Some small but important things happened since my last post,
and it feels necessary to mark them here, because subtle milestones, like
subtle angst, have a way of getting lost in the churn of everyday. I mean, they
are the churn of everyday, which is
why they’re so easy to not see.
I’ve been thinking a lot about units of time. I know what I
want in the big picture—love, creativity, and whatever makes those things possible on Maslow’s pyramid. I sort of know
what it takes to translate those things into a single good day. Read. Write.
Connect with people I care about. Clean some small square of my house and take
a walk. (I often don’t do any of these things because work, because life,
because phone.) But when I think about the middle range, I tend to panic: What
is my five-year career plan? Do I have a five-year career plan? Is it utter
hubris to assume I’ll be alive in five years?
One solution—and I’m not being facetious here—is to not
think about the middle range. Trust that it will write itself if you work on
having good days and moving in the general direction of love and creativity.
The other thing that has been a beautiful balm for the What if I’m doing it all wrong? voice in
my head is the IKEA Writers Collective. Toward the end of 2018, a writer named
Shea posted in a Facebook group for writer parents that she wanted to finish a
draft of her book, and she needed some accountability partners. A group text
grew out of it—Shea, Aubrey, Debbie, Jennifer, Hannah, and me. They’ve been,
essentially, an antidote to the image of Writer as white man who locks himself
in his office at a beautiful wooden desk for four hours a day—and even to my
more contemporary image of Writer as multi-platform Millennial who crafts zingy
Tweets against old white men and gets an instant book deal as a result.
We cheer every time Shea puts a star for writing five
hundred words on the sticker chart she made herself. We weigh the pros and cons
of having a second or third kid. We share pictures of messy houses in
solidarity or admit, as Hannah did, “I think it’s still too early in our
relationship to show you all a picture of my sink.”
It is early, and I’m in the throes of infatuation, but bear
with me.
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This isn't any of our living rooms. This is IKEA. |
These five women, all of them really good writers, have
given me the gift of not making it look easy. And the paradoxical result is
that writing has gotten a tiny bit easier. For the past few weeks, I’ve been
writing for twenty or thirty minutes before Dash wakes up. Dash, for his part,
has given me the gift of sleeping till 7 or 7:30, which could change at any
minute. But I’ll do this while I can, when I can. I’ll take these gifts and run
with them and try to trust that when they depart, there will be others.
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TFW when your memoir is flowing. |
2. next stop,
flip-flop station
I also feel like I pushed through something in my
relationship to my job, although that is as much of a work-in-progress as the
memoir.
Something is shifting with Dash, too. It’s hard to put my
finger on it, but this has happened since he was a baby, where I’ll
periodically look at him and see a new person and feel a little shy and shaken,
like I need to reintroduce myself.
For the past six months or so, I’ve appreciated that he’s
getting more independent, and I think I over-celebrated my ability to do other
things while he’s in the room. I became a little bit obsessed with what I could
clean or cook while he played with his cars, and I was always jumping into the
addictive blue glow of games and socials on my phone. It wasn’t good for me or
him, and in small fussy ways, he’s let me know.
I’m trying to listen to him, and to think of this as a
chapter in our attachment, where he’s voicing his needs and I’m adjusting
because I am attuned, vs. a
failure to take care of my kid, vs. choosing a dumb fashion game over
my child.
Just this past week or so, I’ve focused on giving him my
undivided attention for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch. Those bites—like writing
for twenty minutes—are doable, and they add up. As Dash becomes more engaged
with his surroundings, he’s also more sensitive to them, and he seems more
likely to need a break from the stream of activities AK and I drag him to. He
needs to sit under a blanket with me and read picture books, or build a roller
coaster, or pretend our kitchen chairs are a bus (passengers include Mama,
Mommy, and a lone flip-flop; our stops are Mama Station, Mommy Station, and
Flip-Flop Station).
He needs space and breath, and it turns out I do too.
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Photo by Roopak Ravi on Unsplash
|
I don’t disagree with the metaphor, but I’ve been thinking
about how the type of sand makes a difference. Maybe not all the grains of sand can be a
returned email or a scrubbed sink. Maybe they shouldn’t all be a stroll through
Instagram’s suggested videos, either. And maybe some of the space in the jar
needs to remain unoccupied. Just air.
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