(All references to “now” or “today” etc are out of date. I am too lazy to rewrite anything so that it accurately reflects this newsletter’s journey through time and space. Thanks and sorry)
‘Tis the season to channel Justin and say I’m thankful:
That all three of my meetings for today were cancelled, within minutes of one another, right after I’d sat down with my coffee at a food hall and opened my laptop and wondered how I was going to participate in these meetings with my weak little cell phone hot spot and a horror for making any kind of noise in public. Also that these meetings were cancelled for different, unrelated reasons, and not because eg I’m about to be fired.
That Grace, our cleaner, is doing her thing today ahead of a visit from my in-laws and she told me “Your perfume! It’s wonderful!” as I walked out the door to give her some space, and I know the perfume brand is running a Black Friday sale right now and I can give her a mini version of it with her holiday bonus when we book her again next month. I am a very poor gift-giver but sometimes the universe hands an easy victory to even her biggest idiots.
That we have plans to see family over the holiday season but neither of us come from people who expect us to travel for Christmas itself, or host or attend a large family gathering, and thus it doesn’t take much courage for me to hold the line on my fascist little rule: From now until the kids have moved away, we, the nuclear family unit, wake up on Christmas morning in our own house, with no guests.
Relatedly: I am grateful that a couple of years ago we hit on the idea of Snack Dinner (aka kid-friendly charcuterie) on Christmas Eve, which is eaten in front of the TV while we enjoy our seasonal screening of Home Alone. I’m grateful that none of us give a shit about what we eat for Christmas dinner, either. In years past I’ve gotten myself wound up about planning at least one nice sit-down evening meal for the four of us during the holiday, but the idea of cooking for my family on Christmas Eve, especially, is bonkers — once the kids go to bed it’s all hands on deck to push things over the finish line, but one adult is supposed to peel off from wrapping/stocking-stuffing/tech troubleshooting to go wash a bunch of dishes? No.
On second thought, by Christmas dinner we are kind of desperate for real food, or at least I am. Retiring to the kitchen by myself to roll some meatballs around in my wet little paws sounds kind of peaceful. Ok fine maybe we will have a nice dinner on Christmas.That I am turning 41 in January, which has done wonders for my mental health so far this season, in that I don’t have to project manage Christmas while also project managing a joint birthday party (a neighbor friend and I made a happy discovery a couple years ago: We were both turning 40 on January 9th 2023, and we both found considerable relief in the concept of sharing a party spotlight). Ryan and I are compelled to throw at least one adults-only party per calendar year, and it’s always fun, and I felt a deep sense of well-being and spiritual harmony the other day when a school parent referred to us as as “the ones who throw frat parties.” Still, party-throwing does not come naturally to either one of us. My idea of hell is making a list of invitees (“who ARE our friends???”) and wringing my hands for the next three weeks as I watch the RSVPs roll in (or not). But without a party every once in a while, how to keep the thinnest threads of our most distant local relationships alive? Run myself ragged scheduling catch-up coffee dates with every friend of a friend who I run into once every year or so? No. Some people you just see at parties, sometimes only at your parties.
In conclusion we will throw another party soon but for now, thank fucking god I’m not wondering if anyone is going to brave another wave of wintertime airborne illness to come celebrate my stupid 40th birthday. I can simply sit on my ass and indulge in memories from last year: All the kids whipping glow-in-the-dark balloons around on the dance floor before being escorted home by grandparents; Gordon coming up to me at several points yelling “I NEED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING” and me blowing him off until he finally insisted I bend over while he said something into my ear again and again but I couldn’t hear him over the music so I kept saying what?? what?? until he finally screamed loud enough “I SEE A TEACHER FROM SCHOOL HERE” (a substitute art teacher was in attendance); me telling new arrivals that they could get two drink tickets from Ryan but first, they would have to give him a nice little compliment; going downstairs to the bar to get myself a beer and being shocked by how many people were there; the way everyone was like “wooOooOOOah” when the teetering towers of pizza boxes arrived but it turned out to be the exact right amount; the karaoke afterparty, which built to the customary finish (group rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody at 2am); returning the next day with my co-host to help clean up and being told by the sweet Boomer couple who run the bar that “your friends were all so nice and everyone seemed to have a great time!” They are all so nice, thanks Bill and Cathy!That I can buy shroom capsules at my neighborhood dispensary and I have friends who will take them with me and bumble around the woods for an afternoon like jovial forest hags; for the way my mind unfurled like a fern frond when I discovered a box turtle peering up at me from the leaves; for the way those few hours of being so deeply stupid and full of awe have reverberated through my daily life ever since, first like a strong thrum and now only faintly, but if I concentrate, I can sometimes tap into a faraway echo of it, a ringing in the distant hills where I saw the truth (that everything is so, so funny and dumb)
That I was able to trade in my old DSLR and lenses and get the newer, smaller mirrorless I’d had my eye on. I am still failing to bring it out as often as I’d like and capture as much as I want to, but I am also grateful for the recent realization I had, in the middle of berating myself for not using my camera more, that I only feel this way because I want to use photography to hold onto my life, which is filled with good people and fun things (this is definitely the shrooms talking)
For meeting new neighbors after they began bringing their 2 year old, J., on a pilgrimage to our house every day in October, so he could visit with his “spookies” (the skulls and bones and gravestones and other flotsam and jetsam we scatter around our yard for Halloween). For seeing my own children play the role of Big Neighbor Kids, arranging the decorations in new configurations in anticipation of his visits, coming with me to Lowe’s to buy more shit on clearance and holding up a fucked-up looking plastic jack-o-lantern, saying thoughtfully, “I bet J. will really like this.”
One evening this fall I was walking with some other school moms around a track while our children were doing soccer practice in the middle of the field, and talk turned to the cooling weather and outerwear and the concept of teddy coats and one mom turned to me and said, oh you have a big fluffy one of those don’t you? In that moment I was grateful to be known so well by my fellow woman (I do have one of those; I fuckin’ love it)
That I have had so many opportunities to be surprised by my own children, Gordon especially, lately. On several of those soccer practice nights, Gordon would tag along to the park with Gus and me, but not to play with the other younger siblings he knows from school. Instead he would make a beeline to the basketball courts, insinuating himself into pickup games with other kids his age and, most amazingly, into the attentions of two men in their early 20s who would let him ride their skateboards. As I walked laps with the moms, I would pass by the basketball courts and see a miracle, every time: A child that I made, a not especially exuberant or extraverted child, hanging out with strangers, no big deal.
For this website that lets me fire off a fax to my (even more useless than the others) representative whenever the dread and guilt and terrible visuals get to be too much. For the thought I had, just now, that it might be nice to quit Instagram again, maybe for the month of January.
The problem, then, is not just one of logistics and lack of time and financial resources (although these are urgent concerns, particularly in a system designed to extract maximum labor for minimal return). It’s a matter of vocation, that exalted notion of work as a totalizing force, not a quotidian trade but a way of life. Art and mothering, in the romantic imagination, are each cast as the kind of labor that consumes wholly, that is worth being consumed by. The British sculptor Reg Butler, in a lecture in 1962, infamously chalked up the “vitality” of female art students to “frustrated maternity” and suggested that once they had children, they would “no longer experience the passionate discontent sufficient to drive them constantly toward the labors of creation in other ways.” One wonders if he envisioned motherhood as an endlessly beatific state, every moment of exhaustion, isolation and boredom redeemed by the memory of having given birth, or as a process of ongoing creation in which the children are the equivalent of artworks, conscientiously shaped by the mother, rather than her being run roughshod over by little strangers.
There’s a lot going on there but the idea that we speak about art and mothering as “totalizing forces” is what stopped me. Ah ha!
Here’s to a new year, and being consumed only as much as we want to, and only by the things we think are worth it.
So interesting
Snack dinner sounds divine. We ended up picking up gyros and tzatziki fries for dinner from the only pace open in town, a true Christmas miracle.