Friends, here’s what the Spring Equinox looks like here in Northern California.
I got so excited about the torrential rains predicted last Saturday, a gig-postponing, movie-afternoon kind of rain. Instead, it sprinkled for an hour. Climate change and drought, folks, climate change and drought. But when the sun came out again I decided to photograph some of the spring gorgeousness in my garden. Look at this camellia! She’s one of hundreds on the tree. I hope this incredible pink flower brings you hope for brighter days. There’s been so much global and personal tragedy of late—there are really no words for it. Just to say, if you’re struggling, if you’re despairing, I see you.
In my world, there’s been a vaguely soul-crushing attempt at house-buying and some publications to share.
My (very) personal essay “The Stranger Who Got Me Pregnant” was published in Literary Mama in January. Thank you to everyone who read it, commented, and sent me kind notes. I felt really good about getting Sam’s and my story out in the world. I also have poems forthcoming in The Fourth River and Ecotone. And while I won’t be at this year’s AWP conference, I am THRILLED to share that I’ll be moderating a panel with Gabriela Garcia, Masha Rumer, and Shugri Said Sahl at the Bay Area Book Festival the weekend of May 7-8. Thank you, again, City of Berkeley Civic Arts program, for granting me the time and space to write and curate a panel about immigration, ancestry, and motherhood. Tickets and the full schedule are coming April 8th. It’s always an incredibly meaningful literary weekend. Hope to see some of you there!
With love and gratitude for your support,
Susie
p.s.I spent a bunch of time watching a tutorial to improve the look of my blog posts. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s improving! If you received this twice, that’s because you’re on my blog mailing list and my Mailchimp newsletter. Feel free to unsubscribe from one. : )
It would take a thousand photos to really explain a year of Covid. We had one slideshow.
New Year’s Eve, 2021. We enjoyed a Covid-style masked backyard cocktail with friends and came home for a decadent fondue dinner just the four of us. I’d thrown the photos together an hour or two before. The slideshow started with the boisterous New Year’s Day 2020 party we’d attended, traveled on through the last picture I have of my parents standing in front of our old house, the one we said goodbye to in 2020. And then my leg, all marked up with Sharpie before I had my varicose veins removed last January. Valentine’s Day (26 Valentines, glued by the preschooler, and a heart-shaped cake). The last in-person show my band played at Ale Industries. The trip on BART to I-don’t-remember-where, the kids looking hella East Bay in Warriors gear and caps.
And then, a blurry image of us and some friends surrounded by empty booze bottles and take-out containers the night they announced the schools would be closing, the last night we gathered inside with others for almost a year.
The slideshow rolled on, the photos imprecise, unstaged. List after list, schedule after schedule. One entitled “Basic Rules” (the gem: BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!!), one named, simply, “Projects.” Then, photos of said projects: “Ancient Room,” the flower-collections, the swirl paintings. The hikes and makeshift sensory table. All those days of homeschooling. The Elsa-from-Frozen dress I sewed for my four-year-old. Easter, the kids’ hair already floppy. Making jam with the last of the plums. Black Lives Matter protests, masked and distanced. I could go on and on and I kind of want to, because more than a trip down memory lane, the slideshow felt like a testimony to the difficulty and occasional beauty of a year spent completely under wraps.
This past week, the news, the blogs, and the sosh are all filled with retrospective accounts of the pandemic year, with incredibly depressing death toll numbers and more bolstering reports of vaccines delivered (I’ve had my first shot, even!). We’re headed, I think, out of this thing, and I have a feeling it will take us a few weeks, months, maybe even years to get used to our resumed freedom. Sometimes, now, when I find myself out two nights a week (a birthday gathering around someone’s fire pit, say, and an after-dinner walk), I’m exhausted afterwards. I’m exhausted anyway, let’s face it, but somehow the socializing is so novel and extroverted that it completely takes it out of me. The other night when my 11-year-old and I were discussing the great disappointment of a sixth-grade-year spent almost entirely online, I tried to introduce the silver lining: “school’s starting on April 12th,” I reminded him. “I know,” he said. “Scary.”
And I so got where he was coming from: it’s wonderful to think of life getting back to normal. Of school starting. And for a hundred reasons, it also feels scary.
On New Year’s Eve we watched a 2020 slideshow, and I decided I’m making a slideshow every year from now on. I want to remember every silly photo we took: the last of the plums, the double rainbow that made my kids grin. The incredible fall colors that showed up in late November. And the time my little one dressed up in a gold cape, a floppy green hat, and ring after ring of leis, and posed, grinning, in my bedroom, as though he didn’t even know Covid existed.
What memories will YOU take away from this year? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
We made it through two weeks of homeschooling, two weeks of working from home with two kids around, two weeks of The Spring of the Virus. Even if the Shelter in Place order lasts into summer, into fall?God forbid?it will be springtime in my mind when my future wise self and I look back on this global Coronavirus pandemic. Covid19 shut us all down right as the tulips and asparagus burst forth. The other morning, eerily quiet since traffic has so slowed and Bart is running shorter hours and fewer trains, I heard a flock of Canada geese flying over the house. Heading North for summer? Choosing a different path in quieter skies? It was nice to hear them.
HIGH.?
Things at our house are going better than expected, much better than I?d feared. When we made it to last weekend, I could even say, honestly, that we were doing okay. This after a desperate and depressed couple of days; the shops were overrun with people (but devoid of toilet paper), and I ran into a teacher from my son?s school and we both burst into tears. Governor Newsom had just announced that our kids might not go back to school this year, and that was the reality that hit me the hardest both personally and globally: all these children, for whom school is structure and lifeline, are now floating, aimless, free. My son?s got his best teacher so far, and as Ben put it, we wanted the whole year with him?we needed the whole year!?and we don?t get it. It?s hard not to feel betrayed and devastated.
Except that my kid is, basically, fine.
At ten, he?s both sensitive and oblivious, and nothing if not an introvert. He admitted last week that he?s not much missing anyone, and he?s happily reading, doing his math, shooting hoops, and driving us nuts. The three-year-old seems to be thriving, too, which is confusing to me since he loves his preschool so very much. But he?s easier to be around, less exhausted, more cheerful, sleeping better, and thriving on our makeshift routine: every day at ten, when the morning work shift (mine) ends and I start on kid duty, we cook something together, then have experiential learning time (the endless project of making an Ancient Rome diorama) before family lunch. PE is every day from 2:30-4:00: we scooter, or we bike ride, or we meet up with friends outside and keep a careful six feet away. Or we trek up to Indian Rock and climb around.
The running underlying thread of dread. The confusion and guilt of doing okay: am I faring better than some of my colleagues, than some of my friends? Should I feel bad about this? Is this time the calm before the storm, before the colleges and non-profits close and our income disappears? Will all of our favorite businesses go under? Are the kids who thrived on the routine of school going to back-slide during this time and be forever behind, perpetuating the achievement gap in our city? Will we plummet into a global recession that has consequences so long-lasting my kids will feel them in their early adulthood? And will we get and survive this thing? What about our loved ones?
It?s almost unnecessary to outline these fears. We all have them. Even on the good days, they?re there. It?s like this brilliant quote from that show ?The Good Place,? when the Eleanor character is trying to describe what it?s like being human to someone who?s immortal. ?We humans know about death,? she says. ?So we?re all always a little bit sad underneath.? We humans know about Coronavirus, so we?re always a little bit sad underneath. None of us will ever be the same after this spring of the virus.
BUFFALO.
?It?s good to keep knowing yourself,? says Alicia Keys in this delightful video. The strangest/most magical part of The Spring of the Virus? Really seeing the four people who make up our family in clearer ways than usual. When all the schedules are wiped clean, when we?re the only people we see, somehow I know us all better, and differently. L is shyer than I remembered, and consistently happy to entertain himself. Ben takes deep solace in growing things. I?m alive if I?ve got my early mornings and a cup of tea, writing poems. And little S thrives on being needed, on being cherished, more than ever.
Sending love and light, readers, for your Spring of the Virus. We?ll get through this.
High, Low, Buffalo, similar to Rose and Thorn, is a dinnertime game that was introduced to me by my friend An Honest Mom. Over dinner, you share your day: the high, the low, and the magical, or strange, or odd thing you?re still mulling over: the buffalo.
p.s.
Need some recipe ideas while you?re stuck at home? Check out:
**And remember that it?s very likely that your local, independent bookstore is doing online orders. Mine is! Amazon will survive this crisis. Your local bookstore might not. So buy your books indie, friends.
A few people reported that they found my last blog post depressing. “Is it just the end of hope??” one asked, but that wasn’t what I meant, not exactly, and I’m sorry if you, too, found depressing the idea that normalcy is a fallacy. I hoped that by calling out our lives for what they are?unpredictable?that maybe we could make peace with it. I know that when I hold too tightly onto the idea of something being a certain way, when I hold too tightly onto joy, I feel that much more bummed out when it goes awry. A little lightness can help. Witness: when that flood happened, and Ben and I were both minorly freaking out, I noticed that when we had a quick conversation about it, accepted the fact that our house was going to be in chaos for a few days (ha! Try weeks), and hatched a clear plan for what to do next, we both felt a lot calmer.
But the comments I got on my last post made me see how a mantra of “life is unpredictable” could quickly become something like “life is unpredictable…so you should live each day like it’s your last.” And, you’re right?I do find that depressing. That carpe diem thing always makes me feel panicky. Am I living my best life? It makes me wonder. Could I be doing a better job? Answers: a) probably not, and b) yes, of course I could be doing something better. And then what happens? I take up skydiving because I think I should, because I might get hit by a bus tomorrow? What bugs me about the carpe diem mentality is it seems steeped in, among other things, white privilege. And class privilege. Uh, how are you supposed to live every day like it’s your last when you’re poor? Or, in my case, when you have two annoying but adorable kids, plus a very adorable gecko with very specific temperature needs that are stressful to meet?!
But hear me out. Because I’ve had a revelation.
I’m not going to take up skydiving, but I DO think that if life is so unpredictable…I should try a little harder to chase joy. In January, while I was on school break but things were in minor chaos at my house, I found myself feeling like I was wasting every day, not eeking enough enjoyment out of things and not having enough, well, fun. Part of this is the reality that mothers are never really “on vacation,” because even though I wasn’t working I had to rally the kids and make lunches and whatnot and whatnot and whatnot. But when I teased Ben that if he had an entire month off he’d be going on ski trips and day drinking and riding his bike and meeting me for lunch?and he eagerly agreed, and this is one of the things I love about my husband?I realized that I kind of have a hard time relaxing, being on vacation, even just accepting the abundance of my life and the many wonderful things about it.
I have a hard time accepting joy.
I know how that sounds, sort of Marie Kondo-esque, kind of woo-woo, very first-world problem-y, but it’s true: I am constantly rationing pleasure. If I wake up on a rainy Saturday and decide, you know what, I’m going to spend all three hours of Sammy’s nap time watching Project Runway re-runs, because I’m an adult, dammit, and I can make that kind of decision, partway through, I feel intensely guilty and go do some laundry. If I plan to do something frivolous of a Wednesday?say, meet a friend for some day shopping?I temper it by admonishing myself that I’ll have to get up early to write. If I’m sick and decide to read trashy novels for days on end, I get so depressed at not being up and productive I can’t even enjoy them.
And it carries into my work life and makes me worse at what I do. For example, right now I’m really, really trying to make a big mess of things with the poetry collection I’m writing, but every other day a stern voice urges me to stop playing, to stop creating, to start tightening the language and putting it together. Get serious, Suz, the voice urges. Work harder. Even though I know, in some other rational part of my brain, that I haven’t finished the writing/ideation phase yet, that it might be another six months or even a year before I’ve really worked out the kinks, and that NOT approaching it with too much seriousness is exactly what I should be doing.
Why do I do this? As penance? Because I’m so driven by guilt that I just can’t allow myself any reprieve? Because I don’t believe that I deserve the creative process, deserve joy? I’m not sure, but I know that day after day, I’m consumed by guilt. I’m constantly putting myself on cleanses or rationing my wine, curtailing my spending, feeling tight.
There’s a lot of joy in my life. A lot of space. A lot of stuff to be grateful for. And I am.
So. I’m trying to change this. I’m trying to allow myself some space. Some joy in the lovely process of writing poem after poem in the early morning dark, and not pausing to ask whether they’re any good. To take breaks. To drink a fancy cocktail after a tough day without guilt. Because like is short, and I might get hit by a bus tomorrow.
I’ll let you know how I do. And I’d love to know: do YOU ration joy, in your work, in your life? Comment it up, friends.
January is one of my favorite months, even with the rain, even with the dreariness, even with the promise and delight of the holidays over. In January, I get four weeks off…when no one else in my family does. The deliciousness of having weeks on end of paid reprieve from teaching is, well, delicious. In January I schedule all the doctors’ appointments. In January I clean out the closets. In January, I finish entire manuscripts, read shelves full of books, blog like mad, and, sometimes, relax. In January, everything is back to normal.
In my mind, anyway.
Because it never quite works out like I’m hoping it will. One January I found out in the middle of the night, in the ER, that I needed emergency surgery for a ruptured fallopian tube and that I was no longer pregnant. It was the following January when I got salmonella. I had a Big Important Trip a January after that. This year,?I ended the holidays with the casual thought, “when things get back to normal, I’ll buckle down on the poetry project I’m working on.” I did, for a day or two?until the morning we went to get the kids up and stepped onto soaking wet carpet. The heavy rains had made it into the house, and I spent the next morning pulling up the carpet and moving furniture. That saga has stretched on; contractors tracking mud through the house for ten days now, heavy-duty fans whirring 24 hours a day, and everyone sleeping everywhere. The little one is in a portable crib in our room; the larger offspring is on a mattress on the living room floor, at least, after he gets moved from our bed when Ben goes to bed. Most nights I crawl in with a sweaty nine year old and a zillion stuffies.
I’ve had this thought so many times: I just need to get over this cold/depression/construction project and then things will be “back to normal.” I’m sure we all do this, search for this elusive normalcy that doesn’t actually exist. I’m sure my friend S thought things would be “back to normal” after she had her thyroid removed?until she plunged into three months of insomnia hell. I’m sure my mom thought things would be “back to normal” after she had her hip operation?until she learned she needed another operation later that year.
I’ve been thinking a lot about something my yoga teacher said at a retreat last fall, about how we make these excuses and concessions for the busy times in our lives, as though each time we feel strung out and overextended it’s somehow unusual. “It’s always like this,” she said, and I realized that she was right.
And it’s kiiiind of a depressing thought, I suppose. We humans like routine. We like to think we can do everything. But if we acknowledge that we never know what’s coming down the pike?particularly, frankly, when we have children?maybe we inhabit our time better. Maybe we make better routines, the kind that have some room to wiggle. Maybe we forgive ourselves when we don’t meet our goals and our deadlines. Maybe we approach each day with a little more grace. Maybe we stop putting so much pressure on…January.
I’ve still got two weeks to go of my glorious break. My house looks like a bomb hit it. What’s the point in cleaning? We’ve all had colds. Whenever I start to get some writing done, I’m interrupted by someone needing access to the house, by a phone call. (This blog post has been all kinds of fits and starts!) But it’s all just life. It’s always going to be like this. And in the larger scheme of things, this stuff is, as Pema Ch?dr?n would say, no. Big. Deal.
So, “back to normal,” off you go. For now, I’ll just take the promise of having my children down the hall again before February.
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 