January updates

January 9, 2012

I took this picture one afternoon last week, from my seat at the desk where I spend so much of my time.  This second week of the new year feels like it’s all real now, like it’s time to sink into our regular lives again, whether they are defined by new words or not.  I’m feeling uninspired right now.  A few short updates, instead.

1. I’m not much of a resolution person.  Nevertheless, I think it’s really valuable to be reminded of what our priorities are as we launch into a new year.  These glorious words by Jena Strong, on this topic, took my breath away.  The simplest acts of tending, full of meaning, full of metaphor.  Oh yes.  And she quotes these extraordinary lines, suggesting this as one alternative to the standard resolutions, and I nodded vigorously and blinked away tears.  May we all remember to feel the wonder.

Drink the awe
It’s a brutally fast-paced, Facebooked, hypertext-drunk world, my loves, and it’s just ridiculously easy to take it all for granted, to sit there and type your message into your glorious little device and attach a video and send it halfway round the world as you sip your coffee that came from 8,000 miles away and think nothing of it all, when in fact there are roughly 1,008 astonishing miracles banging around your life right this second if you just were able to realize their wobbly gifts. What a thing.

2. I finished a draft manuscript of my memoir!  Yikes.  Scary.  I’m am now looking for an agent.  Wish me luck!

3. It was a huge pleasure to meet a few online friends last week.  Christine Koh from Boston Mamas, Rachel Bertsche from MWF Seeking BFF, and Katie Leigh from cakes, teas, and dreams.  My experience certainly defies that who claim that online friendships are not real, and I have mostly been hugely impressed by everyone I’ve met in person who I knew here first.  These three women were no exception.

4. I’m devouring everything Michael Ondaatje wrote that I haven’t yet read.  His poetry, his novels.  It surprises me, over and over again, that my favorite fiction writer is a man, but there it is.  The working title of the novel I’m working on is drawn from a line from one of his books, and Divisadero is one of the books I love best of all.

5. Grace (and sometimes Whit) and I are in a habit of going for walks around the neighborhood as much as we can.  We notice the nests in bare branches, we notice the houses that still have Christmas (or Halloween) decorations up, we notice the light on trees, we notice the different colors in the sky.  Even in this barren season, of early darkness and raw cold, there is so much beauty.

What are you doing these January days?


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By admin | Posted in everyday life | Comments (16)

Bloggies

January 6, 2012

I just entered my nominations for the 2012 Bloggies.  So much fun!  I have never done this before and I wish I had.  Maybe it’s like voting: it’s not just a right, but a responsibility.

Please do your part and enter your nominations here.


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Loving with one’s insides

January 6, 2012

And I shall not weep from despair but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion.  I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky – that’s all it is.  It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s insides, with one’s guts.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


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Invisible to mortal sight

January 5, 2012

I’ve mentioned my father before, the physicist-poet whose influence looms large over me (as does my mother’s).  Well, in a single gesture this week, Dad reminded me yet again of the craggy peaks of his intellect; he read my post about light and responded with an email in which he shared a passage from Paradise Lost.  A passage about light.  A passage I haven’t read in years, a passage that brought to mind long, drawn-out conversations about ancient poetry under magnolia trees at Princeton, a passage that reminded me that Dad has read and re-read Paradise Lost, the whole thing, on his own, more than once.  The guy who has a PhD in Engineering.

You get my point.

Anyway.  I wanted to acknowledge my super-cool Dad, for this generous gesture that tells you a lot about the terroir in which I grew up.  But I also wanted to share a few of Milton’s truly incandescent lines (a word Dad used in his email, one that is one of my very favorite words, reminding me yet again of the continued power of light in my life).  The lines I love best from the (longer) passage that Dad sent me are these:

So much the rather though, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Of course celestial Light, and angels, and the power of faith, religion, and belief are all front of mind right now.  But these lines also remind me of some I recently re-encountered, when Grace read them for the first time.  She actually told me, that night, as I was tucking her in, that she’d read something she really liked.  And she’d thumbed her paperback carefully, found the page, and read me this sentence.  And I blinked back tears.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I’ve never been afraid to draw parallels between disparate sources (Dr. Seuss and Mark Doty, anyone?), but this one doesn’t actually feel that disparate.  And what these two passages remind me of is that light, as a concept, as a trope, as a way of understanding the world, functions both externally and internally.  As I continue to strive for lightness – humor and laughter – and to sink into the gorgeousness of the shadows and light and dark at play in the sky, I want to also remember the immense importance of that internal light.

I want to honor the spirit’s seeing, which happens by the beam of that internal light.


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Jerusalem

January 4, 2012

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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Trusting myself

January 3, 2012

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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By admin | Posted in family, Grace, Whitman | Comments (14)

Light

January 2, 2012

I have been thinking, for days now, of how to describe our magical adventure, our family trip to Jerusalem, a week full of delights and overwhelm and memories none of the four of us will ever forget.  We experienced things, individually and collectively, that moved us all deeply.

This is the photograph I keep returning to.  Not any of the more glorious ones, of famous sites, of gold domes and flags waving in the cornflower blue sky and 12th century churches, of childrens’ smiles.  It took me a while, but gradually I realized that this photograph asserted itself for a reason: it fits perfectly with my reflections on 2011 and hopes for 2012.

For me, Jerusalem was about faith.  It is a place where the extraordinary power of religion – to render both egregious harm and outrageous beauty – is undeniable, unavoidable, written indelibly on every cobblestone, every mosaic tile, every crying face.  We saw the silver star on the floor marking where Jesus was born and the rock where he was crucified.  We saw people weeping at the Western Wall and the stunning gold dome where Mohammed ascended for the first time.  I stood outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, listening simultaneously to a ghostly choir singing from somewhere inside (above us?) and to the haunting Muslim call to prayer, the two sounds floating on the same incense-scented air, colliding and, improbably, weaving together into nothing less than the sound of faith.

Faith is something I’ve written about a lot.  It’s something I think about in the middle of the dark night, something I lunge for, awkwardly, clapping my hands together, trying to grasp it even as it floats away, something I look for above me, in the clouds, in the patterns of bare branches against winter’s sky.  It is impossible not to be moved by the tangible faith all over Jerusalem, in the relics but most of all in the way faith itself is animate in the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims moving through the streets.

Above all, there was one moment.  On Christmas Eve, we made our way to Bethlehem (for the second day in a row: on the 23rd we’d gone, seen Jesus’ birthplace, walked around the Church of the Nativity).  We walked across the intense checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank, and after a slow taxi ride made the final half mile ascent into Manger Square on foot.  The sun was setting, and the streets were packed with a crowd whose mood seemed to skitter between ebullient and emotional.  I had a child holding each  of my hands.  And then I looked up.  And I saw the end-of-day light on the wall of the Church of the Nativity.  And my heart thudded and my eyes filled with tears.

That was my moment of faith in Jerusalem.  Not the big scenes, the places where pilgrims threw themselves to the floor and wept, the places where I imagined I might feel the presence of a sense sublime … of something far more deeply interfused.  No.  Instead, it was the setting sun on a wall that had been there for many, many years.  A wall that has mutely witnessed tragedies and glories, that has been watered by the tears of the faithful and been subtly shaped by the over-centuries erosion of their handprints.  It was the light.

Last year I chose a word of the year for the first time.  Trust served me well.  The truth is, I’m not sure – for me at least – there’s a whole lot of difference between trust and faith.  At least there isn’t in how I think of them.  I spent a lot of time thinking about trust last year, and while I still struggle with the effort to let go and to believe that everything is unfolding exactly as it should, I feel enriched and calmed by having focused on the word for 12 months.  I wasn’t going to pick a word for 2012, though.  Nothing really came to me.  But then in Jerusalem I kept thinking of this same word, and this picture, out of so, so many, kept pushing itself into my consciousness.  So here it is.  For 2012.

Light.

Light as in less-heavy: I want to laugh more, to remind people – maybe even all of you, and certainly myself – that there are many aspects of my personality that are not stiflingly serious.

Light as in light on trees, on stone walls, on the faces of my children.  Light from inside and light from outside.  The light of sunrise and sunset, whose source I cannot fully understand; this is the light that makes me feel trust, makes me feel faith.  I am already fairly attuned to this light, photographing it all the time and writing about it even more incessantly.

May the light from the Church of the Nativity, which tremendously moved me, stay with me in 2012.  May I never forget that the power in light resides, somehow, in its relationship to darkness.  Shadows exist at the edge where light meets dark, and they are where I have always found the most meaning.  There is no reason to be afraid of the dark.


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November: Pain

December 31, 2011

I spent the month of October in pain.  First an injury, and then an illness, each of which is particularly painful in their individual categories.  Not at all fun.  I realized how little physical pain I’ve had in my life, with gratitude and also guilt – how could I not have appreciate all those many, many days of feeling just plain fine?  I spent more days that I’d like to admit curled up in my bed, trying to work on one laptop and write on another, closing my eyes when I just couldn’t do anything but breathe through the pain.

I thought I had a high pain threshold.  After my two childbirths, I really thought I was strong.  In fact, those epidural-free deliveries were my benchmark (clearly a 10) whenever a doctor asked me to rank my pain on a scale of 1 to 10.  I was somewhere between 7 and 9, on and off, for most of October.  I’m still at 4 or 5, most days, and some much higher.

I don’t know about my pain threshold anymore.  I do know, in a way I never did before, that pain is its own country.  I have tremendous empathy for people who live with substantial pain on an ongoing basis.  Often I looked at Grace, trying to listen to what she was saying, her voice muffled by the ringing of pain in my head, feeling like I was across a moat in a different place altogether from her and my regular world.  A regular world I had never appreciated until it was stolen from me, replaced by this foreign place full of pain.  It is both exhausting and terrifying to ride the day-in, day-out ebb and flow of pain, the peaks of agony and the valleys of oh-maybe-I-am-okay-now almost-normalcy.  Every time I breathed a sigh of relief and thought, yes, finally, I’m on the road to recovery, something would flare up, and I would return to bed, eyes full of tears and heart full of fear.

It is the helplessness of it, as well as the emotional content, that shocked me the most.  I would get pulled under by a riptide of pain, unable to do anything about it.  And the incredible fear, that I had never anticipated.  I am familiar with emotional pain, in all its range, but I did not realize that physical pain carried with it a big emotional burden.  My mind would get on its hamster wheel: will this never improve?  Am I going to live like this for the rest of my life?  I can see how quickly chronic pain leads to immense depression.  I am not depressed, though: right now I am marveling, more than anything, at the power of pain.

My other observation is that pain is absolutely exhausting.  A few weeks ago I wrote about being tired, and about feeling quiet.  Some of that is surely seasonal, and the particular rhythms of my spirit and mood.  But the tiredness stuck around, persistent, thick, heavy, and I began to wonder if it was also partially caused by my pain.  Now I suspect it was (and is).  I am wading through thigh-deep snow these days, slow going, feeling spent, both emotionally and physically, more quickly than usual.

I read Kristin Noelle’s beautiful post last week with tears streaming down my face.  She writes of a harsh few months, of a demanding season, and of the release of finding herself in a soft place. These lines in particular moved me:

What if becoming (painfully, gut-wrenchingly, sometimes) aware of our fear is not always a sign that we’re far off from peace, but actually quite the opposite: a sign that we’re actually close enough to peace to start collapsing into it, to start admitting to ourselves or someone else how hard things have been?

Clearly, the ways that this last month have been difficult for me are more physical than emotional, though, as I said, there was a soul component that I had not expected.  What have this pain, and the pain’s handmaiden, fear, come to teach me?  I ask myself this over and over again, in the day and in the night, wondering, wondering.  Perhaps they are a sign, as Kristin says, that I draw ever nearer and nearer to peace.  I’d like to believe it.

Note: I believe, firmly, that both of my ailments were helped, not impeded (and certainly not caused by) the cleanse I was on.


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Holiday reading

December 30, 2011

I read a lot this last week, aided by two very very very long travel days (for example, on 12/29 we left Jerusalem at 7pm ET and got home at 5pm ET).

The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy – Priscilla Gilman (A gorgeously written story about love between a mother and child.  Well, about love, period.  with lots of quotes from and references to my favorite poet.  I highly recommend!)

The Cat’s Table – Michael Ondaatje (I couldn’t put this down.  It’s lyrical and haunting.  I’m reminded that Ondaatje is my favorite novelist, and that I adore prose by poets.)

Admission - Jean Hantz Korelitz (Fun read, with lots of details about a place I love, Princeton)

The First Secret of Edwin Hoff – AB Bourne (Written by a friend, thriller set in Cambridge/Boston, entertaining)

The Underside of Joy – Sere Prince Halverson (An ARC of novel released 1/12/12 – stay tuned for my review.  This is beautiful!!)

The Help – Kathryn Stockett (I finally read this, which I’ve been resisting for some reason.  Very entertaining)

Amy and Isabelle – Elizabeth Strout (I seem to be reading her books in reverse order.  This is lovely, though I didn’t adore it as passionately as I did Abide With Me)

Shadow Tag – Louise Erdrich (I’m still in the middle of this)

What did you read this holiday?


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October: These are the years they will remember

December 30, 2011

Most mornings, I walk Grace and Whit into their respective school buildings.  Occasionally, if I have to make it to an early meeting or something, I do “live drop off” instead, letting them hop out of the car while I idle at the curb.  For some reason this always brings tears to my eyes.  There’s something about their backpacks bobbing away from me, their independence, their resolve, their enthusiasm for school – all of it mixes up into a cocktail that brings tears to my eyes as surely as onions on the chopping board or Circle Game on the radio.

The other morning was no different.  I drove away, blinking back my tears, and suddenly I thought: these are the years they will remember as their childhood.  We had driven to school all belting out Edge of Glory together, and then we had sat in the car near school singing along until the song ended.  I looked in the rear view mirror to catch them grinning at each other, overwhelmed again with the realization that tiny things can bring sheer joy for them.

I remember when Grace turned four thinking: okay, this really matters now.  That is because my own memories of childhood begin when I am about four.  I actually don’t have that many memories of my childhood, and those I do exist in a slippery kind of way: am I remembering the actual event, or the picture I’ve seen so many times of the event?  I wonder if part of why I write things down so insistently now is to address this very fact, this inability to remember when I so desperately wish I could.

My flashes of memory, as limited as they are, begin in the second apartment we lived in in Paris.  I was four-ish.  So, my assumption was that Grace and Whit would start remembering things from the same general time period.  Certainly, they will remember these days.  The power of the most mundane moments and experiences – something I’ve long believed fiercely in – was probably particularly on my mind after reading The Long Goodbye last week.  For sure, O’Rourke’s memoir had me thinking particularly of the memories of our mothers that endure.

And so I drove into Boston, my eyes still blurry with tears, watching the outrageously beautiful trees that line the Charles, the river that throbs through the heart of my home, wondering what it is that Grace and Whit will remember of these days.  We are “deep in the happy hours,” as Glenda Burgess put it in her stunning memoir The Geography of Love, and one thing I’m certain of is that it will be the small moments that most sturdily abide.  Will they remember the notice things walks, the trips to the tower at Mount Auburn, trapeze school, and chocolate cake for breakfast?  Will they remember the hundreds of nights that I read to them, tucked them in, administered the sweet dreams head rub, did the ghostie dance, turned on their familiar lullabies?  Will they remember Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving, and their birthdays?

I have no idea what specific events and experiences will be the ones that rise up for my children, out of the dust of the years, some surprising, some familiar.  I could easily drive myself insane trying to make sure every single day is stuffed with memories.  But I choose not to do that, because, as I’ve written before, the memories that I come back to, rubbing them over in my mind like a hand worrying a smooth stone in my pocket, are almost all from days and moments that were utterly unremarkable, unmemorable, as I lived them.  I assume this will also be true for Grace and Whit.  So I suppose all I can do is try to be here, paying attention, to the vast expanse of ordinary days we swim in.  And to remember, every single day, what an immense privilege each one is.


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