ON SPECK SYNDROME, THE BRAZEN ASSERTION OF SELF, AND DAILY INDIVIDUAL NOS ADDING UP TO A SINGLE LIFETIME NO
Thursday April 15 2021
Dear Sarah,
I started writing this letter to you at 6:45 this morning. I am feeling a certain kind of broadening of the horizon. More coats falling away, more shedding of scales, and in their place, a certain clarity. This clarity resonates most profoundly at the start of the day, in the window after I wake and before the day has attempted to hang its weights from my shoulders again. I am getting better about not accepting each of the weights the day offers, but still, the morning is the lightest part of the day, even when the day has its obligations.
Last night I finished Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood, and in fact the news that it was a novel did not make it to me until I had finished reading it; I assumed it to be something like a memoir, a book of fact, but am now remembering the shape of other of her books that were also novels, featuring a character named “Sheila.” This book was refreshing and also quite resonant for my current life moment, this last year of my thirties. In my mind is the lingering idea that the age of 40 is a deadline for having children, a deadline that is somehow met either way, whether one chooses to have children or not.
I know at least a few people who had a child or children when they were young, I presume somewhat unexpectedly, and it is interesting to see those people now with children who are teenagers and more, youth emerging from high school or going off to college, and their parents essentially the same age as me, their family production efforts concluded in some ways. (I think of it like this even though I know that family continues on, you don’t stop being a parent, etcetera. I think to myself, they finished up that life requirement and they are still not that old!) When I was in high school or college the idea of a child just then seemed to me a life sentence, which in some ways it is, though of course the concept of a life sentence carries a negative weight (and I’m showing my feelings by using those words). I was certain that if I had children I would be on a path that was not what I wanted, was not all that I could be. As I’ve aged, I have thought that perhaps that would have been less the case than I’d imagined in my rigid way of understanding myself and the potential my life. Still, there are ways in which I’ve seen different Evas branch off in my mind, representatives of the possibilities of having chosen different life paths — the Eva who did pursue music professionally, performing in an orchestra; the Eva who did go to architecture school, working as an architect or designer; the Eva who went to culinary school and became a food writer. I don’t see among the imaginary Evas an Eva who had children in her early twenties (or even her late twenties or early thirties!), with a child or children now approaching their teens or getting ready to head off to college or an apprenticeship or a gap year or the Peace Corps or any other young adult adventure.
When we chatted last week I was mentioning having been on birth control for just about 20 years now, and how it was a decision I made every step of the way, a pill I’ve taken each day; you don’t think to yourself, I will take this pill for the next 20-plus years, you just take it every day and eventually you might end up having taken it for 20 years. Alongside my daily birth control pill has been my daily lack of interest in having children. The sense of a woman’s deadline at 40, or perhaps my sense of my own deadline at 40, is my sense of the last possible moment to decide to have children, but really, in a purely objective sense, the best moment to have children has largely passed, is probably somewhere at the pivot point of late twenties and early thirties. I know this, too. I’ve made my choice every day along the way for the last twenty-plus years, and in toto my individual nos add up to one single no to having children.
I would be curious for you to read Motherhood and to talk about it with you. The narrator is moving through her feelings about whether or not she should have children, whether or not she wants to have children. It has sort of soothed me into the decision I’ve already made by putting her (my) thought process into words (many words, some of which I felt overlapped directly with words from my own head). In the end I think the struggle with the question can essentially be an answer to the question. If it’s such a struggle to decide, then to have children is not a necessity, not something a person is gravitating toward. I’m sure people who have a hard time making the decision can go on to be extraordinarily glad that they did so, and I also think having children is one of those things where you’re in for a penny, in for a pound — once you’ve started on that path you can’t really back down, can’t quit it like a new job that went differently than expected, can’t move away like leaving a town that didn’t fit the bill. (In this world I suppose you can quit parenthood and move away, but I have no desire to find myself in a position to even think about that kind of decision.)
I wrote this letter to you, am writing it now on Thursday morning as the day has hardly begun. I wonder if this will be the letter I send your way today? Why not? Sometimes it feels like there are letters that I want to get out of my head and onto the page to you, and sometimes I think there are just letters that want to be written and set aside for other letters to then supplant their existence, but there’s no real reason to write a new and different letter this week when I’ve got a perfectly real letter here for you, nearly complete under my fingertips. As we say, there is always next week!
A few thoughts on your letter of last week: is your bland bush a magnolia? They move quickly, it would seem. I was talking to my mother in the last week and she spoke of a tree or bush flowering near her that lasts just a few days, and I thought of your briefly flowering bland bush. Also, did you de-stickify your keyboard?
Thank you for the book you sent! I am loving it, and I love the concept of what the author was calling Speck Syndrome, the way people react differently to the idea that on a certain level, they are an essentially meaningless blip on the long arc of time. I side with the author in feeling comforted by this! It also reminds me of an Edith comic I read the other day in which she is listening to a Great Courses lecture and has the thought that “so many people have lived and died; it doesn’t matter what I do… but in a nice way… I don’t have to get it all right.” Edith, too, finds some comfort in Speck Syndrome. We can each think of Speck Syndrome as a tool to relieve the pressure we feel, or to put more pressure on ourselves.
I work best toward deadlines when the deadline is far enough off that I know it exists, with space to wriggle around comfortably, finding my way into whatever the project is on my own time, with few pressures. As the deadline looms, inevitably the pressure mounts; and then as the deadline draws nearest, the pressure lifts again, when I realize that the deadline will come and go regardless, and it’s just a matter of riding the wave over (through) and past that moment in time. Which I think perhaps brings me back to my words at the start of this letter. I’m feeling good about being 39!
Looking forward to reading your words tomorrow and to talking with you sooner! Happiest weekend to you, my friend! And happy birthday to sweet Simon!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
April 15, 2021
Dear Eva
I am still reeling from your description of silently suffering through a skull-molding scalp massage before your haircut last week. Recreating the experience of the birth canal! Eva! I must admit this did make me laugh a little. Suffering is no joke, but it is amusing to imagine you steeling yourself, instead of simply telling the masseuse to take it easy. To play on a little regional stereotypes, I cannot imagine a more Midwestern response to the problem of a massage gone awry.
I can’t say for sure, but I assume I would have had similar instincts early in my life. Now that I say that, I am having a vivid memory of a haircut gone awry when I was a tween, the stylist taking off inches more than I wanted. Rather than saying anything during the cut to try to get her to change course or after the cut when she asked what I thought, I feigned a smile and then went home and cried. Thankfully, along the way I have developed a pretty strong muscle for advocating for myself. I remember being heavily influenced by a family friend from New York (again living up to a regional stereotype!), who I would watch do previously unimaginable things like telling someone at a store that she was there waiting to checkout before them. Even witnessing this kind of brazen assertion of self was horrifying at the time, but it was illuminating to see that it was possible.
It is funny—I imagine for you, and not just for me—to think about what precisely it is that you feared might happen if you had spoken up to the overly exuberant (violent) scalp masseuse? I am trying to imagine a worst case scenario reaction, maybe he storms out of the salon in a huff, or secretly instructs the stylist to give you a bad haircut. How dare she not enjoy my vigorous cranial techniques?
I am teasing you here, but I am certainly no stranger to letting potential social consequences stop me from using my words. My hesitations bubble up differently—most often when it comes to presenting myself, or some particular aspect of self, usually the professional bits—but they bubble up nonetheless. It is remarkable to think about how much human torment is rooted in social fears! This might be a good time for us to channel your maybe instead of things being hard, they could be easy philosophy.
Like you, I have been consuming less news in 2021 and enjoying the break from the frantic news cycle. On the way home from a piano lesson recently, as we listened to public radio, Jonah marveled, There are always so many sad and awful things going on all over the world. It was a teaching moment, a chance to explain that there are just as many beautiful and wonderful things but we largely don’t need to hear about those things in the same way we do the problems that we might be able to change, and about how it is necessary not to be overwhelmed by global suffering because there are always things we can contribute to in a positive way in our own micro orbits. I say that, but then I have found myself struggling to cope this week with the news of the murder of Daunte Wright in your city. The injustice is so deep, so repetitive, so indefensible, that it feels almost impossible to comprehend. (As I write these words, David Byrne is singing Hell You Talmbout over our speakers, singing out a list of names of the black people murdered in this way.) There is nothing new for me to say about this, nor does my own personal response to it even matter. Another innocent black man is dead at the hands of the people paid to keep us safe, and it is unacceptable.
Tomorrow we will awake to a 5 year old living in our house, as little Simon celebrates a birthday. He assured us (himself) at bedtime that, Nothing will change with my hugs tomorrow, in response to Bill’s teasing about having his last hug from a 4 year old tonight. He is delightfully unaware that his birthday is just another day, and I hope to keep it that way for at least a good decade.
Enjoy your white wine and ravioli weekend of solitude, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah