The Weight (A Balancing Act)

westchester lagoon

I wake up Monday morning, head in a fog and the sky a heavy gray. Maybe I need to pick up the pace on our Lord of the Rings bedtime reading, finish the series and find something lighter to read to the boys: This morning’s gray resembles a specter, a phantom seeping through the windows.

There is light, too. It’s April in Alaska. We wake to light now, but today it’s muted by the undeniable presence of sagging clouds gathered and draped across the Chugach mountains, shrouding them from view. But at 7a.m. in April, the dance between light and dark in Anchorage feels, for my East coast origins and conditioning, properly balanced, stable, “normal.”

“Be grateful,” I growl to no one but me.

Still, I hesitate to rise, to sit up. I rub my hand around my face, press my fingers into my eyes.

I was up till midnight grading papers, a task that segued into restlessly mulling over a number of personal matters while I thrashed around under the covers. At 3 a.m., my seven-year-old, Matt, leapt into bed with me on the heels of a bad dream. Once asleep, he proceeded to kick me through the night – an unintended reminder he was close.

I hear Matt sifting through his Lego drawers in his room across the hall.

Over a swift and admittedly pouty, self-pitying moment, I envy my sister in Virginia, who lives across the street from my parents and can frequently ask them to assist with carpooling or hosting her three daughters.

I also think of my married friends. Envy tag-team parenting for the “bazillionth” time since my boys’ mom and I split in 2011.

“Stop,” I growl. Remember: We’re here. Here and nowhere else. And we’re doing our best.

Aren’t we?

Some days, it’s hard to know.

I swing my legs over the bed.

I’m reminded of a montage scene set to feel-good music in Judd Apatow’s This is Forty, where Paul Rudd adoringly wakes his daughters for school – affectionately tousling one’s hair, canoodling the other, and playfully rubbing his hand around his teenage daughter’s face.

So, I “Power Up” – I motivate, inhale some of whatever so enviably possesses Paul Rudd characters. I breeze into the boys room and cheerily declare a robust, “Good morning! Good morning! Good morning!”

Matt, from his place on the floor, amidst the rubble of his Legos, looks up at me doe-eyed and crestfallen and meekly whimpers, “Pop? Do we have to go to school today?”

He’s still in his pajamas and between his strawberry-blonde bedhead and the spaceship designs stretching across his rail thin limbs, and his childhood-specific pot-belly rounding through his top, I am utterly smitten and vulnerably open to complying with anything he wants.IMG_5937

No! I want to tell him. No, we don’t! No school today! No work! Today we’re building forts in the living room and watching all the Star Wars movies! While eating Pirate’s Booty and ice cream and PB&J! I’ll tell work we took a, a, a Family Care Day, because our “us” is more important than desk work, than paper pushing and Microsoft Outlook; more important than racing you guys to school and then racing to grab you at after care, and then slogging through rush hour traffic and trying to make and eat dinner before 7pm and then bathe and read LOTR at a sane hour so that we can rise rested to start the whole rat race all over again tomorrow!

Instead, I sigh and tell him, “Oh, buddy, I know. I know. I used to want to skip school so many times when I was a boy.” He limply groans and sighs.

Sam’s body shifts under his blankets. Limbs akimbo, he slowly snakes them towards himself and then out again, stretching awake. He blinks a few times and sits up. He rubs his eyes and smiles.

Sam, for all eleven of his years, has possessed the magical ability to welcome each day the way you can imagine the Dalai Lama does. Or Mary Oliver. His waking hours are one long embrace of everything and anything around him, so much so that I’ve often wondered where he really came from, if the stork accidentally brought his mom and me a congenial ambassador or motivational speaker’s child. Never mind getting Sam into commercials or acting, as some have suggested: I often think he’s on the verge of presenting a viral TED talk, or might go solve the world’s problems with Bono.

Today, as with every day, Sam looks around, all smiles and sparkle.

“Good morning,” he sighs, standing.

“It’s dark out there,” he notes peering through his window, “do you think it’s going to rain today?”

“Might,” I reply. “Looks like it.”

Sam stretches once more and bounds to his dresser and pulls out some clothes.

“Wow,” he sighs, “I am so tired.”

Just say the word, I clamor inside. Say it. Say something like, “Can we not do this today, Pop? The weekday runaway train thing we do?”

I stand thoroughly poised to call a sick day, to announce “Fort Building Day.”

He turns and proceeds towards the bathroom.

“Take a load off, Fanny!” he sings.

Ok, wait. No fair. He’s boldly singing the chorus to my favorite pick-me-up song. The one I play on the stereo the way others take a daily vitamin.

“…Take a load off, Fanny!” he continues, running the bathroom faucet, “Annnnnnnnnnddd!…Put the load right on meeee!!!”

I look at Matt.

“Ok, buddy. Time to get dressed.”

mattMatt sighs and groans, pouts. I want to tell him, as Sam’s dutifully reminding me only by the way he embraces a day, something about how we’re in this together, that we can do this, and that every day is somehow always in some way infused with surprising moments of joy, of grace. I want to tell him all that, but he’s seven, and I can’t expect him to agree or understand now.

I pat the top of his head, and he leans his head on my knee. I tell him only, “I know. I know.” Because I do.

There’s a balance to strike somewhere in all of this, adrift as I often feel we are, alone together and striving to keep up with the pace of things in the terrifying, stark, and beautiful spaces we find ourselves. Rather, I imagine, or I hope there is.

I lean one way and then the other, stroking Matt’s hair, wobbly and wavering.

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At Home in a House?

back yard

In a couple weeks I’ll turn 43, and I can honestly say that until four months ago, it never occurred to me to want a house. Scouts honor: Until the past autumn, I never remotely considered joining the American “Homeowner” mafia. It’s not that I’ve been stubbornly opposed to the idea, so much as that my lifestyle has never afforded me conditions for seriously considering the possibility.

I spent my young adulthood in a state of perpetual motion, travel, and transit – mostly between states, and occasionally between countries. These experiences were collected in the name of the book I wasn’t and am only sort-of-now writing. These adventures were regularly accompanied by short stints in contemplative communities, during which periods I’d pause, catch my breath, and ponder the possibility of an intentional spiritual or monastic path. While many of my friends and loved ones grew their 401K’s, smartly invested in future “equity,” and touted the good news of duplex-ownership, I fantasized about the conversation that may have occurred between Thomas Merton and the young Dalai Lama. When, at another in the long string of housewarming parties, you would drop “mortgage” and “new countertops” into the conversation, my thoughts drifted to the Alice Munro story I finished before heading to the potluck. Over drinks, you talk about the mold in your basement, dry rot or asbestos in the ceiling, and I’ll nod sympathetically while actually worrying over the lyrics for a song I was working on in my apartment before we met up. sam piano

Maybe it’s that recently the kids’ Legos have become to our two-bedroom apartment what bacteria is in preschool and daycare, accumulating at such an alarming rate that I’d swear these bricks should come packaged with the same rules that applied to Spielberg’s “Gremlins” – particularly that one about not adding water.

Then, too, I suddenly find myself in the company of an 11 year-old, Sam, who recently began requiring “Privacy” in our bathroom. (The humor is not lost on me, as I am afforded exactly 0% privacy in any room comprising our shrinking living space.) Perhaps you, too, would question anew these admittedly creature-comforted, still-privileged circumstances if you watched your six-year-old pound on the bathroom door, followed by his brother shouting he’s “busy,” after which you hear yourself offer the small boy a mason jar. Refusing that option, I recently told Matt, “Well, then you’ll need to wait. Or, there’s the woods? There! Those trees just past the parking lot?”

* * *

yard

It would have been impossible not to see the house. Resting at the bottom of the hill on the curve that leads to our apartment building, it’s actually a wonder the “For Sale” sign is still standing, that no one making the turn this icy winter has clipped it or smashed into it.

And while I initially spotted the sign, I didn’t make anything of it until a week or two later when, while driving the kids home from school, Sam asked if we could look at it.

He just wanted to look at the house, I told myself. It was in walking distance of our apartment building, and looking at a house didn’t mean I had to suddenly unearth the money to buy it. Or did the kids imagine that acquiring a house was a lot like purchasing the newest Avengers Lego set?

The woman who met us that Saturday morning told us it needed work, and she was selling it for her parents and they wanted it off their hands sooner and so some things were negotiable. “Which is still really no matter,” I thought, running the numbers through my head, “because 0 divided or multiplied by 0 is still 0.”

However, I’m puzzling now about what happened the moments after she showed me the faded, dried up remains of the summer’s strawberry and raspberry patches. And then, too, when Sam reached for the sturdiest, lowest hanging branch on the crab apple tree out front. Soon, the kids were running through the large yard out back and I was suddenly watching a story play out in my mind that I’d never until then mildly entertained. Exactly where had this story been hiding, I wanted to know? The one where the kids run laughing through the wide open yard – not a stone’s throw from the garden – and I then drift from my spot by the woodstove, out to the back deck with a beer in hand and cheerily call, “Alright you knuckleheads! C’mon – it’s dinner time!”

At one point, as the kids rolled around the large, empty living room, wrestling and doing somersaults and cartwheels, I looked out the wide, surrounding picture windows – each of them desperately in need of a lot of work – and I saw the room filled for a house concert featuring a friend’s solo act or one of the many local bands regularly staging intimate, unplugged house concerts around Alaska. Around then, deep in the throes of their play, Sam stopped suddenly, shot a glance my direction, and asked, “Can we buy it, Pop?”

I stammered and sighed. The owner’s daughter laughed, told me she had a couple kids of her own and understood, while I grit my teeth and told Sam we’d think about it.

“But I like it! I want that bedroom!” he announced pointing down the hall.

bird houseWe didn’t buy that house. There are a few reasons why. Money is one, of course, but so was the basement, which yanked me out of my fantasizing and only called to mind The Silence of the Lambs.

And I have yet to buy a house, still, though I’m thinking about it with a bit more conscious intention and thought now. I guess, until that Saturday a few months ago, every other house I’ve stepped into seemed only a house shaped collection of rooms. For whatever reason – the berry patches, the woodstove, the three bathrooms, or maybe the kids running with abandon through a yard, I can’t say exactly – one autumn Saturday afternoon, I somehow found myself plumb in the middle of a possibility called home.

bedroom view