First snow
And settling into cold
It’s Sunday night. Another week starts tomorrow. A full week, after a shorter week last week and a vacation the week prior. I am not excited to see the minutes tick by on the clock. Last week lasted three months. The transition back after a week off was rough. For all of us. And this is the last week with Z at home.
And yet, the view out my window tonight is still. Calm. Quiet. White with snow. In the streetlights, I can see the steady twinkle of snowflakes continuing their gentle dance to the ground below. I breathe in, close my eyes, remind myself the challenges will pass. The small moments of joy will come.
It is hard to say what was so challenging about last week. Tears felt close to the surface, crying was part of every day. Getting back into work was hard. It always is. Clients had difficult holidays. Celebrations were not joyful but painful, strained relationships didn’t get easier, loss and grief felt stronger and more difficult to bear. While I know how to hold my clients’ struggles without letting it spill over into my personal life, it can take a bit to get back into that space. So the sadness and strife and heartache I hear about all day can follow me into my evening.
I think, though, what felt hardest is that L is more consistently pulling away. I have gotten the message that my questions, my very voice are annoying to him. And I get it. I know he is doing what he should be doing—differentiating himself from me and this family, trying on different values and ideas, figuring out what is his to hold on to and what he wants to let go. I knew it would be harder and more noticeable with him than it was with Z. But I don’t think I anticipated how quickly this separation would follow Z leaving home. Or what it would feel like to miss someone who is physically in the same space as me.
L has always been the most verbally expressive of my three. He has been most vocal in his anger, most spirited in his embrace of life, most passionately devoted to whatever it is that has captured his awareness. And thus, his pulling away, his testing of independence would be most substantial. I know all that passion and spirit is going into wrestling. It’s going into his friendships. Into his analysis of the latest cast list and who should have gotten what part. Or a deep dive into what meals are best for pre and post wrestling matches. It is pouring out when he puts headphones on and listens to music that gives voice to all the feelings rushing around in his body. It’s going into conversations and thoughts and ponderings I don’t know anything about. Because he is creating his own life, his own self.
Sometimes, I can almost see the dark, gray storminess of his mood clouding him. I can sense he doesn’t want to be seen, talked to, acknowledged. I know these things in part because I can still feel this way. I, too, have days when I wish I could be alone in silence, without a sound…a word…a glance…without anyone asking anything of me. And as a teenager, I think I felt that way most of the time I was at home. I either wanted to be with my friends or alone.
And now, I am the mom. I am the one watching this boy who can still surprise me with just how grown up he is. This young man who has no idea that when I see his carefully shaven face, I still see the mischievous grin of a little one so many years ago. This athlete who uses his brain and his strength to try and take hold of another athlete and pin him on a mat. Within those muscular legs, I see the swiftness of his 10-year-old self dribbling a ball down the soccer field. When I hear him singing in the shower—a deep, rich voice emerging—I am taken back to a new middle school boy, wearing elephant ears, holding a clover, and earnestly singing:
Alone in the Universe 'Cause I have wings Yes, I can fly Around the moon and far beyond the sky And one day soon, I know there you'll be One small voice in the universe One true friend in the universe Who believes in me Lynn Ahrens/Stephen Flaherty From the musical Seussical
I heard it all the time when these boys were small, when I would talk with a mom who had older kids. My friends and I even starting saying it to ourselves as we commiserated about the struggles of parenting littles: Little people, little problems…bigger kids, bigger problems. The problems of littles are usually fixable—hunger, sleep, discomfort, having to share. The teenage problems feel more consequential, less clear cut, and less things you can crowdsource. Parenting teens is much lonelier, because you want to protect their privacy and you don’t want to deal with any judgment on top of trying to sort through what to do. And you usually only have a sliver of the story to work with.
On top of all of this, these teens are rooted so very deeply in my heart. Of course I loved my babies and little ones. I couldn’t imagine loving them anymore than I did. And watching someone grow up, go through first loves and first heartbreaks and achieve and fail and fall down and get back up and all the things. Well, how could you not love your 16 year old more deeply and fully than the two year old they once were?
As the poet, Sharon Olds, says:
From High School Senior Seventeen years ago, in this room, she moved inside me, I looked at the river, I could not imagine my life with her. I gazed across the street, and saw, in the icy winter sun, a column of steam rush up away from the earth. There are creatures whose children float away at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for weeks and never see them again. My daughter is free and she is in me--no, my love of her is in me, moving in my heart, changing chambers, like something poured from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
Today, L was out clearing snow with us and he threw a snowball. He was lighthearted and silly. He responded when I asked what he wanted for lunch. And he thanked me for getting it for him.
Small things. But they fill a heart that has been yearning to see some glimpse of the boy who occupies so much space there.
So I learn to live with less. To remind myself again and again that this is normal and what they do. To savor the sparkling moments of connection, however small. To remember that I got to have so much of him for so long and now it’s time for him to share all of that with his friends, his coaches, his teachers, whoever fills his life. Just as his older brother has and is doing.
I look out the window and I appreciate the snow. I know that I have to enjoy it when it is here, to take in the quiet, the stillness it brings. Because it may be gone tomorrow. Every winter seems to bring less and less snow. And so, when it falls it is even more precious than in those winters years ago when the ground was covered in snow from December through March.
Catching the sparkling flakes dancing down to earth.
Taking in the brief moment of joy.
First Snow
The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.
~Mary Oliver