There is a corner behind the door in my dining room where all the dust bunnies gather. No matter how many times a week I sweep, still I find them there: inert, fuzzy and gray. It makes wonder over the invisible drifts and currents of air that move through my space at constant. Small eddies and powerful riptides of a wind that must whisper past my messes and children and fast pacing, slippered feet. Whirlpools sparked into action by my passage as I return to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Rapids and churned up turbulence every time Henry runs the length of the main hallway at break-neck speed. And Greyson, down in the dirty mix of it as he crawls from place to place, air and dust and moments swirling around him as he tries to figure out what the world means—as he begins to explore space and place and the ability to move between them. I wonder if we become bipeds, pushing and pulling our weak, chubby baby legs into a standing position, in order to raise our heads above the drifting currents of so many legs passing us by.
As I adjust to this move, I feel much the same. Trying so hard to pull myself to a stand. Cruising from thing to thing, always holding on, unable to support myself entirely. Losing my balance, learning to trust myself again. What would it look like if I could just be brave enough to exist in the turmoil of this moment in my life? To breathe deeply and acknowledge that moving to a new place is hard and stressful and will inevitably send me scrambling to relocate who I am and what everything means.
I swept today. The corner is clean for now. But what dust must still swirl and agitate in the air! It will settle again unto everything—lurking in corners and lingering on surfaces. I heard once that housework is like beading onto a string with no knot. My life feels like this lately, like a constant running to catch up, to be only as far behind as I was the day before. And while I want to make changes, to become something or someone better, I always feel the need to be caught up before I can begin to change. But as of right now, I’m going to approach it differently. I’m going to chip away day by day at what is before me and still try to find time for myself even if I’m not done with my chores. Or else, I fear, I’ll get lost in the mix. There’s going to be dust tomorrow in all the places I dusted today, and there will be more dishes on the counter in the same place I just cleared off, and there will be poop in diapers I’ve just changed, but I’m going to keep going on and I’m also going to find time to pray and to read and to write. And if there’s dust in the corner, if there are dishes on the counter, I’ll live with it. I’m still going to have to change the diapers though…
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
Jane's Take on Memory...
An excerpt of the musings of Fanny Price from Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen:
"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obediant--at others, so bewildered and so weak--and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!--We are to be sure a miracle every way--but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out."
"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obediant--at others, so bewildered and so weak--and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!--We are to be sure a miracle every way--but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out."
Friday, October 29, 2010
Faith Trust and Pixie Dust
Henry has learned his memory verse for the month in two days: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid for God is with you.” I must take this to heart. For those of you who actually read this, if there are any—if anyone who ever read this blog is patient enough to check back every month or so when I’m able to put up a post—you must know I’m scared of this blog. Well, not the blog in particular, but I’m scared of imperfection. I’m scared of ever doing anything that isn’t exactly wonderful or amazing. And so you see my dilemma. I often hate that I haven’t written and sit down and write but what comes out is full of halting fearful starts that are doomed to imperfection and therefore doomed to be deleted.
Ironically, the only way that I will ever be able to get to the meat is if I do it everyday. Like exercise. Imagine working out for the first time in awhile and feeling really out of shape (because you are) and therefore deciding it’s not for you because you’re not good at it. That is how I am with writing. And it doesn’t help that I was once very good. It doesn’t help that, much like a person who was once very beautiful and is now getting older, I look back at my old writing from grad school, from creative writing I’ve done, and I stand, mouth agape, wondering who that person was. That person that I can no longer see in the mirror; that voice that I can no longer call forth. I remember a beautiful documentary by an aged French documentarian who, at different times throughout the film, would focus the lens on her hands and wonder whose they were-these elderly things. Surely not her own. This is how my life has become. Whose life is this?
On days like today, as I finally face the white freedom of this page—wanting so badly to run away, avoid it the way I have been—I worry about what my life is. What it has become. Or perhaps I wonder at my inability to reach into my days and pluck out something small and sparkly: a daily wisdom; an inspired thought.
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time, I was a brilliant student. My mind unlocked and unveiled philosophies and my fingers typed across the keyboard purely magical essays in record time. I would reread them later and not understand where they had come from—the insights, the words themselves. It was like a super-power. I would enter a trance like state, brought on by the mix of stress, caffeine, nicotine, too little sleep and too little food. I wouldn’t leave the house for weeks; my neighbors brought me food and cigarettes; did my dishes; listened to me read and reread every word. I never wrote drafts. I sat at the computer and the first paragraph of a 25 pg essay would take 5-6 hours. It was the most important part. It was like the way you throw a pot—the clay must be perfectly balanced and symmetrical on the wheel before you begin, or the pot will fall apart as you pull it up.
Once the first paragraphs were down, which might take 1-2 full days, the rest flowed out. Well, came out slowly. Word by word; brick by brick. It eeked it’s way onto the page. The process was that I had to reread what I had written, and then what came next would just follow, seemingly of it’s own accord. The essay felt as though it was writing itself, and my job was to listen very carefully and find the exact words to help it go in the direction it was meant for.
And yet now, I grab a few minutes to sit on a bar stool in my kitchen and attempt to cull something interesting out of my life to deposit here like it’s a savings account. And I find I’m over-drafted. There’s nothing left for this space sometimes.
But even in these moments, bankrupt as I am, I must remember Henry’s verse: be strong and courageous, do not be afraid for god is with you. And it’s the menial, petty days full of sticky little details that lack meaning that often require the most courage and faith…
Ironically, the only way that I will ever be able to get to the meat is if I do it everyday. Like exercise. Imagine working out for the first time in awhile and feeling really out of shape (because you are) and therefore deciding it’s not for you because you’re not good at it. That is how I am with writing. And it doesn’t help that I was once very good. It doesn’t help that, much like a person who was once very beautiful and is now getting older, I look back at my old writing from grad school, from creative writing I’ve done, and I stand, mouth agape, wondering who that person was. That person that I can no longer see in the mirror; that voice that I can no longer call forth. I remember a beautiful documentary by an aged French documentarian who, at different times throughout the film, would focus the lens on her hands and wonder whose they were-these elderly things. Surely not her own. This is how my life has become. Whose life is this?
On days like today, as I finally face the white freedom of this page—wanting so badly to run away, avoid it the way I have been—I worry about what my life is. What it has become. Or perhaps I wonder at my inability to reach into my days and pluck out something small and sparkly: a daily wisdom; an inspired thought.
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time, I was a brilliant student. My mind unlocked and unveiled philosophies and my fingers typed across the keyboard purely magical essays in record time. I would reread them later and not understand where they had come from—the insights, the words themselves. It was like a super-power. I would enter a trance like state, brought on by the mix of stress, caffeine, nicotine, too little sleep and too little food. I wouldn’t leave the house for weeks; my neighbors brought me food and cigarettes; did my dishes; listened to me read and reread every word. I never wrote drafts. I sat at the computer and the first paragraph of a 25 pg essay would take 5-6 hours. It was the most important part. It was like the way you throw a pot—the clay must be perfectly balanced and symmetrical on the wheel before you begin, or the pot will fall apart as you pull it up.
Once the first paragraphs were down, which might take 1-2 full days, the rest flowed out. Well, came out slowly. Word by word; brick by brick. It eeked it’s way onto the page. The process was that I had to reread what I had written, and then what came next would just follow, seemingly of it’s own accord. The essay felt as though it was writing itself, and my job was to listen very carefully and find the exact words to help it go in the direction it was meant for.
And yet now, I grab a few minutes to sit on a bar stool in my kitchen and attempt to cull something interesting out of my life to deposit here like it’s a savings account. And I find I’m over-drafted. There’s nothing left for this space sometimes.
But even in these moments, bankrupt as I am, I must remember Henry’s verse: be strong and courageous, do not be afraid for god is with you. And it’s the menial, petty days full of sticky little details that lack meaning that often require the most courage and faith…
a spoon full of sugar
I’ve begun a regiment of Homeschool Preschool. I love the cadence of the description. But what is preschool, really? It is learning artfully disguised as play. And I’m finding ways to incorporate learning into everything—like slipping a dog’s medicine into a hotdog slice.
And one of the easiest tricks I’ve discovered is that Henry’s a sponge. I already knew this—any mother knows that if their child hears a bad word once they’ll repeat it over and over and over. But I’ve used this to my advantage. While buzzing around the kitchen preparing lunch, I will say psalm 23 out loud 3 times in a row. I use every opportunity to sneak in facts about fall or the ways our eyes work (they just send images to the brain which is where they are decoded). Introduce new words. Make jokes about how funny our bodies are—the way that they work. Throw adages or nursery rhymes into everyday conversation and then explain them.
I’m sowing seeds. I’m dropping bits of information and inspiration ad hoc onto the soil of my son. Hoping they take root—rejoicing over the moments when I see them sprout up on their own.
Friday, October 1, 2010
The Book and its Covers...
I want to delve into the meat of this move—this changing of space and memory. Into the infinite electric white space of this blog and divulge secrets and wonders, the wisdom of moving and the sharp emotions of it. But the emotions are sea-glass: rounded and indistinct. My response to stress is invariably the same: retreat. And, especially when I find myself in the throes of something as monumental as a cross-country move—it is retreat, escape, numbness. Nothing.
And, unfortunately, both for this blog and for my greater self, it is not a retreat into the mind, from which I can sally forth weeks or months later, heavy laden with riches of thought and encouragement. No. I retreat into a fog of numbness. I disappear within a shroud of quiet. And I read. I simply devour books—any books I can lay my hands on.
Well, not any book. It must be a reread. I want familiar territory. I want to be home the way one can only be home within the covers of a favorite, well-worn, oft-read novel. Because when my world is new and sharp and foreign, I long for Jane Austen’s England, Beryl Markham’s East Africa; even Hogwarts or Forks will do. Anything that will fly me out of my discomfort and land me squarely on ground I’ve tread before.
When I was a child, there was a public service announcement encouraging kids to read. In it a cartoon alley cat, wearing an admiral’s jacket, would leap and swing between the far-flung worlds of space and sea and country; proclaiming what an adventure reading could be. I’ve always been a reader, but it wasn’t until fourth grade that I fell madly in love with it. I can’t for the life of me remember my 4th grade English teacher’s name, only that it started with a “Z” and that she was a slightly terrifying, energetic woman of small stature with short grey hair. When I try to picture her I’m left with the impression of short, quick movements that snap like a firecracker, energy spraying out of her fingertips—her eyes wide.
I’m sure she wasn’t this way at all, but I love that, whoever she is, she has become in my mind a tenacious witch of a woman. She was all energy. And we had homework; homework that we needed to do on our own, each week. Each Friday we had to turn in an index card with the title and author and a short summary of a book (of our choosing) that we’d read that week. I hated this assignment. I’m bad at anything that involves time management, and to have a whole week to accomplish it and to necessarily choose it for ourselves—I would invariably wait until Thursday night. But what I owe Ms. Z is perhaps the magic of immersion in a book that I’ve found. The immersion and the finding are both key and neither can out-weigh the other. It must be a book that has *miraculously* found it’s way to me and it is also key that I lose myself in it entirely.
*Some Kind of Sorcery!*
To lose oneself in a book: when the world disappears completely. When you spend your days in a medieval castle or on a Victorian fox hunt; in the trenches of Verdun or in a plane over Mumbai; deep in the Louisiana Bayou or exactly in the center of Shibuya intersection; ancient China, whaling boat, river rafting barefoot and freckled; encountering first love, loving a soul-mate; finding oneself. An alternate universe; a terrifying future; a mansion of Long Island; a tenement in turn-of-the-century New York.
To be able to feel the pebbled path through the soles of leather-bottomed boots; to feel the sure, hard iron of the stirrup across the ball of the foot; to know the stinging, rough pull of the mainsail and wind-whipped hair—spray of sea—and taste salt when you lick your lips; hear the creak of the old wooden stairs as you creep into the forbidden wing of the manor; sink deep into the expensive, expansive sofa on the Upper West Side, letting the designer flats slip off your feet as you sip a cold, bright white wine.
And yet, all the while I am here, in my pajamas, smack dab in the real world—with IKEA furniture and two napping boys—crushed Cheerios on the floor, bright loud plastic toys.
This is miraculous. This is the breadth of landscape and universe that exists in the small space between the covers of a book.
So forgive me for not reappearing from my summer vacation with anything more than this. I’ve been busy revisiting old landscapes dear to my heart. But I’m beginning to emerge into my now. Into the space where I actually exist…
Oh Windy City, City of Broad Shoulders, let me lean on you now…
And, unfortunately, both for this blog and for my greater self, it is not a retreat into the mind, from which I can sally forth weeks or months later, heavy laden with riches of thought and encouragement. No. I retreat into a fog of numbness. I disappear within a shroud of quiet. And I read. I simply devour books—any books I can lay my hands on.
Well, not any book. It must be a reread. I want familiar territory. I want to be home the way one can only be home within the covers of a favorite, well-worn, oft-read novel. Because when my world is new and sharp and foreign, I long for Jane Austen’s England, Beryl Markham’s East Africa; even Hogwarts or Forks will do. Anything that will fly me out of my discomfort and land me squarely on ground I’ve tread before.
When I was a child, there was a public service announcement encouraging kids to read. In it a cartoon alley cat, wearing an admiral’s jacket, would leap and swing between the far-flung worlds of space and sea and country; proclaiming what an adventure reading could be. I’ve always been a reader, but it wasn’t until fourth grade that I fell madly in love with it. I can’t for the life of me remember my 4th grade English teacher’s name, only that it started with a “Z” and that she was a slightly terrifying, energetic woman of small stature with short grey hair. When I try to picture her I’m left with the impression of short, quick movements that snap like a firecracker, energy spraying out of her fingertips—her eyes wide.
I’m sure she wasn’t this way at all, but I love that, whoever she is, she has become in my mind a tenacious witch of a woman. She was all energy. And we had homework; homework that we needed to do on our own, each week. Each Friday we had to turn in an index card with the title and author and a short summary of a book (of our choosing) that we’d read that week. I hated this assignment. I’m bad at anything that involves time management, and to have a whole week to accomplish it and to necessarily choose it for ourselves—I would invariably wait until Thursday night. But what I owe Ms. Z is perhaps the magic of immersion in a book that I’ve found. The immersion and the finding are both key and neither can out-weigh the other. It must be a book that has *miraculously* found it’s way to me and it is also key that I lose myself in it entirely.
*Some Kind of Sorcery!*
To lose oneself in a book: when the world disappears completely. When you spend your days in a medieval castle or on a Victorian fox hunt; in the trenches of Verdun or in a plane over Mumbai; deep in the Louisiana Bayou or exactly in the center of Shibuya intersection; ancient China, whaling boat, river rafting barefoot and freckled; encountering first love, loving a soul-mate; finding oneself. An alternate universe; a terrifying future; a mansion of Long Island; a tenement in turn-of-the-century New York.
To be able to feel the pebbled path through the soles of leather-bottomed boots; to feel the sure, hard iron of the stirrup across the ball of the foot; to know the stinging, rough pull of the mainsail and wind-whipped hair—spray of sea—and taste salt when you lick your lips; hear the creak of the old wooden stairs as you creep into the forbidden wing of the manor; sink deep into the expensive, expansive sofa on the Upper West Side, letting the designer flats slip off your feet as you sip a cold, bright white wine.
And yet, all the while I am here, in my pajamas, smack dab in the real world—with IKEA furniture and two napping boys—crushed Cheerios on the floor, bright loud plastic toys.
This is miraculous. This is the breadth of landscape and universe that exists in the small space between the covers of a book.
So forgive me for not reappearing from my summer vacation with anything more than this. I’ve been busy revisiting old landscapes dear to my heart. But I’m beginning to emerge into my now. Into the space where I actually exist…
Oh Windy City, City of Broad Shoulders, let me lean on you now…
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Update or What I Did Over Summer Vacation...
Another year, another city. What did I do this summer? Well, in addition to having an absolutely wonderful summer with friends and family in Atlanta, and finally beginning to settle in and feel like I was at home, we also moved to Chicago. In the middle of August, we found out that Gordon would be starting a new job on September 7th. And off we went into the middle of the country, with only enough time to hire movers and wave goodbye on our way out of town. No processing. No emotional impact. Safer that way. So I’m waiting patiently for it to hit me. Wondering if it will, when it will. Some days I think it doesn’t matter one iota where I live, and some days I know for certain that I will miss people and moments so much it hurts once I finally face the fact that I’m in a new city. For now it feels like vacation. I’m still living out of a suitcase, figuring out where things go, no idea where the closest dry cleaner is.
And, in many ways, even when on vacation, my days are always the same. They’re days of blankies and bandaids, spiderman and pots-and-pans-orchestras: filled with the magic of childhood and littered with the debris that accompanies it. We spend our days at the playgrounds or going for walks around the neighborhood. My life is constant in that it still revolves around the two little blond heads in my double stroller.
For now, I’m content. And whether that is me not having processed anything, or me just taking one little step at a time—waiting patiently for nap times and bed times and first glasses of wine (hooray for 5 o’clock!)—here in Chicago just as I did in Atlanta and in San Francisco before that, I am glad that I am still standing, still smiling, still just me. Gordon’s words are coming back to me again: “wherever you go, there you are.”
Here I am.
And, in many ways, even when on vacation, my days are always the same. They’re days of blankies and bandaids, spiderman and pots-and-pans-orchestras: filled with the magic of childhood and littered with the debris that accompanies it. We spend our days at the playgrounds or going for walks around the neighborhood. My life is constant in that it still revolves around the two little blond heads in my double stroller.
For now, I’m content. And whether that is me not having processed anything, or me just taking one little step at a time—waiting patiently for nap times and bed times and first glasses of wine (hooray for 5 o’clock!)—here in Chicago just as I did in Atlanta and in San Francisco before that, I am glad that I am still standing, still smiling, still just me. Gordon’s words are coming back to me again: “wherever you go, there you are.”
Here I am.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Coming Home
Home. Over the past year this word has become a puzzle to me. Something I've tugged at and stretched and picked at, trying desperately to unravel it. To make it cover me where I am. To make my home where I am. Ode to a snail--who carries his home on his back. But we are not snails. We are yard sales of miscellany and collected bits. We overflow into storage rooms and walk-in-closets and corners of basements. Our things proliferate. But even the metaphor of home--even the intangible feeling of what makes us glow inside, what brings a flush to the cheeks--even this is difficult to cultivate and carry.
I'm thinking about Home a lot right now because we've moved again. A spur-of-the-moment move half-way across the country. And we're back in an apartment, and walking everywhere. We're in a city again. I love it. I miss other things. I wonder, as I did less than a year and half ago when I moved to Atlanta, what it's all about. Who I am when I physically move myself to a different space. I'm at the intersection of space and "the now." It's just as confusing and mystifying as the intersection of space and memory. These are the Shibuyas of emotional import.
What makes me who I am? What makes me ok being who I am, where I am. Why is it so difficult for us to be in a new environment--even if it's better? We are creatures of habit I suppose. Especially me. Give me a warm seat and a good book and I won't move til it's done. I could eat the same thing for breakfast lunch and dinner for weeks at a time. And now I'm in Chicago and Gordon works all day and I still haven't gotten myself out of boxes.
I find myself paralyzed. Unable to DO anything. All I want is to sink myself into something that will consume me and take me completely away from here.
And yet.
And yet.
"And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are!
Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.
And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me."
D.H. Lawrence, "Wedlock"
I'm thinking about Home a lot right now because we've moved again. A spur-of-the-moment move half-way across the country. And we're back in an apartment, and walking everywhere. We're in a city again. I love it. I miss other things. I wonder, as I did less than a year and half ago when I moved to Atlanta, what it's all about. Who I am when I physically move myself to a different space. I'm at the intersection of space and "the now." It's just as confusing and mystifying as the intersection of space and memory. These are the Shibuyas of emotional import.
What makes me who I am? What makes me ok being who I am, where I am. Why is it so difficult for us to be in a new environment--even if it's better? We are creatures of habit I suppose. Especially me. Give me a warm seat and a good book and I won't move til it's done. I could eat the same thing for breakfast lunch and dinner for weeks at a time. And now I'm in Chicago and Gordon works all day and I still haven't gotten myself out of boxes.
I find myself paralyzed. Unable to DO anything. All I want is to sink myself into something that will consume me and take me completely away from here.
And yet.
And yet.
"And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are!
Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.
And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me."
D.H. Lawrence, "Wedlock"
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Treasure Hunt
Two months gone and so much learned. William James made famous the concept of “stream of consciousness” saying that thoughts are like a stream—you step into them once and draw your toe out and when it dips in again it’s somewhere entirely different—the waters themselves are different. And that’s where I find myself now. Two months gone and so many thoughts: so many ideas gone, so many MEs. It makes me wonder what it is that keeps me constant. “I am as constant as the northern star, and I said, constantly in the darkness, where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be at the bar…”
I am considering the past. And I miss it intensely. And I feel blessed in this. What an enormous blessing to miss the past—to have a past worth missing. It doesn’t mean, certainly, that the present isn’t wonderful, but only that you have lived the past well. That it was memorable.
Well, perhaps you must, like me, have pasts in your life that are not wonderful to conjure in order to feel such a blessing in thinking of certain pasts that make your mouth water with longing.
In any event, it is nice to be back here at the keyboard, typing out the things that I love and miss and long for. To remember the people and things that have been so wonderful to me.
Today Henry played dress up. For the first time since his third birthday (which was on Sunday), he dressed up as something other than Spiderman. He was, today, a pirate. He wore his pirate captain Halloween costume and his new eye-patch. He carried his new plastic compass, telescope, and dagger. “Don’t fly me, I’m not Peter Pan, I’m Captain Hook!” he exclaimed as we read the JM Barrie classic and discussed treasures. He carried a plastic spoon and buried his Spiderman figurine (“right here in the floor—like we’re pretending it’s dirt”) who he said was his treasure after we had talked about what “treasure” means and what it could represent. “For instance,” I said, “you are my treasure. It’s what we love most.”
Henry’s third birthday. At the party, many, many people (all of them parents) congratulated me on Henry’s third birthday, reminding me that it was my anniversary of being a mom. True. It was. And it was a marvelous day. A day of looking back at how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve changed. I had a moment, looking in the fridge, wondrously filled with fresh food and fruit and leftovers. I remembered so clearly a time when my fridge held nothing but beer and condiments. What a healthy change. But mainly—where would I be? I love and treasure Gordon so intensely. Not a day goes by that I am not grateful and cognizant of the gift he is to me. But the boys—Oh My God the boys! My heart doubles and trebles with love for my boys! My grown boy and my “big” boy and my baby boy! Blessings rain down on me! I am saturated! I sit back amazed at the way love grows and grows, exponentially. Soul Kudzu. I am so in love and so blessed. My treasures are innumerable. My cup over flows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. (Psalm 23)
It’s been a week of remembering and lamenting. It’s been a week of triumphs and questioning. In fact, there have been two long months of this—and they have gone unrecorded. Forgive me. I hope it will not be so long again.
I am considering the past. And I miss it intensely. And I feel blessed in this. What an enormous blessing to miss the past—to have a past worth missing. It doesn’t mean, certainly, that the present isn’t wonderful, but only that you have lived the past well. That it was memorable.
Well, perhaps you must, like me, have pasts in your life that are not wonderful to conjure in order to feel such a blessing in thinking of certain pasts that make your mouth water with longing.
In any event, it is nice to be back here at the keyboard, typing out the things that I love and miss and long for. To remember the people and things that have been so wonderful to me.
Today Henry played dress up. For the first time since his third birthday (which was on Sunday), he dressed up as something other than Spiderman. He was, today, a pirate. He wore his pirate captain Halloween costume and his new eye-patch. He carried his new plastic compass, telescope, and dagger. “Don’t fly me, I’m not Peter Pan, I’m Captain Hook!” he exclaimed as we read the JM Barrie classic and discussed treasures. He carried a plastic spoon and buried his Spiderman figurine (“right here in the floor—like we’re pretending it’s dirt”) who he said was his treasure after we had talked about what “treasure” means and what it could represent. “For instance,” I said, “you are my treasure. It’s what we love most.”
Henry’s third birthday. At the party, many, many people (all of them parents) congratulated me on Henry’s third birthday, reminding me that it was my anniversary of being a mom. True. It was. And it was a marvelous day. A day of looking back at how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve changed. I had a moment, looking in the fridge, wondrously filled with fresh food and fruit and leftovers. I remembered so clearly a time when my fridge held nothing but beer and condiments. What a healthy change. But mainly—where would I be? I love and treasure Gordon so intensely. Not a day goes by that I am not grateful and cognizant of the gift he is to me. But the boys—Oh My God the boys! My heart doubles and trebles with love for my boys! My grown boy and my “big” boy and my baby boy! Blessings rain down on me! I am saturated! I sit back amazed at the way love grows and grows, exponentially. Soul Kudzu. I am so in love and so blessed. My treasures are innumerable. My cup over flows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. (Psalm 23)
It’s been a week of remembering and lamenting. It’s been a week of triumphs and questioning. In fact, there have been two long months of this—and they have gone unrecorded. Forgive me. I hope it will not be so long again.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
The Magic of Childhood
When I was a child, my grandfather would often preach at Park Street Church in downtown Boston when he was in town from California. I remember so clearly running wild through the ancient cemetery that the lobby let out onto, watching fearless squirrels gather acorns fallen from the enormous oaks. Boston was, to me, a magical land of lush gardens and old brick buildings crouching low on the busy streets. Tall glass skyscrapers and cement monoliths, all sitting atop the troglodyte world of the cavernous T train system. It was going down trash-strewn stairs into the tile-lined tunnels, dark beneath the earth; the screech and hiss and rumble of trains approaching—the rats scattering beneath the tracks; something so ancient, and something so modern. I traveled under the roads and the bay in dirty train cars with old, hard smears of bubble gum and the odd assortment of New Englanders. Immigrants speaking different languages, prim middle-aged women dressed from the Land’s End catalogue carrying canvas library totes, punks and skinheads, and the multitude of college students in worn army jackets and thick wool scarves and torn levis. This was where I encountered the greater world—greater, anyway, than my small, homogenous New England town with it’s little town green and single strip of stores. Boston was rich with history and beauty and it felt worn and dear as a favorite coat. Most of all, it was thick with the mystery of the adult world which I was excluded from. Busy people with lives so foreign to mine, buzzing about their day and intersecting my life for the space of a train stop or two. Then they were off, or I was, and the lines of our lives spun onto different routes. Exiting the tunnels, I’d emerge back into the sun and the city, finding myself somewhere entirely new, like being birthed.
I moved to Atlanta when I was 13, which is just about the age when the magic begins to wear off of childhood—the small tears and chips on the corners appear and, more than that, we realize they’ve been there all along and we were just not aware of them. I think for this reason, Boston remained an untouched perfection, dewy with wonder. It was a fairy tale put away on an unreachable shelf. It was the motherland from which I had been exiled. It lay untarnished, the patina of childhood still firmly in place. It is no wonder that it was not all that I expected when I moved back ten years later. But while I was there, for moments or hours, or sometimes days, Boston occasionally became exactly how I remembered it.
When I walked, the first time, to my interview with the head hunters that would eventually help me get my job, I didn’t know that I’d find myself walking past Park Street Church. But as I turned the corner, just there onto Tremont Street at the edge of the Boston Commons, there was a man who played the saxophone in front of the cemetery fence by Park Street Church. Rounding the corner from South Station, the notes would hit me and lift me straight up. Give me butterflies. I would be giddy with memory and magic and the way in which his playing united the entire street into a cityscape—even the sun was a conspirator in it’s near perfect slant through the old oaks--the way it fell just so on the bricks of the sidewalk. And everyone within hearing was suddenly captured in the net of his music, as if they were all there just for me, a sound stage I’d walked on to. A movie set. Everyday that he was there and playing I would smile so wide I felt like I was being turned inside out. Because I was the guardian of a sweet, sticky little secret: this Boston that I found myself in, weaving in and out and around with the breath of the sax, it filled me. It nourished me. It made the smallest, most interior part of me shiver with joy.
It was as if all of what I had missed, all the magic of New England that lived in my memories, was rolled into this one instant on Tremont street, brought back to me with the flow of the music. The feelings of a New England fall and then the winter that I remembered so clearly: the changing colors, the early dark, the chill in the air, the sting in the nose; chapped cheeks, slush seeping through the seams of shoes; that slightly metallic smell of a scarf that has been wrapped tightly against lips and nostrils—beaded and hot with moisture; the smell of snow; days spent fort building and clumping heavy wet mounds together into snowmen; the sting of snow as it crept over the collar of my jacket and hit my neck while I made snow angels; the oddly sharp pain on numbed skin when hit with a snowball; the crunch and give of day-old snow.
New England still held these wonders for me, unchanged in their beauty. These moments where time bent back on itself and I was wide-eyed and enraptured once again. But mostly, Boston was a city where I worked, and couldn’t afford to live; a place still closed off to me even when I had come back all this way after many years. Inaccessible. It was as if I was trespassing. As if it was no longer mine.
But those windswept moments on Tremont Street, with the saxophone reaching out to me, pulled me into the world, included me in the web of humanity from which I felt so distant. I was caught up in that precise moment: asphalt gritty beneath my foot, swing of my quick walk, rush of air on my cheek, rough wool against my chin, and music, music, music floating me back into a time when I was realer than I’d been in awhile.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
My Year of Pain and Beauty
Atlanta in April. The trees are all wearing leaves again—spring came upon us quickly this year. One of the things I missed most when I lived in San Francisco was the changing seasons. There was something about the lack of seasons there that allowed time to slip past unnoticed. We wore the same clothes all year round. Our hottest weather was in October and everyone would scramble to buy a sundress or unearth a pair of shorts. The few places in town that have patios were packed with long lines whenever the weather got above 70, but no matter how warm it was during the day the evening would bring fog and cold and wind. Summer was often one of the coldest stretches—hats and scarves, misting rain, thick wool sweaters. It was the only time that really felt like fall to me. Pumpkins would appear on doorsteps and I’d remember that it was October, that time was passing. But for the most part, time was a line unpunctuated by anything particular. Time both swept by continually and appeared to never move at all.
I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. I had lived one tumultuous year in Providence, trying so hard to love and be loved. I was with the wrong boy, and it was a year of finding this out. Of continual heartbreak and occasional beauty. But it was undoubtedly my biggest year of growth. Boston had been to me everything I had hoped. And it had been less. And it had been more.
I moved to Providence with Adam, someone who I was desperately in love with. Someone who felt like my soul mate at times. Someone who felt unfeelingly distant and aloof at other times. I lived in Providence, in an apartment which had its own sad story, but that is for another post. We moved in and made it ours as much as we could. But there was sadness in the corners—smeared reminders on top of the fridge. I worked in Boston, a place I had been longing for since I moved away when I was thirteen. Every morning, I took the train from Providence up to Boston and walked to work: a landscape architecture firm on Mass Ave, right across the street from the Berkeley School of Music. I would go to work where I was the only administrative employee for a firm of 23 landscape architects and I would think and think and think as I performed tasks. The longer I was there, the more my job grew to encompass. I was, when I left, involved in marketing, award proposals, RFPs, preparing bids for new jobs, reorganizing the electronic libraries, accounting, and my original job—front desk person. It became important to me. It was a good job with a good company and I was needed. I edited and formatted almost everything that left the office. I was only there for 10 months, but several things happened in that space that changed me and the course of my life.
But again, I digress. I want to write about coming back to Boston; to a place that had been magic to me when I was just a child, taking the T into the city on the weekends with my friends. The trains, the tunnels—walls smeared with soot and graffiti—the musicians who always seemed to be playing Simon and Garfunkel (is that possible?) the feeling of being a very small girl in a very big city. The feeling of being capable. This is something I had lost through years of self-doubt and discouragement.
And suddenly, there I was, back in the New England of my youth. But at first, it wasn’t how I remembered it. It was expensive and cold and dirty. But the romanticism had worn away. The people were rude and the wind was bitter and the subways were just dirty. Mostly, however, it was the feeling of being capable that failed to reappear. I don’t know what I was expecting. To reencounter myself? To become, again, the girl who was so fearless and confident? This had been worn away by many years in the South, a foreign place to me where I had never found my legs. It took many months for me to find her again, but find her I did. It was my year of pain and beauty.
When did it become beautiful? Only after the pain. In that raw and broken space where life feels so real and sharp that it’s like burlap on bare skin.
There are so many small moments that added up to that amazing change in me. So many lonely hours spent wishing I knew myself. Wishing I liked who I was. Hard wooden park benches where I escaped for lonely lunches hoping to avoid being noticed. Awkward seconds spent in the elevator that inched by like hours, feeling insecure and shy and ugly. Was I fat? Was I stupid? Did I have any value at all? A collection of minutes waiting under the large clock in South Station, wondering if Adam would show up. Wondering if perhaps he hadn’t waited for me and was already on the way home. Wishing someone could sweep into my life and fill it up to the brim. Riding crowded train cars, yawning distance between me and the people I rubbed shoulders with.
But at the end of it, when I began to see it all differently, see myself differently, I wallowed in the hurt and fear and crazy until I owned it. Until I became part of the world again as just me: a small girl in a big city wondering who I was and being ok with not knowing.
This was such a crucial time in my life, so rich in blessings and epiphanies, so drenched in beauty, that it deserves many posts. Over the next few days I’ll be writing snapshots of these moments—each pregnant with potential. Each moment an essential piece of who I am as I sit, now, on my front porch in the waning light of an Atlanta spring evening, still trying to know myself. But very sure that I’m on the right path.
I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. I had lived one tumultuous year in Providence, trying so hard to love and be loved. I was with the wrong boy, and it was a year of finding this out. Of continual heartbreak and occasional beauty. But it was undoubtedly my biggest year of growth. Boston had been to me everything I had hoped. And it had been less. And it had been more.
I moved to Providence with Adam, someone who I was desperately in love with. Someone who felt like my soul mate at times. Someone who felt unfeelingly distant and aloof at other times. I lived in Providence, in an apartment which had its own sad story, but that is for another post. We moved in and made it ours as much as we could. But there was sadness in the corners—smeared reminders on top of the fridge. I worked in Boston, a place I had been longing for since I moved away when I was thirteen. Every morning, I took the train from Providence up to Boston and walked to work: a landscape architecture firm on Mass Ave, right across the street from the Berkeley School of Music. I would go to work where I was the only administrative employee for a firm of 23 landscape architects and I would think and think and think as I performed tasks. The longer I was there, the more my job grew to encompass. I was, when I left, involved in marketing, award proposals, RFPs, preparing bids for new jobs, reorganizing the electronic libraries, accounting, and my original job—front desk person. It became important to me. It was a good job with a good company and I was needed. I edited and formatted almost everything that left the office. I was only there for 10 months, but several things happened in that space that changed me and the course of my life.
But again, I digress. I want to write about coming back to Boston; to a place that had been magic to me when I was just a child, taking the T into the city on the weekends with my friends. The trains, the tunnels—walls smeared with soot and graffiti—the musicians who always seemed to be playing Simon and Garfunkel (is that possible?) the feeling of being a very small girl in a very big city. The feeling of being capable. This is something I had lost through years of self-doubt and discouragement.
And suddenly, there I was, back in the New England of my youth. But at first, it wasn’t how I remembered it. It was expensive and cold and dirty. But the romanticism had worn away. The people were rude and the wind was bitter and the subways were just dirty. Mostly, however, it was the feeling of being capable that failed to reappear. I don’t know what I was expecting. To reencounter myself? To become, again, the girl who was so fearless and confident? This had been worn away by many years in the South, a foreign place to me where I had never found my legs. It took many months for me to find her again, but find her I did. It was my year of pain and beauty.
When did it become beautiful? Only after the pain. In that raw and broken space where life feels so real and sharp that it’s like burlap on bare skin.
There are so many small moments that added up to that amazing change in me. So many lonely hours spent wishing I knew myself. Wishing I liked who I was. Hard wooden park benches where I escaped for lonely lunches hoping to avoid being noticed. Awkward seconds spent in the elevator that inched by like hours, feeling insecure and shy and ugly. Was I fat? Was I stupid? Did I have any value at all? A collection of minutes waiting under the large clock in South Station, wondering if Adam would show up. Wondering if perhaps he hadn’t waited for me and was already on the way home. Wishing someone could sweep into my life and fill it up to the brim. Riding crowded train cars, yawning distance between me and the people I rubbed shoulders with.
But at the end of it, when I began to see it all differently, see myself differently, I wallowed in the hurt and fear and crazy until I owned it. Until I became part of the world again as just me: a small girl in a big city wondering who I was and being ok with not knowing.
This was such a crucial time in my life, so rich in blessings and epiphanies, so drenched in beauty, that it deserves many posts. Over the next few days I’ll be writing snapshots of these moments—each pregnant with potential. Each moment an essential piece of who I am as I sit, now, on my front porch in the waning light of an Atlanta spring evening, still trying to know myself. But very sure that I’m on the right path.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Fly me to the Moon
Apparently, anything higher than 120 units per cubic meter is considered an extremely high pollen count. Today in Atlanta, the pollen count is 5,733. The ground is carpeted in yellow dust; the cat making pollen angels as she rolls on the deck, coming up chalky yellow like an elementary school teacher too long at the chalkboard. I’ve been pinned in the house all day, sneezing and itchy from every small foray I’ve made into the outside world: feed the cat, retrieve Batman from the car, get out into the heat and birdsong and sun and leave my life behind for just a moment.
We may have been held hostage inside, but our Indoor Day passed just like any other with the exception of Henry being denied access to the outside world. There was frantic running and chasing and jumping, but there were also lulls of energy for snuggling and napping. There was quiet when miraculously both boys slept at the same time for an overlap of 45 minutes. But mostly there was noise and drama: car chases; fires; trains falling off bridges; Batman and Spiderman repeatedly saved the day. Also, there was hiding and finding; snacking and sorting and whining, tears and time outs and meltdowns.
Henry is now ensconced in his “bat-cave” (a blanket stretched between the coffee table and an upturned laundry basket) holding his “Spiderman car” while he sucks on a binky and nuzzles his blanket. Right now, at 2 and a half, he is a contradiction. He is a puzzle of interesting words and phrases and nonsense; of truths and myths; of baby and little boy. And I love him like this—all mixed up and still snuggly and still mine. His skin is so soft it makes me ache with love, but his legs are punctuated with dull blue and fading light brown bruises, a little scrape on each knee.
Leaving the Batcave, Henry walks towards me and informs me that we are bats. "You are the mommy bat and I am the baby bat. Are your bat wings working on the computer right now?” he asks.
“Not anymore,” I say, putting my computer down, “now they’re free for hugging.”
“And for flying?”
He climbs onto my lap and faces me and we flap our bat wings and talk of going over to the neighbor’s house for a bat dinner.
“What are they having for dinner over there?" I ask.
“Um, stars. Stars and moons,” he says, still flapping.
“Sounds perfect!”
Bon Appetit!
We may have been held hostage inside, but our Indoor Day passed just like any other with the exception of Henry being denied access to the outside world. There was frantic running and chasing and jumping, but there were also lulls of energy for snuggling and napping. There was quiet when miraculously both boys slept at the same time for an overlap of 45 minutes. But mostly there was noise and drama: car chases; fires; trains falling off bridges; Batman and Spiderman repeatedly saved the day. Also, there was hiding and finding; snacking and sorting and whining, tears and time outs and meltdowns.
Henry is now ensconced in his “bat-cave” (a blanket stretched between the coffee table and an upturned laundry basket) holding his “Spiderman car” while he sucks on a binky and nuzzles his blanket. Right now, at 2 and a half, he is a contradiction. He is a puzzle of interesting words and phrases and nonsense; of truths and myths; of baby and little boy. And I love him like this—all mixed up and still snuggly and still mine. His skin is so soft it makes me ache with love, but his legs are punctuated with dull blue and fading light brown bruises, a little scrape on each knee.
Leaving the Batcave, Henry walks towards me and informs me that we are bats. "You are the mommy bat and I am the baby bat. Are your bat wings working on the computer right now?” he asks.
“Not anymore,” I say, putting my computer down, “now they’re free for hugging.”
“And for flying?”
He climbs onto my lap and faces me and we flap our bat wings and talk of going over to the neighbor’s house for a bat dinner.
“What are they having for dinner over there?" I ask.
“Um, stars. Stars and moons,” he says, still flapping.
“Sounds perfect!”
Bon Appetit!
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Waxing Poetic
Some days it’s hard to write because I haven’t had any great thoughts all day long. My days are filled with sidewalk chalk and rattles; matchbox cars and impromptu, pretend games; eating food at certain intervals like I’m checking it off my to do list; changing loads of laundry, remembering what can be dried, what needs to hang; worrying about expenses; answering innumerable questions. These questions range from “why do we talk to God?” to “isn’t this train the silliest one you ever seed in your whole wide world?” But then, sometimes, right in the crux of the thoughtless, mindless day, Henry will break upon profundity. He will utter words so unintentionally wise that they make me catch my breath, and I want to run here to put it down, to let my wheels turn on it: on the absolute beauty and simplicity in the way he sees the world. Child wonder.
Ever since he visited his 5 and 7 year old cousins last weekend, my 2 and a half-year old has been really into superheroes. Really, really into them. “I don’t like Dora. I want to watch Spiderman.” This has raised so many parenting questions for me. I’ve obviously already given up on not letting him watch a lot of tv, but now I’m suddenly faced with age-appropriateness, violence issues, and the biggest one—am I ready for my little boy to become an actual boy who likes heroes and villains and action figures? So I did what I often do, I consulted my own upbringing. And though my parents were very strict with movie ratings (no PG-13 until I was actually 13, which meant I had to skip almost everyone’s birthday party in 5th grade because they all seemed to want watch Dirty Dancing, the only movie I wanted to see so bad it hurt, but it was PG-13 and I was 11. Finally, one of the moms took pity on me watching a kids movie with her younger children and told me to go ahead and watch Dirty Dancing, she wouldn’t tell my mom) I remember watching Superman when I was around 3. So I rented and watched it with Henry. At one point, Superman is talking to his father and Henry asks me why he’s talking to him—isn’t he dead? I explained that his father was still in his heart and so he was sort of talking to him, but yes he was dead. “It’s kind of like the way we talk to god when we pray. You talk to God, don’t you?” “No,” he answered. “Does God talk to you?” I asked. “Yes,” he nodded seriously. “What does he say?” Henry held up his finger right by his cheek the way he always does when he knows an answer or is stating a fact and said, “First, he said ‘get the wax out of your ears,’ then he said to love people. Yes, get the wax out of your ears and love people.”
And there it was: a jewel of wisdom plucked from his little brain. A truth for me, so valuable it may have come from God himself; Henry only the messenger. How can we possibly hear God with all this wax in our ears? Daily noise and staticky buzzing electronics; the hum of the tv, the pull of the computer—even the things I love and the people I love can become impediments. Love people. And get that wax out of your ears!
Ever since he visited his 5 and 7 year old cousins last weekend, my 2 and a half-year old has been really into superheroes. Really, really into them. “I don’t like Dora. I want to watch Spiderman.” This has raised so many parenting questions for me. I’ve obviously already given up on not letting him watch a lot of tv, but now I’m suddenly faced with age-appropriateness, violence issues, and the biggest one—am I ready for my little boy to become an actual boy who likes heroes and villains and action figures? So I did what I often do, I consulted my own upbringing. And though my parents were very strict with movie ratings (no PG-13 until I was actually 13, which meant I had to skip almost everyone’s birthday party in 5th grade because they all seemed to want watch Dirty Dancing, the only movie I wanted to see so bad it hurt, but it was PG-13 and I was 11. Finally, one of the moms took pity on me watching a kids movie with her younger children and told me to go ahead and watch Dirty Dancing, she wouldn’t tell my mom) I remember watching Superman when I was around 3. So I rented and watched it with Henry. At one point, Superman is talking to his father and Henry asks me why he’s talking to him—isn’t he dead? I explained that his father was still in his heart and so he was sort of talking to him, but yes he was dead. “It’s kind of like the way we talk to god when we pray. You talk to God, don’t you?” “No,” he answered. “Does God talk to you?” I asked. “Yes,” he nodded seriously. “What does he say?” Henry held up his finger right by his cheek the way he always does when he knows an answer or is stating a fact and said, “First, he said ‘get the wax out of your ears,’ then he said to love people. Yes, get the wax out of your ears and love people.”
And there it was: a jewel of wisdom plucked from his little brain. A truth for me, so valuable it may have come from God himself; Henry only the messenger. How can we possibly hear God with all this wax in our ears? Daily noise and staticky buzzing electronics; the hum of the tv, the pull of the computer—even the things I love and the people I love can become impediments. Love people. And get that wax out of your ears!
Thursday, April 1, 2010
It's a Wonderful Life
8 o’clock and still perfectly warm. The sun has set and the sky is a dusty blue grey. Planes fly overhead trailing jet streams that glow pink from the sunset over the horizon. As usual here, there is a symphony of raucous, arguing birds, looking for springtime mates and chasing each other about. I’ve seen large blue jays, a pair of cardinals, two chickadees, several hawks, perhaps a dozen mockingbirds, and hundreds of robins. An owl just hooted from behind the tree line, but it’s yet to make an appearance. The sky is darkening now, as I write, and the porch lights begin to glow a brighter yellow against the now deep-blue of evening. Saba is crouching on the edge of the sidewalk, ears perked, observing the dogs being walked through the neighborhood. And my sweet Gordon is working on his computer just across the porch from me. Life is delicious. Better than I’d imagined.
2 days ago, Henry and I found a snail in our front yard and placed it on top of a dandelion flower and waited for it to creep out of its shell and find its way back to the ground. Slowly, slowly, it poked its magic protruding antennae and soft body past the edge of its shell and slithered down. Henry and I laughed at its oddity and discussed why a snail is not a bug, even though it is the same size and lives a similar life. It could not, I explained, be killed by his exterminator-truck-matchbox-car. Life is good.
I’ve spent a lot of my time here, in the space of this blog, writing about the small resentments and details of my life. Blathering on and on about what sucks time and what drains patience. About how I wonder where I am in the mix of this. But this is only a tiny miniature corner in the enormity of my life. Because here I sit, the sky now a dark navy blue, the trees black against it. The stars have come out and the planes’ lights blink paths across the arc of night. And I’m happy; happy with my choices, happy with my family, happy with my life. Sometimes, I admit, I’m not happy with myself, but that’s for another day. Tonight, I just wanted to explain that no matter what I say here in this space, life is good in my house. I am grateful beyond measure.
2 days ago, Henry and I found a snail in our front yard and placed it on top of a dandelion flower and waited for it to creep out of its shell and find its way back to the ground. Slowly, slowly, it poked its magic protruding antennae and soft body past the edge of its shell and slithered down. Henry and I laughed at its oddity and discussed why a snail is not a bug, even though it is the same size and lives a similar life. It could not, I explained, be killed by his exterminator-truck-matchbox-car. Life is good.
I’ve spent a lot of my time here, in the space of this blog, writing about the small resentments and details of my life. Blathering on and on about what sucks time and what drains patience. About how I wonder where I am in the mix of this. But this is only a tiny miniature corner in the enormity of my life. Because here I sit, the sky now a dark navy blue, the trees black against it. The stars have come out and the planes’ lights blink paths across the arc of night. And I’m happy; happy with my choices, happy with my family, happy with my life. Sometimes, I admit, I’m not happy with myself, but that’s for another day. Tonight, I just wanted to explain that no matter what I say here in this space, life is good in my house. I am grateful beyond measure.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
A Woman's Life
Forgive me for not writing. I am trying to forgive myself, as is habit, of all the myriad ways in which I disappoint myself. I am a harsh critic of myself. And although I have had more social interaction outside of the house in the last week and a half than I have in several months—due to pregnancy, newborn Greyson, and not knowing many people after the move—I am furious with myself for the state of the house (a mess), the piling laundry (undone), the piles of laundry (washed but unfolded), and my lengthening to do list, which I have been delinquent in accomplishing. And much like exercise, the longer I went without writing, the harder it was to approach the task. And, whether this was inspired thinking or merely inspired procrastination, I told myself that a space begun to give me freedom should not become stressful. And so I dawdled and backspaced and convinced myself that I wasn’t ready to do it. I’m not sure I am now, but I must write today or I am in danger of leaving this off entirely.
But this is so often the trouble with motherhood—how to keep so many balls in the air without dropping one. I talked to my mom this summer about how difficult it is to cultivate an active mind. How I was worried that until the boys were in school I might never have the chance to be a thinking woman. I told her of all the things I longed to do. About the hours I’d spent in the sun on that silly old queen-anne sofa in the bay window of our San Francisco apartment, gazing out at the street and thinking; allowing my mind to wander, to muse, to go completely blank. I must say this is what I miss most about life before kids. The space to be completely still. And now, U2’s “Running to Stand Still” could be my theme song—where can I snatch 20 minutes to check my email; call that person back; eat lunch; pickup; shower. My life happens in tiny broken spaces of minutes scattered throughout the day. And the stillness doesn’t happen. I’m too busy, in the time I have, trying to accomplish everything I need to do before one boy or the other wakes up.
At the time of our conversation, my mom read to me from a book that she had picked up when she was a new mom. She had been, back in the 70s, surprised by the relevancy of a book published in 1955. Gift from the Sea was written by Charles Lindbergh’s wife. No, I shouldn’t do that to her. It was written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Even in the inclusion of her own name you see her wanting her own life aside from motherhood and being a wife. Here’s an excerpt that sums up exactly how I feel about my position in the world.
…the problem is specifically and essentially woman’s. Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in woman’s life.
For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of the wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint—the inner inviolable core, the single eye.
With new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls—woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman-and-Career, Woman-and-the-Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
And even now, rereading these words, I feel encouraged. I feel understood and justified somehow in the frustration I sometimes feel. I am absolutely in love with my life. I have the most spectacular of husbands—kind, compassionate, wonderfully communicative—and my beautiful boys are just delicious in their temperaments. Yet, inside there is apart of me that longs for expression, for strength. There is a part of me that needs to be taken out to the pasture and allowed to run and also to be put through its paces. There is the inner woman that longs for success and challenge.
Last night Gordon tried to get me interested in some sort of new telescope NASA put up in space, or is about to, I wasn’t listening very well. Finally I said, truly curious, “do you find it unbelievable that I’m just not interested in something you find so fascinating?” To which he responded, “Sort of, but I can’t understand how you can read Real Simple each month. You want to read about housekeeping?” I admit I got just a tad heated as I explained how nice it was to read something about what I do; about how to shave a couple minutes off of a task to buy some for myself, how to clean better, cook better and more quickly, save money, save face, save myself from drowning in a sea of the mundane. Eventually I hit the nail on the head and said “The fact that people sit around and think about all of this stuff which actually is mundane and distracting from the meat of life, the fact that they devote time to it and publish an entire magazine about it each month that hundreds of thousands of women read each day makes me feel less alone in what I’ve chosen for my life. And most of all, on some level, it valorizes the sticky details of running a house. It means that it’s worth thinking about too, even though it’s so ultimately stupid.”
I’m so far away from what Anne Morrow (Lindbergh) seeks—balance. The contemplative life. But the fact that there are so many of us out there vying with the same everydayness and distractions makes me just slightly more able to forgive myself for not having achieved it. For failing, most days, to even try.
But this is so often the trouble with motherhood—how to keep so many balls in the air without dropping one. I talked to my mom this summer about how difficult it is to cultivate an active mind. How I was worried that until the boys were in school I might never have the chance to be a thinking woman. I told her of all the things I longed to do. About the hours I’d spent in the sun on that silly old queen-anne sofa in the bay window of our San Francisco apartment, gazing out at the street and thinking; allowing my mind to wander, to muse, to go completely blank. I must say this is what I miss most about life before kids. The space to be completely still. And now, U2’s “Running to Stand Still” could be my theme song—where can I snatch 20 minutes to check my email; call that person back; eat lunch; pickup; shower. My life happens in tiny broken spaces of minutes scattered throughout the day. And the stillness doesn’t happen. I’m too busy, in the time I have, trying to accomplish everything I need to do before one boy or the other wakes up.
At the time of our conversation, my mom read to me from a book that she had picked up when she was a new mom. She had been, back in the 70s, surprised by the relevancy of a book published in 1955. Gift from the Sea was written by Charles Lindbergh’s wife. No, I shouldn’t do that to her. It was written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Even in the inclusion of her own name you see her wanting her own life aside from motherhood and being a wife. Here’s an excerpt that sums up exactly how I feel about my position in the world.
…the problem is specifically and essentially woman’s. Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in woman’s life.
For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of the wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint—the inner inviolable core, the single eye.
With new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls—woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman-and-Career, Woman-and-the-Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
And even now, rereading these words, I feel encouraged. I feel understood and justified somehow in the frustration I sometimes feel. I am absolutely in love with my life. I have the most spectacular of husbands—kind, compassionate, wonderfully communicative—and my beautiful boys are just delicious in their temperaments. Yet, inside there is apart of me that longs for expression, for strength. There is a part of me that needs to be taken out to the pasture and allowed to run and also to be put through its paces. There is the inner woman that longs for success and challenge.
Last night Gordon tried to get me interested in some sort of new telescope NASA put up in space, or is about to, I wasn’t listening very well. Finally I said, truly curious, “do you find it unbelievable that I’m just not interested in something you find so fascinating?” To which he responded, “Sort of, but I can’t understand how you can read Real Simple each month. You want to read about housekeeping?” I admit I got just a tad heated as I explained how nice it was to read something about what I do; about how to shave a couple minutes off of a task to buy some for myself, how to clean better, cook better and more quickly, save money, save face, save myself from drowning in a sea of the mundane. Eventually I hit the nail on the head and said “The fact that people sit around and think about all of this stuff which actually is mundane and distracting from the meat of life, the fact that they devote time to it and publish an entire magazine about it each month that hundreds of thousands of women read each day makes me feel less alone in what I’ve chosen for my life. And most of all, on some level, it valorizes the sticky details of running a house. It means that it’s worth thinking about too, even though it’s so ultimately stupid.”
I’m so far away from what Anne Morrow (Lindbergh) seeks—balance. The contemplative life. But the fact that there are so many of us out there vying with the same everydayness and distractions makes me just slightly more able to forgive myself for not having achieved it. For failing, most days, to even try.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Spider plants and Miracles
Tonight I went out for girl's night with my best friend from high school. This is a friend whom I can only describe as Howard Roark from The Fountainhead if you've read it. She has always been self-sufficient. She has always been the person, when I don’t know who I am or what I’m about, that I feel uncomfortable around. Because, in her sincerity, there was always the implication that I was, in my falsity, insincere, I was perpetually left with a feeling of hollow aching. It was never a judgment. It was never anything other than me knowing, by comparison, what a long way I had still to go. What a pleasure it was to be with her as just me, knowing who I am and not being insincere or insecure.
And so, I am finally an adult. I’m getting used to saying that. I’m a grown up.
I’m sure this is getting old: my self-affirmations. “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone-it, people like me!” But having spent so many years uncomfortable in my own skin, this is always a miracle of evolution and accomplishment.
One of the best books I’ve ever read and reread and reread is The Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner. In it, there is this amazing passage where he speaks of the miracle of sleep followed by awakening. In sleep, he notices, we are divorced from our self, and there is the miracle of traveling through unknown universes and psyches throughout the night, only to return to exactly who we are the next morning; waking up as just the same person and knowing ourselves as we do each dawn. This is a point that feels even more miraculous to me now, having woken up for years and knowing immediately that I was lost and alone. Now, in my present state and understanding, to awaken to a confident and known quantity, it is a blessing and a miracle beyond words.
I remember so clearly, waking up one morning in our apartment in San Francisco, looking over the alabaster shoulder of my sweet now-husband when we were just beginning, to the sunlight reflecting on the hardwood floors. The spider plant had been growing—parachuting new growth on and on towards the floor.
Here’s what I wrote that morning; is this a cop out, pasting a remembered memory? Space and Memory—this is quintessential, so I’ll allow it…
Happiness—waking up in warm, strong arms that surround me for the right reasons—why is this problematic? But the light falls fuzzy on the comforter and makes me anxious as I watch the spider plant descend slowly over a month of warm, perfect sunny mornings. As I watch the lightening sky through the bay window over the arm of chipped mahogany on the threadbare, green, Queen Anne sofa.
But don’t settle me. Don’t make me safe. Don’t make me happy. Make me reach—leave me alone. I want to watch and wonder at your spider plant and the big-leafed tropical one with elephant ear leaves and odd planes of tilt and green and angle. I want to exist mentally in the open space where sunlight is lazy on your wood floor from seven to seven in the spring. This apartment is settled and secure and knows its purpose. It is used to being what it is—but I’m still watching. Learning from these quiet spaces and slow, patient plants and threadbare sofa, to be what I am and to live for the half day of sun crawling warm and pleasant over the open space of me and my planes of being.
And I’m learning too—did I mention that? Learning to be quiet and patient and without myself. I’m stepping out of myself—and I like it. I like it a lot. This quiet sun on my boards—on my threadbare seat and chipped wooden arms, as I slowly descend—grow—reinvent and become sure and know my purpose.
Yesterday a good friend asked me if I figured out how to be enough for myself before I met Gordon or if I learned it through him, through his encouragement and love. I think this snippet of my writing answers that question. It was both. It was being loved totally even when I wasn’t sure who I was. It was Gordon saying “do it girl! Be electric color Lindsay!” It was the safety of knowing I was loved no matter who I encountered in the mirror when I woke in the morning.
Once, Gordon said to me, “You’re like this enormous planet with so much pull, so much mass—you’ve got great gravity, girl.” It was words like this that pushed me. Being with someone who, no matter how loved I felt and how comfortable the relationship was, always drove me on to be more. I was challenged and accepted simultaneously. Magic. I became the spider plant, flourishing and parachuting each moment towards the warm floorboards of quiet and calm. And that is where I find myself now. And that is why the quiet and the contentment are ok. Because they were hard-won. Because I earned the security of where I am now. What I didn’t yet know when I wrote these words is that I could be settled; I could be safe; I could be happy—and still be reaching.
This is me reaching—can you feel it? I can.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
To be Known
The western addition. The greatest neighborhood ever. The worst neighborhood ever. I suppose this depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. The WA was like an extended college experience. You’ve heard of Extended Learning? This was extended partying. I’m sure there were some people who lived in the hood who had it together, but I didn’t know them. Clearly we were running in different circles. Different times. I was beginning when they were headed to bed.
I remember. I remember getting dressed up and heading out. In San Francisco, this meant funky, vintage, quirky--not dressy. I might wear a fancy dress, but I’d top it with a vintage hat and some motorcycle boots. Add to that layers and layers of sweaters and scarves and light jackets because SF was always cold at night. And then, when I was ready, out the door I’d go. As the metal security gate on the apartment building clanged shut behind me, I was off—up the steep hill of Golden Gate, crossing the three-lane, one-way street at an angle, my hobo bag bumping lightly against my hip. Hands in pockets, coat collar turned up to the wind. I can still remember that. The ability to leave. To be singular. Freedom. Even then, before I knew what it was like not to have it, that’s what it felt like. Freedom. Clean break of selfish outing. Off to I didn’t know where to meet up with I didn’t know who. Off to bounce around the city any which way I chose and to return or not return at any time. Most of these nights Gordon was off on his own adventure or, more than likely, was out of town for work. And I’d be fresh out of class, philosophy swirling through my mind, twinged with slight guilt over my not yet completed work. But off I’d go wearing a captains hat or a beret or a newsboy. Always over-accessorized. Always over doing it. But always free to the point of abstraction.
It’s so funny that when you have it—that ability to just walk out the door and not look back—you don’t know yet how much you should cherish it. Now, the thought of it makes my insides turn over with excitement, like new love, like a crush. Walk off? No sitter? No worry? No curfew?
I remember the echo and scrape of my boots crossing Golden Gate, bracing for the rush of wind as I turned the corner onto Divisidero. It always made my eyes water, threatened to ruin my eye makeup. Blow off my hat. And so, one hand on my hat, eyes blinking furiously, I’d walk up Divis, past Rommy’s and the Green Earth, down to the corner that was the locus of my world. Café Abir, Tsunami and the Fly. These were like my homes—like my living rooms. I bounced from one to the next, never sure who I’d run into or what I’d end up doing. Well, actually, I always knew who I’d run into. That’s kind of what made it wonderful, and like living on a small college campus.
I remember sitting in the yellow light of early New England evening, the TV glowing before me, an electric blue, and I’d hear the gathering momentum of “sometimes you want to go—where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came…” That always seemed like heaven to me. To be completely accepted and welcomed and known. In the town I grew up in, which was a small town 20 minutes outside of Boston, there were only three restaurants in the town center. One was Butricks—an ice cream parlor. And then there was Ye Olde Cottage and Ye Olde Cottage 2. I don’t think I ever went to Ye Olde Cottage 2 and only remember going to Ye Olde Cottage the first once or twice. But once, when my mom asked me what I wanted in life, or maybe it was even unprompted—I don’t recall, I told her I wanted to have a place where I could go and say “I’ll have the usual” and they’d know just what I meant. I could chalk this up to a lot of things: recognizing in myself, even then, the need for sameness and routine; an overload of musicals and Capra movies that depicted small town Americana in a light that I couldn’t resist; an innate feeling of misplaced identity which would continue to plague me through a dramatic move at 13 and several bad relationships, including one bad marriage. Whatever it was, the concept of being “known” was completely foreign to me. If anything, I would have liked to have sunken into the background and slinked through life without notice. Although my personality constantly pushed me to the front—gregarious and outspoken, I constantly had one foot in my mouth and was seemingly unable to tame the things that came out of my mouth. But known? I could barely pick myself out of a line up let alone be known by anyone.
“You don’t know me! I’m not like you!” I repeated this over and over until it felt true. At different times in my life, when convicted and confronted by people who loved me and could see how lost and far away I was. “You don’t know me!” I’d shout until it droned out everything. Their voices calling me back and my own small voice that knew they were right. That knew I was an unknown quantity. At times in life, it was easier, less scary, less overwhelming to pretend who I was than to admit I was a variable: a letter standing in for an unknown quantity. “You don’t know me!” I could have shouted at myself. I didn’t know me. It took a long time to strip off the layers of pretension, of personality adopted to fit in, or to define against. To find what I meant when I said who I was or wasn’t. To get down to that small concentrated formula of Lindsay that I essentially was. Maybe during those times what I was most scared of is that if I stripped it all down, I wouldn’t be left with anything at all.
But in San Francisco, I found Me. I encountered me in that city. The first good friend that I made was a French girl names Sarah Fradet, and she lived with a bunch of international roommates and we all sang and played instruments. I remember going out into the city with my guitar case, hailing a cab to go to SOMA where we would gather at their loft and sing and play for hours. I could hear the song from The Sound of Music playing in my head as I sauntered down Fulton street towards Divis, so awkward and self-conscious, “I have confidence in sunshine. I have confidence in rain…besides as you see I have confidence in me.” Maybe if I sang it loud enough to myself and carried my head high enough I’d believe it. And eventually, I did. I believed it.
And finally, at the corner of Divis and Fulton, at the locus of my new world, I found my Ye Olde Cottage—the place where everybody knew my name. I was finally and completely known. But of course, the best part is that I knew myself then.
As usual these posts, once begun, continue on and on and on. In this “space” I’ve created I’m like my first Horse, Greystone, who once let off his lead in the pasture would take off, tail raised, hooves pounding the hard ground, whinny high in his throat. I can picture it exactly, that pause of tensed muscle and motion, body beginning to lean slightly away as I unclipped the lead from the halter—off he’d tear like I was a demon spirit threatening. Like he wanted nothing to do with me. Like I was plague to him. Of course, he was back in a minute or two, but that first lick of freedom, for him, was so delicious, so overwhelming that he’d bolt in a flash of brilliant energy. He was off. Gone. All nervous energy and tension. That’s how I am here. I’m off and away. Running from myself that I’ve been all day, into these fields of white, my fingers pounding, lead swinging loose behind me. Thank you for allowing me the run and being there when I come back.
I remember. I remember getting dressed up and heading out. In San Francisco, this meant funky, vintage, quirky--not dressy. I might wear a fancy dress, but I’d top it with a vintage hat and some motorcycle boots. Add to that layers and layers of sweaters and scarves and light jackets because SF was always cold at night. And then, when I was ready, out the door I’d go. As the metal security gate on the apartment building clanged shut behind me, I was off—up the steep hill of Golden Gate, crossing the three-lane, one-way street at an angle, my hobo bag bumping lightly against my hip. Hands in pockets, coat collar turned up to the wind. I can still remember that. The ability to leave. To be singular. Freedom. Even then, before I knew what it was like not to have it, that’s what it felt like. Freedom. Clean break of selfish outing. Off to I didn’t know where to meet up with I didn’t know who. Off to bounce around the city any which way I chose and to return or not return at any time. Most of these nights Gordon was off on his own adventure or, more than likely, was out of town for work. And I’d be fresh out of class, philosophy swirling through my mind, twinged with slight guilt over my not yet completed work. But off I’d go wearing a captains hat or a beret or a newsboy. Always over-accessorized. Always over doing it. But always free to the point of abstraction.
It’s so funny that when you have it—that ability to just walk out the door and not look back—you don’t know yet how much you should cherish it. Now, the thought of it makes my insides turn over with excitement, like new love, like a crush. Walk off? No sitter? No worry? No curfew?
I remember the echo and scrape of my boots crossing Golden Gate, bracing for the rush of wind as I turned the corner onto Divisidero. It always made my eyes water, threatened to ruin my eye makeup. Blow off my hat. And so, one hand on my hat, eyes blinking furiously, I’d walk up Divis, past Rommy’s and the Green Earth, down to the corner that was the locus of my world. Café Abir, Tsunami and the Fly. These were like my homes—like my living rooms. I bounced from one to the next, never sure who I’d run into or what I’d end up doing. Well, actually, I always knew who I’d run into. That’s kind of what made it wonderful, and like living on a small college campus.
I remember sitting in the yellow light of early New England evening, the TV glowing before me, an electric blue, and I’d hear the gathering momentum of “sometimes you want to go—where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came…” That always seemed like heaven to me. To be completely accepted and welcomed and known. In the town I grew up in, which was a small town 20 minutes outside of Boston, there were only three restaurants in the town center. One was Butricks—an ice cream parlor. And then there was Ye Olde Cottage and Ye Olde Cottage 2. I don’t think I ever went to Ye Olde Cottage 2 and only remember going to Ye Olde Cottage the first once or twice. But once, when my mom asked me what I wanted in life, or maybe it was even unprompted—I don’t recall, I told her I wanted to have a place where I could go and say “I’ll have the usual” and they’d know just what I meant. I could chalk this up to a lot of things: recognizing in myself, even then, the need for sameness and routine; an overload of musicals and Capra movies that depicted small town Americana in a light that I couldn’t resist; an innate feeling of misplaced identity which would continue to plague me through a dramatic move at 13 and several bad relationships, including one bad marriage. Whatever it was, the concept of being “known” was completely foreign to me. If anything, I would have liked to have sunken into the background and slinked through life without notice. Although my personality constantly pushed me to the front—gregarious and outspoken, I constantly had one foot in my mouth and was seemingly unable to tame the things that came out of my mouth. But known? I could barely pick myself out of a line up let alone be known by anyone.
“You don’t know me! I’m not like you!” I repeated this over and over until it felt true. At different times in my life, when convicted and confronted by people who loved me and could see how lost and far away I was. “You don’t know me!” I’d shout until it droned out everything. Their voices calling me back and my own small voice that knew they were right. That knew I was an unknown quantity. At times in life, it was easier, less scary, less overwhelming to pretend who I was than to admit I was a variable: a letter standing in for an unknown quantity. “You don’t know me!” I could have shouted at myself. I didn’t know me. It took a long time to strip off the layers of pretension, of personality adopted to fit in, or to define against. To find what I meant when I said who I was or wasn’t. To get down to that small concentrated formula of Lindsay that I essentially was. Maybe during those times what I was most scared of is that if I stripped it all down, I wouldn’t be left with anything at all.
But in San Francisco, I found Me. I encountered me in that city. The first good friend that I made was a French girl names Sarah Fradet, and she lived with a bunch of international roommates and we all sang and played instruments. I remember going out into the city with my guitar case, hailing a cab to go to SOMA where we would gather at their loft and sing and play for hours. I could hear the song from The Sound of Music playing in my head as I sauntered down Fulton street towards Divis, so awkward and self-conscious, “I have confidence in sunshine. I have confidence in rain…besides as you see I have confidence in me.” Maybe if I sang it loud enough to myself and carried my head high enough I’d believe it. And eventually, I did. I believed it.
And finally, at the corner of Divis and Fulton, at the locus of my new world, I found my Ye Olde Cottage—the place where everybody knew my name. I was finally and completely known. But of course, the best part is that I knew myself then.
As usual these posts, once begun, continue on and on and on. In this “space” I’ve created I’m like my first Horse, Greystone, who once let off his lead in the pasture would take off, tail raised, hooves pounding the hard ground, whinny high in his throat. I can picture it exactly, that pause of tensed muscle and motion, body beginning to lean slightly away as I unclipped the lead from the halter—off he’d tear like I was a demon spirit threatening. Like he wanted nothing to do with me. Like I was plague to him. Of course, he was back in a minute or two, but that first lick of freedom, for him, was so delicious, so overwhelming that he’d bolt in a flash of brilliant energy. He was off. Gone. All nervous energy and tension. That’s how I am here. I’m off and away. Running from myself that I’ve been all day, into these fields of white, my fingers pounding, lead swinging loose behind me. Thank you for allowing me the run and being there when I come back.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Living the Choices
It's 8:30 and already I'm so tired I crave bed and warmth and pillows. But Grey isn't down yet and this is my only time for (re)connecting with Gordon. And so it goes that I never get to bed before 11, rise at least once to feed Grey, and am up with Henry by 7. But I cherish these first months with the baby which will be gone before I even blink. But I've promised myself to write each night so I'll delve in and see where I go from here.
To continue from my last post, in the looking around my house and recognizing all these odd assortments of furniture and stones and prints that together make up My Things and wondering how it all happened. And most of all in realizing that this is just what I have and where I am, it is the same with Me. With Who I am. Somewhere, in the last 32 years, I've become what I am. Not so obviously as picking up accidental objects from the streets of San Francisco, but who I am has, in one way or another, just happened on some level. I find myself here, as who I am, and not that I can't change or become, but this person that I see the world through when I open my eyes in the morning, that person is just me. It is the me that I see in the mirror and wonder over; the person that struggles with some things that have plagued me my whole life, and other things which have come up only recently. But no matter what, I am 32 years into this life of mine--the only one I'll ever get--and those 32 years of events and moments and loves and wishes and regrets are irrevocable. They are past. I think this is a difficult thing to come to terms with . Past. Past tense. Memory. Things that cannot be changed.
I remember, walking back from Falleti's pushing Henry in the Stroller, seeing those young people in San Francisco. Hipsters and twenty-somethings with not a care in the world and enormous pulsing potential. And I was envious. Or nostalgic. Or perhaps only whimsically remembering that total utter freedom. That selfishness. Being able to do whatever I wanted. Because with security, with responsibility, with the absolute joy of motherhood comes permanency. And this also brings great, earth-shaking love. Last night, after he had made a little cry, I went to check on Henry and seeing him asleep, I kissed that part of his neck right where it meets his shoulder. And this boy, I realized, this curly haired angel, was mine. He was something I created, something that belonged to me for now. Something that was mine to kiss and snuggle and touch. And that soon, sooner than I will want, the territory of his body will become his own and will be off limits to me. And that he will become his own person with secrets and resentments and issues. He will no longer be mine. But for now, for that magical moment by the yellow hush of the nightlight, he was my most tender, sweetest love. And that, moments like that, make the hipsters life seem empty.
I've gotten off track here. I didn't mean to wax poetic over what I miss, over what I've lost. I meant instead to talk of how interesting it is that I am who I am. That I'm an adult. And this person that I am is the person that Henry and Greyson will remember as their mom. I am their idea of a grown up. And that means that who I am is already complete. That sounds odd--it's not that I won't be growing and changing for my whole life, but that most of my major choices have already been made. And I know this is just part of growing up. I think of my parents, who have lived such a wonderful life, and I yearn for the security they have in looking back over a life well-lived. I hope I will be able to do that as well. But this shift just happened for me. The shift between wondering what my life will be and having the freedom to make it however I choose, and having made my choices already and living them well. The looking back comes later--that's the next stage. This isn't news to me, I knew conceptually that it would come. My mom told me when I was only a child about how disillusioned she'd been to discover that there was no plateau of adulthood, no point at which she would ever feel grown up. I think the biggest let down is that there is certainly no plateau of self-sufficiency, self-understanding or self-confidence. There is only who you are at each different stage of life wondering how to make the best of who you are and of each day.
Today was a good day. Full of connections with old friends through email and new friends in person. I managed to clean the house, all but the dishes, and run my errands. But mostly, thanks to the space I've created in this blog, it was a day in which I had room for contemplation. For feeling the inner workings of my mind as it began to chug slowly back to life. Chug--chug--ch--ch--chug. Like the watch I just got from my mom that needs to be wound each day, I need the daily act of mental exercise to work correctly. I've laid dormant and to suddenly begin again there is the joy of movement and the surprise of work that writing gives me. I am thankful for this. That I'm writing, that I wrote yesterday and the day before, it is all seeping into my life, coloring it and exciting me and making me think harder and longer. No poetry during diaper changes yet, but words are beginning to form in my mind and thoughts are rising slowly like bread. I am encouraged. I am finding the Me in the Mom.
To continue from my last post, in the looking around my house and recognizing all these odd assortments of furniture and stones and prints that together make up My Things and wondering how it all happened. And most of all in realizing that this is just what I have and where I am, it is the same with Me. With Who I am. Somewhere, in the last 32 years, I've become what I am. Not so obviously as picking up accidental objects from the streets of San Francisco, but who I am has, in one way or another, just happened on some level. I find myself here, as who I am, and not that I can't change or become, but this person that I see the world through when I open my eyes in the morning, that person is just me. It is the me that I see in the mirror and wonder over; the person that struggles with some things that have plagued me my whole life, and other things which have come up only recently. But no matter what, I am 32 years into this life of mine--the only one I'll ever get--and those 32 years of events and moments and loves and wishes and regrets are irrevocable. They are past. I think this is a difficult thing to come to terms with . Past. Past tense. Memory. Things that cannot be changed.
I remember, walking back from Falleti's pushing Henry in the Stroller, seeing those young people in San Francisco. Hipsters and twenty-somethings with not a care in the world and enormous pulsing potential. And I was envious. Or nostalgic. Or perhaps only whimsically remembering that total utter freedom. That selfishness. Being able to do whatever I wanted. Because with security, with responsibility, with the absolute joy of motherhood comes permanency. And this also brings great, earth-shaking love. Last night, after he had made a little cry, I went to check on Henry and seeing him asleep, I kissed that part of his neck right where it meets his shoulder. And this boy, I realized, this curly haired angel, was mine. He was something I created, something that belonged to me for now. Something that was mine to kiss and snuggle and touch. And that soon, sooner than I will want, the territory of his body will become his own and will be off limits to me. And that he will become his own person with secrets and resentments and issues. He will no longer be mine. But for now, for that magical moment by the yellow hush of the nightlight, he was my most tender, sweetest love. And that, moments like that, make the hipsters life seem empty.
I've gotten off track here. I didn't mean to wax poetic over what I miss, over what I've lost. I meant instead to talk of how interesting it is that I am who I am. That I'm an adult. And this person that I am is the person that Henry and Greyson will remember as their mom. I am their idea of a grown up. And that means that who I am is already complete. That sounds odd--it's not that I won't be growing and changing for my whole life, but that most of my major choices have already been made. And I know this is just part of growing up. I think of my parents, who have lived such a wonderful life, and I yearn for the security they have in looking back over a life well-lived. I hope I will be able to do that as well. But this shift just happened for me. The shift between wondering what my life will be and having the freedom to make it however I choose, and having made my choices already and living them well. The looking back comes later--that's the next stage. This isn't news to me, I knew conceptually that it would come. My mom told me when I was only a child about how disillusioned she'd been to discover that there was no plateau of adulthood, no point at which she would ever feel grown up. I think the biggest let down is that there is certainly no plateau of self-sufficiency, self-understanding or self-confidence. There is only who you are at each different stage of life wondering how to make the best of who you are and of each day.
Today was a good day. Full of connections with old friends through email and new friends in person. I managed to clean the house, all but the dishes, and run my errands. But mostly, thanks to the space I've created in this blog, it was a day in which I had room for contemplation. For feeling the inner workings of my mind as it began to chug slowly back to life. Chug--chug--ch--ch--chug. Like the watch I just got from my mom that needs to be wound each day, I need the daily act of mental exercise to work correctly. I've laid dormant and to suddenly begin again there is the joy of movement and the surprise of work that writing gives me. I am thankful for this. That I'm writing, that I wrote yesterday and the day before, it is all seeping into my life, coloring it and exciting me and making me think harder and longer. No poetry during diaper changes yet, but words are beginning to form in my mind and thoughts are rising slowly like bread. I am encouraged. I am finding the Me in the Mom.
Monday, March 22, 2010
A Stone's Throw Away from Sanity
Rainy day, after 5pm, which means I've popped a beer and am counting minutes until the boys are down and I have some space. Calm is at a premium in a household with a newborn and a two-year old. I've barely finished the housework--the daily run of dishes and laundry and picking up that happens everyday and seems to be complete only minutes before it has all piled up again. I remember a time when I was just me, or just me and Gordon and I couldn't seem to find time to clean my house. I lived in perpetual mess. And now, I clean everything every day and yet it still seems to slip entropically into havoc.
Some days I am the merriest of homemakers. I feel energized and proud of how clean the house is, what I've made for dinner, the number of loads I have washed, folded and put away. Other days I find it difficult to do more than catch up on old episodes of Lost. And most days I just lose myself in the shuffle of everydayness. I let it seep into me and take over. I am only the mechanics of going through motions: chipper voice to engage Henry, accented motherese to make Greyson smile, dishes half-heartedly completed and for dinner--rice, and easy chicken dish and maybe broccoli--the go-to of ease that satisfies hunger with absolutely no creativity. But behind these actions, I am numb, lost, asleep perhaps. Some days I'm annoyed that my mind is so full of these details that hold no import. I resent that I am stressed about not having met my quota of daily tasks. I am desperate for something to fill my mind--or rather to expand it, ignite it, challenge it.
Back in the 60s when she was beginning her path, my mom was asked by someone why she was getting a college degree if she was only going to be a mom and a homemaker. And she said that she'd be able to think about poetry while she changed diapers. What a beautiful thought. On my good days I am poetry in action, keeping a lovely house. Most days it's a trudge through the mundane.
Interestingly, I'm not unhappy. Perhaps I am not effusively spouting with joy, but I love my husband and my dear dear boys. I love my life and my position in it. I am currently, madly in love with the house we're just settling into, it's a much greater joy keeping house in an actual house. But there is a Lindsay within the Mrs. Saint Clair, that runs deeper than mommy or wife. And the Lindsay yearns for growth and for learning and for the opportunity to excel. I'm hoping that this blog can create a space for contemplation. I used to fancy myself a writer. (I've imagined myself many different things at different moments--a singer, a writer, a professor--but I always knew I was made to be a mom and a wife first and foremost). But when I was in the habit of writing--daily exercises and working on several pieces of fiction--I saw life like a writer. Everything I encountered was poetic--fringed with magic and clarity. This is part of the me that I've lost and that I long for. Maybe, at this stage in life, it's just about picking up the discarded pieces, creating the united state of Lindsay from the best bits of what I've put down or left unfinished.
And so, now that I'm writing again, here on this electric gleam of white, I look for the magic at the edges--for the extraordinary in the ordinary. I begin by looking at the space where I find myself. and what I'm struck by is the stuff. The things that have amassed around me and followed me from San Francisco to Atlanta--like satellites that, once in orbit, are forever caught in their runs--the miscellany of items and furniture that found its way into my home is still surrounding me here in this new space. It's interesting to me that these are now My Things. These are the decorations and furnishings that my boys will grow up with and remember as part of their childhood home. I didn't think this through when I found the marble Chinese dragon statue sitting by my car on Golden Gate Ave and brought it home to roost by my hearth. I didn't understand the permanence behind the scuffed regulation bowling pin that sat on top of a fence post on Fulton street outside my first San Francisco apartment. Or that the many stones, large and small, that have accumulated in our house are part of us--part of our adult existence. It's so interesting that this all happened by accident. I never sat down and thought "my main design scheme will center around piles of stones spread throughout my house." And yet, there is the candy dish full of small interesting stones on the sideboard in the dining room; the wire urn by the fireplace containing smooth, unnaturally (although natural) round light grey stones that Gordon had collected before my time; the two larger rocks I took from a trip to the Russian River because they seemed so much like small mountains, craggy and rough that sit atop my mantle. And even more--stones everywhere, scattered like forgotten thoughts about the house.
"I want to play stones mommy," Henry says. And we line them up, stack them, discuss which are our favorites and why. Make (very poor) guesses as to what type of stone they might be. It is completely normal to Henry that there are stones lying on every conceivable surface, cluttering empty spaces like dust. Collecting in the corners. Picking up inertia.
This all goes to say that I am now an adult. And this space that I find myself in, this house, filled with these things--this is my life. It's gone passed the point of conscious choosing and is simply where I am. Who I am. Here's where I am. I'm surrounded by rocks, rich in their rough natural beauty, and little boys (to whom rocks might as well be covered in fairy dust and magic). So maybe, when I can't seem to find it in me to see beauty in the mundane, I should just ask Henry to describe it to me, because he sees it everywhere.
I apologize to those of you following that this entry is so scattered. So rough-hewn and unpolished. It's the pressure of needing to write everyday. I wish I had the time to fix it up, salvage the parts that are rich and dispose of the empty phrases--the mundane. But I've promised myself that I will post each day. And that I will allow it to not be perfect. And most of all, this is a space for me to run free--unhindered by expectations (my own and even yours, reader). And like a run, it is not about where I'm going but the exercise of the run that I'm in it for. Please excuse these first attempts, so like the awkward stretching and jogging before exercise actually begins. This is my gathering of momentum. This is *I hope* muscle memory kicking in. Me remembering how to be the best of me that I've left behind and the moving towards the good parts I haven't yet discovered. Here's to the freedom of the run!
(What follows is some writing I'm remembering now, written 8 years ago, when I was the me that saw poetry in every moment. To be fair, it's hard to find poetry when life is so full of details, which is why I so desperately need this Space. And I laud my mom for being able to do while changing diapers--more proof of her beautiful, vibrant spirit--and that it isn't hereditary!)
I want to grab a dragon by its tail, get a good handhold. Whipped red and gold scales of oriental green-blue angles—wide surprised eyes of Chinese New Years and curling paper lanterns. Run down streets of uneven paving and hear the echo and I’d wish there was rain—to see the paper dragons, paper lanterns, melt in wet, goopy piles of brilliant colors and ink clouding puddles of swirling jeweled light.
Run—run down alleys and boulevards, in crowds—in loneliness, in brightest day and dreary clouded new-moon nights, when the air is clear and thin and cold and sound pierces and travels—hollow echo and sharp skinny cry—like a quartet of me and the run that is free and fine and clear—that is like one black straight line on white paper. A run with no implications—no fine writing or sticky noisy complaints. A run with no need for destination—no time and no beginning.
And the clip clop of heel on pavement , the rush of wind rings when I stop in crowded thoroughfare of empty street, and look up to see whatever is before me and to know that I can go on or change direction because limits are only these pullings in my legs and cramps in my sides and these, I know, I am capable of overcoming-of pushing through. And suddenly I am capable and totally limitless—as long as I push through, as long as I run: I am free.
Some days I am the merriest of homemakers. I feel energized and proud of how clean the house is, what I've made for dinner, the number of loads I have washed, folded and put away. Other days I find it difficult to do more than catch up on old episodes of Lost. And most days I just lose myself in the shuffle of everydayness. I let it seep into me and take over. I am only the mechanics of going through motions: chipper voice to engage Henry, accented motherese to make Greyson smile, dishes half-heartedly completed and for dinner--rice, and easy chicken dish and maybe broccoli--the go-to of ease that satisfies hunger with absolutely no creativity. But behind these actions, I am numb, lost, asleep perhaps. Some days I'm annoyed that my mind is so full of these details that hold no import. I resent that I am stressed about not having met my quota of daily tasks. I am desperate for something to fill my mind--or rather to expand it, ignite it, challenge it.
Back in the 60s when she was beginning her path, my mom was asked by someone why she was getting a college degree if she was only going to be a mom and a homemaker. And she said that she'd be able to think about poetry while she changed diapers. What a beautiful thought. On my good days I am poetry in action, keeping a lovely house. Most days it's a trudge through the mundane.
Interestingly, I'm not unhappy. Perhaps I am not effusively spouting with joy, but I love my husband and my dear dear boys. I love my life and my position in it. I am currently, madly in love with the house we're just settling into, it's a much greater joy keeping house in an actual house. But there is a Lindsay within the Mrs. Saint Clair, that runs deeper than mommy or wife. And the Lindsay yearns for growth and for learning and for the opportunity to excel. I'm hoping that this blog can create a space for contemplation. I used to fancy myself a writer. (I've imagined myself many different things at different moments--a singer, a writer, a professor--but I always knew I was made to be a mom and a wife first and foremost). But when I was in the habit of writing--daily exercises and working on several pieces of fiction--I saw life like a writer. Everything I encountered was poetic--fringed with magic and clarity. This is part of the me that I've lost and that I long for. Maybe, at this stage in life, it's just about picking up the discarded pieces, creating the united state of Lindsay from the best bits of what I've put down or left unfinished.
And so, now that I'm writing again, here on this electric gleam of white, I look for the magic at the edges--for the extraordinary in the ordinary. I begin by looking at the space where I find myself. and what I'm struck by is the stuff. The things that have amassed around me and followed me from San Francisco to Atlanta--like satellites that, once in orbit, are forever caught in their runs--the miscellany of items and furniture that found its way into my home is still surrounding me here in this new space. It's interesting to me that these are now My Things. These are the decorations and furnishings that my boys will grow up with and remember as part of their childhood home. I didn't think this through when I found the marble Chinese dragon statue sitting by my car on Golden Gate Ave and brought it home to roost by my hearth. I didn't understand the permanence behind the scuffed regulation bowling pin that sat on top of a fence post on Fulton street outside my first San Francisco apartment. Or that the many stones, large and small, that have accumulated in our house are part of us--part of our adult existence. It's so interesting that this all happened by accident. I never sat down and thought "my main design scheme will center around piles of stones spread throughout my house." And yet, there is the candy dish full of small interesting stones on the sideboard in the dining room; the wire urn by the fireplace containing smooth, unnaturally (although natural) round light grey stones that Gordon had collected before my time; the two larger rocks I took from a trip to the Russian River because they seemed so much like small mountains, craggy and rough that sit atop my mantle. And even more--stones everywhere, scattered like forgotten thoughts about the house.
"I want to play stones mommy," Henry says. And we line them up, stack them, discuss which are our favorites and why. Make (very poor) guesses as to what type of stone they might be. It is completely normal to Henry that there are stones lying on every conceivable surface, cluttering empty spaces like dust. Collecting in the corners. Picking up inertia.
This all goes to say that I am now an adult. And this space that I find myself in, this house, filled with these things--this is my life. It's gone passed the point of conscious choosing and is simply where I am. Who I am. Here's where I am. I'm surrounded by rocks, rich in their rough natural beauty, and little boys (to whom rocks might as well be covered in fairy dust and magic). So maybe, when I can't seem to find it in me to see beauty in the mundane, I should just ask Henry to describe it to me, because he sees it everywhere.
I apologize to those of you following that this entry is so scattered. So rough-hewn and unpolished. It's the pressure of needing to write everyday. I wish I had the time to fix it up, salvage the parts that are rich and dispose of the empty phrases--the mundane. But I've promised myself that I will post each day. And that I will allow it to not be perfect. And most of all, this is a space for me to run free--unhindered by expectations (my own and even yours, reader). And like a run, it is not about where I'm going but the exercise of the run that I'm in it for. Please excuse these first attempts, so like the awkward stretching and jogging before exercise actually begins. This is my gathering of momentum. This is *I hope* muscle memory kicking in. Me remembering how to be the best of me that I've left behind and the moving towards the good parts I haven't yet discovered. Here's to the freedom of the run!
(What follows is some writing I'm remembering now, written 8 years ago, when I was the me that saw poetry in every moment. To be fair, it's hard to find poetry when life is so full of details, which is why I so desperately need this Space. And I laud my mom for being able to do while changing diapers--more proof of her beautiful, vibrant spirit--and that it isn't hereditary!)
I want to grab a dragon by its tail, get a good handhold. Whipped red and gold scales of oriental green-blue angles—wide surprised eyes of Chinese New Years and curling paper lanterns. Run down streets of uneven paving and hear the echo and I’d wish there was rain—to see the paper dragons, paper lanterns, melt in wet, goopy piles of brilliant colors and ink clouding puddles of swirling jeweled light.
Run—run down alleys and boulevards, in crowds—in loneliness, in brightest day and dreary clouded new-moon nights, when the air is clear and thin and cold and sound pierces and travels—hollow echo and sharp skinny cry—like a quartet of me and the run that is free and fine and clear—that is like one black straight line on white paper. A run with no implications—no fine writing or sticky noisy complaints. A run with no need for destination—no time and no beginning.
And the clip clop of heel on pavement , the rush of wind rings when I stop in crowded thoroughfare of empty street, and look up to see whatever is before me and to know that I can go on or change direction because limits are only these pullings in my legs and cramps in my sides and these, I know, I am capable of overcoming-of pushing through. And suddenly I am capable and totally limitless—as long as I push through, as long as I run: I am free.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Inhabitable imaginary
I've started this blog selfishly. It's not for anyone but me. In fact, and maybe this is just the essence of blogging, it's all about me. And maybe that's why I'm doing it--to carve out a little space. A place, in my life of chaos and noise that's just for me to be quiet and still and try to think. A space for me to remember.
There are so many things I want to remember. And this speaks, more than anything, to what I've lost. We don't need to remember things that are still with us. Memory is the habitat of the lost. It is the frontier of longing and regretting and wishing. Partly because the trail of our past is responsible for our present. Partly because we long for time to stop and in memory, if only for a moment, we can inhabit the past. The time before time moved on.
Memory. In a word, this is what interests me more than anything. Memory recalls what has happened. Yet, it is not static but dynamic in nature. It can change. It can be wrong. It can become more complete later. It is three dimensional. Maybe four dimensional. When we remember something as we experienced it, that is one thing. That is as if what we experienced was filmed as through our eyes. We are limited by that viewpoint. Then, perhaps, someone else tells us what they remember of the same event, and suddenly we have greater dimension. We see more clearly--we can be outside of ourselves.
I remembered so clearly my wedding. It was beautiful and tender and intimate and we followed it with a five week honeymoon in Europe. And the whole time we had such fun remembering the moments and the beauty and talking about what we had loved. And then we arrived home and we received the wedding photos. And suddenly, my memory of the wedding was replaced with a third person narrative of what it had looked like. I now can't remember any of it except what was photographed. So that my memory of our vows is no longer what I saw at the moment--the blinding nimbus of sun haloing Gordon's face--but an image of him and me standing aglow in the late afternoon sun. My memory now includes me--an image of me. Surreal.
And so memory--changing, grappling, rethinking the past--is important to me. Conceptually I'm intrigued by it. Emotionally I am pulled by it. Romantically I am moved by it. And it is even more interesting when connected to space. Every memory is clearly tied to the place of it's inception. Yet it is also connected to the physical space of each place it has been remembered from. So that as I type this now, I am both in the place where I first realized this, as well as walking along the path at Alamo Square park where I often thought about it, and also sitting at my computer in our old apartment in San Francisco where I first began writing about memory. In fact, we are transported to the space of memory. It is inhabitable. It is imaginary.
It is the purpose of this blog to be a total freedom for me. A space to write, and to be, and to relax without strictures. It is my own inhabitable imagined space.
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