Tag: personal essay

May: No Reason and All the Reasons

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May is here again. This is the true end of the year. May is supposed to be spring but it’s actually harvest season. We see what has survived and what has grown. We cull what we can. We return year after year to witness the fact that time has continued to move.

Every year I’m surprised, although I own and use a calendar. Several, in fact. Still, I’m flattened by the rush of endings and the gatherings stacked atop one another. Cut off one celebration and two grow back in its place, fastening ever more ceremonies around your neck like beautiful cursed jewelry.

May gathers up loose threads with brassy pomp and circumstance before summer upheaval arrives with its wet bathing suits.

May is a complete disaster, is what I’m saying. Just look at the inside of my car if you need proof. My Toyota is a rolling evidence locker. A midden heap.

The rest of you, though? You look great. Hydrated and moisturized while you’re winding down, as it were. I salute you. May your linen pants remain crisp and your drinks be as lemon-wedged as you wish.

Me? I’m choking down noises that sound like a 1987 Buick trying to merge while going uphill.

I’m not cute enough to be winding down. May is about endings. Lasts and finals. All I can do is listen to one of my sons tell me that by the time he leaves for college, 90% of our time together is done. I’m not checking that math, thanks, because I’m busy remembering carrying him in after he fell asleep in the car, all dead weight and impossible trust

At night I collapse onto the couch so dramatically that heretofore missing objects launch out of my bra upon impact. Bobby pins, receipts, Cheez-Its, Chapsticks with missing caps. I am not proud of this, but leave it here for future historians who may appreciate the data.

I almost just typed, “Still, I love this time of year.” But I don’t. I mean, I recognize the ache of it, even if it knocks the wind out of me. I recognize that sense of subjective slow motion when something is ending. I recognize that my children have become themselves gradually, then all at once. That they have developed complex, glorious, kind lives, and I get to celebrate and make banana bread for them. No-reason banana bread. All-the-reasons banana bread.

Mostly though, it’s because I’m overbuying bananas these days. They darken as we rush to and from events. I always think we’re a household that will eat many bananas. We are not. We are a household that transforms bananas via neglect into baked goods.

We recently played Jackbox as a family. The prompt was “What is the name of a horse you wouldn’t bet on?” I answered “Last Place Monty,” which got me an appreciative snort from the kids, a noise I will cherish, to some extent. One child answered, “Beefs Wellington.” That won. The next day he wandered into the kitchen and lamented, “I should have gone with ‘Thelonius Glue, Sr.’”

There are entire sections of motherhood no one adequately explains beforehand, including the fact that one day your children may become funnier than you, and that you will feel a piercing gratitude for that.

Every week I begin my planning journal by writing “Do not waste your precious timing giving a single crap about what anyone thinks of you.” This is excellent advice that is fundamentally incompatible with motherhood. There are a few people whose opinions matter to me. My husband. My kids. The dog who watches all of us in case we sneeze weirdly and he needs to retreat. The cashier who sells me bananas when he absolutely should know better at this point.

Loving these people (not the cashier. Ok, maybe the cashier. Hey, Jerry.) requires presence, vigilance, mood-monitoring, remembering who needs new shoes and what size, and who suddenly likes bananas again.

And every May, no matter how tired we are or what strange treasures are embedded in my underthings or in the Toyota’s backseat, we all somehow find our way home. Banana bread. Better versions of jokes. It’s some holy version of “WTF.”

In Attendance

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Also, a Coat

The coat is brown, puffy, and goes to my ankles. Add a messy bun and I look like the poo emoji.

I needed the coat a few weeks ago because it was freezing and my daughter had a regional middle school choir concert at a high school gym.

Middle school choir concerts are my favorite form of civic optimism. Kids collaborate to make something beautiful despite puberty actively sabotaging their vocal cords, all so an audience can briefly believe we belong to one another. This is where hope lives, even if the venue smells like feet.

Parental love has historically forced humanity into far worse circumstances than this, even on a cold Thursday evening.

So into the coat I went, looking and feeling like a baked potato.

My husband, daughter, and I arrived at the high school to find the gym entrance guarded by a teenage usher who held back the restless audience with all the authority of a traffic cone. The kids went to warm up while families packed the lobby. Everyone talked about how busy and tired they were. The tiredest people who have ever busied. As if to illustrate the point, an exhausted toddler lay starfished on the floor, wailing in the Hall of Interminable Waiting.

Five minutes before the show, the poor usher stepped aside and the crowd surged. Someone behind me decided I was an obstacle to their getting exactly as bad a seat as everyone else, and they shoved me. Mercifully my enormous coat absorbed the blow.

Anyway, we easily found seats, as did literally everyone else. My coat’s protective puffiness had been deployed for naught.

A few parents from our kid’s school came over to chat (“Hi! How are you?” “Tired and busy.” “Same.”) and then disappeared into bleachers on one of the three designated walls.

I folded my coat behind me, exhaled, and assumed that for the rest of the evening, the worst thing that could happen was that 50-100% of my butt cheeks might fall asleep.

Along the fourth wall were the rows of choir kids in school shirts and venue-appropriate shoes, clutching folders and ready to be taken seriously while delighting us.

The program started. The choirs took us on a world tour: “Tottoyo” from the Caribbean. The Russian folk song “Kalinka.” An arrangement of “Dies Irae” to liven up the joint.

When not singing, the kids sat attentive and appreciative of the other groups.

And for three glorious minutes, I thought maybe humanity has a chance.

However, another performance unfolded behind us, where a delegation of moms and dads sat. No idea who they were, but they clearly knew each other well enough to narrate the entire concert. Before, after, and during the songs. They declared “winners,” opined on which song “lost them,” and critiqued soloists. They laughed out of delight, but sometimes they laughed in that other way, too. One mom casually sang along to the songs she knew, and she knew quite a few of them. Then she complained about the audience’s bad etiquette when they clapped for soloists in the middle of a piece.

(Reminder: the universe will always choose to deploy irony in a high school gym.)

The singers were too far away to hear the chatter. My husband and I were too close not to.

But no one else seemed bothered – except possibly the person on the other side of my husband, who sat up straighter and straighter as the evening wore on, like her sense of decency was trying to escape through the top of her head before she did something regrettable.

Maybe the talking was the kind of thing you’re supposed to let slide. I reminded myself that no one had crowned me Queen of the Gym Bleachers, Sovereign of Decorum.

My shoulders crept toward my ears with familiar fury. Oh, hello, lifelong training to quell my irritation rather than risk being socially punished for noticing poor behavior.

I tried to listen to the kids, but the conversations behind me kept pulling my focus.

And then, my notably easygoing and also deaf in one ear husband shushed them.

He shushed them. Again and again.

I mean, they ignored him, BUT STILL.

After the final song, my husband and I performed a traditional Midwestern Passive Aggressive Two-Step.

1. Stare down Sing-Along Mom and her friends and say, “These kids deserved a better audience.”

2. Flee.

We found our daughter near the doors, eager to tell us all the behind-the-scenes details.

I nodded along, overheating in my coat, listening to her version of the night where everyone made space for one another.

We told her we were glad we were there.

Auld Lang Sigh

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I, Too, Have New Year’s Thoughts

EEveryone else seems to know how to do this.

Pop Quiz! In the above sentence, “this” refers to:

a) Navigating a Trader Joe’s parking lot without emotional or vehicular damage.

b) Leaving a voicemail (!) without a panic outro.

c) Loading the dishwasher without it provoking a weird fork argument with your spouse.

d) The New Year’s ritual of declaring goals, intentions, and a revised version of yourself.

The answer is D.

(Technically, “All of the above” applies to me, although for the record, I recently exited a TJ’s parking lot and only two people flipped me off. I also tumbled headfirst into a grocery cart corral, if you’d like a fun visual. But I digress.)

New Year’s goals are an annual ritual for deciding who we will become next. Broadly speaking, the available options appear to be: Do more of something. Do less of something. Be more yourself. Be less of whoever you’ve been.

I am not by nature a Grand Goals Person. I am a “Could These Goals Be Administered In A Single Daily Capsule?” Person. What I’m trying to say is that I’m in a stage of life where I forget that I set goals at all, never mind following through on the “actionable steps” required to achieve them. January rolls in, and I’m already behind on being aspirational and/or functional.

Predictably, I once again started January on decidedly WTF footing. I, too, want more and better (or less and better), and yes, Random Enthusiastic Person On The Internet, I understand that only I can make that happen.

Most New Year’s resolution advice assumes you have quiet to reflect, sufficient attention to make good (enough) choices, and enough solid ground to stand on while doing all that.

I am not on solid ground. I’m dog paddling through whatever swamp-adjacent mucky fuckery all this is. As such, I’m not doing anything other than scanning my surroundings and wondering how long we all can keep this up before stress-testing floating debris to see if we can comfortably nap on it.

Many of us are operating with severely depleted attention, and we’re absolutely fried due to what feels like oversubscription to the world. When attention thins, decision-making degrades.

Last year, I said I wanted to pay attention to where my attention was going – real genius stuff until I tried and immediately forgot what I was doing. Attention is what allows you to evaluate options well, and without it, every choice feels loud and wrong. I hate loud. I hate wrong. I especially hate loud and wrong.

This unsettled, flayed feeling is apparently the emotional launchpad for Grand Goals Setting.

But, I DID set goals.

Last year.

Just for posterity, here they are:

  • Let my inner weirdo become my outer weirdo.
  • Find more wonderlands: big cushions, warm chairs, fireplaces, and someone patting the seat next to them like, “Come. Sit. Stay a while.”
  • Work the phrase “everything went tits up” into more conversations.
  • Be like my dog: long walks, bursts of speed toward nothing, naps in the sun, and flappies (scientific term) to clear my head.
  • Read more. Write more. Read better. Write better.
  • I used to tell stories here. Real ones. Small ones. Messy, absurd ones. Somewhere along the way, I got stuck in broad magician-off-the-Strip tellings. No more. Back to real ones, with all the tits-up moments.
  • Schedule my damn flu shot.
  • Play.

I am not going to tell you which of these I accomplished.

Ok, yes, I will. I got my flu shot.

So for the sake of rest and attention, I will recycle that list.

This space, whatever it is, remains open for oddness and wonderlands. And for madly gripping joy, especially because it may be a floating debris pile to nap on to take a break from all the mad dog paddling.

And if things go tits up as we tumble into our grocery cart corrals in the Trader Joe’s parking lot – well, maybe we can figure out how to use them as flotation devices.