Lindsey Mead's Blog, page 9

Things I Love Lately

Favorite books of 2019 – I have thought a lot about this (and I’m asked it a lot).  Think my two favorite books of last year were Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss[image error] by Margaret Renkl and The Overstory[image error] by Richard Powers. What about you?

Grief is my Side Hustle – This Facebook page gathers the writing of an old friend (by which I mean we have known each other for a long time, though are only recently back in touch) who lost her mother last summer.  She writes gorgeously about the experience of grief and with every post I learn something new.  Highly recommend, whether grief is a part of your day to day life right now or not.

Nothing to See Here[image error] – I’m reading Kevin Wilson’s hilarious, genre-bending book right now and it’s every bit as marvelous as everyone says.  So.  Good.

Green-ness – we finally started composting in 2019 and I don’t know why we waited so long.  2020 is going to be my year of reducing plastic.  Once you pay attention, it is everywhere.  I’m horrified.  I’d welcome any suggestions that have worked for you!

What It Means to be a Man – I read Peggy Orenstein’s cover article in the Atlantic with tears in my eyes.  I can’t wait to read her book, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity[image error], from which the article is excerpted. There’s so much about this topic that’s complicated, so much that’s new to me, so much that’s vitally important.

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

January 2020

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

I think very often of Hurston’s quote.  And, in the last few weeks, even more than usual.

After a series of years that asked questions, 2019 was (at last) a year that offered some answers.  I described 2019 on Instagram as a year “with blessedly rounded edges.”  And it was.  And maybe the lesson was a simple one, one that’s eluded me for 45 years: just let go a little.  Let things come as they may.  Everything, after all, passes.  Both the good and the bad.

I’m grateful that 2019 was a year of relative smoothness, and whose ease offered some answers at last.  I haven’t chosen a word this year, because none has presented itself.  I’m also not a big resolution person.

But I do have Shawn Colvin in my head, right alongside Zora Neale Hurston (remember, years ago, when I wrote about Doctor Seuss and Mark Doty in the same breath?).

Steady On.

That’s what she keeps saying.  So I will.  And I’ll hope for another year that answers questions.  But if it decides to ask them instead, what I know now is I’ll make it through.

 

Happiest holidays 2019

 

Thank you for still being here and reading.  It means more than you know.  See you in 2020!

Things I Love Lately

Why I Wear Five Wedding Rings – I love Margaret Renkl’s piece (her book was one of my favorites of 2019) in the New York Times.  It reminds me of how my mother wears her mother’s and grandmother’s wedding rings, and of how I wore my mother’s when she was in the hospital several years ago.

Our Favorite Books that will Change the Way You Think about Parenthood – I’ve read almost all of the books in Motherwell’s wonderful, thought-provoking list, and have recommended and given many of them too.  Highly recommend.

Over the holiday I read The Overstory[image error] (magnificent) and For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World[image error] (wonderful).  Highly recommend both.

Two holiday gifts I love to give that support small business owners:

Nicely Noted – this stationery subscription delivers three letterpress cards a month.  I adore it.

Light & Pine desktop calendar – I love these calendars and keep them on my desk.

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

 

Thank you

we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

Dad died two years ago today.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday.

I don’t feel sad necessarily, so much as skinless, feeling it all – the bright and the painful, the glory and the hurt, the joy and the sorrow.  There is so much of life that swirls around these last weeks of the year.  That’s always been true, but it’s a more emotional time for me now that it’s inextricably wound together with my memories of Dad’s sudden death two years ago.

I have Merwin’s beautiful words in my head, the same poem a line of which I shared the morning of my last Thanksgiving with my Dad (11/23/2017) and through whose prism I have long viewed Thanksgiving.  I just understand them better now.

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water looking out

in different directions.

…

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us like the earth

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

– W. S. Merwin

Hard Work

For a bunch of reasons lately, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that I definitely privilege hard work and toughness.  I may over-privilege it, truthfully.  I’ve been thinking about Dad, one of whose strongest messages (in a litany; we have established that his is, above all, the voice that I hear in my head, the original imprimatur that guides my living, doing, and being) was that life was full of uncertainty and challenge.  One thing you could count on, he taught me, was that there was a lot out of your control.

His view was probably overly cynical; I think he felt tht when things worked out that was a happy accident, and that mostly we should be prepared for challenges and switchbacks.  But he was also clear that life’s unexpected detours often took us to the most beautiful vistas.  His Fulbright year in Germany, for example, which happened because of the well-intentioned suggestion of a college professor, kindled a life-long passion for Europe and led to his spending a decade there with his young family.

Difficulty made life worth living.  He often joked that our family motto was “never easy, never dull,” a memory that truthfully makes me squirm a little bit inside.  I guess I would take that over boring, but sometimes, isn’t there value in things being easy?  I told him once, at a dinner the two of us in the mid 2000s, that I wanted someone to “keep the world at bay for me” (I’d been listening to a lot of Dixie Chicks.  I can still remember this facial expression upon hearing this; he shook his head, his scorn palpable.  His message, though delivered slightly more gently than this, was: no daughter of Kirt Mead’s needs the world kept at bay for her.

Run into the world.  Engage with the world.  You can and you will.

I am intolerant of wallowing and of complaining when something can be done to change a circumstance.  I think I can be overly tough on this dimension.  Sometimes life calls for love that isn’t tough.  I know that, and I’m working on it.

But life in the last few weeks has caused me to reflect on this important lesson of my childhood: that when things go wrong, it doesn’t mean all is lost.  There may be surprising adventures to be found in these unanticipated detours and even if not, hard work will get you moving forward again.  Never give up.  Life was not meant to be lived in a straight line.  It was never going to unfold without hiccups.  That’s the way of the world.  The weather is inevitable, and what matters is how you proceed through it.

Holiday Books 2019

As is my tradition in the last few years, I wanted to share some of the books I’ll be wrapping up and putting under the tree this year.  I firmly believe that books are the best gift and often give many.  Some of the books I give are seasonal and change, but some are eternal.  Previous holiday book suggestions posts are here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014. 2013, 2012.

If you are a book-giver, I’d love to hear what’s on your list this year!

Memoir/Non-fiction:

Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World[image error] – this short book, which is an adaptation of Admiral William McRaven’s commencement speech, was Whit’s pick for this list.  He read it and loved it (and we all did too).  Great for young men in your life and adults as well.

The Book of Qualities[image error] – Ruth Gendler’s unusual, beautiful book has been one of my favorites for a long, long time (two of our wedding readings were from it).  I love to give it as a gift.

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me[image error] – I reviewed Adrienne Brodeur’s gorgeous memoir here and have already given it to multiple people in my life.  Anyone interested in cooking, anyone interested in family dynamics, anyone who loves to Cape, or anyone who loves good writing: all of these folks will love this memoir.

Life’s Accessories: A Memoir (and Fashion Guide)[image error] – I was delighted to blurb Rachel Levy Lesser’s wonderful book, which is a delightful series of essays about accessories in her closet and the memories of her life that go along with them.  I laughed, I cried, I read sections aloud to my husband because I related so much.

Fiction:

Homegoing[image error] – Yaa Gyasi’s powerful novel was Grace’s choice for this post.  It was her school’s required reading over the summer and she and I both read it and loved it.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies[image error] – John Boyne’s novel, which I read at the end of 2018, remains one of my favorites of the last many years.  I’m recommending it left and right, still, and plan to give it to any of my novel-loving friends who haven’t read it.

The Great Believers[image error] – Ditto everything I said above regarding Rebecca Makkai’s glorious book.

Children and Other:

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems[image error] – Randall Monroe – I love Randall Monroe (his Thing Explainer[image error] is one of the books I’ve given most of all) and I’m excited he has a new book out.

Sofia Valdez, Future Prez [image error]– I’m delighted to see another book in Andrea Beaty’s wonderful series, which I’ve given a lot (Rosie Revere, Engineer[image error], being the original).  Can’t wait to read and gift this.

Love Poems for Married People[image error] – John Kenney’s book of poems is hilarious.  It was sold out this spring when I wanted to give it to long-married friends with a sense of humor, and I’m thrilled it’s back in stock.  So.  Good.  I plan to read his follow up, Love Poems for People with Children[image error], as well).

Disclosure: these are affiliate links

Wild Game

“For the drama to deepen we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” – Vivian Gornick

When I saw Adrienne Brodeur read from and speak about Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me[image error] last week, she quoted this and the whole audience gasped.  This is what Wild Game does so beautifully: evokes the deep humanity of its flawed and beguiling central character, Malabar (whose name is aptly exotic) and the profound neediness of its protagonist, Adrienne herself, Malabar’s daughter.

Wild Game is a riveting, beautifully written exploration of a particular, unusual mother-daughter relationship.  In its telling of Malabar and Adrienne’s story, Wild Game does what the best memoirs do: it illuminates something universal – the complexity of the mother-daughter bond – by diving into the deep nuances of a very specific, singular story.  I wrote my thesis in college on the mother-daughter relationship, so it’s not an overstatement to say it’s a topic that has fascinated me for 25 years.

Brodeur’s story begins when her mother, age 48, wakes her (age 14) up in the middle of the night to tell her that her father’s best friend, Ben, had kissed her.  Beginning that night, Brodeur is woven inescapably into the fabric of her mother and Ben’s affair.  For years it goes on, and Brodeur is her mother’s “confidant and accomplice,” not really thinking that there’s anything wrong with her role in this extramarital affair until during a gap year in Hawaii her boyfriend reacts badly to her telling him the story.  When her boyfriend asks “what kind of person would do that to her daughter?” Brodeur is confused.  Her reaction, that “Adam is getting this all wrong,” reveals how one-sided her impression of her own situation is.

We follow Brodeur through college and through her falling in love and marrying an interesting person.  I won’t reveal more here but her choice is at once startling and not at all a surprise.  We see Brodeur’s growing into adulthod, having her first baby, and dissolving into a tearful panic attack when for the first time her mother meets her newborn daughter.  In the back quarter of the book some of the story’s ends draw together, and we understand what happened to the key players on that night of the first kiss.  The kiss that, as Brodeur says, “marked the beginning of the rest of my life.”  Without giving away the facts of the story – and this is a memoir that reads, as Richard Russo says, “like a thriller,” it is true that Brodeur’s narrative closes with her reaching individuation from Malabar at last.  With space and years she has the perspective to look back on her mother’s behavior, which truncated her childhood and profoundly complicated their bond.

Mothers and daughters need to separate, a process that usually occurs during adolescence.  This can be painful and difficult, but it is necessary for two fully developed adult people to form where once an adult and an absolutely reliant baby were.  This individuation is complicated – and compromised – by Malabar’s choice to not only confide in Brodeur but to ask for her help in hiding her affair.  And when the necessary separation between mother and daughter does not happen, like plants that are deprived of light, growth can be stunted.  To continue with the tree analogy, it is that stunting, that gnarling, which Brodeur examines in Wild Game, and, from which she eventually breaks free.

Wild Game is a moving tale for anyone interested in the mother-daughter relationship or, further, anyone with curiosity about families in general.  It’s also beautifully written.  Both Cape Cod herself and Malabar’s gorgeous cooking are characters in their own right.  Brodeur powerfully evokes the dunes and tides of Cape Cod, a geography that’s very familiar to me, and she writes about Malabar in the kitchen in a particularly compelling way.  From the first scene, where Ben walks in holding a brown paper bag of fresh, dead squab for Malabar to cook, damp at the edges with blood, we return over and over again to Malabar at the stove.  She is a sorceress in the kitchen, whipping up gourmet meals with ease and grace and making even the reader salivate with hunger.

This is a stunning book, engrossing, thought-provoking, and hard to put down.  I have bought copies for friends and am recommending it to everyone I talk to.  I couldn’t recommend Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me[image error] more highly.

 

 

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.