A certain necessary grief

I left school yesterday angry, exhausted, and sad. How many school shootings have there been just in 2014? Reports differ, but the obviously correct answer is too goddamn many. And a good part of my anger and exhaustion is lodged firmly in the fact that they are not going to stop anytime soon. We are not doing anything to stop it.

I did small things to keep myself from sinking. I picked up my daughter; we held hands and scampered through the rain to the car. I took her along to my hair appointment where she sat and read, totally absorbed in her book, which the stylist clicked her tongue at the news and I closed my eyes against it, trying to focus on the scent of the shampoo and the heat from the hair dryer. We picked up Isaac and came home. We had planned to meet Matt for dinner and a few errands, but he heard the fatigue in my voice over the phone.

“Do you want to just stay in tonight?” he said. “I can bring home Thai food and we can run errands tomorrow.”

Yes, I did want to stay in. I wanted to put on flannel pajama pants and curl up with the last sixty pages of The Paying Guests and drink wine while the kids watched Clone Wars. I wanted nothing more than to hunker down in my little house in our quiet little neighborhood, the lights from our kitchen and living room windows shining into the rainy dark streets.

I signed on to Facebook and immediately read someone’s sanctimonious comment about how this is just one more reason she’s glad she doesn’t send her kids to public school. I typed a furious paragraph. Deleted it. Typed it again. Deleted it again. Then I just blocked her. Someone who is that self-righteously out of touch, someone who is that devoid of compassion or sensitivity, someone who would use this terrible day in such a tasteless attempt to pat her own back -- well, we don’t really need to be internet friends. And maybe I should have stayed off Facebook altogether; probably that would have been wiser. It’s just that for all the superficial noise that goes along with social media, sometimes I crave that human connection underneath it all. I want to type something I’m thinking, or I want to type something that maybe feels a little bit vulnerable, and I want to know that someone, someone, will read it.

Maybe that’s why we’re all here. Maybe we should all be a little gentler with each other.

I also read a lot of this: Hug your children. Appreciate every moment with them. Tell your loved ones that you love them. We all say that, when terrible things happen, and it’s good advice, if a bit trite. I would like to think I try, truly and earnestly, to do this. It’s one of the reasons I write all the time -- it’s this near-desperation to hold each moment of their babyhoods and toddlerhoods and childhoods. I go back and read pages of the journals I use to write letters to the kids, and I might say to Matt, “Remember when Suzannah insisted on sleeping in her little pink sweater every night when she was not even two?” or “Remember the funny way she used to pronounce elephant?” or “Remember when Isaac used to go and get the boppy and haul it over to me with this big grin on his face when he wanted to nurse, even if I happened to be in the shower?” and his face goes soft, and our hearts just break a bit with love and nostalgia and this sort of grief -- I don’t know what else to call it -- over time passing, over the impossible bridge between then and now. It is a blessing, because watching our children grow is our deepest joy, but there is a certain necessary grief in letting go. I’m not good at it.

And can I also confess something? That sometimes when I should be basking in gratitude, when I should come home and simply sink to the floor with my babies and delight in every aspect of their existence because I am so very aware that tomorrow is promised to none of us -- so aware I could scream with sheer pain for those who have already lost tomorrow -- instead I am short-tempered, I am impatient, I snap at the kids to pick up their toys right this second or nobody is going to get to pick a movie, I tell them that they are just going to have to go ahead and be hungry for five minutes because the dog needs to go out and the dog needs to be fed and the groceries are still in the car and Mommy doesn’t have five arms and can’t I just have one single minute of people not needing things?

I say some of these things out loud, I think the rest, and then I put on a DVD and carry the laundry into the bedroom, where I dump it on the bed and fold it and cry quietly, hoping the crackers and cheese and apple slices and Clone Wars will be enough to keep them from noticing that I am not within an arm’s reach for the moment.

But the moment passes, because it has to. Our evening settles into normalcy. I cannot stay inside my bedroom and cry all night. So I come out and start dinner, and help my son into his Ninja costume, and I read the pages my daughter fills at the dining room table. She has won a couple of little alien toys from her school fundraiser, and she has decided that they are going to have a wedding, and she is busily scrawling ambitious honeymoon plans all over sheets of printer paper in her neat third-grade handwriting -- what they will wear at each destination, what they will do, games they will play. It is essentially three solid pages of creative writing, and tonight I am so delighted with it -- the imaginative spontaneity of it all, the thoughtfulness and the playfulness -- that I grab her in a fierce hug and kiss her face and tell her how amazing she is.

“Mom, you are kissing me a lot this weekend,” Suzannah says, pleased but exasperated. “It’s a bit much.”

What I think, but what I don’t say, is tough shit, Kid. But she has forgiven me, it seems, for my bewildering earlier snappishness.

And what she doesn’t know now but might understand someday is that even though she is eight years old and her brother is nearly five, I still can’t go to sleep at night until I have tip-toed into their rooms one last time. To brush my lips against their cheeks, to smooth their hair away from their foreheads. And, yes, to make sure they’re still breathing, and to pray that morning continues to come.

A life I love enough to break my heart

The sunshine was so unexpected this afternoon. The forecast called for rain, but when Suzannah and I walked out of gymnastics the sun had turned everything golden. Back at home Matt mowed the lawn and the kids kicked a soccer ball around the yard, managing, for the most part, not to fight over it. When we left for Seattle I found myself reaching for my sunglasses, the light bright in my eyes as we drove along Puget Sound. Some moments are so perfect, for no reason at all. What, exactly, is so special about an ordinary Saturday in our little corner of the world? What could be beautiful about driving past the little strip malls with the random teriyaki joints, nail salons, tattoo parlors, furniture stores? The Pole Fitness place, the “For Lease” sign in the window of the pizza place we never got around to trying before it closed? Simply this: The expanse of Puget Sound on the other side of the highway, the mountains rising behind it. The fact that this, every day, is my view on my way to work. The fact that this, nearly every Saturday, is where we drive on our way to Seattle. To the Pacific Science Center, to the aquarium, to Discovery Park, to the Elliott Bay Book Company. We leave the winding tree-lined road that leads from our house to Pacific Highway, and sometime between Pacific Highway and I-5 my son nods off in the back seat. At age four, Suzannah had long since abandoned even the pretense of taking a nap, but Isaac -- though not required to take one on Saturdays -- will reliably conk right out at three o’clock in the afternoon. (Sometimes I wonder if that’s why we plan these afternoon trips to Seattle, just to give him that little space to fall asleep when he would resist so hard at home.)

And there is this: Every morning, on the way back to Suzannah’s school after dropping off her brother, we stop at the top of a hill at a particular stop light. It’s just that: a moment at a stoplight, on an ordinary street, in our ordinary little suburb. But in the fall, the trees along this street burst with gold and red leaves, and for a moment I am blessed with the sight of the leaves falling on the sidewalk, lit by the morning sun or golden against a cloudy sky, as far as I can see.

The light changes. We drive on. But that one still, golden moment fills my heart. It hurts a bit, in the way only autumn can.

It has been a rough few weeks. I’ve dealt with one of the most upsetting situations of my career, but a.) I can’t really write about it here and b.) it’s been more or less resolved. I’ve had a couple of students break my heart. I made three kids I love cry within a single, terrible hour. I hatched a hopeful and idealistic and possibly really stupid plan to help a teenager who completely and utterly exhausts me. (In essence, I volunteered to spend twice as much time with her, and yet I relax when she skips my class. What am I thinking?) I’ve felt tired, and sad, and lonely. I’ve felt that I cannot possibly be enough as a teacher. I’ve felt that I cannot possibly be enough as a mother. That tired old pull.

But, as always, the cracks let in the light: a perfectly-timed e-mail from a friend who knows the words I need to read. A dinner and long conversation with another friend who knows my heart more than just about anyone else I’ve known in my adult life. A hug from someone I work with. Talks with my parents, because even at thirty-five, I still need them. The reminders that I am not nearly as alone as I sometimes feel. The unexpected sunshine.

This, I suppose, is October. It’s the beginning of my favorite season in the Pacific Northwest: the rain, the storms, the darkness. The golden leaves falling over the sidewalks. It is also when I feel unmoored, stressed, and prone to fits of doubt and sadness. The crazy thing, though, is that I also feel deeply happy with so many aspects of my life. My children are blessedly healthy. My daughter sits cross-legged on her bed, wrapped in her Star Wars blanket, and reads my old Nancy Drew books. My son stands on a chair in the kitchen and helps me make dinner. My husband comes home from work and kisses me until our daughter protests. Our old dog is blind and deaf but she is in relatively good shape; I sit with her awhile before bed, to calm her anxiety. She snores against my thigh in our big recliner in the living room while I read.

These small moments are the ones that sustain me. The bigger things I can’t control -- the kids whose lives I can’t fix -- well, they’re the reasons I come home and need a run, or need a hug, or need my husband to pick up a pizza because I can’t do anything except sit on the family room floor and watch cartoons with the kids while we play with their puzzles or play brownie mixes or ice cream sets. They’re also the reason I care so damn much. They break my heart.

I wouldn’t trade any of it. I know this on a cellular level, even when I imagine all the alternate lives I could be leading. A life I love enough to break my heart is the life I want.