slowly, suddenly

This past weekend we took a road trip to the other side of this wide state of ours.  We crossed two rivers, drove through four tunnels, and hugged the curves tightly around countless mountains.  It was a beautiful time of year to be driving: the low coasting sun skimming the trees, standing proudly in their ornate autumn glory.  We were gone only the span of a few days, but what was a dazzling promise on our drive out was a glorious fulfillment of that prophecy for our return trip. It was a slow change for these trees, but it seemed to my eyes to happen overnight, as if I had closed my eyes to the thick blanket of green tucked around the mountains, and awoke to the layered weaving of autumn’s richness. I don’t think I’ll ever numb to this splendor.

Even as we returned home, the momentum of the kids’ bodies pushing open the screen door, their feet met the leaves on the ground, and they were surprised by the crunch.  “Fall is here! It’s really Fall!” they exclaimed, bending down to break leaves in their hands, feel it crumble into the powdery dirt from which it came.  Of course, just last week they were playing in the same yard, and we noticed the light change, the colors migrate towards umber.  It changes gradually, but then it happens all of a sudden, too.

The Eldest steps out of the bathroom in the morning, chirping happily about school, and I notice that his pants are all of a sudden too short.  He has been growing slowly, daily, but there was no warning for this immediate lack of proper pants.  The Littlest, whose existence has always been caught up in the energy of his older siblings, experiments daily with his own body.  He stands himself upright, wiggles a bit to find balance, and with a confidence that he owns, takes that first step, all eyes on him.  Yes, he works hard moment by moment, but when it happens, with such suddenness, it’s hard not to know it as surprise.

Our trip this past weekend was to celebrate a wedding.  The bride and groom took each other’s hands, made promises too big to understand, pushing rings onto fingers: two become one.  In an instant, it all changes.  We toasted, and danced, and celebrated the greatness of this.  It’s all of a sudden – not married, now married – but it’s gradual, too.   It happens in the little changes, in the moments of becoming each other’s. It’s been their every breath to get to this point, and it’ll be their every breath from here on out.

Is it a point of no return? Is it in contrast to it’s opposite? What makes us notice that which has been slowly spiraling, signalling change with every breath?  How do we understand the minutiae of change? This change is all around me, now: These little ones who moment by moment become less little, standing taller in their disposition.  This air through the open window – cool and refreshing one minute, damp and bone-chilling the next.  It’s in the slowness that I see it for what it is: always happening, constant motion, gradually all of a sudden.

it all begins

I have been slow to relinquish summer.  My hands have been clenched into tight balls, white knuckles grasping at lazy days at home, not ready to trade bathing suits for sweatshirts.  I love fall, really.  It is my favorite season for all sorts of reasons.  But the summer that had me terrified in May made a better friend than enemy. I have to remember that this new season likely will, too.

The Little Ones, luckily, don’t have this same angst that I do.  School began.  The Eldest was happy to find a few familiar faces in his new class, and always puts on his best self as he hangs his bag in his cubby, squeezes his arms around mine in a tight goodbye.  The Middlest was brave as she stepped into her first school adventure, and with her style and story, I know that she’ll captivate those teachers, like she has captivated me.   No tears, no worries.  Just that swagger that saw some good looking donut holes and a trunk full of dress up clothes.  Likewise, I paused only a moment at the door before the Littlest and I left our missing pieces behind in that school building of circle rugs and wooden chairs.

We’re only a week in, and here’s what I can say: I can tell you that I’m trying hard to make peace with our drive to school.  Four days a week, now, I’m hoisting bodies into car seats, buckling our morning into place with a click, as we sit together in traffic and wait our turn to go.  Forty five minutes on our way there seems pretty normal, and though my whole being wants to stomp and shout, I made this choice knowingly.  Round and round we went in conversation about finding somewhere closer, or staying home altogether.  Ultimately, this is the choice I made: four mornings in rush hour traffic, flipping the radio between NPR and “Wee Sing Silly Songs,” all of us giving up a little something, giving in to a little something.  I’ve tried to be all zen about our drive, really – something like seeing all these cars as fish in one big river; about finding my breath, making peace with time.  But mostly it ends up that someone is hungry, and someone is falling asleep at all the wrong times, and someone is poking with legs and fingers and arms.  Mostly, someone is not unbuckling the car seat when they should be, or some IS unbuckling it when they shouldn’t be.  Mostly, it’s just four of us stuck in a car together longer than we want to be.

Only a week in, and I’m staring down the barrel of three snotty noses.  Just as this, the long week, was coming to a close, and I was almost lifting my hand in victory, grasping at the trophy of a weekend, the Eldest trudged down the stairs, flopped himself on the couch, and pulled a blanket up over his shoulders.  Because I was already in the middle of making peanut butter crackers for the Middlest, and listening to the protest of the Littlest, in his crib and begging to be set free, it took me a moment to even notice him.  But when I did, it was all there for the telling: the hot-to-the-touch forehead and cheeks, the weepy looking eyes.  I cancel plans; I dig out the saline nose drops.  And in our house where we try our best to share everything, this too, of course, gets passed around.  The weekend that was supposed to be a reprieve merely pushed me further into my own exhaustion.

Then today, when I exiled everyone to some corner of the house, I exiled myself, too.  I took my cup of coffee and sat in my pajamas on the front stoop.  I sat there, on the chipped concrete, watching the cars whizz up our hill.  It is a busy road.  There is no lazy, quiet porch rocking here.  The cars speed dramatically by, like bumblebees on mission, and the trucks engage in war with their gears  to push themselves up the incline.  These motor noises echo and reverberate against the hill and the house.  I sat on that step, listening to the cars, and asking God: “what would you have of me, today?”

Sitting on that step, having drained my coffee, and about to gather my wits to go back inside, I watched a butterfly flit about our butterfly bush.  The purple wands of flowers aim this way and that, and all summer long I’ve been battling them.  When we planted these bushes two springs ago, we never had any idea that they would stake such an aggressive claim in our front garden.  I’ve pruned like a maniac, becoming addicted to following the wooden stalks down to a crotch, finding the next invasive arm and making a clean cut.  We’ve worked hard to keep this beauty in check, and though the thick piles of green and purple that I’ve hauled into the woods has sometimes given me pause, I can look at the butterfly bush this morning and know that I’m doing right by it.  It’s filling out in all the right ways, and it is less accosting as visitors walk up the steps to our house.

This is what I heard God tell my heart this morning.  He told me about the pruning, about the cutting, about the raw ends being exposed.  He told me about the beauty and strength that are already here, waiting to be given some sunlight and some room.  I felt Him whisper to me about growing into who I am meant to be.

The Middlest had finally grown bored with her books, and her curiosity propelled her off the couch. When she pushed open the screen door, I stood up from the front step, calling together all who had been exiled.

It all begins somewhere.

a night on the town

Standing on my tip-toes I lean close to the mirror.  I pucker my lips one more time,  and as I press the lipstick into the creases of my lips, the waxy smell catches in my nose.  For a moment, I am a child, 6 years old, maybe 8, sitting on my mother’s tall four poster bed, watching her examine herself in her bathroom mirror.  My sister and I are in a puddle of play makeup, my mother’s castoffs, and we are decorating ourselves with as much determination and purpose as my mother demonstrates from her polished stance.  I am opening tubes of lipstick to choose a shade for my sister. The Saturday lineup on PBS plays from the TV in the corner, likely The Frugal Gourmet, or by now it may be late enough for This Old House, back when it was hosted by Bob Vila.  We will have had milkshakes for dinner, made with bananas and raw eggs, and my father will have already gone to get the babysitter.

Shrill laughter is coming from the hallway, and it’s my own children now who are scurrying underfoot, eager and watchful as Mark and I put the finishing touches on our outfits.  Mostly, there are few similarities between my grown-up social life and the fancy way I remember my parents going out.  Ours is a more home-grown way of entertainment, nothing like their elegant dinner parties or restaurants.  Tonight, we’re out to celebrate a friend turning 40, this birthday marking out milestones of life.  Tonight, I’m wearing the tall heels, finding the right jewelry.  I’m full of jittery energy, the combination of leaving the little ones for the evening, and simple uncertainty in my ability to behave like a grown up.

Later, I laugh at my own insecurities.  The tedium of party small talk breaks open into rich conversation, and we hardly move all night as friends, old and new, dance in and out of these threads of talk.  By night’s end we have ebbed our way through vacation recaps, and updates on kids, into truthful territory of aging, and great stories of Remember When.   The spark of a good time landed on us, just for showing up.

What seems like just a good time to me must seem like magic to the seven year old who is embraced and passed along clumps of family and friends all night.  When your dad is turning 40, and the hero of this party, it means that you, too, are a kind of  hero.  Under that backyard tent, warm wind threatening to blow out the tiki torches that keep the mosquitoes at bay, I wonder how he’ll remember this night.  To not be ushered to bed as the sun falls behind the horizon, and the music gets louder, but instead take a seat along the edge and be entrusted with this: to hold the memory and make the story.  To bear the gift of the grown-up talk, laced with politics and the occasional bad word, to see the emotion your dad carries at the demonstration of how much he is loved. Of not knowing, really, what any of it means, but knowing all the same that it is magic.

I’m in another party tent, this time of my own childhood.  My sister and I are zipped tight into sleeping bags under the table where above us the grown-ups have gathered empty cocktail glasses, and maybe almost forgotten that we are there.  We are at Princeton University, celebrating some reunion of my dad’s class.  From our vantage point my sister and I watch the dancing feet of the party that goes long into the night.  The heavy beat and bass of the band first beckoned us to dance with my parents, and then later draws us into sleep, it’s rhythm mimicking our own heartbeats.  I recall very little of the specifics, but the memory is full of nothing but magic.

Mark and I are now home.  I’ve nursed the Littlest back to sleep.  We’ve kissed the sleeping lips of the older ones, adjusted blankets over exposed legs.  I’ve washed the eyeshadow off my costumed face as Mark spat toothpaste into the sink.  I click off the bedside lamp, knowing that tomorrow we’ll tell each other the stories of our night on the town, and the kids will tell their stories, too.  These stories will turn into memories which will become magic again.

adaptation

We are in the playroom once more.  And just like yesterday, the Little Ones are pulling at baskets with dress up clothes littered around their feet.  I tie a cloak around someone’s neck, help another into a tiger costume.  But where yesterday there was magic, today is only tears.  The cloak is too long and the Middlest keeps tripping on it.  The velcro is scratching and uncomfortable.  Frustration bubbles up, and the disappointment is written on their faces.  Mine, too.  What went wrong?  The same props, the same bodies, the same imaginations.  But today, it just isn’t adding up right.  Try as we may, we are unable to recreate the joy of yesterday.

Somedays it comes easy, the glimpse of heaven, the party full of ordinary and breathtaking all at once.    The brilliance is there to be recognized.  It is easily grasped.  The feet are infused with a beat, and the whole body flows in coordinated movement.  I’m not talking about anything  glamorous, but just the small moments that seem big.  The moments when I seem to be watching myself from above, transcendent from the daily moments of living.  Yesterday in the playroom, it came easy.  There was a snowstorm, and a tiger chase, and something to do with back packs and elephants.  Oh, and smiles, theirs and mine.

I know what they are after, today in that same playroom, with those same costumes.  They are trying to do it over again, have that same feeling.  It seems like it should be that easy, right?  But just because we found our way through the back of the wardrobe into a new world yesterday doesn’t mean that it’s won’t be full of old coats with a finite end tomorrow.

Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones says this: “When we live in a place for too long, we grow dull.  We don’t notice what is around us.”  I think that this is what happens in our magic moments, too.  That’s when those moments that were breathtaking return to just being ordinary.

In physiology there this concept called adaptation.  This is  ”the decrease in the response of sensory receptor-organs, as those of vision, touch, temperature, olfaction, audition, and pain, to changed, constantly applied, environmental conditions.”  In other words, our bodies get used to things, and we can’t sense them anymore.  Did you know that your eye makes teeny tiny movements constantly, even when you are staring at just one thing?  This makes it so that your eyes can still see things, because without those movements your eye would just get used to whatever image it is taking in.  That is adaptation.  The same thing happens when you get used to a smell, even one that was pungent and strong just moments before.  Your nose has dulled to the sharpness; it is now familiar.  I can recall a funny incident in which a friend of mine just dropped a glass of orange juice from her hand as she was watching TV.  She had been holding it so long without moving, she just forgot it was there!  Her hand couldn’t feel the glass any more.

I think that this concept of adaptation plays out in other areas of my life, too.  Too much of any thing becomes ordinary and I grow dull to the beauty.  Sometimes I need to get a different view.  It’s nice to have old favorites, but even those can wear thin and become ordinary.  I stop noticing what is around me.  It can be frustrating trying to recreate the fun of a memory.  Maybe we’re better letting a memory be just that.  Last week instead of wanting to play in the splash pool all afternoon, the Eldest pulled out his bike instead.  Still beautiful in it’s simplicity, we created different kinds of breathtaking moments.  We’ll return to the pool.  We’ll have wild adventures in the playroom with costumes and fantastical story lines.  But with the different view that we’ll get on this side of things, we’ll begin noticing the magic again.  We’ll awake from the dullness, and again say “yes” to the party.

rocking

The ball of my foot pushes the rocker back, and the chair makes a soft creak as it falls forward again in rhythm.  This chant is familiar and comfortable.  My eyes flutter open and then close gently with the rocking motion, weary babe suckling, heavy in my arms.  There is a soft breeze on his cheeks, same as mine, from the ceiling fan, and the evening light that slants through the spaces in the blinds sways over his body. We mark time in this place, countless times a day, but it is also the constant paradox of small lives that in this space time also stops.  I faintly hear the bigger Little Ones in the family room, cheering one happy moment, and just as quickly erupting into shrieking squabble.  Their story is not mine for just this minute, and I leave them to do what siblings do.  The drone of their play is mere harmony for this, rocking and nursing with the Littlest of all.  I fill his tiny belly, nourish his being, and receive my blessing.  His small fingers wrap playfully around the fabric of my shirt, rubbing and twisting until they no longer do. Rest comes.

The fabled calm at the end of the day seems so beyond reach in the marching orders of bedtime: to the bathroom! clothes in the hamper! brush those teeth!  There is little reserve left, and Little Ones don’t quickly listen; I am too quick with harsh tone.  This gray time between emptying and refilling are confusing at best.  Sometimes a drink of water is just a drink of water.  But we make room in the bed for one more body, squeeze in tight for a story.  Together we lift up our day, finding redemption in the retelling and being held by the One who hears it all.  We make haste with one more hug and kiss; dash down the stairs with kisses blown.  Often there is a hungry dog waiting, too, and a sink full of dishes.

Then, later, in the grown-up hours, after a glass of wine and hands entwined, together, we watch those bodies seem so small.  We tiptoe close in, grasp tightly to door knobs, feeling the turn so as not to click awake those Little Ones, and let our prayers out in sighs heavy with the day’s weight.  Small, round bellies rise and fall in rhythm.  Night’s light dulls the edges, blurs day’s brilliance into haze. Now it is with full peace that I cross my fingers over foreheads, sweep sweaty hair behind tiny ears, and kiss baby lips.

And then it is again, the fullness of night bearing down on our house in small hours, I waken to barely a cry, stumble sleep-drunk to the nursery.  I press his not-yet-awake body to mine, sink deeply into the chair.  I lift my shirt.  And again, press the ball of my foot against the floor, sending the chair creaking, the weight of my body and his, my world, back and forth, rocking.