We Can Do Hard Things, Monday 3/30/20

to Chris Rice

Some of you have asked -- my boy Henry is up in Washington. He lives off campus with a few friends and is doing "school" virtually. I understand from both boys that school is really just "school," that they don't feel they're actually learning and that it's all bullshit and boring. I hear the word boring a lot, and to tell you the truth, I feel grateful that they're bored. At least for now, because who knows what sort of long-term effects this strange, strange time will have on them, our youth, our hope, our future?

I miss Henry.

Sophie just had a huge seizure that rattled me. I'm still capable of being rattled despite being tens of thousands of seizures in. Epilepsy really sucks. When will this be over? Never.

I read an article by Aisha S. Ahmad titled "Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus Productivity" that was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The writer says:

Yet as someone who has experience with crises around the world, what I see behind this scramble for productivity is a perilous assumption. The answer to the question everyone is asking — "When will this be over?" — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never.

It's not depressing, though. It's very wise, and what it did for me was to affirm what I already know, have already experienced yet willfully forget or bury or don't have the time to remember. What I already know is that I can do hard things. I know this hard thing is like no other hard thing in its scale, so I won't use the word but. It's not about me. What I can offer, though, is my tiny little mother mind™ -- remember that? I do. It's the part of me that was left after Sophie was diagnosed on June 14th, 1995. The rest of me came before that. People are used to things being recoverable, and we live in a culture -- whether religious or not -- that makes faith and hope virtues in what to me is a weird way. Some things are just not recoverable. They are irrevocable. I drove to Ralph's grocery store yesterday, wearing a mask and gloves. I have tried to limit myself from any of the shopping, but I really needed to see what was there because I'm the one planning and making the meals. I parked my car and stood in a long line that snaked behind the building, each person standing six feet from the next. We were let in one at a time, in small groups, and we shopped that way, too. Everyone is shopping that way. My eyes filled up with tears and my mask and warm breath made them fog up so I couldn't see. A long time ago, I was driving my three young children around the shitty from one of Sophie's various therapies or something. I'd gone through the drive-through of In N Out to get some french fries for them. Oliver was an infant, facing backwards, but Henry was three years old and sat in a car seat next to Sophie who was also in a car seat. Henry fed Sophie french fries, one at a time, cheerfully. Cheerfully. Or matter of factly. Matter of factly. I glanced up in the rearview mirror and teared up. The words It will never be normal for them rose up in a snaky cartoon-like bubble, filling the entire back seat. Irrevocable. I think that's why we cry. We are sad for things irrevocable.


I was talking about this with my friend Chris, who is no stranger to things irrevocable, to apocalyptic experiences, who is wise and like a big sister to me. We also know that we can feel joy anyway, live anyway, I said. She agreed. And that my friend is the ultimate example of holding two seemingly disparate ideas in one's mind at the same time and still being able to function. 

I can do hard things. You can do hard things. We can do hard things.

...be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you thinnk and how you see the world. Because the world is our work. And so, may this tragedy tear down all our faulty assumptions and give us the courage of bold new ideas. 
Aisha Ahmad

Re-Cap

I sort of panicked when I logged in to the old blog and saw that I hadn't written a post in over a week. I don't know what's happening to me, but I'm finding it difficult to get the words down and out. I feel a sort of pressure to write well here -- to write something meaningful, to exercise the muscle for the offline writing, but that takes so much out of me. I used to come here and just gab on some days, and I kind of miss that. Do you? I feel that we have a whole lot of gab to deal with nearly every single moment in the clusterfuck that is our country right now. Why should I add to it?

Here's some gab: Henry was home for nearly a month and is already gone and back to college. It was wonderful to have him home and weird, to tell you the truth. It was like he never left. The fighting with his brother, the piles of clothes on his floor, the empty cereal bowls and crusty spoons left out, the boxers on the floor of the bathroom -- shall I go on? But left he did indeed -- back in August and now again, last week. I actually remember what that experience was like -- to leave for college and then to come home. To have your parents still -- your parents. I cringe at how I probably was insufferable then. Not that Henry was insufferable -- to the contrary. There's a certain amount of angst, though, that comes with the age. We live in weird times and seem so much closer to our children than we were with our own parents. At least I think.

In other news, I did a reading on Sunday with a couple of dear writer friends. We were part of Diane McDaniel's Backyard Literary Salon and read from works-in-progress. I had done a podcast with Diane a few months ago, and she invited the incomparable Chris Rice and Tanya Ward Goodman (who also did podcasts with Diane) to read, too, along with her own writing. We had a really great turn-out of about sixty people, got over our jitters and stood up there and rocked it. I think the others would agree that it was glorious. There's something awesome about expressing yourself in amazing company -- I felt galvanized to keep at it -- to finish up MGDB*.

I so rarely like to post photos of myself all alone, but the inimitable Carl Jackson, Bird Photographer Extraordinaire and love of my life (!) took these and I actually like them. I'm trying to shed some vanity in 2018 and get over my snaggle tooth, my chins and roundnesses. I'm trying to consume less and create more.

Hold me to it.

*My Goddamn Book

Both Confident of the Tune

The road upon which we are ramblers

To Chris

I am rich in friendship, bound to a few women I've known for decades, to many that I've known for years, and to several that I've known for only a short time. I met my friend Chris at a writing workshop a little more than a year ago and fell in love with her at another writing workshop up in Tomales Bay last fall. I say fall in love because it was that but not that -- it was her reading her writing and me reading and listening. It was me reading my writing and her reading and listening. The deep connection of writers. I sat to the right of Lidia, our workshop mentor, and Chris sat to the right of me. I was aware at every moment of these two women on either side of me -- Lidia's blond braids and red boots, her Cheshire cat smile, the way she coaxed eros out of all of us and Chris' wide cheekbones, her dark eyes and silence, her coiled energy that unfolded in words on paper. I heard Chris read her life several times during the five days we met in workshop and sat in witness to what some may deem unbearable about that life except that some would bear it and do so gratefully. The power of Chris' coiled energy rippling outward from the page, her sweet voice. I do that because I can. Because it's an honor to be witness. As a mother I am rooted to the earth. My lap is broad. My hands are large. I would have gathered Chris up into my arms as she read, placed my hand on her head, my palm to her forehead, my fingers a cradle. I held her words instead. They held me.

I say fall in love because it was that but not that --  it was getting to know her through conversation about books, about our lives, over food and wine, Chinese fortune-telling, laughs. She brought beads to Sophie the first time she met her, looked in her eyes, spoke to her. I imagine she heard Sophie's voice such is her quiet, her coiled energy. 

Chris is the big sister I've never had.

On Friday night I took Sophie to the beach and picked up Chris. She had told me earlier that she would be happy to accompany us sometime this summer to the beach, to spend more time with Sophie. We walked along the water for some time, got soaked at high tide and then walked back to the car where Chris held up a towel as a shield while I changed Sophie into dry pants. When I sat Sophie in the wheelchair and began to pull her hair up and into a hairband, she began to seize, and Chris asked what she could do, how she could help. She shook the sand out of a towel and gently draped it around Sophie, covering even her feet. There's nothing to do, I said, and there is nothing to do. There's nothing to be done, really. Nothing has been done, really. It's been the same every single time Sophie has had a seizure. Nothing to do, nothing to be done, nothing has been done, nothing. That's what it feels like. Energy coiled in me as Sophie expends it. When it was over, Chris said, I've never seen one before. And that was everything. As a mother I'm rooted to the earth. I speak in confident tones. I reached across the wheelchair and put my arms around her, my big sister, my witness.

It is not what you have but what you have lost that links the reader and the writer. The longing to repair loss is in the rhythm and tone of the written piece, not in its words. The rhythm is where the reader senses the writer's truthfulness, as unerringly, I think, as an infant senses whether the person who is holding it loves it. The writer and the reader are always singing along together, both confident of the tune, but the writer more certain of the words than the reader. I understand what people are saying in their letters to me. I might say, What am I supposed to do with the sorrows people have confided in me? But isn't it the same thing as I want them to do with my sorrows, published to them? Don't do anything for me but know about me. You know this song too, don't you? Well, won't you help me sing it?

Nuala O'Faolin, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman 

Read these:

Where She Came From 
Too Much Hope
The Lid