Vanatage point
It is raining softly, and the sky is the color of goose down. The fan oscillates back and forth, blowing paper ellipses across my studio floor. I’m starting to love this space. This place for leaving tracks across the page of my heart, for wandering and wondering, both.
Finches dart from twig to branch outside my window, calling each other and shaking raindrops from their wings. I’m grateful for the rain today after yesterday’s warmth. The past few nights we’ve had heat lighting, illuminating our bedroom with stark white light, and the days have been so hot and damp, clothes stick and sleeping seems impossible. Now the air is cool and gentle, and raindrops fleck the wooden windowsills.
I’m gearing up for a shift back to teaching, to being pulled in hundred different directions. I feel myself wanting this abundance. I love challenge. I thrive when I’m pushed, when an economy of action develops out of necessity, when my days are bursting
The past eighteen months away from work have been something I needed down to my very core. I needed this time to realign myself, to relocate my foundation and settle again into the house of my spirit. Like a bowl of water I gulped eagerly after a long hike, this time away from work with Bean ameliorated my fractured creative self, grown used to being pushed aside.
Now I have a studio instead of an office—I’ve given thought to where I put my paints and tools rather than storing them in boxes under the bed. I’ve adorned the walls and sills with artifacts I love: rocks from Long Island Sound; shells from Puerto Rico, prints I’ve made, photographs in faded black and white. This is why I feel ready to go back to fullness of my work as a teacher: because I have recharged and grown. I’m going back to something I’ve done before, but my vantage point has changed.
So I’m looking forward to returning to the daily activity of meeting small minds and giving them handfuls of ways to learn. I love the opportunity teaching provides me: to think ever flexibly, to see each child as an individual, and to discover how I can help them learn. I learn so much from this.
It’s such an interesting opportunity: to take time off, and to return to something that you love. A bit like time travel, I settle into the familiar setting of the classroom, with younger, less experienced versions of myself in attendance, as I gather papers and sort through books.
I’ve often wondered if other people have moments like this---where they encounter themselves and discover how abundantly they’ve grown. Because of the very nature of growing (organic and chaotic,) we hardly ever have the clarity and calm to glimpse beyond it while we’re in the process. We’re simply doing it. But then there are occasional moments like now, where I feel like I’ve landed on a smooth rock amidst the turbulence---and can see below me the vast topography of where I’ve been.
I’m always shocked at this. To see myself, different than I was. To catch glimpses of younger selves; to find their outlines smaller than the shape of now.
Self portrait as: trying to get the balance right
The morning after our fight feels exactly the way it does when you walk outside after a rainstorm: everything is washed clean, and light refracts from a thousand small droplets of water.
He looks different to me: maybe more like the person he really is. And as I watch him making coffee, I see that this is what marriage is: a process of holding the mirror up again and again for each other, so that we may see ourselves anew—and also, so that we may be seen anew. It takes both: to see, and to be seen, to become truly aware of ourselves—and despite the hurt of it, this is what we offer each other in the moments when we hurl words about in the narrow place of our anger.
I catch myself sucking in air, realizing that no matter how long we’ve known each other, I’ll only know a small sliver of who he is. This is why I’m grateful for our moments of tension---because they force something deeper to open, and for a brief moment I catch a glimpse of the him that’s bigger than the picture I already have.
It is so easy to grow accustomed to seeing only the part of him that is us. The person that picks up where I leave off, emptying the dishwasher, sautéing zucchini, running Bean’s bath, or the other myriad things we do together every day. Easier still to see him for the things he doesn’t do—the small, banal things that don’t really matter at all, that my mind alights on like a hungry vulture after a day spent giving, without time to myself.
Today I lie in the tall grass on the hill behind our house, all alone. The green is so vibrant here it almost sings: the foliage is such a riot of emerald hues, dense with insects and ruffled in the wind. I close my eyes and let go, feeling the earth spin.
I feel my cells drinking this solitude, replenishing the part of me that has grown sparse in the past few months, when every moment was jam-packed with responsibility for things that had very much to do with us, but never to do with simply me. I know he feels this too, this fierce need for time spent all alone doing things according to pure selfish whimsy. We both thirst for it, just as we thirst for each other, and this is the push-pull I think we’ll always feel. A struggle to find the balance between our separate selves, and the self that is sum of our love.
A year here
A year ago, more or less, I started this blog hoping to find a reason to come to the page every day. I have. You. Thank you. For your kindness, your friendship, your encouragement, your humor, your beautiful art, your appreciation. This blog has become a kind of lens for me, allowing me to look from a different angle back at my life. Most months I have come to the page almost every day and given something up. Some shred of my day, some moment, some thought. And the act of writing it, and sharing it, has altered it. Like sudden small diamonds pressed out of the carbon of daily life, I’ve learned to see things differently through this process.
I could not have imagined this outcome. When I started writing here, I still felt like I was an imposter as a parent. I was still in a riot of shock that I was somebody’s mother, and this was the place I came to start exploring this new role. Now a year into the thick of it, scraped knees feel second nature. But also, I’ve found art again: my brushes, camera, keypad. I’m so grateful.
PS—Tonight we sat outside at the edge of the lawn where the last of the evening sun fell in large swathes of yellow on the grass. We blew bubbles, and watched them float weightless and dreamy through the light. Bean, his hands outstretched towards each swirly blue and rainbow orb. Me, shutter happy as usual. See ?
A post mostly of pictures
Carefully pressed into the small nooks of my mind are thoughts waiting to be shaken out, like sheets after a winter’s storage in cedar scented drawers. I’m aching to tell you about a painting I’ve finished, to let down my hair and write wildly, with gusto. But not today. Today, my mind feels like the fine shards of slate that sheer away from the main piece, exposing layers of mineral color; patterns variegated and delicate. Too much in too little time, still. Every moment at the house, now often with Bean in tow (and like the trooper he is, he plays with wrenches and ratchets in the Pack&Play, narrating to himself softly in babblespeak.) Yesterday, the rollercoaster of sheer delight: the job. A first grade position at a school very near my house; abundant with professional development, resources, support. I can see this next transition---shifting back into the mode of teacher, but with the newly gained clarity, patience, organization, and rest that this year off has afforded me. I can imagine loving the daily challenge, the vibrancy of full-force ahead involvement, the laughter and camaraderie of colleagues. And graduate classes. Finally.
But today dawned drenched with rain and dark, and with the weather came other somber thoughts: finding Bean a just right morning daycare program (DH can pick him up at noon every day) looms now more daunting than any job search ever did. How do I do this? What should I look for? Ask? Say? (Advice please.)
Sunday I’ll get to write, and finish another painting—but tomorrow, it’s all day at the house again. We’re painting, and during our breaks, we saunter about inspecting the wild thicket of green and blossoms everywhere. Here, I’ve kept you in suspense long enough. Some pictures:
Oh--and and I absolutely HEART you all for all the sweetness of last post's comments.
Backyard blooms
Bean & I trapse around our tiny backyard in the city, where spring is bursting, full force. Everywhere, insects, sunlight, color. Furry yellow dandilions in dappled shade. Mud in crumbled earthworm trails. Fragrant, sweet tasting violets by the downturned wheel barrow. I watch as he plays. Sticks, mud, rainwater in flower pots. He's occupied for an hour. My notebook pages fill with inked lines and words. My shoulders soak up sun. I adjust aperture and look through the lens at his mud flecked grin, at the pale spider in the bowl of the dandilion bloom, at the swelling chive buds, veined with purple. Click. A smatering of perfect moments.
(A real post, ripe with updates, to follow. Pinky Swear.)
Moody
All day I felt tender, my heart prone to easy bruising. I awoke after too few hours of sleep to little Bean pressing the buttons on the clock radio, causing some sort of very lively Indian music to spew forth LOUDLY. It was kind of funny, in that other-worldly, ‘this isn’t really happening to me’ kind of way.
From there the moments just continued to fracture. Everything today felt out of synch, like I was always playing catch-up with each moment. Sadness kept staining the space around me as though it were the pigment seeping from crushed petals. So much is undecided. (I got an interview on Monday, and I’m terrified; we’re going out of town for the weekend---our first overnight hotel trip with Bean; there are only three weeks are left before we have to move; I think I have a stress fracture in my right shin, but I have to wait until Tuesday to see my very busy doctor.)
Guilt always crowds in at times like these. Bean didn’t really get any sit-down meals today except lunch, and his nap times were totally off. And, though I’m already sick of writing about the disappointment of my mother’s visit, she keeps creeping back in: hers is the voice that narrates guilt for me, and today I heard “I would never do that,†a hundred times as I fed Bean organic alphabet soup from a can, and let him bang wildly on a plastic piano in a toy store when he should have been napping.
But there was also this: the rainbow tonight driving home. And before it, a wash of gold over the distant mountains. The sky was filled with storm clouds as DH and I ate calzones for dinner on the lawn at our new house. Bean napped in the car. From below us, the sonic trilling of peepers drifted up. And when Bean woke, we took a walk, just the two of us, hand in hand. Through tall grasses, and then under the low-hanging cloud of apple blossoms, almost blooming. Five gnarled apple trees, their branches leaning earthward, make up a perfect hideaway.
1st time in the pool
A smattering of days, and he’s suddenly different all over again. My heart sometimes aches with the velocity of his changing, like Penelope’s tapestry, each day it must be unraveled and made anew to accommodate the greater love and wonder that I feel.
We went swimming tonight. His first time in a pool. His body abruptly feather light, his pale skin nearly transparent and beautiful. Eyes big, and lashes wet. But seeing is Daddy at the edge produced a thousand grins. Laughing as I blew bubbles near his cheek, he wanted to hold on to the tiled cusp of the pool. Even there, especially there, with the feeling of weightlessness, he wanted to climb.
In the locker room afterwards, sitting on the low blue bench by the wall in his new monogrammed terry robe from his grandma, he watched a three year old boy closely, transfixed. When the boy left, Bean went to each place he had been—touching the bright yellow metal locker, and then the mirror where the boy had stood, pulling on his swimming trunks. This is why I keep coming to the page: the fragility of memory will not hold this sweetness.
The way his hair still smelled faintly of chorine tonight, even after his bath; or the way he now reaches for his stuffed monkey, cupping his face into its fur to go to sleep. I want to capture everything, and startle to realize how I’ve already lost the urgent memory of when he was newborn, or how he used to push up before he could crawl, like some funny seal pup.
There must be some secret in this: that memory only holds so much. Perhaps we would not move with agility into the future of each moment, if we could fully contain the memory of each passing day. But days like today beg for more. More noticing, more attention. I want to saturate myself with this moment: the way the three of us, walking to our car after dinner, were an orb of family. Bean’s tiny legs wrapped round my waist, his arm touching his Daddy’s chest, and around us both, DH’s muscled arms.
Self Portrait Challenge #1: An introduction
Kath created a brilliant new Self Portrait Challenge Site, and in honor of it's creation she has challenged us to 'introduce ourselves.' Before I knew you...
there were several ill advised months as a red-head, an adolescence in love with the surf; whole days spent in the my bike saddle following the black ribbon of road up to Canada, or later, along the crumbling edge of northern California, with the pacific right below us.
we stayed out late, and sleep late; could make love any time; skip breakfast entirely, do nothing all day Saturday.
and later, there was the everyday collision of wonderment and exhaustion, my love spread out across the need of so many hungry little hearts with not enough attention at home, teaching words, and poems, and numbers and kindness.
and there were afternoons tossing a frisbee, or playing chess, or walking with our lanky English Shepherd who’d roll on command and was afraid of the water.
then you, making a space in my belly and then in my heart
and now I know you and I am different in a hundred ways.
Getting there
Spring up here in the north part of the country is a gradual unfolding. Each day, a little more--but not all at once the way I always felt it was in Connecticut. Maybe I was too busy to notice before? The lilac blooms before they've burst. The way the grass is suddenly lush. The outlines of branches no longer stark, but soft and blurred with buds and blooms.
In the backyard at the house, a riot of forsythia. Birds everywhere making nests. And the sheetrock is finally up!
Fingers crossed
“Go for it,†she told me casually from the edge where she dangled her long legs in the water. Her toes were painted red. I adored her. "When you hit the water, hold your breath and kick you feet, and don’t stop kicking.â€
I believed her entirely.
And I wanted to go down the slide so badly. I imagined its blue fiberglass hull was the back of a dolphin. Resolute, I climbed up the rungs of the ladder; up to the top.
I could see over the fence from there, into the neighbor’s yard—I could see their turquoise pool and waterslide, and beyond it, another pool in another yard. This is what certain neighborhoods were like in L.A.: back yard pool after pool, separated by high fences or concrete walls. A patchwork of postage stamp yards—with a stitching of bougainvilleas and roses between them.
But we didn't have a pool. And we didn’t live in a neighborhood like this. My dad always had a fierce attachment to having land (something I seem to have inherited), so we lived on two acres at the top of a mountain in Northridge, with a wild yard full of bamboo and prickly fruit and loquats. Instead of having pools, our neighbors kept horses.
So the whole pool thing was wildly exotic to me. A dream come true. The perfect antedote to the oven-hot of mid day. The perfect balm to scratched knees and boredom. The perfect escape.
Once I’d decided, I went for it, just like that. No second guessing. No long minutes wavering at the top. I climbed up, crossed my fingers, and slid down—the speed sending me hurtling towards the water, replacing breath with giddy glee. Then I hit with a splash and sank. Down I went, and down, and down.
But I held my breath.
And I started kicking.
And suddenly I was moving up and up, towards the blue bright surface where the water and air pressed together in a thin line. Then I burst through, gulping and ecstatic. I was swimming.
I'm still like this. When I decide to go for something, I simply do. I don’t waver. I don’t linger at the top wondering what if?. I just jump in.
Then I hold my breath and start kicking---which is pretty much where I’m at right now with my whole job search. I went to a school today that I’d love to teach at—close to home, and rich with opportunities for professional development. But it’s in the most competitive district in the state—and they've received close to 200 applications for just that one position. So I’m mostly just holding my breath. And kicking.
And keeping my fingers crossed.
Being related
Having a mother, and being a mother is a polarity I thought about often this weekend—How someday, invariably, my boy will grow up and his thoughts and ideas will shear away from mine like an ice berg from the polar cap. With unswirving certainty he’ll find criticisms of me; see me as different from him in fundamental ways.
Blood is a limited connective tissue—biological relation is only a small part of who we become, and I felt that this weekend, talking with my mother. Sitting next to her on the couch, I see small pieces of myself: my cheekbones are like hers, my nose. Occasionally, I hear a phrase, or a handful of sentences she says that wrap their way around an idea, and resonate with me. But most of the time her conviction, her intensely burning idealism, and her far flung beliefs: in palmistry, astrology, anthroposophy, cosmology, numerology, cause me to veer the other way. The outlines of our differences are stark.
I lean towards relativism; my reality shaped more by day to day experience than by esotericism. I value truth—both sacred and factual, as it resonates for me, but I don’t expect other’s to see it as I do. There are as many ways for knowing god as there are people; similarly for living a good life or raising children.
Childrearing came up a lot over the past few days, and I found myself always second guessing the things I’ve grown accustomed to trusting. Her perspective on raising a child is based on the implementation of a strict rhythm: meals and bed times marked indelibly onto the meridians if the day. She values a certain stoicism too: crying it out is a method that works for her, and doesn’t rip apart her every nerve.
The teacher in me has already for years valued the way children thrive in the security of a structured day—and routine is an important, predictable background onto which the daily activities are superimposed. But I also feel like there is a place for the willy-nilly glee of deviation; of following a whim, of breakfast in bed, of dinner out late on occasion, or skipping a nap for the sake of an adventure.
I try to exhale and shake off the residual tension that’s found its way to my shoulders and heart over the past couple of days. Outside rain is falling again and the cherry blossoms are just about to burst into bloom. Suddenly the house is filled with shrieking, and the patter of small running feet, coffee being made, the cats being chased round and round the kitchen island. On the counter, the bright orange roses my mother brought home for me from the market. We’re both growing.
I maybe shouldn't have run to get the camera first...
...But I couldn't help it. It was just too funny: the sound of catfood falling, and then his immediate wail of utter woe. Catfood. Everywhere. He could not be consoled until I got the dustpan and brush and showed him how to sweep it up. Such a sweetie, he is.
The taste of dirt.
Spring is all about mud in these parts. The roads are thick with it, and around the edges of the lawn are patches of soaked ground, perfect for poking sticks into or finding pebbles, and Bean has fallen in love with DIRT.
Where my heart finds home
When my heart begins to flutter like the fins of a hundred small fish with worry about the things I cannot control, I seek out wild places where words no longer matter. Where language is the drip of snowmelt, the rat-a-tat-tat of the early woodpecker, or the calling of the chickadee.
Today I explored a small corner of the several hundred acres of woodlands behind our house.
With Bean in the backpack I begin to climb, feeling his weight transfer to my hips. Soon I hear the thrumming of my heart in my ears, my cheeks flush hot, and my lungs find a new cadence as I as I move. At first Bean’s small voice rings out clear among the stands of trees, branches still bare save for snow in nooks between limb and trunk, but soon he grows drowsy with the steady side-to-side movement of my gait, and drifts off to sleep. Then I hear his tiny breath whispering softly above my head.
I smell snow, metallic and sharp, and the tang of newly cut wood where someone has come before and cut away a tree fallen across the path. After a while, I’m not anywhere else. Just here, balancing on small stones to cross rushing streams where the water runs clear and cold and sparkling silt gathers in pools on the mud below. Just here, where everything is still, save for the dripping of snow melt falling from trees and the trilling of an occasional bird. Just here, where my muddy tracks cross the tracks of wild turkeys, then field mice, then a vole’s. Many tracks I see are partly obscured in the slush, their edges melting.
I come to pool after pool of water, each like a piece of amber with last autumn’s leaves glowing from below the surface. Snow fell yesterday here, and everything is saturated, slippery, muddy. Sometimes my shoes stick and as I pull my foot away, the mud sucks it back.
All around me is forest. Above me: a halo of delicate branches. A filigree. A vast network of capillaries: twigs running with sap, buds just forming everywhere. Most of the trees are young—small enough to wrap my arms around, wrists overlapping; but some maples have been here longer—their trunks burly and split open, their gnarled branches reaching up thickly into the sky.
After a while I turn my attention to the worry in my bones and find it has melted with the snow. This is now. This is all I have. Moss adorned with water droplets, new shoots of green pushing up through wet snow. Here my heart is home and this is all that matters.
(p.s. I am feeling better—thank you for your kind thoughts. A day of rest was seriously needed. I may have spent most of yesterday asleep. I'm not sure. :)
Also, more pictures are here.)
Feeling giddy
What a difference a day makes. Not that yesterday was really so bad—it’s just that more than twelve hours of non-stop one year old can lead to moments of well, that picture said it so much better than words ever will. But the weather has been the perfect antidote to the stir-crazies, and today we went on our first bike ride of the season—just a lazy jaunt down to the waterfront & along the bike path to the beach.
Everyone everywhere is suddenly out and about, baring skin, kissing, or lying face up to blue glazed bowl of sky that was perfectly empty of clouds today. There was a certain aliveness in the air today. Everything is getting busy. Literally and figuratively.
With the onset of warmer days, drenched with hours of sun, everything is suddenly sensuous after a winter of comparative deprivation. The college kids are everywhere, in throngs, performing intricate mating rituals, much like the pigeons in the park and the wild circling gulls at the beach.
It was Bean’s first experience of sand—he went last summer to the beach but was so small then. A tiny, barely crawling big eyed boy who stayed on mama’s lap. So much changes in a half a year. He was running every where, willy nilly down the hill. Falling, stumbling, rolling, laughing. And then he came to the sand and stopped. And sat. And promptly fell in love.
Thankfully he seems to be past the stage of eating it. Instead he fingered it, looking in utter amazement at his disappearing and reappearing toes. He stuck sticks in it and stirred it, and scooped handfuls and stirred some more.
DH and I played with him on the beach, feeling the same wild spring fever as every other creature in sight, and managed to steal a handful of moments just us, after we got back. I’m still smiling.
