Living the Questions

“I want to beg you, as much as I can…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

This is a quote I have carried in my heart for so many years. I remember writing a blog post back in 2011 that was called “Answering Year.” A little paper called the Raglan Chronicle published it and had just agreed to let me do a regular column for them when we found ourselves whisked back to California from New Zealand…for so many reasons, all of them right. There were so many answers that year. Everywhere I looked, answers to questions, and yet still more questions arrived to take the places of those answered and evaporated.

I suppose that’s what one’s thirties are often like. It’s a time that many of us become parents for the first time (I was actually 27 for the birth of my first and then 29 for my second son, but close enough). That put me in my early thirties for those wild few years where you’re trying to figure out how to be mother to these achingly beautiful creatures who have issued from your own body and also be the thing that you were before—and also the thing you want to become (for me, that was a writer and a yogi and a spiritually sound human). The fear of not being (or not having inside of me) any one of those three things (the mother, the before, the after) made me a little crazy, I have to admit. And the questions multiplied like rabbits. I worked so hard in those days—at everything. And I loved so fiercely the babies I had birthed and was lifting up with my partner Dwaine.

Then came my forties. These are not so easily characterized. I’d say the first half of the decade was a lot more of the same, only exponentially stressful, mostly because they were difficult years for us financially, but also because I needed to allow myself and my little family to be led by our sons’ passions, which in those days was snowboarding for both boys in equal measure. Rakai continued to learn bigger and bigger tricks that took my breath away, and he began traveling to New Zealand alone (at age 15) to follow the winters and compete for the country of his father’s birth. And then there was the shift for Taiaroa—away from snowboard competition and toward the arts. Music. Visual Art. Philosophy. Amazing and beautiful to behold, all of it, and a lot to hold up from beneath, like a strongman lifting a world over his head, his back arching and his legs straining with the weight of it all. Still, his curling moustache and mysterious grin meant he loved the job and was in it for the long haul. That was me under there. And Dwaine too in his way.

Today I am in the last year of my forties. Fifty is knocking at the door. And my older son Rakai is 22 today. He is a man, and Dwaine and I, we made him. We loved him up and guided him and, to the extent that we feel we still can, we continue to do both of those things. The love itself? It’s infinite and exponential. I look at this photo of him in his little yellow outfit—the one I chose for its gender neutrality while he still swam in the waters of my own body—and I love him so much it hurts. And it’s so difficult to describe. Love and grief are so intertwined. The grieving is for the baby I will never hold close to my face again to flutter my eyelashes against his cheek and call them “butterfly kisses.” Whose eyes will never drink me in with their You are my all messaging that I understood with my entire soul. But that grieving cannot be extricated from the powerful love and gratitude I feel as I look at and wrap my heart around the young man who stands before me today. There is love in his heart for a girl he wants to spend his life with, and their joy spills into the air around us, even in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that has pushed and pulled them into conversations and decisions that might have waited for years (or to have never even arisen) had the world not been so topsy-turvey. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times,” wrote Dickens, and he could easily have been talking about this very year for our boy.

And Dwaine and I, we find ourselves on the South Island this year, our younger boy living with us in our home. How lucky we feel to have stolen back this lost time (I have always blamed the year he was allowed to burn through both the third and fourth grade curriculum in a single school year for his early exit from our home). Today we got our Christmas tree together and decorated it to Christmas music and with tea and holiday “biscuits.” I swoon to see the young man that he has also become, working so hard and only one year from graduating from his university. So different from his brother but so powerfully connected to him. My heart did little flips today to hear them laughing and talking over the phone as Taiaroa hung his laundry in the yard and chatted to his older brother on his 22nd birthday. There are no words to express how much I love these beautiful boys, these amazing men. And of course their father who has been my partner in helping to shape their loves, their beliefs, their lives…and then with me, stepping back to allow each of their lives to unfold in its own way, each of them led by their own heart’s compass.

I suppose there will always be questions, but nearing 50 and with two grown sons, I feel they are less urgent. It is a kind of contentment I have never known and for which I am unspeakably grateful. The questions are more an expression of curiosity than the kind of driving uncertainty that I used to feel in my thirties and even into my early forties. I remember my friend Nancy once said, upon turning 50, that she felt like she had earned something in reaching that age. That it felt good and right and that there should be a T-shirt for it or something…at least a club membership. I loved that. And now here I am. I am a good six months away from my 50th birthday, but my son’s 22nd precipitates my thinking around that milestone. I am nearly there. In the same way I have been ready for all of the other moments in my life that I thought I might never be ready for…I know I will be ready for this.

I have lived into so many answers, and the questions themselves become friends. The Rilke quote I scribbled in my journal all those years ago when I was 18 years old…it blooms in my heart and in my life. It becomes truth as I knew it would, but in a way I never could have imagined. Rakai, my son, my love. Happy 22nd birthday, my darling. May you live the questions now. Lean into them and even love them. They are a vital part of the growing, the breathing, the living. And may your love always, always multiply in your own heart and in the hearts of those you choose to draw near.