On the parenting theme, spaces beyond communication, and heavy TGIF vibes
April 23, 2021
Dear Eva,
Happy Friday! I’m feeling a heavy TGIF vibe as I sit down to pen this letter. We have very few scheduled commitments for the weekend—just a loose plan to get our garden planted and finally purchase the outdoor furniture we have been eyeing these past few weeks. Spring is upon us! I am getting a little tingly with anticipation for warm summer nights on our soon-to-be newly decorated patio, surrounded by a string of white lights and a garden full of vegetables.
I found your letter last week so meaningful. It was moving to hear you pondering your series of small decisions that translate into one big one and feeling good about where you are as your self-imposed deadline nears. I felt happy reading your words, feeling the palpable sense of calm and contentment that undergirds them. What a good place to be! As I wrote over text, I also felt honored by the fact that you would share this with me and invite me in. The decision to have or not have children is such a personal one, drawing on identity, meaning, family history, and just about all of the most emotional aspects of a life. Perhaps because of the depths of this terrain, in my experience it is a personal decision that too often gets universalized. Like overconfidence, I think at its core this reflects a failure of imagination. There must be infinite ways to craft a meaningful life; why would anyone think that what was meaningful for them (e.g., having children) was the singular way to do it? There can also sometimes be a mysterious defensiveness—an assumption that one person’s decision of whether or not to have children necessarily contains a judgment about the contrary decisions by others. This one is even harder for me to understand! Although now that I write these words, I am realizing that perhaps it should not be hard to understand at all, given what I just said about the ways in which people tend to assume their meaningful choices are the only meaningful choices. Needless to say, this is not a way I want to be in the world.
I would love to read the book you mentioned, Motherhood, and discuss it with you! It is fascinating to try to channel my pre-mom self and conjure memories of my own decision to go off birth control. I know that I was never one who saw parenthood as an inevitability in my future. In fact, I was fairly certain I would never get married. Then, once married, we were pretty ambivalent about having kids for the first few years of marriage. It is hard to remember what shifted precisely; it just started to feel like something we wanted to do. I don’t remember much of any angst or indecision. For such a life-changing decision, in retrospect I feel like I gave it an uncharacteristically low level of reflection! As you wrote, the struggle with the question can essentially be an answer to the question. Perhaps the flipside is true, too—the ease in answering the question can be an answer to the question. I know two people who will be better suited to make this judgment, but I think motherhood suits me. It seems perhaps my gut knew this, too.
On the parenting theme, I have been thinking this week about a New Yorker story that described and showed a portrait series made of images of the photographer’s parents in their driveway outside their home, waving farewell as she drove away as they did every time she came to visit. The image of their smiling faces saying goodbye to their adult daughter tells you everything you need to know about these parents, and seeing them in the same position over the years as they age was enough to take my breath away. Eventually, there is only one parent waving, and then just a picture of the home, driveway empty. It is hard to imagine any text that the photographer could have written that would tell the story as well as those images. I am not sure what made the memory of this series bubble up for me this week, but gosh it has stuck with me ever since I found it more than a year ago.
Before I close, I will answer your two questions from last week. Yes, our bland bush is a star magnolia. And I did not actively de-stickify my keyboard but I haven’t noticed the stick so maybe my grimy fingers soaked it up? Yuck!
I am sorry for this tardy letter. Thank you for posting so late into the evening! I look forward to reading your words very soon. Have a wonderful weekend!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday April 23 2021
Dear Sarah,
Interestingly, I created a document for my letter to you on Wednesday, and I specifically remember that I started the document because I had something distinct that I was ready to say to you. Just after 10:30 in the morning on Wednesday! But when I just opened the document tonight to keep on with it I found that it was blank! I think I had a spurt of inspiration on Wednesday morning that ended up carrying across a few thoughts at the same time (I could write that, and I could do that, and I could send that email! All at once!) Instead, I started the doc but didn’t put words into it, and whatever feather of inspiration was tickling me then was lost to the wind. I think it’s possible it will come back to me when I refresh myself on your letter of last week, and perhaps my thoughts on my own letter of last week.
(I’m looking back at my Wednesday morning calendar to see what might have been so inspirational-slash-distracting — there is, in fact, evidence that I may have successfully written a couple of emails on my to-do list, but otherwise I’m not sure what was up! I did have a very late night on Tuesday, picking M up from the airport (!) after the first air-travel-necessary work trip he’d had in a year and a half, and I could have been having a bout of sleepy-morning inspiration — do you get anything like this? Sometimes when I am generally just very tired I find that I can approach certain kinds of work with a clear head. I think the tiredness irons away some of the anxiety and second-guessing I would typically bring to thoughts and projects, and instead I just go ahead and get some things done that I need to get done, because I have to. Sleepy-head doesn’t always work that way, but sometimes it does!)
You know what: I think my burst of thought had something to do with reflecting further on the pre-haircut scalp massage I received over my birthday weekend. I was still puzzling over why I didn’t just say something to avert the complete annihilation of my skull. I just found my notes! Thinking again about the scalp massage: I look forward to the possibility of the salon space as a space beyond communication — I like to think, they will know what feels good to me; the thing I want will come to pass. We’re supposed to ask for what we need, to be clear and straightforward in our communications — but sometimes I find I want someone to know precisely what I need, perhaps better than I know it myself. I want there to be moments where I can underperform in my communications and still get out with a good result. I’ve had enough good scalp massages without saying a word that I still think this apprentice was an outlier, but I think there was some part of me that didn’t want to have to ask for what seemed like the obvious thing: please stop squeezing my head so hard, it feels like it is going to pop like a Thanksgiving cranberry! How could it not be apparent to someone, who presumably had feeling in their hands, how hard they were massaging my head? Anyway. It can be hard to use your words all the time, to communicate clearly all the time, and every now and then there are moments when you don’t have to communicate so hard, and those are moments to treasure. But, in future, if someone is trying to rebirth me I will definitely speak up!
I am thinking about your words reflecting on how you too have been consuming less news thus far this year. This week I did tune in to public radio for the tense and emotional reveal of the jury’s verdict in the trial of George Floyd’s killer. I have otherwise not spent a lot of time on The New York Times or Guardian sites where I would typically just browse to occupy my eyes with tidbits that I’m less and less sure I need in my life. I’ve been trying to think of my news time as just reading time, and then to think about whether the news is something I actually want or need to be reading. I still intend to peek in from time to time — I don’t want or need to live entirely under a rock — but I’m not sure it’s important for me to spend as much time ingesting The New York Times’ content as I have been. I’m not certain it makes my life measurably better! Sometimes it gives me something interesting to talk or think about, but more often than not I think it’s just a form of digital grazing, passing my eyes over words because my eyes like to look at words. The exceptions: I do like to regularly read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethicist column, and I do like the Best of Late Night comedy recap. In any case, I’ve been reading more books since completing Motherhood last week; perhaps because I’d come to some new understanding with myself, I felt comfortable reading Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, which she wrote a number of years ago but which I had been avoiding (even though I love to read her work) because I knew it was at least in part about her new foray into having a child. I read it over the weekend and I enjoyed it; it’s another book that I can add to my constellation of collected texts by authors working in fragments (or, perhaps more positively, in dense little puzzle pieces of text), like Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Patricia Lockwood, and others. I finished The Crying Book by Heather Christle recently and would add that to the stack as well. I also tucked into some of David Sedaris’s collected essays in The Best of Me, and today at lunch I passed on news grazing in favor of Roz Chast’s cartoons in Theories of Everything.
I’m rereading the rest of your words on enjoying a break from the frantic news cycle, and I appreciate your explanation to Jonah about how, in addition to all the sad and awful things going on all over the world, 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. At those words I felt the tiniest bit shamefaced for not reading the news, but I am reassuring myself that I know pretty well a number of the problems I can be a part of changing, and you are of course tasked with introducing to this wild and weird world a human who’s newer to the whole scene than either of us!
I may have mentioned it somewhere along the way in my letters, but I think it’s possible that I appreciate Fridays during the pandemic even more than before — for one, they represent a reclamation of my home for home living instead of work living; and two, Fridays and weekends used to be more full of activities (frankly, I am mildly busy this weekend, a first in a while) but pandemic Fridays tend to mean quiet nights at home appreciating the emergence of the weekend ahead. Happy Friday and happy weekend, my friend!
Until soon!
Yours,
Eva
P.S. I forgot to mention it when we chatted, but the idea of seeing you in person sometime this early summer put a positive bounce in my step this week!