My old flex is my new flex
I'm not a nostalgic person. (An emotional virgo who runs hot? Oh yes. But sentimentality isn't really my thing.) So I've been surprised, over the last couple of months, to routinely find myself looking toward and thinking about the past, specifically the last year.
It started around Ligaya's first birthday back in March, which at least made some sense at the time. Will & I are not having any more kids, so my last baby will be my forever baby. For weeks I was consumed with thoughts and visions of her staying a baby permanently. "If I could," I told a friend, "I'd relieve the first year of her life over and over again forever." It seemed strange and even a little unhinged to me as I typed it, but it was also the truest thing I could express. I thought it would pass, but it hasn't really. Instead it seems to even extend beyond Ligaya, into other corners of my personal life, my working life. I don't want her to stay a baby anymore (and anyway she walks and defiantly climbs furniture now so that ship has sailed), but I can't shake the feeling that I'm somehow missing out on my life and my memories even as I am out here, fully, living it.
It's been a year since I sent out a newsletter. I didn't mean to not write anything for a year. I have a "Drafts" folder filled with 10 abandoned attempts at writing one of these things, most of which were started in hotel rooms while I was traveling alone doing book events. (While poring over receipts for taxes the other month, I realized I took 2-3 trips a month all last summer and fall.) And it's not that I haven't been writing. Over the past year I published a few stories that I'm proud of, including this essay on "(White) Mom Books" for The Cut and a piece on How to Advocate for Yourself in the Delivery Room for the New York Times. I also went on a reporting trip to BabyLand General Hospital in rural Georgia to watch Cabbage Patch Kids be "born" from a giant tree/crystal-cabbage-vagina.
This morning I woke up with the urge to go downstairs, grab my phone, and see what the photos I had taken a year ago were of. (Maybe the nostalgia is driven in part by my devices which, even though I have shut off these notifications, constantly seem to be telling me to look back at my photo archives?) What I learned was that on this day last year I taped an interview with Terry Gross in the basement of my local NPR station which aired the next day. A year ago I was on Fresh Air?
It was probably sometime in the week between the interview airing and my book's pub date (during which I received hundreds of emails that I still haven't replied to—sorry!), that I understood something in my life was changing. That my world was shifting from an inward, private, domestic, place to something more public. Something vaguely but decidedly "bigger." I wasn't in a place where I could process anything (or even think clearly), so in a haze and with an eye on both survival and ambition, I vowed to just go with it. See where it took me.
Well, it's taken me—literally and figuratively—to so many new places. To a place where I receive daily direct messages from mothers on instagram and cry while reading them. To a place where I've formed real friendships with people grounded, improbably but undeniably, almost entirely in the internet. Last week it took me to Oakland where, the day after the Alabama abortion ban passed, I cried while reading an excerpt from my book at an event that was a fundraiser for an organization that's home to both an abortion fund and a diaper bank. Earlier that day while looking for passages with a more political vibe, I realized I had already marked up most of what I would end up reading. I had done so back in September, when I was in San Francisco for another event (this one raising money for a multicultural community doula program) that happened during the week of the Kavanaugh hearings. It felt as good to make this connection as it did terrible. I feel as proud to have written something that can support essential work as I do sick that the work needs to be done at all.
My brain feels kind of like a ball of yarn that, after completely unfurling, has been rewound onto itself—hastily, into something lumpy. I can't separate the transformations of this first year of Ligaya's life—my first year as a parent of two daughters, my first year as a published author, a year of professional growth and success, the pain of existing in the world at this particular time—from each other. I can't seem to sort the toll they've taken on me and what they have given me, the net impact they've all made. Or, if I'm being honest, I've been too afraid to.
Writing requires sitting still, tuning in to the quiet, falling into the slipstream of my mind, pulling on a string. I just haven't wanted to do that. It's been easier to keep going. But it all catches up. I'm certain it's why I find myself here now, looking back, writing. Trying to re-start something in order to move forward. I'm 41 and I finally know this about myself: I feel better when I am writing, when I am doing the work that I clawed so hard to make my work and am now lucky enough to have be my work—even if it feels terrible the entire time leading up to and during it (aka"My process"!!).
When I started this newsletter almost three years ago, I sent an email to a couple dozen friends: "Turns out writing a book is as overwhelming as it is good. There's so much to research and so many things I am inspired by that I occasionally (often) find myself paralyzed for hours (days) at a time. I weirdly miss the weekly deadline that kept me honest and kept me writing when I didn't think I could."
I am working on my next book but as you can probably guess, progress is slow. I'm in research mode and have been letting my mind wander and fall down internet rabbit holes, come up for air, scroll instagram, scroll twitter, fall down new unrelated hole, switch to book I have been trying to read for the last two weeks, try to remember what it was I was doing in the first place, type a sentence then rewrite it four times, check email, get back to researching. I've been keeping myself busy and, more importantly, NOT writing—and telling myself that is what I NEED to do—because I am afraid of writing again in earnest. I mean, it's so fucking hard. And the stakes somehow feel higher (theoretically, there are more than twice as many of you reading this newsletter than there were the last time I sent one out!). But I won't allow myself to stand in my own way.
Will & I went on vacation a few weeks ago. We left the girls with my parents (hi Mom, you're a hero) and went to a remote tropical island where I tried to find a way back into stillness, back into myself, back to Will. Every day we swam, got ravaged by mosquitoes, and ate fresh seafood in damp swimsuits. It was so important that I found myself wanting to keep it to myself, in my body, offline. This is not a letter about how social media is bad, I promise—please do whatever you want with your time and your technology especially if it makes you feel good!—but while on vacation I read Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing and this passage (about research) hit me hard:
"I think often about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its own form of 'research,' and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy...What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time?"
I'm trying to feel my way back to the place where I spend less time scrolling and looking for inspiration and more time generating it myself. To sit and tune in, even when it feels like it might be my undoing.
🧶
p.s. My book is out in paperback now! If you live in Seattle, I'm doing an event at Elliott Bay on Sunday, June 9 at 3 p.m. All ages! Children—restless toddlers, screaming babies—not only welcome but encouraged!!