I’m writing this in the gray of last Friday, thinking ahead to your future of next week. Wastewater testing in Boston suggests that we may have reached the crest of Omicron Mountain at last, with cases projected to drop sometime in the next ten days. When I started considering parenthood, they told me I should brace myself to spend a lot of time thinking about poop, but I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind. I hope we’re seeing that downslope translate into a real reduction in case load by the time you read this. I hope you and yours are well, or as well as can be expected in the circumstances. I know a lot of you aren’t, and I send you love and strength.
Our last day of child care was Monday of the week before Christmas. I’ve been handling the 9(30) to 5(ish) care at 80 percent time since my recovery, which has meant that from Monday to Thursday I write what I can before 9:30 and… that’s it. Ideally that would be an hour and a half of work, but most days it’s closer to an hour, what with this and that.
A funny thing has happened though. I struggle to describe it in any positive way, even though the experience of it is profound and positive.
I’ve been giving up.
It started when I was healthy enough to take on more child care. I wasn’t really recovered. I couldn’t speak much. My throat felt like a hot wire by 8 pm. I was sucking down tea. What I figured was, if I get eight hours of sleep, and drink plenty of fluids, and write a bit in the morning, I can handle this without hurting myself. So that’s what I did. After the first day, I didn’t feel miserable. So I did the same thing the next day. And the day after that. I kept expecting the slog to hit. I kept expecting to drown in the overwhelming pile of the undone. And… four weeks in… I’m okay.
For the last four weeks, I’ve been watching my child. In the last four weeks, I’ve let things go. I’m cooking less. I spent much less time on the internet, and on email. Running? I’d love to, but with what time, and what energy? Only this week has it even felt possible, so… maybe next week? Or not. It took me four weeks to find the time to muck out my inbox, and I’m pretty sure it was a mistake to do so. Hardly any of those people needed to hear back from me. Running will return, I’m sure, but for the last while it’s not been one of the three things I can do. So I don’t.
And time has opened.
It’s hard to talk about what that is, what it feels like, because much of it is about the texture of spending time with our child. About being there, talking, telling stories, investigating and experimenting and playing. About being genuinely present with another person, who is all the time becoming—and who is too young to exercise veto power over their stories being spread across the internet, so that’s all you’ll get from me on the subject.
I noticed throughout the day that my first instinct when “off duty” was to check email and scan social media and slack, seeking human connection through the phosphors and cell signal, but indulging that instinct left me feeling… well, gross. Scratchy eyeballs and all the emotional balm of hand sanitizer. Not (to be clear) because I don’t like my friends! What I didn’t like was the compulsive, reflexive nature of the thing. So I stopped reaching for my phone in those moments. My first choice now when off duty is to sit in a dark room, and do nothing. Maybe you could call it meditation, but I don’t want to, because ‘meditation’ make it sound like it’s something I’m doing, presumably with an app involved and some kind of daily routine and daily checkins and a guru of some sort and an instagram feed and a podcast about consistent practice. And: that ain’t it, kid.
There are real costs to this time, of course. I make my living by writing. I’m writing maybe a third, maybe a quarter as much a day as I could otherwise. But, as I would have struggled to tell myself during the last long childcare-less lockdown, a quarter or a third is not zero. The weird thing about this January mode is: I don’t care. Sure, the work happens slowly, but, the work happens. I read back over it and it is good. (Though admittedly I’ve noticed Tara’s voice acquiring a distinctly Thomas Cromwell-ish texture every now and again since my re-read of Wolf Hall. That will come out in revision, I suppose. Or it won’t.) I know almost everything that has to take place between now and the end of this book, and it will get written, one paragraph at a time if I need to do it that way. One word at a time.
In exchange, I’ve felt: here. Present in my writing. Present with our child. Present as I cook and as I move about the house, and in the few things I do in the course of the day. I end the days dog tired, but I’m there to be that tired. And that feels good.
Please don’t read this as “everything’s all right”—it’s not. Parents of young kids right now are not okay in the old US of A. I’m no policy expert but it staggers me to think, on a societal level, how much pain we’ve been willing to undergo to make sure that people can get drunk in public on the regular, vs. giving parents basically any support or coherent guidance. I don’t know any parent of young kids right now who doesn’t feel as if they’re wandering in the dark. So: don’t mistake me. That’s all very real. But I’ve come to expect it. This other thing has taken me by surprise.
When I say I feel good, I’m not engaging in some kind of eager, fake-it-til-you-make-it gratitude practice, I’m not hunting for silver linings. It’s a strange space, and I’m a bit worried that writing about it will somehow make it disappear, like fairy gold at dawn. But it is there, and writing about it marks it down. This was so, is so, can be so.
Last Exit is still out next month. Booklist gave it a great (starred) review: “Last Exit is thoughtful, action-packed, hopeful, and terrifying all at once, and has true, complicated friendships, found family, and queer love at its core.”
My story “To Make Unending,” at Sunday Morning Transport, has been receiving kind reviews—including this at boingboing. As a boingboing reader since caveman days, this feels great. Check out the other great January stories at sundaymorningtransport.com!
Thanks as always for the post, Max, and it's good to hear from you :)
I am glad you are being more present. It's such a struggle to not look at the screen, read your notifications, optimize, optimize, every day. I'm feeling it hard right now! I hope you can continue to let yourself be there for family, writing, and everything else in your life. And maybe eventually the support structures that we all need to survive will come back. I'm just looking at the wastewater numbers and hoping for an eventual return to something resembling normal life.