Martin Buber, I and Thou

On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, I had to pull Everett’s box out from under my bed.

I have a box for each of my children under there. They contain those things I’ve saved over the years: programs from band and chorus concerts, an essay or two they’ve written. Artwork from school or our kitchen table. Those special papers culled only once in a while from the folders they toted home weekly during grade school.

That morning in Everett’s box I’d hoped to find some photos, but instead I found the camouflage watchband he’d worn daily in fourth grade, and also his Batman suit.

***

The forecast for the wedding was rain. After so little of it that spring, we were promised rain for the entire second half of the week and also the weekend.

Which shouldn’t be a problem, right? They say that rain on a wedding is good luck. But the wedding ceremony was to be in an open field encircled by woods. There were a few refurbished, century-old buildings for the preparations and reception, but the wedding itself would be outside.

I was on my weather app almost hourly that week, mentally shoving the radar report toward Sunday. As far as I was concerned, it could rain buckets on Sunday. It didn’t seem that clear skies –for just a few hours on a May Saturday afternoon– should be too much to hope for.

As it went, the weather looked (potentially) positive: the rain was delayed later and later in the week, with percent-chances on the decrease. We had hope for our Saturday afternoon.

And when it came time for Friday’s rehearsal, all signs of rain–in the sky, not the forecast–had disappeared. The air was warm, the light golden. After dinner, we all spilled out of the reception barn and onto the lawn for cornhole and Frisbee and, as the evening went on, a long and laughing game of hide-and-seek.

***

I suppose some might argue that Friday evening was the time for them to get married. Wedding party and some family were assembled, and here was the weather they had certainly envisioned when, a few months before, Everett and Olivia had discovered this beautiful venue.

But they didn’t get married because of weather, obviously. And the date had been chosen; the guests were invited and planning to come. You don’t just arbitrarily choose a day to get married, do you? We certainly don’t decide to get married based on barometric pressure.

So, how do we decide? Which are the elements that must converge in order to have a wedding? We have happily married friends who did it at the courthouse, pulling obliging strangers from the hallway to serve as witnesses. We have friends who eloped. We have friends who got married in intimate ceremonies with no one invited but their families–and then we joined them to celebrate in a reception the next day.

The date of the wedding–and even the how (the horse-drawn carriage that fetches you to the reception, say; or the destination to a glamorous city)–can’t begin to matter. Not near so much, anyway, as the why. 

***

When Bill and I married, the weather was insignificant: both wedding and reception were indoors. But we remember the weather that day nonetheless. In the morning, I sat in my bathrobe on the deck of the house where I grew up and watched clouds slide fast across a clear sky. The sun and wind continued until late afternoon. Then clouds moved in and we, now married for about six hours, stopped at receptions held at Bill’s father’s and then mother’s homes.

That night after dark it rained and thundered, and we have since commented to each other about it: we’re glad the weather was varied, glad it wasn’t all-day-perfect. If weather on one’s wedding day holds any kind of meaning for what a marriage might be like, then at the very least turbulence seemed honest.

***

The appearance of the Batman suit should not have surprised me. I was digging in Everett’s box, after all. The thing is chock-full of “Everett artifacts,” if you will, the place where I keep most of the treasures pertaining to him.

And I will admit that the Batman suit, which he wore as daily as possible throughout the entire year he was four, was less of a surprise than the watchband. It took me a moment to recall what it was, especially as the watch itself (broken and thrown away, I assume) wasn’t there. I don’t remember where he got the watch, but since its re-discovery on the morning of the wedding, I have noticed it on Everett’s wrist in old photographs. Ah yes, the watch that Everett wore for months during –was it?– fourth grade.

And then one day, presumably, it broke. Or one day he just stopped wearing it. And his mother knew that here was a piece of his life that was precious enough for the keeping. Into the box it went.

As was the watch, the moment of its interment in the box is also lost to memory, as are many of the moments of his fourth grade year. But I have that watchband.

I suppose my keeping it is testament to foolish sentimentality. Or to love. You decide.

***

In any case, the fact is that the watchband only matters because of its wearer, but the wearer himself is not something I can keep, stored in a box (creepily) under a bed. No, the life of the child will progress regardless of whether or not we are paying attention, of whether or not we are storing things in boxes or, as did the mother of Christ with her blessed child, in our hearts.

I have plenty of Everett-moments stored away. There is the time when, age three, he came back inside to invite me to investigate with him an anthill he had discovered in the yard. And the times, younger still, when he would come to me, busy as I was and pregnant with his sister, and say, “I hold you, Mommy,” at which point I would abandon whatever I was doing and hoist him into my arms.

The times he had trouble leaving me to go to school and then the glorious day when he didn’t. The morning I walked with him and my father to the beach and then watched Everett celebrate the water. The evening we picked him up from his first middle school dance. The afternoon I picked him up from his first day of high school. The early morning we sent him off at the airport on his gap year travels and the golden afternoon, six months later, when we welcomed him home again.

But I don’t know exactly the day he knew he loved Olivia, the moment he knew –as once upon a time Bill and I did of each other– that he had found the Someone he wanted to do the good and hard work of marriage with. That’s really not the sort of thing one necessarily tells one’s mother. It’s not something a mother needs to know.

***

An outdoor wedding, we all agreed, is “just so Livy.” This young woman who loves my son also loves sunlight and growing things, bare feet and daisy chains. Of course she should get married outside.

But the weather, as we all know, is something we have yet to control. Despite the extraordinary advances given us by science, the weather vexes and concerns us in ways both small and great. After a week of watching the forecast, Friday’s glorious evening seemed to portend the blessing we’d all be hoping for: Saturday would be beautiful.

Still, did it need to be? With all we’ve been given, did we need also to insist on good weather? Days before the wedding, speaking of exactly this, I said to a friend of my about-to-be daughter-in-law, “I just want her to have what she wants.”

My friend’s response was full of wisdom: “She already does, doesn’t she?”

And Olivia did. I know she would agree. She had the about-to-be husband she had prayed for, the person to do the good and hard work of marriage with.

In that context, good weather on May 11, 2019 would be extra.

***

Bill and I were ridiculously young when we got married, but we knew this much: we wouldn’t always be happy. We wouldn’t always seem to be the best partner for the other. We would sometimes disagree and argue; we would apologize and forgive. We would do the good and hard work of being married to each other, come what may. Like so much weather.

And this is why we’ve been glad that the weather was so varied on our wedding day: because the imagery, if you will, was perfect. We knew the trouble would come, although we didn’t yet know how. And we knew that the trouble is what forges the marriage.

Certainly the good days, the joys and ease of a healthy relationship forge a marriage, too. But it’s those times you struggle through, the fights you resolve, the times you think you might like to walk away but you don’t— that’s when you know that happiness isn’t what keeps you there.

Happiness comes and goes. And comes again. A marriage based on feelings of happiness will disappear like the sun behind a cloud.

In this context, a little rain on a wedding day –if you’re wanting symbolism– is nothing short of a blessing.

***

About an hour before the wedding ceremony, Olivia did a wonderful thing. I’m guessing it’s somewhat commonly done these days, but on my wedding day, I had never heard of it. I wish I had.

Dressed in her gown and ready for the wedding, Olivia met her father Tom in a quiet corner of the field, away from any guests or onlookers. It was her father’s “first-look” at his daughter-now-bride, a moment for the two of them to be together before this momentous change in their lives.

I didn’t have a moment like that with my father. I know I rode with him to the church, that he waited with me and my bridesmaids before the ceremony. And after I sent my precious flower girl ahead of me down the aisle, he turned to me and asked, “How do I look?”

He meant to be funny, and he was, but I was nervous and distracted. And sadly I was unaware of the enormous weight of this moment for him, so I brushed him off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that I had responded differently.

Separated from the busyness of last-minute wedding preparation, Olivia and her father had time to talk together. I didn’t watch it happen, but I’ve seen the photos. I’m sure that both of them treasure the time.

It’s good to make time for moments like these, because so much of life becomes lost in the everyday.

***

The truth is that –on the one hand– it doesn’t matter when you get married. Weather, time-of-day, glamorous location (or not) aside, it’s what happens on the wedding day that matters. And what happens on the wedding day actually occurs before the wedding day itself.

It’s at some point before the wedding day that you decide you’ve found your person. That this person and no other will be the one for you. That you can trust the other to know you at your worst. That this person, above all others, can help you be your best. That they, like you, will fight for the other and, sometimes more importantly, for your marriage.

The decision to that commitment happens some time before your wedding day, I say. Your wedding day is just the moment when you formally declare it to the world.

And that moment matters. Enormously.

***

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. -Genesis 2:24.

***

At the beginning of their wedding ceremony, Tom stood with Olivia in front of the guests. When Malcolm asked the question (“Who gives this bride?”), Tom’s answer was out of the ordinary. He didn’t just say the traditional, “I do.” Instead he replied, “Her mother and sister and brother and I.”

Their family, like ours, was once a family of five. On May 11, 2019, they simultaneously became a family of four and a family of six.

This is mystery and reality together. It’s difficult and beautiful. And it’s good.

***

On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, the sky looked like it might conceivably turn blue, but as the day went on, the clouds settled in. It looked like rain, but we continued to hold out hope even when Tina, the wedding organizer, trotted out baskets of umbrellas.

The guests were assembled and we all continued to watch our weather apps, passing along word of percent-chances, this time reckoning them by the minute. The bride and bridesmaids stood at the ready, and it was a question of waiting: should we wait ten minutes? Fifteen? What were our chances to avoid the rain?

Tina asked Olivia, and Olivia said we should begin. The music swelled, we assembled for the procession, and off we went.

We had the darlingest of twin flower girls, radiant bridesmaids, and an utterly beautiful bride. But I will admit to mostly watching the groom that day. It’s an infrequent gift in life to watch your son promise himself to the well-being of another, to declare before God and with his help that he will be committed to her for the rest of his life. To enter– so young, so bold, so humble– into this adventure that his father and I have known: the good and hard work of marriage, the appalling views it affords onto your own selfishness, the apologies and forgiveness that make a life.

And then they were married and the bridal party was off, two by two, behind the husband and wife. There was music and all the laughter and congratulations. We parents and grandparents made our way out, and the guests after us.

Moments later it began to rain.

all photos courtesy Sarah Darnell Photography

The post Like So Much Weather appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

And it is. Suddenly. Our tree is still up, some decorations still out, but Everett is right. Everyone is back to work or school, and yesterday my parents went on their way. So now–for real and for true–we seemed to have turned the page to January.

And yet, one street away from us, neighbors have pumpkins on their front steps: three of the standard orange and one white and squat.

I get it. I absolutely do. For me, 2018 flew by, and the months between the autumn and winter holidays were like something out of L’Engle’s tesseract: for all I know, someone took the corner of October first and bent it right into December and voila! Christmas is over and Everett’s birthday, too, and we’ve celebrated the New Year to boot. Spit spot! (That’s Mary Poppins).

As we drove past the pumpkin neighbors, Bill (who will be taking down our outdoor Christmas decorations this afternoon) explained it to me. “We don’t get any practice for this,” he said. “Between October and December we have so much to decorate for, but for the rest of the year, no one cares.” He’s right. You can have anything–or nothing–decorating your front steps the rest of the year. But come September it’s pumpkins or nothing, and within weeks, pumpkins are all wrong.

Not that anyone’s judging.

I’m certainly not. I feel like the last three months of the year are a bit of a scramble for lots of reasons. First of all, I am not a good plan-ahead gal. I know lots of people who do their Christmas shopping year round, people who write out menus and buy ingredients in November (because they’re on sale) for things they’ll bake the next month. I have nothing but admiration for them.

But (and despite being a mother for over twenty years), I feel like I’m just beginning to learn that Christmas and the other holidays are actually annual events, and I have no excuse but to be better prepared. At the very least, I would be wise to spread the shopping out over the last several months of the year.

The truth is more fundamental, though: I’m just not a special events kind of person. That isn’t to say I don’t love them: I do. But event planning is not my thing on lots of levels. I thrive in the everyday, in the routine and normalcy that give me room to think, and in the slower rhythms that allow for emotional quiet. Those are the spaces that allow me to write.

Boring. So boring.

I know.

So here we are in January, and Everett may be sad about it, but I’m not. I’ll take the new calendar, all blank squares and black lines. I’ll take the swept front steps, too. And I’ll take (yes, please) the empty trees, their trunks and branches limned in sunlight, and the sound the wind makes as it rushes through them.

My grandmother taught me to love the empty trees. “When they’ve lost their leaves,” she would say, “we can see their shapes.”

There’s much to be said for the shape of a tree. And there’s much to be said for clear eyes and clean views and, yes, fresh beginnings.

Welcome, January. I’ll take your openness and your emptiness: all of that quiet possibility.

The post Turning the Page appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

While it is already January 3rd, we are not quite through the holidays at our house: my parents are still with us, and so I refuse to return to normal life.

But I thought I’d throw a little something out on this here website of mine, something that reflects where my mind–in those rare, idle moments of these holidays–allows me to go.

And where does it go, you may be asking (or maybe not, but I’ve led us that way, so here goes)? My mind moves ahead to what 2019 will be bringing: the wedding of our second-born, and the high-school graduation of our third-born, and the anticipated and inevitable emptying of our nest.

I have more thoughts on this (are we surprised?) but will leave them for now. My parents are here, and I want to spend more time with them. Instead, I will offer you this from another year, a Christmas that, in practice, was not all that different from this year, except that Emma was four-and-a-half, and we went to Pennsylvania and Bill’s parents for the holidays.

Emma Sleeps

These are not ordinary days, these Christmas ones, these holidays. These days we are eating too much, and lazing around, visiting with family and friends we haven’t seen in too long, and staying up too late. We are away from home now, and we are gone home to western Pennsylvania with Bill’s family. The children love it here, not just for the snow which, sadly, is melting fast anyway. The children love it for their grandparents and the joy that comes with being with them. It is good to be here.

One of my earliest memories is the sound of my grandfather sipping his morning coffee where he sat in the lazy-boy of his living room. From my bed at his house I could hear this, and I would go creeping down the stairs to be greeted with joy by both my grandparents, greeted with almost unreasonable joy: we were only just starting another ordinary day, after all.

My grandfather loved to remember a story of me on an ordinary morning like that, a morning I remember well. How old was I– six? I came down the stairs and climbed into his lap, laid my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. I stayed there like that with him for a long time, half-listening to him sip his coffee and simply breathe, half-hearing him tell my mother and grandmother that yes, indeed, I had gone back to sleep.

I had not gone back to sleep, but I stayed there, comforted, for a long time. And afterward I loved to hear him remember it, his eyes almost closed by his smile and the pleasure of the memory. I don’t remember if I ever told him that I hadn’t slept at all.

But these are not ordinary days, these Christmas ones. Christmas can make Emma sleepy, particularly if we leave the house at 5:30 in the morning for our big trip, particularly if the seldom-seen cousin arrives at 10:30 at night, particularly if she doesn’t go to bed until after mid-night, regardless of Santa Claus.

She was so sleepy that she fell asleep on my lap during mass last night just as the priest was beginning the homily. I could tell that Something would have to happen: she was just far too squirmy to make it through the service without a Serious Scolding. She sat on Bill’s lap, she sat on mine. She tried to climb on the kneeler; she tried to climb on the hymn-shelf; she made a Big Hole in her tights. Trying not to sound horrified, I told her that she Must Sit Still and Say Nothing. Within minutes she had folded herself sideways, her head on my knee. I stroked her hands and traced her fingers; I stroked her hair where it fell over her forehead and my skirt.

It wasn’t long before I realized that she had been still for a long time– a Long Time for someone who is four and has only recently been climbing the pew-back. I looked and saw her eyelashes lying on her cheeks; I saw her fingers relaxed and still against her leg; I knew she was asleep.

There is a good deal of wonderful and significant standing, sitting and kneeling in a Catholic mass. I missed it all but the sitting, enjoying her slumber and its privilege falling on me. I listened to the reading of Luke 2; I sang the hymns from the missal; I was moved again– again– by the reminder of the abject humility of Christmas, what Annie Dillard calls “God’s emptying himself into man.”

I felt nothing like empty, my arms and lap full of the weight of my sleeping daughter.

The children were awake alarmingly early this morning, considering how late their rest began last night. And although Emma Grace was the last to wake, she warned me of a Need to Nap only halfway through the gift-opening. After a bath, after brunch, she curled up with both brothers and Granddad and was still there an hour later, sleeping fast, the only one in the bed.

I let her sleep for that hour, then went in to get her. The need for sleep at her age is an awkward thing to balance: too much sleep now means no chance of it later, and then we begin the cranky cycle all over again. So I pulled her from the bed and carried her to the living room where I was visiting with family, hoping all the while to coax her from her dreams.

I didn’t try very hard. Although she is tall for her age, Emma Grace’s little body still fits warmly in my lap. Her yellow hair smelled so good from the bath; her even breathing contented me. She sucked her thumb and, as she always has, let her fingers spread themselves out over her nose and eyelids. Then her thumb fell from her mouth, her head tilted up, and I looked into her still-sleeping face, watched her lashes rest on her cheeks, watched her little mouth open like a flower.

I held her for nearly an hour, maybe more. The time felt like nothing, and the afternoon was nothing like ordinary, Christmas or no. I sat there with my daughter filling my lap and thought of my grandfather, his eyes creased with joy at the memory of holding me.

The post Something Old for the New Year appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I don’t hear the jays every day. At our feeder we get chickadees and finches, a nuthatch, and a small brown bird with a dart of white behind its eye. Every time I see it, I intend to learn its name, and then I forget to follow through when I go on to everything else.

These days I awake to birdsong. One of them starts up before five a.m., and by the time seven rolls around, lots of them are going at it out there. Some are songs I know, but not all. I would like to know.

But today I heard the blue-jays. One crying, then another. It’s a distinctive song, less music than call. A conversation. I was standing in the kitchen–feeding the dog? Putting the granola away? And I heard the jays out there under the cloud-covered sky.

When I was a child in July at my grandparents’ house, the jays woke me up every morning. It’s a bird sanctuary where they lived, where my parents live now, everywhere trees until you get to beach. I knew all sorts of birds by song and sight.

The blue-jays woke us up every morning.

And they were the birds that sang in the rain. Those rare, rainy days when the world was dark with clouds and the shade of trees, when we didn’t go to the beach but sat inside and read, and heard the rain on the leaves.

I thought of that this morning, standing in the kitchen, listening to the jays. The clouds made the world darker outside this morning, and it seemed right to me that the jays should be calling to one another just off edge of our deck.

And it was right, I thought, that the jays cried in the rain at my grandparents’ house, as they cry in the rain at my parents’ house even now.

Except that, in those days when I was eleven with a book on my lap, it wasn’t right to listen to the blue-jays in the rain. It wasn’t right to listen to them in those days, and I didn’t listen, no more than I listened to the rain on the leaves. I just heard the rain. I heard the birds.

And all was right with the world.

The post Blue-Jays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I spent every July with my mother’s parents as I was growing up, and I regret not one minute of it. I never went to camp; I didn’t get a summer job until I graduated high school; my summers at home amongst my friends were shortened by a month.

But I’m so glad for those days I had with my grandparents.

Our children spent about a week with each of their grandparents this summer. They were a week in western PA with their Grandmom and Granddad. And then they were on eastern Long Island with my parents for a little more than that.

And we are lucky to have Bill’s mom within walking distance here in NC, so that the children get to spend lots of time with her.

It’s always amusing to me how their influence shows up. My father, for instance, has singular ways of saying things, and he returned my children to me with some of his phrasing firmly planted in their vocabulary.

Emma Grace was absolutely serious when, as I tucked her into bed, she reported to me that she needed “a little shut-eye.”

And Everett interrupted his bicycle riding on Sunday to get a “slug” of Gatorade.

After school today, Emma Grace told me that she hadn’t been very fast in gym class. No, she reported, she wasn’t very fast. But you know, she told me, “I’m all aches and pains today.”

I’m pretty certain I know which grandparent that last phrase comes from, but I’m not going to tell which one.

The post Time With Grandparents appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Bill and I arrived home from Pennsylvania last Saturday night Without The Children. Yes, we left them there On Purpose to enjoy a few more days with their Pennsylvania grandparents before being whisked away to Long Island by their New York grandparents for most of this past week.

It feels Very Strange here without them.

But it’s not such a strange thing to do. Beth’s Olivia is with her grandparents in Michigan this week. My sisters and I used to spend the entire month of July– every year– on Long Island with our grandparents. It’s an important thing for children to have time alone with their grandparents. It’s an important thing for grandparents to have time alone with their grandchildren. And it’s an important thing for parents to have Time Alone.

We did this last year, but it was later in August. Bill’s parents had the children for a week in western Pennsylvania while Bill worked and I spent a week of in-service days at Trinity School before school actually started.

But this week has felt Really Weird, because it isn’t yet time for teacher work days at Trinity School. And so while Bill has gone to work every day, I have been here Alone.

I’ve been busy. Very. I’m still working on tenth grade humanities curriculum, which I’ll be teaching for the first time, and I’m refining the ninth grade humanities curriculum, which I’ll be teaching for the second time, Just Better. And it isn’t like I don’t have reading to do for my Master’s thesis, which I’ll be writing this semester. And it isn’t as though we don’t have a jungle growing in our front (and back, and sides) yard. And it isn’t as though there isn’t (still) work to be done in our basement (and we spent The Entire Day working on that yesterday).

There’s plenty to do.

But I’ve missed my children– their laughter, their conversation, their interruptions, their messes, their hugs, their sleepy-eyed, early morning selves. And I’ve sat working and working at the kitchen table, books and papers spread out all around me, in this very room where we homeschooled together for All Those Years, and I’ve thought about them. Sometimes– I freely admit it– I have wished to have those days all over again, when they were So Very Little. Oh My, Yes.

From my seat here at the table, I have a perfect view of our bird feeder. I have kept it well-stocked, and I have chased the too-bold squirrels away. And I have enjoyed how many of the birds look like young ones: they have, for the most part, their adult coloring now. But here and there, around their necks, or on their backs, are the light and curled feathers of the Very Young Bird. When I see this, I know they are new at this flying thing, at this independence.

This, too, makes me think of my children.

The post Empty Nest appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.