the good kind of magic: onward and awpward

Photo by Ben Dutton on Unsplash

I'm writing this from the lobby of the Seattle Convention Center, which is strangely beautiful for a convention center. Escalators going up to the sky, flanked with warm wooden stair-seats that look out over Downtown Seattle. 

Somehow this is my first post of 2023. Time is a motherfucker.

I'm here with C.C., Dash, and Joey for four and a half days of the AWP writers' conference, smashed together with a family vacation. I desperately needed a change of scene. I think we all did. My Great Mental Health Relapse of 2022 hitched a ride to 2023, despite nothing bad happening. I'm going to therapy, doing EMDR, taking more Effexor than I was before, but it's been hard to shake the feeling that something terrible is around the corner, and that feeling becomes its own trigger. Am I afraid of doctor appointments, or am I afraid of how afraid I get of doctor appointments? It's like "live in despair for a week" is an item on my to-do list that I have to check off periodically.

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Getting out of town has been good medicine for getting out of my own head—not falling into that low hum of depression/anxiety the sight of my own living room for a few days. I feel bad saying that (I am so good at feeling bad) because I love my living room, toy diaspora and all, and I love my life. But constantly looking at it and asking myself "Do I love my life? Are we all okay? Is something terrible about to happen?" is not helpful to anyone.

So, AWP. Apparently my book hasn't been selling like hotcakes or like, I don't know, a more successful book, and it would be very easy to look around this massive building full of writers and feel like a peon. But this is an area where time, that motherfucker, is on my side. In the...17? 18? years since my first AWP, I've found my niche as a writer, published some stuff, and made my peace with humble expectations. It's okay if I never publish with a Big Five publishing house (though I'm not turning one  down, either), and it's okay if I don't even attend every panel that sounds interesting.

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We're staying at the apartment of C.C.'s friend Meg (not to be confused with my editor friend Meg, whom I got to hang out with here for the first time ever), and I was reading about the history of imposter syndrome in her copy of the New Yorker. People arrive at imposter syndrome—or imposter phenomenon, as it was initially and more accurately called—in a variety of ways, but one of them is when parents have low expectations for their children, who then go on to be high-achieving, and they struggle with the disconnect they feel. "How can I have achieved ABC when I've always been sure I was a stupid screw-up? The only explanation is that I must be a fraud."

I've been thinking lately about how my anxiety about Joey's health and development could be really bad for him. I mean, I have a couple of years to work my shit out in therapy—the only option for screwed-up parents who don't want to dump it all on their kids—before he starts to notice that I'm constantly like "Is something wrong with you?" 

I worry something is wrong with him because I suffer from the imposter phenomenon as a mother. Not as Dash's mother—this is all so twisty and deep-rooted, it's hard to explain—so I fear a day when Joey will notice that—that I see Dash as a golden child who validates my desire to be a mother, and I see Joey as some sort of proof of my failings and undeservingness. When—OBVIOUSLY—neither of them is either of those things. They're little kids who deserve the space to be their own people, and loved for whomever they are. 

So, without being too hard on myself—because PTSD is real and our adoption "journey" has been full of potholes and some of those potholes have been more like sinkholes—I want to try to pivot to believing in Joey's ability to learn and grow. Because he's already demonstrated it. Because if he had some sort of dire condition that would render him an infant forever, we would probably already know about it (and I would grieve and try to meet him there and love him anyway, but it would be hard, and I tend to assume the hardest thing is the thing that will happen). Anything milder—small delays or quirks or viruses or needs—that may pop up is probably manageable. I want to have faith in my ability to manage it, and in his ability as well. I want to set the bar high. Not tiger-mom high, but "if you did X, you can do Y, and I will believe in you and help you" high. 

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On Thursday night, I read at Literary Mama's 20th anniversary event in the basement of a Capitol Hill bar. Jody Keisner read from an essay about a mom who abandoned her children, whose pursuit of freedom caused her to come utterly undone, and the tradeoffs mothers face when they want to run away from their own lives. I don't think I want to run away from my life, but I related to the essay more than I ever would have when Dash was a baby. I related to this room full of moms talking about what it feels like to lose yourself, and not in a good way. I want to run away from my constant questions about my own life. I want to run away from my own head. The intrusive thoughts, the bracing stomach, the floor-drop feeling that comes all too easily when I consider a new and terrible possibility. 

But I can't leave myself without leaving the earth, which would mean leaving my family, which I have no intention of doing. So I feel trapped. And that makes me want to leave—to leave something—even more. 

Usually that's when I pop half an Ativan and remind myself that the day will end and I can watch some TV. 

I want magical, spiritual, epiphany-style cures, but all I've ever found is short-term bumps and decades of therapy, and a kind of love that is sometimes magical and sometimes the opposite—a thing made of durable fibers and realistic expectations.

Photo by Terri Bleeker on Unsplash

There was a woman in the Literary Mama audience who is on her own adoption journey, already fraught with professionals who haven't delivered on promises. I wanted to hug her. I hoped her story wouldn't be like ours. I scrawled my email address on a bar napkin and told her to reach out any time. I hope she does.

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Yesterday I had coffee with Myriam Steinberg, whose graphic memoir Catalogue Baby, documents her very long road to motherhood, full of mystical moments and miscarriages. Eventually she got pregnant with twins, but when her son's water broke early, she was on bedrest for four months. Four months! Then her babies were in the NICU for a month and two months respectively. 

At many junctures, she said, medical professionals told her about worst-case scenarios, but she stayed true to what she called her "prime directive." I admire and envy the ability to take medical advice with a grain of salt. I have this all-or-nothing thinking that says, "Doctors saved your fucking life, Cheryl. If you want to believe them when they say you don't have cancer, you need to believe everything else they say too." (To be clear, no medical professionals have predicted dire outcomes for Joey; quite the opposite. But I'm always thinking ten steps in the scariest direction.) 

Talking with Myriam gave me some perspective, at least for a moment, and made me see how relatively little we've actually dealt with. She spent 62 days with her babies in the NICU, and I have PTSD from spending four completely uneventful days there with Joey. But again, I'm trying not to beat myself up—I'd dealt with some medical shit before that, and Myriam didn't escape psychologically unscathed any more than I did. 

Also, importantly, her twins are four years old and have Been Through Stuff and are pretty much fine. It's not all or nothing. It almost never is.

Last night I went to a reading by my old grad school friend, Miah Jeffra, and a diverse handful of queer fiction writers and poets. It was so much fun to hear fiction, my other old friend. A surefire way to escape my head and my life. I hope I can hold onto a little bit of this magic when I get back (the bad magic, the magical thinking, says "Remember how you had a wonderful time at MacDowell in 2012 and came home and immediately got diagnosed with cancer?" so insert all the evil-eye emojis here). I want to read more fiction. Maybe someday I'll even write some again.