Dancing While the World Burns

Way before the election results, I had booked up a bunch of outings with friends, going to gigs and hitting up artistic events. And, wow, I am so glad I did! 

A certain amount of this is just autumn in the Bay Area. Halloween is at least a month long, and that kicks in just after the school year starts, with all the events that entails, and then we roll into the holidays. Even in normal years, this is a busy time. 

But a prevailing theme amongst activists I follow is the reiteration of creating community, gathering together, and not isolating with one's own worry and fear. And I bumbled into a preset schedule that's kept me mingling, kept the conversations going, allowed opportunities to dance it out and give each other hugs and strategize for what comes next. 

In the aftermath of this extremely stupid electoral result, and the onslaught of chaos we're already enduring in the mere weeks that have followed, it's been really awesome to be out with people who inspire me, and to be reminded that human history is made of endurance through awful chapters, during which we still make art, still find love, and muddle our way through. 

I was really afraid of getting left behind on Baby Island, alone and overwhelmed with exhaustion as I tried to figure out our new family configuration. That's what I muddled through before, alongside the horrors of Trump Round One. So I aggressively packed my itinerary with events that lifted me up, and after the baby is in bed, many nights I'm out in the world living my own life, thanks to my lovely husband, helpful friends, and excellent babysitters. (Baby Island is also a really lovely refuge right now, full of tender moments and warm snuggles, but I don't want to be marooned.)

It matters more than ever now. Last night, I was out at a friend's show that was beautiful, cathartic, and open to grief and healing. It was a date night, and we brought friends who were new to the crowd. I hugged people I've known for half my life now, let the performers surprise me, and we closed with a powerful message from the event's producer about finding the commonality of life and unity despite everything. 

So, it's all serious, but we still need to play. We need to find each other in the mess. That is how we transcend the worst of it all, and cultivate the creativity that lifts us out of the muck. 

Go support your local artists, spend your money on live events, and embrace the moment as well as each other. Time is short, and history is long. I hope to see you on a dance floor soon. 

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. 

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Sleight of Hand, Hands Full

Holding my baby last night, nursing him, I let myself retreat into the lavishness of that embrace, the peace and beauty of our quiet moment together, a safe space insulated from an outside world growing more chaotic and dangerous. 

And it was beautiful, though it also instantly and viscerally brought me back to doing that with my first baby, seven years ago. How it felt to keep him safe through instability, the heavy lift of making a happy universe of our own at home in the midst of the betrayal inflicted by the adult world. It felt like I wrapped myself bodily around my baby to protect him from a car crash that rolled on for four years.

At the end of those years, my body was aged from chronic stress. I had to sit back, rehabilitate myself, breathe deep and heal. I will forever be grateful to Joe Biden for providing the years of relative normality that gave me space to catch my breath and show up for my child less burdened than I had been in his earliest moments.

Now, it starts again, with my rights severely eroded, with a new babe in arms. I think the state of the country will be significantly worse, and I am braced for impact. I feel it, bodily. I have told these stories before, I know, but we keep staying stuck living through it, so I have to keep talking about it.

I have to say, I do truly hate Trump and his supporters for stealing so much joy from my parenting years. I don't see myself working on that feeling anytime soon. I doubt I'll have the space to do so, with the constant assaults to come. The nightmares of their creation have robbed me of bandwidth I would have otherwise devoted to more imaginative games with my babies. It’s hard to fully play when I’m so exhausted. They have kept me fighting, and have released such ugliness into the world that I have had to devote even more work to counter at home. I’m trying so hard to cultivate love and hope here, and they continue to exist as evil black holes, warping the gravity of our society as my children try to find their balance in life. 

I have to explain all of this as a mother, contextualizing the cruelty in age-appropriate ways, and it is tiresome, painful, and draining. It is also easiest with the babies, because I can be their world. As my eldest gets bigger, however, he sees this rot himself. It hits different when he needs an explanation for this lack of justice, these moral failures, this racism, sexism, and abuse. He is expected to cooperate, be kind, and respect others, even as none of that is modeled by the most visible figure in our country, who evades accountability at every turn, habitually defrauding and harming others in plain view. I can't hide this from my child; I can only continue to explain the pathology of it, and hope he embeds deeply a sense that this is not right.

The beautiful microcosm I’m building at home is sustained in a force field of my own creation, not impervious but impressively strong. The nucleus is portable; I can uproot us and plant the seed again somewhere else if I need to. I hold that strength in my heart, ready to expand for my children whenever needed.

But I deeply, deeply resent that so many of these tender moments have been tinged with the contamination of their larger context. I wish I could have spent more days with both arms wrapped around my children, instead of using one to hold the crushing forces of the world at bay.

The Horrors Persist, But So Do I

I keep wanting to write about this election, and it's hard to even know where to begin. 

It's horrifying that it's close. There's only one way that we tip the scales, and that is to vote, and to talk to each other about these issues as we march to the polls. If you are eligible to vote, you need to vote, wherever you are. 

The other day, I had a conversation with a politically conservative loved one, in which we discussed abortion bans and their impact on women's lives in the United States right now. He sighed heavily, and let me know that he saw the horrors. I asked him directly to vote for Kamala Harris, because the other guy is a  danger to me and other people he loves. 

I have a backup plan if this all goes wrong, but most of my nearest and dearest don't. I'm not living through another four years of the United States eating itself while I'm trying to raise small children. I can get them out of here, but not everyone. 

So I'm going to vote like I don't have another option. I'm going to use my vote to help buoy Harris to the presidency so we can continue to have tough conversations. I've happily voted for Kamala before, and it's honestly an honor to do so again in a historically consequential way, but this is about more than that. 

We are already hearing the orange oaf truthfully state that he wants to turn the military on our citizens for protesting. His own advisors have called him a fascist and explained how he admires dictators.  His closing arguments on the campaign trail have been promises of violence, racism and misogyny. He used his previous presidential term to erode our international standing, make the rich richer, and endanger women; to demonize difference, degrade our environment, and elevate christofascism to our highest offices. 

2020 wrung me out. My first child was born in 2017, and together we attended so many protests, made so many phone calls, knocked doors, spoke up. January 6th, 2021 started with joy about Georgia's contributions to the Senate, and within two hours of that celebration I was watching, horrified, as congresspeople I follow were live-tweeting a coup. 

By the time Biden was safely inaugurated, I needed a break to nestle in with my family and rebuild. After so much national instability, I bet you needed some normal, too. 

But the side effect of needing that normality is that we seem to have forgotten the big lessons we needed to take forward. As someone else wonderfully put it, the only excuse for voting for Donald Trump now is having just woken up from an 8-year coma. 

Kamala Harris is a brilliant, thoughtful politician, a joyful warrior who is presenting policies to make having a family safer, to make buying a house easier, and to stop the horror of rising maternal and infant mortality, among so many things. Her lived experience has brought her through so many angles on our nations toughest problems. She is deeply experienced, and has a record of accomplishment that proves her brilliance and commitment. I am excited about her presidency, and I also don't agree with her on everything. I look forward to continuing the work that her administration will make possible, even without perfect agreement. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump stands there, old and visibly losing his mind, exhausted but viciously going mad, a poor person's idea of a rich person trying to outrun a lifetime of fraud and abuse of working people. He has had so, so, so many decades of throwing those who stand with him under the bus at the first opportunity. He is a convicted felon who has thrown in his lot with our enemies, so long as they flatter his brittle ego. He is a coward, a draft-dodger, a serially bankrupt loser who arguably only ran for president in the first place to keep himself out of jail, and I suspect that's much of his motivation still. 

It's been a long road. Take a deep breath, and make your plan to vote. Move democracy forward. Get it done.

Not Tired of London, Not Tired of Life

This time last year, we had a trip to London felt like a weeklong date with the city, and was also one of the first moments I noticed that I had a big kid, and that we could simply take off for a day of sightseeing with minimal prep or gear. It felt light and lovely, and I loved it! 

Dash and I spent a few of those days mostly on our own, as James had some work to do, and we did things like spend an entire day in the Science Museum. We had fun together, and it wasn't a struggle. 

I have to admit, I have some very big feelings about sacrificing that ease to embrace another baby. The wallop of exiting toddlerhood with Dash into a pandemic and having to work so goddamned hard for years to hold things steady for so many lives really took it out of me. From Summer 2022 to Summer 2023, it finally felt like there was room for a fully-fledged version of life for me to emerge again. 

My paradigm for this postpartum and beyond is not to say to myself, "This part passes quickly"--because, for me it did not--but rather to establish a new rhythm where love and joy and fun are back in the equation as fully and quickly as possible. I'm not interested in straddling mom guilt and being subsumed into some version of early childhood where help is a treat. I cannot wait another five years for life to feel good again. I am not interested in narratives of maternal sacrifice. 

So, I look back on this trip a little wistfully, and resolve to pour that yearning for a life that finally feels like it has balance back into the efforts at hand. Honestly, I imagine picking up Muffin like a quarterback and hauling that baby into a life I want for me, and being extremely low empathy about interference and attempts to intercept my plays at my own self-actualization. (The latter is aimed at the adults in my life; honestly, Dash was never the problem.)

With Dash, at this point in pregnancy, I stood prepared for a paradigm shift (as much as that’s possible), ready to give up what was necessary to clear the path for this great leap into the unknown. Now, it's different: I've tasted the sweetness of life where there's more teamwork and competence under my roof, and I'm not going back.

Baby Island and Big Kid Town

There is something really magical that happens with getting settled into a school community, and this is a gift that I'm reminded of from a conversation with another parent today. 

For years, Dash was kind of the only kid around, unless we were hanging out with folks from our birth classes or preschool friends. We were really blessed to have a small preschool through COVID, which was a de facto pod and never had any outbreaks while we were there, thanks to the watchful eyes of the teachers and the care the three or so families involved were taking with regard to each other. However, small it was, and during that lockdown time our whole world was, too. 

But now, I find that we're spending more of our time with so many parents of Dash's school-age peers, and there's just this understanding. Sometimes, kids are not at their best. We can't actually control them, only guide them and get them out of situations that are clearly not working. And everyone is working on stuff, whether they are 6 or 45. 

It's just such a different vibe than being bold enough to take a kid into a mostly-adult setting, where there's more of a presumption that I can perfectly anticipate a little person's behavior at all times, or say the magic words to rein him in when he's not perfectly on track. There's a degree of relaxation that comes into things for both me as a parent and Dash as a kid, where his natural exploration of the world around him as well as the world within of social development happen with less pressure. 

This is different than any of the mommy-and-me groups, or other (very important and useful!) early socialization experiences. We have friends in the neighborhood in a way that we never have before, and many of them! There are accidental play dates that turn into dinners together, bumping into pals at weekend breakfasts out, getting the kiddos into other fun classes and simultaneously bemoaning the chaos we're unleashing on teachers by enrolling them along with buddies. 

Now, I am pregnant again. I had a lot of fear about getting marooned on Baby Island with the new little one, especially now that I’m enjoying having a bigger kid in school. So many moms get stuck with help only as a treat, and mostly doing the work of raising infants in daytime hours (and beyond) alone, and the days are often long and exhausting. That certainly was my first two years with Dash. I felt a visceral resistance to doing it again, and heartbreak at the loneliness to come. 

While I still don't know how the picture will look once we've got a fresh baby in tow, a lot of these families of Dash's peers are already stepping up in ways that make this journey feel different. They are already showing up to have him over when we have appointments, or standing ready with practical support as we need it, or even just expressing excitement about having a baby around again. 

This is just how it's supposed to be--we were never meant to raise our babies one-on-one, boxed away in houses and trying to fit babyhood in around the margins of an individualistic idea of adult life mostly in a workplace. We're social animals, and our kids in a pack teach each other so much, allowing more space for the adults to hear each other and work in tandem, too. For the moms still in the trenches with babies, toddlers, and even preschoolers--it truly can get better. Your world can grow along with your child. There is this magic that gets unlocked when we are suddenly spending more time in spaces that are built with regard to children, instead of merely accommodating them. 

Somehow, we have established a modern world that makes just existing with kids in public a constant gauntlet of ill-fitting environments that seem to assume we were all born adult. Thankfully, some of that falls away when we find ourselves working in community with folks that have similar needs and fresh ideas about where we can all go to enjoy the time we have with these small humans.

Drifts of Leaves and Sheaves of Notes

At any given moment, I have approximately 200 tabs open in my browser. My desktops, both literal and digital, are strewn with notes about countless projects in process: Design drawings and details, shopping lists, shipments in progress, travel itineraries, to-dos for days and for TODAY... 

This is an extremely accurate reflection of what it feels like to have this bunch of very different irons in the fire at all times, and to try to hold the line against or amid the chaos, so that basic household functions and beyond keep moving forward without disruption. 

I'm very blessed to have a partner with whom I have a lot of overlap in terms of attention and ability. To an extent, we have our specializations, but we also frequently have to hand the reins over to each other to focus on something more singularly. He has his own stacks of scrawled scraps of paper, calendar reminders and commitments that somewhat resemble mine and also push forward things that remain on the margins of my own consideration. 

And, still. As I try to organize this to aid a sense of clarity as my brain struggles to resettle into this time zone, I'm a little awestruck by the receipts and what they reveal about how broad my focus has to be and how attentive to the details I have to somehow remain. Make sure the renovation proceeds roughly in budget, but also make sure the kiddo has a Halloween costume that fits. Coordinate a busy holiday season, and be sure that the dog and everyone else gets their vaccinations on time. Pay the normal bills, and all of the irregular ones that can lead to losing the house if they are forgotten. Order school pictures, make sure there are lunch supplies, and don't forget to feed yourself. 

Adulting is entropy. Or at least this stage of it, with a young child and a dog and a marriage and a house to keep up, is. It doesn't feel like chaos all the time, but there are certainly moments when I'm trying to organize it all, like redirecting the tide, where I sit back in awe of how far beyond looking out for myself I have gotten. 

Last week, I had a small hotel room to myself. Keeping it tidy with just me in it felt remarkably effortless. I am a maximalist and a clutterbug, and yet, on my lonesome, everything finds its right place by the end of the day, even when I'm thoroughly occupied with business in two time zones across the world from each other and a very full schedule running around a city as big as London. 

I'll admit to looking around at the situation at home and wondering why it isn't cleaner, smoother, more refined. But the truth is, there is a lot of life going on around here. A lot, a lot. There's no way to focus on everything 100% at all times. Balls get dropped; some bounce, some roll away under furniture and emerge covered in dust bunnies, and others manage to be juggled no matter what other parts of the act descend into disarray. And some shatter--rarely, but it happens. 

Like leaves in autumn, these notes and reminders fall at my feet as I keep up the juggle. When I look closely, I can see so much hiding in them: The incubating interests of my growing child. The continued cultivation of curiosity and adventure with my husband. The commitment to building a safe and healthy world that can expand to hold others. The hibernating hopes of old dreams, and the gently composting substrate of countless ideas that often surprise me by providing fertile ground for new possibilities. 

I sweep the path a little here and there, physically and psychically, clearing space for things to grow. On and on it goes...

Thoughts on a Saturday

When it comes to babies, like dating, if it's not a "Fuck yeah!!" then it's a no. 

I didn't used to believe this. I myself was not particularly into babies, though I did feel my son's spirit out there calling to me, and had felt with my husband nearly from the beginning a primal sense of our child's possibility. I was very into *my* baby, but I'm not really the person who feels an overwhelming need to hold anyone else's baby. 

But I also felt like there were so many people in my life who didn't want children who would make excellent parents. I wished, for the sake of humanity, that these fantastic people would be at my side in the endeavor of parenting. I wanted the club to be full of my favorites, and for us all to plot a new course together. 

Now, having a real, human child, I deeply appreciate the fact that the majority of abortions are had by women who are already mothers. The bones-deep understanding of the commitment, the risk, and the paradigm shift of parenting that comes only after a child's arrival is at least as primal as any urge to reproduce, and I think actually a lot more. 

So, kudos to those that realized a lot of that even without the experience of bringing a person into this world. It's major, and if you're not into it, I'm absolutely with you that you shouldn't sign up for it. 

The problem is that we have built so much of our culture up into grooming girls and women to subvert their own instincts around mothering--instincts which, by the way, do not dictate that they should want to have babies when every condition is set against them. The knee-jerk reaction is to minimize concerns, talk up how adorable babies are, hint at some otherwise unattainable fulfillment, and generally ignore the needs of the fully-formed human in front of us. 

I can tell you personally that the falling birth rate in the US is a function of the incredible risk the endeavor entails, where we have neglected maternal mortality to the point that it's actually rising, where we value the mass hallucination that is the economy over the very real animal needs we have to not just survive but thrive in a healthy environment, and where the answer from rightwing male politicians about this is not to correct any cruelties but in fact to enslave women to misogynistic pressures with no prospect of escape. It's absolutely suffocating. 

I say this all as a corrective to my prior doubts, where I often thought that some folks were hesitating to become parents partly because they were so present in their assessment of the situation that they were selling themselves short in terms of rising to the challenge. 

Several years into being a mother, I can tell you so much more about the systemic pressures to always be selling oneself short in ways that are very physical can be very dangerous. I hear so differently the doolally optimism that is reflexively trotted out when a woman expresses doubts about motherhood. 

I actually know now how discussions about a second child will never, ever hold me at the center. It's all about some fantasy of what siblings might be like, or what my husband wants, or some extrapolated sense of my own regret that fails to account for holding together what I already have. People occasionally ask me what I want, as if I consistently get the opportunity to consider that or was taught to value those impulses. Women in this culture are given very little scope to identify their own happiness and desires without guilt, to be ambitious and be praised for it, to thrive in their own lives. The pressure is to always be of service.

But I'll tell you something: Turning the other cheek only works for men, and not even all of them. For women, it's part and parcel of the erasure, the exclusion of one's own screaming instincts that this whole thing is not working well at all. And in the face of very reasonable doubts about our most essential act, entailing one's own ability to survive the risk, the answer should be to ease the way, not expect compliance and resilience in place of actual process improvements. 

So, if it's not a "Fuck yeah!!," it's a no. We need abortion access, bodily autonomy, mandated maternity leave as well as paternity leave, time to recover and bond, universal affordable childcare, reasonable prospects to safely school the children we choose to have, and a society that prioritizes living like the social animals we are so that the project of raising our high-demand offspring well is shared among many enthusiastic adults. 

Neglecting the outcomes and issues faced by living people in the now in favor of obsessing over pregnancy is abuse. Believe women, and do not turn the other cheek.