quiet time

Today is the first day of third grade. And tomorrow is the first day of eighth and eleventh grades. It's happening people. Buckle up.

Yesterday comprised a series of obligations and duties. A big grocery shopping trip with special emphasis on desirable lunchbox items, a stop at dreary Office Max with the third grade supply list in hand, loads of laundry, an errand for a friend that took too long, ordering new dance shoes and leotards as Beatrice has outgrown everything, counter and sink scrubbing in service of the ongoing battle against our current fruit fly invasion. It rained on and off all day as I crossed various parking lots pulling mask loops around my ears. In the late afternoon, gripped by box store-induced malaise, I walked into the house and announced I had to lie down with my book for 15 minutes and could everyone please not talk to me. 

I am crazy about the novel I am reading right now. Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin. It's about a nearly perfect person behaving imperfectly, and the toll it takes when one's outer and inner lives do not match up at all. At least that's what it's about so far; I'm midway through and so eager to find out what will happen to Polly Solo-Miller, the privileged cheerful caregiving woman at the center of the book who is having an affair. It was published in 1982 and I think I am supposed to stand back every once in awhile and think: wow, things were so different then for women! So glad the work of countless determined feminists stand between what it was like to be a 40something mother in 1982 and 2021! But I identify so much with Polly and absolutely never stand back and think that. I only think about how I should probably be thinking that. 

The book in part is about what happens when life breaks through the stories you were told growing up, then took inside and kept on telling yourself, about who you are supposed to be and what your life is meant to be like. Sometimes something happens that is not supposed to, and the pages of the script fall uselessly to the floor all around you. Your forty-two year old beloved husband dies of a rare cancer. Or in Polly's case, you fall in love with someone who is not your beloved husband. Everything you expected and operated according to the logic of no longer holds up. Who are you, exactly, if not the person in the story that once framed your life?

Her problem was not that she had fallen in love with Lincoln, or even what had made it possible to fall in love with him: her problem was herself. It was the yoke she put herself under, the standards she chose to adhere to, and the fact that underneath all the service, cheer, care, and nurturing was some other Polly she had not quite confronted.

Three years in, I have begun to interrogate my insides. It's so uncomfortable. Yet I am compelled. I find my own stories there, and I am not so sure about any of them anymore. 

Gabriel came to see me in my room ten minutes into my declared quiet time and stretched out next to me. The dog had already come in and draped herself across my feet with a sigh. (One of my strongest moments of recognition: Polly and I both love 'horizontal life' and would do most everything lying down in bed or on the floor if we could). I put down my book on my chest and told Gabriel I loved it. I read him a passage out loud about how to recognize people who had been to progressive schools that made us both laugh (they hold their pencils funny, because they were never taught to do anything until they felt like learning it). Then he went to get his book and came back and we both read for awhile. Then Beatrice found us and arranged herself crosswise over my hips, legs hanging off the side of the bed and arms outstretched towards Gabriel, reclining Superman style. I told her she could get a book too if she wanted.

No thanks. 

Okay, but this is quiet time. 

Okay.

After about five delicious more minutes, I checked my watch and groaned. There was lots more to do before dinner time on the last day of summer vacation. All I wanted was to stay right where I was. I made pathetic gestures towards getting up.

Poor tired Mama, said the children.

I laughed. I told them I wish I was better at being an adult sometimes, meaning I wish I was better at putting a brave face on doing things I don't feel like doing, and thus modeling pleasant dutifulness for them. Tricking them into thinking keeping this family afloat is easy peasy.

No, no, said Gabriel. It's better like this. Remember? In our family we tell the truth.

Yeah Mama, Beatrice agreed. You should be honest about how you're really feeling. We like it that way.

That response gave me the strength to shake the dog off, dislodge myself from under Beatrice, and slip on my shoes. 

In that moment I saw clearly that being a functional adult does not require papering over one's pain with false cheerfulness. I suspect that might actually be a fucked up vision of adulthood, especially womanhood, and an unfortunate set-up for the generations that follow us. It ensures inner-outer disconnect. It's okay to be tired and want more than anything to read in bed, and it's okay to do the things anyway. 

The enlivening sweetness for me was in the fact that my children were teaching me about it. Believing our stories so intently, both Polly and I had only begun to face our inner knowing - that being depended upon to gracefully take care of people without proper acknowledgement is exhausting and ultimately enraging - when we were well into our forties, and only then in the wake of life-upending events. But my kids seemed to know something about this with charming and improbable simplicity. Duh. Just tell the truth. You're tired. It's better that way, for all of us.  

It can be hard and lonely to take care of my children by myself. Also, I love them more than anything. And I do, amazingly, feel appreciated and seen by them. 

I hope the stories they are learning about who they are and what the world is like leave lots of room for the vast beauty and heartbreak of their real life experiences. 

I hope their insides and their outsides are never too far apart. 

vacation's end

On Friday I wrangled Beatrice into bed way too late per usual, and was rushing us through her goodnight routine with a distracted mind. It ends with a sacred 'two minute snuggle' which is typically performed in silence. If we start talking it messes everything up and we have to restart the clock and begin again.

So after the final five goodnights, I draped an arm lightly around her ribs two-minute-snuggle style and quietly settled in to think of all the things I still had to do before I could close up shop for the night, feel annoyed at myself for not doing more to mitigate Beatrice's perpetual sleep resistance, and begin to think of steps I could take to support earlier bedtimes. Until she interrupted my thoughts. 

Mama. Mama! C'mon. Snuggle like you mean it. 

She explained she is always the little spoon and as such depends on the big spoon to come a little closer and provide a proper nest for her to nestle into. She wanted full contact. All the way. Like I meant it; like my mind and my body were in the same place, right next to her.

Oh, you're so right. Sorry about that. 

I scooted up as close as I could and wrapped my arms and legs around her, tight, then let all that weight relax and crush her a bit. She laughed. 

That's better!

Before I confess the following, please forgive me for articulating challenges that are associated with having two months off in the summer. I know I'm really lucky. But this year in particular I felt oppressed by my own expectations. In June and July I expected myself to complete various house projects, train our dog, teach Frances to drive, teach Beatrice to ride a bike, make time to nurture and care for myself, garden, provide the kids with fun summer adventures, help Beatrice go to sleep at night in her own bed and stay there until morning, and...oh yeah, finish writing that manuscript. I wouldn't be working, so there would be plenty of time!

Well. A few days ago I told the three of them that I couldn't wait to be a working parent again. Turns out this whole stay-at-home gig is too exhausting. I do a lot of dropping off and picking up, grocery shopping, hopefully putting things on the stairs where they sit neglected until I take them upstairs myself, pleading with Bea to get off a screen, struggling to balance the often-conflicting needs of three people, nagging them to do chores, feeling guilty when they struggle. Just because I have two months off work doesn't mean anything about parenting gets any easier. I forgot. 

And it fills all the spaces. Every available nook and cranny. 

A friend and I wallpapered my bathroom but I haven't made the dining room curtains or put up paint samples. The hanging basket of flowers on the back deck has turned to a shriveled symbol of my inability to water regularly. Beatrice still doesn't know how to ride a bike; it is my widow's shame. It's so easy to focus on the things left undone. 

And it's the last week of July! A week from today I will go back to my office, where I haven't worked since March 2020. It's shocking to think how long it's been since I enjoyed lunchtime chats with my coworkers and in-person therapy in the quiet and cool of my office. These are wonderful things to look forward to. 

And when I begin, I will say goodbye to the summer expectations because my summer will be over. Honestly, there is some relief in that.

But I'll also have to say goodbye to 9:15 barre class, open time with my kids, sleeping til seven, admiring the sunflowers, and companionable hours during the day with my adorable, infuriating untrained dog. It's okay. And luckily I'll have August to acclimate before the kids' fall schedules begin and I will have to crouch inside my barrel and brace myself for the rapids and inevitable trip over the falls of multiple evening activities and transportation coordination and childcare and so. many. emails every night about school and dance and cross country and mock trial and music lessons. 

At least that's how a part of me is feeling. Serious Sunday night dread. 

But then I remember like you mean it. I want to mean it. I want to be there for my life, even when my life is being a stretched-thin solo full-time working parent of three. If I don't mean it, I'll miss the snuggles. I'll miss the sky, the taste of coffee, the outrageous pleasure of a hot shower. I'll miss them.

I saw a photo of someone I don't know's baby shower on Instagram this morning. My mind immediately took me to the memory of baby Frances's fat hands pushing down on my bare thigh to pull herself up to standing while I sat on the floor at my sister-in-law's baby shower so many years ago. Our baby with her enormous brown eyes and soft wispy hair, taking everything in, leaning into my body when there was a barely a boundary between us; she knew the warmth and solidity of me would always be right there for her like her own hands were always right there whenever she lost her balance. My heart hurt, the memory was so vivid. Frances. Now she drives herself to work with increasing confidence while I watch and direct her from the passenger seat.  

The pull of the current can be so strong. I have learned the powerful expectations I have of myself as a parent from my culture, my peers, my own perfectionist bullshit. It's impossible; a set up. You can't be there for your life from the inside of a jolting, bouncing barrel. You can't shiver with the pleasure of a baby's hands on your skin. I want to set an intention right now, on the cusp of this new almost-post-pandemic approaching-a-normal-that-never-was season. 

Here is my prayer: God, give me the strength to say no, to take a breath, to resist multitasking, to tolerate and even embrace imperfection. 

Help me to make the space to live like I mean it. 

sing a song

A few nights ago I dreamt I was writing a song. In the morning I told Frances about it. She listened with an open, smiling expression, and when I was done asked, well, want to write a song with me?

Hmmm. Yes! I mean, I think so. Can I do that?

Her invitation was delivered with simplicity and an implicit faith that writing a song was something we could definitely do, no big deal, like taking a walk or making a phone call. Like making breakfast. She happens to write amazing songs so speaks with some authority about the apparent mundanity of all this. So the next morning when I woke up way too early, even though I don't know how to write a song, I tried out some lyrics at the kitchen table.

She found them later - you wrote a song! - and then asked if she could try setting it to music. Which she did, I kid you not, in about eight minutes. We sat down at the piano and identified the parts that sounded way too sentimental, the lines with too many syllables, figured out what was missing and what could use more rhyme. The back of my throat gathered tears throughout this easy collaboration with my musical daughter. I kept telling her how she was blowing me away. She kept laughing and telling me it was just basic music theory, nothing special.

Are you kidding me? I don't think so. She is a songwriting goddess. The way she can arrange chords and make simple words fill up with emotion and meaning they didn't have moments before, when they were sitting flat and pencilled on the page, strikes me as magical. 

We went through a few versions and finished it yesterday. We sang it together for my mom, Beatrice, Diana and Teb last night after dinner; I could barely hold off the tears. It's a song about turning forty-four next week, which is the same age as my dad. It's about having to grow up without him, and not wanting to leave the space his years made, and I sang it with my daughter who will someday turn forty-two and contend with being the same age as her dad. 

Later, Diana emailed me the poem she had recently written after her uncle died, about the experience of going to the site where his plane had crashed with family. It took me breath away. Reading it, I felt something of what it was like to be there, the quiet and light, the absence and presence.

And then this morning I received a letter from my friend Christine, inside of which was folded a poem she wrote that will be published next month. The poem is about learning that Mike died while she was at the beach. After dropping Beatrice at camp and Frances at work, I only had time to read the letter before going to a barre class. Afterwards, sweaty and content, I climbed back into my car and sat parked on Prince St with the windows down, the cool morning air and sounds of street life gently pushing against me as I unfolded her poem. 

You can read it in The Southern Review soon, if you're interested. It is very beautiful and like Diana's poem, took me right inside her experience: the water all around, the sun too bright, the shells on the beach.

I held that piece of white paper lightly in my fingers and a raucous brass band outside the Market nearby began to play. The joyful music fully cracked opened the pain of Christine's loss for me - her son's godfather died! - and it filled my whole body. Just for a moment, a gasp. Then I took a breath and nosed into the flow of traffic.

And all of these brushes over the past twenty-four hours with words and music that stretch towards what it is really like to live in the face of loss, mystery, and love have left me with a feeling of poignant tenderness that pulsates right at the surface, right where my skin and the air touch one another. The tenderness is for our particular stories, but even more than that I am moved by our human impulse to take pain and make it into something beautiful we can touch and give one another.

A song, a poem, a porcelain teacup, a photograph, a dance. Art can contain a crushing avalanche of hurt and transform it into glistening veined pebbles, the kind you can't bare to leave on the beach but take home and save in a glass jar instead. It can take the brute absurdity and outrage of death and transform it into an exquisite shape we can hold in our hands.

I love that. I love being a person and living in this world with other gorgeous maddening yearning people who make exquisite things out of what we are given. 

After we sang our song last night, Frances asked me if I wanted to write other songs (that is, after she trains me up so that I can actually sing the songs I write, which she insists is possible). 

I think they'll all be sad, I said. I can't really imagine writing any other kind of song.

That's okay, she said. Me neither. 

(The Frank O'Hara poem up top was on the wall of an exhibit at MOMA,where Frances and I visited last week for her 16th birthday).

the best day of my life

On Saturday night I sat down on the floor beneath Beatrice's loft bed (after a decent effort we concluded it was too scary up there for sleeping, so long ago we slid another mattress into the ingenious space-saving nook beneath and kicked the furniture back out into her crowded tiny bedroom). She beckoned me closer, to snuggle for her bedtime routine, so I stretched out long next to her and wrapped an arm around her tidy ribs. 

How old will I be when Didi goes to college?

I had to think. Hmmm...you'll be ten.

And what about Gabriel?

Then you'll be thirteen.

Silence. We lay entangled, our private thoughts about that eventuality unraveling within us.

It will be just us. 

I know.

I told her I've thought about that a lot. Will we be lonely for them? Will we love being a pair, or will we find it unsettling and fill the house with friends?

As we talked more about it, Beatrice became increasingly concerned about what it might be like for us to be alone, until suddenly she looked at me and said, but wait - I've been thinking about this as if I will be the same eight year old person when they go away! I'll be so much older, I'll probably feel differently about things then.

I agreed, and brought up all the teenagery things she sees her older siblings doing now that she will probably want to do then. It will feel really different, to be so much older. But that ushered in a whole new wave of discomfort. The shift was palpable. 

...But I don't want to be really different. I want to be me. 

Ah, but you will be! You'll be YOU, just older and wiser, more and more yourself. Beatrice, you're more you every day, all the time. It's so cool.

This brought some relief, and the freedom to pursue a series of math challenges and figure out how old everyone in our family will be when she is fifteen and eighteen and twenty-two. It felt exhilarating to both of us, imagining all the incredible futures ahead, all the things we have yet to experience, what it will be like to be a family of young adults, doing extraordinary things out in the world and loving each other through it all. 

But as the numbers got older (especially mine, in relation to theirs) I could feel a dark turn towards mortality waiting in the wings and so put an end to our endless bedtime routine, extracted myself from the pile of blankets and pillows on the floor, and said goodnight. 

Don't go!!

I'm going. Goodnight Beatrice. It's very late. 

Can I read?

Yes, but only for a few minutes.

I went upstairs to say goodnight to Gabriel, and almost cried as I shut his door in parting, imagining him as a twenty year old (which is how old he'll be when Beatrice is fifteen, as we had just discovered). 

I went down to the kitchen to give the animals their last bit of care for the day and lock the doors and turn out the lights. I remembered how Beatrice said earlier: I love today! I think this is one of the best days of my life. Nothing particularly amazing had happened. The older kids had had their second vaccine shots the day before and were feeling low energy, thus we scrapped some other plans. They were off the hook for chores and we watched Sing Street together in the middle of the day. I blasted The Cure afterwards, and made a plan for us to go to the beach in July. Beatrice and I went to our friends' house for a little garden party and she practiced her cartwheels on the pristine lawn. I grilled hamburgers for dinner. I always feel like a badass widow when I use our grill. We ate on the front porch and watched people with their dogs wandering by in the lavish evening humidity. 

It was a beautifully uneventful, unbusy Saturday, and we spent it together. It was one of the best days of Beatrice's life.

No wonder she worries about the changes ahead. I do too. 

The thing is, I notice myself oriented towards the unknowable future often and casually considering the present to be transitional, in-between, on-the-way-towards. On the way towards what exactly, I'm not sure. A time when I'm a better therapist, more knowledgable and authoritative? Maybe a time when our house is as it should be instead of in-process, when the walls are all painted and the washing machine doesn't leak. When my body has achieved optimum fitness and strength, when my hair color is just right, when my dog  has developed some modicum of impulse control and doesn't bark at the neighbors. When I write that book already. And when I have fallen in love again with a beautiful wise and funny man with whom I will want to share all this poignant, abundant, messy life.

Because then this scrambling grieving widow interlude will end, and prove to have been the creme center of an Oreo, sandwiched between chocolatey parts one and two.  

The only problem with being in-between the times when my real life happens is that it makes zero sense. How could I think my life isn't already real, here and now, all the time? If I believe myself to be treading water, waiting for something new, something better, to happen, I will entirely miss the fact that I am a fucking ace swimmer, and that I've been kicking out towards the vast horizon for a long time now. 

Sometimes I practice this little Tara Brach thing to help me remember. I recommend it. Basically, whatever is happening, you respond with yes. I tried it last night while I was squinting in the sun, waiting for an outdoor choral concert to which I had brought Beatrice and our friend Annika early, in preparation for their performance. Yes. I'm hot, it will be another hour til the concert, I don't know a soul here, I'm irritable, yes. Those yeses encouraged me to wander around until I found a sweet library porch with comfortable chairs where I could read. Yes to my novel, yes to words. Yes to the sadness that overwhelmed me while I was listening to their beautiful music and Mike's absence squeezed my heart. (That yes invited tears that had been patiently waiting to come out). Yes to the sweaty summer crowd of families all around me, still a novelty. (That yes brought a smile). Yes to cicadas falling from the sky. (That yes, a laugh, tickled by their absurdity). Yes to not being able to find the car afterwards. Yes, definitely yes, to an ice cream stop on the way home, yes to licking towering cones of soft serve and sitting at a shabby picnic table at a country intersection, billboards and a shadowy crane dark against the sky that glowed its last gasp in brilliant pinks and oranges before the darkness fell, and it was finally time to go home.

I love walking to school with Beatrice. We have one more morning to go before second grade is over. Last week, we were playing a game on our way, and she dared me to tango across an intersection with her. Well, that yes was an easy one. Yes to tango. Yes to silly. A couple of days later, a woman waved us down near the school. 

I saw you two tangoing across the street the other day. I was waiting at the red light and you danced in front of me!

Beatrice started to turn red and covered her face. She peered at me between her fingers and whispered I'm so embarrassed.

I smiled at her. I smiled at the woman. Yeah, I admitted. That was us. 

You guys made me happy all day long. I just wanted to thank you. It was awesome.

That was it. She waved, we waved. That was my life happening, right here and now. 

I got distracted with something and forgot to tell Beatrice to turn out the lights on Saturday, after our long talk about growing older together. I ran back up the stairs and saw her light on and groaned. It was after 11. I'm so bad at facilitating healthy sleep for that girl.

I called out, Beatrice! Lights out!

She didn't respond, so I went in and found her sound asleep on her back, a book tucked under one arm, her face turned away from me, beautifully lit in profile by the warm glow of her reading light. She was wearing one of my shirts. 

Beatrice won't be eight forever. We know, we've done the math. But she is eight today! To which I say yes.