Why Write

There is a poem by Sean Thomas Doughtery that I’ve seen repeatedly shared on Instagram and other online writing circles. It is called “Why Bother” and it simply reads:

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words.

This is not a post discussing the intent or meaning of this poem. Its application on social media is meant to be motivational, a way to encourage fellow writers or yourself to keep at it. Keep writing. Writing is a time-consuming practice and apart from a small minority of professional writers, most people who do it have other jobs that take up the majority of their days. They fit writing into their free time, their family time, their TV time. They turn down social invitations and rearrange their schedules, waking early or staying up late to fit in writing wherever they can. And they do all of this for very little gain. The odds of success by any generally accepted measure of success are very small. The act of writing is often hard and frustrating, and the effort to get published is mostly demoralizing. I once described the submission and querying process to my husband as being like if every time you tried to make a new friend, you instead got punched in the face. You tamp down your vulnerability, gather up your courage and introduce yourself, but instead of the start of a beautiful friendship, you get a face full of fist. And when you recover from that hit, you have to get up and do it again with someone new and repeat the whole horrible process. After enough times of being punched in the face, it would be reasonable to wonder if you’re simply not meant to have friends and you should maybe go ahead and just give up that dream.

So why bother writing? Why take the repeated hits? Because the world needs your words, we are told. Because somewhere out there is a person “with a wound in the exact shape” of those words and they need you to keep going. Someone needs the story that only you can tell.

No they don’t. Or maybe they do, but who cares? What are the odds that your specific words are ever going to reach this hypothetical person in need? There is an endless supply of things to read and most of it will go largely unseen. The author Linda Holmes wrote an essay called “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything,” way back in 2011 and it has stuck with me since I first read it over a decade ago. In it she writes:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore.

As writers, we’re not screaming into a void. We’re screaming into a wall of sound and praying that by some miracle, ours are the words that break through. Meanwhile, that person who is desperately waiting for your words? Either their wound has continued growing such that your words will no longer be enough to fill it, or they’ve found another way to help it scab over. I think you can let yourself off the hook.

I’m not trying to suggest that writing doesn’t matter, I just think the only reason to do it is because it matters to you, and not because it matters in some larger global sense. Do it because you like it and because you want to. Because it challenges you or it fills you up, or it lets you escape yourself for a while. The most common writing advice you see is to write every day. Even if it’s just a little bit, every day should include some amount of writing. Why? Is there anything else you do every single day apart from eat, sleep, and use the bathroom?

I tend to set a writing schedule for myself because I want to dedicate the time and it can be too easy to let other concerns and responsibilities creep in and get in the way of writing. But during that writing time, whether or not I actually write depends entirely on my mood. Sometimes I work on something new, sometimes I fiddle with an old draft, sometimes I am firmly in revision mode, but there are other times when I don’t feel like doing any of that and I sit and read instead. I think about writing. Jot down a couple loose story ideas or a random line that sounds good in my head but is only just fine on paper. I’ve stopped telling myself, you should be writing. I write when I want to. Luckily, I find that most of the time I do still want to write. But over the past year I’ve more frequently hit stretches where I’m just not that into it, and I’ve given myself permission to let it go and wait for when the urge returns at some point in the future, which it always does eventually.

My husband plays the guitar and the piano. He’s played both for most of his life and is particularly skilled at playing by ear. Let him hear a song once and he’ll start picking it up within a couple of minutes of sitting down at the keys. But he also likes to compose little pieces of his own. When he started working from home during the pandemic, he would often grab his guitar throughout the day and fiddle around between meetings, writing short little songs. “What is that?” I would ask him every time I heard him playing, wondering if it was something I should recognize and he would shrug and say it was just something he was making up in the moment. I am not musical so I find this skill baffling. I’m sorry, the music comes to you as you go along, the ways words come when I’m writing a story? I simply cannot comprehend thinking in music.

Many nights, when it is my turn to put our son to bed, I will come downstairs to find my husband seated at the piano with the headphones plugged in so that only he can hear what he is playing (it’s an electric piano if that wasn’t obvious). He looks so at peace in these moments, lost in his own world, playing only for himself. It’s a creative outlet that exists solely for his own pleasure. He’s not planning to record any of these pieces. He doesn’t need to share them with anyone else. Any dreams he may have once held of being a professional musician have long since been abandoned, and not because he tried and failed and had to slink away friendless and bloodied, but because that’s not the purpose music holds in his life. He plays because he likes playing. He does it just for himself. How lovely!

During the first year of the pandemic, I wrote obsessively, in a frenzy. In a way, I had more time than usual because my job couldn’t be done remotely so I had to shut down my business, but in reality I had way less time because my son, who had just turned three when the pandemic started, was home with me all day, every day and only took one short nap in the morning. But I filled every available second with writing. I sat him in front of the TV longer than I otherwise might have just to create a little more time to write. I needed the outlet, a way to release my pent-up anxiety and frustration, and to break free of the monotony of days where we couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. But more than that, I think I was afraid of dying. What if I got covid and died and all that I left behind was a life that didn’t feel like it had amounted to very much? I needed to write and I needed to be published so that some piece of me could exist beyond the walls of my own home. So someone could point to my work and say, ah yes, Claire lived and this is what she had to say.

You need a healthy dose of ego to believe your words are worth reading. And an even healthier dose to keep on believing it after your inbox has filled with agents and editors telling you sorry, but they have to disagree. But more than that, I think you have to learn to see the value and significance of your life that exist independently from what you create for other people’s consumption. Write because writing helps you live, not because someone out there needs your words and will remember them long after you’ve died.

My father has been a writer for most of his life. His writing is primarily academic, but he’s spent some time writing fiction and poetry. He always has a project going. Always something he is working on. We’ve had a lot of conversations over the years about writing and ambition, about thwarted dreams. He tells me about how he’d like to have some collection of writing to leave behind. Something he can pass along to his kids and grandkids. We all want to go on living in some way, even after we’re gone. I’m sure I would find a collection of his writing to be a comfort, something I could return to again and again, and hear his voice in my head as I read it. Losing my dad would leave me with a wound that is shaped in a way that truly only his words could fill. And yet they wouldn’t be enough, not even close, to replace the experience of actually knowing him and they’d be a poor substitute for my own memories. A stranger could come along and read everything my dad has ever written and they still wouldn’t know what he looks like on the occasions when he laughs so hard he can’t breathe, or how free and easily he moves when he dances with my mother, or the way his face scrunches up when he falls asleep while reading, his pencil still suspended in the air, waiting to make a note in the margin of a book.

Whenever I find myself tempted by the idea that if I can amass enough publications, leave enough of myself in print, I’ll be able to live on in some small way after I’m gone, I try to remind myself of how peaceful my husband looks when he strums the guitar, how at ease my son is when he sets marker to paper and the image in his mind spills out onto a page. It is so beautiful to watch someone doing something they love. And it is so wonderful to give yourself over to something you love to do regardless of whether anyone else will ever see it, regardless of whether anyone else needs it, or will be made better by it, made whole. Do it simply because you want to, because it makes your life better. Do it entirely for yourself.

Come Light the Menorah

For Hanukkah, we light two menorahs. One is a minimalist silver piece that looks like a metal picket fence. My husband’s mother gifted it to him when he was in college, I’m pretty sure. I was around and I remember him receiving it, but after a while, the years all begin to jumble together in your mind like a clump of poorly stored necklaces, all the chains twisted together, painstaking to separate. The point is, this menorah is pretty old and covered in now two decades' worth of candle wax because we are terrible about cleaning our menorahs at the end of the holiday and the next year we dig out just enough dried wax to be able to insert new candles. But its age is nothing compared to our other menorah, gifted by my mother-in-law to my son on his first Hanukkah. Or passed down, I should say, as it is nearly forty years old and was used by my husband and his siblings when they were children. It is a Sesame Street menorah, made of nine individual candle holders that you can line up in any order you choose: four Oscar The Grouch; two Big Bird; two Grover; and one Cookie Monster. These Muppets have seen better days. They are chipped and peeling in spots, each one covered in a film of wax that has distorted their smiles into grimaces. Cookie Monster’s head appears sunken in, as though he has been beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. There is something desperate and pleading about Big Bird’s eyes. It is truly one of the ugliest menorahs you’ll encounter and my son loves it.

Last night, for the first night of Hanukkah, he took charge of setting up the Sesame Street menorah. He helped prepare the latkes. He helped set the table. He lit the candles himself for the first time ever. He is getting so big, which is delightful and heartbreaking in equal measure. I am overwhelmed by that bizarre parental feeling of wanting to literally squeeze your child to death because you love them so much. But I get by just kissing the top of his head and breathing him in for as long as he’ll still let me.

He decided that Grover should hold the shamash candle, the helper candle, the candle you use to light all the others. “He seems like he would be the most helpful,” he explained, an opinion based on an extremely limited knowledge of Sesame Street and yet somehow surprisingly accurate for this group—Oscar too grouchy, Cookie too chaotic, Big Bird too childlike despite his towering height.

I do not operate from any specific framework or philosophy when parenting. I learned quickly to let go of any expectations about myself as a parent or my son as a person and to instead leave plenty of space for us each to grow and change, to learn from each other, and get better over time. But if I do have one hope for my son, one goal that guides the way I interact with him, it’s that he will maintain as much of his current sweetness as possible as he grows. Though he is naturally very loving and tender, there was a brief period when he was four years old when he started saying “I will hurt you if you say that to me,” anytime I said something he didn’t like. It was an empty threat—he never actually tried to hurt me, never hit anyone, always burst into tears himself if he even accidentally caused someone else pain—but still, it really bothered me because I couldn’t help but picture him as a grown man, rising to anger whenever someone pointed out his failings, questioned his behavior, or even slightly bruised his ego. The kind of man that unfortunately never seems to be in short supply.

I sat him down, this sweet-faced four-year-old caught halfway between a pudgy toddler and a lanky little boy, and told him that he needed to stop threatening to hurt me when he felt mad. “Right now you are a little boy,” I said, “but someday you’ll be a big boy and after that a grown-up man, and when big boys and grown-up men threaten to hurt people, even if they don’t actually mean it, it can be really scary.” He asked me why and I told him because a lot of men do hurt people, they hurt women and children and even animals. They get angry and instead of finding better ways to deal with their anger, they hurt someone else. “So it can be scary,” I told him, “especially if you’re a woman and a man threatens you because you worry that maybe he really will hurt you.” He then asked me if men had ever made me scared and I told him honestly, yes. Many times. He took it all in. Said he would stop. And he did. We brainstormed some other ways for him to respond when he felt mad at me, and he changed his behavior, not gradually like I expected would happen, but immediately. The threats stopped right away.

I don’t know if this conversation would be considered good or bad parenting, and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m raising one boy and I have another on the way and I believe that young boys have an outsized responsibility to learn how to manage their anger and frustration in ways that don’t place anyone else in even perceived harm, much less real harm. Sorry boys of today, you must carry the burden of making up for the men of the past.

At nearly 7 months along, I am visibly pregnant and frequently get asked if I know if I’m having a boy or a girl. We didn’t find out with our first. After 49 hours of labor, when the baby finally emerged, my husband and I were both so exhausted and dazed that I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we were still waiting on that piece of information. The midwife had to remind my husband that he had requested to be the one to announce and, momentarily stunned, he looked down, said, “oh, a boy,” and then they quickly whisked the baby away because he was blue and not really breathing at the moment. I found out early this time because I was horrifically anxious during my first trimester, as a result of a thyroid imbalance it turned out (I’m fine), and I needed something concrete to hold on to, any little piece of information about this soon-to-be-person that could anchor me to reality. That and we wanted to be able to tell our son if he was curious, which it turned out he was not really, though now he talks frequently about his little brother coming, and damn if it isn’t heartwarmingly adorable. But now when people ask and I tell them I’m having another boy I can see something cross their faces, a moment where they need to recalibrate their immediate reaction, a brief feeling of sadness for me. “Oh well that will be fun,” they’ll say. Or some will actually ask me how I feel about that, wanting to gauge my response to this news before offering their own. I find this the most irritating, to be honest. How should I feel? And what’s it to you? I get the sense that mothers are supposed to want girls and fathers are supposed to want boys and that getting one of each is like winning the two-child household jackpot. In truth, I don’t really care. If I were having a girl that would be fine. But I’m having a boy and that’s fine too. Either way, I am raising someone who has to learn how to be a person in all the beautiful, ugly, painful, joyous, and complex ways in which we exist in the world. Either way, I will come to the end of another year and I will think, I did some things well and I did some things poorly, and a new year will begin with its own successes and failures awaiting me.

When I came downstairs after putting my son to bed last night, the Hanukkah candles had already burned out, which was too bad because I like to witness the moment when the flame fades to a thin wisp of smoke. Tonight we will only light the silver menorah because we don’t have enough candles to light both on all eight nights, so we are saving up what we do have to use both menorahs on the last night when all candles are lit and the light is the brightest. The last night of Hanukkah is on Christmas this year. We will spend the morning celebrating Christmas with my family and then we will return home to watch movies and order Chinese food. When it gets dark, we will FaceTime my in-laws and light the menorah and my son will open one last gift from his grandparents, and then all that is left of the holidays will be the candles burning brightly on our windowsill. As the flames slowly fade, the wax will drip down over the faces of Oscar and Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Grover leaving them worse for wear but still going strong after another year of use. In the morning, I will think maybe I should try to clean them off before I box them up and put the menorahs back on the shelf, but I know that in the end, I won’t bother. We’ll pull them down next year, the four of us this time, and they’ll still be covered in this year’s wax, this year’s mess and we’ll once again dig out just enough to get the new candles to fit. Just enough to start again.

---

To accompany this post, here is an itty bitty unpublished poem I wrote a couple years ago.

Dear Santa

Over the weekend, my son and I spent some time reading his favorite book: the toy catalog that recently came in the mail. ’Tis the season of want.

The first day it arrived he went through and circled in blue all the items that interest him. He drew a big red X through anything he thought looked boring or was meant for younger kids. He has since gone back and circled some of those items in red and informed me that I should buy those too so that he can share them with his younger cousins. A small measure of generosity among the excess.

“Will you get me these things?” he asks and when I tell him to make a list, he holds up the catalog and looks at me like I’m being intentionally dense. This is his list, plus everything he’s mentioned over the past year which ranges from “a real-life boomerang,” “one of those, like, remote control truck things that shoot actual lasers” (is this a thing? how did he come up with this?), to “little animals made out of glass.”

This is mostly my fault. In the dilemma of raising a half-Jewish child who still gets to celebrate Christmas, we decided early on that Christmas morning would always take place at either my parents’ or my sibling’s house instead of celebrating it directly at home, and that we wouldn’t bother with the whole notion of Santa. Not wanting to make our son responsible for ruining Christmas magic for any other kids, though, we explained that his dad and I (and other family members) handle all the gift giving so Santa has more time to make it to all the other houses he needs to visit on Christmas Eve. Because we get the benefit of two holidays, I explained, we are trying lessen the jolly man’s load at this busy time of year. Aren’t we so thoughtful?

But now, instead of being able to pass off any gifting disappointments onto some mythical bearded man from the North Pole, we have to shoulder the full blame if we fail to recognize that “a real-life boomerang” was an actual request and not simply a fleeting desire after reading a book about Australia.

The main thing my son wants right now, though, is as much of my attention as I can give. I am due to have our second baby in the spring, and my son is old enough and wise enough to know that this new family member will steal a lot of my time. My son is in school all day for the first time in his life and laments that he has fewer opportunities for play than he used to. So when he asks me sit down and read the toy catalog with him, to slowly go through and name each item and read its description, I do, even though what I want most right now is as much time to myself as possible. Like him, I too am acutely aware of how much attention a new baby will require of me. My husband and I spend most of our time talking about how we can best manage it all—newborn exhaustion, quality time with our oldest, maintaining regular, dedicated opportunities for me to slip away and write.

I know how to write in the smallest pockets of free time. Everything I have created and published since I started writing in a more determined, dedicated way in 2019, has been accomplished while raising a young child. And while I have the benefit of working part-time, I do have a separate job that has nothing to do with writing that takes up time and energy. In the past three years, I have published nearly 100 pieces of writing in print and online journals, created and published multiple short collections, and edited and designed four issues of a literary magazine. This is no small feat and I’m really fucking proud of myself. As a lifelong depressive, I have a tendency to compare myself unfavorably to everyone else, to not give myself credit when credit is due. But I’m trying to be better about that, and credit is due here. I decided I wanted to write and damnit, I made it happen. Good for me!

When I start to worry that I will lose all ability to write when the new baby comes, I try to remind myself that there is more time available than is often immediately obvious, and that writing rarely happens in one big go, but instead is built up in bits and pieces, a story growing over days, weeks, months, years. A line of poetry written one moment and then set aside will still be there when I’m ready to come back to it.

As a sort of advent calendar for the season, on my social media sites I am sharing a few lines each day from pieces that are in my notes app or drafts folder. Putting this together has made me realize I did way more writing this year than I thought, and that I have a lot of pieces, at various stages of development, to draw from next year when time is tighter and my energy is diminshed. Right now I’m looking at the year ahead like it is one giant catalog of time and desperately circling every moment in blue. I want this one and this one and this one and this one. Can’t I have them all? But I know that I will be happy with even a small smattering of writing time and that I will make the most of it.

In his effort to soak up as much of my attention as possible, my son has started asking me to linger at bedtime on the nights when it is my turn to tuck him in. “Chat with me,” he says, and I sit on the floor beside his bed and rub his back while we talk about the day, or what the week ahead will bring, and I try to answer whatever odd questions or concerns pop into his mind. Last night he asked me “will you die soon?” and I reassured him that I still have a long time to live.

I hope it is true. I hope I have more time ahead of me than I could possibly know what to do with. A long life full of stories to share.

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To accompany this post, here is a flash essay that was originally published in the holiday edition of Near Window in December, 2020.

Wishlist

He wants a blue anti-slip mat like the one in his grandma’s bathtub. He wants a drill truck with a drill that really spins. Or a forklift truck where the fork actually lifts. Or a jackhammer truck that goes zzt zzt zzt zzt zzt zzt. He makes the sound for another fifteen minutes. He wants everything in the little Save The Animals catalog the World Wildlife Fund sent in the mail. A pangolin. A harpy eagle. A blue-footed booby. A green sea turtle. Something that looks like a buffalo, but isn’t. A set of three monarch butterflies. A pair of scarlet macaws. A three-toed sloth. He wants to know why all the animals are dying. He wants a drum set. No, a trumpet. No, he wants one of those things you can shout into and everyone will hear you. A bullhorn? Yeah, he wants a bullhorn. He wants to scream at the top of his lungs and he wants to say shut up and he wants to know why I won’t let him feel his feelings. You’re right, I tell him, go nuts, and I pour another cup of coffee. He wants a new set of markers and a big pad of paper. He wants those paints that are like crayons. You know the ones he used to have, but he used them all up? He wants more of those because he wants to paint me a picture. Would you like that, he asks me. I would like that very much. He wants to know what else I want. 

I want to live in a hotel for a week and pick my pores in the harsh light of the bathroom. I want to scoop all the fat from my belly, dump it in a trash bag and set it out on the curb for Tuesday pickup. I want to get so drunk I fall down and crack a tooth. I want to hold my breath beneath the surface of the bathwater and just when I think I can’t possibly hold it any longer, I want to hold it for one minute more. I want to scream at the top of my lungs, and say shut up, and feel my own feelings. I want to set this house on fire. Stand out bare-legged on a freezing cold night, cackling as I watch it all burn. 

Maybe I too would like a drill truck, he suggests, and I kiss the top of his head. That sounds great, I tell him, but I have everything I need.

Muddling Through

This is a love letter to people who leave their blinds open at night.

I like to take walks through my neighborhood and peek inside your homes. Especially this time of year, as Christmas trees begin to pop up in windows and stair banisters are strung with twinkle lights. I am not trying to spy on you—mostly I am interested in what color your walls are painted, what kind of kitchen cabinets you have, I am always on the lookout for a better living room lamp, do you have a nice one that might serve as inspiration?—but every now and then I catch a glimpse. You on the couch, watching television. You at the counter, chopping onions. Your family sitting down to dinner, so much later than mine does. Was it a busy day at work? I tell myself stories about your lives, imagine you as characters in a piece of writing I’ve been slowly crafting in my mind. The woman seated in the round back chair by the window, book in one hand, a glass of wine on the end table beside her: she is a mother, small children finally in bed. Her shoulders ache, her neck is stiff, but this is bliss, seated here alone in the dim light of a reading lamp. I’ve got a glass of wine and a book and nobody needs me! she will text a friend and they will go back and forth for forty minutes, sharing stories of their days as she scrolls through Twitter and Instagram until she starts to grow tired and decides, wine finished, book unread, to head up to bed.

It is a strange time of year, this space between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Equal parts festive and melancholy. The daylight diminished but everything aglow in holiday lights. I like the pinpricks of color reflected in windowpanes and wet sidewalks. I like a cold night where I need a scarf and a hat. Where I pass other people on the sidewalk and we smile, tight-lipped and rosy-cheeked, and I can feel the weight of the past year in the hunch of their shoulders.

My family finally caught Covid, after all this time, and I can still feel it in the way my breath catches if I inhale too deeply, which is something I do often this time of year. Step outside in the morning and take in a full breath of the frosted air. Walk in the evening and let the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves fill my nose. I am still fatigued, more easily worn down by small tasks. I cannot walk as far as I would like to, and thus have fewer windows to peer into. I am hopeful that this will improve in the coming weeks—as more decorations appear, so will my stamina.

I used to live in a neighborhood that was next to a neighborhood full of beautiful old homes. What is nice about Baltimore and its abundance of rowhouses is that with a single quick glance you can see the majority of someone’s home; the downstairs floor is usually one continuous long space. But there was one rowhouse in the fancy rowhouse neighborhood that had a grand staircase in the front room and it blocked the view of the rest of the house. The owners would drape white lights and garland along the banisters and red bows hung in even increments down the full length of the stairs. In this high-ceilinged foyer, they would place a towering Christmas tree. I would pass by this house every night when out walking the dog, stand for a long moment and look through the window at this gorgeous setup and imagine the lives of the people inside. People I never saw.

I think about that house often—the scene inside like something from an old movie, classic and beautiful, the kind of Christmas Bing Crosby would sing about. I prefer our current neighborhood, though, with its kitschy displays—inflatable Santas and reindeer, oversized plastic nativity scenes that cover an entire porch, so many colorful lights strung from a single home that it’s almost an assault on your eyes. Best of all, I like the handmade children’s decorations that get taped to windows and doors. Wonky, asymmetrical snowflakes and construction paper Christmas trees.

My son has a set of markers that are made for drawing on windows. At Halloween he drew a spooky scene of ghosts and monsters. For Thanksgiving, he did a series of turkeys of increasing size—Tiny Baby Turkey all the way up to Jumbo Magnus. Yesterday he erased the turkeys to make room for his holiday display, though he is still waiting to decide what exactly he wants to draw. Soon we will hang up the advent calendar my sister and her husband made for us—a tradition that is big in Germany where my brother-in-law is from. Soon we will pull out the menorah. We will get a Christmas tree and my parents will come to town to help my son decorate it. We will celebrate many little bits of the holiday season. We will try to lean into cheer and warmth and the cozy joy of traditions, while also trying not to overdo it as we teach our son about gratitude and restraint.

The weeks will march on and the year will come to an end and my husband and I will try and fail to make it to midnight. It was a pretty good year, we will say. Good enough. Better than the last. Maybe next year will be even better. Easier. It is the lie we all tell ourselves to keep going, to push through the long, gray winter. To hold out for spring. Though I admit, I have grown to like winter. To anticipate it and welcome it with something akin to pleasure. It asks so little of us really: Slow down. Seek warmth. Simply survive.

I walk and I take in whatever the evening has to offer, whatever the season has to give. I like coming back inside with my nose and cheeks stinging, the smell of cold clinging to my hair. My home is warm and dimly lit. Upstairs my son is sleeping. I sit on the couch with a book and a drink. Nobody needs me, which feels wonderful, but lonely—a perfect encapsulation of this time of year—so I pick up my phone and text a friend.

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As an accompaniment to this post, I offer up this seasonally-appropriate poem, previously published in Second Chance Lit.

My Father and I Take the Same Antidepressant

Christmas is canceled.

He’s finally making good on that threat—

lifting the tree by the trunk with one hand and

splashing water out of the stand 

onto the floor. Later my mother will mop it up 

with towels and a knowing shake of her head. 

The limbs are still strung with rainbow lights and covered in 

ornaments: reflective red orbs, popsicle stick reindeer, handmade

paper cutouts framing our smiling school portraits, a bizarre wooden clown that

years from now we’ll finally throw out 

having collectively decided it looks vaguely racist. 

He flings open the door and heaves the tree into the backyard. 

Ornaments smash and scatter across the grass. 

Christmas is canceled, he tells us,

quietly closing the door. 

Years from then I tell him

“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is unequivocally

the best Christmas song ever. 

Oh definitely, he agrees. But only 

the old version. The one about muddling through somehow. 

Yes, obviously. Of course

the muddling through. 

Yes, obviously

we’ve always had that in common.

Fear Itself

One of my childhood homes had a spiral staircase that led from the central part of the house up to a loft that served as my parent's bedroom. When we first moved in, the stairs were lined with beige carpet and the railing was painted an ugly, poop brown. My mother stripped the fabric from the steps and painted the metal staircase a melange of bright colors. It felt fun and welcoming during the day, but at night the spiral pattern loomed out of the shadows, twisted and unnatural in a way my young mind found unsettling. I was afraid of this staircase. I often imagined one of us slipping on the top step and falling head over feet down to the bottom, our bodies breaking and rearranging like a character in Death Becomes Her. Or I imagined our house on fire and my parents trapped in the loft, my siblings and I escaping into the yard and huddling together as the house burned and our parents’ screams echoed through the night. 

I didn’t sleep well as a child, too often plagued by vivid, terrifying dreams. I remember one night, sick with a fever, I awoke to the sound of a train. But it wasn’t a far-off signal, traveling through the dark from across town. No, this train was close, too close, and moving closer by the second. I stepped out of my bedroom as the train came barreling through the loft and down the spiral staircase, metal clanging against metal at a deafening pitch. I remember screaming, and I remember my mother racing down the stairs, the touch of her cool hand pressed against my fiery forehead. I remember her tucking me back into bed. The train was not the most frightening thing I saw come down those spiral stairs, though. That honor belongs to poltergeists. 

My parents love movies. They never shied away from showing us their favorites at an early age that would likely horrify most parents these days. The only movie I recall them ever really hesitating to show us was Night of the Living Dead. It was Halloween season and we wanted to watch something spooky. They went back and forth with each other, debating whether it was too scary for three young kids. Ultimately they decided to go ahead, with the caveat that this was one of the scariest movies they had ever seen, and we were free to stop watching at any time if it felt like too much for us to handle. 

We didn’t make it even halfway through the movie before we asked to turn it off because all three of us found it comically bad. 

Night of the Living Dead was one of the least scary things I have ever seen. I almost felt bad for my parents. This is what passed for horror when they were growing up? We switched and watched Poltergeist instead, an early 80s movie where a ghostly presence terrorizes a family after they move into a new house, and a little girl gets sucked into a tv. There’s even a bit in the movie where a creepy clown doll comes to life and attacks a little boy, but that’s not especially scary because if you own a clown doll you kind of just have to expect that eventually it’s going to come to life and try to kill you. Sorry to blame the victim.

What I found especially chilling about Poltergeist is a scene where a wispy, ghostly form slowly descends a staircase. It has been decades since I have seen this movie and yet that image remains so clear in my mind, along with the one that tormented me for months after: that same ghostly form slowly descending our spiral staircase. I couldn’t look at our stairs without seeing a hazy white apparition drifting down from step to step, coming for me. 

The other day I was trying to find a Halloween movie that would be appropriate for my five-year-old (but that wouldn’t make me want to drive a nail through my eye to escape from boredom) when I got to thinking about what it will be like to someday show him the movies that his dad and I found genuinely frightening when we were growing up. Will Poltergeist be his Night of the Living Dead—all camp and terrible special effects? Or better yet, will The Ring? The Ring scared my husband so badly that he has refused to watch horror movies since. Though to be fair, he wasn’t a big fan of horror movies to begin with and he especially dislikes ones where creepy, demonic children terrorize people. 

We saw The Ring together on Homecoming night instead of going to the school dance. I can’t remember if we both went home and changed first, or if we went straight to the theater from dinner, him still in his suit and me in my sparkly silver dress. It was a late showing and by the time he dropped me back at my house after the movie, all of the lights were out and everyone else was asleep. I made him walk me to my door, through our dark garage where the light had burned out a long time ago and no one had ever bothered to replace it. Then he drove home alone to his own quiet, darkened house where his mind stirred and stirred with frightening images as he made his way to his attic bedroom and tried to get some sleep. 

I try to imagine my son watching this movie someday and what his reaction might be. It’s a movie about watching a videotape (a thing that doesn’t exist anymore) and then answering a phone call (a thing that never happens anymore) to receive a cryptic warning about your impending death. Just writing that out sounds so stupid I can already picture my kid rolling his eyes and asking incredulously, “you thought this was scary?” 

Like Poltergeist, I haven’t seen The Ring in decades. I have no idea if it holds up even a little bit. In all likelihood, if I watched it today I would laugh at how silly it is and tease my husband mercilessly for being as frightened as he was all those years ago. After all, my parents were forced to admit that by the standards of early-90s film and television, a black-and-white movie about literally the slowest zombies you’ve ever seen who look like Wall Street guys stumbling back to the office after a three-martini lunch was not especially scary. Time comes for all of us and makes us look like fools. 

The house with the spiral staircase is gone now. One year the Guadalupe river flooded its banks and surged through my old neighborhood. The house next door to ours was knocked off its foundation by the rushing water and smashed into ours, destroying it. My family had already moved away by that point, but I went back a couple of years later to visit a friend and we drove down to the spot where my house had once been. No one had rebuilt on the land yet, so there was nothing there except an empty yard reaching all the way down to the water. I stood in the overgrown grass and let the house rise up around me, conjuring each room in my mind. I pictured myself as a little girl, drifting through the house like a ghost, haunting the now empty space I had once called home. 

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My poem “Flood,” originally published in Canary, a literary journal of the environmental crisis, is about this same home and even makes mention of the spiral staircase. If you’d like, you can read it here.

Sparks

After nearly a week of nonstop rain, we’ve been gifted the most perfect fall weather—sunny and cool, with a brilliant blue sky every single day. It’s been wonderful for the long walks I like to take. The other day I took the dog and walked along the wooded trail near our house. The main trail runs the length of a stream that connects into the Jones Falls and eventually ends up in the Baltimore harbor. Smaller, more rustic paths wind their way from the main trail down to the water and a thick curtain of tall trees and vines surround the stream on both sides. It’s very peaceful. I find it to be a little too buggy for my liking during the heat and humidity of summer, but this time of year, as the leaves begin to change and the breeze rustles through the trees amplifying the sensation of being near running water, it is one of my favorite places to be.

On this recent walk, I happened to look up at the moment a strong breeze blew loose a cluster of small yellow leaves from high atop an especially tall tree. The wind caught the leaves and sent them shooting upward like sparks flashing against the sky. They fell slowly then, swirling down and landing lightly along the path in front of me. I stood still and watched them fall, trying to take in everything about this moment that felt refreshing and uplifting.

I am not a person who can really meditate (I have tried and failed many times), but I am someone who can stop and notice a moment of beauty, catalog it in my mind and return to it briefly in times of stress as a way to calm myself, which is what I do with the image of these leaves when all the lights in our house won’t stop flickering.

I have an extreme fear of fire born from an early childhood experience that left my mother’s hand badly burned. (If you’d like, you can read more about that here.) Flickering lights for me signal fire—a fire that is soon to happen, or perhaps one that is already underway, lurking unseen behind the walls, sparked by a problem in the wiring. The lights flicker and in my mind the fire is already moving from room to room, taking over the whole house. I imagine that by the time we actually see smoke, it will be too late. The house will be overrun with flames and all we’ll be able to do is escape onto the street where we’ll stand barefoot in our pajamas and watch our home burn to the ground.

Our house was built in the 1840s from stone that is two feet thick. Sure the insides could be reduced to cinders, but this is not a house that can easily be turned into a pile of ash. When we first bought the place, all the utilities were kept in a small rundown shed attached to the side of the house. The hot water heater, the boiler, and the circuit breaker could only be accessed by going outside. At the time of our purchase the home inspector informed us that he couldn’t tell exactly how old the boiler was, but he did know that the company who made it had gone out of business in 1961. It needed a maintenance check every year. It wasn’t long for this world and during one routine maintenance visit when I asked what could happen to it apart from it simply breaking down and no longer being capable of heating our home, the plumber shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It could maybe explode.” This was my literal nightmare. I didn’t have a decent winter’s night sleep for years after I heard that.

We finally reached a point where we were able to afford a renovation on the house, the primary purpose of which was to upgrade these old systems and incorporate the utility space into the interior of the house. That we managed to get two additional rooms added to the footprint of our small home was just a bonus (and an absolute life saver when the work was completed in March of 2020, just as we found ourselves stuck in our house for months on end). The electrical work that was done with the renovation is only two and a half years old. It shouldn’t be flickering. The connections shouldn’t be loose. The wires shouldn’t be faulty. I shouldn’t be spending my evenings trying to convince my anxious mind that our house isn’t about to suddenly light up like a struck match and make us victims of a gruesome, fiery death. But alas, this is where my mind goes, so I close my eyes and picture the leaves.

We are trying to get to the bottom of the problem. The electric company has been out several times now, but nothing they’ve done has fixed the issue. My husband and I joke that perhaps it’s a ghost. It is almost Halloween after all. I would honestly prefer a ghost. Ghosts are not nearly as terrifying to me as fire.

I have done my best not to pass my anxious tendencies on to my child, which has not been an especially easy task given that his entire existence has taken place during either a Trump presidency, a global pandemic, or both at the same horrible time. I do not have a particular parenting philosophy. Most of the time, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to raising a kid. I just try to follow my instincts and wing it, and frequently remind myself that despite what our culture likes to tell us, as his mother, I am not solely responsible for determining how he turns out. But one thing I do believe when it comes to interacting with children, especially in this current moment when so much about our lives and our futures feels uncertain and scary, is that you have a responsibility to balance teaching kids how to confront and manage the hard stuff with sharing what is good and beautiful about the world. There is a lot of hard stuff, but there is also so much that is soft and comforting. There is a lot of sorrow, but there is also so much joy. Among the seemingly endless list of things to fear, there are reasons for hope and optimism.

My son likes to let us know when he catches the lights flickering. We have made it a group project. “There go the lights!” we shout to each other across the house. We have turned it into a kind of game, one that I am desperate to see come to an end, but that my son may be disappointed to have to stop. The flickering grows worse in the evenings, as the sunlight fades and the air cools down even further. Or perhaps it is simply more noticeable because we have more lights on and we are all home at once, keeping an eye out, catching every small flicker as we sit together eating dinner or go about our nightly routine.

Some evenings, we’ll all head out together to take the dog for a walk. We create little treasure hunts where we have to look for different types of Halloween decorations, or I challenge my son to see which one of us can find the most colorful leaves. Each week, more and more trees are changing colors. Red, orange, and yellow are popping up everywhere we walk. One evening we pass a tree where only the tips of the leaves have begun to turn. Small, pointed green leaves like spears tipped in bright red. I stop and draw my son’s attention to them. I show him how the color is starting to creep its way down the length of the leaf. It is beautiful, the way we lean our heads close together to get a better look. The way the fading sunlight slants through the tree branches and dots the road beneath our feet. The way something so small can settle your racing heart and erase the worries and tensions of the day.

In moments like this, the love I have for my life is so strong it feels like it might consume me, like a fire building up beneath my ribs, unseen and unstoppable.

I surrender myself to its warmth.   

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I always try to write a little something after my walks as sort of ritual or practice. After the walk mentioned at the beginning of this post, I quickly jotted down this poem that I will likely never revisit.

A Slow Return

I am going slow. Intentionally for the most part, but a bit out of necessity. These days I measure success by how much of my time qualifies as rest or leisure. I am doing my best to ignore the voice in my head that tells me to get back to work, to stop being so lazy. I no longer believe in laziness. At least not as a cause for admonishment.

It is rainy and cool and I am sitting in my writing shed for the first time in months. Once a cinder block room with a concrete floor and a single fluorescent light dangling from the ceiling, we converted the space into an office earlier this year. Drywall and a wood floor, recessed lighting, and a small window that looks out onto the yard so I can watch the birds come and go from the feeder as I work, have transformed the space. There is no heating, but the room is small enough that running a space heater for just a few minutes leaves me feeling cozy and comforted. Which is how I feel right now, drinking my coffee and enjoying a little piece of the last of the cider donuts.

At some point this year, I got away from the quiet task of closely observing my surroundings, and in doing so, my writing fell away too. So I am slowing down and getting back to watching the world around me, taking it all in without the expectation or obligation to regurgitate it in some fashion, to reflect on it and turn it into writing. I am trying to observe just for the sake of observation, for the interest and pleasure it brings. And if doing so inspires me to write, all the better, but if not, that is fine as well. I have decided not to push it, but to allow the words to come in their own way and time.

There is so much emphasis on producing in writing. Tracking submission stats and word counts. Racking up consecutive days of sitting down to work. I mention this without judgment—I do it too; it is part of the publication process. But when it starts to feel like too much, there is something quite wonderful in taking a step back from objective measurements of your writing efforts and letting it all go for a while. Who cares if I don’t publish anything more this year? Who cares if all I have to show for the time I spend in this converted shed is a list of disjointed thoughts and lines, stray observations that are eventually lost to time, never coalescing into a complete and finalized version of an initial idea? That’s okay because my focus for now is to return to a place of enjoyment in writing, free from expectation, untethered to any particular sense of achievement. Like I said, I am measuring success in different ways right now.

Four times in the brief period of writing these paragraphs, I’ve gotten up from my seat to go outside and shoo a squirrel away from the bird feeder. It keeps returning. The birds flit and flutter around the squirrel, trying to run it off but to no avail. The squirrel is unperturbed. This is a daily practice in the fall, opening the door and shouting, “Hey, get out of here!” at the squirrels who perch their fat bottoms in the center of the feeder bowl, or who dangle upside down from the suet holder, paying no mind to the rising chorus of chirping and chittering from the birds around them.

I return to my desk not sure what I was planning to say next, the thought having raced from my mind like the squirrel racing away from the sound of my voice. Perhaps it will return again in a few minutes, just as the squirrel does, or maybe it is gone for good this time and will be replaced with other ideas and observations, like so many birds swamping the feeder in the squirrel’s absence. They are hungry and hurried. They jockey for room around the bowl. Sometimes they push each other away, pecking at each other’s sides until one falls back away from the feeder. Other times they make space, swap turns so everyone gets a chance to eat some seeds. I love to watch them and realize now that I missed them over the summer—their noisy chatter, their busy wings.

In the weeks and months ahead, more and different varieties of birds will return to the feeder. Nuthatches and tufted titmice, house finches, and the occasional gold finch. Every time there is a bird I don’t recognize, I look it up in our bird book. Yesterday we spotted our first cardinal at the feeder. “Well, hello, old friend,” I said as it hopped along the ground picking up fallen seeds. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

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If you’d like to read another piece about birds that isn’t actually about birds at all, check out “Call Notes,” originally published in (mac)ro(mic). (CW: cancer)

How Am I Not Myself?*

I used to be a runner.

Before I was a runner I was definitely not a runner. I hated running. I made myself do it out of an effort to be healthy (by which I actually meant to be thin) but it was always an obligation instead of a desire. Then in my twenties something changed and running turned into an activity I loved. I felt strong and accomplished. Running cleared my head, my footfalls drowning out the perpetual whirring of anxiety and self doubt churning through my mind. Over several years I kept adding on mileage: 10k, 10 miler, half marathons and then finally a full marathon. Eventually when I got pregnant my mileage dropped dramatically. Then I had the baby and it dropped even more. I developed a chronic pain condition a couple years after my son was born and I stopped running entirely. If I were to set out for a run today, I doubt I could make it even a couple of miles before having to call it quits.

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I’ve read a lot about how women lose themselves in motherhood. This is partly inevitable. Parenting an infant in particular is all-consuming. You can’t help but work your way through the dark tunnel of that first year and come out the other side irrevocably changed. It is true that in time, pieces of who you were return, but you can never go fully back to being the same person you were before you became a parent. I once described it like this:

my mind a blank slate
as though I’ve birthed a new me
along with the baby

That sense of loss is obviously not helped by how little maternal support there is in this country. Yes, parenting requires so much time and effort, but the lack of affordable childcare and paid parental leave, plus an imbalance in parenting expectations and commitment in many partnerships exponentially expand the difficulty of raising kids.

But I wonder if some of that feeling doesn’t stem from a problem with the basic way we define who we are. From an early age, we are encouraged to conceptualize ourselves by the things we do. What are your hobbies and interests? What are you good at? What do you want to be when you grow up? When our interests shift away from the activities that had previously defined us, or we have to take a break from them to make room for other changes in our lives, it often feels like we have given up a part of ourselves instead of, more accurately, simply changed the way in which we spend our time.

Even within the writing world we are asked to define ourselves in narrow terms. Are you a poet or a fiction writer? Genre or literary? Though you may cross over into a variety of mediums, there’s still the question of what best defines your style. In a world that increasingly demands we develop our own personal brands, what type of writing would you build your brand around? What kind of writer are you?

I didn’t really start writing until after I became a mother. In some ways, I suppose I was always a writer. From a young age, writing was a hobby of mine. An interest. It was a thing I was good at. But it didn’t become a pursuit until I became a parent. The limitations that parenthood put on my time and energy brought with them a clarity: If I had such little time for myself, I wanted to spend it in the most fulfilling ways possible. For me, that meant writing. At first I fit it in wherever I could manage, like during my son’s nap time or later at night, after he had gone to sleep. But as my sense of myself as a writer became more defined, the space I created in my life for writing expanded. I am lucky to have family and a partner who support this effort, but the most important part of forming a writing habit was choosing to write instead of doing something else, and then allowing other parts of myself to fall away. I suppose you could say I lost those parts, but I prefer to think I let them go so a different version of me could grow and flourish.

I don’t know if I will ever start running again. Sometimes when I am out walking the dog, someone will run past me and I’ll feel a pang of jealousy. We are less than a month away from the Baltimore Running Festival, and though I know this will sound ridiculous to anyone who is not a runner, a part of me is sad that I won’t wake up this Saturday morning and set out on an 18-mile training run. I was a runner and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore. I used to be one person and then I became someone else. I am nearing forty and I don’t expect the next decade to look exactly like this one. In all likelihood, my life as a runner will be confined to my twenties. When I was twenty-eight, at the height of my running fitness, I went to bed early and gave up my Saturdays to long runs instead of bottomless blood mary brunches. I made a choice and in time I turned into someone who would have been unrecognizable to my younger run-despising self. But I didn’t look back at the ways I had changed over the course of that decade and felt as if I had lost something. At twenty, we don’t lament that we’re no longer the people we were when we were ten. So why now, at the tail end of my thirties, does it feel like everyone wants to classify change as loss? It is true that I am not the same person I was before I became a mother. Hell, I am not the same person I was before the pandemic started. We can’t help but be changed by major life events. We can’t help but lose ourselves a little over time, shedding parts of ourselves as if we are snakes who have outgrown our skins.

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My son’s favorite toys are what he calls cars with eyes and mouths. They are basically hot wheels from the Pixar Cars universe and they make them for even the most minor side characters. Having inherited his father’s collector gene, my son wants them all. We buy them in lots off of eBay and dole them out at holidays and his birthday. We gave him half a dozen this spring when he broke his arm and had to have surgery. He loves these toys and can tell you the names of every single character he has, even though some have less than a minute of screen time in only one of the three Cars movies. For a long time, he would “play” with them by carefully lining them all up on a shelf. Then the next day, he would slowly and gently line them up again in another part of the room.

“Don’t you want to drive them?” I asked. “Maybe make them race?” But he was too afraid he would break them. If they moved too fast their wheels might fall off. If he played too hard they could get scratched or dented. I sat down next to him on the floor and explained that though it sounded impossible, one day cars with eyes and mouths wouldn’t be his favorite toys anymore. He would grow up and something new would become his favorite. I told him he should play with them as fully as he could now while he still loved them more than anything in the world, and though he didn’t believe me that a day would ever come where he didn’t love these cars, I think it gave him permission to let go of his worries and really enjoy his toys. He started driving them all over the house. He now sends them smashing into each other and soaring off ledges. He is no longer afraid to let them get a little banged up, but he’s also not at all convinced that his love will fade. And why should he be. It is impossible to look ahead and see how many versions of the self can exist inside a single person.

“I am always going to love cars with eyes and mouths,” he told me one day.

“Oh yeah?” I replied.

“Yeah,” he said and shrugged, his palms turned up toward the ceiling. “That’s just who I am.”

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You can read more about my shift away from running and the development of my chronic pain condition in “The Road to Here,” originally published in Red Fez.

* “How am I not myself?”

With Love

My son is on day five of a bad cold and we are sitting on the couch watching a nature documentary he has seen a dozen times. I am behind on so many things: I need to finish sending decision emails for submissions to the latest issue of the children’s literature magazine I operate; my massage therapy license is due for renewal in a month and I still have not taken any of the required continuing education courses; next spring’s tax season is going to be horrible because I am horrifically behind in bookkeeping for my business; I owe everyone in existence an email, or a follow-up text, or a check-in because it has been so long and I am terrible at staying connected to the people I love. Oh and also, I’ve pretty much completely stopped writing. The well is dry. I should probably get on that.

But when your sick child asks you to keep him company while he rests on the couch and watches a nature documentary, you drop what you are doing and join him, which is why I am yet again watching a pair of bald eagles fight over a scrap of carrion instead of making any headway on my ever-growing to-do list. I have not seen this particular documentary as many times as my son, but I have watched it with him often enough to know all the animals it features. There are Siberian tigers and African elephants. There’s some strange cat-like thing called a fossa that my son calls a fusser. There’s a great section with hornbills that always reminds me how much I like hornbills. They are so funky looking. It’s wonderful. There is a part of the documentary that is about forest fires, and another about how wildlife is slowly returning to Chernobyl. It really is a fascinating hour of television, especially the first time you see it before forced repeated viewings have turned its more educational elements into tedious lessons.

I can feel my son watching me watch it. “Here comes the tiger,” he says, glancing over to be sure I am paying attention. He signals when it is time for the elephants. “Remember this about the forest fire?” On and on, his eyes darting back to me throughout the show, hoping to confirm that I am not missing a single second of its many delights. It’s endearing really: no matter how young we are, we all relish sharing the things we love and desperately want other people to love them too.

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I find it hard to talk to non-writers about writing because the conversation inevitably turns to whether or not I’m working on something new. If I haven’t been writing, it is hard to explain that no, I haven’t been working on anything, but I’ve been thinking a lot about things I could or should be working on. There are always ideas floating around in my mind, but they are not anything I can describe in a coherent or interesting way. They are not fully formed or cohesive enough that I could offer them up as some form of action, some evidence that though I am not actually writing, I remain writing-adjacent. If I have been writing, it isn’t any easier to describe my work-in-progress without feeling like it comes off as silly and slight, as if I have no better handle on its plot and themes than I do when trying to describe a book I read years ago and only vaguely remember. This is of course, entirely a me problem. Friends who ask me about my writing because they know that’s how I spend much of my time and they want to demonstrate an interest in my life and passions are lovely people and I appreciate them tremendously.

Perhaps surprisingly, I do not find it any easier to talk to other writers about writing. I always end up comparing myself to them in ways where I fall short. Take for instance this recent interaction with the dad of one of my son’s Kindergarten classmates when we found out we both write:

Him: What do you write?

Me: Oh, you know. Stuff hardly anybody reads and that doesn’t make any money. How about you?

Him *proceeds to tell me about the book he has coming out soon and how he needs to get working on his next proposal for his publisher.*

His publisher. Oh, right. He’s a real writer.

I know, I know. We are all real writers. But let’s be honest, some of us feel a lot more real than others.

I like to talk to my son about writing, though. He is in full-time school for the first time and though it is glorious in so many ways, it is a big adjustment for both of us. Suddenly we are not together most (if not all) of the day like we have been for the last five years. It feels odd to spend so much time outside each other’s orbits, unaware of what the other is doing all day. We’ll catch up on the time we spent apart and I’ll tell him I worked on a new story (without needing to elaborate on what exactly that means on any particular day) and he’ll say, “Cool!” with the same genuine enthusiasm he has for sharing a new fun fact he learned about caterpillars. We are both sharing a little bit about something we love and hoping the other will recognize its inherent greatness.

I am trying to find my way back to writing simply for the pleasure of it, divorced from any specific metric of success or realness. To seek publication as way of sharing what I love with others, rather than a form of validation, a reward for my efforts. That is in part why I am going to try to get back to blogging regularly—a thing I used to do simply for the enjoyment of it, back in the early days of LiveJournal and Blogger. Writing that is just about sharing ideas, memories, the thoughts kicking around in my mind.

And I’m going to try to share more of my work that I love, things I have published in the past and maybe even bits and pieces of stuff I am currently working on, or work that has been languising half-finished for months or even years. You can feel free to read it or ignore it—I won’t be sitting there watching you take it in, quietly whispering, “here comes the tiger.”

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Speaking of nature documentaries, this piece, “In Spring When We Couldn’t Leave the House,” published in my chapbook Mother Nature, begins with another much-beloved nature documentary in our house, and shares some of my favorite interactions with my son from the long, tiring days at the start of the pandemic.

In Spring When We Couldn’t Leave the House

I cried in the bathroom. Sat down on the Sesame Street step stool, dropped my head onto my knees and sobbed for a full five minutes. It felt amazing. My son was watching a nature documentary at the time. The same episode he’d watched every day for two weeks, because he was in that stage where he wanted to consume everything over and over again until it imprinted on his being like a sense memory. Years from now he won’t remember anything he learned about orangutans, but perhaps he’ll feel a momentary calm whenever he sees an image of one swinging through the trees. I like thinking about that. About how this moment will fade into the past and jumble together with the rest of a life he was too young to remember. It’s a small comfort, but I accept comforts of all sizes these days.

Like these, for example:

The gummy bears my mother purchases from the mill shop at the bottom of her mountain road come in twelve different flavors. A nonsense rainbow of sugary excess. Teals, and pinks, yellows both wheat and buttery, three different shades of blue. He likes to cup his chin between his thumb and forefinger, give careful thought to his dessert time decisions. “So many good options,” he says to me. Yes, I agree. Life is full of difficult choices.

He has named his crane truck Mary. She works so hard. All day lifting brightly colored wooden blocks and beams. Mary has built three dozen cities, watched them razed to the ground, and calmly started over again. I have so much sympathy for her, constantly observing her world’s heartbreaking cycle of progress and destruction. Mid-build I tell him I’m going to make some tea. Would he like some too? “Tea sounds delicious!” he replies, and it is—his cup of warm water with a heaping spoonful of honey. We sip our tea quietly, and then I set down my mug and help Mary pick up another beam. “What are you doing?” he asks. I am helping Mary work. Is that not okay? “No,” he tells me. “The construction workers are taking a break for tea.”

“When I was a little kid,” he says, and what follows is a rundown of the aching, tender moments of his sweet, short life.

Why couldn’t I sleep when we were in Maine?

Why was I sad at Aunt Leah’s wedding?

How did I hurt myself that one time when I got that scrape?

(and the time after that, and the one after those, and so on)

Why did I yell when you told me I couldn’t have those things?

Why did you tell me I couldn’t have them?

Why was I sad when I yelled when you told me that?

Why was I nervous at school?

Why didn’t I like being in a strange place?

Why was I scared of Curious George?

Why was I scared when that fan made that zzzt zzzt zzzt noise?

Why don’t I like scary noises?

Why did I cry that time when you cried?

Because you feel sad when other people are hurting?

“Yeah, that’s why.”

We hold dance parties almost daily. He runs upstairs to put on his tutu and then tells me to play “love keeps lifting me.” We spin. A swirl of blue tulle and pink-cheeked joy. “Have you ever seen anyone dance like this?” he asks, as he twirls on one foot, throws himself to the floor and kicks both legs up behind him. I have to admit I have not. The Degas poster from my childhood bedroom hangs on his wall. I watch it as I spin in a circle, the colors blending together even more than the artist intended. Around and around, feeling higher and higher.

On a Monday he pours a bucket of water over a pile of dirt and digs half a dozen holes in the mud. What are you doing? “Burying my animals,” he says, and I decide not to read anything into it about his understanding of death. On Friday I suggest we pretend to be paleontologists. We carry a handful of paint brushes out to the dirt pit and gently free the animals from the earth. I find a gorilla. He finds a rhinoceros. Halfway through uncovering an elephant he pauses and laughs. What’s so funny?

“I almost forgot to remember all the things I’ve been hiding.”

The walls are covered with drawings of cars and trucks. An ATV with purple and green tires, a blue stripe, and a bunch of red lines that are meant to be flames. There’s a truck with fourteen wheels. I heard him counting them out. He says thirteen in a way that sounds like fourteen. Ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen, fourteen. He is learning to write his name. The B, two circles stacked one on top of the other. He creates a mixed media piece of a building on fire. Stamped fire engines and emergency vehicles. Thick lines of black crayon for the fire ladder. Wild strokes of orange marker for the flames. “Here is the smoke,” he says, furiously scribbling a gray colored pencil across the top of the page. It looks just like a fire, wild and chaotic, background images slowly emerging through the blaze. He is learning so much, I tell him. “I wake up every day and I learn something new,” he says. “I can hardly believe it.” I know. It’s amazing.

How It Started: "Still, Life (With Avocados)"

Capsule Stories Spring Edition: In Bloom

Cover Art by Darius Serebrova

When I read a piece of writing, whether prose or poem, I often find myself wondering how the writer developed the piece. Did they start with an initial image, or a single line and build the rest of the piece around it? Was there a particular emotion they set out to convey, or a bit of action, or story twist that drove the narrative from the beginning? Some writers need to find an opening line before the rest of the piece is able to unfold. Others can start somewhere in the middle and skip forward and back as they construct their stories. Some writers are especially adept at endings; they know from the start where the story is going and just need to figure out how to get there.

I am surprised by how often a piece of writing develops in a way I wasn’t expecting. It is one of my favorite things about writing—the way the piece itself can take over and follow paths you didn’t plan on taking. While it’s nice to not necessarily know how the sausage was made and leave all interpretation up to the reader, I think insights into how a piece was created can be really interesting and even helpful to developing one’s own work. So I’ve decided to share how some of my pieces were crafted. I’m hoping to share one a month, or so, with a nice variety of fiction and nonfiction prose, and poetry.

For the first post in this series, I’m starting with my short story, “Still, Life (With Avocados) in the Spring Edition of Capsule Stories, which is available for purchase in paperback and ebook. The theme for this edition was In Bloom, and I wrote this story specifically for this theme.

You can read “Still, Life (With Avocados)” in full here if you’d like (I recommend reading it first!) and then continue below to learn more about how this story came together.

Content Warning: Death & Grieving

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The jar would sit on the windowsill in the dining room alongside all the others, avocado pits lined like votive candles at a prayer altar

I started this story with a specific image in my head: A row of avocado pits placed in small mason jars lined up on a windowsill. For a period of time, in design blogs, Instagram posts, even in my friend’s kitchens, I felt like everywhere I looked people were trying to grow avocado plants from pits. I remember looking up how to do it once and reading that an avocado plant grown from a pit would likely never bear fruit, and even if it eventually did, it could take over a decade to make it happen. I imagined a person excited to grow their own avocados, not knowing that the most they could reasonably hope for would be a pleasant houseplant. There was a bit of sadness in this image for me, the hopeful effort of attempting to grow something that would never actually bloom. From that idea, the story of Elizabeth and her avocado pits was born.

It seemed an apt metaphor for grief, the work of moving toward a point you would never reach, healing that would never fully blossom. So I knew I wanted Elizabeth to be grieving something, and to be in the process of trying to emerge from the darkest point of her pain at the same time as the world around her was beginning to emerge from winter.

Half the battle was pretending you were okay. Waking each morning to say, “Today will be fine.” Trying to speak the words into existence, slowly letting the lie turn into truth.

It would be easier now that the weather was shifting, hard ground softening into damp earth. The promise of spring. Mornings that smelled of dirt, rebirth, possibility.

Initially, I had thought her grief would center around a lost pregnancy or some form of maternal grieving, but that ultimately felt a bit like trying to incorporate too many levels of “blooming.” I was playing around with the story in my head one evening while washing dishes and the window above our kitchen sink looks out across an alley and into our neighbors’ backyards. One neighbor’s fence is lined with trees that bloom early in spring, blossoming with lovely little white flowers that smell horrible. My husband and I often lament how unfortunate it is that the first scent of spring is the stench of hot feet wafting from these trees. I liked the way that image slightly undercuts the beauty of spring, and introduces an imperfection to this season of hope and rejuvenation. Once I had that in my mind, I decided Elizabeth would be grieving the death of her spouse.

The tree across the alley had begun to sprout. She could see it from her kitchen window, the tiny white buds like blemishes popping through the skin of the tree bark. It was one of those stinky trees—she could never remember what they were called—the little white flowers filling the air with a scent that made her nose scrunch up the moment she stepped outside to pull the garbage cans to the curb.

“Ah, the sweet smell of spring,” he would joke each year, hands on his hips, sucking a deep breath in through his nose. This year it would have to be her, taking the deep breath, making the joke. It was so painful, all the ways the world kept reminding her of what she had lost.

I have always found spring to be a hopeful season, and yet at the same time, I feel a sort of melancholy awareness of how fleeting that sense of renewal and rebirth can be, how it is just one small part of a cycle that will continue to repeat itself. The heat and humidity of summer are close at hand, the desolate darkness of winter will come back again. Grief too can be cyclical, the pain of a loss returning, again and again, a season of darkness from which one must repeatedly emerge. Though in time it becomes less effortful, it never goes away completely. There is no endpoint for healing, only a slow continual process. There is a real sadness in the avocados as a stand-in for Elizabeth’s healing, in knowing that they may never grow, she may never heal. I wanted the emphasis to be on the work of healing, though, on the effort required to move forward and grow.

She inspected each of the avocado pits for signs of growth. No roots snaking down into the water. No cracks in the smooth brown shells of the seeds. No tiny sprouts pushing skyward.

“You can do this,” she said, gently touching the top of each pit with the tip of her finger. “Take your time. There’s no rush.” She would wait patiently. It was amazing, she thought, how sometimes the world changed in an instant, flipped upside down so that one second it looked one way and the next it was completely unrecognizable. And how other times it changed only by force, through steady deliberate effort, the quiet will to push forward again and again, up and out of the dark, to make a series of tiny cracks through the hard surface of the world, everything slowly bringing itself back to life.

And in the end, I wanted to leave Elizabeth with a sense of hopefulness, for it is spring after all.

The avocado pits would grow. She could feel it. She believed it.

“You’re doing fine,” she said aloud. “Keep going. You’re doing fine.”

Losing Touch

Back in early March, shortly after Maryland announced it’s Covid-19 social distancing and stay home orders, I wrote this essay about how closing down my massage therapy practice and not being able to connect with people through touch left me feeling lost and disoriented. The shift from regularly touching people for hours at a time to not even being able to come within six feet of anyone outside of my household was a particularly difficult adjustment for me. This essay was published as part of Art in the Time Covid-19, released as an ebook back in July by San Fedele Press and American Writers Review. A portion of the proceeds for this anthology are donated to Doctors Without Borders. I highly recommend grabbing a copy if you’re interested. You can read my full essay, Losing Touch, below.

You Don't Have to Put a Positive Spin on a Pandemic

As the weeks of social distancing and our new stay-at-home lifestyle wear on, I’ve noticed a growing trend of focusing on the positives of this sudden (and for many of us traumatic) shift in our daily experiences. I understand the impulse. While it’s important to recognize and process the fear and sorrow that accompany this difficult moment and all the uncertainty it brings, maintaining some degree of mental wellness throughout this ordeal requires welcoming small comforts and making space for joy and pleasure. (If Twitter and my neighborhood’s email group are any indication, it also requires baking lots of bread.)

But it’s worth noting that not being able to find the bright side to a global pandemic isn’t some kind of failure. A lot of people are sick and many are dying. More will join them. People have lost jobs and are uncertain of how they’ll continue to provide for their families. Others have shuttered businesses that they worked hard to build and that may not recover. Some people are isolated in their homes without the social connections they relied on to remain healthy. Some are trying to work and parent at the same time, and finding themselves struggling mightily with both. It’s okay to not feel thankful for all the free time you have now that you have no way to earn a living. And it’s okay to not collapse at the end of a long day of juggling Zoom meetings and managing your kid’s online learning, and feel blessed by all this extra family time.

For years when my depression flared up, I would make a list in my head of all the good things in my life. Ostensibly this served to counter the negative spiraling that depression often creates by providing a reminder of everything I had to feel happy about. Over time, though, I began to recognize that rather than being a balm to my bad mood, it became a way to chastise myself for being depressed without a legitimate reason. How self-absorbed must I be to feel sad when I could easily name half a dozen reasons why I should be happy?

It took me a long time to learn that I didn’t need a reason to be depressed. Depression was the reason. I wasn’t depressed because I was miserable. I was miserable because I was depressed. It didn’t matter how good my life was, or how happy I should be. It doesn’t work that way. I can recognize how lucky I am, how good I have it, and still feel depressed, because I have depression. I’m entitled to that paradox.

We’re all entitled to feeling really crappy right now. No one chose a global pandemic that would trap most of us in our homes with limited outlets for stress relief, put essential workers at high risk, and leave all of us anxious and reeling as case numbers grow and our social isolation extends with no clear end date.

My business is closed. Yes, this has given me more time to write and create, but I’m worried about my clients and my finances. I have lots of extra time to spend with my son, but he desperately misses his teachers and his friends. He misses the playground and the gymnastics class he had just started. Plus I never planned on being a stay-at-home mom. My own stress management requires a certain amount of solo time and space to clear my head and work through my own emotions. That space is gone now that we are all at home all day every day, parenting and working, and trying our best and failing terribly to accommodate each other’s needs and schedules. Yes, I have more family time, and in ways that has been lovely, but I have much less time for myself and that is very, very hard.

It’s okay to feel miserable right now. Doing so might seem selfish, but it’s not. Other people are dying, you might think, but everyone you love is still healthy and safe. Thank goodness. Who are you to be miserable when people are losing their loved ones and you’re just feeling frustrated that you can’t respond to all your work emails, and entertain your toddler, cook dinner, get the dog walked, and find a moment for a bit of peace in the day? It is almost always the case in life that when you think you have it bad, someone else has it worse. People aren’t dying because you feel miserable. They are dying because there’s a pandemic. You feel miserable because there’s a pandemic.

There is a pandemic.

Not everything needs a positive spin.