Waiting Is A Holy Place

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Thanks to the rise of technology, we are a people poorly practiced in waiting. We can get anything we need or want, any time, in a matter of seconds or in a day, be it information or stuff, or even groceries. When you really stop to think about it, that’s pretty wild.

At any rate, here we are. Waiting.

2020 has been nothing if not a year of uncertainty. A year of waiting. We have been waiting on the rise and fall of coronavirus like watching waves in a bewildering storm. We have waited for schools to open, for quarantines to pass. For friends and family members to get better or worse. We have waited for employers to give word on jobs, for governors and mayors to open or close places of business. We have waited for doctors to find treatments. We have waited for researchers to discover vaccines. We have waited for courageous volunteers and patients to take them and see if and how they work.

We are still in the thick of the pandemic, now not only waiting for an end to this virus, but also an end to the election. Tensions are high, but we scarcely have the energy required to make it to the finish line. We are all so tired.

Several years ago, I had a health scare, and in the midst of it we had to do some waiting. Waiting on something like that when you have preschool aged children and a new baby at home is … well, it’s really something. But what it taught me, beyond gratitude in the extreme, is that the work of waiting is so important.

Waiting has a way of winnowing us down to the soul-level; waiting is where things get real. It’s where our mettle is tested, where our best and worst inclinations are revealed and overcome.

Waiting is a holy place. In it, we hold hope and despair, joy and sorrow and uncertainty. We stand in the space between what was and what will be. In waiting there is fear, so much fear. There is wanting in its most basic and tender form. Waiting humbles us. It demands of us a sort of divine fortitude, and the journey, no matter how long is always harrowing. It reminds us that we are unfinished and imperfect and absolutely, positively, heartbreakingly human.

I don’t have any wisdom to offer as this comes to a close, but I do know that waiting prepares us for whatever it is that’s on the other side. It is the essential breath we take before the doing.

I hope that as we all wait for the votes in this election to be counted, we will push ourselves to do more than just refresh the browsers on our phones. We are in a moment that, despite the static nature of waiting, demands a very particular kind of work. Regardless of the election’s outcome, regardless of who you were for or against, we are headed into a moment that will require the best of what is within us to do the hard, peaceful work of reckoning and reconciliation.

We can do this, America! But first, we have to wait.

Planting Seeds

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If you have children of a certain age, or if you just happen to love musical theater, then you know the power of the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat. My kids’ recent favorite song is “Non-Stop,” but my twelve year old can belt “Helpless” with an understudy’s zeal; my eight year old can roll his r’s just like Jonathan Groff’s King George III in “I’ll Be Back,”; and my ten year old has been known to pass a melancholic, quarantined afternoon with “It’s Quiet Uptown” on repeat.

My personal favorite, though, is a song that the kids usually skip. “The World Was Wide Enough” sets the scene for the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. In a play that harnesses the drama and intrigue of American history to such a degree that even an eight year old can sit watching with riveted attention, this is arguably its most dramatic and powerful moment. As the song builds and Burr fires his shot, the scene freezes around them. Here, Alexander Hamilton gives us his last words:

“Legacy—what is a legacy?” he asks. “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me. America, you great unfinished symphony …”

If I forced my kids to listen to this bit of drama over and over, they’d whine: “Mom, this is so sad!” and we’d flip back through to “Satisfied,” or “Wait for It,” depending on the mood. But for me, “The World Was Wide Enough” captures Lin Manuel Miranda’s inspiration at its height, and it carries a message especially prescient for today’s America.

We often relegate the word “legacy” to people who are capital-I “important.” Famous nation-builders, writers, artists, physicians and pioneers in all manner of fields leave legacies. But what about our friends and neighbors? What about us? What seeds are we planting in the gardens we’ll never see?

Now less than two weeks from the outcome of an election that could just as easily be likened to a reckoning, I think about this. Last week, as I stood in line for an hour and a half at my local early voting precinct, I felt so proud to be a part of a country whose founders envisioned raising our minds and our voices rather than raising our guns.

Alongside me was an elderly man shuffling through the infinite line dragging his bad leg by a walker. A woman and her husband dressed beautifully for this unique and privileged occasion. She was wearing a feathered hat. Two haggard, unshaven guys behind me discussed the books we passed as we wound through the stacks of the public library before reaching the voting booth. A woman well ahead of me in the maze broke rank for just a second to compliment a faraway voter on her shoes.

America, the beautiful. America, the complicated, the imperfect, the human. The unfinished. How I love thee.

You, yourself, might be standing in line to vote as you read this. Or you might be planning to watch the debate tonight, to see if it will help you make your final choice. You may be wrestling with messages from your upbringing–past wounds and loyalties that get in the way of clarity.

Or, you might feel a bit defeated and apathetic: does any of this even matter? I think we all know what Alexander Hamilton would say to you: definitively, it does.

On our way home from school each weekday, we pass a beautiful white church on a prominent street. I first saw the protesters gather there in May, but they looked a little different from the people peacefully protesting and rioting in the streets of cities’ downtowns. This brave cluster was made up of elderly white people. Some of them leaned on canes; all of them wore masks. They held Black Lives Matters signs, standing six feet apart in their geriatric shoes, and they rang cowbells. (Who doesn’t love a little cowbell?) At first, there were no more than a handful of them — five or six at most. Over the summer and fall they’ve grown to forty or more.

This week we saw them again, and the kids and I had a Hamilton moment as we slowly drove by. “Who Tells Your Story” was on full blast, and we had the windows down. The day held that warm, soft autumn light that makes October in the South so wonderful. My eight year old leaned as far out the window as he could safely do. “The Oldies are protesting, Mom!” he said with delight. In his face was this incredible mixture of hope and joy. I’ll never forget it. They’re planting seeds in a garden they may never see. For my kids, it’s a lesson that you don’t have to stop growing even as you grow old.

Beneath the political noise and the fear-mongering, the paid political advertisements, the endless loop of your newsfeed, and the drone of cable news, Hamilton inspires this one helpful, clarifying question:

What might bloom in the garden where you intend to plant your seeds?

Vote wisely, friends. History has its eyes on us.

Wake Up

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Photo Credit: Laura Chouette

At some point during quarantine, our youngest child started giving us all a little nudge.

“Mama … Mom … Mom … Mom … Wake up!” he’d say to me when I was absently scrolling Instagram.

“Wake up!” he’d say to my spouse, glued to the two computer monitors he’d set up in his “home office” (i.e. the kids playroom).

“Wake up!” he’d say to the girls as they did their school work via screens.

“Wake up!” to me, again, as I texted friends, read recipes, researched emergency homeschooling techniques, worked on the stalled-out novel I’d previously been making good progress on, and scrolled Facebook to see if the world really was as crazy as it felt, and if everyone else thought so, too.

What he was saying was “pay attention to ME,” of course. He’d learned how to scramble to the very top of our hallways’ door frames, and how to physically climb our walls, and he wanted us to see. But there was something in his phrasing that carried foreboding:

Wake Up!

What, exactly, were we asleep to?

Like everyone else, we’ve muddled through our quarantines. For a while, I made a paper chain and wrote down each day’s activities: worked on jigsaw puzzle; went for a walk even though it rained; played Yahtzee seven times, cleaned out the closets, etc. Already fairly outdoors-loving people, we’ve embraced, even more, all the open spaces that exist within a three hundred mile radius of where we live. We’ve read lots of books. We taught the kids how to play Hearts, Spades and Russian Bank. We gave them unfettered time on their devices. We bought a trampoline; we let our twelve year old go on solo runs; we granted permission for unchaperoned neighborhood bike rides. We fielded our kids’ unanswerable questions; we held non-celebrations for three family birthdays (four, if you count the dog’s), and my husband and I even went on a “date” in our garage.

We were AWAKE, for heaven’s sake. We were more awake, even, than we wanted to be; more awake, maybe, than we have ever been.

But about a month ago, knee-deep in pandemic fatigue, I took a step back. The kids had returned to school, and I’d started working again, however haltingly. Still, I couldn’t concentrate. My watch and my phone and my computer kept dinging. Every time a news story broke, I was too often propelled to social media, where a tidal wave of opinion, hearsay, fabrications, prideful misinformation, mean fun and hard news would, shamefully, ruin my day.

After a particularly testy conversation with my mother, she asked, “What is WRONG with you?”

I have a thousand answers to that question, but, quite honestly, the constant, muffled rage I’d been feeling was a bit … unnatural. So, I reassessed. I started paying attention to the way my body actually felt when I tapped that Twitter icon, or when I saw the outrageous memes, posted by both left and right-leaning “friends,” on Facebook. I took stock of the low-level depression and the high-level anxiety and the general frustration it all ignited within me.

I became more and more aware that I’ve been holding my breath rather than actually breathing. And I started wondering what it might feel like to be both less irate and less foggy, a paradoxical pairing that nonetheless seems wildly appropriate for today’s social and political landscape.

First, I deleted the Twitter app from my phone, and I found that I didn’t miss it. After a Facebook post announced that no one could be a Christian, an American AND a Democrat–I mean, really?–I gave that up, too.

A few days later, my husband and I sat down and watched Social Dilemma on Netflix, and it affirmed everything I’ve been processing over the past several months. Our perspectives are distorted because we are being pushed around by algorithms and unnatural digital platforms that actually don’t “care” whether we live in a functioning society or not. They don’t value our relationships. The Internet doesn’t mind pushing conspiracy theories or sowing division, and, unfortunately for we actual people, the weaker members of humanity and politics don’t mind agreeing with distorted reality so long as it’s used to their advantage–creating a snowball effect of enormous proportions.

Now six weeks in to my social media hiatus, the itch to see what “everyone” thinks is gone. After turning off all my phone’s notifications, aside from texts and phone calls from real people, the fog has begun to lift. I know where to get my news. But rather than having it dumped on me throughout the day, when I’m in a frame of mind that can abide it, I go looking for it myself.

Which leads me here–twenty-some days out from a major election that will likely impact whether or not social media companies face regulatory oversight. What if we all decided to wake up? The internet only has as much power as we allow it. Without us, its distortions have no agency. I’m not suggesting that we go back to 1990s-era bag phones–only that we begin to think more intentionally about how these pocket-sized computers can be used as tools, rather than allowing ourselves to be the ones who are used.

A Plan For Tomorrow

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Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

By the time all this is over, my hair will be gray at the temples, gray at the roots–and not from the stress of quarantine, though it is stressful–but because the gray is something I’ve been covering for years.

By the time all this is over, I wonder: what else will be laid bare that has been hiding in plain sight?

I picture myself in mid-May–or will it be August? Or November? Will we, after so many days unmarked, even know? I’ll drop the kids at school to gather supplies abandoned before their worlds stopped turning. They’ll clean out their desks and discover little bags of goldfish crackers and nutri-grain bars shoved to the back of their cubbies, long forgotten; wrinkled papers covered in math they used to know; spiral-bound agendas whose daily trends toward progress will look, even to them, naive.

No one will be able to fool them then. Tomorrow, it will be clear, is only an idea, a matter of hours.

But it is the hope of tomorrow that still gets me up in the morning. Nine days in to quarantine also means nine days out.

When it happens–when the world opens up again–I will be radiant. So will you.

I will be fearfully, joyfully, wildly gray; kinder, maybe.

I will be older. So will you.

We will enter in to the world then with a tender awareness of the many things we each have been covering up all this time and how they have been laid bare.

It will be okay, whatever you are afraid of. You can’t see the helpers now, but they will be there, emerging from their homes; appearing next to you, where they maybe have been hidden all along; walking alongside you on a road you’d thought abandoned, all your own.

Have you woken up each morning of quarantine and wondered when it will all end? How it will? Me too. See? We are not alone, after all.

One more thought to get you through today, the many hours ahead that will be spent behind your own four walls; the hours you will spend cajoling your children to go outside, to take deep, healing breaths in celebration of those who, as of this moment, cannot fully breathe; the hours that you will hold the sick and those who care for them up to the light; the hours ahead of you which will be filled with buzzing news alerts; the hours ahead of you in which you may feel you are sealing your own leaking boat with paper and scotch tape:

Maybe what we were living before was its own sort of quarantine. There would have been no way for us to know it. We couldn’t have seen.

But in the after that will be, months from the isolation that was and the quarantine that is now, we will see the world differently.

After all this, it won’t be hard.

We will reach out and link arms and find ourselves buoyed by a generosity that had been buried so deep within us that we’d forgotten it was ever there in the first place.

We will find ourselves reaching not only for our hair dressers, but also for one another.

We will see all the grays that everyone has been covering and offer a shrug of dismissal. Of course, they’ve always been there–the roots of things, buried deep, that tell the truth.

We will need to be gentle. We will need to apologize, maybe. We will need to listen, and to act, and to do so as though we were called to it, to do so as though this was all meant to be.

Hope Restored

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Last night, my kindergartner performed in her school’s holiday pageant. For weeks, she has been singing her heart out to “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” as well as – curiously – “Hickory Dickory Dock” (a favorite). She asked me to ask her music teacher for the song lyrics so she could practice, and practice she did – while doing perler bead art and taking baths, while perched in her booster seat and as a means of blessing at the dinner table.

Historically, Elizabeth takes on the Cindy Brady game show stare when on stage. She is a fan of neither crowds nor strangers. And, I suspect, like me, she has trouble learning anything auditorially. To this day, I cannot recall most song lyrics, lines from movies, or very much in the way of learning that I haven’t written down.
So, my hopes for this Christmas pageant were only that Elizabeth would enjoy it – and that there would be glimpses of her true joy on stage. In all her past performances, Elizabeth has only mouthed a word or two of the assigned songs, looking uncharacteristically glum in the process.

It turns out, though, all that practice paid off. She sang her heart out, smiled and giggled and, as one 2nd grade friend said after the show, “looked just like a firework.” Elizabeth still didn’t know ALL. the lines, but that was OK, because she was SO EXCITED about being there, and she knew that’s where she belonged.

Parents always tear up at things like this. And I think it actually has less to do with the sweetness of such an event (although it was very, very sweet), and more about the way it restores our hope in the future, our belief in all that is truly good and truly important.

Watching 100 five year olds celebrate the magic and light that composes their worlds makes it easier to believe in the magic and light in our own.

And the reason children give us so much hope is that they represent the very best of everything – our best effort, our greatest love, our undeniable wealth in the only things that matter.

As I looked at that glittering stage last night, so overflowing with excitement and the grandeur of childhood, I felt an upswell of joy that’s eluded me for some time. I recognized again that the reason we feel so passionately about the wonderful and terrible things happening in our nation and our world is that we desperately want to bottle up this kind of joy and freedom. Which is a little bit of a problem – because joy and freedom are best unbottled.

Our kids need to see US overflowing with hope no matter whatever crazy things, out of our own control, are bringing us down. (I am in no way suggesting this is easy; I am suggesting it is a goal worth reaching for.)

So the questions I’ve got running around in my head these days are:  What am I imprisoned by, and how can I walk towards freedom? How can I support a more joyful, care-filled existence for anyone who comes in contact with me today? If I can change just one person’s day for the better, why wouldn’t I?

It was only a Christmas pageant. But it was awesome – a ridiculous, adorable, celebratory thing that reminded me, again, that we can all be united, despite our differences, and that hope is still very much alive.

A Break from the Bad News

~ towles ~ 3 Comments

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There’s a lot of bad news going around these days, so much, in fact, that it seems to be drowning out the usual, frantic hum of the holiday season. Today, I listened to experts on NPR’s “On Point” debate gun control in light of the Sandy Hook anniversary, closely followed by another news program during which I learned that 78% of Syrians do not have access to clean drinking water.

This is the kind of bad news that makes me feel so powerless I just want to curl up in a ball and look at old copies of House Beautiful and reruns of “Fixer Upper” all day. It’s the kind of news that makes me want to gather up my children, lock my doors, and bake cookies and paint paintings and lovingly read books with them until we’ve all had our fill of magic and simple joy. It’s the kind of news that makes me wish narratives, once established, can be erased. Clean slate! Let’s start over! But, of course, they can’t.

I don’t want to be someone who hides from the world’s realities. I have friends who don’t watch the news as a measure of self-protection, and that’s something I completely understand but can’t quite bring myself to do. But I do need a break from the bad news sometimes, and I think everyone else does, too.

So, I’m starting a little initiative of my own.

I’m going to take a little Christmas joy to social media and post, daily, something uplifting, something beautiful, something that reminds us that the majority of the world is made up of humans rather than monsters – artists, thinkers, dreamers, people, young and old who are courageous and wild and creative in the best and most extraordinary ways. I’m counting this as a Christmas gift I’m giving to myself, and I hope that others might join me.

Several years ago, my husband and I started this thing called “Beautiful Time,” in which we’d sit down for breakfast and share a thing of beauty with our little girls. They were tiny then, and while we all loved the idea, with the arrival of our third child and the overall chaos of our household, we couldn’t keep it in our routine. This initiative of mine may just bring it back, though. We all need a little beauty to warm us up from time to time.

A friend of mine unearthed this Wendell Berry poem the other day and posted it on Facebook, and I’m sharing it here again. May you find a place to absorb the peace of wild things today.

The Peace of Wild Things

BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Sunlight and Shade

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About a year ago, I added over nine hundred followers to this blog thanks to a post entitled “A Letter to New Mothers,” which appeared on Freshly Pressed. The baby I was so eagerly anticipating when I wrote that essay started kindergarten last week, and leading up to her first day, I felt restless – not so much with worry, but with wonder. What had I done with her for the last five years?

When my first child went off to kindergarten, I had poignant flashbacks of all the fun things we’d done together that I was going to miss – leisurely trips to the zoo, spirited library story times, play dates with friends now scattered across several area schools, and a few who’d moved out of state.

Elizabeth and I kept a very different preschool rhythm. She was happy to play quietly in her room alone or with me, happy to draw or make perler bead art, happy when left with her own imagination to tinker with things that may or may not appear to be toys. She loved an occasional outing, but rarely demanded one.

In the days leading up to kindergarten, I found myself feeling guilty for not having more zoo memories with her. What had we done? We had gone to Target together, where she’d tried on every pair of sunglasses that struck her fancy. We’d drawn with chalk on our driveway and used up several giant sized bottles of bubbles. We’d overcome a year’s worth of furious temper tantrums brought on by the arrival of her baby brother. We’d gone to the grocery store, to buy shoes, and to pick up dry cleaning. We’d curled up on the couch and read book after book, pulled out the baby pool, eaten popsicles, and imagined the most elaborate stories a preschooler can muster.

At the time, it felt to me that I was taking the easy way out – schlepping an ornery two year old and a nine month old to the zoo is no way for a young mother to keep her sanity. (I know, I tried.) But the truth is that the reason being at home felt so easy was that there was really no other place E wanted to be.

Home, not the zoo, or the library, or the playground with a dozen of her friends, is the place where our hearts were sewn together, and, it should come as no surprise, the place where E wishes she were – right this second.

Kindergarten has been in session for a little over a week now, and every day at drop off, or at some point during the day, she’s cried. I’m not talking about a little sniffle. When Elizabeth cries, she gives it her all – true teenage heartbreak channeled by a five year old. After several days of this, I called a counselor I know, and he said, “You know, the problem with society today is that no one wants anything to be hard. Hard is OK. Hard can, in fact, be great.”

I hate it, but I agree with him. If I pulled my girl out of kindergarten right now, it would send the wrong message. She’s big enough and brave enough to know that some things are hard, but that they’re still worth doing.

Confidence is a bear of a thing to cultivate in a child. According to experts, saying “Good job!” too much can eventually have an adverse effect on self-esteem; telling kids they’re smart, rather than hard workers, can make them more anxious about their performance; correcting their bad behavior, rather than effusively praising the good, can make them feel like they never do anything right. Our knee-jerk reactions, like wanting to give Elizabeth another year under my wing, are not always the right ones.

I miss snuggling with E on the couch and hearing her little voice up the stairs, but I don’t want to snuggle her to defeat, or to love her to the point of not knowing what she might accomplish in the face of a challenge. I don’t want her to consider herself a hard worker because I say she is, or for her to measure her worth based on how many times her dad says “good job.” I want her to consider herself a hard worker because she’s carried the load and felt the satisfaction of having done it her way, to know in her heart that whatever she feels pleased to have done is, in fact, as good as it gets.

For the past week, when I’ve tucked Elizabeth in, she’s told me she doesn’t want to go to school, that she’s “not ready,” and/or that she misses me. As painful as all this is to hear, it gives me the opportunity to tell her the truth – something she can return to in five or ten years when other, possibly bigger things, are getting her down – that it’s my job to believe in her, even when she doesn’t believe in herself. I say it, and she looks at me like she’s studying a page in a book:

“What does that even mean, Mama?”

It means that I can see the spark inside her that she’s too clouded over with bewilderment and mommy-wanting to feel. It means that I’m going to pull her along until she can see the beauty of her own mind unfold, until her confidence finally takes root and becomes the thing that takes in sunlight and gives her shade. It means, and this is what I tell her, that I love her, and that she’s going to be okay, even if it doesn’t feel that way quite yet.

Find Me at AHA

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Art House America is a wonderful nonprofit for whom I have written several essays in the past. I am proud to be part of an organization that that seeks to inspire its readers, and whose aim is “Cultivating Creative Community for the Common Good.”  Let me know what you think of my essay, “Eulogy:”

http://www.arthouseamerica.com/blog/eulogy.html

I can’t remember a time when I’ve worked so hard at getting every word just right!

Strange Fashions

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I spent last weekend with some of my closest friends in the mountains of North Carolina. We’ve been getting together on an annual basis for nine years now, and although we don’t all live within driving distance of one another, we are as close as we’ve ever been.

These ladies all vetted my would-be husband and then stood beside me when I married him. They helped me say goodbye to my dad, heralded the arrivals of each of my children and have otherwise served as fine, funny, encouraging friends ever since I’ve known them.

I couldn’t be more thankful, especially this year, because I’ve found myself in a bit of a morass when it comes to today’s fashions. I am 5’2″, with what could be described as athletic/curvy/stocky legs; I have a penchant for high heels and cashmere, fitted shirts and a clear delineation between my torso and my lower body. The thing that’s going on with leggings, tall boots and long, chunky sweaters? To someone built like me, it feels downright immoral; after spending a lifetime taking exacting measures in fashion to counteract an unadvertised body type, the act of even considering “skinnies,” tunics, Uggs, and blanket coats is just reprehensible.

And yet, I feel an odd pressure to try and (finally) embrace it, maybe because we just bought a mini-van and I don’t really want to look the part, or maybe because I live in such a trendy city, where plenty of people, older than I am, have no qualms with donning a fedora and/or wearing screenprints with skull and crossbones.

I happily pegged my pants and wore a lot of hairspray in the eighties. In the nineties, I’m pretty sure I asked for Jennifer Anniston’s haircut, and I may have worn a vest. But in the 2000s, I settled nicely in to a closet filled with classic sweaters and universally flattering boot-cut pants, none of which were made of leather. I hardly ever came across another person and cringed, thinking how terribly out of style I must look. But then the fashionistas broke out the tall boots and skinny jeans, Lululemon came to power, and people, real people, started wearing it all – and my whole “pearls and cashmere” thing was blown to pieces.

This past weekend, my friends and I discussed several things: school choices for our children, baby naming, dinner ruts, work/life balance and, of course, the current fashion trends. Now, I should be clear that all the girls with me last weekend are a lot more on-trend than I am, but the general consensus was that much of what we see happening out there is, at the very least, difficult to identify with.

After a discussion about the right and wrong ways to wear the styles today, I started feeling a little braver, though. I resolved to update in the most timeless way possible, and on Monday, before the feeling wore off, I rushed to the mall.

After sending my friends a variety of selfies from the dressing room, in which I am making ridiculous faces in the mirror while trying on clothing that makes me look like a potato, we reached an agreement on a few things that were deemed not so far outside my personality that I should not buy them. I have boots now, pants that are skinny enough, but not obscene, and a few tops that, according to people other than me, might be described as flattering.

My husband was out of town when I went shopping, and since he returned, I’ve worn some derivation of this new style – what he has referred to as “strange fashions” – every day. I’ll admit that it’s nice to have a few new things to wear, and that it is good not to feel so stuck in 2008. But I won’t feel I can own this look for some time, if ever.

Fashion has a way of pulling even the most confident women into a delicate state of vulnerability. We hear a lot about the dearth of real body types represented in the media, but very little, really, about how clothing trends are chosen and the aftermath for those of us at the mercy of people who design clothing for ladies who weigh about as much as an average American 12 year old. As a woman, I find this exasperating; as a mother of two girls, I foresee a lot of long talks in dressing rooms, and I hate that they, at some point or another, are going to feel their worth is in the clothing they wear, or how they wear it.

If you see me out and about sporting my new style, know that I am pretending, at least a little, and that underneath that voluminous sweater I’m wearing, I’m holding my breath, waiting for a new trend to spike.

Freshly Pressed, and Thoughts on Being Super Mom

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In the past year or so since I’ve let my blog go dormant, I’ve gotten a few notifications from WordPress. Sometimes they included legitimate comments from readers, but the more occasional ones were all spam, and I thought the email I received from the site a little over a week ago would be no different.

But it was. So. Different.

Krista, an editor at WordPress, somehow found an essay I wrote over two years ago. She liked it so much she wanted to feature it on Freshly Pressed. This digital age is a funny one, and for a minute after I read her email, I thought, “Oh, ‘Krista’ is probably just a computer, trolling sites for key words.” But then I read her email again, and she actually sounded like a human being, who had actually been moved by my writing.

When it hit Freshly Pressed later that week, I started getting comments, and “likes” and reblogs, and followers that trumped my previous numbers several times over.

All this attention for something I wrote such a long time ago has made me feel like I’ve woken up in a room filled with bright lights and party hats. As soon as I sit up, everyone shouts, “Surprise!”

I didn’t know how much I needed that kind of attention, but I did! It’s set my brain on fire.

…

All around me, the world is loud. My children are loud. My husband is loud. My tea kettle is loud. My new phone, because its speaker is not yet clogged with apple sauce, is loud. My dog has acquired a barking problem, and I’ll be damned if she is not loud. My own thoughts are loud, too.

But for the last year or so, I have been quiet – not writing, barely investing in reading – because if there is anything I want right now, it’s quiet. I want my brain to be quiet, my life, especially when I am alone, to be quiet. Pictures instead of words, if you please.

One could say from all this talk that I am depressed, or not coping very well with the chaos that is life with three young children, but the reality is that most of the time, I love my life. I am deeply grateful for everything in it, painfully aware that in just a few years, I am really going to miss the noise and the mess that trails after my children at every turn. I breathe in the sweet smell of my two year old every night, and I revel in how simple it all is right now. No one is begging for an iPhone; no one’s rolling their eyes; no one is sneaking out, or getting bullied, or having their hearts broken. It’s pretty great, really, in the grand scheme of things.

But my thought life, and therefore, my writing life, does suffer. Until this week, I’d been willing to let that go as an inevitable consequence of the season. It had kind of fallen into the mini-van category: a necessary evil that makes life for a mother of three exponentially more convenient.

The convenience of not writing, though, the luxury of all this quiet, has its consequences. And while I am not exactly sure what all of them are, the sum of their parts equals Not Good.

I read an article in the New York Times the other day about modern day Mommy Culture – how our life as mothers has somehow become so defining that it’s supplanted our core identities. Until my third child arrived, I felt I was able to hold most things in balance. Since then, I have (mostly unknowingly) been asking myself the following questions: “Do I want to be: A Mom Who Writes? A Mom Who Exercises? A Mom Who Volunteers?” Etc. etc. — As opposed to being a person who does all of those things and also happens to have a family.

The article in the Times came down pretty hard on our culture, and perhaps rightfully so, but I would also argue that all the Super Moms out there are knowing parties in the madness they’re perpetuating. These high achievers want to be the best, and it doesn’t matter if all we’re talking about are cake pops and class party logistics. They’re women who have had their dreams deferred (and sometimes derailed) by the process of parenting, and like everyone else, they’re desperately fighting the demons of insecurity.

I don’t have it together enough to be a Super Mom. I’m kind of a mess, really. But I feel for them, because I kind of know what they’re going through, and I wish for them that they could just take a deep breath and stop. Their kids don’t actually want them to be crazy.

My kids don’t want me to be crazy, either. Occasionally, I have been – and I am not using the term ‘crazy’ as a colloquialism when I write that. But as I have quietly been making my way through the past year or so, I’ve started to mix a little bit of my old self back in with the new. I started exercising after an embarrassingly long hiatus; I’m taking turns editing this awesome new lit mag; I felt the freedom to sit on a porch swing at the beach house to finish the last few chapters of The Goldfinch, while the dads manned the fort. Maybe writing again, more often, is next. We’ll see.