carpe momento
There was a time when I was, shall we say, emotionally reserved. Not quite Spockish — maybe Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai. The music behind the menu selections on a DVD can bring Becca to tears, but until recently I could watch the scene in The Notebook where James Garner brings his wife out of her dementia just long enough to dance with her before she slips back under for another year — and never stop trying to remember the theme from The Rockford Files.
Those days are long gone. Parenting has made me a complete sap. A couple of weeks ago, Becca came back from Target and laid a couple of pretty pairs of socks on Laney’s and Erin’s pillows and a box of Connor’s favorite energy bars on his. “Just a little surprise,” she said. “They’ve been working so hard lately.”
I burst into tears.
This is me lately. The Notebook is entirely out of the question. I can’t even make it to the end of Charlotte’s Web.
I think I know what’s behind it. The winds of change are blowing hard around here lately. The youngest entered kindergarten, the middle is on the cusp of puberty, and the oldest — once a suckling babe — is 20 months from high school.
Becca and I (I realized last week with a shock) have reached the precise midpoint of our children’s childhood. Twelve years ago our eldest was born; twelve years from now, our youngest will enter college.
Erin, at age nine, is the emblem of all this, exactly midway between entering our home and leaving it. So it’s not surprising that a recent picture of Erin made me gasp:
Like all photos, it was a moment trapped in amber. But this particular moment had an absurdly large number of meaningful elements trapped in it — all of them in flux. Some had already changed in the weeks since it was taken. Everything else would change before you could sing “Sunrise, Sunset.”
Let’s take a quick inventory:
First the obvious. My little girl will shortly turn ten. Then eleven. Then twenty-six.
If she sticks with violin, the little blue tapes on the neck will come off soon. But she probably won’t even make it that far — she’s decided to switch back to piano, which means this photo narrows the frame to four possible months of her life, our first four months in Atlanta. Back on the dresser, beneath her bow, is her third grade league championship baskeball trophy from Minnesota (8-and-0, woohoo!). The design of the names on the wall is an idea from a dear family friend we left behind — Erin wanted her letters caddywompus, and Delaney wanted hers straight across.
Above Erin’s bed in the black frame is a collage of photos from her going-away party in Minnesota, signed by her friends. The Beatles poster has since given way to Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus.
At the head of her bed is an interesting blob of amber in its own right: a photo of Erin, Delaney, and Connor at Christmas in 2005. Will she still have a photo of her brother and sister over her bed in four years? It’s possible. I somehow doubt it.
I could go on with clothes, hair, Raggedy Ann, the paint on the walls, even her experiments with nail polish — but you get the idea. The shutter hadn’t even closed before these things started to change.
I could also work in some connection to meaning-making, or something about how the passage of time is especially poignant to those who know full well they are mortal. Mostly I just wanted to share a little of the intensely bittersweet feeling here at the midpoint of the most satisfying and purposeful period of my life.
Words fail me
Love is too weak a word for what I feel – I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you.
WOODY ALLEN in Annie Hall
I was born in the Sixties. My first two kids were born in the Nineties. But try to name the decade my youngest was born in, the one we’re in at the moment, and you’re left muttering clunkers like “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” or sounding like Grandpa Simpson by referring to the “aughts.” It’s called a lexical gap, a concept for which a given language lacks a concise label. German is said to lack a precise word for a person’s “chest,” while English speakers are left speechless when it comes to Fahrvergnügen.
When I first heard Alvy Singer struggling to express his feelings for Annie Hall, I thought it was just for laughs. But I’ve begun to struggle in recent years with precisely the same lexical gap — so much so that I’ve almost entirely stopped telling my wife and children that I love them.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
The problem is the overuse of what was once, I suspect, a more sparingly-used, and therefore more powerful, word. The fact that Paul McCartney’s only response to the problem of “silly love songs” was to sing the phrase “I love you” fifteen times in three minutes seems to prove my point.
As a result of using “love” to express our feelings about everything from self-indulgence (“I love sleeping in on Sunday”) to food (“I love Taco Bell’s new Pizzaburgerrito”), I find the word “love” now entirely inadequate to describe the feeling engendered in me by my wife and kids. I don’t love them. I luuurve them.
No no, come back. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic. I’m zeroing in on a practical, lexical problem, that’s all.
Mawwiage
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togevah today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dweam. And wuv, twu wuv, wiw fowwow you, fowevah.
IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN from The Princess Bride
Whenever I think of the reasons I luuurve my wife, I recall an event I attended two years ago — a debate between an atheist and a theist. I described the scene in PBB (pp. 96-7):
When the discussion turned to morality, [the theist] said something I will never forget. “We need divine commandments to distinguish between right and wrong,” he said. “If not for the seventh commandment…” He pointed to his wife in the front row. “…there would be nothing keeping me from walking out the door every night and cheating on my wife!”
His wife, to my shock, nodded in agreement. The room full of evangelical teens nodded, wide-eyed at the thin scriptural thread that keeps us from falling into the abyss.
I sat dumbfounded. Nothing keeps him from cheating on his wife but the seventh commandment? Really?
Not love?
How about respect? I thought. And the promise you made when you married her? And the fact that doing to her what you wouldn’t want done to you is wrong in every moral system on Earth? Or the possibility that you simply find your marriage satisfying and don’t need to fling yourself at your secretary? Are respect and love and integrity and fulfillment really so inadequate that you need to have it specifically prohibited in stone?
I first dated Becca because of conditional things. Non-transcendent things. Had she not been so unbearably attractive to me, had she not had the most appealing personality of anyone I knew, had she not been so funny and smart and levelheaded, I wouldn’t have flipped over her like I did. It may sound off to say it this way, but she fulfilled the conditions for the relationship I wanted, and I, thank Vishnu, did the same for her. I asked her to marry me in large part because of these not inconsiderable things.
But then, the moment I asked her to marry me, something considerably more transcendent began to happen between us. She said yes — and I was instantly struck dumb by the power of it. This splendid person was willing to commit herself to me for the remainder of her one and only life.
Holy (though I try to keep this blog free of both these words) shit.
No, I am not waxing, dammit, I am making a point. We were moving into the unconditional, you see. She had moved from being one of the many attractive, magnetic, funny, smart people I knew to The One Such Person Who Committed to Me. See the difference? And then, once she actually took three small packets of my DNA and used them to knit children — well, at that point, it became hard to look at her without bursting into song. I’m still not over it. What was a strong but technically conditional love moved decisively into unconditional luuurve.
So yes, there are things beyond the seventh commandment that keep me from cheating on my wife. Like the hilarity I feel at the thought of finding any other woman with any amount of those conditionals more attractive.
As for the children…
You’re an atheist? So then…you think your children are…just a bunch of…processes?
JEHOVAH’S WITNESS at my door last year
Last week a radio interviewer asked about my kids, with mild facetiousness: “So how about your own kids? Good kids, ya love ’em and everything?” In addition to the pure silliness of answering such a question, I fell head-first into that lexical gap once again — and the resulting three seconds of dead air probably did me no favors with the audience. I finally sputtered something about them being amazing kids, terrific kids, but it fell short, as it always does, of my real feelings.
I don’t make up for this lexical gap with the kids by telling them I luuurve them. Instead, almost every single day, I tell them, “I do not love you.” And they smile and say, “Oh yes you do!” — and all is understood.
They know in a thousand ways that I am transported by being their dad. They’ve become accustomed, for example, to the sudden realization that Dad is staring again. They’ll get that prickly feeling and turn to see me lost in a contemplative gawk. They’re very good about it, usually returning a smile rather than a roll of the eyes, which I think is very nice of them.
Recognizing that the love of our children is rooted in part in biology — that I am, in part, adaptively fond of them — does not in the least diminish the way I’m transported by contemplating the fact of them, and of our special connection, and of their uniqueness, of the generational passing of the torch.
But it’s interesting to note that, unlike my relationship with Becca, this meditative gawking began on day one. The order of things is reversed. My marriage started in the conditional and added the unconditional. I loved her from the beginning, but only slowly came to be so completely slain by her.
Kids, on the other hand, begin in the unconditional and add the conditional. From the moment they emerged from my wife — seriously, reflect on that for a moment — they were unconditionally wonderful to me. They were half me and half she. They were our connection to the future. Etc.
Gradually we formed additional bonds based on their actual attributes. They are smart as whips, wickedly funny, generous and kind and fun to be around. But that’s all frosting on an unconditional cake. Marriage, on the other hand — if it goes well — starts with frosting and gradually slips the cake underneath.
So yes, my kids are “processes,” whatever that means, and so is my wife. But they are also the main reasons I wake up grateful and filled with meaning and purpose every single day.
(Wax off.)
You put your whole self in
I don’t like bumperstickers. Half the time it’s just a self-righteous scold issuing from an automotive backside like a continuous ideological fart. I don’t even care if I agree with it; no fart is good when I’m behind it.
The rest of the time it’s witless humor. I see this in front of me in traffic
and begin weeping for at least three reasons. I have changed lanes in vicious traffic just to get an especially stupid sticker out of my sightline.
Once in a very long while there’s the exception that proves the rule, whatever that means — a bumpersticker that manages to be both witty and meaningful. I saw one two years ago in the parking lot of a Unitarian fellowship in Fridley, Minnesota. It said
I nearly wet myself with delight. Three days later I was pasting a copy on my own rear end. It’s still there. It captures the central joke of our existence, the difference between how big and serious we feel and how small and silly we are. [I’ve called this ‘the monk and the monkey,’ thinking I’d coined the phrase — then Googled it and learned otherwise. A classic monk-and-monkey moment.]
Best of all, the sticker calls into question the idea that “it” has to all be “about” some one thing.
It doesn’t, you know.
When someone hears that I think God is pretend, a meaning-and-purpose question is not far behind. But how do you get out of bed in the morning, and so on. It’s important in these moments to hide my instant, overwhelming desire to pull the person’s underwear up over his head and skip away humming I’ve Got a Loverly Bunch of Coconuts. Instead I pretend it’s a question worth answering. It isn’t, but what the hell.
I explain that we all ought to get out of bed in grateful surprise — unconditionally, every single morning — giggling with amazement at our luck to be conscious things, to be inside that tiny window of existence between two infinities of nonexistence. Most mornings I fail to wake up that way, and shame on me for that, silly monkey. For countless millennia I was mindless stuff. In a few years I’ll be that again. But for now… *HAHAHAHAHA!!!* LOOK AT ME, all up and EXISTING!!! WOOHOO!!!!!
You really have got to do that once in awhile, and mean it.
To insist on more is outrageously piggy. Our luck at even having that tiny window (most potential “people” never do, after all) and at being inside that window right now — why, that luck is so incredibly huge, we shouldn’t even be able to get to the end of our solemn declarations of the hunger for “meaning and purpose” without bursting into fits of giggles: “My existence is meaningful because…heh…heh heh….WOOHOO!!!!!!!! *HAHAHAHAHAHA!!* WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!!!”
But it isn’t enough, is it. I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
In the months that followed, my purposometer dropped to the mid-30s. I had no idea which way to go professionally. All of my romantic relationships had ended in flames and the waiting room was empty. I felt like a photocopy of a photocopy of a hollow log that wonders what the point is.
It was scary. It was unsettling. I didn’t like it one bit.
I scrambled to feed the meter with the only currency it had ever accepted: I went back to school. But I was haunted by the feeling that I was in the wrong field. I had followed what I was good at instead of finding what might fulfill me. My meter registered a cautious but bearable 50 and would have stayed there until the next square hat landed on my head, had not some damn fine M&P come strolling into view:
I had seriously dated enough of the wrong women (3, 4, or 5, depending on your definition of “serious,” “date,” and “woman”) to recognize the right one when she walked into the frame. I’ll refrain from further description of my lucky marriage, since it tends to come out like a Barry Manilow song. But when it comes to waking up everyday in grateful surprise…well, let me tell you, it’s just great to see her experience that every morning. Heh.
We were married, I got a job as a college professor, we had kids, and M&P became a non-issue. In one way or another, everything that mattered centered on them — and once the purposometer is in the high 90s, it’s pancreatic again.
It was about five years ago that I realized I hadn’t given M&P a thought in a long time. It only began to register again because my career had stopped satisfying me. My family was still my primary raison d’être, but work no longer worked. As the needle dropped, I could feel the hunger for a topping-off of my sense of purpose. I was spoiled, really. After so many years of fulfillment, even dropping into the low 80s was painful.
Last year I quit my job and became a full-time writer. There was no real M&P boost at first — the financial silence after the last paycheck was so terrifying that I was editing business books and telecommunications manuals, anything to put food on my family. If anything, the purposometer took a hit. But I slowly found work that was much more meaningful: writing for schools, writing for Nonviolent Peaceforce, and launching the parenting book. Deeply satisfying, purposeful work. Now I’m back in the high 90s. Wind from the NW, gusting to 20 mph.
Here comes the point.
“Meaning and purpose” is not an all-or-nothing commodity. It goes up, it falls down. It swings around wildly, trying to find its bearings. I don’t believe there is, or should be, one universal “meaning of life,” god-based or otherwise, no one thing that keeps all of our needles pinned. Neither do I believe we make our own meaning from pure random scratch. I think we discover what is fulfilling for us. We feel in the pits of our stomachs when we’re on a hollowing path, then register a shock of recognition when we veer onto another that fills us up.
When I was eighteen, I had no idea that family would end up being the most fulfilling element of meaning and purpose for me. I had to go hollow for a long time first. One of the most painful parts of parenting will surely be watching my kids go through trial and error in their own search for meaning — left foot in, left foot out, right elbow in, right elbow out. I may think I want them to be happy and fulfilled every minute of their lives, but no predigested meaning and purpose is going to feed them in the long run. Like everything else, the process of finding it yourself is essential to knowing when you can finally put your whole self in.
Then you shake it all about.