Lindsey Mead's Blog, page 10

The end of October 2019

A few random thoughts at the end of October.

These are the darkest mornings of the year.  I think this every year, in the weeks leading up to the clocks going back.  Because I am an early riser I spend my first hour or two in darkness now.  I used to find this depressing, but in a strange way I find it comforting now.
I went to Costco this weekend and was incredibly conscious for some reason of the massive number of individual plastic water bottles they sell.  There was more than one person with a cart full simply of water bottles.  I’m fine with the push to eliminate straws, but I do wonder if we’re missing the forest for the trees.  Plastic water bottles (and individual plastic cups) seem like a much bigger problem.  Please stop using individual water bottles, people!
My spinning class on Monday morning played Landslide and I thought yet again of how much I love that song.  It feels like yesterday I wrote about Landslide here (and then I revisited it here) and since that day I’ve thought of it as an anthem of sorts for this parenting journey.  This LIFE journey.  It’s only getting more true.
I started reading Wild Game[image error] at last.  Wow.  I highly recommend.
I don’t write about politics much (or ever, other than my post on the eve of the 2016 election) but it’s not a secret that I’m not a Trump fan.  I’ve been saying since he was a candidate that of the many things I find deeply objectionable about him possibly the top of the list is how poorly spoken he is.  For this reason I adored Frank Bruni’s column in this weekend’s Times.

Happy end of October, all.  The decade draws to a close.  Onward.

Seventeen

Dear Grace,

Next Saturday you turn seventeen.  I know. Such a cliche, the disbelief I feel, and such a deep truth, too.  It feels like a month ago you were born (2002), and like a week ago I started writing this blog (2006), because I wanted to capture details about you and your brother.  All those years, collapsed into a slurry of bright colors and joyful memories, the difficult moments mostly faded, though I know they were there. Hundreds of days – thousands! – whose details have faded but whose sense memories remain: laughter, love, notice-things walks, long drives to and from games, errands, card games, reading together, trips to Crane’s Beach, and a million more things I can’t list.

This is your third year at boarding school.  We miss you when you are gone and love when you are home, but we know you are in the right place.  It’s a joy to watch you flourish.  You were the one who wanted to explore boarding schools and who chose to go, and it’s been an unequivocal win.  You grow every year in maturity and independence.  Junior year is no joke.  This is a stressful season, there’s no question about it . But you are handling things with your characteristic organization and willingness to work hard.  That ability to understand what needs to happen and to grind to get it done will stand you in good stead in the world.  I know it will.

My sincere hope is that among all the AP classes and varsity sports and SAT prep and other commitments you can find pockets of time to simply be a teenager.  Your natural inclination towards hard work and prioritizing effort and accomplishment can sometimes occlude opportunities for delight.  Believe me, I relate to this tendency, to both its advantages and its downsides.

This is your fourth year running varsity cross-country, and your first as a captain.  I know it’s felt like a lot, and that you are frustrated by how hard it feels this year (physically and psychologically), but I applaud your good nature and willingness to keep at it even when there are so many competing demands on your time.  You are a leader on the team and we watch that with tremendous pride.  Keep at it.  Your team is different this year, I know, but it’s full of strong runners and there’s something to be gained from every experience.  You demonstrate real grit in the way you accept the ways things are different and continue focusing ahead.  This is one of many ways you inspire me.

There are many difficult-to-describe attributes that contribute to a happy life, but I think at the top of the list is likely who we choose as friends and companions.  This is an area where you shine.  I am impressed by the people you have chosen to be close to.  Dad and I have enjoyed meeting their parents who are, like their children, wonderful.  In both middle and high school you’ve navigated challenging social waters with self-knowledge and grace.  I know it’s not always easy, but I am so proud of the way you have chosen solid, trustworthy, dedicated, interesting people to be close to you.  By the way you haven’t let the sometimes overwhelming, sometimes confusing social currents overwhelm you.  I don’t think this – the selection of who we hold dear – is a trait that people note much but I think it’s vital to the future and I think you make excellent choices.

You’re on your way already, I know that.  You are a young woman, with a driver’s license and your own ideas about what you want and what matters to you.  It is the honor of my life to be yours and Whit’s mother, and as much as I miss your younger days, I love the young adult you’ve become and watch with anticipation as you step into your glittering future.  I’m always going to be here, watching from the wings, rooting for you even when I can’t see you (the cross-country metaphor, which extends now to the fact that you live outside of our home).  I know how hard you are working.  I want you to know that you are already enough.  You are already incredible.  Dad and I are watching you fly, speechless with pride and love.

To the girl who made me a mother, to my dream-come-true daughter, I love you, now and always.

Mum

Previous birthday letters to Grace are here: sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six.

Alone

“I ain’t lonely, but I spend a lot of time alone.”

Matt told me a while ago that this, the first line of Kenny Chesney’s Better Boat, made him think of me (aside: we are all country music, all the time at our house).  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about those words.  There’s such truth in them.  I don’t think I actually spend a lot of time alone, but it’s definitely true that it is often my preference to be alone.  And I am never lonely when I do that.  In fact, when I do feel lonely, I have learned that it’s always when I’m surrounded by people with whom I don’t feel a connection. I am literally never lonely when alone.

Sometimes people are surprised that I’m a very strong introvert.  There’s never been any ambiguity about my Myers-Briggs type: INFJ.  And I’m getting more I, not less, as I get older.  Reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking[image error] was definitely eye-opening for me.  It explained two important things to me: first, how much I’ve been compensating in my professional life, where extroversion is valued, and second, why I never felt fully comfortable at Harvard Business School (not that many I’s there!).

The compensating explains a lot about how much I crave being alone when I’m not working.  I truly love the people I work with, and I truly love my work, but it definitely demands interaction, attention, and engagement.  I am not surprised, therefore, that when I’m not working what I want is to be alone.  I want to read, or I want to drive in silence (this is a particular detail of my life that people find weird), or I want to just be by myself.  One of my friends from college recently bemoaned how she was getting plans mixed up because she just wanted to say yes to everything.  I quipped that that’s where we were different, because I just wanted to say no to everything.  And I do.

Sometimes I worry I’m becoming such a curmudgeon in my old age.  But then I remember that for 10+ hours a day I am interacting and somewhat intensely.  It makes sense that for me, I need to decompress in the day’s other hours.  It’s perhaps unfortunate for the two E’s who live with me (though my 14 year old son is very happy to have me in a room by myself and not talking to him!), but it’s just the way it is.  I think they get it.  Hopefully they do!

As I get older I am less and less inclined to override my instincts, which tell me to stay quiet, to stay alone, to breathe deeply, to look at the sunset, to build up my strength for the next day.  I guess we all just become more ourselves as we age.  And for me, that self likes to be alone.

Things I Love Lately

Big Little Losses – Rebecca Pacheco’s beautiful piece about dropping her daughter off at preschool for the first time literally rang every bell for me.  Those preschool days are long ago, but the feelings I had there are still a part of my daily life.  “I see it all before me, and there’s so much I can’t see, and it’s all too much.”  Yes.  Yes.  Daily.

The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale[image error] –  I devoured Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale[image error].  The book is gripping and I couldn’t put it down.  Wonderful storytelling and I found it more empowering and hopeful than Handmaid’s, which remains eerie and unnerving in its prescience.

The Beauty of the Ordinary – Pico Iyer’s piece is a beautiful evocation of the ways that fall reminds us that life is beautiful precisely because of how ephemeral it is: “…but as we pass into a deeper season in our lives, we come to see that the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last.”

Unbelievable – I watched this whole series in a weekend and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.  Powerfully told and alarming at the same time.

What are you reading, thinking about, watching, and loving lately?

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly. You can find them all here.

Much is Taken, Much Abides

I wrote a piece a while ago that I shared on Medium last week.  It’s probably pretty redundant for anyone who has been reading here – about Dad, poetry, Tennyson, Whit, loss, memory.  One of the reasons I go back and forth on continuing to write here is this sense that I’ve become a totally boring, repetitive writer.  Still, it’s a piece that means a huge amount to me, so I’m proud to see it up.  You can read the piece here, and the first part of it is below.  To add color to the particularly complicated and rigorous last year, Liz, who read at Dad’s funeral (one of two non-family members to do so) recently died herself.  I will attend her funeral next weekend.  Losses everywhere.  Much is taken.  Much abides.

***

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Dad closed the heavy Norton anthology and slid it onto the table in front of him, before picking up his wine glass and leaning back against the house and looking at me in the candlelight. It drove Mum crazy when he leaned back on the chair’s rear legs like that. She was always afraid he’d either fall or break the chair, maybe both.

I could hear the late-summer crickets chirping in the deep darkness and thought once again of how early sunset came these days, as the world rushed towards Labor Day and the fall. Dad and I were on the back porch in Marion, candles burning down, the napkins of the rest of the family crumpled on the table. Mum and Hilary had gone inside a while ago, and Dad had pulled the old Norton out of the front room bookshelf to read. He loved Tennyson and so do I. I was going back to my senior year in college next week, and I had almost chosen to write my thesis this upcoming year on Tennyson. Ultimately I’d chosen to write about motherhood and poetry in the lives and work of three twentieth-century poets, but Dad and I had talked a lot about Tennyson as I made that decision. He’d read me Crossing the Bar (the poem he’d always told us he wanted read at his funeral and which his own father had also adored) and Ulysses more times than I can count, and others, too: he loved High Flight and had recently re-read the Inferno for fun and wanted to talk constantly about the incredible imagery of light and dark in Paradise Lost. “Read” is not really accurate, actually, since he recited long parts of these poems by heart.

As I grew up and got married and had children of my own, Dad and I kept talking, about life and the world and poetry, too. I didn’t really understand the meaning of those Tennyson poems, or, perhaps, of those candlelit evenings where we sat in the dusk with poetry and late summer rising around us, until the fall of 2017. My husband Matt’s father died in late September of that year and two months and three days later my father died, too. Matt’s dad’s death was quick but expected; he’d been battling a variety of health issues stemming from a successful heart transplant in 2002 for years. Dad’s death was sudden and shocking; he died of a presumed heart attack three days after hosting Thanksgiving for 30, after a run and before he was coming over to our house for dinner.

Dad’s December funeral was surreal until I heard the familiar words read by one of my family’s oldest friends,, Liz. She stood on the podium and began to read.

“Sunset and evening bell, and one clear call for me,,” I looked up from my front-row seat and felt as though I was floating in the rafters, maybe above the driftwood cross that hung from the ceiling, watching myself.

Then I could hear my father’s voice, which felt as much a part of me as my own heartbeat. “But such a tide as moving seems asleep,” Dad recited Tennyson’s words by heart.

Liz stepped down from the pulpit and returned to her seat. The silence in the church was heavy, punctuated by sniffling and rustling. I heard someone sob quietly in the back of the room. The last time I’d been in this church with Dad was just over 17 years ago, when he walked me down the aisle towards the man who would become my husband a few minutes later.

 

PTSD

This year, as August began to pinwheel toward autumn, I was aware of a low throb of dread in my stomach.  It was almost subconscious, but it was there.  I then entered a stressful sprint at work which is now ebbing, and the dread is back.  It’s taken me a while to realize that I have some deep-seated PTSD about the fall, since for three years the autumn months brought loss and fear.

In 2016 Matt sustained a serious injury that necessitated surgery and a difficult recovery.  I shared on Instagram an image of three years ago late August when I was thinking about how that day marked the beginning of a difficult season.  In 2017, both of our fathers died and Grace left for boarding school.  Saturday marks two years since Matt’s dad died.  His death, while knew he was sick and ailing, was very quick at the end.  Of course only two months later my father redefined what a “quick” death was.  In 2018, we faced a significant health scare.  It was a scary fall but everything is ok, and I apologize for the vagueness but want to keep it private.  Everyone is healthy.

When I write that down, I guess it doesn’t surprise me that I have some powerful anxiety about this time of year, that something deep and inchoate echoes inside of me.  Truthfully, it’s as much about loss of control than it is about loss in general.  More than anything, these last years have shown me in vivid, visceral terms that I am not in charge of the big picture of life’s unfolding.  They’ve also reminded me that all we have is today.

I think all the time of Stanley Kunitz’s question, “How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?”  That these words are dear to me is not new since my personal feast of losses in the last years.  I wrote about them in 2011.  But I think I understand this question in a new way now, and my heart is growing reconciled.  Slowly, imperfectly, absolutely.  But I do feel that there’s a peace settling into the space between the new holes in my life.

To me, that reconciliation is just about acceptance.  And some of this, I’m sure, are standard midlife learnings.  Nothing that happened in our family in the last 3 years is extraordinary; it was just a little more than I expected in a short space of time.  Everyone grapples with losses and fears.  That’s life.  I know that now.  And even in the darkest seasons, there can be light, love, and laughter.  I’ve learned that too.

Onward.  There’s nothing I can do but honor the quaking inside, which at least I think I understand now.  This morning there was a ladybug on my arm, which I’m taking as a good luck omen (did I make that up?)?  Maybe this fall will unfold without any trauma.  I can hope.

 

 

Things I Love Lately: summer reading edition

I read some great books this summer!  I’d love to hear what you enjoyed as well.

The Most Fun We Ever Had – Claire Lombardo’s novel was engrossing, entertaining, and un-put-downable.  I loved it.

On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard[image error] – I’m lucky enough to have met Jen Pastiloff and to already love her work; her memoir was even more moving, wise, funny, and honest than I expected.  Gorgeous.

City of Girls[image error] – I adored Elizabeth Gilbert’s book and devoured it.  I can’t get Vivian’s voice out of my head.

 The Expectations[image error] – Alexander Tilney’s book is sharply-observed and familiar.  Entertaining (though I did catch one reference to a girls’ athletic contest against Belmont Hill School, which is a boys’ school!)



Where the Crawdads Sing [image error]– I loved the first half of Delia Owens’s book (it reminded me of two books I adore: Island of the Blue Dolphins by O’Dell and My Absolute Darling by Tallent) and the second half a bit less.

 The Guest Book[image error] – In an altogether different way, Sarah Blake’s book was about deeply familiar world as well.  It touches on complicated themes and explored the ways that choices in our past echo into our present.  Really good.

The Silent Patient[image error] – Alex Michaelides.  Page turner.

Normal People[image error] – Sally Rooney’s novel came incredibly highly recommended and it lived up to it.  Wry, funny, wise.

The Last Romantics – [image error]I really enjoyed Tara Conklin’s novel, with its themes of love, poetry, history, the presence of the past.

Rich and Pretty[image error] – Rumaan Alam’s novel is an incisive, keenly-observed examination of female friendship.

Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi’s book, which is Grace’s All School Read this summer, was my first book of the summer and my favorite.

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss[image error] – Margaret Renkl’s book was the last book I read this summer.  I can’t remember who told me I had to read it, and I wish I could because they were absolutely right.  A mix of Annie Dillard ad Mary Oliver.  Beautiful.

Nineteen Years

9/9/00, Marion, Massachusetts

Today is our 19th anniversary.  I’ve written about Matt on this day for many years, and I feel a little bit like there’s nothing new to say.  In case you’re curious and have a lot of time on your hands: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.

So, I’ll try to capture the last nineteen years, which have been simultaneously and alternately a lifetime and a moment, in numbers.

20 – length of our wedding ceremony, in minutes

5 – the amount of time we’d been in the church when it started pouring, thundering, and lightning, in minutes

1 – number of houses we’ve lived in

18 – number of years we’ve lived here

6 – weeks we’d known each other when we planned a 2 month trip to Africa

5 – continents we’ve been to together

19,341 – highest elevation we’ve been to together, in feet (summit of Kilimanjaro)

2 – children we have welcomed

40 – length of Grace’s labor, in hours

3 – length of Whit’s labor, in hours

2 – fathers who died in the fall of 2017

6 – grandparents we have lost since we met

1 – number of times I have beaten you at tennis

lost track – number of times we’ve run together as the sun came up – best way to start the day

0 – number of times I’ve eaten shellfish since we’ve known each other

4 – number of books that we’ve both read and enjoyed in 20+ years (our tastes differ)

0 – number of minutes that I slept on our four flights between Boston and Bali for our honeymoon

0 – number of our duffel bags that arrived in Bali with us for said honeymoon

45 – number of minutes that you slept while I was in transition at the end of Grace’s labor

6 – minutes per mile (you)

8.5 – minutes per mile (me)

2 – number of cars of ours that have been hit by tree branches falling in storms (one was totaled)

unlimited – how much I’m looking forward to the next 19

This is 45

This is 45.  I am halfway through my forties.

In the first half of this decade, I have: lost a parent and a parent-in-law. watched a child leave home. watched a child get her driver’s license. watched both children grow taller than I am. visited 3 European cities with my children. seen cancer up close. watched my close friends lose parents. gone to funerals, weddings, and christenings. with 4 beloved colleagues, founded a company that’s thriving. seen the Grand Canyon and Hawaii for the first time. edited an essay collection published by Simon & Schuster.

I am less sure of anything than ever. I have more questions about what happens after death every year. I have known some of those dearest to me for over a quarter century. I’ve been married 19 years, and have lived in the same house for 18. I wake up at 5-something almost every day. I can recognize a kindred spirit when I see him or her (and the reverse, too). I told my college friends I was both shocked and grateful to find myself here in midlife, and that’s true.

I have frown lines between my eyes but I’m happier than ever in a quiet, sturdy way. I deeply, deeply love my life.

originally posted on my birthday (8/16) on instagram.

College tours

Over the course of the last three weeks, Grace and I made three separate trips to visit a total of 13 colleges.  As we planned these trips (with precision, I might add!) several people told me how important these experiences had been to them.  These were from all perspectives: people reflecting on college trips they had taken with their parents, parents remembering special visits with their teenagers, and people just slightly older than me who’ve recently done this.

And all three trips – Philadelphia, Connecticut, and Virginia/DC – were absolutely marvelous.  Chock-full of memories and laughter and the occasional bickering too.  Just because we are regular people.  We visited a couple of dear friends but largely kept that to a minimum so that we could just be the two of us.

We danced with the past, the present, and the future these last few weeks, in different, complicated, and lovely ways.

More than once I had the kaleidoscopic, dizzying feeling of time contracting and of my own teenage self walking alongside my adult self and my teenage daughter.  My father in particular was so viscerally present while we toured my alma mater and his I ached for him.

We were quite adamantly present.  I did some work in the afternoons and evenings, yes, and we stayed with tw0 of Grace and Whit’s three godmothers, but mostly we spent a lot of time alone.  We went for runs in spectacular nature preserves, explored unfamiliar towns, tried new restaurants, passed many hours driving, g0t a little bit lost, experienced two major rain squalls, and took a lot of selfies.

Most of all, though, these three weeks made me aware in a new way of the future.  All of a sudden I can see and sense the years that lie ahead for Grace – the years that were some of the most cherished and formative in my own life – and they are dazzlingly bright.  I feel excited about the experiences that lie just over the threshold for her.  She has two more years of high school, and this future isn’t here yet, but she – and I – feel suddenly aware of it in a new and tangible way.  Like all transitions, this one is bittersweet (holding within it as it does her departure from our home – though, in many ways, that’s already happened), but the truth is it’s far more sweet than bitter.  I’m just plain old excited for her.  It didn’t escape me that the two women we stayed with – two of my very dearest friends – are people I met when I was in high school and college.  She’s building relationships and laying down memories now that she’ll have for the rest of her life, and that fact makes me happy.

I shared many photos of our tour on Instagram, and for the next month I’ll only be there.  Happy end of summer, all.