Life with weight

My son cries out in the middle of the night. This is rare and almost always signifies a very bad dream. 

I stumble between our two rooms and to his side. “Hey sweetie. Mama’s here. Did you have a bad dream?”

His head nods vigorously. 

“Do you want to tell me about it?” I nestle my face close to his to listen. He smells sweet, of soft hands and childhood wonder. 

“Dragons,” he whispers. They were tickling his toes, he explains. I bite back the urge to make this silly; he is too clearly terrified. 

I snuggle next to him under the warm covers; the late fall air is crisp in his bedroom. I rub his little back and whisper words of comfort. I feel him relax and then I suggest: “I know there is a part of you that is really scared about that dream. Do you think you can tell that part of yourself that you are okay, that the dream is fading away now, and that you are safe to go back to sleep?” 

We contemplate this prospect together: parts of ourselves, and how we might reassure ourselves to release vigilance. Eventually, he is ready to try, and I return to my own bed, though my thoughts remain with the little body in the next room and the work he is doing as he returns to sleep. 

In the morning, he tells me: “I combined that dream with other ones, Mama, and it made it fun and silly. Then, it was okay.”

Earlier that evening, after our children had already gone to bed, my husband and I stood in our kitchen, talking as we cleaned. We spoke of Gaza, of genocide and war crimes, and of our broken hearts and feelings of helplessness as our country refuses to call for a ceasefire. We spoke as our children slept in their warm, comfortable beds and, halfway around the Earth, bombs shredded the homes of other families. 

The next morning, after I drop my kids off at school, I walk with our dog down to the ocean. I should be in front of my computer, sending emails, balancing budgets, and raising funds for local climate solutions but, this morning, I need to walk first. I need to feel my feet press against the frozen earth, feel the sharp cold on my face, and watch the sun reach between spruce branches to illuminate shockingly green moss. 

As I walk, my mind races between thoughts. The pace of life, the churn of a system I want no part in, but the leaving feels impossible. 

I reach the beach, where waves pelt the rocky shore. I sit and watch. Across the water, a point breaks into my view. I know that point. I brought my children there frequently as toddlers. We’d slowly wander the beach just to the other side, dipping into tide pools, little fingers finding crabs, popping seaweed, discovering a whole community beyond the water’s edge. I miss those slow, incredibly demanding days. Now, we often race: from school drop off to work to school pick up to gymnastics to what in the world are we eating for dinner?

I stand to leave and notice something in the wrack line, just above the water’s current reach. A plastic shipping bag twists into seaweed and stones. I disentangle and clutch it in my mitten to carry back to my car. Perhaps it carried someone’s Christmas gift from one place to the next, like the legos I ordered for my son recently. I hold it, dripping, for the entire walk back, as a continent of plastic churns far out in the ocean, growing every year. 

The day is breathtakingly beautiful. The sun is bright and the wind swooshes the pine boughs overhead. My dog is delighted to be out, and he smells everything. 

As I walk, my thoughts return to Gaza. Words turn in my mind, the title of a book I read in undergrad while studying the Rwandan genocide: “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.” It felt almost intrusive, disrespectful to be discussing the book’s contents from the cushy halls of a New England liberal arts school. But we study history so that history will not repeat itself. 

Well. 

When I return home, before heading to my desk, I notice a painting on our wall. It is two sailboats resting on the water as the sun sets. The masts reach for the sky, two tall points. The painting reminds me, suddenly, of my maternal grandparents. This is how they would want to be: sitting peacefully on the sea, taking in the sunset, side-by-side. My grandmother left us too young, too soon. My grandfather stayed for a very long time. He always saw the best in everything and everyone. He drew it out of us like a gardener tenderly cultivating a whole collection of beautiful flowers. 

I sit down at my desk and dig into the work of local climate solutions. Some days, this work invigorates me. At other times, I long to just keep walking between the pines, my own “sitting on the sea watching the sun set.” 

I wish I could combine it all cleverly like my son, making something lighter. But our days carry weight. The grief, the sunlight, the delight of my dog, the plastic in the ocean, my son’s sweet smell: the best I can do is stay open to it all. A life with weight is a life lived.