I sometimes feel as though I am whipsawed between two polar opposites who war in my body, and my mind. The “responsible me” who makes choices based on what is “safe” or “smart” and “dreamer me” that is trying to push past my fear, take risks, be brave and who (if I listen to my gremlins) risks sending us to certain doom.
Truth is I am neither of those people. I am fiercely resilient and a problem solver and someone who can look at any situation and give you best and worst case scenarios in the time it takes to say my name. I am a planner and an implementer and a person who can see all sides of a situation with a clarity that is alarming. I can see into hearts with tenderness and know what frightens and gladdens you without needing to hear your whispers. But, when you do whisper, I cherish what you shared as though it were the secret to everything. I am not religious but I am deeply spiritual, even when (especially when) I seem to lose my faith. I have known deep pain, and real loss, and given myself over to the Universe time and time again, only to find a new way emerge out of what at times felt like an impossible tangle. Several times over I lost sleep desperately afraid that I would lose everything. Indeed, I have lost lots of things (more than I would like) but never myself. No, even though its been very dark at times, and I have stumbled and tripped and turned about in circles, I never lost hold of myself.
Let me tell you a little secret. I am both extraordinarily happy and flat out scared these days. Often both at the exact same time. The happiness and fear–well they stem from the same piece of news in my life. I am, as a single mom, with no other means of support and barely any savings, planning to head back to school to open up a new life that has been calling me.
It is a choice that will mean student debt and a reduced salary and a choice to stop climbing the career ladder that has for so long defined me. It means financial gymnastics and the end to luxuries like bookstores and movie theaters and take out food and new clothes and air conditioning (and who knows what else). It means the end of my own house as I take in a housemate and the end of saying “of course” to Max without thinking about what we give up. Its means thinking about the price of gas before dashing across town. Its a choice that may mean giving up on providing Max a solid chunk of change for college in exchange for teaching him about following his heart and doing what others might say is impossible.
It is also a choice that means embracing something that feels as natural to me as breathing–finally choosing a path that may at times be challenging but never is hard.
The fear shows up sometimes as that exhilarating kind of scared you get right before jumping out of an airplane or riding the latest roller coaster. Sometimes its a dark kind of scared, like you feel when all the lights have gone out and the snow is piled up and you think you might just never get out again. But then, when my mind stops and I can listen to the song of my life, there is a happiness, a contentment, a feeling of relief and peace that comes when I no longer thinking– just doing–taking steps, shuffling one foot in front of the others, knowing that slowly, slowly I am making my own life– not simply making do and dreaming of a way out–but making my own way.
I am making my way as I make my bed and I sit in meditation and take my vitamins and drink my water and eat my breakfast because I know that self-care is fundamental especially when going through transitions.
I am making my way as I make Max’s lunch and discuss what we learn from TV (good and bad), as I drive him to school and help him with homework and put medicine on his feet and read him to sleep because even though he and I are both changing and growing with dizzying speed, my love for him is the North Star, the one true constant in my life.
I am making my way as I make my train, make appointments, make my meetings, make conversation, make eye contact because I know the most important way (perhaps the only way) that I make a difference is simply by showing up.
And yes, I am making (and remaking) budgets, making choices, making phone calls, making proposals, because this forward moving action, however slow or small, is the only way I will welcome in the change I seek.
I write here on this blog to a small circle of friends. Some I know in “real life”, others only by your sweet comments or lovely emails. I never mind the silence here but on the scarier days I need to know that I am not alone. If you come here, tell me so and hold my hand as I keep making way.
The daffodils that Max and I planted with John are now in full bloom
Six months ago, by the light of the bright moon, my friend John and I dug in earth and planted a daffodil with a wish wrapped around it. He had come to the house, after hours of writing his law school essays. He was frustrated and blocked, momentarily out touch in with his own amazing potential–the big dream of his life loomed huge, a mountain insurmountable. So he came to take a break and I dragged him out to plant daffodils.
Max and I wrote our wishes for John on pieces of paper and he too played along. We went outside and planted them, and then having declared what we hoped for him we all gave them over to the earth and recognized that like the daffodils–they too would bloom in time. I told him that now that the Earth was holding those big dreams he could let go of the “biggness” and focus on what was immediately in front of him. I think he thought me a bit crazy (as he often does when I drag him out to do these things) but he listens to me because I cook him dinner and tell him I am old enough to be his mother.
We watched the Caps game and cleaned the house. We stayed up late talking and even spent some time trying to break open the stickiness he was feeling around his essays. Somehow the weight of that essay–the need for it to be amazing as though it was a magic key that would unlock his dreams (or forever keep them hidden away)– made it so big. But I told him if he could just let go of all the meaning he was putting on the essay and write he would have no trouble. He is a gifted writer.
The next morning after Max’s hockey game John went home to write one of the best essays in the history of law school applications. I am sure it would have happened anyway but some how letting go of the big huge massive vision of the change we wanted, trusting it to the Earth or to God or to whoever makes sense to trust, made it easier to take the immediate steps. Its a lesson I keep forgetting but remember frequently with joy.
This weekend I have a heart both heavy and full. Yesterday, 6 months to the day when John planted his daffodil, he left the city where we became friends and headed out to begin his new life at his first choice law school, a top ranked school which not only accepted him with open arms but offered him cash as well. I am so incredibly proud of him for all the tiny steps and big leaps he took to walk the path toward his dream and I miss him because he was in every way a daily inspiration.
For so long now I have been overwhelmed by a very big dream myself, a dream of becoming a healer. On a good day it feels still just out of reach and on a bad day I can think that I am bat-shit crazy. To even get to the place where I thought I might be able to do this has required so much transformation and change and release of fear. All fall, I planted hundreds of daffodils myself, each one of them a prayer that I asked Mother Earth to hold. The flowers are blooming now and for me well its time to get cracking.
All spring, I have been consumed by hundreds of small steps that may just open up the path for me. Truth is I have been walking it already but now after months of slow wandering, it feels as though I am sprinting down it at lightning speed. There are thousands of tiny (but huge!) things that need to be done to pull me a long and I run the risk of getting paralyzed by each of them. We are renting our basement and I need to find the right tenant, line up the contractors to do work on the house (so said tenant can come in). Line up my financing, apply for scholarships, restructure my current paid work, figure out new ways to plug the gap between what I will be making part-time and our current expenses. And yes, I am doing all this while trying to keep our life humming along. To quote a dear friend of mine, I feel like I am balancing a refrigerator on my head. I could at any moment just give up and let the whole thing come crashing down, declaring that it is too damn hard.
But instead I keep remembering what I told John that chilly October night. Give the big dream over to the Earth and let her hold it and just do what is in front of you–right now. Don’t give it too much importance. Just walk, tiny step by tiny step and trust that if you do that, one day, that dream will blossom.
Seven years ago this weekend, Juan and I stayed up all night and he told me he was leaving. It took him another year to leave and several more for the divorce to become final. Its taken 3 years for other details to be laid to rest, property to transfer, documents to be signed. Years later we are still navigating and negotiating–consulting about rides to karate and child care back ups and sick days. Nothing is ever gained or lost–it is just transformed and so too it is with the kind of commitments one makes to our children. But something feels big about crossing over the threshhold of seven.
Even as I write I am crossing a big milestone. I am putting stamps on the final document I need to send in–at least what I think is the final document to lay to rest another detail, the final big one.
One last big step away from an us that ceased to exist that night 7 years ago and one more step deeper into the magical and marvelous life that I am building–step by step, breath by breath, glorious morning by morning.
Seven years is a very long time. When things take that long to fully dissolve it can create a kind of inertia. The documents that needed to be mailed sat on my desk all week. In a timeline that has unfolded this slowly, a week is but a blink of an eye.
Sometimes I can get so frustrated with myself and the slow pace with which my life has seemed to unfold lately. Even the simplest of tasks seem to take longer some days. And yet, the landscape of my life has not changed by earthquakes but has instead been shaped by a slow steady rain, years and years of patient life giving rain that has worn new paths, shaped stones, grown trees and moss. Looking out at my garden I am in awe of the beauty that has resulted. Yes it is transformed, quietly, slowly. When I look at the results, who am I to curse the pace?
Some things take longer. Lifetimes or centuries. Millennia even. In the scheme of things, what is seven years? Seven years to finally put to rest something I thought would last a lifetime doesn’t seem that long, even as it feels like an eternity.
And yet there is something about the passing of seven years that makes me stand and take notice. Springing out of bed, as though an alarm has sounded. Enough already. Lets get moving.
Seven feels like a complete number, magical and round. Time now to dust off my hands and whatever inertia is left and move up and out and all around. Shake the earth and move the boulders. Its time. Its time.
I just made the mistake of reading a long back and forth on someone’s facebook page–the kind of rants inspired by wars and Wisconsin. I never should read those diatribes. They never lead to anything good. Case in point: I am having a hard time breathing.
I am having a hard time these days with lines drawn so firmly in the sand. With open hands turned into tight closed fists. Mine. Yours. Fights and struggles over who deserves what. Name calling. Power plays. People not wanting to share.
The illusion that seems so real to so many, the illusion that we are separate seems to be all I see and hear and feel these days. It hurts my heart. The constant infusion of fear and hatred (You are going to take what is mine! you have more than me! You don’t deserve the (fill in the blank)! ) is suffocating. Crushing.
Truth is we are one. Connected and intertwined whether we like it or not. Your poverty hurts me. You joy creates space and openness in my life. Its that simple. When your blood spills it pollutes my water. We are in it together though we like to pretend that its a zero sum game.
I don’t know how to stand in such a mindset anymore–that place where someone has to lose so that someone can win. One where we only get richer by making sure that someone doesn’t get what we have. One where we are constantly vigilant for the thief who will rob us blind, or the neighbor who will take too much if we are not careful.
I am not naive. I know that thieves and liars exist. I know that those who worry that no one will ever feed them in the lean times will horde now leaving still more to starve. I also know that those who share everything they have risk going hungry by giving. Recognition that we are so interconnected and acting upon this recognition requires the greatest act of faith.
And yet I am beginning to see that there is no other way forward.
Tuesday nights are rink nights. After hockey practice I untie Max’s skates and while he is undressing get in line at the grill at the rink to order our dinner. Its always the same–a piece of pizza and a red gatorade for him, chicken and fries and a small coke for me. And his friend D. is always right behind me with a $20 dollar bill and his order: two hot dogs, a coke and a venti skim cappuccino for his dad. He leaves a nice tip for the grill guys. I like that about this kid. I always let him cut me in line because I like that so much.
One by one the 9 and 10 year old boys piling in to the booth next time mine where I sit with my computer. Dads are allowed to hover nearby but this mom needs to stay at a bit of a distance at least one booth away. This is male territory. They laugh and tell stories and quote movies and run around turning the grill into a basketball arena. No one seems to care as these cubs tumble about. Everyone seems to acknowledge that these young men are the princes here. And when their dinner is finished they each dig for pocket change and head for the rink’s arcade.
It brings such heady joy, this ritual of ours. The air is thick with silly boy joy. I can’t help but smile, reveling in the simple sweetness even as I hang back–a witness. I bring my camera because I want to capture its sweetness, so that I can remember that this is our life. Our life is a string of moments like these–moments of connection and friendship and learning and laughter.
Our life is also tears in the locker room and homework not yet done. Its it chores and messy cars and spilled milk and a frantic desperate gymnastics to arrive at school and work on time. It is forgotten lunches and major disappointments and sick days when I have to do the conference call anyway and he thinks that means that I don’t want him with me at work. But it is a steady stream of nights like this when love is a piece of pizza and a handful of quarters and your buddies all around.
*****
Hockey is now over. I started to write this post sometime in January I think when it felt as though that rhythm of our life would never end, when I was awakening to the joy that that slog to the rink and the late nights and early mornings offered. But it has ended. All things shift and so we are spending our Tuesdays doing homework and setting up tents and getting the laundry done. We spend our weekends cleaning up the house and the yard, getting ready for baseball and swimming, plotting sleepovers and catching up with our our life locally.
I wanted to hold onto the sweetness I discovered this winter so dearly. I spent many tortured minutes second guessing my decision not to put Max in spring league this year. I knew our schedule would not abide it but I wanted so badly to not let it go.
And that is precisely why I held firm. My resistance to letting the season shift and change is why I decided we wouldn’t. I needed to practice letting things evolve naturally. I knew that holding on so tightly would not serve. Pushing ourselves to keep it going–just to keep it going felt wrong and counter to the easy way that hockey unfolded for us this year. As hard as it was to let go of something beautiful I know I needed to just to give space for more sweetness to be born. I want to teach Max how goodness comes into our life and how we can’t grasp at it like sand but instead need to let it go, transform, develop–that goodness is abundant and will flow differently, never stopping but always changing, always changing.
Not going to the rink means I need to call those families that I loved and miss seeing and show up at their house to eat spicy red kidney beans and brown rice. It means plotting sleep overs and reunions at stick n pucks. It means sending pictures in the mail and yes it means piling into the car and heading to the rink with the boys to watch the dads’ game and to cheer loudly for the men who had become so dear. We can do that now that we have the time. Creating the open space opens doors to new goodness.
Tuesday night we had no hockey practice. With a championship won and spring upon us, the long nights and early mornings at the rink have come to a pause. We have left the hockey season behind.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn’t know how to stay on-sides and who was tentative on the ice. Now there is a hockey player who is aggressive but does not cross the blue line without the puck, who passes with precision. In between was a coach who praised and encouraged and sat and taught and quietly smiled when he succeeded, who would tap him on his helmet when he got off the ice.
I opened the fridge at dinner time and realized there was nothing there. I had long since stopped cooking on Tuesday. For the last five or months we had rushed right from school to the rink, done homework at a table in the diner and after practice, ate our dinner with the team at the tiny diner. The boys would take over the booths, then dash to spend allowances at the arcade or shoot neon bouncey balls around with their sticks while we adults lingered at the counter. I give up and order pizza. I will have to shop for dinner tomorrow.
Once upon a time was a boy, all alone, who stepped onto an ice sheet full of strangers with head bowed, wondering if he would be accepted. Now there is a hockey player, who bursts through the locker room door with his head held high. In between was a kid with a hot dog in one hand, a goalie stick tucked precariously under his other, who pushed his way into a booth with the new kid Max. In between was another kid who knelt at his side when he was down, another who taught him to play the games at the arcade, the boy who always told him something positive about his play and one who told him that his mother was “the source of his greatest strength”.
On my coffee table is a stack of CDs with photos I have taken, labeled for each boy who face appears on the disc. I am shipping copies of my photos off to all the parents this week. Each of these boys tugs at my heart in different ways–it might be his soulful wisdom, his bouyant energy, his fierce loyalty, his joyfulness, his drive, but each boy carried a gift with him into the locker room, a gift I watched blossom with awe. I know each of their numbers by heart and have called their names over and over again out loud. Their parents too stick with me, and I think of them throughout the day, wondering when the adoption they have been dreaming about will come through, and praying that they stay safe while they fight that big fire, wondering if they will stay warm on this cold cold day while they work outside. Thinking about the miracles of family life that unfold in each home each day.
Once upon a time was a woman, who felt so small in this huge rink with its activity and the crush of strangers, who felt shy in the tiny locker room, tripping over other people’s bags. Now there is a hockey mom who walks into the rink with open arms and ready to wrap around someone in a hug, who holds her breath when any child has fallen, who tells the boys their stats while she tells them to pick up their clothes. In between were skates to be tied, equipment to be helped into, quarters to be loaned, juice boxes to be passed, penalty boxes to be guarded, scoresheets to be filled out, clocks to be run and photos to be taken. Thousands of tiny inconsequential moments that strung together, changed everything.
The championship trophy sits on our mantel, a central place of honor. Hockey was the center of our schedule for so many months, a pulse that pushed us through the darkest days of winter, so it seems only fitting. The golden trophy reminds us of what 15 boys can do when they learn how to work together, and how interconnected they all are but it also reminds us that this season was once magical but is now passed, the battle won, the trophy gained.
After a weekend of togetherness and parties, it was at last time to leave on Sunday, without any firm plans of when we would see each other again. No games on the schedule, no practices to make, the last party was over. Max stepped onto the driveway of his coach’s house and in the safety of the darkness collapsed against me and started to sob, saddened that this wonderous journey had come to its end. I held him, practically carrying his big boy body to the car, biting back my own tears for his sake. “I know baby…I know.” It was all I can say, it is all I can say.
A wise teacher once told me that nothing is ever gained or lost, it is only transformed. As I manage my own grief over the loss of such a sweet adventure, I repeat this wisdom over and over. Not lost, just transformed. Not lost, just transformed. Truth is it has always been transforming, always changing. The beginnings and endings are sometimes clearly marked with ceremonies and trophies and parties, but often they are blurred and more subtle. We have all been transformed all season by love: a love of hockey, of our children, of coffee at 6:30 am, of quiet time with our kids in the car, of pizza and hot dogs and pancakes, of arcade games and stories, and and lastly of each other. That was the magic we all felt. That transformative, alchemical love.
Emails are flying around tonight. We are camping together in June. Watching the Caps in the playoffs in May and yes…meeting at the rink for a stick & puck session on Saturday. The spring will give way again to a hot summer and the pool and grills. We will run around in sunshine instead of huddling in the cold rink. Some will fade away, others will join.
And we will not be lost, not at all, just transformed. Over and over again.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
Every Wednesday night, more or less, for the past few years have been guitar night–when Jeff comes over and when we pour wine and laugh and talk hockey and politics and and play our guitars. We often start with a lesson and then we play some together just for kicks–the songs I love to sing. And then as the night grows old (and I grow sleepy) my friend plays for me as I curl up on the couch and delight in homemade music. Sometimes I sing, and every now and then I dance, but mostly I just listen.
Witnessing a song being born can make my breath catch and cracks me open. “Play me something new” I always insist. When we first met, Jeff played me old standards, but I quickly demanded to hear his originals–the ones he rarely played out. Now, if I am lucky I will hear a song that he wrote just that morning. Tender or wistful songs that offer me a glimpse into a part of my friend’s heart I hadn’t yet known.
When I got my camera, I knew that I wanted to take pictures of my favorite people’s hands, going the things I love to see them do. Yet, I was shy taking out my camera to capture his hands as he played for me that night. I who write or do my art in the safety of solitude, I was confronted with the rawness and vulnerability of creating in front of someone else. Suddenly, in the simple act of raising the camera to my eye, I understood the level of courage it takes to share a new song and in that moment almost drowned in gratitude for what happens in my living room each Wednesday night.
Some days are harder than most, the days when even the most simple of tasks weigh heavy and it is as though the entire universe has dug in its heels and says NO! Days when disappointment and frustration is palpable and progress is laughable. When everything feels impossible. On those days there is only surrender.
And then, sometimes, in the silence that follows the giving up, there are quiet whispers that promise a way forward, or at least change of some sort. Perhaps its an idea, more often its a flower, or a bird song, or the kindness of the guy at the mechanic who is more upset than I that I still have no windshield wipers and the rain is coming…Something that holds me gently and suggests a step in a new direction, or maybe just another breath.
So often, however, I don’t hear the wisdom through the silence but instead am wailing and gnashing my teeth at the unfairness, consumed by my own despair over the endless spinning. The pushing and the wailing both feel so noble but they are no more than an exercise in exhaustion.
I am learning sometimes that giving up and giving in is the wisest of moves. Ironically, it is the only thing that allows me to conserve the energy I need to keep on keeping on.
I don’t know how to teach my son stamina–how to teach him to keep moving forward when the winds of life are pushing back, sweeping sand into his eyes. So much easier it is to sink into the ground, on knees, crumple into a heap, or lay in a position of rest with face to the sun, like a cat with her belly exposed and the sunbeam warm. Is there wisdom in that place of laying down? More wisdom than in the pushing forward against the wind to no avail. What can be learned in that place?
Are we really weak when we admit we can’t go on? Or are we strong to admit that now is not the time to push forward anymore.
I have one of these cool journals. A ten year journal where you have just 4 lines to capture the essence of the day. It is laid out so that on one page one can see what happened on the same day over a period of ten years. February 19, 2009…February 19, 2010…February 19, 2011. After writing the days news yesterday, I looked back over the last three years and sighed. “Nothing’s changed,” I shrugged. Reports of ice time and Caps games and playdates. Same problems, same sadnesses, same simple pleasures that stitched together a day. I grumpily closed my journal and turned over to turn out the light, murmuring about the lack of movement in our simple little life.
But the simple fact is everything changes. All the time. The sameness is just an illusion, a cheap trick. But all it takes is a shimmering ray of sunlight to break the trance.
In the last 3 months, this boy has grown an inch. He’s made friends this year, who don’t live so close to home, on the other side of the county. The first night that he is over there, it is as though he is half a world away. These changes snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking, slowly bit by bit, the way the baby fat disappeared leaving a lean young man at the dinner table doing his homework. Subtle.
Someone I love who was very sick got well, and another person I love who was well got very sick. These things happen, like that, a bomb dropped, a miracle. Sudden.
Jobs change. Addresses change. Adventures arise when we least expect them. People leave. Others come. Some stick around for now. And every now and then we are struck with a remarkable moment of pure laughter and love.
Pay attention to this moment, girl, for all that it brought, tinged with joy or sorrow or maybe both, all it brought is about to slip away. You can try and hold onto it but it will only make you cry when it pulls away from your desperate grasp. Because it will. Are you going to waste this moment here trying to hold onto something that has gone? This is the way we miss our life. We can miss it without even noticing that we are missing it. We can miss it by grieving that we missed it.
A wise teacher once told me that letting go of every breath is the most basic act of faith. The exhalation does not come with a guarantee in writing that if we let go of this air there will be enough to breathe next time and yet we breathe. We are already so practiced in the act of faith. We have been faithful since birth, since the first time we breathed out without knowing if we would ever fill our lungs again.
This is a good thing, because I need that sort of faith to loosen my grasp on the moment and to let it go without knowing what comes next, without worry, without fear, without expectations. All those things get in the way of paying attention. Quick sink in and let it wash over you and bathe it with its warm warm light before it goes again with the exhalation, whoosh…
