On Shabbat
October 29, 2010 at 12:15 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | Leave a commentTags: blogging, chronicle, classes, commandments, daughter, family, Judaism, life, motherhood, musings, neighbors, parenthood, practicing, reflections, sabbath, school, Shabbat, writing
I had the opportunity to talk with some of the seniors at our high school last week. They are studying world religions and I shared with them my experience of being Jewish and some background on Judaism. This is the fourth year I have been invited to do this, and have enjoyed it each time. The students always come up with great questions, which together with the fact that I have to pull a presentation together, turns it into a chance for me to take another look at my life as a Jew, as a woman, an American, musician, mother, daughter, friend, wife, teacher, etc.
In the midst of each year’s talk, I explain about the idea of Shabbat, the Sabbath. Their teacher pointed out that one of the ten commandments is that we should observe it. Of course, as soon as something is required, any of us who have issues with authority start to bargain with and resist. And not only is there the commandment itself, but also the list of thirty-nine acts that are prohibited on that day. Talk about a great way to stir up creative rule-bending/breaking!! So why – and in what ways – do I observe it?
Ironically it was a Christian friend of mine who first inspired me to consider the possibility. She was a neighbor of ours at the time, in a rural section of town that had first been settled as a large orchard. All the homes, built mostly between 1920 and 1940, had the feel of old farmhouses, and our neighborhood had many qualities of the quintessential old-fashioned small town. Our children (her three daughters and my two) were together often, swinging in one backyard or the other, going to a neighbor’s pool for their swimming lessons each morning, and playing house on rainy days. My friend and I were both of like minds about letting our girls be little girls for as long as possible, resisting the urge to rush into all the extra-curricular activities, and keeping our families’ lives as simple as we could. Somewhere in there she decided to make Sunday a real Sabbath, and she shared her thoughts with me.
I was at the time studying Judaism through a local chapter of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-school, which offers a marvelous two-year curriculum now available in 60 cities throughout the US, England, Canada, and Australia. My teacher, a modern day mystic, cultivated for our class a rich and deep foundation for learning. When the subject of Shabbat came up, the seeds had already been planted by my neighbor, and I decided to explore it by trying to experience it.
The traditional interpretation of the Sabbath comes from the Creation story, which tells us that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Obviously, many modern Americans in the Judeo-Christian world do not take that literally, but the idea of a day of rest is still a valuable one. Just as we need to sleep at night, we also need to plant breaks into our daily rhythm. Practices of many kinds recommend taking two to five minutes every hour to get up, whether from the desk or assembly line, take a walk around the room, do some deep breathing. We digest our meals better if we pause from what we are doing to eat them. Most studies reveal that if we work too long without a reprieve, we become less productive.
I have to admit that the very first time I heard about the Jewish Shabbat, I stepped right up onto a feminist soapbox. I was nursing Rachel, a toddler at the time, and Chloe had just turned six. As a mother of young children, I was not going to get much of a rest, and I spoke up – hotheadedly – to protest that Shabbat was perhaps more about men getting a rest than the women who really needed it. The person teaching that class was diplomatic, helping to make it a little less black-and-white than the territory into which I had leapt, but I was only a little bit consoled. Those were my reactive days, and my learning curve was steep enough that I pretty much had to put the kernel of the Shabbat concept aside. What my family did do at that point was simple (though not easy) and basic. On Friday nights we ate in the dining room instead of the kitchen, and we lit candles and said blessings over our juice and bread.
So now, two years later, I decided to see what Saturday could feel like, now that our Friday night ritual was intact. To be honest, I remember no details of the day itself. What I remember is that I reached a moment of great discomfort. I wanted to do something. DO, with a capital D. And that’s when it hit me that my life was centered around everything I was doing, and what I needed was to take a break from that by just being. This was not about what my hands were doing. I could nurse Rachel and at the same time be focused on all the things I was going to accomplish during her ensuing nap, which was what I did all week long. Or I could sit and nurse Rachel and have it be totally about nursing Rachel. I could chop carrots for dinner and be thankful that I could feed something nourishing and tasty to my family. I could breathe more deeply if all I was paying attention to in that moment was my breath.
What came to me that day was that observing the Shabbat is about taking that day to be mindful and present, and not about doing, no matter what I was in fact doing.
So last week, as I stood in front of that class of seniors, summarizing briefly my understanding of Shabbat, I found myself filled with a longing for a real Shabbat. Fast forward from those precious days with my young girls to now: Chloe away at college and Rachel a full-fledged teenager, in every sense of the word. Some Friday nights Dan, Rachel and I are actually home, and we set the dining room table for three, light the candles and say the blessings. If we are not too exhausted, we play a box game or watch a DVD after dinner and dessert. Many Fridays Rachel and I have violin classes and we get home after 7:00, to that blessed dinner, prepared and set out by Dan. Some Friday nights are centered around something that precludes our dining room altogether. Saturdays are often so busy I totally forget it is actually Shabbat.
The gift of doing things like speaking to a class at the high school and writing this blog is that it gives me the chance to take another look at something. Pulled away so gradually from the purity of my practice in those early years when the girls were young, I had completely forgotten that I can still carry the spirit of Shabbat with me, no matter the circumstances. In my own mind – and heart – I can make everything within those fully-booked Saturdays more about being there than about what I am accomplishing. I’ve had a lot of practice.
On cool calendar dates, reunions, and synchronicity
October 11, 2010 at 9:27 am | Posted in Very Long Blogs | 1 CommentTags: aging, chronicle, college, composing, cool numbers, daughter, family, friends, friendships, getting to know me, guitar, journal, life, memory, motherhood, music, music business, musings, old friends, parenthood, performing, practicing, reflections, reunions, school, songwriting, synchronicity, the mind, writing
I have always loved dates like today’s: 10/10/10. My first memory of such a date was June 6, 1966, only days before I graduated from the 6th grade, which made the day feel personally special. And in that morning’s paper was an article about twin girls who were celebrating their sixth birthday that day. I think they lived on 6th Street in their town, with a zip or area code with numerous sixes in it. I was so excited by that.
I’m not the only one who finds things like that attractive and intriguing. Tonight Dan and Rachel and I will be attending a party. The host couple has commemorated the appropriate date for the past few years: 5/5/05, 6/6/06, etc. (As I am writing this, I just want to say that in five minutes it will be 10:10 on 10/10/10. Yes, my heartbeat accelerated just a wee bit as I typed that.) And remember when we could actually watch the numbers turning on our car speedometers turn over from 99.999 to 100,000? (Assuming your car made it that far. And let me just note here that one of our two cars still does have that old-fashioned mechanism.) And who of you knows what I mean by our golden birthday? That’s when you turn the age that is the same number as your birthday date. For me it was turning 22. Poor Rachel had to celebrate it on her 5th birthday, before she was old enough to understand it. At least the rest of us enjoyed it!
I don’t know if it was the stars and planets lining up because of this date approaching, or just coincidence (though I have to say I hardly believe in coincidence anymore), but I have intersected with three different threads from my past in the last two days. I feel a little stirred up by having so many memories and connections sparked by all three.
One was an email from someone I have not seen since Chloe was very young, I think even before Rachel was born. She was one in a circle of friends. Though the two of us were never super-close, as a group we were bonded. For me, one of the most significant ways in which she affected my path was after I had written a particular song, back in my active folk performing days. It was such a personal song that I could not imagine anyone understanding it, let alone identifying with it, which made me very reluctant to sing it in concert.
I’ll back up a little here to try to describe what it used to feel like for me to perform a new original song for the first time. Somewhere pretty early in my solo career I was practiced enough that I was never very nervous in concert. I really enjoyed the interaction I had with my audiences, and felt like I could ride that energy and have a very relaxed, fun, and also meaningful exchange with them from the stage. But performing a brand new song was nerve-wracking by nature. There was always the strong possibility of forgetting words or messing up a guitar part, as it just wasn’t completely a part of me yet. If it was a song I had recently written then there was even more heaped on top of that normal anxiety. One aspect was that it felt like I was exposing something about myself. (Usually this was justified, because I was!) This always made me feel like I was taking off all my clothes and performing naked, it was such a fragile thing to share from my heart this way. Another piece was that I was always, at that point in the life cycle of a song, totally in love with this newest piece of work, and desperately wanted everyone to share in that love. It was not unlike whipping up a self-invented delicacy and wanting everyone to feel deep rapture while eating it. And finally, there was the precedence set by my previous songs, and the fear that perhaps this one would fail to live up to a higher expectation. Rather lofty, and clearly daunting on all counts, though also clearly self-created and perpetuated.
So back to my friend and my newest song. This particular work had been forcefully ejected from me by a powerful muse, and though I kept running away from it mid-stream (literally leaving the room right in the middle of composing it, hoping to escape the painful birthing process of those verses), I was consistently marched back to the drawing table by something far stronger than my own urges, until it was finally completed. I had never experienced such a wrenching creation process. I truly felt I had written a song against my will. It took over a month before I had the courage to play it for one other person. I was attending a music conference and found a willing audience in a fellow songwriter. She sat on my hotel bed as I sang it. When I finished and looked up at her, she asked me if I would sing it again, which I did. I think she had me sing it a third time before we talked about it. Agony. But she liked it. Very much.
So finally a month later I decided to debut it at a small concert in an intimate setting. My friend, along with a few others from our circle, sat in the audience. It was her face that gave me the courage to start, execute, and finish it. And again the response was good. So it became part of my repertoire and eventually the title song of the next album, though I never would have foreseen that! And two days ago, after years of silence between us, she emailed that she had been thinking of me and listening to my music and felt like reaching out to me. It was like a little electrical jolt to see her name there on my screen after all that time. What do you say to a friend, fifteen years later? So I answered her, with a brief update, and will see what is to follow.
Earlier that same day, I had had a cup of tea with an old high school friend. Similarly, we had never been close when we were in school together, but we had gotten to know each other and had a few classes together. Though on a different schedule, as I graduated a year ahead of my class and then took time off to record and travel with my band, we graduated from our hometown university at the same time.
Three months ago I was part of a concert that deliberately featured music from three differing styles of music, held in a small art gallery. I was wearing my singer-songwriter cap for the first time in a long while. Since this performance was being given in a new location for this series, I sent out an email announcement to try to generate a little more interest, as ticket sales were slow. As a result I knew several people in the small audience. Greeting people before the show, I was very surprised and pleased to find myself saying hello to this high school friend. After living on the east coast for a few decades, she and her husband had recently moved back here, where most of her family had remained. We agreed to get together.
Circumstances being as they are, it took until late last week for that to work out. We had such a lovely quiet time together, exploring where our paths had led us through all these years, and sharing what we are navigating in the present. I am sure we will see more of each other. And she may even become my neighbor, as she and her husband are house-hunting in my neck of the woods. I came home with a little excited flutter. All these years that I have been a mother raising two kids, I have shared much with many friends, felt nurtured in several communities, and Dan and I have grown many new friendships. Somehow this single hour over a cup of red berry tea felt new, like the beginning of a fresh chapter that put me in the center instead of my children or my relationship with them. I pictured inviting this friend and her husband over for dinner, Dan cooking up a gourmet meal, and the four of us enjoying each other’s company as grown-up friends. It’s not that this hasn’t happened at all in the past 18 years (though I have to admit it hasn’t happened with great frequency!) It’s just that the image conjured itself up and it excited me with its sense of promise. That is definitely new.
The third brush with my past came yesterday afternoon in the form of a get-together to remember a recently passed co-worker and friend. I spent my college years working in a local restaurant. My fellow waiters, bartenders and managers were some of the most intelligent, creative and fun people I have ever known, and many after-hours were spent in each others’ company during those years. The restaurant business often attracts people who are on their way to something, and this group was no exception. In our midst were future doctors, lawyers, artists, scientists, mountain climbers, dancers, actors, writers, poets, teachers, and many more. Our beloved manager died last month of cancer. His mother and his brothers celebrated his life – and what would have been his 64th birthday – at his mother’s house, serving the same food we dished up when we all worked together.
It is always such a bittersweet thing, these gatherings. I cannot help but find myself thinking, “Why couldn’t we have had this party while he was still here?” And yet I do not want to diminish the gift of having had that time yesterday with these people who all cared deeply for this sweet man we all called a friend. It was a treat to find out what everyone has been doing all these years, to see how well everyone is aging, who remembers what, and who is still connected to whom. There were, of course many people missing from our circle, some due to other commitments and some because we have lost touch.
Okay. So now it’s time for true confessions. I came home with my mind swirling. Even today I am calming down from the dizzying effects of over-stimulation. As fondly as I remember those years, they were also some of the most despondent in my life, fraught with uncertainty about myself in the world, desperately lonely even when I was surrounded by people, trying hard to be someone I wasn’t, and being hit over the head repeatedly with the lesson that I could only be myself, yet refusing to learn it until decades later. All of the unhelpful and hopeless tapes that were helplessly recorded in my subconscious back then have been trying to pull themselves back into the forefront (wherever the forefront of my sub-conscious could be) since last night, and my very grey matter is tired, all the way to the tips of my just-as-grey hairs.
Sitting here writing this, I also find myself pulling something else together. A few days ago, after a hard day of teaching beginning violinists, I asked the universe to offer the guidance of a few clearer signposts. (Interesting. I had to correct my mistyped word “soundposts.”) Everyone at the party, my out-of-the-blue email, and my tea date, everyone asked me if I’m still doing music. Yes. But what music did they mean? The last each of these people knew me, I was a folksinger, not a violinist in a baroque orchestra, taking and teaching private lessons.
Just this week I picked up the guitar, for the first time in quite awhile, and a new thought began to come forth. There is no extra energy or time in my life these days to set up a solo folk concert and do all that is necessary to publicize it. Could I put a show together and show up and do it? Absolutely, with pleasure. But performing is not just giving a concert to an audience. In fact, that part, which is the most rewarding and fun, is in many ways the easiest part. So now it suddenly came to me: what if I were to pick one song and work on it, at my own pace, up to performance/recording level? And then I could employ our little digital camcorder and post it on Facebook or YouTube, or both, and let my friends know about it, just to be able to connect to people with my music in some way. It’s not that I have no desire to play the very music around which my entire life revolved for all those years, now in my present tense. It’s that while I was resting from it, and raising my children, the world – and in particular the folk industry – continued to evolve, and I cannot step back into it without a major commitment on a lot of levels. It would be hard to do it in a micro or fractional way. This is the first inspiration I have had to move back out into the public as a soloist, just a little bit.
Just last week I read an article about a singer who goes into corporate settings and rallies these business people in meetings to sing together! Not surprisingly, it has helped co-workers deal with conflicts, stuck energy, and many other challenges in the workplace. Just before I left the stage and the touring circuit, this was an idea I had had, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to pull it together and market it. Reading about this woman rekindled that question – could I work with local companies? I would love to provide some inspiration to grown-ups who do not have enough music in their lives.
So here I sit, my mind reeling with questions. For my own sake (and to contribute to your possible boredom or at least overwhelm) I will try to articulate them. The big one: what am I being called to do? (This might be an appropriate place to mention that last week I went to the library and checked out a book about finding and following your calling. What attracted me to this book six days ago?) A smaller and more immediate one: can I quiet the noise in my head and find some stillness? It is out of that stillness that I am usually able to identify something to do just right now, in the short run.
So with that I will close for today. First, I will do the mundane and necessary thing that string players must do often, which is to clip my nails so I can practice. And then I will practice. And after lunch I will lie down and breathe, and do my best to let everything fall away for a short time. I have a lecture and a concert to attend – as an audience member and friend of the performer – and then a 10/10/10 party to attend. With dear friends I have known for decades and care very much about. Hmmm. Recurring theme a la mode.
10,000 times and counting
October 6, 2010 at 10:10 pm | Posted in Short Blogs | 4 CommentsTags: daughter, Dr. Suzuki, excellence, family, Malcolm Gladwell, memory, motherhood, music, musings, parenthood, piano, practicing, reflections, teaching, violin
I was working with a piano student this afternoon, going over a passage that challenged her fingers a little. “Just practice this section about a million times!” was my prescription. We laughed. And suddenly I remembered how, years ago, our family explored what it is to do something a million times.
We were driving in the car and someone must have said something about a million – maybe it was Chloe wondering what it was like to have a million of something she wanted, or perhaps a character from one of our books-on-tape said something about a million. I will have to ask Chloe, because she may remember. (Rachel was too young at the time.) Anyway, we set about figuring out how long it would take to count to a million. I have to admit that the math was way beyond our two daughters at the time, but it was a fun exercise nevertheless. I have no memory of even a wild estimate. But I do remember that we had to time ourselves counting pretty far in order to come up with a guess. And of course it is way faster to say “one” and “fourteen” and even “seven hundred twenty-three” than it is to say “eight hundred seventy-six thousand five hundred eighty-one,” and there are definitely more of the latter than of the former. So we had to take that into account, and somehow we arrived at our version of an answer.
Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, who developed the Suzuki pedagogy for violin, said that knowledge alone does not equal ability. “Knowledge plus 10,000 times,” he claimed, is what produces ability. Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers says that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to develop extraordinary ability. So though my recommendation to my student is obviously an exaggeration (and goodness knows how long it would have taken her to follow it to the letter – but I’m not going to go there!) it is more on track than off.
It makes me wonder how many hours I have actually put into violin or piano over the course of my lifetime. And what else have I repeated enough times to be able to put it in the category of expertise? What internal tapes have I replayed that many times? What knee-jerk reactions? And what have I cultivated, as opposed to enacting by default?
I will have to get back to you on this one.
The school of leavings
September 4, 2010 at 10:39 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 2 CommentsTags: daughter, family, grief, journal, life, miscarriage, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, rite of passage, school
I played music for a bat mitzvah service this morning, a very sweet occasion. At the very end, right before the closing song, a passage written by Albert Einstein in 1954 was read:
“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”
An optical delusion of consciousness. What a powerful and apt term! I sat through the whole service teary-eyed and choked up – rites of passage always do that to me anyway, no doubt enhanced today by the freshness of Chloe’s leaving – and those words showed up as a lifeline, a rope to grab hold of to lead me out of my soggy puddle. What is my life – your life, anybody’s life – but a meandering path of leavings, and of moving forward even when we want to hold on?
The day Dan and I began to try to conceive, I was thunderstruck by the realization that we had stepped onto the escalator of letting go. Could we control whether or not we hit the jackpot (so to speak) this ovulatory cycle? Never. We had no say over any of it, speed nor date of conception, the nature of the pregnancy, the first miscarriage, the grieving process, how many months more of trying for the next, the nature of the next pregnancy… Obviously, I could go on for years with this list. And once Chloe was born, and later Rachel, I had no control over the next set of variables. Each step of developmental progress was another departure – from my body, from our arms and laps, from babyhood and soft sweet cheeks and wide open eyes and clinging, eager hands and ramrod posture and adorable outfits to everything that comes with every single stage of growing up. I had pictured parenthood as the act of welcoming someone into the world. What a surprise to learn I had it backwards! Our children were welcoming us to a whole new curriculum of lessons to be learned.
I know I have not been the best of students in that school, though neither have I been the worst. When I could not go by my own experience, I looked for others who could teach me. I learned about being a gentle parent from three unlikely couples, namely, the parents of Frances and Gloria, in all the Priscilla Mary Warner children’s books; of Arthur and D. W., in the PBS series inspired by author Marc Brown; and of Ramona in Beverly Cleary’s classics. They were great models for me in the area of love, patience, maturity, and understanding. But their stories show little to nothing of the slow parade of good-byes that lie ahead. Like Dorothy in the land of Oz, I had to find them for myself.
They did not come on the expected days, like the first morning of kindergarten or even the first time Chloe drove Rachel to their dance school and Dan and I were left waving on the porch, the air oddly sucked out of our lungs. I felt it more when Chloe would come home from a play date a little farther away from my understanding, a new cockiness in her voice. Or when Rachel suddenly didn’t need a good-night kiss and hug anymore. Then who am I? What am I now?
If I am first and foremost the one who brought them into the world and sustained them with the milk my body produced for them, I stand alone and separate, as Einstein observed. But if I remember that I too navigated my path away from my mother and father into the world that was awaiting me, they join me as two more children in a long line, and we join all families. All mothers and fathers were once children, following the drive to leave their parents, forever moving forward. I can now turn with compassion toward my own parents, who must have grieved my moving out at age 19, though I didn’t notice at the time. It was not my job to notice them! I was joining the world – for myself, I thought at the time. Now I know better. The baby bird leaves the nest and flies off, to grow big enough to build another. It is the way of the universe. I will never know whether the mother and father bird shed tiny tears in their abandoned circle of twigs, but I know it is the same set of impulses, even if I use words to try to understand it all, and they do not ponder but only act.
I am thankful to be swept up in the fast and fierce winds that meet my face as I hurtle helplessly forward in time. It is comforting to me to be part of the very nature of things. That in itself frees me (for the moment) from the prison of separateness and personal agenda. And by the way, Einstein wrote that magnificent paragraph the year I was born.
Hit the ground pausing.
August 31, 2010 at 3:52 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 1 CommentTags: chronicle, college, daughter, family, journal, life, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, rite of passage, thanks, update
In the years that I used to be a touring folksinger, I bonded intimately with the expression “hit the ground running.” I would usually be working on several projects at once right up until we packed up the car to go, and then we would drive cross country for two days, or three, or even four, to our designated geographic region of the month. Upon arrival, I often had only hours before entering the first concert venue to open the performing portion of the trip. We always tried to fill as many days as we could with gigs, as down time is generally not too attractive during a tour. After the last gig, we would turn around and start the trek home, and once home, I invariably had commitments almost right away. It became a lifestyle. I am married to a “do” kind of person, we are both self-employed, and there is always something begging for my time, and for his.
For the past year and a half much of my energy has revolved around all the steps toward Chloe going to college. Each campus visit required an inventory of detailed planning: flight, accommodations, and rental car reservations; schedule particulars, both on our end and those of the school; signing up for a campus tour, for which we encountered different hoops to jump through for each school; setting up a violin lesson with a professor; and often many more. The application process provided a new and exhilarating ride to say the least. Preparing for auditions involved providing support for Chloe’s musical efforts as well as all the travel logisitics. And auditions themselves were nerve-racking for everyone in the generally vicinity. (I wish you could measure the quality and quantity of energy circulating through a conservatory on audition day.) Waiting for acceptance packets (or, in contrast, the dreaded rejection letters) to arrive in the mail was its own frontier to navigate. Then the month-long big decision, which led us back to more campus visits (see earlier in this paragraph…) And after that, the transition period between everything-being-about-getting-ready-for-college and Being There and Saying Good-bye.
Dan and I drove home as fast as we could. Six hours the first day (we left campus at 4:30 in the afternoon, after the last parent session, entitled “Letting Go”), fourteen hours the second day, and four the third. In one sense I followed my old protocol. I had Sunday afternoon and evening to catch up on email, put my teaching schedule together and contact all my students, and respond to last minute fall-semester questions, not to mention catching up with Rachel after the days apart. And on Monday I made announcements to three middle school classes, taught my first two violin classes and took Rachel to her lesson and orchestra rehearsal. Busy, busy, busy.
On another level, I feel as if I am walking through a different kind of atmosphere from the one I left last week. It feels thicker and heavier to walk through. Breathing can be challenging for a moment here and there. Time is ticking by in a new silence I had never noticed before. I am passing through a threshold I had not expected to be encountering. Raw is the best word to describe this new place. I know it is also filled with promise. The path that led to Chloe’s entrance into our family fold was one that multiplied the expansion of my universe exponentially, internally as well as externally. So it should be no surprise to me that her first step of departure from this nest would send me gear-shifting into the next catapult. I will not lie and tell you that I am eager. But I am willing, and I am as ready as you can ever be, if only by virtue of the fact that I am able to put it into words for you this afternoon. Thank you all for receiving it, and thereby standing witness for me.
On transition
August 16, 2010 at 10:32 pm | Posted in Short Blogs | 4 CommentsTags: autumn, change, chronicle, college, daughter, fall, family, journal, labor pains, life, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, school, transition
Chloe and Rachel are out for the evening, tie-dying and dining with friends, so it is quiet here. I have a violin lesson tomorrow morning and I want to get some more practice time in tonight, but thought I would write just a little bit first.
The weather was cooler this morning, giving us a hint of fall, bittersweet. I love the crisp air, the deepening colors of autumn, the new shade of blue in the sky, but with this prelude a little part of me begins to pull in, bracing for what’s to come. My acupuncturist speaks of this transition time as the fifth season, deserving of its own mark on the calendar. What would we call it? Threshold? Bridge?
Perhaps in truth every day is a transition. We awake with expectations of what it may bring, and are almost always surprised by something before we yield to the night. It is so easy to ride our time on the ship of complacency, believing that the details we enter on our digital daybooks are the important ones. When Chloe and Rachel were little, I was reminded of what really matters a hundred times each day, startled out of the mundane by those young and unconditioned voices. Now our teenagers look up at the family calendar to see what’s coming as often as they open their eyes to see what’s here.
As long as I can remember every August into September has carried the promise of something new. Even after I had graduated from college, I started something in the fall. I took classes in weaving, yoga, Pilates, Jewish history. I took on new students of my own, settling into a rhythm so different from that of the warm summer months. For years I prepared for and embarked on a fall tour, traversing both familiar and unfamiliar territory each time. A couple of times, Dan and I went backpacking in September, feeling even more keenly the chill of earlier sunsets.
Once our children began attending school, August held a new meaning for them. And through the years our family has navigated the path from relaxed breakfasts to rushed, from shorts to sweatshirts, from evenings of leisure to assignments and requirements, with mixed reviews. The older they grew, the more complicated the mire of gains and losses that came with this passage, with Dan’s and my feelings adding to the tangle.
This year we are all more careful and less sure. Every meal together is a little more poignant, every silence loaded. The floor of Chloe’s room is filling with boxes and packages. The contents of her closet grow a little leaner, as she selects what goes with her, what gets handed over to Rachel or me, what gets given away. We are all too, too busy, though maybe the distractions are at least a partial salvation. One week from tonight Rachel will be rehearsing with one orchestra or another (depending on this weekend’s audition results) and Chloe and I will be finishing the last of the packing.
I go up and down every day now, excited with the ripeness of possibility and promise one minute, devastated in the next by the visceral awareness of Chloe’s pending departure. As much as I detest the quiet in our home this evening, it is allowing me to breathe through this new brand of labor pains. I can hardly believe I will make it through the next contraction, but I do. And I make it through the next, and the next as well. It’s transition. ‘Tis the season.
Naming my blog: a (slight) retrospective
August 12, 2010 at 11:47 am | Posted in Long Blogs | 4 CommentsTags: blogging, chronicle, composing, daughter, family, getting to know me, habits, journal, life, motherhood, music, musings, names, parenthood, reflections, writing
I admit it, I do become obsessed when I’m searching for the perfect whatever. Decades ago, when Dan and I were planning our wedding I got so wrapped up in the quest for the right dress, I still found myself gazing at silks and pale colors two and three years after the gown had been properly stored away. Embarrassing, but true (and somehow freeing to say it out loud in public, after all these years – thanks for listening!) So when I was trying to come up with a name for my blog, it was torture. Here’s what I wrote while still in the throes of the final decision-making agony:
So now it’s a name. No, no more babies, no more dogs, unless you call this blog my newest child or pet. But perhaps it would be helpful to review the last few name-selecting processes I have been through and survived to tell the tale.
- Chloe’s name. When I was pregnant with Chloe, we chose no boy-names. Holding on to the old fashioned mysteries, Dan and I had decided that even though the doctors and nurses and staff people could be informed of our baby’s gender through the miracles of science (I was 38, so they required amniocentesis) we wanted to wait until the moment all of our ancestors had had to wait for. I’m not saying there were no male names that we liked. There was Ian, Ewan, Matthew, Martin (except for what “Martin” means), and more that have been long forgotten, but none of them made it to the “possibles” list. So we arrived at the hospital (with less than two hours to spare, but that’s another story) with four girl-names: Emma, Laurel, Maureen, and Chloe.
- Rachel’s name. Another story, first of all because we knew she was a girl. As it was our second time around, we decided we were no longer in need of a mystery and allowed the clinic to give us the complete report from the amnio. Actually, she was so different in the womb, I had thought that perhaps she was a boy, and shared my thoughts with Dan and Chloe. So we spent a few weeks of early pregnancy picturing the little quintessential family with one girl and one boy, and then got the news that our imagined portrait had a major flaw. That was amazingly shocking! We found ourselves reeling for awhile over that piece of news.
- The Folkaltones. I think I still have all the sheets of scrap paper on which we brainstormed for just the right way to capture the essence of our trio. We loved Tribe of Three, until we Googled it and found it was already taken. It went from there, and every time we ran a search engine we found we were not as clever and unique as we had believed. It was ego crushing, not to mention frustrating, and it was getting annoying that we had no name. I honestly have no memory of how it happened, but we finally settled on the Trifolkals. We liked the implication of 3-ness, the obvious folk reference, and we decided to capitalize on the “focal” aspect by giving our music the subtitle “visionary folk”. Egos back, intact.
- Naming my song Adjustment, and then changing the name to Bouncing Back. I wrote this song in 1979. Dan and I had split up in September of that year, after two years of dating, and two months later the song pretty much wrote itself, the result of a wrenching time. “Can I help it if I’m not bouncing back…” is how the song starts, and the refrain echoes it at the end of each verse. So when it came time to give it a title, a poet friend of mine suggested I call it what it is. To me it was about adjusting to being alone, separate from Dan, when I wanted to be with him. Once I had performed it a few times, audience members started to request the song about bouncing back. It isn’t about bouncing back, I would respond. It’s about not bouncing back. Aren’t you listening carefully to my lyrics? (I didn’t say that last part out loud, it not being a good idea to criticize fans.) It went on my first solo album as Adjustment and retained that title.
- Naming this blog. I keep going back to the advice of my poet friend, call it what it is. What is this blog about? Based on past experience, I may not really know the answer to that question until around the year 2040, but in the meantime, I think it is about two main things. One is walking through the process of letting go of my older daughter as she leaves for college. The other is figuring out what on earth I am going to do with my own life now that most of it has revolved around being the mother of two daughters and I will only have one living here. Those don’t sound like they are related, except that both of them involve me, and I do happen to be the one writing this blog. And one is catapulting the necessity of figuring out the other (you can work out which is which for yourself.)
There was no question in my mind. Chloe was my favorite, hands down, and I couldn’t understand why we would consider any other choice, but since I thought Dan wasn’t sure, it seemed the right thing to do. And to clinch the list idea, we reached a milestone decision: How could we really know who the baby was until he/she was born, and therefore, how could we pick a name ahead of time? Even with my bias, it seemed obvious to us that you have to wait and see who you get.
So after she was cleaned off and we got to look at her, we had to walk through the process of ruling out three names. One look told us she was not an Emma, and probably not a Maureen either. (I had gone to nursery school with a Maureen, and it forever holds meaning for me as a sweet and adorable bright-eyed toddler.) That left Laurel and Chloe. The latter had come from the movie “The Big Chill”. Chloe’s character is somewhat enigmatic, of a younger, seemingly more flakey and carefree generation from the rest of the cast, but in the end she turns the most troubled individual around and offers him a new chance for happiness and serenity. I saw her as a caring and wise soul peppered with a sprightly cheer.
Was Dan really strongly considering “Laurel”? I’ll never really know, but I do remember that I breathed a sigh of relief when he came around. And our Chloe has turned out to be a caring and wise soul, without a doubt, with more than a touch of her own brand of chirpiness. The irony is that years later Dan discovered that he has been saying his L-sound in the wrong part of his mouth all of his speaking life. Instead of using the tip of his tongue he has always pulled the back of said tongue up toward his hard palate – a very difficult thing to do, but it’s how he interpreted it way back when. So, poor thing, either of our top two would have proved a mouthful for him! It’s okay, she’s worth it.
Soon Dan and I went to work collecting names again, and this time nothing took. We spent months combing through name books from the library, my parents’ house, and our friends. Nothing. Or rather, each time something sounded good, there was a compelling argument against it. We liked Gretchen, but as we watched Chloe learning how to write her name, we decided it was too many letters. I liked Ruby, but Dan felt it was too old-fashioned. Emma, Laurel and Maureen were not even considered.
A few months later, on the way to the hospital in the back of an ambulance after Rachel had been born on the living room floor (I’ll cover that one some other time) I suddenly remembered that we had no list of names, or perhaps more accurately, no names on our list. Once Chloe was handed off to my parents and Dan caught up with me in the hospital room, we discussed the issue at hand. Finally we came up with the name Margot. My parents had been brought together by a folksinging Margot Mayo in New York, which added a nice dimension, and we liked the sound of the name. During the night, as I lay there too overwhelmed to sleep, the name Rachel came to me. We decided in the morning to give Chloe the choice.
Unbeknownst to us, Chloe had gone through her own process during the months prior, and had decided the best name for the new baby would be Diamond (taking off from Ruby – another gem? I’ll never know.) I can easily imagine the kind of appeal that name would hold for a four-year-old who is becoming a big sister. What I cannot imagine is what went through her mind when Dan called her at my parents’ house and offered her our two options, which had to seem unquestionably inferior to her. Luckily she was by nature quite agreeable, and since there was in her mind no contest between Margot (ugh) and Rachel (yay!) she came through. Definitely a family process.
Until we had printed out business cards and had the graphics all ready for our debut CD and a friend of mine from Chicago mentioned that there was already a trio by that name. I had even already even made the acquaintance of their songwriter/leader, Greg Trafidlo, at a conference. That was close! So we had to return to the drawing board. We played around with all the ideas again and, happily, stumbled fairly quickly upon Folkaltones, which took. We like it, but most people think we are the Folka (like polka) tones and that continues to drive us mildly nuts. It’s better than a lawsuit (though Greg is way too nice to think of it.)
Until three years ago, when I decided to re-release a compilation CD of songs from my first three records. This was my chance to make any changes. The pain having been eased during the past thirty years, it dawned on me that perhaps the song was about bouncing back after all. Maybe I wrote it during the early phase, when progress on that front was slowest. Maybe my fans had been right all that time. So for the first time ever, I re-titled a song.
The challenge is that it is difficult to encapsulate both of those in a four-word title, give or take a word. I had first come up with “Notes from the nest” but it’s taken. I contemplated how this nest is going to be half empty – “Half-empty nest”. Already taken, but also it is seen as leaning toward the negative, which is not my desire. So I brilliantly and optimistically went for “Half full nest” but it’s taken. And I decided also that it kind of sounds more like the earlier years of child-raising (especially when you read the blogs at those sites.)
So I have been brainstorming for days. Partial list: Face the Music, Cries at Weddings, So Far from the Nest, Musings from the Nest, Mom in Search of, Tune-up in the Nest, Mamatone, Take Your Vitamins, Whose Life Is It Anyway, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Love in the Translation, Tune-up for Mom, Losing my Marbles, Recomposing (maybe a little too close to “decomposing”), Lullabies for Mom, Apron strings and A-strings…
Finally I stumbled upon Roots and Chords, which everyone in my house (at the time) liked. I liked it too, but there was no sign from the universe to go ahead and grab it, except that it wasn’t already taken. Up stepped my Great Doubting Mind: If it isn’t already taken, maybe it’s not so good! However, that kind of logic has a fatal flaw, which is that I will never ever get to post my site if I am seeking approval from an already existing title, SINCE I CAN’T HAVE THAT ONE. Okay, breathe in, breathe out. I finally just went to bed after that episode. And this morning I jumped onto a new and different track: Apron strings and metronomes. Or Bach, Baez, and Bombeck. I’m kind of liking that approach and have two hours in the car this afternoon to come up with more tries.
Obviously, by the time you read this, the decision will have already been reached, since I will have chosen a title and posted my blog site. OR you and I will be dead because waaaaaay too much time will be taken in making the decision. As it is painful for me to imagine this being read at my funeral – or worse, used as my epitaph, I choose the first option. I promise you will hear from me soon.
Back to August 12, 2010. You can see where I ended up. I think it turned out to be the best choice, just like all the others.
Dorm news, the nature of grieving, and a lesson in exponents
August 7, 2010 at 12:54 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 8 CommentsTags: college, daughter, dorm life, family, grief, journal, life, miscarriage, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, the mind
Yesterday, after several tense weeks, Chloe finally received the email announcing her freshman roommate and her dorm assignment. Now she has one more tangible piece of the year ahead that she can place in the puzzle before her. Only somewhat tangible, however. She found her roommate on Facebook and sent a message along with a friend request. The latter was granted, but as of eighteen hours later, there is no return message. Okay, the girl is apparently at Disneyland right now, and was up late last night. We assume she friended Chloe on her iPhone and went to bed. As Chloe pointed out, it’s simultaneously fun and creepy to fb-stalk someone. But we were happy to see that she plays violin and also likes the Beatles and Jason Mraz, so it can’t be bad! We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that Chloe will move closer to the top of her list after she leaves the Magic Kingdom. And then they can talk about who will bring the mini-fridge and other domestic details.
For me the new degree of reality brings up a mass of tangled feelings and then the typical aftermath of thoughts, trying to sort it all out. Last night Dan and I joined friends for dinner and Chloe stayed home and had friends over for dinner and a movie. As we were seated in the Ethiopian restaurant, I had a sudden rush of awareness: tonight we are here and Chloe is at home, but in a few weeks, when we return home from anywhere we go, she won’t be there. After I rescued my stomach from the basement beneath my chair, I knew one thing for certain. This is no different from any other kind of grieving. There’s the over-the-top wallop of the loss itself, and then there’s the waves that hit you in any random moment, with no warning. I haven’t even had the wallop yet. These must be prelude-waves.
Before Chloe, I had a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. Dan and I were overcome with sorrow, and then, of course – what else can you do? – we began to carry on with our lives. Two months after the miscarriage, I walked into the backstage dressing room of a concert hall and spontaneously burst into tears. Until I set foot in the dressing room, it had not dawned on me that months beforehand, I had pictured myself doing that concert in a maternity dress. Over the coming months, I came to understand that we walk through grief by mourning each micro-component of the whole. Every moment, every face, every thread that is attached to what we lost has to be met and felt.
It’s all around me. Last week Dan and I went to see “The Kids Are All Right” which had received good reviews and didn’t look too heavy. Little did we know that (and I don’t think it will ruin anything for any of you who have not seen it if I include this – but if you want to, you can skip this paragraph) the movie includes a main character who has recently graduated from high school and has only a few weeks left before she leaves for college. The parting scene shows her arriving on campus, dumping her stuff in her dorm room, saying good-by to her family and watching them drive off without her. Okay, was it really necessary for us to watch this right now?
And a few nights later I was at a party where Chloe was to play background music with a friend. I was chatting with another guest who is ahead of me by a few years. As if to refresh my memory of the movie I already wished I hadn’t just seen, she described her own experience of driving her daughter across several states, helping her unload into her dorm room, and saying good-by. “And then,” she continued, “I got into my car and began the drive home. I must have sobbed for two solid hours! And I was all alone. Or wait – was my mother with me for that trip…?” Oh great. I hope I remember that Dan is driving home with me someday years from now, when I am telling my story to some fragile wisp, trembling before me. Assuming we don’t have an accident, driving on the interstate while sobbing. Perhaps we’ll stay on the side roads for the first part of the journey.
I know, I know, I know. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s wonderful. Yes, it’s necessary – and right. And I have lots to do in the seventeen days between now and our departure. And there is nothing to fix. There is no one dying. Heaven knows, I am well aware of the difference between my 80-year-old father passing away a year ago and my 18-year-old daughter embarking on the next chapter of her life’s adventures. And I am not alone. Dan and Rachel are moving through it in their own ways. I guess it’s also true to say that our family foursome is moving through it as a whole as well.
I remember that after Chloe was born, I figured out that adding a baby to a couple doesn’t just make three. It’s closer to exponential because you have to add the dynamics of all the relationships. So to begin with there were three relationships: Dan and his relationship with himself, my relationship with him, and my relationship with myself. Adding Chloe gave us four more – hers with herself, that between each of us with her, and the threesome. Adding Rachel gave us a myriad more, because it wasn’t just Rachel herself and Rachel with each of us. There were now “the girls”, “the kids”, “the grown-ups”, etc. Even though Chloe is not a “member” of each of those relationships, it affects all of them.
Everyone tells me that our relationships with Chloe will continue, but they will change, and I do believe that. It helps me to remember that our family has ridden the shockwaves of past transitions, and it has always been for the better. So yes, this is uncomfortable, and each of us has an occasional moment of squirming, flailing and/or writhing, but we are in it together, even as we are each negotiating an individual set of bumps and turns. I feel mighty fortunate to have such a strong set-up. In this moment, bolstered by what has just come clearer to me, I know we’ll all be okay. What is it they say – the only constant is change?
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Roots and Chords 