changing places
June 27, 2015 § Leave a comment
It is an ongoing conversation, a place of home. The comfort of familiarity over the lure of possibility. The temptation to move tickles the quiet of our ease into an enthusiastic wondering. The balance of our uncertainties, little voices of worry dressed as practicalities, caution us against impulsivity.
I’ve been making spreadsheets of change for as long as I can recall; notebook paper scratches tallying choices into an accounting of probability. Almost every outward decision stems from an internal question of wants and needs, responsibilities and opportunities.
In motherhood I have come to list my children’s hopes and fears in the same space as my own. Inseparable and unequal, there is an imbalance of importance; like a hand that lingers too long against the scale until it is impossible to weigh the value of change. Do I guard my children’s fears more closely than their dreams? What of my own or my husbands?
Are we selfish in our wants or crippling in our protection? A lesson in change or an unnecessary experience of loss? Do we wait for life to pull us into change or march fearlessly by a map of our own design?
My children cannot imagine a home without their friends anymore than I can imagine never moving. In the same way they crave stability, I itch toward the temptation to explore.
For now our decision teeters between the freedom to choose for ourselves and the burden of choosing for our children. Drafting daydreams and counting excuses.
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.
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
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.
mothering appreciation
May 24, 2015 § Leave a comment
In the earliest days of motherhood I met my husband eagerly with every fear, hope, and need. Tattered and terrified of all that I did not know, my husband held these confidences tenderly and we mapped our choices by need with love.
One such choice was to shun gifts of appreciation to model a less material gesture of celebration. I became so entrenched in the mechanics of less, that I undervalued the enthusiasm of more. My family demonstrated appreciation too quietly for my needs out of respect for what I presumably wanted. I had miscommunicated how I feel appreciated and the value of that need.
I don’t want anything is an unclear marker. It guides attention to what I dislike rather than what brings me joy. I was looking for those I love to navigate the intricacies of my silence rather than sounding out a subtext of need. Nothing was actually something; homemade cards and acts of care, words of appreciation and demonstrations of thoughtfulness.
On the eve of Mother’s Day I spiraled into a self-indulgent pity party. I had presumably changed the rules without talking through my wishes with my family and sabotaged my experience of happiness while cluttering my expression of gratitude with a need that felt shameful and greedy.
I’ve been trying to think about how to write this moment; questioning if it is important enough to take up room in my story. It feels self-serving to speak of my wants when addressing an occupation of the heart. So how do we, I, celebrate unselfishly and still my family in an expression of gratitude that validates my needs? And why is this important?
When I imagine my children one day parenting their own children or remembering my place in their childhood, I want there to be room for both joy and purpose. That requires that we know how to demonstrate appreciation and speak need.
This is where the answer required I shift my perspective. I was looking for validation and appreciation, to be seen where I might first need to guide sight.
Maybe this year my words and actions have not nurtured gratitude, perhaps my expectations of others have outspoken my words of appreciation. I am trying to recenter my actions to speak love more loudly. Remembering that to be appreciated we must first model appreciation. To be seen, we must first make ourselves visible and our needs known.
This year I am thinking of how we celebrate and honor those we love and spending a little more time consciously guiding my children’s eyes to the invisible places of care with greater awareness and appreciation.
therapy dog
May 24, 2015 § 1 Comment
There is no paper trail to validate this claim, no certification of care or qualification to our companion’s title. Instead there is only the quality of our days; the gentle, steadfast way she loves us. We are better people in her care.
Her affection is patient and kind, she nestles loyally into the perimeter of our attention when obligations distract us from play. There is no record of our errors, no anger in her posture; there is only the most innocent attentiveness to our emotions. She sits beside us in comfort and encouragement, a silent keeper of our worries and enthusiastic champion of good cheer.
She is the first face we see at the dawn of each day, a companionable shadow. The one who welcomes us home, with an unguarded pleasure. She moves cautiously between us and strangers with a purposeful sense of protection and, alternately, behind us with uncertainty.
Our children lean into her care, eager to tend to her happiness, but our service is deceptively unbalanced to her own. She draws us outside our rhythms of self into a sense of selflessness, from indoors to outdoors and from procrastination to play.
The part of me that resisted the unpredictable inconveniences, the mayhem of messes and the burden of need has found a greater dependency on her joy, a calmness in the chaos and a purpose in her need. I worried our responsibilities would consume our restfulness and freedom without knowing that she would rejuvenate us collectively with a reckless joy that jostled the expected into a curious new knowing.
sound & sentiment
May 21, 2015 § Leave a comment
Sitting on folding metal chairs stretched neatly across a familiar gym room floor, there is a sound to this memory. Children shuffling nervously and parents settling into quiet greetings, a scraping and rustling as we nestle into one another’s company. We are near the end of our days in this season of elementary school gatherings and today my heart is full of sentiment for the sweetness of this time.
It seems like only yesterday I was wrestling a wiggly toddler onto the same uncomfortable chairs, begging stillness from my daughter while my eyes sought my son’s over the chaos of children filing determinedly into position. Personalities as different as their eye color and years between their songs, both children began every performance with an anxious seeking until their gaze would relax into a reassuring smile.
This morning I marveled at the dance of time, my oldest’s teenage limbs folded uncomfortably into stillness as we settled into his sister’s school performance. Gone is the madness of restlessness, the quiet encouragements and pleas for patience. We have moved collectively into a new togetherness and I was left to note the unexceptional sounds of a too often overlooked moment.
Today my joy and sentiment push against the music of my memories, the present and the past scraping into the folding metal chairs that hold our place even as we approach goodbye.
on remembering
May 17, 2015 § Leave a comment
This year a woman I barely knew, a forgotten acquaintance from years past lost her battle with a terminal illness. The news found me last fall in the complicated algorithm of a social media news feed; a familiar smile disclosing the intimate heartache of a tragic diagnosis.
In the months to come I followed this woman’s story, cautiously counting my blessings with a guilty mindfulness for the unfathomable cruelty of another’s misfortune. I let her courage and kindness guide my attention.
Then I forgot.
Consciousness comes in waves. In one moment I am lost to my own distractions, caught in the machinery of the mundane as I move among my obligations. Then I remember the blessing of this moment, the complete irrelevance of so many cluttered details, and I unravel into a simpler attentiveness.
In these moments I say yes where I might have said no, I apologize or forgive where I might have lingered in harm, and I bend the rules to steal extra minutes with those I love. I’ve let the house get messy and I’ve been more adamant in cause for celebration.
I am trying to honor another’s life while demanding purpose and presence of my own.
We meet others at tender intersections of vulnerability and we invite their story into our own. In a world congested with differences, we are bound by the minutes of possibility between us.
when you were me
March 19, 2015 § 2 Comments
Do you remember when we first met? When you gathered your grievances into an introduction and named the injustice of your treatment as a daughter-in-law? You itemized each indiscretion, pointing an unforgiving finger at your husband’s family; the alcoholic father-in-law who was verbally abusive, the emotionally recluse mother-in-law who treated you as insignificant despite your best efforts to please, the favoritism in treatment of your children, their grandchildren, or the value of money over relationships.
I never met your father-in-law. I barely knew you when I watched your mother-in-law die, this stranger whose memories had been stolen by Alzheimer’s. What she forgot, you remembered. Perhaps she filled such a space in your mind it was inevitable you might become her or assign me your role; accidentally or intentionally you have created a cycle of unhappiness that has consumed any kindness between us. We are living your past, but I will not become you.
Do you remember when you were me?
secret keepers
March 18, 2015 § 4 Comments
We bought my husband’s childhood home, begrudgingly; overpaying at the expense of our pride. It was a decision layered with gestures of false generosity and cautious hope, like the wedding we did not want, we acquiesced to parental requests in an effort to please. Our home, our wedding, and the years of silence all payment for a peace that never came.
My husband could not live among his memories; truths that are not mine to share but read a sad tragedy, an impossible fiction of reality. He moved doors and ripped out dry wall, tore up the floors and built new walls; still the secrets reside like scars hidden in fresh coats of paint. No amount of windows or light can disperse the ghosts who haunt our joy; flesh and blood they move among new boundaries with old demons.
We build a life around these secrets, with the wisdom of a professional who guards these truths and family friends who stand witness to old harms and new, releasing us from the burden of someone else’s unhappiness. They stand witnesses to the past we do not name out of respect for those we love but cannot live with. Guardians of the past, the secret keepers who remember even as we struggle to forget.
scribblechic 