Since it has become a parent, one of my favorite domestic tasks has been to get the garbage cans out of the night from the garbage. Not only the explosion of fresh air, sudden darkness and the sigh of the silent suburbs are a welcome break in the dam in the stimulation of family life with a young child, but it is also a chance, in a clear night, to reflect on all the iterations of my kindergarten self who looked at the same sky.
By pulling the plastic bins on the rough sidewalk of my driveway outside Boston, I look at a handful of stars and planets. I can't see many from here; The milky way that I saw every night when I lived in rural California is masked by the city's lights at only 20 minutes. But I find all the usual suspects that a budding astronomer can recognize – the constellations of Orion, the seven sisters, the great ladle and the Cassiopeia. In the clear freezing sky of winter, I spot the parallel heads of the Gemini and the tip of a wing of Pegasus. For a large part of the year, I can also spot the brilliant regular lights of Venus, Jupiter and Saturn and the smallest and redest.
These skies connect me at some times when I felt the most free of my life – the new adult of young adults through Death Valley, surrounded by a night sky so free of humidity and light pollution, there was no black, just a layer on a layer of light sting, the shiny milky way like a road that seemed as close as the highway. While for the moment, my life has shrunk in chicken nuggets and authorization sheets and dates, the stars remind me of the dizzying dynamic dome above my head sticking out the context of my life. I could have been anyone, or nobody, on the way to become someone or anything.
Now, graying hair on my temples, the first meetings to the optometrist to blur the vision, I savor this time alone to eliminate the trash and shake the hand of the universe and old iterations of myself, like a smoke break in stressful work.
Parenting can be deeply disorienting. Especially in the hyper-individual structure, centered on the nuclear family, at the end of our culture, and especially for mothers. We can lose track of ourselves, while a large part of the emotional and practical work of the education of children falls on our shoulders, whatever the progression of our own values or those of our partner or our community. The itself can feel radically divided between the children before and after, and according to my experience, when we lose contact with the “before”, we can feel fractured, empty and alone.
But if early maternity is disorienting, the night sky, for me, is deeply oriented – not only in cosmological time, but also in my own personal history, a chain connecting to each iteration of whom I have been. Any accordion me in the stars – the adolescent, the young adult explorer, the tired mother – each is a star or a planet, and watching the sky connects them in forms and patterns, a map of my own constellations.
The other evening, after staying there on the sidewalk, head tilted back, finding all the planets and constellations I could, I entered the house to invite my husband and my son to join me. We gathered for the time of 20 degrees and I knelt on the ground, the cheek pressed towards my kindergarten, aligning its vision with mine to find Sirius, the most brilliant star of the night sky. I showed him Venus, Mars, Jupiter, the sword and the belt and the Orion triangle hat. This looked like such an essential education, timeless teaching, an orientation of countless parents offered their offspring during the millennia. A deeper lesson than words of sight or count things by 10, which occupy most of his days in school.
During some moments, we left the world that we are used to dressing together and joining a greater reality – so much larger than our cuisine, our neighborhood, our city, our state, a burst country, a poisoned planet. I felt an acute knowledge of my mortality, that these stars would be here long after my departure, and it suddenly seemed a film, a mother on his knees in her alley, his face in a hurry against the cold face of her little boy, pointing the limits of what humans can know. I imagined him morbid with comfort in this memory while he showed stars to his own children, and felt both pain and existential peace – it is the way of our world. Our lives flash and turn off here under this eternal sky.
There is a famous Buddhist who says: “After ecstasy, laundry.” My husband and I are kidding that parental aphorism should be: “After laundry, laundry”.
When we decided to leave the city for the suburbs last year, we abandoned so much, but we were ready for more space, quieter, and one of the big motivations for me was to live in a place with a certain access to the night sky. We would miss our friends, the familiar streets (too bent, too narrowed), and all the events and activities of which we were part, but I felt the lack of darkness and astronomical context with a sharpening.
It is my dream to take my husband and my son to one of the few really dark places that we left in this country, to discover the night sky as I knew. But even this view of our alley now comforts me deeply, offering overviews of the people I was, transcendent in the middle of the laundry, the universe with each night of trash.
Gila Lyons is a teacher of writing and literature and author, recently presented in the book “About us: test of the New York Times Disability Series. ” @gilalyons we X And Instagram
