There is no question that I am the unadventurous sibling.  I’ve mentioned my sister?  The one who is living in Jerusalem for the year, with her two daughters, ages 5 and 3?  Yes, that one. Apparently many boarding school teachers spend their sabbaticals reading books in a hammock at their lake house.  Not so my brother-in-law and my sister.  Instead they moved their small children halfway across the world to the Middle East.  And whoa, am I proud of her.

On the other hand, I have lived in the same house for 11 years.  A house that is a mile from where my children go to school and less than a mile from the house my sister and I were born in.

Hilary and I grew up in the same world; we are from the same terroir.  In fact she’s the only person in the world who was by my side during those formative early years with me.  It is she who was bundled under the seat in front of me (and my mother) on a transatlantic flight when we were 1 and 3.  It is she who’s standing next to me in so many pictures across Europe, with Another Damn Cathedral (ADC) soaring behind us (you can see that I did not inherit my father’s photography skills: in the photo above we’re standing before the Dome of the Rock.  But I chose a less-than-optimal spot for capturing the moment.  Classic.).

Coming as we do from the same particular soil, one that was intense, challenging, and rich, Hilary and I have a great many things in common.  I’ve always thought we look very much alike, a fact that I think is apparent in the photograph above (which redeems it, in my view, from its lack of excellence in the touristy-shot category).

But there are some big differences, and today it’s this one – the appetite for adventure and risk – that’s on my mind.

I’ve long believed that people are more a product of nature than nurture, so who knows how much of Hilary’s and my differences are innate and how much of them come about through our different reactions to the same circumstances.  But regardless, I look at her and T, and think of the extraordinary experiences they are engraving n their daughters’ early memories, and I wonder why it is that I went so thoroughly the other way.

My father has long held that an international adventure is critical for proper family life.  I know I’m a bit of a disappointment, at least on that dimension.  It’s true that my own personal experience of our transatlantic childhood was not unequivocally positive.  I would never do it differently, but for me the back-and-forth across the Atlantic rhythm had some difficult repercussions.  But of course there were tremendous riches, too.  And when I visit Hilary in Jerusalem, and witness all that they are exploring and learning, I recall only the horizon-expanding moments.

I’ll never know why it is that I responded in such an unadventurous way to my childhood.  I regret it, in some ways, but in others I’m doing just what I said I’d do: stay put.  What I find myself thinking now, in the aftermath of our life-changing trip, is of how I can introduce adventure, particularly of the international sort, into our life without fundamentally changing its structure.  Whit’s godmother, one of my oldest friends, is moving to China this month.  I am dreaming of a visit to Beijing.  Stay tuned.

And Hilary, thank you, as always, for ever, for the continued inspiration you provide for me.

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I still don’t quite have words to fully describe our experience in Jerusalem.  I recommend Hilary’s reflections, and in lieu of any writing, offer some photographs.

My sister Hilary and I and our families by the Dome of the Rock.  We went to the Temple Mount twice, and both times I was moved by a sense of calm and peace in the expansive plaza that surrounds the beautiful, exquisitely-detailed building.  Looking at this picture I’m struck, also, by the evidence that Hilary and I are, in fact, grown-ups, and that we have created these real live families.  Which, somehow, continues to shock me.

Jesus Christ’s birthplace in the basement of the Church of the Nativity.  Like so many of the high, holy spots in Jerusalem (and in this case, Bethlehem) I was struck by what seemed like simultaneous ornateness and randomness.  We knelt in front of this silver star and touched it, in a small, low-ceilinged basement lit by hundreds of gas lanterns.

Bethlehem rooftops, with a mosque and two churches cohabiting.  And the stunning blue sky that graced our whole visit except for Christmas Day, when it poured all day long (and created an entirely different, but also real, beauty).

Grace and I on the Mount of Olives on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve in Bethlehem.  Heavily armed guards and Santa.

Sunset over Shepherd’s Field, where the angels first appeared to tell of Jesus’s birth.  We sat in an ancient church, open to the air, and sang Christmas carols as the sun set.

Christmas morning in a 12th century Crusader church.  The children went forward to light the advent wreath’s four candles.

Mark of Islam against the same glorious sky.  So many of my pictures are of crescent moons and crosses and flags against the blue Jerusalem sky.

Again, the Dome of the Rock.

The crosses of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Visible in the same frame as the gold dome, if I had had a wider lens.

My son looking up to my father – in so many ways, literal and figurative – at the Western wall.

The prayer that Grace put into the Western Wall.  I left one too.  Praying is saying thank you.

Damascus Gate.  One morning we circled the ramparts around the old city, and explored behind this ornate and beautiful facade.

Inside Jesus’s tomb, from which he ascended into heaven.  I love this picture because you can see the children are praying and I am looking up.  That’s what I do, always, when prayer is called for.  I look up: to the sky, to the stained-glass windows above the altar, just up, up, up.  It’s my automatic instinct.

And so, enriched by a week in December, looking up, always, I go forward into 2012.  Thank you, HTHM.

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Before we went to Jerusalem, I had an exchange with my friend Aidan about how mothers universally doubt themselves.  This is simply and inherently part of the terrain, she said, and I agree.  But for days after our conversation I found myself thinking about those moments – rare, but important – where I have trusted myself as a mother even when the prevailing wisdom said otherwise.  To understand how vital these experiences are to me you have to understand that I was never a “maternal” person – I had never changed a diaper until I had Grace, I didn’t babysit as a kid, and having children was never part of the future I ran so aggressively and directly for.  It wasn’t not part of the vision I had of my life, but somehow it – motherhood – was never an explicit part of my plan.

And then, as you know if you know me or read this blog, motherhood came upon me suddenly, without warning; my pregnancy, a surprise, announced itself the same day that Matt’s father was diagnosed with a terrible illness.  Indeed, Grace’s gestation, birth, and infancy are wound tightly around my father-in-law’s illness and eventual, miraculous heart tranplant.

All of that is to say that I reflect with a very real sense of wonder at the moments when I did trust my own mothering instincts.  I was often not aware of this in the moment, but with perspective certain turning points stand up, insistently, reminding me of the undeniable power of an identity to which I’d never given much thought: mother.

During my labor with Grace, I went somewhere I’ve never been again, to a land of incendiary and incandescent pain, and I knew somehow that she and I were going to be okay.  A more conventional birth environment probably would not have allowed this to happen, so my choice at 28 weeks to move to the midwifery practice at the small local hospital – which was, on the face of it, somewhat radical – is one I continue to be proud of (and amazed by).

When Grace was almost 2 and she had some symptoms that our doctor could not understand.  He sent us to a specialist at Children’s, and she had blood work, x-rays, ultrasounds, a CAT scan.  The doctor began talking about possibility of a brain tumor.  In this midst of this – a time that I recall more than anything as utterly devoid of panic – I decided to switch her from soy milk to rice milk.  I was worried about the estrogen-mimicking qualities of soy.  All of her doctors scoffed at me.  Her symptoms disappeared in 2 weeks, and I’ve been profoundly skeptical of soy ever since.

When Whit was 3 his nursery school teacher was worried about his speech, and was unsure whether something cognitive was going on.  She sent us to speech therapy, where had him evaluated, and the whole time I failed, again, to freak out.  I knew he was fine and he was (and is).  He just speaks – to this day – with a slightly funny accent.  Now it makes us all laugh.

When Grace was 5 (almost 6) she flew on an airplane alone.  She flew from Philadelphia to Boston as an unaccompanied minor.  I put her on the plane (well, I watched her walk down the gangway with a flight attendant) and Matt and Whit met her at the gate in Boston.  Unbeknownst to me, she wrote about it in her kindergarten journal, and I cried when I saw it at our parent-teacher conference.  I received stinging criticism on the playground and from other mothers (notably, not from any of my close friends).  To this day she talks about the experience, evincing great pride and self-confidence about the fact that she did it.

And these days, I follow my intuition every day.  It weaves a narrow path, glimmering, through the overscheduled, overstuffed, more-more-more world of childhood today, and I try to follow it, hand-over-hand, like I’m palming a ribbon.  I take my children for walks, I take them to the playground, we thrill at the small sparrow on the porch.  I worry - I’ll admit it, a lot – that their lack of skills at Mandarin or violin or hockey will be a problem eventually when it comes to applying to schools, colleges, etc.  But even more, I believe in the small still voice in my head that says: protect this time.

Aidan, thanks for prompting this conversation, for causing me to dive into my own memories, to remember anew that I do have instincts here, despite how often I bemoan the fact that mothering does not come naturally to me.

Do you have memories like these, about any aspect of your life, that bolster your trust in yourself?

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Last week I read Amy at Never True Tales’ words on The Witching Years.  She writes about the years that her children were young, with a combination of regret, loss, gratitude and wonder that I recognize intimately.

It’s clearer here, on the other side. In the light. With kids who brush their own teeth and do their own homework and get their own snacks. I know now that being a mom of young children, staying in the house day after day, parenting solo 80% of the time…well, it is what it is. (Oh, is it ever.) I know that I did my best.

I also know I’ll never get those years back, as much as they often make me shudder: those years that passed so slowly as to nearly grind backward. Those years so long I measured my children’s ages in months instead. And that’s a travesty, because I left a piece of myself there. Something raw, and unmeasured, and instinctively maternal. Something sacrificial.

Those years were also, for me, a time that felt removed from the rest of my life.  It’s absolutely true that it’s clearer here, and also that this feels a bit like the “other side.”  In retrospect those dark years were a kind of slow, dark traverse, like the hours-long slog to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro where all I can remember is step, breathe, pause.  Step, breathe, pause.  In a white-out ice storm.  For eight hours.  All the while wanting it to be over, and then the minute I’m through it I want to go back.

Hurry up, slow down, faster, slower, the interplay of impatience and of regret.  This is the music to which my life is danced.  When my children were little I used to talk wistfully – everyone used to talk – about “getting my life back.”  And yes, I have my life back now.  But it’s not the same life.  And furthermore, I feel nothing short of anguish that I wished over some of the most tender, raw, and special days of my life.  I will never revisit that unique interval of time when your regular life – that life I wanted back so fiercely – recedes.  I will never have that wild magic back.

And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.  What I can’t stop thinking about is the notion of I left a piece of myself there. Oh, yes.  My first few months of motherhood were a crucible, so hot that I emerged made up of a totally different alloy.  In those dark weeks it rained and snowed constantly, we waited for Matt’s father to come through surgery, I woke up every morning from deep, soggy sleep and swallowed a white pill, believing desperately that it would help me?  Beyond those initial weeks, the first few years were also their own country.  Set to the drumbeat cadence of the needs of a toddler and an infant, the demarcations between day and night eroded, the very earth beneath my feet tilting perilously.   My sense of self adjusted slowly, creakingly, to this new forever-after reality?

What did I leave there?

I left my body swollen with childbirth, with milk, with life.  I left eyes so tired that they felt like they had sand in them; I’d press my fingers to my eyelids and see stars exploding faintly in the blackness.  I left behind the powdery smell of newborns, a bottle drying rack by the sink, mint green coils of diaper genie wrapped diapers, sterling silver rattles dented from being thrown on hardwood floors, and all sizes of white onesies. I left behind the explosive and extraordinary experience of natural childbirth, though it reverberates to this day through my sense of self.

I left my naive but absolute belief that motherhood was my birthright.  That shattered like a lightbulb exploding and left behind questions and doubts as numerous as those shards of glass.  One of the tasks of the last few years has been to see the beauty in the doubts, the tremendous richness in the questions.

Most of all I left behind my certainty.  My certainty that I knew what I was doing, that my path was assured, that I was safe.  That was lost forever in those weeks where my sense of solid ground shifted; the tremors of those days reverberate still.  Nothing feels safe, but the uncertainty holds a dangerous, fearful promise that I never anticipated.  The impact of those years is carved onto my soul as indelibly as a scar would be on my skin; the difference is it is invisible to others.

I grieve those old, surer, more confident versions of myself, though in retrospect I can see in each of them the buried seam of doubt, rising occasionally to the surface, disturbing the apparently smooth, clear surface like a pebble dropped into a lake.  That’s what I left there, most of all, in the autumn of 2002: who I was sure I was, what I was certain the world was, and the future I saw unfurling in front of me so vividly and assuredly.

Nothing has ever been sure again.  And what an immense, outrageous, terrifying blessing that has been.

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We are off today to visit my sister and her family in Jerusalem.  It is Grace and Whit’s first trip out of the country, and an adventure for all of us.  I plan to truly soak up our time there, which would already be holy simply because it’s my whole family together, but is made extraordinarily more so by our visit to the holiest place in the world.

We return on the 30th.  I’m going to post one of my favorite posts from each month (other than August, which was my month of photos, and December, which feels too recent) for the remaining days of this year after the solstice.  I’ll be back in January.  It was a surprisingly emotional experience, this diving into my archives (diving into the wreck, you might say – and, indeed, the words are maps).  It was not always easy to choose what I wanted to share as emblematic of a particular month.

Thank you for being here, for reading what I share.  It means more to me than I can ever possibly express.

May you have a happy, hopeful, and holy rest of 2011, celebrating the close of the year with those you love.

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My commitment to simplifying this holiday is significant.  And it has paid off: the Christmas cards are mailed, the gifts are all bought, though not all wrapped, the tree is up.  Still, I adore Christmas and its traditions, and have some small annual rituals.

There are a few things we do every year.  Whit has a LEGO advent calendar.  Grace has an advent calendar that has 24 pockets on it, each of which holds a small card with an instruction for her.  So one day it’s “read a Christmas book to your brother” and another it’s “write a letter to your grandparents” and a third is “bake cookies for our neighbor.”  A couple people have been surprised that she is satisfied with this, in lieu of a morning chocolate or a LEGO minifig.  But … at least for now, she is.

I’m very moved by Advent, probably because of its themes of darkness and the promise of light.  I have several books about it, and this year I’m dipping into Watch For the Light.  More evenings than not I open the window of my small third-floor office and stick my head out into the cold, watching the sun go down across the streets, the glow of the sunset filtered through the black branches of the tree I know practically as well as my own hand.

We have a big green boxwood wreath on the front door, around which I tie the same wide length of celadon green satin ribbon every year.  Our tree is decked with ornaments we’ve been collecting since we were married, and dotted with a few from my own childhood that Mum gave me.  Each year for the past several I’ve had personalized ornaments made for Grace and Whit, too: a silhouette one year, doll-like, cloth faces another, their names on porcelain circles a third.  When the tree was decorated, the angel sitting proudly on its crown (every year), Grace leaned back and looked at it carefully.

“Why is it that some peoples’ trees are more fancy, Mummy?” she asked me.

“What do you mean, fancy?’

“I mean … you know, all gold, or all silver, or the ornaments match.”

“Well, Grace, our ornaments don’t match but they all have a story to them.”

She thought this over for a minute, gazing at the tree, before saying, “Oh.  So I guess our tree isn’t fancy, but it is full of love.”

Exactly.

I adore this 24 days of books tradition that the Gutsy Mom posted – check it out.  She gathers 24 Christmas or seasonal books, wraps each in twine or ribbon, and labels them with a day.  Each day they read that day’s book.  I think this is marvelous and I hope to try it next year.

And even though I listen to Christmas carols year-round, they are still important to me in this season.  We are listening to two CDs on repeat: the Lower Lights’ Come Let Us Adore Him and a homemade one of all of my old favorites.  I come by my obsession with Christmas carols honestly: my father played his CDs of Kings College Choir singing old-fashioned hymns from Halloween to Valentine’s Day.  I’ve also grown fond of some more modern interpretations, in particular Annie Lennox’s (among them, Universal Child), Shawn Colvin’s (Love Came Down at Christmas), and a couple by the Barenaked Ladies.  Oh, and Sugarland’s Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel, which I’m especially obsessed with lately.

My friends and I have an annual Secret Santa tea, complete with champagne, at a marvelous place in town that’s lit with sparkling pink lights.  Grace and Whit and I will bake several batches of cookies and decorate them.  We will exchange gifts and celebrate with our extended family, the stool, and hopefully take our annual photograph of the whole clan (C’s reindeer headgear included).  While I generally dislike scented candles, there is one called Forest, with a faint smell of pine and winter, that I adore, and it’s burning this whole season.  Sadly, we will miss a couple of my favorite holiday traditions, my parents’ annual Solstice ball and carol-signing on Christmas Eve with my oldest friend, though it’s for a very good reason.

How do you celebrate this season, whatever it means to you?

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Thanksgiving was full of experiences that carried the mantle of important, moments I could feel turning to memories even as I lived them.  Most of all there was our Friday evening celebration of my in-laws’ 45th wedding anniversary and the 9th anniversary of my father-in-law’s successful heart transplant.  My in-laws had their three sons and five of their six grandchildren together (the sixth, 8 months old, was not able to stay up so late!) for a lovely dinner.  My sister-in-law and I made a book of photographs of the last 9 years for our father-in-law, and the memories contained in its pages brought everyone in the room to tears.  Also of note: my turkey was damn good.  I think my cider-based brine (which I pretty much made up) was a hit.  I think I was proudest, though, that all of my dishes were done before dinner was served.  A big achievement for such an ardent believer in clean as you go as I.

It was two far less weighty moments, however, that stand out for me as the most crystalline.  They were moments with a surprising, surreptitious power, the kinds of mundane experiences that I have learned can turn into the most sustaining and vital memories.  I hope that Grace and Whit remember days like these with the same affection and gratitude that I do.

On Friday morning Matt had to work so Grace, Whit and I took our skates to be sharpened and then stopped by a playground on the way home.  I sat on one of the swings (swinging alone is one of my favorite things to do) while they played together for 15 minutes … 30 … 45.  I swear.  I watched in wonder as they cooperated, laughed, and made up an imaginary world where the ground was lava.

The sky was crystal clear, the branches were all bare, and we didn’t see another human being the whole time we were there.  It was so warm both kids shed their jackets.

The sun shone on that hour.  And in its light I saw something glinting.  My life.

On Saturday afternoon Grace, Whit and I walked to a nearby movie theater to see The Muppets.   They are generally amenable to my walk-whenever-we-can policy, parroting now my points that it is better for both our health and for the environment.  On our way home we detoured past the house Hilary and I were born in.  I pointed out the windows to the living room, where I told Grace I remember walking in circles around the room reciting my times tables.  When I was in third grade.  With the homeroom teacher who is now her Math teacher.  And they are learning their times tables.  Sometimes it all swirls together so blindingly I have to blink and hold onto something so I don’t get dizzy.

The three of us played for a long time on the seesaw, which has three weighted balls that you can slide from side to side to even out the weight.  I wished my physicist father was with us to answer some of the questions I got.

Then they hopped on the swings and went for a while, holding hands.  They made up songs and sang them at the top of their lungs.  I sat over to the side, watching them.  The light turned their faces golden as it sank towards the horizon, and then everything cooled and dimmed when it slipped below it.  I looked at my children, and I looked at the light of the hour.

I am as proud of my children for their imaginative play as I am for any of their more conventional accomplishments.  I feel intensely grateful that they are still overjoyed by a playground, that they can run and jump and swing and invent a world.  That they want to do this together adds immeasurably to my joy.  This pride is linked to my belief about the power of fairy tales, I’m sure of it.  I want my children always to experience wildness (a central reason I love the cemetery so much, another place we went this weekend).  I want them to rejoice in the freedom offered by unstructured situations.  I want them to enjoy moving their bodies, to prize the fresh air, and to laugh together.

And they did.  And I was grateful.  The holiday held a plethora of gorgeous moments, for sure, many of which I’ll never forget.   The two that I felt were the purest expression of thanksgiving, though, were these two hours at the playground.

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Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for so much that I sometimes feel gratitude like a swell in my chest, pressing on me from the inside out.  And yet, there is still so much here I do not understand (Adrienne Rich).  Loved ones circle around tables and take time to consider that which matters most, the world turns ever-faster towards the darkest day of the year, our family in particular remembers the heart transplant, nine years ago, that changed all of us forever.

This is a particularly evocative time, for me, in the natural world.  The shadows gather earlier and earlier and the trees lose the last of their leaves.  The light right now carries a particular charge of both life and loss.  This weekend we will probably return to one of our favorite places, the tower at Mount Auburn, where last year my children took my breath away with their wisdom.  Perhaps we will go back to Walden.  For me this is always a quiet, thoughtful weekend, replete with both sorrow and hope.  Thanksgiving is the holiday of grace incarnate.

Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up. I think it’s why we are here, to see as many chips of blue sky as we can bear. To find the diamond hearts within one another’s meatballs. To notice flickers of the divine, like dust motes on sunbeams in your dusty kitchen. Without all the shade and shadows, you’d miss the beauty of the veil. The shadow is always there, and if you don’t remember it, when it falls on you and your life again, you’re plunged into darkness. Shadows make the light show. – Anne Lamott

Isn’t it, after all, the interplay of light and shadow that provides the texture of our lives? The darkness creates contrast, but it also scoops out some emotional part of me, allowing me to contain – experience, recognize, feel – more joy. I am grateful, I realize anew, for way my lens on the world is striated with both light and dark.

I am thankful today for evening light on bare trees, for the deep, glowing blue of the afternoon sky, for the words of a friend that make me feel less alone, for the tousled hair of sleepy children, for the lyrics of a song that bring tears to my eyes, for the moments when I am really and truly present, when I feel my spirit beating like wings in my chest.

So, this is happysad day for me, in a reflective season. My heart swells with awareness of my tremendous blessings, of the extravagant beauty that is my world. My thoughts are quiet and shadowy, but lit by incandescent beams of light. Like a night sky whose darkness is obliterated over and over by the flare of roman candles exploding, their colors made more beautiful by the surprise of them against the darkness. Like my life.

(I wrote these paragraphs in 2009 and they still feel as enormously, specifically relevant today as they did then, so I share them again)

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If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. – Einstein

I just adore this quote.  Putting aside for a minute my essential belief that raw intelligence is innate, I agree with everything that Einstein means with this single beautiful sentence.  Why?  For lots of reasons.

Fairy tales are where the archetypes live.  They are where we learn about courage and love, about family, loyalty, and betrayal, about tests and triumph.  They are where we learn the most essential stories of humanity, the stories that go on repeating themselves over and over again in our lives and in our literature, as we grow into adulthood.

Fairy tales exist firmly in the realm of the imagination, and they allow children to dream of a world unrestricted by the boundaries of reality as they know it.  In fairy tales, magic can truly happen, and I think a commitment to the power of that which lies beyond reason and logic is fundamental to both intelligence and creativity.  How else can enormous leaps of the imagination come about, without this capacity?

More basically, stories are how you learn about the world.  I love that someone as aligned with the rigorous worlds of science and math as Einstein celebrates the power of the story.  I agree with him.  This reminds me of what I’ve written about my father: that he has a master’s degree in Physics, a PhD in Engineering, and an abiding trust in the ability of science, logic, and measurement to explain the world. At the same time, he has a deep fascination with European history and culture, often manifested in a love of the continent’s cathedrals, those embodiments of religious fervor, of all that is not scientific, logical, or measurable. His unshakeable faith in the life of the rational mind is matched by his profound wonder at the power of the ineffable, the territory of religious belief and cultural experience, that which is beyond the intellect.

I grew up in the space between those two worlds, believing that they are in fact as mutually enriching as they appear paradoxical.  I’d like to provide the same powerful learning for Grace and Whit.  As I help Grace learn the multiplication tables and how to touch type, may I remember to teach her also about dragons and princesses, about the hero’s journey, about spells which change the world, and about the fierce bonds of love.

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A vampire and Anakin Skywalker

Halloween through the years:

2010

2009

2008

2005, 2006, and 2007

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