ve shared this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, before, but it remains my all-time favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.  I make these all the time, and they literally never fail. I make them with regular chocolate chips, or a mix of dark and regular chocolate chips (not chocolate chunks). If you want to know how to comfort someone who failed a test, you can always send comfort packages through a fresh cookie delivery service.

What are you reading, loving, and thinking about lately?  Books on my list include: Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning (Claire Dederer), Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (Sheryl Sandberg), Her: A Memoir (Christa Parravani), and Deadfall (Linda Fairstein). What else should I be sure to read this summer?

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

Look for that pinprick of light

This is your assignment.

Feel all the things. Feel the hard things. The inexplicable things, the things that make you disavow humanity’s capacity for redemption. Feel all the maddening paradoxes. Feel overwhelmed, crazy. Feel uncertain. Feel angry. Feel afraid. Feel powerless. Feel frozen. And then FOCUS.

Pick up your pen. Pick up your paintbrush. Pick up your damn chin. Put your two calloused hands on the turntables, in the clay, on the strings. Get behind the camera. Look for that pinprick of light. Look for the truth (yes, it is a thing—it still exists.)

Focus on that light. Enlarge it. Reveal the fierce urgency of now. Reveal how shattered we are, how capable of being repaired. But don’t lament the break. Nothing new would be built if things were never broken. A wise man once said: there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Get after that light.

This is your assignment.

-Wendy MacNaughton and Courtney E. Martin

I love these gorgeous words that I found on Being Rudri.

Happy birthday

Dear Matt,

Last year was nobody’s favorite year.  Not yours, not mine, not Grace’s, and not Whit’s.  A host of things were challenging, but none more than your injury.  At the end of August, you tore two of your hamstring tendons and wound up in surgery.  It was a stressful and scary week while we figured out what to do, but finally we connected with an excellent doctor and the path forward felt clear.  You spent almost two months this fall sleeping in our living room, recovering slowly from an injury that was described to me by your doctor as the “worst in sports medicine.”  As I’ve told you, when he came out to talk to me after your surgery was complete, he said, ruefully, I’m not going to lie to you, you wish it was his Achilles or his ACL.  It wasn’t.

And yet.  Your character shone in those months. It feels strange to say this but in a way I’m nostalgic for the fall.  It was an intense time – both kids preparing for standardized tests and applying to new schools, my busy season at work, you flat on your back in the living room.  But somehow life was distilled, too, down to what mattered.  I’ll never forget the Labor Day visit from two of my oldest and dearest friends, and the warmth I felt as we all sat around the living room and laughed, eating cheese. It was an evening I will always remember as incredibly special. You were one of the first boyfriends and then husbands to enter the scene of my college friends, who remain largely the most important people in my life. Your relationships to and with them is a source of true joy for me, and I remembered it over and over again this past fall.

Your attitude was excellent.  You steadfastly refused to let me have Comcast install a television in the living room, a decision that surprised me as much as it impressed me.  You read books.  You were positive, resolute, and focused on your physical therapy and gradual improvement.  We would go for slow walks up our (short) street, which took 20 minutes round trip. You were loving and proactive with helping me as much as you could.  I know I wasn’t always a picnic to be around, and I’m sorry about that. Beyond your injury there were actually a lot of other things that contributed stress to our lives.  I’ll just say that in the last part of 2016, a lot went wrong.  But something essential went right, too: I learned a lot about who you are this fall, and I won’t forget it.

We are heading into a new season of our lives now, as Grace heads out of the house, and you know I’m anxious and emotional about it. Still, this past fall taught me there’s nothing we cannot endure together. I look forward to many years ahead, on crutches or on foot (hopefully the latter), and thank you for being the best, most patient partner I can imagine on life’s surprising, beautiful, startling roads.

Happy birthday, Matt.

I love you,

Lindsey

I have written to Matt on his birthday for many years now (and it’s one of the only times of the year I write about him!)

2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

Matrescence 2.0

December 2002

I loved reading The Birth of a Mother in the New York Times, and not just because that photograph reminded me of one of my favorite photos of Grace when she was a baby (see above, December 2002).  I read the article, which asserts that matrescence (the process of becoming a mother – a word that I had never known and which struck me because it acknowledges that that is, indeed, a process) is important and under-examined.  I share this view.

What I’m living right now is not so much my own first matrescence – that took place a long time ago, and being a mother is firmly at the center of who I am.  It’s more the transition of my motherhood into a new phase, but it feels as material and as jarring in its own way.  I’m struck by how I read about maternal ambivalence and postpartum depression (which was very much a part of my own matrescence) and those feel long, long ago.  I’m entirely, absolutely, head-over-heels in love with my own children now, and don’t feel much – any – apprehension about those being the central relationships of my life (along with their father). Those early, complicated days, which I can recall vividly, but with effort, have faded into the background entirely.

The future, however, is full of uncertainty.  This moment may be defined by my own full-fledged embrace of motherhood, but I can’t escape the shadow of what’s coming. My reality is taking on a new shape. Grace is going to boarding school and our family life is about to change in a major way.  There is no question this is the end of something.  I realize this is the most first world of first world problems (and when I read books like The Bright Hour, I’m reminded to Get A Grip).

As soon as I got my feet under me as a mother, it feels like, this season is about to end. I know, I know, this is just another reminder that life’s only constant is change.  My children, at 12 and 14, are such entertaining people.  I love them, but I also truly like them. They’re my favorite human beings to be around, and they easily make me laugh, think, and, sometimes, yell and also cry.

Life’s ordinary rhythms have taken on an almost unbearable beauty.  The routine of morning wakeups, breakfast, and driving to school (3/4 of a mile so it doesn’t take long!) makes me cry every single day and I have to actively try not to count how few mornings like this we have left.  I am trying to be here now, I really am, but wow, it’s hard.

I realize that it is impossible that this transition is as much of an earthquake as Grace’s arrival, but it feels almost commensurately big. I think of Jon Kabat-Zinn, of his line that “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf,” I take a deep breath, I try not to look into Grace’s room where the folded piles of laundry I put there remind me that she still lives here, for at least a little bit more.  I try to appreciate the gorgeousness around me. No matter what happens, I will always be their mother. She isn’t going that far. I believe in the depths and fibers of my soul that this is the right next step for her.  I always said I wanted to raise a brave and a smart daughter, and here I am, watching her take flight. She is brave and smart. Everything is as it should be. I just didn’t know how much it would hurt.

April 2017