ON FEELING MILESTONES, PONDERING WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND TICKING THROUGH MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF SELF
Thursday December 26 2019
Dear Sarah,
It’s our last letter of 2019! And tomorrow you will be enjoying your milestone birthday! Tonight I had dinner with friends and we discussed whether it was in fact meaningful to tip over into these new decades, if it does or doesn’t feel meaningful in the lead-up, and whether it does or doesn’t feel like a change after the calendar has flipped. I’ll be curious to see how you feel tomorrow, next week, next year!
It’s been a busy week as we (the M and I we, the you and I, separately, we) have traveled to Michigan for the holidays. The travel seems like it will be the tiring thing when I anticipate the time away — the ten-plus hour drive each way, the contemplation of the possibility of bad weather (less problematic this year than it has been in other years, with temperatures in the fifties!). Instead, this time I found that I could home in on another feature that makes these trips tiring even if they are also enjoyable: I have many identities on these holiday trips “home,” when we try to connect with everyone we know and have known over the years, during the short week-plus around the Christmas holiday. I am myself and I am a wife and best friend; I am an old friend, the partner of an old friend, a new friend, a good friend, a friend of a friend, a friend of a child’s parents, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a daughter-in-law, an aunt, a cousin, an adult, a memory of a child. The driving seems on the surface to define what it is that is tiring about these trips, as we travel between Minnesota and Michigan, the Lansing area and the Metro Detroit area, but only this year after so many years have I really thought about how it can be tiring to be all these different people, and to switch and trade between these identities, none of which quite encompass all of what I think of as me, myself. When I am quiet in my office during my regular days, I feel in some ways to be most myself; I am, at least, most connected to my own thoughts and can follow them as they unfold across the hours of the day. When I slip into the other identities that the short period of the holidays requires, the details of living my day-to-day life fade back a bit while I reconnect with people through the lenses through which they know me, often ticking through multiple identities in the space of a few hours. The holidays can feel a bit like we all must recount, in brief, what has happened in the last year or so since we’ve seen each other, and I too am guilty of asking friends how their year has been. The conversations I treasure more at this time of year are the ones where our lives are gently refracted, where we talk not about ourselves and exactly what we’ve been up to in work and life since we last saw each other, but instead where we show ourselves and our likes and dislikes and personalities through the ways we talk about things — the ways we describe the movies we choose to watch and the places we go, the ways we tell the stories of our pasts that have pointed us here.
When we get a chance M and I like to wander around in Ann Arbor a bit, M returning to the architecture school from which he graduated. Every time we visit the architecture school I covet the trappings of the studio spaces, the high ceilings and the broad expanses of desks with projects in various states of doneness sprawling across their surfaces, chipboard and balsa wood models in the process of coming to life, landscapes and buildings iteratively taking shape in miniature. M and I met in a pre-architecture class in undergrad, one of the courses you had to take to make your way toward the major, and I considered pursuing an architecture degree, and for various reasons decided not to — chose instead to pursue an English degree with a healthy smattering of art and architecture courses. The key word being that I chose to not to pursue an architecture degree. But every year when we are back in the area and if we get a chance to ramble through those studios and to see all those projects in process, the holiday break spectre of the community formed by what I know were, during the busy weeks, dozens upon dozens of students staying up into the wee hours forming ideas about design and the built environment, forming them literally into models and plans scattered about the light-filled spaces — I sometimes wish I had chosen differently. It’s not regret, exactly, it’s that having arrived at this stage of my life and having seen how few of my worries in those days came to fruition, I would like to give things a try differently, simply to see how they would go. I can only want such a thing because I have the comfort of having made what I deem a fine (in the sense of quite satisfactory) series of choices, and now I would like to see how another series of choices may have played out. When people reach a stage in their lives when they are asked if they would have done anything differently, and they say they would do it all again just the same — do people actually say this, or do I have the sense from stories that they say this? — I wonder, what’s the fun in doing things the same way all over again? I suppose the subconscious idea could be that you’d do it all again and relax a bit more the second time around, knowing how it would unfold. Instead, I think, I’d like to do it all differently, give it a fresh new go. If “I” had the chance to do it all over again, would “I” even be “me”? No, I would be some fresh new soul giving it my first go-round, again.
I periodically wonder if I still want to go to architecture school, and I do, in a way, in the way that I want to keep going to school always without any particular consideration of what comes after school. I want to go into a huge light-filled space every day, filled with desks and desks and projects and projects and, this year, the gangly and delicate three-legged baltic birch stools that all the students appear to have had to construct either to sit on or to display their work. In the end I often think not that I wish I were formally architecting at this phase of my life, but that the spaces in which I spend my days more closely resembled a wide-open expanse of studio. These buildings are harder to come across as living spaces (I would like to live in such a space, since my days are spent working at home) but they are where I aspire to be in the long run.
I appreciated your letter of last week wherein you felt the impulse to excuse your letter from the prior week. When I read over your prior-week letter I found not a thing that seemed to need any excusing. One delight of these letters, as we’ve acknowledged over the weeks, is that no one letter needs to stand all alone, needs to be the letter that carries it all. When I think about my earliest creative writing classes at Michigan, I think about a teacher I had, Therese, whom I felt was the most welcoming of students who were just beginning to stake their particular claims on the written word. No matter how rough some of our story drafts were, she knew how to find something in each of our stories that glimmered, even if the glimmer was simply a few words, an idea, a phrase, a memory — something she’d mark in our drafts and say, Tell me more about this, or perhaps, Do you really feel that way? In our letters we’ve found the nuggets and returned to them, we’ve delved into what we say and do and think, and why we say and do and think it. There’s something in every letter to carry forward, something in every letter that is carried forward.
I’m thinking too about how you have been subtly tormented by the many thoughts and experiences that evaporate before you can capture them in writing. I think you are right that this is somehow another way of obsessing over more. I’m planning to develop a certain kind of diary for the year 2020, a diary whose particular form I haven’t fully decided, but I am thinking on how to make it less of the daily documentation that I performed over the past couple of years (though I think I fell off early this year) and more some sort of essential capture of each day. I think I will want to reconnect with Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary as I ponder how, in 2020, to capture some essences of my days. I am curious for both of our next years! Happy birthday to you, Sarah! May it be a year filled with all the things you enjoy, and not too many of the things you don’t! I shall raise a glass to you tomorrow, and when I see you next!
Until then, and until next week,
Yours,
Eva
December 27, 2019
Dear Eva,
Today marks my official completion of four decades on this Earth. I have been looking forward to writing this letter since I figured out my birthday fell on a Friday and made arrangements to set up childcare for a few hours so I could write. But here the moment is—a quiet hour at my desk with the sun pouring in through the windows in my office—and I am not sure what to say! I am realizing it takes quite a bit of effort to make a birthday feel like anything other than a typical day when you are an adult. And of course, it is, in fact, just another day! For me, and for the rest of the world.
Stubbornly though, I want to feel this milestone. I like the idea of pausing to ponder / appreciate another decade lived, a new decade to be entered. At midnight last night, I officially crossed over the threshold from age 39 to 40 snuggled in a child-sized bed with a sick 3 year old. It is a fitting bookend to a decade that was most notable for my transformation into mother / caregiver. This was not an easy transition for me. Ten years ago, Bill and I had just moved across the country to San Francisco where we knew virtually no one. We got a puppy, and I became a mom of sorts. I remember actually crying about how suffocating it felt to have to go straight home after work to let her out, forgoing happy hours with coworkers and spontaneous dinners out. It seems hilarious and pathetic in retrospect—tears spilled over happy hours missed—but freedom is a difficult thing to relinquish. As I lay huddled under the princess comforter in Simon’s bed waiting for him to fall back asleep so I could return to my own bed, I thought about how fully I have settled into these shoes over the course of this decade. Much of the time, the constraints that come with being a caregiver feel less like shackles and more like anchors. I am Mom, and this feels like a defining part of my life’s work at this point in my life. I wonder what it will feel like in ten years time, when I am marking my 50th birthday just a few months before Jonah graduates high school and embarks on life outside of our ambit? Will I be writing about it in a letter to you? I relish the thought.
I find it confounding that so many people seem to get sad or somehow embarrassed about entering new decades in life. I guess I have always loved the idea of fresh starts, new terrain, open road. Entering my 40s strikes me as a chance for a new beginning, which is not to say that I have any reason to want to leave behind my current state of things. I just appreciate the notion of a new chapter, perhaps one filled with a little less tending to the primal needs of my children as they start to stand more on their own metaphorical feet. There are a lot of different elements folded into this new start—a freshly earned graduate degree, a new way of thinking about money and budgeting as Bill and I start to more aggressively pay down our debts, a different outlook on work (my own and more generally), a plan for a year-long creative project. In fact, when I write it that way, I find myself tingly with anticipation of the promise ahead, so I need to stop myself. I am always a sucker for fresh starts—new diets/workout plans/projects/habits/resolutions. One thing that will be different about my 40s is I will not always be looking out ahead. I will tilt my head back down to the present.
Thank you for a beautiful year of letter writing and conversation and friendship! It has been the very best gift.
With love,
Sarah