One evening last week Whit and I sat in companionable silence in the family room.  He was building a LEGO and I was working.  “Mummy?” At his voice I looked up from my laptop.

“Yes?”  He was perched on the side of the low train table, LEGO pieces in one hand and the other held to his chest.

“I can feel my heart beating.”

“Cool, Whit.”  Why did you suddenly think of this?  The inner workings of Whit’s mind and heart will always be a mystery to me.  Which reminds me, daily, of the vast and essential unknowability of even those we love best.

After a long moment of silence, during which I watched him sit, holding his hand over his heart, he spoke again.  “It feels amazing, Mummy.”

Why yes, Whit.  It is amazing.

The next morning was Whit’s seven year doctor’s appointment.  He sat on the doctor’s examination table in just his jeans, his white chest looking impossibly tiny and incomprehensibly grown-up at the same time.  The doctor pressed his stethoscope to Whit’s back.  He asked him to turn his head this way and that.  He kept listening.  Time stretched uncomfortably.  I glanced at Matt, my anxiety mounting.  What was he hearing?  What was he listening for?  Whit looked over his shoulder at the doctor, sensing, too, that this was taking an awfully long time.  “Whit, turn this way,” the doctor’s voice was stern, his face limned with concentration.

I chewed a nail and watched, feeling my own heart skittering in my chest.  Was last night’s comment a harbinger of this, a prompt by the universe to appreciate the amazement of our hearts beating, of this most taken-for-granted and yet outrageous gift?  I could feel my breath speeding up and I began to awful-ize.  He needs open heart surgery.  I should have paid attention last night, put down my computer, pressed my hand to his chest, noticed the extraordinary beauty of his ordinary heartbeat.  I should have done that years ago.

“Okay,” the doctor cleared his throat and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears.  “He’s fine.”  I exhaled, but only part way.  “But you can hear the whooshing of the blood in his aorta.  It’s something we see rarely in kids, and I kept asking him to turn his head to test if it was that or not.  I wish my med student was here right now; this is rare and it’s cool to hear.”

“But it’s really just normal, and not an issue?”

“Yes, really.  Promise.  It’s just a detail.  It’s interesting, and unusual.  His blood just flows close to the surface, your kid.”  I exhaled the rest of the way and helped Whit pull on his shirt.

After a few more minutes, we walked back to the car.  I thought of a quote I’ve always related to, which I just tweeted recently, by Alan Gurganus: “Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.”  I let go of Whit’s hand and held my fingers against his back.  Thump, thump, thump.  His small heart rabbited against my hand.  It is amazing, mummy.  Calamity is always so close.  We walk the line between ordinary and catastrophe every moment.  Thump, thump, thump.  Close to the surface.

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Dear Whit,

Today you are seven.  I have loved every age you’ve ever been – that’s really the truth; for example,  I will never be able to adequately express to you the way that your infancy healed so many broken things inside of me.  But right now, you are particularly divine.  You are growing fast but you are still, for now at least, a little boy: you instinctively take my hand when you’re walking next to me, you embrace the world without guile or preconceptions, you tell me daily and sincerely that you love me, you unabashedly adore LEGOs, robots, coloring, and Tin Tin, and you throw your arms around my neck for a full-body hug before bed.

You have a close circle of friends and I’m very proud that they are all very nice kids.  It’s a pleasure to watch you interacting.  Recently I drove you and a friend to a birthday party, and listened to you talking.  You were talking about covering yourself with mud in the Dead Sea, and you realized your friend had seen the photos because his mother is a friend of mine.  “Oh, I need to make sure you know,” you told him earnestly, “I am wearing those pink shorts because I only have girl cousins on my mother’s side and we forgot bathing suits.”  Your friend looked at you like you were crazy.  “So I had to borrow something from one of my girl cousins.”

“Oh, I thought the shorts were cool,” your friend averred, winning my loyalty for the rest of his days.  “Oh, good.”  I could hear you relax.  “Yeah.  I liked them.”  I glanced in the rearview to see you both nodding.  “There’s no such thing as girl colors and boy colors, you know,” you went on.  Your friend agreed, and you went on to declare purple your “second favorite” color.

Though you have an extensive vocabulary, often surprising us with words we had no idea you knew, there are still times I field “what does that mean?” questions.  For example, you recently asked “what is a dork?”  I fumbled a bit, starting with “Well, it’s not really a nice thing to say, kind of a way of saying someone is not really fun.”  You looked confused.  “Well, I’m kind of a dork, too.”  I finished lamely.

“That is not true, Mummy,” you looked at me, shaking your head.  “you are so fun.”

Oh, my little man.  I know you won’t always think this, and I’m trying to really drink in these days that you do.

Your natural state is one of exuberance.  You burst, blond and laughing, into each morning, climbing out of the top bunk where you sleep clutching your monkey, whose name is Beloved. Despite your energy and enthusiasm towards almost everything, you are often cautious and don’t like to do things until you know you can.  I asked Grace what her favorite story about you this year was and she mentioned Storyland.  On our third visit, our second year, you finally agreed to try one of the rides.  On the log ride you sat in front of me, clutching my hands with white knuckles.  After we came down the flume, water splashing all around us, I asked you cautiously what you thought.  I was worried that you’d hated it.  Instead, you turned back to me, your face absolutely lit up.  “Mummy!  At the top of the ride my tummy was full of butterflies!”  That moment was Grace’s favorite of the year, and I admit it was up there for me too.  After that seminal ride you went on almost everything at Storyland, and at Legoland too.

You love hockey and golf, both passions you share with your Dad, and watching the two of you pursue them makes me smile so hard my heart hurts a little.  After a summer in which I worried that you would never read, you are suddenly devouring chapter books, and, most importantly to me, enjoying reading.

Your body is growing angular, your limbs long, and curling into my lap is getting harder and harder.  The scar from your terrifying second anaphylactic reaction has faded from an angry red gash to a flesh-colored one that glints when light hits it, and the Christmas Eve scar right above your eye is fading also.  In the summer your hair is white-blond, and your eyes remain their startling, genetically-surprising blue.

You are the funniest person I know.  Your sense of humor made itself clear early on, but it has blossomed this year.  You make everyone laugh, and it’s the first characteristic that most people notice about you.  More than once people have asked me if I named my children the traits I wanted them to have (grace and wit).  Um, no.  Despite your hilarious bravado, and your little-man swagger (one of your new favorite words), there’s a seam of deep sensitivity that runs through you whose source I think we all know.  You’ve can be hugely sentimental and are aware of loss in a way far more mature than your years.

You’re growing fast, my beloved boy, my first son, my last baby.  You are losing teeth and gaining skills with every passing week.  This summer was full of milestones; I called it the summer of letting go and I was specifically talking about you.  You enlarge my life and bring me more joy and love than I ever thought possible.  You are the drumbeat of my life, and as much as your steady, noisy rhythm sometimes overwhelms me, I beg you never to stop it.  I will never forget the moment that you were born, on a freezing cold Thursday at 3am, after an intense labor that I experienced mostly alone and will always remember as some of the most luminous, empowered hours of my life.  You were blond and blue-eyed and you were, most shockingly of all, a boy.

And thank you, dear universe, for bringing such a marvelous, intractable, delightful, delicious child into my life.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Whit, for all that you are.

I love you.  Now and always.

The letters on your other birthdays: six, five, four, three, two

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Seven years ago tomorrow.  Cliche alert, but: how?  Cue sobs, weeping, overwhelming love, and intense nostalgia.

January 20, 2005
3:15 am
Samuel Whitman
7 lbs 9 oz
6 days early (and not a dwarf)

“And we are put on earth … That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
- William Blake

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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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On September 1st I took Grace and Whit on a last summer adventure.  We drove about an hour north to the beach.  The day was magical.  It started out with Grace noticing a rainbow in the cloudy sky – not the standard arc but literally a patch of rainbow among the clouds.  I thought of the Tennessee Williams line I love about a complete overcast, then a blaze of light.  The rainbow is always there, even in a sky mottled with clouds.  You just have to look.

We got to the beach early and it was low tide and beautifully deserted.  Throughout the morning the tide came in, creating and then erasing a series of sand bars as it did so.  We spent the day dancing with the inexorability of the tides.  We stood on sandbars until the water lapped at our feet, wondering at how something that can be so seemingly solid – the sand under us – can suddenly disappear into the ocean.  Whit kept shouting about how the sandbar had been “washed out to sea” and I explained that no, the next time the tide went out it would reappear again.  He looked at me when I said this, baffled, but then he smiled, visibly reassured.

Grace and Whit played in the shallow water as the waves came in, noticed how you could feel the water pulling away at sand under your feet as it receeded.  They jumped in the waves, holding hands.  I watched, fighting tears.

Then they built a castle right at the water’s edge and worked at defending it against the incoming tide.  Grace scooped out a moat in front of the castle and Whit piled new sand on top of it.  They giggled as the waves washed over their castle, slowly wearing it down to flat sand.  No matter how hard they worked, of course, the tide won in the end.  But of course we know, with utter certainty, that the tide will turn and go out again next.  May we trust the tides.

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It was just a regular morning.  Clear and cold; it finally felt seasonal after a few oddly, swampily warm days.

The kids were quiet in the backseat, listening to the Boston Pops’ Sleigh Ride on the radio.

Out of nowhere, I asked, “Hey, guys?  I have a question.  If you had to say one thing I have taught you, what would it be?”

Silence filled the car.  I glanced in the rearview mirror.  They were looking out the windows.  Solipsism alert!  Why would I ask that?  I don’t really know.  I guess reflections are on my mind, summings-up, reckonings.

“That’s easy,” pronounced Whit immediately.  I caught his eye in the rearview mirror and he grinned his gap-toothed smile at me.  “Potty training.  You taught me that.”

I laughed.  Yes, yes, I did teach him that.  Grace was chewing her lip.  “Grace?” I prompted.

“Well, it is one of two things,” she said.  “Split between two.  One is noticing things.  And the other is manners.”  She paused, peering out the window.  “I don’t know which is more.”

Potty training, noticing things, and manners.  I guess I could be doing worse.

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This is my every morning.  I park the car, we walk into school, first to Whit’s building, and then to Grace’s.  I always trail them up these steps, for some reason, watching their bodies skipping towards the door.  Lately I’ve had the physicality of motherhood (and childhood) on my mind, and it is never more apparent than those moments when I watch their ever-lengthening bodies walking away from me.

We’ve been listening to Love Came Down at Christmas in the car, which Whit loves because it’s “the song he was the drum for.”  Last week, one morning, we had a very detailed conversation about my pregnancies with each of them.  Whit knows he kicked every time that carol came on and Grace, with her razor-sharp focus on fairness, wanted to know what song made her kick.  I don’t know, I told her honestly.  I went on to tell her about a day I’ll never forget, at my friend Schuyler’s wedding, in the summer of 2002, when I hadn’t felt Grace (then known as Finbar, gender unknown) for a while and sat on a couch prodding my stomach, my entire world narrowing for the first time to a beam of frantic concern about my child.  Okay, she said, satisfied that there was also a story about her inside my belly.

I watch them walk away and I think about all those days when I felt their little feet in my ribcage, when I watched an arm, a knee, an elbow, turn over inside me, a knobby piece of a yet-unknown person bulging against my domed skin as it did so.  Just as everyone cautioned, it’s hard to remember exactly what that felt, having a new life swimming inside of me.  While I know it was both miraculous and uncomfortable, I wish I remembered more precise details.

The intense physical union of pregnancy gives way, in a moment as brilliant and searing as lightning, to a time of continued bodily intertwined-ness.  I miss those days, too, in an odd, grateful, relieved kind of way.  And then, as the years of childhood unfurl, gradual but indeniable physical separation occurs.  I know there will be a day when my children don’t want me to curl up in bed with them.  A day when they will close the doors of their rooms and retreat to a world where I am not welcome.  A day when Whit’s first request, upon stubbing a toe, is no longer “will you kiss it, Mummy?”

I fear and dread that day, but I ought not let that keep me from imagining what is right now.  Isn’t this one of the central themes of my life?  The way I sometimes let fear of what is coming occlude the brightness of the moment?  Instead of falling into this familiar groove, allowing myself to be engulfed by an anticipated loss, may I instead lean into what is true right now.  Last night I tucked Grace in and discovered that she was clutching a tank top of mine; I hadn’t put her to bed, and in my absence she had gone into my closet and pulled out a piece of my clothing to hold close.  Whit still lets me wash his hair and soap his back in the bathtub, and each time I admit I wonder if this is the last time.  How long will the simple fact of my physical presence be enough to soothe whatever it is that upsets my children?

I want to stop that wondering and abandon myself to what is.  It’s so hard for me to do this.  But as I watch Grace’s feet grow and grow, edging into territory where our flip-flops could be confused for each other’s, and as Whit’s teeth fall out, I feel a vague panic about the future encroaching on the present.  I suspect part of this is my own deep longing for a day when concerns and anxieties could be so easily solved, in the body of a parent, in a kiss, in a sweet-dreams-head-rub.  The solution to this panic, I know, is the most counter-intuitive thing for me: I ought to turn away from it and curl into right now.  All I can do is try.

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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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Whit lost his third tooth this weekend.  As usual, I cried as I hugged him, celebrated one of life’s passages even as I mourned it.  Is there a more tangible marker of growing up than teeth falling out?  I don’t think so.

Later that day, Grace and I were driving home from her soccer game and talking about Whit’s tooth.

“Does it make you sad, Mummy?”

“Well, yes, sort of, Grace.  I mean, you know that.”

“But it doesn’t make you sad when I lose my teeth, right?”

I glanced back at her in the backseat, tousled from her season-ending soccer game, cheeks pink.

“Well, Grace, not really.  It’s always the first time when something like that happens for you.  And so it’s exciting.”

“And you know that Whit still has those things ahead, right?  He’s your baby.”  She was looking out the window.

“Well, yes.”  Was she upset?  I couldn’t tell.  We drove in silence for a few moments.

“I get to have all the firsts.  And Whit gets to have all the lasts.”

Of course, predictably, my eyes swam with tears behind my sunglasses.  I nodded and swallowed.  She’s right.  And how immensely fortunate I am that my life contains so many of both.

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One day last week I was puttering in the kitchen and it occurred to me I hadn’t seen Whit in a while.  “Whit?” I hollered up the staircase.  Our house is very up-and-down and we have a terrible habit, all of us, of shouting up and down the stairs.

“Yes?” I heard him answer from upstairs.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just looking out the window.”

Oh.  I stood in the kitchen, a potholder in my hand, stunned, still, thinking about that.

Later that afternoon I was folding laundry on our bed while Whit sat in the upholstered chair in our bay window talking to me.  The late-afternoon sun streamed in, viscous, gold, like maple syrup.  I shook out pajama bottoms and folded them, smoothed little boy underpants printed with robots and sailboats with my hand, piling them neatly.

“Mummy?” Whit said from his perch, and I turned to see that he was gazing out the window.

“Yes?”

“Admire the light of this hour.”

I gaped and looked at him, at the back of his head which glowed, burnished blond, in the late-afternoon autumn light.  I had just recently reminded my children about looking at the light of every hour, about the power of really noticing things.  Still, I hadn’t realized how fully he had internalized this.  I dwell so often on the myriad ways Grace is, often uncomfortably, like me but for some reason reminders that Whit too has a seam of sensitivity and awareness running through him tend to take me aback.  I find it particularly moving that my Lego-worshiping, lightsaber-wielding six year old son can also spend long minutes looking out the window.  I’m not sure why this surprises me: I guess that Whit, like his mother and many people I love, contains multitudes.

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