Mole Week
You know how some weeks feel like marches of triumph--everything you touch is gold. Your kids happily praise the mother God gave them and you feel complete, as if the world is a good place despite it all.
This is not one of those weeks.
I feel like a mole this week. I feel like, when I put my head into the light of righteousness, I have to squint my eyes to bear the sunbeams. I feel like my kids are unfulfilled and I have problems.
Yesterday, on our morning walk, the rain was a mist that blew into our faces and the trees towered into more rain. It was beautiful and refreshing and irritating all at the same time. Charley kept tracking birds and barking as if he could catch them and make them his own: first a raven, its wings shining with raindrops, then a seagull, circling over our heads, white against grey.
"Oh, ye dingbat, Charley," I said fondly. "Ye can't catch the birds, brother dog, for they fly above ye and are too much aloft."
He followed them with his snout. "I can dream of catching birds," he said.
As we tromped along a muddy path out of the fields and onto the road home, I thought of myself in college, and how I thought that the world was just waiting for me to shower it with my own personal gifts. It was ripe for me, my plum to pick. I didn't even spell-check a story before entering it in a national contest, and glory be, I won second prize. Just like that. Think of the rich rewards that awaited my talent if I just ran a spell check next time!
Too, I remember walking back in the well-to-do neighborhood behind the towers and dorms of our Chicago-suburb college, and I remember the longing that suddenly opened inside me as I watched mothers standing by neat picket gates, chatting with each other, calling their children home for supper. How I wanted to be just such a mother--a wildly famous one, perhaps--but a mother nonetheless.
Now here I am; we've given up the picket fence and all the marks of being solidly middle-class, and we're living in this wee sweet house with all the accoutrements of graduate students. The solidness that I craved for so long is gone, swept away by a sudden turn in life. I think back to Pennsylvania days--days of innocence--perfect by no means, but with a sense of building something solid and real, when the world was working as it should: do good, find a reward; work hard, build a life.
But instead of teetering into the chasm of "what-ifs," I find myself deeply grateful for this imperfect life, for the mountains outside our dining room window, for the paid rent check every month, for children who must live with me, their imperfect mother. I am grateful for my small successes and for the bigger ones that I do not yet understand because I am not wise enough. I am grateful for my old Subaru with its rust spots from snow and ice from that good home in Pennsylvania. The gulls circle even on gloomy days and I remember suddenly that the Sound, full of whales and fish and opalescent nudibranches, is not far away.
And of course, I am ever grateful for all of you, my community near and far, who understand oh, so, well, when I have a week of being a mole, and when I snap at my poor children, and when I write nothing of consequence, and love me despite it.
This is not one of those weeks.
I feel like a mole this week. I feel like, when I put my head into the light of righteousness, I have to squint my eyes to bear the sunbeams. I feel like my kids are unfulfilled and I have problems.
Yesterday, on our morning walk, the rain was a mist that blew into our faces and the trees towered into more rain. It was beautiful and refreshing and irritating all at the same time. Charley kept tracking birds and barking as if he could catch them and make them his own: first a raven, its wings shining with raindrops, then a seagull, circling over our heads, white against grey.
"Oh, ye dingbat, Charley," I said fondly. "Ye can't catch the birds, brother dog, for they fly above ye and are too much aloft."
He followed them with his snout. "I can dream of catching birds," he said.
As we tromped along a muddy path out of the fields and onto the road home, I thought of myself in college, and how I thought that the world was just waiting for me to shower it with my own personal gifts. It was ripe for me, my plum to pick. I didn't even spell-check a story before entering it in a national contest, and glory be, I won second prize. Just like that. Think of the rich rewards that awaited my talent if I just ran a spell check next time!
Too, I remember walking back in the well-to-do neighborhood behind the towers and dorms of our Chicago-suburb college, and I remember the longing that suddenly opened inside me as I watched mothers standing by neat picket gates, chatting with each other, calling their children home for supper. How I wanted to be just such a mother--a wildly famous one, perhaps--but a mother nonetheless.
Now here I am; we've given up the picket fence and all the marks of being solidly middle-class, and we're living in this wee sweet house with all the accoutrements of graduate students. The solidness that I craved for so long is gone, swept away by a sudden turn in life. I think back to Pennsylvania days--days of innocence--perfect by no means, but with a sense of building something solid and real, when the world was working as it should: do good, find a reward; work hard, build a life.
But instead of teetering into the chasm of "what-ifs," I find myself deeply grateful for this imperfect life, for the mountains outside our dining room window, for the paid rent check every month, for children who must live with me, their imperfect mother. I am grateful for my small successes and for the bigger ones that I do not yet understand because I am not wise enough. I am grateful for my old Subaru with its rust spots from snow and ice from that good home in Pennsylvania. The gulls circle even on gloomy days and I remember suddenly that the Sound, full of whales and fish and opalescent nudibranches, is not far away.
And of course, I am ever grateful for all of you, my community near and far, who understand oh, so, well, when I have a week of being a mole, and when I snap at my poor children, and when I write nothing of consequence, and love me despite it.
Comments
T