I go back to February 1963

Last month we celebrated my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. As the milestone approached, I kept thinking of Sharon Olds’s “I Go Back to May 1937,” and the words she uses to describe her parents on the brink of their marriage:

“…they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent…” 

From “I Go Back to May 1937“)

I tried to write about this, but it felt unkind to share that these are the words that came to me when I thought about my parents marrying. I worried how they might feel if they were to read my writing and see them. On the weekend we celebrated their anniversary, though, my mother made a joke about how she was sure no one thought their marriage would last.

“Really?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “We were so young and dumb.”  

How could they have been anything else? They were only 19 and 22, for god’s sake! Before their second anniversary, we were a family of four, which means that I have memories of my parents in their 20s, 30s, 40s and all the decades that followed. It means that we were all very young together.

It’s a long story, the one of their marriage, our family.

Olds’s poem is harsh and bleak. For a time–back when my dad was still drinking, when my own life was unspooling–it was the kind of poem I might have written myself. I understood the desire of the poem’s speaker to go back and prevent a marriage that was an impetus of pain. I read her words and wondered if my parents, too, were the wrong people for each other, and if it would have been better for all of us if they hadn’t married. I wondered that even as I knew it would mean that I wouldn’t exist to wonder about anything.

Later, when we were all a bit older, a bit more developed–when my dad was sober and I’d managed to stitch together a healthier life–I no longer wished to spare us all by undoing their union. When I would look at their wedding photo I’d wish instead that I could wave some sort of magic wand and cast away the hard things we were all going to live through, keeping the good and tossing the bad. I’d keep the dad who did math problems at the kitchen table with me after dinner and came to every one of my track meets, but not his moods that could turn suddenly, frighteningly dark. I’d keep the brother I shot baskets with in the backyard, but lose his long-undiagnosed autism that no one understood or knew what to do about. I’d keep the kind, gentle mother who was my refuge, but also, somehow, let her have a larger life in which she could more fully be an artist or athlete or activist.

But that’s not how any life works, is it? That’s probably for the best, for who would my parents be, if I could possess such a wand, and who would my brother and I be, if we were not the people our fates have forged us into being? Who is to say that an alternate life would have been any kinder to us, that our sorrows would be lesser or our joys greater? After all, my parents are still here, together, by choice. Not habit nor dysfunction nor impossible-to-escape circumstances, but by deliberate choice.

When I was lost in the forest of my own marriage’s demise, I asked my mother why she’d stayed in hers.

“I always loved your dad,” she said. “Even at the worst times, I never wanted to be not married to him.”

What a great gift, to live your days with someone who has known and loved every adult iteration of yourself you’ve ever been and continues to willingly, purposefully choose you. It’s hard for me, who will never know that, to think of a better foundation for a good life.

I hesitate to let that last paragraph stand. To share any of this post, if I’m being honest. I have struggled to write it. I have struggled to find words that are neither sentimental nor simplistic, to convey truths more complicated than our usual narratives about long unions tend to be. I have struggled to find words that are both kind and true. Because the truth is: My childhood was hard. My parents suffered. My brother suffered. I suffered. My children have suffered as a result of the ways in which my suffering formed me. These words feel unkind, and how do I explain that even in the face of these truths, I wouldn’t go back and tell those young, dumb kids not to do it? It’s not just because, like Olds, I want to live. (Though I do. I want to live.) It’s because I want us to get to where we are now.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that all you need is love, or that eventual benefit outweighs earlier harm, or that our pain didn’t matter or wasn’t significant. It did, and it was. But our suffering is not the whole story, and while things that happened cannot change over time, our stories, like people, can. I want to get to the story I know now.

When I look at my parents’ wedding day photo today, I still see two innocent kids who were far too young for marriage–especially the one they were going to have. But I also see in their faces, on what my dad recently told me was the best day of his life, a story about the kind of bright hope we all have when we are making our first important choices, and what I feel most for those kids now is tenderness–tenderness and the kind of protectiveness I feel for my own children, who are already older than my parents were when I was born. I look at that photo and I want my dad to have that day. I want my mom to smile that brilliant smile. I want these things because every life has its moments of tragedy and sorrow, no matter how carefully or prudently it is lived, and no matter what things did or didn’t happen afterward, their joy on that day was pure and true. I want that kind of joy to have happened, to have existed in our broken world. I want that joy to be what it has been, the seed of so many others we have all experienced throughout our lives. I want it for them, and for my children, and for myself.

When I look at that photo and then ahead to my childhood that will follow it, what I see now is how young and tender and gorgeous we all were, together, and, often, how dumb. How we were everything all at once, and still are.

I couldn’t see that when we were in the thick of it. I couldn’t see how much we all, more often than we got it, needed some grace and a hug. Of course my parents did damage; how could they not, damaged as they were by their own parents, who were in turn damaged by theirs, and all of them damaged by living in world of damaged and damaging people? Don’t all parents do harm, no matter how old we are when we make a family, no matter how much we are determined not to? Don’t we all struggle, doesn’t life throw hardballs at all of our heads? I tried to tell myself once, when I was a teenager, that they didn’t really love me, but it was no good. I knew that they did. I knew they always had and always would. And I know fully now what some part of me grasped only a little at 14: They always did the best they could with what they had, and that counts for more than a person might think. What I also know now that I didn’t then is that not all parents do these things–love unconditionally, do the best they can. I know that, in some ways, despite the ways in which fate was unkind to our young family, I have been all kinds of lucky.

Now, when I go back to February 1963, I see them the night before their wedding, she in impossibly tiny capri pants, he in a button-down shirt and chinos. He is lying on his back, legs raised to the ceiling, with her girlish body balanced atop his feet. She’s facing him, their hands clasped, and she smiles down at him, looking, perhaps, like she knows a secret. They are playing like the kids they are. They are young and dumb and all they know is that they are in love. In a few short years, when he plays this game of airplane with his daughter, she will fear falling but will also willingly choose the rush of flight, begging “do it again!” each time he lands her safely on the ground. This will not be a metaphor for her life with them. It will be only one kind of memory out of multitudes. She cannot have the one without all the others, which is why, when that girl grows up and is getting old herself, she will write her way to a place where she imagines going back in time and saying to them:

Yes, go ahead, do it again. Do what you are going to do. Fly.

It snowed

A lot.

image of outside chair with about 10 inches of snow on it.

The forecast was for a trace to 2″ in higher elevations. Hah!

image of outside chair with about 10 inches of snow on it.

It started snowing around 10:00 AM, but nothing was sticking because temps weren’t below freezing. It started to stick around 11:00, but not much, and the temperatures were still above freezing. Many of us didn’t think that much about it because…oh, I don’t know. Because we all count on weather forecasts to be accurate now. Because whenever we all get excited about possible snow, it almost never materializes. Because it was sticking to some things, but the roads were still clear. Because last week was false spring in northwest Oregon, and we’ve collectively decided that the time for real winter has passed.

Some schools closed early, but many did not because it wasn’t supposed to freeze until later, after the snow was supposed to stop falling.

Many, many people ended up on the road around 3:30, when, instead of tapering off, the snow started falling harder and the temperature dropped. People like Cane and me, who had to go feed his daughter’s cat. We could have left to feed the cat earlier in the day, when his school closed at noon, but instead we took a nap. Because we were tired. Because we knew we could go later. Because there wasn’t that much snow on the road and it would probably melt. Because the weather was not a big deal.

Hah!

image of outside chair with about 10 inches of snow on it.

Once in the car, we quickly realized our folly.

About a third of the way there we realized that even if we could get to said cat, we might not be able to get back home. That realization took us a bit of time to get to because denial is a strong persuader, and it’s hard to let go of our ideas about what we can and can’t control and how things are supposed to be. But finally, reluctantly, we admitted that the cat could live until we could get there the next day, but we might be in some trouble if we didn’t turn around. We ducked into a side street and went around the block to get ourselves going in the opposite direction on the street pictured above. We then moved two car lengths in 20 minutes. And while we were idling and trying to make a plan, we had the further realization that all of the routes home we might take included a slope of one kind or another.

We needed to bail on the whole enterprise of driving.

We took the first turn onto a side street that we could, and we drove as far in the direction of our house as we could before hitting another clogged street or hill. Then, we parked our car on the side of the road, locked it, and began a nearly 2 mile walk to our house, with snow blowing in our faces in below-freezing temperatures.

Before we left the house, I’d grabbed a pair of thin, knit gloves I use for skating, but not my warm ski gloves. “It’s not like the horse is going to die and we’re going to have to get there on foot,” I’d joked, “but I feel like I should have something if we’re going out in bad weather.” I was sure I wouldn’t need them.

Hah!

We walked a mile. We took our glasses off because we realized we could see better without them. The world felt a little apocalyptic.

We stopped at a bar to dry off and warm up because our pants and my silly gloves were soaking wet and my thighs had gone numb. Cane got his glasses out, and the frame snapped in two. We ordered a drink.

From the news playing on big screens, we learned that another 4-6″ was now expected to fall through the night. We realized we’d best get moving. So we did. More blowing snow. More trudging. More numb thighs and cold hands. And then we finally got home, around 6:30.

It kept snowing. And snowing. And snowing.

image of outside chair with about 10 inches of snow on it.

But our power stayed on, and we had food, and it was pretty, and we felt lucky.

It turned out to be the second-biggest snowfall that Portland’s ever recorded. (The #1 spot goes to a snow in 1943.) Ten inches wouldn’t be a very big deal in a lot of places, but it is here, where we rarely see that kind of accumulation. It took some guy on Reddit more than 12 hours to get home, and the news reported 6 hour commutes for many. Some people on interstate roadways walked away from their cars. It was a big deal because weren’t ready for it, we have little experience with it, and–because this kind of thing is rare–we don’t have a lot of infrastructure in place for it.

So much depends upon what you’re prepared for, doesn’t it?

The next day we took the bus to the cat. Had the whole thing to ourselves.


The cat was OK, and we were OK. We ended up doing some more walking in the cold east winds, but it was no longer snowing, and we had good shoes and hats and gloves. I wore thicker jeans than I’d had on the night before.

The day was beautiful. Still, it was cold, and it felt so nice to walk up to our cozy little house when we finally got there. Again.

As I finish these words, we’re in the ugly stage of snow. It’s raining, and the view out my window is full of chunky, dirty-gray sludge. We should soon be back to our region’s normal. I’m going to miss our brief respite from normal. The night we walked home, we passed a sloping street with a long back-up of cars. Several people who lived along that street were out with snow shovels, helping people get their cars unstuck. Stories of good samaritans made the news. On Friday, the streets were quiet in the way they were during the early days of the pandemic. The few of us who were out smiled at each other more than we usually do. Our Thursday night was challenging, but now we’ve got a good story we’ll tell each other when snow falls in the future. It’s been a quiet weekend of leftovers and movies and puzzling. A big part of me hates to see it end.

Still, I know other good things are on the way, and it will always be true that change is the only constant.

Daffodil sprouts pushing up through the snow.

Checking in

I’ve been working on a post for two weeks or more, about something that matters deeply to me, but it’s still not right. So, I’ll have to save that for another day. Thought I’d just stop in with a few updates via what’s saved on my phone.

Last week was so busy, I couldn’t get to the grocery store until Friday. This meant eating what we had, something I know I need to improve on, anyway. Not only because it will be better for our financial health, but also because of the environmental impacts of food waste. So, this was lunch one day. The meat was left over from a recipe from my new favorite cookbook. (I know: meat production is also terrible for the environment. Progress, not perfection.)

This is from a book I wanted to think didn’t really apply to me: The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke. O’Rourke details her experiences with autoimmune disorders, which I apparently don’t have. But this book really is for anyone with chronic and poorly understood conditions that impact functioning and quality of life. For the last three weeks, I’ve had 3-day migraines, and this particular passage resonated deeply. My fibromyalgia symptoms are also acting up. I’ve been doing so many of the right things I’m supposed to do–exercising, meditating, eating regularly and hydrating. But. But. But.

It helps to feel seen, and I’m looking forward to reading more of this book.

Ending on a high note! My very part-time gig this school year is developing SEL (social-emotional learning) curriculum for the school I taught at last year, which still Cane teaches at full-time. He and I create the curriculum together and provide some supports for teachers to implement it. Our most recent lesson happened to fall on Tuesday, which was Valentine’s Day. Instead of doing a typical lesson, we planned a love poetry slam, which provided an opportunity to talk about a core SEL skill, social awareness. We got to talk about how not everyone loves VD, and how there are lots of different kinds of love and ways to love, in a way that was fun and built community. Our teachers were the contestants, and they delivered poems conveying a wide range of perspectives on both love and poetry. Some wrote original works, some used song lyrics, and two incorporated AI-written poems into their performances. It was sometimes funny, and sometimes touching, and always so, so good. And it was poetry! (I felt like a stealth English teacher.) Students were pretty much glued to the slammers, but I was glued to them. So many smiles and so much engagement. With poetry! At the end of the day, Cane said, “This was the best Valentine’s Day I can remember in a long, long time.” It really was.

Hope you have a good week, and maybe I’ll get that dang post finished. Maybe.

I also got new socks. (I forgot to pack socks on a trip to my parents’.) Apparently, these come with a lifetime guarantee. How can you do that for socks? I’m betting they think no one will really take them up on that. I will. I’ve got that kind of time now, and for what they cost, I want a pair for the rest of my life.

And don’t it feel good

Sometimes, my Facebook feed feels like a parade of dead parents. So many people I know are living through the same stage of life I am, and this is where we are: the age of our untethering.

A good friend from college recently lost her father, suddenly, and although–I guess?–none of us should be surprised, it was still surprising. I haven’t yet crossed over to the island so many of my old friends now inhabit, and I always feel at a loss for words when I see them climbing onto that terrible shore. What can I call across to them that that will be helpful and true? What do I know of where they are, or of what life now means to them? When I imagine the journey ahead of me, my own foundation collapsing and throwing me into that same sea…well, I don’t. Imagine it. Not for long, anyway.

My friend, who is also managing some other challenges typical for those our age, has been much on my mind. One dreary day this week, as I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, Katrina and the Waves’s “Walking on Sunshine” came on the radio:

What a frothy confection of a song! It transported me to 1985, the year Kim and I, a pair of coltish young women all lanky and clumsily beautiful, became friends. I remembered a particular afternoon in our sorority’s sun-filled living room, feeling good with her in a place I often felt bad, laughing at that song, at where we were, at how it felt to be everything we were on a rare warm northwest spring day. Everyone around us was blonde and light, with faces turned toward futures I couldn’t imagine as anything other than bright. Nearly 40 years later, sitting in my car in the parking lot of a dismal grocery store on a gray January day, the song made me smile, the way it always did then and always has since. It made me feel good to think of us as we once were, so many of our dramas then as silly-serious as the music, with our biggest mistakes not yet made and our deepest pains not yet felt.

Weren’t we lucky, once?

I want to say that we had no idea how good we had it, but that’s too easy and not quite true. Filling out an intake form recently, I wrote that I am, right now, the best I’ve ever been. And I am. That is true. Sure, I would love to still have my 20-year-old body–and so many of the things and people and places and opportunities I’ve had and lost since then–but not the fears and worries and nearly unbearable weight of impending choices my younger self struggled to carry.

Yes, we had so much. Yes, we had it all ahead of us. Yes, there is something wonderful about a mostly blank slate. And also: It was terrifying and hard and confusing because there was so much we didn’t know and so much pressure to get it All Right. We didn’t know, then, that all right was a fantasy, a myth. That we would never be entirely OK, no matter which choices we did and didn’t make. That simply choosing right would not prevent wounds or heal the ones we didn’t even know, yet, that we had. That even the golden ones among us would suffer. That our lives would always be as they were and had always been, a terrible, gorgeous mix.

Although I will, in the face of another’s grief, always fear saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing the wrong way, I have learned that it is generally better to say something than nothing. So I sent the song to my friend with a few bumbling words, even as I worried that they might land wrong. That she might wonder what the hell I was thinking, would not understand what I was trying to offer or say. That I would make her feel even more sad than she already does.

But what she wrote back to me was, “I can’t express how much I LOVE this.”

I don’t know how she feels–how any of my friends on that shore I’m heading for truly feel–but I know that the more I lose, the more I love what I’ve had, and the more I realize what a gift it can be to have something good to feel nostalgic and heartbroken with, even if it is only a soft song that lets us forget, for a few moments, all the hard “yes, ands” we all live with, no matter our age.

What were we doing here? I have no idea. Having fun, that’s what we were doing. Probably by being snarky.

What’s making me cry this week:

Of pain and gain

I’ve written here about being a school librarian, but I’ve never said much about the other role I played for the last third of my career as an educator: instructional coach. In short, my job was to support teachers in improving their instructional practice. My speciality was literacy, and I was often leading training sessions to teach teachers how to implement an instructional framework my district had committed to that I came to believe wholeheartedly in.

My faith was based in both research studies showing the framework’s effectiveness and in seeing how it transformed teaching and learning for those teachers I worked with who implemented it fully. For a very few teachers, I watched teaching become more joyful, less arduous, and more effective.

Why only a very few? you might be wondering. Well, because very few were willing/able to implement it fully. Many were frustrated and burned out by the many, many systemic inadequacies they worked within. Many had tried many, many things already that had promised to make things better, only to be disappointed when they did not, in fact, make things better. What I was asking them to do was not easy, and most of us won’t voluntarily do hard things if we don’t have faith or hope that doing them will make things better.

“I already do that,” they’d say to me. (No, they didn’t really. They did parts, or they did things that were “that” superficially, but not in the ways that mattered most. But they weren’t really doing it.)

“It won’t work because ______ (fill in with any number of things that are beyond a teacher’s control to fix or change),” they’d say. They believed that if someone else could just fix those things (poor attendance, kids’ home lives, lack of resources, etc.), the ways in which they were teaching would be just fine and they wouldn’t need to change what they were doing.

I was often frustrated and bewildered by their responses. There I was, offering a way that was in their control to make their teaching lives better–and improve their students’ learning. True, it would require them to teach in some radically different ways. It would require the shifting of some long-held paradigms. It would mean bucking tradition and giving up some things that they valued. But the current ways weren’t really working! (Everyone admitted that.) And they were unsustainable!

“What do you really have to lose if it doesn’t go well?” I’d ask. “Just try,” I’d implore.

Most did not. I could not understand the resistance I faced when I was offering tools of empowerment. So many people I talked with were so frustrated because they felt powerless. “The great thing is that you have the power to make things better,” I’d say. “And the hard thing is that you have the power to make things better.” It’s hard because if we have the power to make a change, we are the ones who have to make it happen. We are the ones who have to change. We can’t wait for someone else to do things to improve the situation.

This fall, as a student in a 7-week pain management course, and in subsequent experiences that have grown out of that one, I’ve come to a greater understanding of that resistance.

I hated my pain management course. I dreaded Thursday mornings, when I’d have to sit in a 2-hour Zoom meeting and listen to excessively chirpy and annoyingly positive facilitators tell me that I had the power to reduce my pain and make my life better.

I was pretty sure that those facilitators did not know chronic pain the way my fellow participants and I know chronic pain. They were not living it as we were. (I actually don’t know if that’s true. They might have been.)

They shared a poem that basically said it was our responsibility to change the course of our journey with pain, and the implication that it was my choices creating my pain (and therefore my fault) pissed me off so much I said in a session that I thought the poem was ableist and insulting and wondered if perhaps they could find something that gave a similar message about empowerment without the victim-blaming. (Yep, I was that person.)

I, and, it became clear, all of my fellow course participants, had already done and tried so many of the things they were “teaching” us to do. And yet, there we all were, still in pain that was negatively impacting our lives. That pissed me off, too.

In one session, I got extra pissed off because life circumstances for most people make the remedies they were suggesting impossible to implement. Many of the things suggested would not have been possible for me to do in my life when I was working full-time and single-parenting my kids. Since September, I have told others that my new job is getting a handle on my health and pursuing remedies to the various maladies that have plagued me for 3 decades or more, and I haven’t been joking. It has felt like a full-time job, doing All The Things (which I won’t list here).

And, man, if I don’t now get where all those teachers who didn’t want my Kool-Aid were coming from. I was just as burned out from years of struggle with my health and the healthcare system as many of them were from years of struggle with their teaching practice in a dysfunctional educational system. Like the teachers I worked with, my frustrations and anger and hopelessness were real and justified. Things have been all fucked up and it just isn’t right.

But that doesn’t mean my pain class facilitators were wrong.

Seeing the parallels pretty quickly, I forced myself to do the kinds of things I wished more of my colleagues had been able to do with me. I made myself stick with the class. (I did skip one session, though.) I made myself keep trying new things. I made myself keep making and attending appointments and doing the things at home I’ve been advised to do. I read books and clicked links and watched videos. I made myself work to keep an open mind. I gave myself permission to be imperfect in all of this and take breaks when I just couldn’t with it all. And this week, I finally (I think, I hope) got to a doctor who was able to weave the many threads of my story with pain into a cohesive narrative. For the first time, ever.

And damn if those perky facilitators weren’t (for the most part) right. (Yay! And Fuuuuck!)

As is often the case with true stories, there is no black-and-white conflict, no easy cause-and-effect, no simple or neat resolution. There is much more “yes, and” than “either/or.” Yes, there are things I can do to improve my life with pain AND the pain has not been something in my control because it originates from my parasympathetic nervous system, which cannot be consciously controlled. Yes, it is, in a sense, “all in my head”–in that the pain originates in my brain–AND the pain is real, and felt in other parts of my body. Yes, the parts of my body that (now) hurt are structurally sound and disease-free, AND decades of living with a hyper-aroused nervous system have caused physical damage to some of those parts. (Also: In the past, some body systems were damaged, and that damage created pain, and that contributed to forming neural pathways that create pain now, even though I no longer have those organs that created the initial problem. It’s been tangly.) Yes, I lived and worked in broken systems for years that helped create these problems and that I was powerless to change, AND simply leaving those systems hasn’t made everything all better. (And won’t.) Yes, there’s finally a pathway to something better, AND going down it requires a lot of resources that aren’t available to a lot of people–which means that I probably couldn’t have done all that much to improve my situation in the years when I didn’t have them. And that we shouldn’t blame or shame those who don’t have what they need to be able to shift out of surviving a situation to improving it.

As was true for the teachers I worked with, there is no outside fix that will make everything all better and what I want it to be. There is no quick and easy solution, and certainly no perfect one. I cannot pick and choose the parts of a coping framework I can easily adopt and ignore other whole parts of it. If I do, I will get only partial benefits, if any. (Which is why so many of the things chronic pain sufferers been told to do over the years haven’t really worked for many of us.) Improving things will require me to adopt new paradigms and do things differently and it will take some time for me to see results. To stay on this path, I will need to abandon others, and there is some loss in that.

But I will tell you this: for the first time in years, I have hope that things can be significantly better. If you’ve ever lost hope and then regained it, you know what a gift it is.

Epiphany

Some years, I can hardly wait until December 26 to take the Christmas tree down. Not this one. My daughter’s husband flew in from Sweden with the ice storm on December 22, and for two weeks our little house was full of sugar and clutter and candlelight and puzzle pieces and music and comfort food and ease. It felt like a warm, slow-moving dream, and I didn’t want it to end, but finally, on Epiphany Eve, I began to put Christmas away.

I’d thought about waiting until Fredrik left to begin dismantling our holiday, but as the world moved on from New Year’s Day things started to feel differently. When Cane returned to school, it started to feel right to begin gathering up our beloved objects and putting them back in their boxes, a physical manifestation of our transition to a different way of being. I didn’t meet the traditional expectation and get everything taken down and put away on Epiphany Eve. In some cultures, that would mean that our decorations needed to then stay up until February 2–but I just can’t with that. I didn’t even finish the next day, Friday, though I made some progress. We were having such a nice one, our last full day with Fredrik. I didn’t want to lose the time we still had to preparing for the time to come.

I was deep in de-lighting the tree that afternoon when Cane’s daughter called to tell him that her cat needed to be put down. We knew it was coming–he was old and ill when she adopted him nearly three years ago–but it was still a blow. Cane would need to be with her the next day while Grace and I took Fredrik to the airport. It was to be a day of hard endings for our girls, and for us, too.

I finished putting Christmas away on Saturday, after our trip to the airport. Driving away from Fredrik and from Grace who was going to privately say goodbye to him there before getting herself to work, I counted three couples clinging to each other on the sidewalk in front of the departures doors, some wiping tears from their faces. I couldn’t stop my own from coming.

That night, Cane and I sat in front of a fire in our living room. Normally, I love the first evening after putting all the Christmas things away. The clean, open spaces feel good. Not this time. “It feels empty in here,” I said, even though we’d spent some of the afternoon talking about how we have too much furniture in the room. “I think this is the first year since I’ve known you that I didn’t say ‘fucking Christmas’ at least one time during the season,” I added. He laughed and agreed that it was.

I suppose that might be because it’s the first year in my adult life I found myself accepting the holidays as they came, able to be more grateful for what we have than sad for what we don’t. As Cane and I sipped wine and put wood on the fire, we talked about our family–the people we’ve lost (our grandparents, younger versions of our children and parents and selves) and the ones who remain. We talked about our fears for losses we know are coming.

“What I didn’t understand when I was younger,” I said, “is that everything and everyone is always dying. Every good-bye is a little death. The Fredrik who gets on the plane will not be the same one we see the next time we are all together in June. We won’t be the same.”

I know that sounds morbid, but I found it comforting, somehow. Time feels like an endless sea at the beginning of all our holidays, all our love stories; we float and play in it with nothing but delight because all we can see is water. We know there is a shore and that the waves are taking us relentlessly toward it, but it’s so far away. Until it isn’t. Eventually, always, the calendar turns. Something ends. Someone leaves or dies. The tree comes down. But that there are always endings means that there are always beginnings, new versions of us to fall in love with, new waters to dive into with joy.

As the fire burned down and we talked about all that we love and have loved, the room began to feel a little more full, and I began to make peace with the changes in it. Or maybe my eyes just began to get used to how it is now, as they always do. We’d planned to cook dinner at home, to make a good new memory in our favorite place, but we were both tired from the day and couldn’t bear the idea of cleaning up afterward. Instead, we went out for Chinese. “It’s still the holidays, right?” he said, and we laughed.

When we returned, the house felt a little more like home than it did when we’d left. And it was all right.

We were all right.

(From our visit to my parents’ over the holidays.)

Is it too late for a new year’s post?

(Nope.)

Each New Year’s Eve, I wonder what the coming year will bring that I cannot anticipate, which prompts me to look back at the previous year and note those things that surprised me. In 2022, for example, these are developments I could not have predicted on December 31, 2021:

I returned to the ice.

I began a new, fundamentally different relationship with my body after an episode of severe back pain.

We bought a project house in Louisiana.

These are all huge things for me, and my life is significantly different from a year ago because of each of them. I will also wonder, too, about what things will happen in the world. On January 5, 2020, I wrote these words, reflecting on the death of someone important to me:

“We are living through a frightening, unstable time. Robert and I viewed many things differently, but we agreed about this. His death–or, more importantly, his life and his beliefs and his many words to me–have me thinking hard about what work needs to be done in the face of all that is coming.”

Ha! “…in the face of all that is coming.” I had no idea what was going to be coming in the months that followed: pandemic, schools closing, protests, wildfires that gave my city–for a week or so–the worst air quality in the world, a presidential election in which the loser (we now know for sure) tried to overthrow the results and was largely responsible for ending our long streak of peaceful transfers of power.

What will the coming year bring? Who knows! After the past few, I have lost any illusions I once had about being in control of what happens. And honestly, I am glad I don’t know. I’d rather deal with the hard things as they come; knowing about last year’s ahead of time would not have allowed me to prevent or mitigate any of them. As for the events I’ve deemed “good,” this last year gave me such lovely, wonderful surprises, and a big part of my delight was the unexpectedness of them.

Perhaps because of the way so many things have felt out of my control in recent years (in ways both good and bad), I’ve abandoned anything that looks like a traditional resolution, and I don’t choose a word for the year, and I don’t really even set intentions. I like to think that new ways of being are something I can invite in at any time (which is why I’m publishing a new year’s post after everyone else has moved on from that topic), and I’m more interested in small shifts than grand undertakings. So, these are two small shifts I’m making this month:

1. PT and yoga: I began physical therapy in the fall, but I haven’t made good progress with it. Despite the fact that it should only take me minutes a day, I’ve had a terrible time making time for it. Yoga is also something I’ve been wanting to start. I’ve signed up for a 30 day yoga series through Yoga with Adriene (recommended by the pain management clinic I started working with in October). I am only a few days in, but I’ve been starting my days with PT and yoga. Maybe I needed more of a time commitment, so that it wouldn’t be so easy to tell myself I’d do it later in the day? I’m not sure how it will work when skating starts up again (classes weren’t in session over the holidays), but my goal is to do PT/yoga on any days I’m not skating. (I’m giving myself permission in advance not to be perfect in my practice. I think that’s got to be a key to sticking with new things.)

2. Reading: Last year my daughter introduced me to an app called StoryGraph. I signed up for it, recorded one book, and promptly forgot about it. I’ve never been a GoodReads person; StoryGraph appeals to me (maybe?) because it’s small. Or it’s small the way I plan to use it. I’ve signed up for the January Pages Challenge, using both the audiobook I’m currently listening to (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) and the print book I’m reading (The Winners). I want a way to track my reading, and I want some accountability for myself. I like the visuals of this platform. I don’t know why I’ve been having trouble sustaining my attention with print books, but I’d like to work on changing that. I know the best way is simply to read more. Right now, I’m just raising my awareness of how much I’m reading and why I sometimes don’t pick up a book. If this is something you use or are interested in using, let’s be reading buddies; my username is ritamarie.

That’s it. These are two things I hope I can turn into new routines in my life, regardless of what the year brings. Challenging my body and my mind, cultivating good mental and physical health. I’m still plugging away at food issues (planning, preparation, low-inflammation options, developing workable routines), household organization, figuring out skating goals, and thinking about writing goals, but I’m not starting anything new with any of those things. I can only cultivate so many new habits at once, and these two seem pretty compatible with winter, with its slower pace.

I would love to know what you’re anticipating in the coming year, how you establish new habits, or if you have any book recommendations. Or maybe just chime in on what you want to be in 2023:

(from https://www.instagram.com/positivelypresent/)

Sending wishes that all your surprises in the coming year will be good ones.

This is me wearing my new skating halo, a gift from my daughter given with hopes of avoiding the bad surprise of a head injury.

The gifts of time

I meant to stay away from this space until after the new year, thinking I’d want to spend my time in other ways, but this morning Jill of Open Space Practice shared an article on Facebook about the choices of a man dying of glioblastoma–which are the choices all of us make, every day, whether we know death is imminent or not.

This man, who chose to begin an important creative project (knitting a sweater for his son) even though he knew he might not finish it before dying, made me think of a conversation I had this week with an old (from college) friend. We acknowledged that we are moving into a new stage of life, one in which time feels short in ways that it never has before. “I find myself wondering what I want to do with what remains,” I said to her.

It brought to mind, too, a piece that Kate shared on her blog this week, The Satisfaction of Practice in an Achievement-Oriented World, in which the writer, Tara McMullin, makes a case for doing things for the experience of doing them–not for accomplishment or some byproduct that doing the thing might provide, but simply for whatever benefit we get in the moment of doing. She advocates for the value of practice over achievement.

This is a different thing, in some important respects, from the man who hopes to finish knitting a sweater, but it also isn’t. Both are about letting go of outcomes–starting the sweater even though you might die before it is done, taking up running because of how it feels while you’re doing it and not because you want to lose weight.

Talking about the article with Cane, I recalled how I felt the morning after my book of poetry won an award–how I understood, for the first time, that I would from then on write–if I wrote–for the sake of writing itself and not for accolades or publication. The accolade was nice, but fleeting, as was the feeling I’d had when I first held the book in my hand. It wasn’t enough to sustain me or the effort it took to write while parenting and teaching full-time.

Yesterday, my daughter needed to go to work even though our city had become a block of ice. “Who is going to go ice skating today?” I wondered, but I knew the question was meaningless and futile. It was two days before Christmas, and there was no way a mall was going to close. Her boss called to confirm that she could make it in, and he told her that yes, the rink was open even though no one was skating. I had planned a day of baking and general house puttering, but as she, her husband Fredrik (arrived just the night before from Sweden, getting in right as the ice storm was hitting), Cane, and I sat eating breakfast, we mused that it could be a perfect day for skating. “Mom, no one will be there! This could be your only chance until after New Year’s to have a good session.”

For me, a good session is one that is not crowded, something I haven’t had since Thanksgiving, really. It means the ice will be smooth and the spaces open for practicing moves. We spun a fantasy of having the whole rink to ourselves. I imaged gliding in big, swooping turns over the ice. We knew it might not happen, but it could. And so, I ditched my plans for the day and we all found warm clothes and headed out to the bus with her. (We were not driving on ice-covered streets.) It was an adventure! In the frozen city! She, Fredrik, and I would skate before her shift began, and Cane would watch for a bit and then head off to the bookstore coffeeshop.

Well, by the time we got there, others had made their way there, too. We got to skate for about 15 minutes before she had to clock in. Fredrik’s rental skates hurt his feet, so he left, too. That left me alone with terrible ice and a crowd of non-skaters, which wasn’t anything resembling fun. I changed out of my skates, found Cane in the coffee shop, and browsed through a book until he’d finished his drink. Then, we bundled up and headed off to the bus. “This was a lot of effort for 15 minutes of skating,” I said to him.

“Are you regretting your life choices for today?” Grace asked as I stopped by to tell her we were leaving. I assured her that I wasn’t, but her question made me wonder.

After an hour, we realized that our bus line’s route had been canceled (staffing shortages). An hour after that, the four of us were shivering on a shuttle bus driving the route of our city’s light-rail train. Grace’s boss let her go early, worried that she might become stranded in the cold. It was dark, we were hungry (no restaurants had been open), and we knew we might have a 25-minute walk once the shuttle got us as close to home as it would go.

“You sure you’re not regretting your choices?” she asked as we waited for another bus after getting off the shuttle, wondering if it would really come.

I thought about the day I might have had, the cookies I’d have baked, the meal I would have eaten as soon as I felt hunger, the quiet ease of a warm house. I thought about the skating I’d hoped to do but hadn’t.

“No,” I said, knowing I meant it. “It would have been a nice day at home, but I can have a lot of nice days home alone with Cane. I wouldn’t have remembered that day years from now, but I know I’ll remember this one. We will laugh about it and say, ‘Remember how we all went out after the ice storm and only skated for 15 minutes and it took us hours to get there and back in the cold?'” We’ll remember how we spent the day together. The day wasn’t about skating, just as skating–for me, now–isn’t about passing tests or competing or even mastering new skills. It’s about how it feels just to do it. It’s about how we choose to spend our limited time. It’s about what and how we practice.

Later that evening, after our bellies were full and our hands were once again warm, we decorated the tree with our beloved old ornaments. We’d waited until Fredrik arrived, so he could do that with us. Grace pulled out a ceramic ice skate my mother gave me when I was in my 20s. At that point, it had been over a decade since I’d quit skating, but she still saw me as a skater. Or, perhaps, she wanted to remind me of something skating had meant to me, and what it means to have something like that in a life. I’ve let go of many ornaments over the years, but never this one.

We never know what a day, a season, a year is going to bring us. My college friend and I missed decades of friendship. In our 20s we both moved away from each other, and in those pre-internet days it was much harder to maintain ties. We let ours drop. I don’t remember how we found each other again, but now her adult child lives in our city, and our parents live near each other, and here we are. Having that friendship back is a lovely surprise I never anticipated. I was supposed to go skating the morning I met her for coffee but chose to spend the time with her instead; we don’t get many chances to see each other in person and I didn’t want to miss one. A year ago I had no idea that skating would come back into my life, but now it is something I treasure as a regular practice. If I knew I had only a year or so to live (and who knows? I might), I’d still choose to spend much of it on ice, even though I’ll likely never compete or land an Axel. I’d choose a day on a cold bus with my beloveds and a morning in a coffeeshop with an old friend. I’d choose to spend my time here, putting words together because of what I get from the act of doing so and, after hitting “Publish,” connecting with kindred spirits who read them. And I would consider all of it time well-spent.

As we embark upon the culminating days of this holiday season, I’m wishing all of you the gift of time well-spent, too. What better gift could there be, really?

Tidings

It’s been a frosty, sunny stretch of days here. We put up the tree, celebrated my birthday, meandered our way toward the holidays.

When I was a young teen, I made all the gifts I gave to adults. I had so many people on my list–great-grandmothers, grandparents, parents, an aunt and uncle–that I began working on them in September. I remember plotting out when I would make each one on a calendar, amazed at how little time I had. I sewed, made art, wrote books that I illustrated. I remember trying my hand at candle-making and other kinds of crafts.

This week, I have been uneasy because I am not stretched for time. By design and through loss, I have few gifts to give this year, and I can’t shake the sense that I have forgotten something important. I keep thinking there is something I’m supposed to be doing that I haven’t, and I’ve been remembering a recurring dream in which it is Christmas and I have forgotten to get presents for my family. We are having the simple holidays we decided, back in the summer, that we wanted, but I am discovering that the conditioning of 50+ years is not so easy to cast off.

I’m feeling a bit of sadness, too, some longing for holidays of years past. Today some of my cousins are gathering, but I won’t be joining them, much as I’d like to. They are too far away, Cane has to work tomorrow, and we are limiting our contact with others to increase chances that we’ll be healthy for a visit to my parents in the week after Christmas. We haven’t seen them since the summer, as illness keeps canceling our plans. The last time my extended family gathered was the Christmas of 2019. We ate the food we always eat together (Croatian spaghetti, kroštule, scotcheroos), and after dinner we sat at the table and played Apples to Apples. It was normal, familiar, comfortable, unremarkable, wonderful. For much of my life we gathered every year, around my grandmother’s table, but that year was the first time we’d been able to do so in several. We said then that we needed to make sure we didn’t let so much time pass, that we would need to make sure to meet again the following year. We had no idea what was coming at us in 2020, or that it would be years before we could gather in such a way again. Writing these words, I can’t help wondering if we ever will. How many years can we go before a tradition that had already frayed breaks completely?

I’m doing my best to let that sadness sit beside different kinds of comfort and joy–to accept that a long life is a thing of constant inconstancy, a coming-and-going stream of people and places and things that we love, a rich amalgam of grief, abundance, loss, gain, and surprise of various kinds. (We never know what might happen in any given day, do we?) This year we have my daughter with us, and her husband will be joining us from Sweden. We are looking forward to good food, a fusion of Swedish and American holiday traditions, and a day designed for introverts. I am sure there will be a year in the future–if I’m lucky–in which I will look back on this one and miss the parts of it I no longer have.

Wishing all of you peace, comfort, and joy in the coming days. I will catch up with you again in the new year.

(I just love this little bird. Another highlight from the week: Our rabbit is back. Hadn’t seen it for weeks and weeks, but yesterday we caught it eating berries from a bush in the front yard.)

On tanks, the repairing and filling of them

I might have mentioned that I’ve got a small, part-time curriculum-development gig this school year. About twice a month, Cane and I develop a social-emotional learning lesson for students at his high school and facilitate a professional learning session for staff to support them in delivering the lesson. This week our lesson was focused on wellness during the holiday season, and I thought I’d share here a resource I developed for it.

I was inspired by a similar board I saw in multiple places online; I am not sure who originally created it, but I’m linking to a school librarian’s site because I’d bet money it was her or some other librarian. I revised it to include links for all the options and to make it holiday-season specific. Two of the boxes contain links to our local public library system (Multnomah County Library, which is awesome), but everything else should be useful for anyone, anywhere. It contains items to hit all the categories of a typical wellness wheel.

(source: https://www.ginger.com/activities/wellness-wheel)

Our students responded positively to this, so I wanted to share it with a wider audience, and I know that some of you are raising teens and some work with teens. This time of year is challenging for teens, y’all. If they are in school, they are fast-approaching or are at the end of a grading period, which is stressful whether they are doing well (and don’t want to blow it on their final exams/projects) or not doing well (because they may be out of time/opportunities to fix things). If the holidays that none of us can entirely escape from are not part of their religious/cultural practices, they may be feeling unseen and left out. If they are, they may be feeling anxiety about gift-giving (lack of $$$, pressure to get the right gifts), having to see family who are unpleasant or harmful, and dealing with their care-givers’ holiday stress. A break from school is not a positive for many teens. It can cut them off from IRL contact with their friends, it disrupts their usual routines, and it may mean increased responsibilities at home. For some, rather than going to school and focusing on their own lives, a school break means being at home and responsible for giving care to siblings or other family members. If they have jobs, they may be working extra shifts (and dealing with folks who are acting out their own holidays feelings). As is true for many adults, this is a time of year when grief can strike hard. Teens may be grieving people they’ve lost, the holidays of their childhoods (that felt different from how holidays feel now), or the family they wish they had (maybe once did have) but don’t.

This board is geared to teens, but it was helpful for me to create it and remind myself of the variety of kinds of self-care available to us. The table includes a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium live webcams*, and I’m just gonna tell you: When I watched the jellyfish, I could feel my breath slowing and my body softening.

I so wish we had known in the 80s (when I was a teen) what we know now about the physical impacts of chronic stress and complex trauma (or that there is such a thing as complex trauma), and how to mitigate them. I finished up my pain management course this week, and I attended an introductory session with a doctor who focuses on re-wiring (not the clinical term) our unconscious brain so that we can respond differently to perceived threats. This is a slide I screenshotted from the session:

Chart that lists common effects of chronic stress:  inflammation, tension and migraine headaches, insomnia, back pain/chronic pain, fibromyalgia, IBS/digestive problems, high blood pressure, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, anxiety/panic/depression, obesity, sexual dysfunction
(Hey, mirror)

It was so helpful to gain a greater understanding of why simply understanding the stress/trauma that is causing physical issues isn’t enough to cure them: The action is happening in the parts of our brain that we don’t consciously control, so we can’t entirely think our way to different responses. (I have an extreme startle response, for example, and even when I know a noise is coming and that it’s not a threat, my whole body often still jumps when I hear it.) Because of neuroplasticity, though, we can create changes in our parasympathetic nervous system, which will change how we respond. Or that’s the theory, anyway.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts and feelings about the sources of my chronic stress and complex trauma, especially those that relate to working for 3+ decades in public education. The thoughts are barely formed and if I tried to share anything right now, it would just be a big word vomit. But I can say this:

Things are not the same as they were when you went to school. Our teachers and students are under constant stress, and it’s different than it was 15 or 20 or 30 years ago, and it’s not sustainable. We have got to find better ways, because a society full of traumatized and under-supported people is going to look…well, a lot like the one we’re living in.

Despite that dire last paragraph, I am feeling hopeful in ways that I haven’t in decades, and the hope is a tremendous gift. Now that I have it, I can see how long I didn’t, and what impact a lack of hope has had on me. For many weeks now, I have not been attending to much other than my health. I go to various appointments, I go skating, I make nourishing food, I tend my primary relationships, I run our household, and I rest. All of that adds up to a full-time job. I haven’t had much time for writing or any other creative work (other than the small curriculum job) or other kinds of things that have typically filled my tank (for example, dates with friends). But I’m OK with that. This isn’t the season for me to fill my tank; it’s the season for me to repair the holes in it. I’m playing a long game here.

Hoping that you are finding ways to fill and/or repair yours. Would love to hear about them–or your thoughts about anything connected to this post. Sending wishes for health and peace to all who read here.

Cozy bed in front of a window, through which you can see a snow-covered tree.
(What self-care looks like for me right now: This is the room that used to be my office/project space, but it is now a space to support healthy sleep. Cane slept here when he had Covid this fall, and I go here any time his snoring is keeping me from going back to sleep in the middle of the night.)

*The live cam link can be a bit finicky. For some reason, it works best for me when I access it through the link on the chart. Have no idea why that should make a difference.