hello, tuesday
June 16, 2015 § Leave a comment
Today feels a little like Monday, I started my day rattled and a little hurried. Yesterday I was prepared for routine, but last night I fell asleep distracted and unconcerned by the morning’s expectations. Piled into a late night moment of silliness with my family, I was completely unconcerned with tomorrow when dreams carried my thoughts elsewhere.
It’s summer, after all, school is newly dismissed and we’ve barely had time to become restless for our enthusiasm. Rain keeps interrupting outdoor play and indoor tasks beg sidelong glances and wishful thoughts of sunshine. We haven’t made vacation plans and our commitments feel a little cumbersome without the promise of escape.
There is no assumption of privilege in these wistful hopes, just the indulgence of undisrupted exploration and restful stillness. Something new to rustle the soul and engage the senses. Some days I forget that we choose our experiences.
So, today I’m charting my own course from my front door in search of happy, mindful moments of joy; meaningful conversations and mindful consumption, play and purpose. I’m dressing the day in my best attention and looking for a muse in the mundane.
to my children
June 14, 2015 § 2 Comments
Last Wednesday we piled into the car for a short drive up the street. The weather lately has been uncooperative, wet and cool then hot and humid. I was thinking mostly of the clouds as we drove the short distance, my eyes on the blue patches of sky second guessing the decision to drive; we might have walked after all, but then I was also already planning what we might need to do later.
It was in arriving that I lost track of all the mundane thoughts that had only moments before held my attention. Time stood still as years chased old memories around a tiny bundle of hope swathed in love. I can’t recall the last time I held such a new life or when the memory of your own infancy felt so tangible against the impossibility of your adolescence.
Sometimes magic sneaks up on us in plain sight.
Memories tumbled unbidden of days lost to old photographs and fractured reminiscing. It seemed a trick of sentiment that I could recall days long past with the clarity of yesterday even as you leaned curiously over the tiny sleeping form who fascinated us with content irreverence for our fussing. My children bent tenderly in respectful fascination over another’s miracle.
How quickly the years have slipped from the moment beneath my feet. Time is a funny measure of life, memories changing the weight of minutes into something we cannot so easily define.
Love, Mom
growing against the grain
June 13, 2015 § 2 Comments
Tomorrow our son will attend his first high school class without support. This is an exaggeration of course, he is not walking abandoned toward change. His teacher is as aware of his needs as he is of this newfound independence. We are, rather, moving against the familiar with a new experience of change. It is the way we accommodate opportunity.
For years our son has had the company of a personal aide in the context of his academic days. He has not yet matured into self sustained independence; still he is fiercely, passionately, willfully independent in his sense of self. Our experience is ever changing, consistently inconsistent; needs and ability contorting themselves into footholds of growth.
We do not succeed independent of difficult challenges. Neither are we alone in our accomplishments.
These past nine years we have evolved into an assumption of compromise and expectation of progress as we partner with professionals who meet us with anxious questions and eager uncertainty. There have been moments of crisis and conflict born of lessons in the disparity between professional training and necessary accommodations in anticipation of the spectrum of needs that inform the many experiences of special needs in mainstream classrooms.
There have also been humbling lessons in grace as we partner with rare souls who share our responsibility to our son’s education; learning alongside one another as we go.
I have come to understand that IEPs do little to guarantee resources and that kindness is a greater predictor of success. The labels that inform need also bind us to assumptions that are sometimes limiting in their generic untruths. We modify expectations without compromising our dreams.
This new moment is an anticipated uncertainty, one that finds me holding my breath, heart on my sleeve. Hope bound a little too tightly around so many variables I cannot control. In this experience I am exceptionally average, a mother with universal worries in an intimate experience of vulnerability.
So I try to gather words and a tender posture of faith, something that looks like confidence and feels like false bravado.
friday night lights
June 13, 2015 § 2 Comments
Last night the power flickered into darkness and we moved quietly from our separate corners of distraction into the kitchen. My husband and I unshelved decorative candles, remnants from a holiday I cannot place. Personalities grated in uncoordinated togetherness like the light interrupting darkness. We had only just settled into the unexpected when the electricity started flickering, arguing with the candles for importance; our children unprepared to return to the anticipated comforts over the fleeting adventure of improvised expectation.
Suddenly something unwanted became a choice.
We turned off the power and gathered around a board game, directing questions and sharing answers that brought enthusiastic giggles. The rules were forgotten and we ceased to tally correct answers, more interested in the back and forth of curious facts volleying across the candlelight. Slowly light interrupted our play, first to guide our meal preparations and then unintentionally as outdoor lights came to life.
It was imperfect and fleeting, but a happy disruption from the expected. Chance and choice conspirators in play.
blind spot
June 12, 2015 § 4 Comments
I’ve been thinking about the ways I comfort myself with easy untruths, kind dismissals. The way I talk around my fears and hopes until I push them a little further from the edge of my day, letting myself feel safe and inviting a quieter harm in procrastinating the pursuit of undetermined potential.
They are a blind spot of my making.
It happens predictably and unexceptionally. I skip the pool to hide physical insecurities, old demons of poor self-image. I sidestep confrontation for passive aggressive disinterest. I pass on opportunities from the sidelines of uncertainty. In most cases, the avoidance does less to shelter me from discomfort than it does to feed the voices of doubt that inform remorse.
They are often so habitual, these behaviors and self-talk, that I don’t see their harm until I change the pace or direction of my attention.
It happened most recently when I was perusing social media and noting the accomplishments of so many old acquaintances. Here’s an ugly truth, I remember thinking I was destined for something bigger than them. Years later I was a voyeur to opportunities differed; places I assumed I would travel, careers unexplored, tough goals tackled and public imperfections atoned.
The biggest difference between myself and familiar strangers was a leap of faith into uncertain success at the risk of uncomfortable error. I’ve led a beautiful life, safely.
So today I’m thinking a little about where I tip toe away from the edge, the places I retreat with my dreams into invisibility. I’m shining a light and paying a little more attention to where I disappear; trying to conjure a greater presence of self.
summer lessons
June 10, 2015 § 2 Comments
Each summer dawns an uncertain but welcome reprieve from the predictable rhythm of school day routines. Some years our family escapes to adventure and other years we fall into the structure of previously orchestrated distractions. More recently our summers have evolved into an experiment in spontaneity.
In many ways the absence of plans has been freeing, our attentions are driven by whim. We rush towards casual invitations and welcome opportunity. Other days we are tasked to a burden of boredom that forces us to a simpler necessity of creativity. On these occasions I am reminded of my own carefree summer days, unstructured and filled with endless drifting; the chaffing restlessness that grates against rusty daydreams.
There is one small exception.
Over the years I’ve cornered pieces of the day for studies and responsibilities with a language that demands we validate play with work. This summer I am reframing the idea of summer learning.
To my children,
In the past I’ve bought academic books to ration time for skills, this year I want to give you a question or idea each day to wrestle for an answer. There’s something about working off the page that helps us think outside the box. (This was Dad’s idea.)
Rather than demand chores for play, I’d like you to play at helping. Work doesn’t have to be monotonous and play doesn’t have to be an enticement. I want you to manage your time and space with good humor and moderation.
Instead of handing you book titles someone else has deemed of value, I want you to find value in your love of reading. I’m worried less about titles or tracking your time between pages.
Most importantly, I don’t want to account for every minute. Summers were made for getting lost and finding time. Move with the sun and play under the stars, the days are as long as the possibilities are endless. The lessons are everywhere if you’re willing to look at the world with curiosity.
Love, Mom
to my son
June 8, 2015 § 4 Comments
Tomorrow is the last day of your first year of high school. The last two school days have been test days, cumulative evaluations of mastery. Soon we will have a tidy snap shot of academic performance that will outline growth and highlight opportunities for improvement, but for today I want to dwell on your attention to preparation over the weight of your performance.
Whatever your marks, I’m proud of your effort. I noticed the determined bent of your brow as you drifted between subjects reviewing old material. I saw the nervous tension when you shepherded our pup outdoors into distracted play. I watched the way you returned after each reprieve to your studies without needling or nagging.
I noticed you trying your best.
I’m not sure I say that enough. Maybe its this stage of our experience, an unexceptional parenting phenomenon to offer a premonition of hindsight. Lately I hear myself cautioning potential harm without first acknowledging the brave certainty of your leap into chance. I miss the enthusiasm of your early lessons when I would stand aside uncertain consequences and celebrate your curious exploration.
Too often our conversations feel reactionary rather than reflective and I think that’s a pretty important distinction. I am going to try to be a better listener and to pay closer attention to the shape of your efforts.
I’m still figuring out how to be your mother, worrying so much about making the right choices that I sometimes forget to stand still in greater attentiveness to the reality of the present over the certain uncertainty of what may be.
I’m trying my best, too.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
June 6, 2015 § 2 Comments
Yesterday was your last day of elementary school. It was a week of long goodbyes and distracted celebrations culminating in an evening among classmates under the stars. You sang in harmony around the fire to the accompaniment of a guitar; chased noisy ghosts through an imaginary graveyard; played between doorways as we fought off sleep for stolen moments of conversation.
It was in the quietest of interruptions that I heard you whisper first for your father and later for me that I gathered the sweetest memory of the day. In the pathway that separated houses and divided the company of children and parents you guided our eyes with a steady hand, conjuring a constellation into our line of sight. In a day busy with friendship and celebrations, it was this tender discovery that guided my dreams.
Sweet girl, I hope you always navigate your time and company by a compass that is mindful and true; that you will find joy among friends and in the solitude of appreciation for quieter pursuits; that you may find magic in overlooked moments of possibility.
Love, Mom
long goodbyes
May 30, 2015 § 2 Comments
Nine years, more than half my days in motherhood have been spent in my husband’s childhood elementary school. It is the longest I have ever been a member of a single community; three preschools between two children and a kindergarten year in a different school district, my own education divided neatly between divorced parents. It has become a new normal, this space of my experience, and I cannot fathom the impossibility of goodbye.
Every day of the past nine years there has been a familiar face to welcome questions and offer guidance, hallways that lead to memories and individuals who have shared extraordinary measures of kindness as we stumbled over unfamiliar challenges toward personal success. I’ve leaned across the boundaries of parent-teacher conversations and witnessed loss and celebration with intimate expressions of grief and joy.
These men and women are my friends, but they are so much more than the sum of my memories. Despite the details we have shared over class conferences and play ground banter, these individuals are more complicated than my school year partnership permits. They have classrooms filled with families in need and years of families in friendship beyond my experiences. They are parents and children, friends and students, athletes and architects of dreams I only passingly understand.
Teachers and therapists, administrators and aides, they have chosen professions that anticipate personal investment and seasons of goodbye, but for me this moment feels impossible. I keep sounding out first sentences and last hellos not wanting to speak the inevitability of the week to come. A thank you that feels too small and a wish that feels too selfish.
misplaced memories
May 29, 2015 § 2 Comments
The neighbor woman leaned precariously over a nondescript blanket pulled across a corner of shade, the bend of her torso and angle of her head drawing me to a curious intrusion. I marveled at the balance of tension and peace, stillness and movement in the lines of her posture. As I lingered over the image tiny arms and legs batted at the sky and I remembered the shape of my own memories.
In much the same way my body sways to the distant cry of another child, I still feel the warm weight of my children against empty arms. The tired muscles and eyes heavy with sleep are ghosts of days long past; a story I tell without the ache of remembering. The phases of hopeless frustration and anxious uncertainty are only words in a hollow telling.
Then a stranger lost to an extraordinarily unexceptional moment rustles memories that scrape against the tenderness of slumbering emotions and everything past rushes into the present until this moment is not big enough for all that I remember. Today and yesterday feel jumbled in disarray and I cannot untangle grief and joy from the knot in my heart that catches in my throat.
