Tag: Sadness

It’s Hard, Ain’t It Hard, Ain’t It Hard, Ain’t It Hard: the No Good, Awful, Terrible, Very Bad Day

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Sometimes things are so sad, and so hard, and not your story to tell – and they follow you in and out of rooms and around corners and out into the street and you feel like you're riding on some perverted, malformed roller coaster.
There's nothing to do, really, but apologize for the maudlin language, sit back and hang on for dear life. 

Like the Counting Crows song about sitting in the hills in Hollywood hoping "this year will be better than the last." The new year is coming so I suppose that's worth considering. It's hard though.

For those of you who know us, nobody's sick and nobody's dead and we're still married and our family seems fine. This is something else. And it's really, really hard – because it doesn't feel right or fair or even sensible. We've gotten through everything else so I guess we'll get through this too. I wouldn't even bring it up but I own those of you who are still taking the trouble to stop by here an explanation for the silences between posts. Just wish us well, OK?

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY: ROBERT FROST, YEAR’S END, AND FAMILIES

Robert_frost_4 Nothing ever stays still, does it?  I remember a Robert Frost poem we read in high school – Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower,

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

As this year draws to a close, I’m so aware of the rocky ride between joy and pain that life brings us.  Children succeed and are happy; suffer, argue, question and, as adults, make huge decisions whose consequences are no longer our business.  Others we love face illness, work stresses and moments of spiritual angst.  And we ourselves struggle. With our own pain.  With the knowledge that the best times — the gold — never last and must be cherished for the time we have them.  And with the realization that the job of parent includes a form of built-in obsolescence, that rescuing, even those we love, is not always a gift to those we try to help.

I’m still learning how to be the mother of grown men.  They have been and continue to be a joy to me but  the best gift I can give them, struggle to give them, is to be available but never more than that.  I’ve done pretty well, but in moments when I worry – health issues, love issues, work issues, life-changing issues – I have to hold my breath and hope.  To remember that over the years we’ve provided one another with many moments of "something gold" and that now, as their parents have, they must pass through their own moments of sublime and ridiculous, gold and dross. 

There’s an old saying that "you’re never happier than your least happy child."  I struggle not to allow that to be true.  The best gift I can give our boys – and for that matter my husband as well – is to separate, to trust them in their journeys and crises, joys and troubles.  To love them, listen to them, and respect them enough to allow them to live their own golden moments and mourn their loss – hopefully with enough experience over the years to understand that even as a moment of joy departs, another is forming just around the bend.