“When I reread my notebooks it never fails to remind me that I have a life, that I felt and thought and saw. It is very reaffirming, because sometimes writing seems useless and a waste of time. Suddenly you are sitting in your chair fascinated by your own mundane life. That’s the great value of art -- making the ordinary extraordinary. We awaken ourselves to the life we are living.” -- Natalie Goldberg
I turned 35 on Wednesday. My children seem to have reached that magical age in which they’ve built up their immune systems after catching all the colds, the ear infections, the viruses, the sinus infections, and the fevers, and since I haven’t had to take days off work to stay home with them this year, I decided to take the day off just for me. I was home last year on my thirty-fourth birthday, but I was taking care of a sick child and wallowing in my own self pity. I remember wandering around the house in sweats, feeling down about having to cancel the modest birthday plans I’d made, and berating myself for not using my “day off” to at least get some papers graded or finish reading a novel. This year, I decided to take advantage of my good fortune and spend the day doing everything I love best.
Before I could do any of that, though, my daughter surprised me with breakfast, a plan she’d concocted the night before. During dinner she suddenly said, “Dad, I need to talk to you. Over there.” And she hustled him into the study. When they returned to the table, I said, “So what’d you guys talk about?”
“Nothing,” Zannah said before turning to her father. “DAD. Don’t tell her.” When I climbed out of bed in the morning Matt and Suzannah were in the kitchen, cracking an egg over a pan. Oh, this is why you have children. Nothing tastes better than a gloppy fried egg with a broken yolk atop a grilled veggie sausage when your daughter has prepared it for you.
After I dropped off the kids, I headed down to Tacoma where I happened to bump into one of my best friends at a local coffee shop. What do you know -- she'd taken the day off school, too! What a spectacular coincidence! So we had coffee, and I worked on revising a poem I drafted during a recent writing workshop while she graded papers. She took me to lunch at a sweet little cafe, where we shared warmed brie with a baguette as an appetizer and I had a glass of wine, of all things, even though it was barely noon and a Wednesday. We walked around in the sunshine for awhile afterwards -- the sunshine! The sunshine! -- and then I drove home again, where I had just enough time to go for a run (in short sleeves!) before I met Suzannah at her classroom door.
While I ran I thought about how I remembered my own mother when she was the age I am now -- I’d have been right around Suzannah’s age. And I realized I am nowhere near as wise, gracious, and mature as my own mother was in her mid-thirties. She scoffed at that when I confessed it on the phone that night, but I can’t really see my mother showing up at my classroom door, panting and sweaty, ponytail sticking to her neck, which is exactly how I greeted my daughter. Her teacher chuckled.
“You must have been running,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
Suzannah was horrified. “Mom!” she shrieked from inside the classroom. (She is often the last one out the door, as she likes to walk around and make sure the chairs are straight and everything is in perfect order -- her things and everyone else’s -- before she leaves for the day.)
“Hi, Bug!” I called cheerfully. To which she replied, “You’re all sweaty. Don’t hug me.” Back home, though, she threw her arms around my waist and said, “Oh, fine. It’s fine. I’ll hug you. But don’t kiss me until you take a bath, please.”
I took a bath and read some of Ann Patchett’s latest collection of essays. As soon as I smelled like bubbles and body lotion, we picked up Isaac and headed to Seattle, where we met Matt at the Elliott Bay Book Company -- one of my favorite birthday/Mother’s Day rituals -- and I bought a few things before we all drove to dinner at Veggie Grill, which is hardly fancy but which we all love, and I somehow always leave that place feeling so cozy and content. Not a bad way to end my first day of being thirty-five. (Nor is watching a couple of episodes of Orphan Black before bed while sipping a gin and tonic. Who knew I’d find a drama about clones so compelling?)
I’m not writing all of this because I think it’s fascinating reading or because I want to pass along some profound birthday wisdom. (I tried the profound birthday wisdom when I was about twenty-four and I must have sounded so insufferable.) I’m writing it for the same old reason I write anything here, I suppose, except for the times when I’m ranting or when I’m sad or lonely or confused or heartbroken, because I do that, too. But I also want to do the impossible, which is to hold on to these perfect, ordinary moments. They’ll pass, and I’ll feel stressed and anxious again. I will be a hypochondriac; I will be a martyr. I will snap at my children. I will pick fights with my husband. I will mutter barely under my breath about other people’s messes while I clean them up in a fantastically passive aggressive manner.
But underneath all of that, I will stay in love with the everyday simplicity -- sipping a perfect latte in a warm, sunlit coffee shop. A glass of dry white wine and brie at noon. The first run of the year in short sleeves. My goofy children making weird things out of Wikki Stix in a booth at Veggie Grill. Honestly, I felt just leveled by gratitude all day -- that I get to have this life, with these people. That I get to breathe this sweet air on a sunny afternoon.
I don’t think happiness is an automatic part of the deal when we’re born. I don’t think it’s something we’re owed; certainly it’s not something we’re ever promised. And it seems strange to say, maybe, but I don’t think any of my life goals have anything to do with being happy, or achieving happiness, or however you want to put it. And while of course I want my children to be happy, it’s the same thing -- when I think about my desires for them, I hope more that they lead compassionate, intentional lives in which they serve the world with the gifts they’re given. I don’t necessarily hope they go tromping off in search of happiness. It sure isn’t going to come from the car or the house or the trip or the stuff, or any of the things that we think we're supposed to want. I think it grows right up out of learning to stay present and stay grateful.
(I sincerely hope this isn’t masquerading as profound birthday wisdom. If it is, I am so sorry. Forty-five-year-old me will probably read this and roll her eyes forever.)
I am such a work-in-progress, and I know I can be a colossal pain in the ass in the meantime. I can also be, and often am, decidedly ungrateful and not terribly present. But I’m trying. And that’s why I write it all down -- so I can remember, in those insufferable, ungrateful moments, that my life is filled with grace, and light, and love.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Monday, February 17, 2014
A perfectly imperfect mini-vacation
The worst sound in the entire world is this: a child’s sudden whimper, followed by a violent spray of projectile vomit splashing on a tiled bathroom floor.
I was just lounging on the bed, enjoying the snow falling thickly outside the window of our cozy hotel room. We’d just had some popcorn and watched a movie and were ready to tuck into bed early on the first night of our family mini-vacation in Leavenworth this weekend. And then that happened.
To all the people who say, That’s why I’m not having kids -- I kind of get it. I do. I actually remember watching a poor boy throw up his lunch in the cafeteria when I wasn’t much older than my own daughter and feeling so nauseated that I wondered, at the tender age of eight, whether I had it in me to ever clean up someone else’s vomit. It’s horrible. And as a mother who has caught more puke in her bare hands than she cares to think about, I can tell you that it’s still horrible, but when it’s actually happening I don’t really have time to worry about that. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever caught your child’s puke in your hands and felt triumphant for sparing the carpet. Right? You know what I’m talking about.)
So when I heard that first splash, I vaulted out of bed and landed squarely in front of the bathroom door. My poor little son was sitting on the toilet, which is why the next spray of vomit -- oh, we weren’t done! -- narrowly missed my feet. I’ll tell you what it didn’t miss: pretty much every inch of the floor, his pajamas, his underwear, the bathroom door, and the side of the tub. He looked at me with wild-eyed panic.
“It’s okay, Buddy,” I said, hoping I sounded both cheerful and soothing. “It’s okay. We’ll clean it up. Let’s get you in the tub.” I stripped off my own pajama pants and tossed them on the bed. I’d only packed one pair, and I was going in. I managed to grab a couple of towels from the rack above the toilet and drop them onto the floor before I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the faucet to the tub, and lifted my son off the toilet seat. Suzannah had scuttled in horror to the other side of the hotel room, and Matt headed down to the front office for more towels. (The twenty-year-old kid working the front desk seemed hesitant to give us more than our “fair share” of towels and suggested that maybe we should take our kid to the doctor. I shouldn’t be so hard on him, but I am still rolling my eyes two days later. Look, kid, I’m sorry about the towels, but I feel pretty good about the fact that I cleaned that bathroom well enough so that the housekeeping staff wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss the next day.)
I tell you what, it was a good idea to bring along a sleeping bag. Last summer, the first time we stayed in a hotel without bringing along a Pack ’n Play, we thought the kids might peacefully share a bed. They seemed excited about it, but they were, predictably, all up in each other’s business, and then Isaac decided he wanted to “camp” on the floor anyway. I thought it might not be a bad idea to have that kind of back-up along this time, too. This time, though, it was because Suzannah was not about to share a bed with someone who had the potential to throw up on her, and I wasn’t wild about the idea myself. We made Isaac a nest on the floor next to the bathroom with his sleeping bag and a towel and the trash can right next to his head.
He was pretty brave about the whole thing, and we hoped it was a fluke -- the result of too much greasy food, maybe, combined with an afternoon of crazy sledding and excitement and no nap in the car and whatever please please God let it just be a fluke please. He said his tummy felt better after that, and so we tucked him in and I laid down myself, tense as a board. Not five minutes later, it happened again. This time I was listening for it, though, so I managed to hoist him over the trash can in time to catch almost all of it. His second pair of pajamas wasn’t so lucky, so he spent the rest of the night in sweatpants.
“Well,” I said to my husband, feeling rather hysterical, “I guess every family needs a vacation story like this.”
Ever since our entire family came down with a stomach bug at the same time a couple of summers ago, I panic at the thought of it happening again. I forget that most of the time, a child throwing up doesn’t mean doom for everyone. Kids puke. For the rest of the weekend I asked Suzannah how she was feeling so often that I got on her nerves. “Mom, I’m fine,” she said. “I feel perfectly fine. I feel great.”
But the night was rough. Suzannah decided to sleep on the bed farthest from the bathroom -- the bed Matt and I had originally claimed -- and Matt and I took the bed closest to Isaac. I’m the one with the sensitive hearing, though, so every time I sensed a change in Isaac’s breathing I would leap out of bed and haul him upright, holding him under the armpits over the trash can before he’d woken up enough to realize he was gagging. By midnight he was heaving pitiful dribbles of bile. He barely woke up for it; still, I had him drink a bit, even knowing he’d throw it all back up. Finally he was sleeping for an hour or two at a time. I crawled into bed with Suzannah, who seemed less disturbed by my constant jumping out of bed. She only woke once, to sit up and say, “Is Isaac throwing up again? That’s like five times.”
I slept restlessly, achy with tension and queasy myself, but when we all woke up for good Isaac was thirsty enough to gulp some Gatorade -- which stayed down -- and everyone else seemed hungry for breakfast. My husband has a deep love for continental breakfasts with waffle makers, and Suzannah goes crazy for mini muffins and all the kinds of cereals we never buy but hotels always seem to have. After I’d had toast and eggs and some coffee, I allowed myself to feel a little optimistic.
And we did have a lovely weekend. Leavenworth was so beautiful in the snow, which fell steadily all day when we arrived. Matt took the kids sledding in the center of the village while I wandered around, snowflakes catching in my eyelashes. We ate pizza in a cozy restaurant and enjoyed the last weekend of the Christmas lights twinkling in the center of town. I supported the local independent bookstore, naturally, and drank a lot of hot chocolate. On Sunday afternoon, Matt went snow-shoeing while the kids and I napped at the hotel; later, we all swam in the hotel pool. Our second night was infinitely more restful than the first, although in the interest of minimizing drama I slept with Suzannah and Matt slept with Isaac (and as it turns out, both of our children hog all the covers).
I didn’t care so much what we did this weekend, truthfully. I just wanted us to get away together. And even if it included a sleepless night and an upset tummy, as well as inching over an icy mountain pass and terrible roads on the way home, I’d do it all again. Last night, as we watched Up on some Disney movie channel and the kids piled on top of me and we looked out the window at the snow, which had started to fall again, I thought about how lucky I was to be in this warm little room with all of my favorite people in the world, about how crazy we can all drive each other, about how we’re all in each other’s faces all the time and about how a slightly different setting -- a hotel room in a little mountain village instead of, say, our family room -- can make that seem so perfect.
I was just lounging on the bed, enjoying the snow falling thickly outside the window of our cozy hotel room. We’d just had some popcorn and watched a movie and were ready to tuck into bed early on the first night of our family mini-vacation in Leavenworth this weekend. And then that happened.
To all the people who say, That’s why I’m not having kids -- I kind of get it. I do. I actually remember watching a poor boy throw up his lunch in the cafeteria when I wasn’t much older than my own daughter and feeling so nauseated that I wondered, at the tender age of eight, whether I had it in me to ever clean up someone else’s vomit. It’s horrible. And as a mother who has caught more puke in her bare hands than she cares to think about, I can tell you that it’s still horrible, but when it’s actually happening I don’t really have time to worry about that. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever caught your child’s puke in your hands and felt triumphant for sparing the carpet. Right? You know what I’m talking about.)
So when I heard that first splash, I vaulted out of bed and landed squarely in front of the bathroom door. My poor little son was sitting on the toilet, which is why the next spray of vomit -- oh, we weren’t done! -- narrowly missed my feet. I’ll tell you what it didn’t miss: pretty much every inch of the floor, his pajamas, his underwear, the bathroom door, and the side of the tub. He looked at me with wild-eyed panic.
“It’s okay, Buddy,” I said, hoping I sounded both cheerful and soothing. “It’s okay. We’ll clean it up. Let’s get you in the tub.” I stripped off my own pajama pants and tossed them on the bed. I’d only packed one pair, and I was going in. I managed to grab a couple of towels from the rack above the toilet and drop them onto the floor before I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the faucet to the tub, and lifted my son off the toilet seat. Suzannah had scuttled in horror to the other side of the hotel room, and Matt headed down to the front office for more towels. (The twenty-year-old kid working the front desk seemed hesitant to give us more than our “fair share” of towels and suggested that maybe we should take our kid to the doctor. I shouldn’t be so hard on him, but I am still rolling my eyes two days later. Look, kid, I’m sorry about the towels, but I feel pretty good about the fact that I cleaned that bathroom well enough so that the housekeeping staff wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss the next day.)
I tell you what, it was a good idea to bring along a sleeping bag. Last summer, the first time we stayed in a hotel without bringing along a Pack ’n Play, we thought the kids might peacefully share a bed. They seemed excited about it, but they were, predictably, all up in each other’s business, and then Isaac decided he wanted to “camp” on the floor anyway. I thought it might not be a bad idea to have that kind of back-up along this time, too. This time, though, it was because Suzannah was not about to share a bed with someone who had the potential to throw up on her, and I wasn’t wild about the idea myself. We made Isaac a nest on the floor next to the bathroom with his sleeping bag and a towel and the trash can right next to his head.
He was pretty brave about the whole thing, and we hoped it was a fluke -- the result of too much greasy food, maybe, combined with an afternoon of crazy sledding and excitement and no nap in the car and whatever please please God let it just be a fluke please. He said his tummy felt better after that, and so we tucked him in and I laid down myself, tense as a board. Not five minutes later, it happened again. This time I was listening for it, though, so I managed to hoist him over the trash can in time to catch almost all of it. His second pair of pajamas wasn’t so lucky, so he spent the rest of the night in sweatpants.
“Well,” I said to my husband, feeling rather hysterical, “I guess every family needs a vacation story like this.”
Ever since our entire family came down with a stomach bug at the same time a couple of summers ago, I panic at the thought of it happening again. I forget that most of the time, a child throwing up doesn’t mean doom for everyone. Kids puke. For the rest of the weekend I asked Suzannah how she was feeling so often that I got on her nerves. “Mom, I’m fine,” she said. “I feel perfectly fine. I feel great.”
But the night was rough. Suzannah decided to sleep on the bed farthest from the bathroom -- the bed Matt and I had originally claimed -- and Matt and I took the bed closest to Isaac. I’m the one with the sensitive hearing, though, so every time I sensed a change in Isaac’s breathing I would leap out of bed and haul him upright, holding him under the armpits over the trash can before he’d woken up enough to realize he was gagging. By midnight he was heaving pitiful dribbles of bile. He barely woke up for it; still, I had him drink a bit, even knowing he’d throw it all back up. Finally he was sleeping for an hour or two at a time. I crawled into bed with Suzannah, who seemed less disturbed by my constant jumping out of bed. She only woke once, to sit up and say, “Is Isaac throwing up again? That’s like five times.”
I slept restlessly, achy with tension and queasy myself, but when we all woke up for good Isaac was thirsty enough to gulp some Gatorade -- which stayed down -- and everyone else seemed hungry for breakfast. My husband has a deep love for continental breakfasts with waffle makers, and Suzannah goes crazy for mini muffins and all the kinds of cereals we never buy but hotels always seem to have. After I’d had toast and eggs and some coffee, I allowed myself to feel a little optimistic.
And we did have a lovely weekend. Leavenworth was so beautiful in the snow, which fell steadily all day when we arrived. Matt took the kids sledding in the center of the village while I wandered around, snowflakes catching in my eyelashes. We ate pizza in a cozy restaurant and enjoyed the last weekend of the Christmas lights twinkling in the center of town. I supported the local independent bookstore, naturally, and drank a lot of hot chocolate. On Sunday afternoon, Matt went snow-shoeing while the kids and I napped at the hotel; later, we all swam in the hotel pool. Our second night was infinitely more restful than the first, although in the interest of minimizing drama I slept with Suzannah and Matt slept with Isaac (and as it turns out, both of our children hog all the covers).
I didn’t care so much what we did this weekend, truthfully. I just wanted us to get away together. And even if it included a sleepless night and an upset tummy, as well as inching over an icy mountain pass and terrible roads on the way home, I’d do it all again. Last night, as we watched Up on some Disney movie channel and the kids piled on top of me and we looked out the window at the snow, which had started to fall again, I thought about how lucky I was to be in this warm little room with all of my favorite people in the world, about how crazy we can all drive each other, about how we’re all in each other’s faces all the time and about how a slightly different setting -- a hotel room in a little mountain village instead of, say, our family room -- can make that seem so perfect.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
This beautiful, ordinary night
When Suzannah and I drove to Puyallup this afternoon for her friend Sam’s birthday party (a showing of the Lego Movie, which I actually found rather whimsical), I pointed at the snow-capped mountains not so very far away and wondered if we’d actually have any more snow here this year. When we emerged from the movie theater hours later, our little Honda Civic was covered in a thick layer of wet snow. I opened the trunk to look for our scraper, but all I found were Matt’s hiking poles. I used one of our canvas shopping bags to brush our windows clear before beginning the 30-minute drive home. It’s funny; an evening of wetly falling snow in Montana would be just another almost-spring evening, but here it makes me tense enough that I’m deeply happy to arrive safely back at home and spend the evening here. Usually we find ourselves out on Saturday afternoons, eating out for dinner, but tonight I was more than content to hunker down in our cozy little house, get the kids bathed early, and eat plates of homemade broccoli-and-tofu stir-fry while we watched the backyard fill up with snow.
This morning I curled up on our couch with my book and a mug of coffee and gazed dreamily out the window, up our quiet little street. And I thought in that moment that I can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else. Sometimes I think I’m supposed to want us to move up, somehow, to aspire to five bedrooms and a bigger garage, but when I look at the rooms in our home I always find myself imagining the ways in which they will continue to evolve as our family does. It’s not really about the house, though. It’s about the way I love our quiet neighborhood in this little suburb. The way we can walk to Starbucks or down to the shore of Puget Sound, the silence in the winter, the sound of lawn mowers and children’s giggles in the summer. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to move away and then drive through these streets, to see the path through the woods that leads to the park or to the school, to remember walking with my newborn son and my preschooler nearly every day -- to the playground, and then to Starbucks for hot chocolate afterwards. To remember walking my children home from school. My Saturday morning or spring and summer evening jogs. I think, honestly, that my heart would break a bit -- to remember this place from somewhere else. Maybe that’s how I know I’m home right now.
We’re planning a mini-vacation soon; nothing extravagant, but a little family getaway. Two nights. Suzannah has been packed for days. When we fly to Minnesota for ten days she gets to pack a single carry-on that she carries all by herself, but we tell her we’re leaving for a weekend and she packs four times as much -- mostly books, from what I can tell. This is the girl who has been waking up extra early in the mornings, hustling through breakfast and brushing teeth, just so she can have a little extra time to read in her room before we go to school.
For the last week, Isaac has been reading “The Monster at the End of This Book” on our way to and from school. He’s so earnest about it -- “YOU TURNED THE PAGE!” and “YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING TO ME” and “I’m so embarrassed.” It fills me with so much pure delight I could burst.
It is the weekend after the first week of second semester, which means I have no grading to do tomorrow. Yesterday morning I made all the copies I’ll need for next week, which means that tomorrow I will pick up some pho on my way home from church, eat it while I read a book, and sink into a nap on the couch in the soft gray light of the afternoon while snow or rain falls just on the other side of the window. Isaac will nap at the same time because he usually does still nap on Sundays, and Suzannah will read books in her room. Next weekend we’ll try something new, we’ll explore a place we’ve never been to, we’ll sleep in a hotel room, and we’ll make memories that stand out from our ordinary weekend routines. Tonight, though, I’m happy to curl up right where I’m at.
This morning I curled up on our couch with my book and a mug of coffee and gazed dreamily out the window, up our quiet little street. And I thought in that moment that I can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else. Sometimes I think I’m supposed to want us to move up, somehow, to aspire to five bedrooms and a bigger garage, but when I look at the rooms in our home I always find myself imagining the ways in which they will continue to evolve as our family does. It’s not really about the house, though. It’s about the way I love our quiet neighborhood in this little suburb. The way we can walk to Starbucks or down to the shore of Puget Sound, the silence in the winter, the sound of lawn mowers and children’s giggles in the summer. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to move away and then drive through these streets, to see the path through the woods that leads to the park or to the school, to remember walking with my newborn son and my preschooler nearly every day -- to the playground, and then to Starbucks for hot chocolate afterwards. To remember walking my children home from school. My Saturday morning or spring and summer evening jogs. I think, honestly, that my heart would break a bit -- to remember this place from somewhere else. Maybe that’s how I know I’m home right now.
We’re planning a mini-vacation soon; nothing extravagant, but a little family getaway. Two nights. Suzannah has been packed for days. When we fly to Minnesota for ten days she gets to pack a single carry-on that she carries all by herself, but we tell her we’re leaving for a weekend and she packs four times as much -- mostly books, from what I can tell. This is the girl who has been waking up extra early in the mornings, hustling through breakfast and brushing teeth, just so she can have a little extra time to read in her room before we go to school.
For the last week, Isaac has been reading “The Monster at the End of This Book” on our way to and from school. He’s so earnest about it -- “YOU TURNED THE PAGE!” and “YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING TO ME” and “I’m so embarrassed.” It fills me with so much pure delight I could burst.
It is the weekend after the first week of second semester, which means I have no grading to do tomorrow. Yesterday morning I made all the copies I’ll need for next week, which means that tomorrow I will pick up some pho on my way home from church, eat it while I read a book, and sink into a nap on the couch in the soft gray light of the afternoon while snow or rain falls just on the other side of the window. Isaac will nap at the same time because he usually does still nap on Sundays, and Suzannah will read books in her room. Next weekend we’ll try something new, we’ll explore a place we’ve never been to, we’ll sleep in a hotel room, and we’ll make memories that stand out from our ordinary weekend routines. Tonight, though, I’m happy to curl up right where I’m at.
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