I’m speaking at the EVO conference this weekend, in Utah, which is really so much prettier than I expected – why I didn’t expect it to be so pretty is a mystery that I’m not going to probe right now, but I thought that I should I state it for the record – and I am, of course, missing my babies desperately, because it is so easy to miss them when they are not grabbing my hair at four o’clock in the morning. Also, because I miss them even when they go around the corner for daycare and junior kindergarten, and Utah is so much further from Toronto than ‘around the block,’ hair-pulling or no hair-pulling, so.

This is the thing that no one can really explain to you, before you live it, before you feel it deep in your heart in that place that you didn’t even know was there until your children came and called to it, is this: that you will always miss them, always even as you crave and relish your solitude, even when you experience that aloneness as a kind of bliss, even when you thank the gods that you got to spend the night without a toddler attached to your hair, you will miss them. You will keenly miss them.

And the heart never gets used to that.

He blows kisses, and my heart, it stops.

Jasper is two years old today. Two years old. It doesn’t seem possible that so much time has passed since he was born. It doesn’t seem possible that so little time has passed since he was born. It doesn’t seem possible that this baby…

… this sweet-faced cherub with the heart-crunchingly dimpled cheeks…

… has become this boy – this precious boy – who is still so much baby, and yet, so not.

Ah, my heart.

I celebrate this day and sing this day, but this day, this day, it squeezes my heart – it squeezes it hard, it squeezes it relentlessly – because I know that after this day comes another day, and then another, and then another, and soon he will be three and then he will be four and then he will be fourteen and then forty and even though he will always be my baby he will not always be this baby, this boy, this chubby-legged sprite with the sparkling eyes and the gap-toothed smile and the ever-present smudge of crud in his dimple.

And I will miss this baby, this boy. I will miss him so much. Even though I know – I know – that I will love every moment of the man he will become, and even though I know that I have all the years of his boyhood ahead of me, my heart aches for the loss of him, the inevitable, ongoing loss as he walks his pace – steadier and steadier – away from me.

Happy birthday, baby. These are happy tears, really.

Palm Springs was amazing. I wandered the desert and climbed mountains and ate sushi and lounged in spas and met the Lord of the Cellos and fell in love with a three-legged dog…

Gabe, the three-legged dog of Mount San Jacinto.

… but I miss my babies. Do we ever stop missing our babies when we’re away from them for more than ten minutes? Don’t answer that.

My heart knows the answer.

(Of course, I miss my children, but still: I’m so grateful to California for this experience. It’s been beyond wonderful.)

To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come

– Christina Rossetti, 1881

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And happy, happy day to all mothers, everywhere: your hearts are so many quiet homes.

(My own ode to my mother is here, in this post about one of her greatest gifts to me. And my reflections on how I love my own children are here, in this post at the Huffington Post. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go enjoy my children, who are expressing their appreciation for me through half-eaten cookies.)

This boy?

This wee, mop-headed baby boy is gone. With one careless, husband-directed trip to the hair salon, he is no more. He is now boy-boy. Again, only more so this time, so much more – I don’t know – Junior Banker, if Junior Bankers had front comb-overs, which I suppose some of them do:

I don’t think that my heart can stand this, all this change. Am I going to shatter every time that he gets a haircut? Am I going to fall to pieces every time one of his curls hits the floor of a SuperCuts and gets swept away by a hard-bristled broom?

He grows and he grows and he grows and every inch of him changes, every day, and I find myself resisting it, his movement forward, his journey up and out of babyhood, this journey that will take him through boyhood and through adolescence and beyond, ever further away from me, and ugh, this is how it starts, doesn’t it, the inevitable, terrible transformation of a mother into desperate, grasping creature of need, into a woman who cannot let go of her children, who cannot, especially, let go of her son, who wants to keep him clasped to her chest forever, always close, always hers, her baby?

Is this inevitable? Am I doomed to have my heart shattered endlessly? Am I going to turn into a desperate, clingy, salon-averse harpy who hisses at all who would take her child or her locks away from me? Will I be the worst mother-in-law in the history of the world, ever? I AM TERRIFYING MYSELF, GODS HELP ME.

The question was: what story are you telling yourself right now? (And, can you give yourself permission to change the ending?)

The answer was: this year, this decade, is ending in sadness. This year, this decade, is ending and my heart is wrapped in grief.

But: I can give myself permission to change the ending. I just need to figure out how.

A start: reflecting on the things that have made me happy this year. To wit: traveling across the country with my children and with dear friends; having a few lovely, brilliant days with my father before he died; my husband, who is my joy and my rock; my children, my children, my children, my children; overcoming fear; overcoming greater fear; facing fear and calling it to account and demanding that it reveal itself as something more, something better, something beautiful.

This is the ending that I want for my year, an ending that celebrates all the joy that circumnavigated the grief, and ending that finds the bravery in the fear and the beauty in the darkness and the wonder and greatness and living and loving that was in everything.

And I want this ending to be a beginning, an opening-up, an opening-towards new fear and new beauty and new wonder and new confusion and new dark and new light – because all of these need each other, each of these requires the others – and all of this as it folds back into the old and becomes greater-than and more.

And it can be. It will.

Happy New Year.

Christmas has come and gone and we are still picking figurative tinsel out of our hair, even as we move forward into a difficult week, clinging to the hangover of joy so that whatever pain the next few days bring is blunted by its residue.

We’ve come west to try to finish the work of clearing out my father’s home, of getting closer to closure with the business surrounding his death. My husband is doing the heavy lifting – the packing, the moving, the cleaning – and leaving to me the sorting – the physical and emotional sorting – that will, hopefully, bring the aforementioned closure, closure that I am not certain that I want, but still.

I cannot go to his home this week. I cannot do it. I am ashamed of this, a little, but it is necessary, so I am trying to forgive myself. Instead of me going to Dad’s stuff, his stuff – the few remaining things that might matter, the stuff that my husband will sift and sort and set aside – will come to me in the lair that I have fashioned for myself in my mother’s home some miles away, and in the meantime I will fret and fuss and worry that some precious object – some note, some stone, some photograph, some feather, some fine bit of detritus – will be misplaced or overlooked or tucked in the wrong box and sent to the thrift store or the recycling box and be lost forever. I will, worry, I will worry constantly. But that is also why I cannot go, because were I to go I would linger over every last spoon and teacup and paper clip and oil change receipt and spend an age agonizing over whether I could bear to let these – these remaining artifacts of my father’s life – go.

So, no. I am struggling to keep a distance, some little distance, between myself and the things that are, right now, too difficult, and working to distract myself with diaper changes and music shows and marathon cookie baking sessions and visits to see the horses at the ranch and eating my mother’s lasagna. And I am tending my grief carefully and quietly, keeping it well watered with the last drops of holiday joy. And hoping that I will be okay.

The view from the road between my mother’s home and my father’s. Desolate, and breathtaking.

I don’t know how much I will write this week. I may need to write. I may need to not write. We’ll see.

Have yourself one. Maybe, while you’re at it, have some beer nog, hug a child, and think of all the things – spiritual, material or otherwise – that make your life abundant. And let your heart be light.

Happy, happy holidays.

Last night, I was writing a post about having had a particularly bad day while Christmas shopping. It was a post about struggling with grief over the holidays, about the heartache that comes in those moments when you’ve gotten caught up in the holiday spirit and forgotten that something – that someone – is missing and then suddenly remembered and OOF. It was a post – again, again – about my dad. I struggled to write it. I always struggle when I write about him. I was wondering, as I always do, why I persist. I was feeling sad.

Just as I was finishing it, I heard a small voice from the other room, singing, in very high, measured tones, hallelujah.

Hallelujah, Hallelejuha… Hallelujah, Hal-lay-yoo-oo-oo-ooooooo-yah

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is a song that my dad loved, a song that I’ve played a very few times since his death, because it tugs at my heart in a way that I am not always prepared to embrace. A few times, now and again, once or twice in Emilia’s presence. The last time, maybe, a couple of weeks ago, when she and I had been choreographing routines to the Glee cover Don’t Stop Believin’ and it came on after the shuffle and I stopped and moved away from her and sat on the sofa to listen, and to cry. Are you crying because it’s pretty, Mommy, she asked.

Yes, sweetie, I said. And because it reminds me of your Grandpa.

– And because it’s pretty. He liked it because it’s pretty.

Something like that, I said.

That was two weeks ago, maybe three.

My husband was equally perplexed. Do they play Leonard Cohen at daycare?

We looked at her.

Hallelujah… Hal-lay-LOO-OO-OO-OO-YAH

That’s a nice song, I said.

-- Yeah. I like it because it’s pretty. It’s a Christmas carol.

Oh, yeah?

– Yeah. Can we go carolling? And sing this carol?

Maybe. Why this one?

– It came into my heart. I can sing it another way, too.

Oh, yeah? I braced myself. Would this be the version dedicated to Grandpa at his Death House in Heaven? Would this be the one with lyrics spun to reflect Mommy’s sadness? Had I, in my grief, created a four year old Leonard Cohen who would be bent on ringing in Christmas with dirge-like ballads?

She began to sing.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hal-lay-POO-yah, Hal-lay-POO-OO-OO-OO-yah.

I laughed.

– I knew that I could make you laugh, Mommy. Because I do FUN carols.

You do, baby. You do.

And right then, I knew. Christmas is going to be okay. Because I have them, because I have her. It’s going to be okay. Better than okay. It’s going to be fun.

Hal-lay-POO-YAH and all.

****

Meanwhile, elsewhere in my world: that post that I mentioned above, that reflects upon grief, yes, but also on how I overcame that grief, and what an owl has to do with it. And, a few of my favorite things, and not a warm woolen mitten among them. Also, cookies. Or not.