The chance to be here and not here

I’m sitting in a lovely community center downtown while Petra is in choir practice. Petra is my 10-year-old, younger sibling to the main subject of this blog for many years. Wally is now 15, a sophomore in High School. It’s been so long since I’ve written here—2 years!—it seems like perhaps I need to (re-)introduce the characters.

Waiting in this quiet room is a luxury, a moment during the hectic week to breathe. Out in Brooklyn until after 11 PM at an editor meeting on Tuesday. Three-hour wait at the eye doctor with Petra on Wednesday. Picture Day. Spirit Week. Enveloped in this quiet, I’m reminded of the weekly brief but life-altering half hour I used to wait while Wally age 2 played with an OT in a sensory gym near Columbus Circle. I started this blog at that time, a moment when blogs were blossoming. No laptop, no parents I knew, a place to sit comfortably. Not a room to myself exactly, but still an in-between with its a liminal tranquility. A protected place for reflection. And now with Petra's choir practice I have a weekly pause again.

I could jot down thoughts for a book project. I have three massive ones due by January, more work than I’ve had I think ever. Petra has piano, softball (casual fall ball), and choir plus middle schools tours. There are vaccines to schedule (extra round this fall including rabies shots as Wally got bitten by a stray cat outside Rio in August), my husband is once-again adjusting to a new principal in his South Bronx middle school and now to being the only English-Language-Learner teacher in the school. The usual frenzied muddle of making dinner, doing dishes, buying groceires, finding abandoned bananas in the bottom of backpacks. Yet I know one of the most important tasks of this time will be staying present to this time of letting go, the end of elementary school for my younger child. 

(How am I now that person writing about such big kids? I remember putting down Catastrophic Happiness and finding out that Catherine Newman was the mom of almost entirely grown kids and feeling almost hoodwinked – what? You were talking about the exhaustion of constantly bending over with snacks and Bandaids and wiping tears and meanwhile your kids are wearing crop tops and playing guitar sulkily in dark bedrooms?)

Having turned away from this space, toward grad school, flash fiction, finally publishing a story I'd worked on for years, and other (often less satisfying) ways to connect like WhatsApp, social media, endless texting, I’ve recently been inspired by lovely newsletters from Nicole Gulotta, Jami Attenberg, Madeleine Dore and Samantha Dion Baker to return here. There seems to be a re-emerging tolerance for a longer form in-the-moment thinking through one’s life and the shape of the days. I miss it so much.

But something is nagging at me. Something unfinished. (Something of many things. A million unfinished songs, poems, stories, novels, essays, drafts of posts here over the past two years.) Right now the most pressing unfinished pull is an essay I wrote the summer before last about another liminal moment, the end of middle school for my older, the last year in the beloved elementary school at the top of the stairs for my daughter before the school moved further downtown. I had some interest from editors. Some yes-but-with suggestions for revisions. I revised. I rethought. Rewrote and resent. But, no, still not quite there, not really. 

And then the moment was gone. 

Scrawling with my pen in a rain-soaked notebook today I decide I will publish it here, on this blog. Why not? It will feel like tracing out one place on the map where I've tried (imperfectly, discontinuously) to document this time of active motherhood. And then I can continue on with the work of the in-between, starting from here, which of course will always mean circling back, again and again.

So here it is.

*

How a New Walk at the End of the School Year Helped Me Find My Way

First I walk down loud and crowded 9th avenue past the paper lanterns outside Chelsea Market and the sidewalk cafes. Further down, I cross the cobblestone streets of the meatpacking district, where once I played guitar at midnight. When I reach the outer edges of the West Village the street name changes to Greenwich. What a perfect place to meet someone sometime, I think each time I pass a wine bar below Jane.

Soon, the streets are quiet enough that I begin to hear my thoughts and feel the heat. After the flurry of getting the kids off, the gallop through a shortened workday mixed with household chores, I’m here. A “here” that keeps changing on the walk but one that centers me nonetheless.

This is a ritual I only began in May, with the end of the school year just five weeks away. Why hadn’t it been a tradition all along? Most weekdays I relied on the school bus, but on Fridays I like to pick up my daughter so she can go to the park with friends from school. Why had I always taken the subway down with its potential delays, its overstimulating, rushed feel, delays or skipped stops adding to the anxiety of the day?

Halfway through the walk, I pause outside the middle school where my son goes. He had never let me walk him there or pick him up, but there is something comforting about passing by it. And also to the symmetry to things - for now we are lined up on a single street. Our Chelsea apartment, a West Village middle school and an elementary school in Tribeca. I take the same path the next few Fridays. Watching one neighborhood turn into another makes them feel more connected, and the day more connected, too. It is the not rushing, the paying attention.

At home in the evenings, I sketch out pieces of an essay about this walk. To find what I want to say, first I have to relearn how to walk without talking. I had gotten in the habit of walking while dictating text conversations. I remove Whatsapp from my phone. I pull back from texting. With my voice back in my head, the walks become quieter.

For so many years I was content for hours without interaction. I wrote songs alone at the piano. I wrote in my journal many times throughout the day, almost every night. Urgently, obsessively writing only to myself. It was never lonely. Why does it feel that way sometimes now? Maybe lonely isn’t the word, but detached, a bit lost. Was it blogging that changed things? Social media?

It can feel strange to exist just alone on the page when I could be engaging with others in real time. When someone might “Love” something I write, the minute I write it. I could be discussing, debating, clicking on links with the joy that others clink their glasses of champagne.

The failure to walk “alone” (that is, without conversation, music or a podcast) feels tied to the difficulty of writing alone. I don’t know why now I have to be coaxed back into the lovely solitary room with the yellow tulips in a jar. I am thinking of May Sarton; she was always relieved and endlessly grateful to be alone. Like I used to be.

For three weeks I tell my writing accountability group my goal is to revise my essay about the walk. What is the story you’re trying to tell? I write longhand in blue marker on a big white sheet of paper. Lists bloom along the margins. Zucchinis, lemon, whole-milk ricotta. Orthodontist. Teacher thank-you $$. And new French words as well: cerisier. souhaiter. ficelle.

“Ficelle” means string. It came to me from a song by a Canadian singer named Ingrid St. Pierre. It is a sad song about her grandmother losing her memory, and the singer hoping she won’t forget her name. 

I knew the middle school years would go by quickly, but I didn’t know I would remain at such a distance from them. That the November pie meet-and-greet tradition we kicked off in the first fall was the first and last. That in March of 6th grade my son would get a role in a musical they would never perform. That there would be no musicals at all. Only one in person parent-teacher conference. 

If only I’d been taking these walks all along. The essay would have a natural shape. The walks and the disrupted school years. I could try to string them together.  

A few blocks south of North Moore, I reach the little school at the top of the steps. It will move downtown at the end of June. Covid kept the graduates including my son from being able to visit their classrooms after they left. Now their chance is gone.

Two days left until the deadline to decide about high school. My son got a high enough score on a citywide test to earn a spot at a select school. He has an offer from an arts school as well. A lucky problem to have. Two wildly different paths. Down one he’ll learn Latin, annotate classics, learn to debate. In the other he’ll get to participate in theater every day, pursuing a less serious academic path. We know many who have chosen the rigorous school, already arranging the morning commute together. We know almost no one heading to the arts school, but many who are outraged about the open admissions process this year, moving to private school or further, to Jersey. 

The choice hangs over our house in the evenings.

Immersing myself in the present of the city sidewalks creates a counterpoint to the liminal space of these weeks. I am no longer even reaching for my phone while walking. I’m no longer tabbing to other pages while writing. But am I holding desperately onto a moment that’s leaving? At the start of the pandemic, I had one child in first grade and one in 6th. Now one is off to high school, one will begin fourth grade. I have become that mother of “big kids.” In these walks, in this essay I’m trying to write about them, am I reaching for a helium balloon slipping out of reach?

One Friday left. On the walk downtown I see the 8th graders in the middle school yard signing yearbooks. I think I catch sight of my son’s curly head, but he doesn’t see me. In Tribeca my daughter tells me the classroom is packed up in boxes. The 3rd-graders did arts and crafts, wrote letters of goodbye. I feek like a child in a picture book. Was I ready to write a farewell letter too?

On Monday, the last day of school, many students will be absent. Onto the next thing. Often this is the case, kids missing the last days of school. Running off to catch a flight, start camp, pack up for a country house. Families willingly giving up the in-between, the chance to be here and not here, making one’s way through the threshold with its attending anxieties and their potency. Meanwhile, I’d always paid attention to endings, and this year, I began to revel in the in-between. To soak it up.

Crossing Canal, or crossing lines off in a draft. These weren’t the walks I’d taken all along. They were the ones I discovered at a precipice. A ritual for just a short while.

On the last day of school, I take the subway down because I am carrying a picnic for an end-of-year celebration. The kids come running out but minutes later the skies open and the picnic called off. My daughter and I jump on the city bus, soaked and grateful for its swift arrival. At Barrow Street, a pile of middle school kids clambers on, my older child among them. For a moment, it feels like the old days, when the two kids were briefly in the same school together. On Fridays we’d take the bus home after the park. But the 8th graders tumble off the bus before our stop with what sounds like a plan for frozen yogurt. 

Through the blurry window, my younger one and I wave goodbye.