Stories for Self-help

The advantage to staying in bed until there is just enough sunlight in the room to make the silhouettes sharp presences rather than looming suggestions is that at the edge of the mattress the blue-green sheets are illuminated in this long narrow band of near whiteness which makes you think of those images of the sun rising over the earth from space.

Of course it also allows you to tell yourself that you are nursing the cold that has crowded your head, made breathing work, filled the spaces that you are used to taking for granted as space in your head, altered the acoustics of everything that is disconcerting when you are so regularly focused on attention to what you hear.

Staying in bed allows you to pretend everything hasn’t been just hard this week, the physical discomforts of being sick, of being exhausted, the repeated experience of doing the best you can to ask the people you live with to do specific small things to care for the place you live in together and being — this word is almost experimental, disappointed. Because so many times that feeling has come, cleaning the house one day and having everyone come in and leave books, backpacks, shoes wherever they drop, having children sweetly agree they shouldn’t eat in their rooms and when you next walk into their room there’s an accumulation of dirty dishes, dirty clothes — that makes you feel like a failure. Like you’re a nag, a shrew, that if you were just somehow GOOD enough they would rise and meet you there. And so naming it disappointment and allowing it to be there, that seems to be your homework this week.

It isn’t that there haven’t been brilliant moments to the week, too. Walking the crowds of the Last Thursday art-fest street fair on Alberta, and finding an enjoyment rather than the distancing in the crowd that is unusual for me. Some of it is that the word-generating part of my brain is humming a little again, and I can walk through the crowd trying to find the best words for the experience and that somehow, I didn’t think it worked this way, instead of making me feel further from everything going on, it makes me closer. And I am fascinated by the people, the art, the things being expressed all around me, so I am not just a tourist in the carnival atmosphere of very homemade looking art, the scammers who might be geniuses and the geniuses who might be scammers. I find a delight in moving from a soundscape of a band of people in goth-steampunk-vaudeville costumes flailing at banjo and violin and guitar and into a soundscape of tribal drumming and then into the soundscape of another band almost identical to the first, and then a further soundscape of surprisingly good R and B funk. I look and discover that the freakshow tattoos and revealing clothing and sideburns and skinny jeans and funny glasses are tender rather than mere cliches of hipsterism, and that for all of the posturing something sincere and weirdly civic about the crowd.

Other brilliant moments: hiking with my firstborn, and just marveling at the person he is. Buying tickets to go visit a friend in Japan in two weeks which is terrifying (my first solo international travel!) and exhilarating. New energy for writing. And that not only do words sparkle again, but even the sound of an out of tune, scratchy-toned violin enthralls me. I am resigned to the two masters part of that, imagine that it could be like having two children, some things you do feed both of them at the same time, sometimes one gets a little neglected for the other and to your surprise it doesn’t break the child after all, and sometimes the two play together quietly long enough for you to have a hot bath.

And then, I had a lesson of my own, which is sort of landmark, an acknowledgement that I am not just practicing to support the kids in their doing it, that there is something in it for me. And so the practicing this week feels filled with discoveries, that there is a balance of force and delicacy when the vibration of the strings run up the fingers of not just the hand depressing the strings but also the hand moving the bow. That using a metronome brings about a cognitive reorganization around the beat. That I love the paradoxical stillness it requires to do the fastest version of the scale, 32nd notes, eight per bow. The teacher asked for the scales to be dispassionate and “dispassionate scales” has been a subheading in my brain. There’s a new easiness in allowing a movement to come from a handshape when he gave me a new fingering for the scale. He tried to get me to practice keeping my eyes focused on the bridge, finger board, contact point with the bow, saying that this view is my constant, while everything else in the environment may change, and so I imagine this as a home, as a frame, as the place I live.

And there’s something else, too, I guess that’s been good about this week, and that maybe that has to do with a shift in the story I tell myself. That while the homework has been maybe that I can ask for a thing, and be disappointed, and that disappointment is uncomfortable but not unbearable, the deeper story is I am a girl who loves challenges. Not, I am a girl consigned to disappointment, or the work of being human is getting resigned to loneliness or — I’ve had all sorts of lovely stories occur to me and they just aren’t useful. But there was something in the book The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle about how growth happens when kids are in a zone of being challenged, which isn’t about being flat-out frustrated being asked to do something beyond their capacity, not about being allowed to safely keep doing the thing they already know how to do, but being supported so they could reach a little further. And one of my core beliefs turns out to be that we are born loving challenge until that love is drowned out by anxiety or the form of anxiety that is perfectionism or the form of anxiety that is not wanting to let people down or let them see what is hard for you.

Somehow, taking the moments that are just flat-out overwhelming, the testing situation with one of the boys or Raven and finding the space to process it — what am I being challenged to do here? It makes things more bearable. Reminding myself, I love being challenged, I am, and oh, how I resist this word, grateful for the chance to grow. To try new things and to try old things in new ways. And having been told over and over that everything would be just fine if I could focus on what I am grateful for, it finally occurs to me that it’s not about invalidating the feelings of disappointment or fear, that I can’t move past that feeling until I have felt it, but that it’s about helping not to get stuck with the feeling.

Playing with the metronome it’s easy to sort of feel ridden by the beat, like it’s an engulfing wave that will swallow me as I get frantic trying to get on top of it. So I stop, isolate, try to do only two beats worth of notes or one beat plus the landing of the second beat and it’s not like enough repetitions allow me to slow time down, but that if I can take a breath, maybe chant out the rhythm, hear it in my head, I can get on top of the beat, can surf it, be carried by it as if all that force and I were one. And sometimes it’s like the work I am trying to do, the patience, the humility, the trying again and again, the just willingness of it all, it’s all the same work, whether it’s with the violin, the sentences, the kids, the marriage.