growing up so fast | pull up a chair

June 26, 2020

amid the chaos, my true song rises

the requisite homecoming appliance: the mixer of countless welcome-home cookie doughs over the decades

the homecoming was delayed. the homecoming was complicated. by COVID, of course. it entailed a long drive, half across the country, nights in borrowed beds, and one in a hotel with a curious chandelier fixation. but, at long last, the station wagon, packed to the gills with the siftings of law school life that won’t be moving to the next chapter, pulled into the garage just as the sun lowered in wednesday night’s sky.

i leapt as soon as i saw the light shining through the garage window, realizing the devoted driver (the one who’d set out across the country simply to shave one airplane ride’s risk from the summer’s complicated travel equation, the one who’d driven 28 hours just to shield his firstborn from the fear of worrying if the guy with the coughing fits two seats away was spreading the dread disease), had picked up the pace on the drive through america’s flatland–ohio, indiana, the surrounds of chicago.

i wish i’d had a picture of the sight i saw next: the graduate in graduation robe, (the tassled-cap had been momentarily misplaced under the heap in the wagon’s rear spaces) with N95 mask strapped round his beard (yes, we know that beards are not optimal tonsorial fare, not in the age of the red-ringed virus), bare legs, and the crumbs of a cross-country car trip. for a pause of a moment we air hugged. but then, i surrendered. if COVID comes roaring this way, i’m going down with the rest of us. and, anyway, it seems biologically impossible to dwell in the same house and avoid rampant exposure. (COVID tests have now been taken, and we await the results, in two to four business days.)

ever since, it’s been decidedly noisier here, and far less monastically choreographed. as i type, two laptops are spread across the kitchen island, conjoined by a wire, as the old one disgorges its contents into the new one. tax returns are piled next to the laptops, leftover business best dealt with with mom and dad’s stamps. the peanut butter jar is curiously emptying, by the giant-sized spoonful. and the pile of laundry is teetering toward the basement rafters.

the most curious thing, or maybe the most complicated, is my heart. i find myself aswim in an aching as i realize just how uncommon, how far-apart-and-few-between these homecomings will be. how we’re not really his home anymore (something i certainly know intellectually–i’ve been sending packages to new haven, connecticut, for the last three years, after all, and before that, for four years, to amherst, massachusetts–but in that way where the heart is at peace with a knowing, is humming along with the whole of it, well that certainty is not yet ground into the walls of this ol’ ticker), and i’m not really ready to swallow that truth. truth is, we feel something like a way-station. a place to store old paintings for a year. a place to tuck the graduation gown into the back of the closet. a place where old stories are the ones that most vividly percolate.

and i find myself yearning–sometimes just a tad, other times with every ounce of my heart–for the old days, when night after night all four of us fell asleep under the same single roof, and every morning was a mad-dash to somewhere, with someone or something inevitably lost, left behind, or stuck in the laundry chute. wishing i’d known then–amid the full-on, high-decibel chaos–just how much and how soon i’d come to miss the whole of it.

i promise i’m savoring the sweetness of now. savoring every blessed drop of it. cooking like there’s no tomorrow (and the way the dinner plates are being piled high, there might be no food for the morrow; the fridge looks to be draining in double-time). throwing my own to-do list to the wind. we are staying up far too late, all of us curled on the couch, trading wit, witticism, and old family barbs as we catch up on netflix.

but the sense of evanescence is inevitable, undeniable. already the flights to oregon have been booked. the lease in downtown portland, soon to be signed. the summer is short. i’m catching my breath.

and, for now, i’m wrapping myself in the strands–tangled and not–of my mothersong, the one that pours from my heart’s truest, deepest stillpoint. the warbles and wobbles, the uncertain off notes, they’re all a part of its beauties. the heart, at its glorious best, is a vessel of many scales, chords, and rhythms.

and i’m finding my way, line after line.

a premise here at the chair is that truth–even when it’s messy–is what we trade in. in the ordinariness of our lives, we pay attention, we alight on illuminations. i teeter here on the brink, the edge between chapters and verse. i write to find my way, to make sense, to reach for understandings.

how do you navigate the in-betweens of your life, those stirrings that animate the not-yet-settled?

14 Comments

May 24, 2019

the very last school bell: a litany of thank you, thank you, thank you

i’m guessing you thought i might explode by the time today came along — today, the day my once-upon-a-prayer miracle child, the Egg Who Wouldn’t Take No For An Answer, the one who made me an Old Mother in the obstetrical books, born just shy of 9-11, the kid who all but grew up here at the chair (he was new to kindergarten the day this began), today’s the very last day he saunters out the door to high school. the day you might say my front-line duties are downgraded/diluted/shoved to the side, as i move one step back to where i mother from a little bit farther away, from impending long distance, from text and phone call flung from cell phone tower to cell phone tower clear across the heartland, 357 miles kitchen door to college door.

i actually thought i’d weather it without too much percussion.

i was wrong.

somewhere in the last couple days — maybe it was when that sweet boy reached his lanky arms across this old maple table and said the before-dinner prayer the other night, the last Grammy Tuesday of a quarter-plus-century, when he thanked God for a Grammy who was there every step of the way, to take him to toddler gymnastics, most every soccer match he ever played, who pored over spelling books with him, and helped him figure out his math, and then cooked his very favorite orange chicken or her famous 3-4-5 stew, to boot. or maybe it was the night before last when he paused in the dark at the top of the stairs and asked if he could give me an extra-tight hug — it hit me. washed over me like the tidal wave i should have expected.

all i could think of was thank you. thank you, Universe and heavens above, for this unlikeliest Wonder that i’ll ever know. the one i’ll never ever get over.

thank you to the whole litany of heroes big and small who have made this adventure in loving and growing a human so very extraordinary.

thank you — for there’s no finer place to begin — to the mighty big brother who, long ago, declared the impending wonder his “dream come true!” and never once wavered from thinking so. and never once acted as if the late-stage expansion to our little family was an interloper, or any sort of nuisance. (heck, in all these years, i’ve never heard either one yell at, poke, prod, or otherwise seriously incense the other; that eight-year buffer does much to dilute filial rivalry.)

thank you to the five-star teachers, the coaches, the counselors, the school-bus drivers, Other Mothers, and tribal elders who’ve aided, abetted, and leapt into Superhero togs and tights on an as-needed basis. thank you to the dispensers of band-aids and bubble gum, forgotten soccer shoes and sharpened pencils, all along the way. to the school nurses who quelled the queazy tummy and oh-so-calmly called me at home when he got klonked on the playground. thank you, thank you, to the kindergarten teacher who made him giggle each and every day (and whom he declared his “very favorite ever” till well into high school). the first-grade teacher who tucked love notes in his pencil case, and chased away the butterflies. the second-grade teacher who called no attention to the fact that alphabet letters were not lining up into legible words, and certainly not into readable sentences. to the third-grade teacher who never taught him cursive (it’s a lost art, i’m told), but taught volumes on kindness. and on through to the seventh-grade social-studies teacher he wants to grow up to be.

and then there’s high school, where a phalanx of first-rate teachers and stellar human beings — biology, debate, and american studies, in particular — made him love even impossible subjects, and imparted wisdoms far beyond text books. and where anyone willing and brave enough to steer an american teen through the labyrinth — and pitfalls — of modern adolescence is more than a superstar in my little book.

to the brilliant journalist and editor and outside-the-box thinker in cambridge, MA, who invited us all to spend a year of sumptuous thinking in 02139, and gave the kid a chance to live out his never-say-no, “We Need to See the World!” philosophy. one that gave him a flotilla of friends from around the world (and a mighty fine Common App essay for college, besides).

to the glorious one who, early on, helped him figure out how to tie his shoes, hold a pencil, and cut with a knife, when those dag-nab things confounded him. and who, to this day, has never stopped looking out for him. to the extra-special soul who taught him all about puns, and irony, and the first few chapters of critical thinking, and to whom he owes his very proud (albeit scant) claim to Game of Thrones origins (that glorious teacher’s very own kid just happens to be showrunner, writer, and co-creator of Thrones, and back in the day she regaled us in real time with tales of the curious show in the making — one whose name i never failed to mix up, forever calling it Crown of Thorns, which it was certainly not).

thank you to the brilliant pediatric nurse practitioner who nursed our boy back from a nasty concussion (or two), and defended his case before the high school’s board of inquisitors. thank you to every single wizard who helped him iron out the kinks of growing up in a deeply digital, over-pressurized world. thank you to those rare and heavenly friends of mine who have always, always, talked to him as if he was their peer. and who dialed up the shine in his eyes. (wink-wink to the one who sent him the many-paged letter of wisdoms he keeps tucked in his bedside drawer, and to the one over whom he now towers and loves with all his heart as she fuels him with big ideas and ways to wrestle injustice in the world.)

thank you for the grandma and grandpa from far away who have sent love notes and trinkets and holiday treats — and countless knock-knock jokes and infinite, infinite love, year after year, phone call after phone call, since the hot august day he was born. thank you for the upper-east-side aunt who is, hands down, the very best giver of ahead-of-the-curve boy gifts that ever there was. thank you to the auntie now in maine who once upon a time, among other weekly adventures, wrapped him in aluminum foil, and led him by the hand into the world of unlimited arts and creation. and to the cincinnati aunt who drives as many hours as it takes to be here for most any special occasion — or plain old sunday brunch. and to the uncles who have loved him up close and long-distance for all of his years. especially the ones who sit down beside him and engage in deep and long-winding conversation (and don’t mind at all being listed as the one to call, God forbid, in any emergency). and make him laugh out loud at their bottomless jokes.

there really aren’t words to capture the love that’s grown between my sweet boy and my mama. it’s one of the breathtakingest loves i’ve ever seen. he simply adores her. takes her by the hand and whirls her in circles, their own imaginary waltzes. sets aside most saturdays for lunch with her, treats her to hot dog and fries and silly conversation. sees in her a tenderness that she might have reserved just for him.

and thank you, of course and emphatically, to his most beloved band of brothers, the comrades in arms who together have taken on the ups and downs of boyhood, straight through to high school graduation. the antics they try to hide from parents, and the ones we’ve watched wide-eyed — and proud. a boy couldn’t wish for more loyal — or hilarious — or tender sweet, true-to-the-end friends.

thank you to his papa, who has loved him lavishly and wisely. and without whom i’d be lost. (and whose particular thank yous are spelled out in real-time, in words spoken not typed.)

and thank you, most of all, to the God who gave him to us. who gave me one more chance to try out these mothering tricks, to traverse the twists and turns of the tight mountain pass. to test my patience, and melt me all over again. to leave my mark on the world, in the indelible form of the Boy with the Extra-Big Heart.

watch over him, angels, saints and heaven above. he’s my treasure. and he’s just about ripe for the world.

amen.

forgive my diving into the long and winding particular here. i’d meant to make it more decidedly universal, but got caught along the way, in all the nooks and crannies of remembering. i could have strung together a litany of “chairs” from over the years, monster fighter, reading by the light of double DD, heart to heart. all of which are sealed here — and, some, in the pages of my trio of books.

my beautiful brave friend robbie died this week. her wisdoms are sealed against my heart. she was so rare, and so very very brave. here’s a bit of her beauty, her capacity for pointing us toward what most mattered….may her memory be a blessing forever.

who are the heroes — especially the unsung ones — in the world that is yours? the ones who might never realize just how much they matter?

18 Comments

August 24, 2018

one last whirl: a lesson in savoring

the little guy i love heads off to kindergarten (this was actually his “practice” walk to school): summer, 2006

i should have done this a long time ago. years ago. but, like many, many things in my life, i started late. was behind the average. way behind.

according to the centers for disease control, those fine governmental folk who track these things, the average maternal age for a second birth in the U.S. hovers just above 28. i was 44.7. i remember clearly the saturday afternoon when, knees shaking, i called my obstetrician to tell her the little white stick (aka home-pregnancy-checker gizmo) had just turned happy blue — i was, gulp, miraculously and against all odds and medical prognostications, “with child.” without taking a breath, my dear doctor rattled off the dreary stats: risk of miscarriage, 60 percent; risk of down syndrome, 1 in 32; risk of not surviving till the little bugger’s 18th birthday, 5.5 percent. (i’ve got 349 days to go….)

tell all that to the magnificent 8.0-pound baby boy born on august 8, 2001, at 3:22 in the morning, his big brother, father, and a phalanx of doctors and nurses (who’d rushed in the room when things got dicey) all in attendance. he and i plowed through every statistical obstacle strewn along the way. which is why his names, first and middle, mean “God’s gift,” (in greek), and “gift of God” (in hebrew). he was birthed — and named — in prayer upon prayer.

and now, all these stats-defying years later, said child is beginning his last year of high school this coming monday, which means this old house has entered official countdown mode. every step along the way, from now till the day we pack him up and drop him at some dormitory door, will come with modifier: “the last,” “the last,” “the last”….

what that means for me is that i dial up the savor knob, and even in the middle of a humdrum summer’s afternoon — while he’s ensconced in his little room at the turn in the stairs, and i’m chopping in the kitchen — i might just get a hankering to call up the stairs, and remind him for no reason whatsoever that i love him more than life. (to which he might moan “uh-huh” in humdrum reply.) i even find myself plucking inside-out shorts off the floor, smoothing rumpled sheets on his bed, and not minding one little bit because i know — full-well — that a year from now, i’d do anything to be able to pluck evidence of his presence off the bedroom floor.

i’ve lived — for the last seven years — with one foot in faraway-child mode, and one close as close could be. i know full well just how much that distance makes me ache. just the other morning, in faraway connecticut, i dried the tears as the shuttle pulled away from the curb and hauled me to the airport, my second-year law student disappearing behind the cars and trucks and light poles as the van turned the corner and i could see his broad shoulders no more.

like i said, i’m late to this. so late. plenty of my friends — from high school and from college — have long known grandmotherhood. know what it is to have the little rascals come for sleepovers. watch their firstborns cradle firstborns. not me. i’m still penciling in teacher conferences on my own calendar, making sure my rascal’s up and out of bed on the days the school bell rings.

i don’t know from empty nest. ours has not been empty in a quarter century. and we were married 27 years ago tomorrow. we mostly only know “nest accessorized with child.” come college shove-off next august, it’ll be the first time in 26 years that there won’t be another pair of feet clonking around the floorboards up the stairs. won’t be a soul to listen for as i lie there in the dark, awaiting the click of his key in the front door.

so until we get to that eery silence, that absence that’ll make this house an echo chamber, i’ll savor and savor and savor some more. my hunch is that i’ll be less cranky in this year to come. i’ll even relish smelly socks. and empty pie plates left overnight on the kitchen counter.

i know how absence feels. i know what it is to find myself in tears in the grocery aisle, because i’ve just reached for the something that i’d always thrown in the cart — but suddenly there’s no need anymore; the someone who always loved it is being fed by someone else now, someone in a college cafeteria. i remember full well how hard i tried to re-wire my brain, my being, to wrap my head around the notion that some kid i loved now dwelled hundreds of miles away, called home once on sunday nights in those first few months when he, too, was trying to find his place in this new equation called long-distance.

as always, i’m late to this. and i might be the oldest mama in his senior class. but gosh darn it, that only makes me wise enough to hold this year as if it’s the last. because, well, it is.

at the schoolhouse door: first day of kindergarten and a boy i love gets a shoulder squeeze from the very fine school principal.

how do you intend to savor this next whirl around the seasons?

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August 9, 2013

the nest, emptying….

a dear friend sent this along (the link i’m tucking below ), telling me only that he thought of me when he watched it. he tacked on the note: “long-term video of a robin’s nest on a front porch, with bittersweet ending.”

i braced myself for the bittersweet. couldn’t bear to click on it for an hour or two. but finally i did. and when i did, i knew i was bringing it here, to the table. where one recurring and quietly pulsing thread is that we are, at varying stages, all witnessing a bit of this mama robin’s dilemma. she spends her days loyally brooding her eggs, then she exhausts herself filling their ever-open, ever-squawking beaks with worm after worm. after worm. then, frames later, comes the bittersweet.

i won’t spoil it, but there’s a flash of a look on mama robin’s face, one you might call bewilderment, or maybe something wholly other than that. you decide, and decipher. all i know is i felt a total pang of “i know how she feels. i know just how she feels.”

here’s mama robin and her nestlings….

and so it fits these years and days — here in this old house, at least — when one nestling has just swirled home for a short three weeks, maybe never again to live here. and the little one, who turned 12 yesterday, is still very much a part of the thick and the thin of every day. but because i’ve just witnessed the full-throttle slam of how swiftly they slip away, how swiftly they enter a current that — at best — gives you a glimpse from the river bank, or occasionally eddies in late-night phone call, i am trying in double-time to live in the moment, and freeze-frame it off to the side.

all over town i see folks who just a few weeks ago — or so it seems — were filling their supervans with unending shifts and rounds of carpools to hither and yon. and now, “for sale” signs are staked in front yards, as hollow old houses echo with yet another generation’s tucked away hubbub and commotion. breakfast tables, now hushed but for the sliding of the butter dish. no more shoving and pushing of cereal boxes across the maple plain. no more knocked-over OJ. maybe only a bed or two to make in the morning.

and all over town, i hear scratching of heads, as mamas and papas wonder and ask, “how’d that happen so fast? wasn’t i just deep in the thick of it, in the shopping-for-school-supplies, signing-permission-slips, forking-out-dues, lying-awake-listening-for-footfalls, and now, now it’s all distant, all miles and miles and months and years away?”

so, mama robin, i know just how you feel. i know you’re a bird and i’m not. but that quizzical look on your face, that look as you fly home to the nest, only to find it emptied and hollow, i know it.

and i’m holding on tight to every moment i’ve got, soaking it deep in my heart and my soul.

anyone got a spare worm?

your thoughts as you watched mama robin?

4 Comments

March 7, 2008

boy school

it’s a class to which i’ve not been admitted. but i take notes. the tests will never be mine. but i keep watch from corners, wince when learning takes its lumps, and savor all the triumphs.

it’s boy school. and i think we might be up to some new level here, the 300s, maybe, the ones for upper classmen, even though the boy enrolled, the one up yonder trying to tie a knot before dashing to a train downtown last eve, is merely a high school freshman.

the headmaster, and chief instructor, is, no doubt, my firstborn’s father. there are, of course, visiting professors–uncles, teachers, men with roles to model. but mostly–and of late–it is one-on-one tutorial, and it might well last a lifetime.

it started, long long ago, with blocks and building towers. the little one i loved–now a manchild–sat for hours on the floor with his tower-loving papa. they stacked oblong blocks of maple as high as they could go before the whole thing toppled. the little one learned the intricacies of load and balance, and eventually, how to sweep his heart up off the floor when the tower finally crashed.

there was, for a semester that stretched across quite a string of springs and summers, baseball for beginners. that pitching thing never came too easy to the one who now dreams of being a philosophy professor.

his papa tried, oh, he tried. i can still hear the ball banging against the house in our teeny tiny city yard. can still see them out the window, in the mostly-empty lot next door, running bases, steering clear of the apricot tree sheared to only stump and sawed-off limb, smack dab in centerfield. that sorry stump had once bloomed, like real live inhale-able art right outside my window, but one odd afternoon it was attacked with saw and hatchet by the wild-haired lady who let the players play there, and gave them lemonade when the inning finally ended.

i watched as father and son became obsessed with collecting baseball cards. i was there when the banged-up rusty scarlet tin came home from the papa’s boyhood bedroom. i remember…

how the two of them sank deep into a world of names and numbers (some in print so small i could barely read it then, and that was before the old-lady glasses became essential to my getting dressed each day). how that child, and his dear best friends, could trade all day and night. how the numbers seemed to mean something. and how they knew them all, upside down and sideways. and how the man i married seemed to have some uncanny storehouse of knowledge i’d never known about. he remembered plays–you know, who threw to who, whose feet slid where, who swore, who was a sorry loser–from ancient times, but re-told them as if he’d just then seen them on the TV.

i shook my head, and kept right on wiping down the stove. or cleaning out the sink. or maybe even opting for a game of solitaire. bleary-eyed at all the ball talk.

ah, but now, now i’m listening in.

the lessons these days are like the peeling back of the genetic code. the lessons here are all about how to be a man. and i don’t mean some global sweep. not the politics of manhood. nor any sort of wretched macho diatribe. there’s no room for that in the raising of a thinking, feeling soul–at least i don’t think so. and if there is, i’ve closed my eyes and shut my ears for the imparting of such stuff.

what i’m talking here is far more charming. it is all the basics: how to hail a cab. how to stanch a nick while shaving. how to shine a pair of shoes (and mind you, the man i married was first described in adoring terms by my mother as “old shoe,” a phrase born perhaps of the gaping holes in his penny loafers, and the less-than-ironed shorts that had long lost their hem).

what color belt belongs with shoes of black, and shoes of brown. (these things don’t come intuitively with the gene pool here, i tell you, it involves some teaching.)

why, i’ve heard whole paragraphs on the navy blazer. and the essential nature of what i heard referred to as “the uniform,” and how once you had it assembled (preferably on hangers, not heaped on closet floor, i pipe in, my maternal contribution, in case anyone is listening), you could just about go anywhere, do anything, your growing heart desires.

if it sounds intensely sartorial, it is not. there is in this comprehensive course something so sweet, so loving, i know men who would weep at hearing of it.

i know men whose fathers loved them very much. but somehow they never got this all spelled out. and what was lost was not only a sense of how to get your socks on in the morning, but the very notion that along the mountain climb they had both guide and hand behind their back.

in the whole of parenting, there is occasional mention of teaching children how to ride a bike, or swing a bat, or mix a chocolate cake.

but this art of steeping a child in how to step into a civilized, grown-up world, it is often overlooked. it’s quite easy to miss.

sometimes, with all the shepherding and signing-up of children, the most essential thread of parenting–the teaching, day in and day out, for years and years and years, through every phase and tumble down, and every scraping off the floor–is simply barely given airtime.

but to miss it, don’t you think, is to wholly miss the point. and all the grace. and noble beauty.

one generation trying with all its might, and accumulated mistakes, to smooth the bumpy road for the next one up the pike.

if i were not the mother here, if i were not hearing bits i’ve never heard spelled out, i might, too, miss all this. i know, as the only girl among four brothers, i never heard such things. perhaps, a sister pays no heed in quite the way a mother studies how her boy becomes a man.

perhaps, too, it is in hearing all this acquired knowledge being passed in chapter and in verse, it rubs raw, just a bit, the fact that i’ve no girl to whom i can whisper all the things i know about trying to be a woman. geez, what to do with the little bit i know about mascara?

it is tender stuff, this transferring of time-tried truths. it melts my heart to watch the father of my firstborn care enough to shine the child’s shoes before his first high school dance (never mind that he got the polish all over the kitchen floor, or that he tried to do it without a cloth, and thus his pointer finger was black as night for a day or two).

i nearly wobble as i hear the ping-pong volleys late at night, punctuated by all the talk about what to look for in a college, and how one fine prof might just change your life.

it is at once heady and knee-buckling, this esoterica and plain old sidewalk smarts.

it humbles me to hear it. i wonder, did i have some deeply buried clue when i fell in love with him, that the man i married would so finely, keenly raise a son?

just last night, i watched the child shave without a nick. i peeked around the corner as he tried, and tried again, to knot his father’s tie. i tried not to sigh as he slipped on that navy blazer, became a man, grabbed his nearly-tattered tome, the odyssey, and bounded down the stairs, and out the door.

the train downtown–to meet his father for a worldly sort of lecture at a club where that blazer was expected–he nearly missed. in fact, he hurdled up the ramp with just a minute and a half till that hissing hulk lurched into the station.

that class, train catching on time, he’ll try again. a boy does not become a man without a few retakes along the route.

and, if he’s truly blessed, a teacher who wholly understands the art of knowing when to turn the page, and when to let the pupil learn the hard way.

trusting all the while that someday the student, by then a man at last, will be the sort who, in turn, as he once was taught, will impart his very best to some young boy who has no clue what to do with razors and blazers and all those manly mysteries.

have you watched a child–boy or girl–learn the ropes tied to adulthood? are you, like me, without a child of a gender that’s your own, so all that wisdom–most of it learned the hard way i assure you–has no place to go, no deposit box? do you remember being pulled aside and showed the little things that made you feel the world was a place you belonged, and just maybe could conquer?

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Tag: growing up so fast