Self

The Return of Crafting

By / January 19, 2022

For more than six months now I’ve had crafting efforts on the back burner. I had no intention of moving them off that burner in January because I intended to focus on re-drafting my middle grade novel, House in the Hollow and on house projects like preparing to move the kitchen door. To my surprise, crafting showed back up anyway these past couple of weeks. I’m not at all sure why. Particularly since I spent the first ten days of January feeling very defeated. Even without understanding why, I can celebrate the return of small projects that have no purpose other than personal joy. So I’m going to celebrate progress, even though none of these projects is finished.

Me wearing a long crocheted blue tunic/cardigan that reaches my knees. It is open at the front and the sides clearly don’t meet in the middle.

I started this cardigan project sometime last year. I feel like it may have been last January, so most of what you’re looking at is last year’s work. But in the past couple of weeks I finished the back panel and joined everything together. The pattern I’m working from has sleeves, but I’m feeling discouraged about my first attempt at making a sleeve. Also I think I like how it looks and feels sleeveless. So I’ve switched to working on the ribbed collar that runs down the entire front of the cardigan. One problem with it is that it feels too tight/constrained below my waist. I may either disconnect the sides from the hips down so that it has slits, or might crochet triangle sections to make it more swooshy. But first I want to get the collar on and see how that looks.

Side by side comparison photos of me wearing a red knit dress. The second photo has a waist piece added so that the skirt ends up longer.

I have several of these dresses and I love them. They are super comfortable and are excellent for dressing up with accessories. My only complaints about them are that I feel like the waistline hits too high on me, and I wish the skirts were a few inches longer. (I prefer tea length in dresses.) So I decided to deconstruct one of the dresses and add in a panel to elongate and emphasize my waist. In this side-by-side picture (if you squint) you can see that four hours of work turned a perfectly wearable dress with a few irritations into a slightly longer wearable dress with different irritations. I’m not completely happy with what I’ve got yet. The waist panel needs to start higher up on the dress. Also I discovered that I couldn’t put the bottom of the waist panel as low as I had intended without emphasizing some body shape that I would prefer to de-emphasize. So I’ve got lots of unpicking and resewing in my future. But first I want to wear the dress as it is to see if the added length of skirt is as happy as I hope it will be. The length doesn’t look that much different in the photos, but it feels different.

Shape of a phoenix bird in pencil, but the bird is made up of words that are taken from Amanda Gorman’s excellent poem A New Day’s Lyric.

Several years ago I played with the idea of creating images out of words. That idea has been calling to me again and seems like an excellent thing to combine with poetry. Eventually I want to get to the place where I am writing original poems and executing the shapes with calligraphy. I decided to practice concepts using Amanda Gorman’s poem A New Day’s Lyric. This process lets me really delve into the beauty of that poem and internalize the words and ideas in a way that I’m really enjoying. Using excerpts from the poem, I now have the rough shape of a phoenix. I need to re-pencil on a larger piece of paper. Then I can break out my calligraphy markers and start shaping the lines of words. Ideally I’ll render the final piece in reds, oranges, yellows, and browns. So I’ll have to figure out which colors add to the clarity and message of the words. I suspect I’ll have to re-draft and re-draw this a dozen times before I am happy with it. All of which appeals to me, because the point of the piece is practice, not the end result.

The thing I can’t easily post a picture of is my progress on House in the Hollow. I’m about 8500 words into my re-drafting process. All of those words have happened since January first. That is slower than I wanted. I was hoping to do a thousand words a day, but it is more progress than I’ve had in the past two years combined, so I’m feeling triumphant about it anyway. I’m aiming for 60,000 words, so I’m barely started. Slow and steady moves me forward.

Complicated Kindnesses

By / November 29, 2021

The first kindness arrives on my doorstep wearing a Christmas hat and smiling, standing a pandemically-correct six feet away from the door. She was my child’s primary teacher fifteen years ago and wants to reconnect with us now that she has moved back into the neighborhood. The person she remembers no longer exists. My child has changed their name to Lad and embraced a nonbinary gender identity, including the use of they/them pronouns. I want to give her the connection she needs, but I have to decide whether to disrupt her memory of my child, and possibly her binary worldview. The words “they go by Lad now” are easy to say, but saying the words opens a conversation far larger than a porch treat exchange.

I stand in the doorway between her and the inhabitants of my house, including Lad, now adult, but still living at home. I’ve held space for Lad before. Teenagers seek identity, to discover who they are. This important developmental task becomes exponentially harder when your body does not match your internal experience of yourself. It was years before any of us, including Lad, understood how gender dysphoria was complicating Lad’s ability to live, miring them in suicidal thoughts and depression. When Lad opted out of church, it was almost a relief that none of the youth leaders came to ask why. At the time I didn’t even know what the explanation was, just that my child needed space. So I defended their space. I sorted the people in Lad’s life into allies or obstacles; people who understood and adjusted to needs we couldn’t always define, or people incapable of comprehending gender or mental health issues no matter how much explanation I poured into their ears. Not knowing which the woman on my doorstep would be, I decide I am too tired to be an educator today. I thank her for the treat and remembrance. She waves a cheerful goodbye and leaves.

The next kindness comes in small packages left on our doorstep, holiday gifts from church leadership. I stand there looking at a card with the wrong name on it, printed from a database by a person who does not know our story. This gift is meant to make us feel part of the community. For me, that community is a refuge. For Lad… it is an alienation rather than a connection. Alienation was not always Lad’s experience with church. There were loving adults and friends, moments of joy. But once a person turns twelve, church participation becomes binary gendered. Lad traveled the expected track with an increasing sense that this was not their place, that the binary did not fit. Their choice was to press themselves into a false shape in order to stay, or to leave.  Even after leaving, it took Lad years to find their name, their voice, themself and to be ready for that name to be known. When they finally were ready to tell people, we were in the middle of the first year of pandemic. Opportunities for sharing the name change were few. It is not the fault of church leaders that they do not know about Lad’s name switch. I quietly re-gift the offering, waiting for a less mass-produced opportunity to let people know Lad as they are.

The third kindness is my friend who texts me a passage in the updated handbook saying transgender members can update their membership record to their preferred name. This friend knows about Lad’s name switch and since her husband is ward clerk, he can update the record. In moments Lad’s name is in LDS Tools. The gender options are still binary, and we have to squeeze “they them pronouns” into a suffix field, but it is a start. With this small change my ward and neighborhood can begin to engage with the person Lad is now. The old name served well, but it is done. Becoming who we’re meant to be by acquiring a new name should be understandable for church members, a pathway to comprehension. Most of my neighbors only need an instructive map for how to welcome people who don’t fit their expectations. The updated handbook begins to teach how to be more welcoming, how to change expectations to have room for more people. Listing Lad’s name lets people come to me and ask for information when they are ready to know. At the very least it means the next automatically generated label for a gift will have the right name on it.

Lad is not likely to come back to church. Not unless church culture and doctrine changes more dramatically than is usual for a single person’s lifetime. I sometimes grieve that my cultural home was not a place my child could stay, but I must find peace with things as they are rather than holding happiness in wait for changes that may never come. God has told me that He loves Lad exactly as they are, because of who they are, and they will be welcomed in eternity. I don’t try to match the edges of this knowledge to doctrinal structures, instead I exercise faith in the goodness and fairness of God. Lad has other paths to connect with the divine and I am to stay with my people and my church. This is where I serve. This space in between. Sometimes that service is standing in the doorway to protect Lad from people who will judge and not understand. Other times I am a bridge, extending love and explanation to beloved community members who want to connect but don’t have the information to do so.

 Kindness is sometimes packaged clumsily, but the intent is love, and love is the construction material of connection. With that love I work teach my people how to make room, so that some future child has a space where they can both be themselves and stay.  This is the kindness I can offer in return for all the kindnesses that have been extended to me.

Note: The first reader for this essay was Lad, they gave edit notes and had veto power over the entire essay.

Paying Attention to Money

By / October 29, 2021

I was talking to my artist daughter the other day. She described a thing she was working on and I turned the conversation to its salability. I’ve done this to her before, and it is not good because the salability conversation takes her to an anxiety place. So I caught myself and returned the conversation back to joy-in-project, which was a much happier conversation for both of us. As I thought about the conversation later, (because I always overthink conversations later) I considered how different my daughter’s creative life is from mine. She has a spouse with a day job that pays their family bills. She doesn’t have to make creative decisions with bills in mind. I do.

My entire ability to pay bills is based in the combined creative output of both Howard and I. This has been the status quo of our lives since Howard quit Novell back in 2004. I’ve had nearly twenty years of training that means the minute I see a creative thing, my brain starts considering salability and marketing strategy. The impulse to market is less when I’m at the front end of project money rather than the dwindling tail, but it is still there and it affects everything. It shapes my every day, where I spend my efforts, and what I commit to do. I would like to put out some books via traditional publishers. It would help us diversify our income streams, it would reach new readers, it would be personally satisfying and reassuring. But traditional publishing is a spec project that is very slow and ties up IP that I could turn into money faster using another means. It also uses up time and energy that I could be using on more immediately lucrative tasks. This is a huge reason why I keep de-prioritizing writing my novel or my picture books.

I am constantly looking past the point when funds run out, to think how to make the next batch of funds arrive before I can’t pay bills anymore. It is an ongoing stress and a distraction, yet even while worrying about money, I am aware of how fortunate I am to have resources that let me buffer the highs and lows. Long-established home ownership is a huge buffer even while being a money pit. That buffer got bigger with the huge increase in home values in the past year. Which just highlights to me yet another way my daughter’s life experience is different than mine. In the last year my buffer got cushier, while her possibility of ever owning a home got further out of reach.

I can’t afford to undo twenty years of training in thinking about marketing. I mean that both literally in the financial sense and more figuratively in that the energy to put into that work would be even more energy not going into paying my bills. For years I moved forward, half aware of the constant financial calculation in the back of my brain, but hoping that if I could just bring in enough money, get far enough ahead on the bills, I could buy some space for me to create work that doesn’t have to prove its value with dollars.

Then I had a conversation with Howard. It was one of our regular kitchen meetings where we talk about the work he has in front of him and I have in front of me. In this particular conversation I talked about accounting, giving him a summary of our financial state; enough so that he knows how close we are to needing to run another Kickstarter without tangling him in so much anxiety that his ability to work is crippled for the day. During the conversation I realized that I am monitoring the world situation, the labor shortages, the supply chain issues, and panicking a bit because if we do have a big recession I don’t feel financially prepared for it. I have plenty of resources to manage bills for the next several months, but I don’t have the resources to solve long term problems for a couple of my children who are currently disabled to the point that they can’t support themselves. I am panicked, not because we’re in trouble, but because I am borrowing trouble and trying to defend against every branch in the future possibility tree. It is a huge waste of emotional resources.

So while the world at large is living the consequences of Just In Time manufacturing, I’m trying to learn how to spend my stockpiles of time and effort (and therefore money) on things that are not immediately poised to bring in money. I’m also highly aware that despite the noble-ish sound of letting creative work be what it wants to be regardless of salability, I’m also playing a long game here. Because if I ever do manage to sell something into commercial publishing it will be because of work I did on spec.

The thoughts are still all tangled, and perhaps I’m circling the same realizations I’ve made before and lost track of. (This is one of the hazards of keeping a blog for nearly two decades, delving the archive and realizing that I had a very similar epiphany seven years ago.) Yet this morning I started my day with writing a tweet-sized spooky story and then this blog post before doing any work that is tied more immediately to income. For today I trusted that my future self will figure out the money stuff and let my today self find joy in writing.

My Office Home

By / September 21, 2021

I have an office, a room in my house that I can arrange however I wish. Sometimes I tend the arrangement of my office space, making plans, moving things around, trying to balance the necessary things with the beautiful things and with the items which have drifted into my space because they don’t have anywhere else to belong yet. My office ends up being an eddy in the household. A place where random things come to rest. These things accumulate until the space is so cluttered as to be almost unusable. I sometimes tell myself that this is why I don’t use my office much. It is too cluttered.

I have a secondary office in the front room. It is a chair sitting next to a TV table piled with my laptop, my phone charging station, stacks of books I intend to read, notebooks I grab for writing thoughts down, and loose papers where I wrote notes when I couldn’t get to a notebook fast enough. This space is unlovely, but contained. I sit in it every day, seamlessly moving from household administration to creative work. All the other people in the household walk into this space and talk to me. They don’t intend to interrupt my work, but the space is public. It is where they come to eat and be social. On the third time I’m interrupted mid-written-sentence, I wonder why I don’t retreat to my office, to a space that is more private where they’ll think before intruding. But it feels dark down there in the basement, despite the cheerful yellow paint on the walls. Despite the art I selected and arranged. Despite the leaf trim I hand painted which adorns the top edge of the room. Lack of windows and natural light is another reason I give for not using my office.

I have a plan about my windowless office. I heard of a means to make a faux window. I bought the supplies from the light board to the curtains. All the pieces are sitting there among the other clutter. Waiting for me to move the dresser, so I can remove and re-space the shelves, which will let me reorganize the books, which will let me install the faux window, and create a cozy space that I will surely start using. I can put the cozy faux-fireplace space heater right under the window. That would be the same heater I bought to make the space feel cozy so that I would start using the space more. I keep trying to lure myself down there. It keeps not quite succeeding.

My desktop computer resides in my office. I sit at it to print postage, to do the weekly accounting, to work on layout and graphic design. I sit there several hours per week, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty hours per week depending on the shape and urgency of projects. I sit at the desk covered with stacks of paper intended to remind me of coming tasks, next to my arrangement of small artworks on the wall. Most of the art is small prints or originals purchased directly from artists at conventions. They make me happy when I remember to look at them instead of focusing on the work in front of me.

In the other corner is the rocking chair which used to live in my baby’s room. All four babies in turn were rocked in that chair, and then it was shuffled from corner to corner of the house after children no longer needed to be rocked. I supposed it makes sense that it ended up in my office when I wasn’t willing to let the chair go, even though all the babies had become adults. I sit in that chair every week for two hours while I attend an online writer’s date. My writer friends see this little corner with its library of books and the wooden carved mask which we bought on our trip to South Africa in 1999, another object that ended up in my office because it carried to much emotional freight for us to let it go, but for which we couldn’t find any other place in the house for it to belong.

So I guess I do use my office. I use it for specific tasks and to store specific things. Yet it feels like I don’t. It feels like I sit in the front room, in the sunshine, and in different clutter than my office clutter, trying to write where people will walk through and talk to me. And when they do, I wonder to myself why I don’t go sit in my office. I wonder, but I don’t get up and move.

I have a tertiary office. It is my bedroom, one corner of which I’ve turned into a Zoom space. I painted that corner of the room a different color from the rest and put up decorative shelves where they can be seen on camera. Carefully placed beautiful objects adorn the space. That little corner makes me happy to see when I look at it from my bed. It isn’t comfortable for working (hence sitting downstairs for my weekly writer dates), but it is perfect for attending Zoom meetings and virtual parties. I love my Zoom corner.

Sometimes I sit on my bed to write. I prop up all the pillows and open the blinds so that I can see out into my back garden with its trees. From that spot I can stare out the window, or look at my Zoom corner. It is a quiet space where people won’t interrupt me as easily. My use of this tertiary space lends credence to the theory that the problem with my office might actually be the lack of windows. I crave natural light, particularly in the winter months.

I imagine a hypothetical office someday. Perhaps when I can claim a bedroom back from one of my children after they leave home. I imagine an office which combines all the best parts of my current offices. With a designated shelf for books I intend to read, a desk specifically for letter writing and crafting, comfortable lounging spaces for writing, natural light streaming in the window, and art I selected for myself.

If I had this hypothetical office, would I use it all the time? Or is it something else that draws me to do so much work while sitting exactly where everyone can easily interrupt me? Perhaps I have a habit of always being available because I spent so many years being the on-call parent when my kids were small. Perhaps it is in response to the fact that Howard and I have a collaborative process made up of a dozen small creative meetings throughout the day where we round up the thoughts from the just-finished task and open up the thoughts for what comes next. Perhaps it is knowing that I have to catch my people in the moments when they are in between if I want to talk to them at all. So I lurk in the place they pass through.

I don’t actually have answers, I don’t need answers, but I find the behavioral observation of myself interesting. I have three office spaces, but all of them are some level of shared. I could retreat more often than I do, but I tend not to. I could claim spaces and set boundaries around them more firmly, but I don’t. Mostly it works. I’m able to create and think and administer. So my process may be scattered and strange, but It isn’t actually a problem. I guess I’ll keep flowing with it until the need for something else emerges.

Touchstones in My Parenting

By / May 4, 2021

Mother’s Day is drawing nearer and I’m watching it approach with some trepidation because I’m never quite sure what emotions will hit me on that day. As I was trying to figure out how to feel, I went spelunking for a twitter thread I wrote a few years back that I thought would be a good reminder to put in front of people. (This one) Yet during that dive, I found some things I did not expect, like this post on The Endgame of Motherhood, written by me eight years ago. In that post I was facing my oldest leaving for college and the grief I carried around that life shift. By itself, this post would have been a moment of nostalgia, but the next thing I found was Walking the Spiral, a post written two years later. Those years had been transformational and painful in ways that I hadn’t even imagined when I wrote Endgame of Motherhood. To quote from Walking the Spiral:

2012 was before. It was before all the transitions that our family made stepping all the kids up, one to college, one into high school, one into junior high. It was before my younger daughter had panic attacks. It was before my older son began his long slide into depression. It was before we recovered from that. It was before I discovered that our recovery was a limited one. It was before my younger son also had panic attacks. It was before all the appointments, therapists, doctors, medicine, and meetings. It was before something in me broke, or gave up, or grew too tired. The person who visited the spiral in 2012 could honestly look her depressed son in the eyes and promise him it would get better. The person I was when I returned wondered if that was true. I wondered if I had been lying to him. I knew I had to keep going, taking the right steps, but somehow I’d lost touch with the belief that we could pull out of the emotional mire which kept reclaiming us. We’d seem to be out, but then the troubles would come again. My feet stood at the opening to the spiral. The last time I’d been here was before. I didn’t know why I needed to come again, nor why I wanted to cry at being there. I stepped forward and began to walk…

…Finding and walking the spiral seemed such a silly thing. I still don’t understand how so much meaning got attached to it. Yet in that step out from the open end of the spiral I felt like I’d left some grief behind and took something hope-like with me in its place. The spiral helped me remember that there was a before, and the existence of a before heavily implies that somewhere ahead of me there is an after. I just need to keep wending my way along the path until I get there.

I realized that I have now, eight years after the first post and six years after the second, arrived at the after which I posited must exist if I could just keep moving forward. After took a lot longer to arrive than I would have hoped for, and if anyone had told that me who walked the spiral that she had six years of struggle ahead, it would not have felt like good or hopeful news. And it wouldn’t have been. Even with all I’d been through, the hardest bits were still ahead of that younger me who sought out a spiral without knowing why. Yet here I am, with all four kids still alive and beginning to thrive. And I can see all the ways that progress needed to be slow and steady. The ways that we had try and fail and try again. (and fail again and try again and…) Now I read these words from my eight years ago self who was facing one grief without knowing a multitude was coming for her.

I don’t miss the baby and toddler years, though I enjoyed them while I was in them. Right now is what I will miss. I’m going to miss four at home, two teens two kids, all of them running in different directions, squabbling over the cat, and the incessant sound of video games. This is my heart’s home and just now it feels like I will spend the rest of my life missing home.

I would not trade positions with her for anything. Yes that all-the-kids-at-home time is a treasured memory, but now I get to have all-my-kids-are-adults-and-their-lives-aren’t-my-job-anymore. I loved that stage and I love this stage. There were a lot of things between there and here which were heart wrenchingly difficult, but I wouldn’t trade those away either because most of the best things have happened as a direct result of the hardest things. I have a new heart’s home now, and it is a good place. More than that, I can feel that future heart’s homes exist out there for me. This one is good. The next will be too.

Right now my primary task in relation to motherhood is to make peace with myself about all the things I did and did not do, to find kindness in my heart for the choices made in difficult circumstances. I still have mothering work ahead of me, a role to play in the lives of my adult children. Depending on the long-term needs of my young adults, I may never be an empty nester. Also, they are not the only ones I will nurture, I’ve turned some of my (joyously surplus) mothering energy toward helping other creative people grow. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but it is far less intensive than what I’ve been through, for which I am glad.

I still don’t know how I’m going to feel on Sunday, but whatever feeling shows up, I’ll give it a space to exist for a time. Then I’ll move onward.

Easter Thoughts

By / April 4, 2021

I don’t have any personal traditions surrounding Easter. I probably ought to since it is part of my religious tradition, but somehow the ones I used to have were all focused on providing an experience for my children rather than me forming a personal connection with the holy day. So when the kids stopped caring about egg coloring and Easter egg hunts, we also stopped having lessons about Christ’s resurrection. The two probably shouldn’t have been intertwined, but somehow one triggered the other. The other thing that led to an ebb in household Easter traditions was that some of my kids have stepped away from my religious tradition. We’ve found a good family balance now where all the beliefs are given space without imposition, but it means that creating a family experience out of a religious symbolic holiday is not something we do anymore. Christmas still works because we can all engage with the more secular trappings equally, but Easter always had a lighter touch on our lives. (This is a cultural oddity since from a purely religious standpoint the importance and spiritual weight of Easter is far greater than that of Christmas. Christmas is the promise of a Savior to come, Easter is the culmination of the atoning work of a Savior.) All of which is to say that I’m in the middle of a holiday with no particular plans for marking the day.

I did listen to the General Conference for my church which is a semi-annual broadcast that happens the first weekend in April and October. Sometimes the spring conference coincides with Easter, which it did this year. So I got to hear multiple people speak about the holiday, its personal meaning to them, and its larger significance. I particularly appreciated that the church chose Easter Sunday as a day to lean into the multi-national aspects of my church. The vast majority of the speakers gave pre-recorded talks from their home countries. For most of them English was not their first language. I loved hearing different sounds given to familiar words, and I marveled at the courage necessary to give a speech to a global audience in a secondary language.

For me Easter is deeply connected with the Spring bulbs that are blooming. It is hope for things to grow and thrive even after they’ve died or gone dormant. It is a calmness of spirit that rings like a clear tone inside me when I pause to listen to it. It is knowing that when I reach out to the divine, I connect with a source of strength larger than what I can carry inside me. It is a thread of hope that I can someday hug my grandparents again even though they died years ago. And yes, it is also in specific stories about Jesus Christ, His life, His death, His resurrection. I’ve seen some of those stories scoffed or ridiculed on the internet today. Not in the gentle meme jokes that someone inside the community makes for fellow believers to laugh together (I’ve seen and laughed at some of these too,) but sharp jokes aimed at Christianity as a powerful giant to be speared and taken down. Christianity is indeed a large and clumsy giant with very large footprints. It is sometimes leveraged harmfully. Yet it is also a source of personal strength and guidance to many people, and careless attempts to spear the giant can wound people.

Today I am not wounded. In fact, I feel profoundly healed and whole. The other day I was having a conversation with one of my kids about how the pandemic quieted all the noise in their lives. It removed all the options for schooling, volunteering, expanding outward, and forced them to sit with themselves. In that quiet they gained identity that they had lacked before. In many ways pandemic did the same for me. Today as I sit with the feeling of Easter and try to connect with God, I feel grateful for the lessons of the past year, I feel hope for how far I can fly once I’m fully free of the pandemic cocoon. Easter is a story of suffering, betrayal, pain, death, entombment, transformation, and re-emergence. It feels very relevant and important to me this year.

Getting Vaccinated

By / March 29, 2021

The place was tucked away behind a gym, marked only by a sign that said “vaccine clinic” with an arrow. We had to park far out in the parking lot because the only available close spots were marked as being for the gym customers with signs atop those road construction barrels. A simple, practical way for the gym and the clinic to temporarily share. Six month from now the gym will still be there and the vaccine clinic will be gone. Mass vaccinations complete. The day was exceptionally windy, and tugged at the papers in my hand. Forms confirming my appointment and that I’m not likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

I did not expect the man at the clinic door to be wearing the fatigues of a national guardsman. Though as soon as I saw him, I realized that it made perfect sense to use personnel trained in discipline and service. He asked if we were there for our first or second shot, then waved us into the building to a table where a different guardsman looked at our papers. Then we walked down a hallway into the large warehouse space, aisles and lines defined by traffic cones topped with caution tape and tape markings on the floor. We moved from station to station, no chance to go astray. At each step a guardsman directed us to the next station. Nurse to read through the papers again and write some things down on the admin section. Guardsman to scan our IDs and print labels for us to carry forward. Guardsman to show us which table to sit at. Nurse to put a sticker on the form we brought with us and to schedule our second appointment. Guardsman to tell us which table to sit at next. Nurse to afix the second sticker onto vaccine cards which she hands to us and tell us about possible side effects from the Pfizer vaccine. Guardsman to send us to the next room and assign us a table. Two nurses, one for each of us, with alcohol swabs, needles, and bandaids. Then some nurses to send us into a forest of individual chairs, six feet apart, where we are to wait for fifteen minutes.

It is all very efficient, despite all the stops. Except for that last fifteen minutes, we never have to wait for more than a minute for any station. We never bunched up with other people. All of it tuned to get people through and back to their lives. I wonder if all the vaccine sites have developed a similar efficiency. Probably. Efficiency just sort of happens when people have to do the same thing hundreds of times in a day. For the guardsmen and medical personnel, this is their job. They’ll do the same thing tomorrow and the day after. I want to take pictures of it all. Record the extraordinary mundainity of it. All of the mass pushes for childhood vaccination happened before I was born. The only vaccinations I’ve known happen as part of regular doctor’s visits. This is something else. This is community mobilizing, collective effort, expense, and organization to save lives. My only participation being to pass through and get my shot without causing a disruption.

Today’s shots were for me and one of my adult children. Later this week I will return with the other two adult kids. Since I won’t be getting a shot, I’ll wait in the car. The clinic people don’t want or need an extra body in there, and my people will navigate the process just fine without me. They too will pass through and participate in this historical moment.

Six weeks from now, we’ll all be fully vaccinated. We’re already beginning to have conversations about what that means and doesn’t mean for our household. I really thought I would have more emotions about my vaccine day. Maybe I had them already. Maybe they’re out there waiting for me after my brain shifts out of dispassionate-analyse-this-moment mode. For today, the thing is done, and now I move onward to the next thing.

The Edges of Compassion

By / March 23, 2021

My friend was struggling with the fact that a person they trusted to tell about their depression told them “quit moping around and get proactive about their situation.” I found some words in response to my friend’s pain that I want to capture here, because I might need these words as a reminder when I am the one struggling:

It always hurts when you run up against the edges of another person’s ability to be compassionate. Leaves you cut and bleeding when you’re already limping around injured. The flaw lies in the other person’s limited capacity for compassion, not in the size of your need. When you are healed and strong again, you will be able to extend understanding for their lack. Right now, be self protective.

I’ve had times in my life when I was overflowing with pain, where I poured that pain into the ears of sympathetic people. Yet I also watched. Because as I was pouring, there would come a point where my listener would sit back and say something like “Wow. You’ve got a lot going on.” That was when I would stop pouring even if I still felt full. My listener was at capacity and if I continued to speak, they would behave in self protective ways that might hurt me.

I’ve also experienced this from the other side. I’ve been the person trying to help someone who is depressed, who can’t/won’t take simple steps to claw themselves toward less depression. That “can’t/won’t” is the hard bit. It isn’t easy to tell which is happening, not even from the inside. Sometimes we think we need sympathy, but the thing that gets us moving is being angry at someone for the lack of it. Other times we’re just sliced by the edges of another person’s capacity and the injury makes getting out of the pit that much harder.

It is all hard. And messy. With no clear map.

Yet, I was a person who had so much pain that it overflowed when I tried to keep it private, and I doled it out in swallowable portions to my friends willing to listen. Now I can have visits with friends instead of therapeutic outpourings of emotion. I can move through entire weeks without crying. Slowly, carefully, self-protectively I have pulled myself out of stress and depression. I am able to re-build relationships that faltered while I was struggling. I am in a place where I am able to work on expanding my capacity for compassion rather than needing to depend on capacity borrowed from others. I wonder if it would have been easier in the hard place if I’d known that there was an “after” that I was struggling and scratching my way toward.

Pandemiversary

By / March 11, 2021

Today is my Pandemiversary. One year ago today I knew that everything had changed and I was fairly certain there would be no going back. Even very early on, I was working through my emotions trying to set up a pandemic life I could be happy inside for a year or more. I cried for losses before many people knew there were losses. A year ago today WHO officially declared SARS-CoV-2 (Covid 19) to be a pandemic, Disneyland closed its doors, the NBA called off March Madness, and church meetings were canceled. Prior to this day last year I lived in a world where none of those things seemed possible, then suddenly I lived in a world where they were real. In the evening I made a quick run to the grocery store to pick up bread and felt the urgency and panic in my fellow shoppers. Did I even have a mask at that point? I can’t remember. We all stood in a long line, six feet apart, made anxious by the shelves picked bare. It would be months before supply chains adapted and the shelves were re-stocked again.

Yesterday Howard got his first dose of Covid-19 vaccine. The fact of that is a testament to scientists, lab workers, and manufacturers who, without taking any risky short cuts, pushed this vaccine into existence twice as fast as we believed possible. I scheduled the appointment the very day that he became eligible. Him being vaccinated reduces our load of fear because he was the most vulnerable of my household. We know that even after vaccination we need to be responsible for reducing risks to others. Our behavior probably won’t change much, but not having to carry that fear makes everything easier.

President Biden announced that he wants every American eligible to be vaccinated by May 1st. The state of Utah already announced that it will open up vaccinations to all adults on April 1st. These announcements sound like good news, they’re certainly good for my family, however I can’t help but feel that my country has elbowed its way to the front of the vaccination line. I have friends in Canada who will have to wait into August or September. For other areas of the world it will be even longer. This is not fair. Over and over the pandemic has shone a light onto all sorts of unfairness. So guilt will be mixed in with my gladness when I’m able to make appointments for my household to be vaccinated. We will be adding to herd immunity, but I hope that someone in some other place doesn’t have to pay the cost for our benefit. I have no say over how much vaccine gets shipped to which location in the world. I can only follow the directions of my local public health officials and show up to get my shot when they say it is my turn.

We still have a long road ahead. I think it will be 2022 before we can see what post-pandemic normal looks like. I know I will be careful in deciding which things get welcomed back into my life and when. I need to see what happens to case rates when vaccinations make people over-confident. I need to see what impact variants have. I need to see whether the vaccine effectiveness sticks around for longer than six months. We’ve entered a new phase, which is not the same as being cleared to go back to life as it was. That life is gone, whats next is something new. Vaccinations mean that I won’t feel a stab of guilt or fear each time I interact with someone in my pandemic bubble. It means I can again visit with a friend or two outdoors from several feet away. It means my 18yo can seek a job without being afraid he’s risking his dad’s life. It means we can begin to address the agoraphobia that some family members have developed without having to simultaneously face down pandemic panic. Maybe I can walk inside a church building at some point this year. I’m not ready for much more than this. Not until I see how the next months play out.

I wanted to mark today’s pandemiversary in some way, have some conscious recognition of the year just past. I’d half planned to have a fire in my firepit out on my pandemic patio. Then task followed task: car maintenance, shipping packages, listening to emotions, spending time watching a movie with Howard, laughing at cats, bringing in the mail, cooking shared food. It was all so normal, and the hours slipped away. Now it is cold and I don’t really want to venture outdoors to light a fire. But perhaps letting today be entirely ordinary is a better answer to pandemiversary than creating a ceremony. A year ago the world changed, today it just continued forward. I can’t think of any better evidence for our ability to overcome and survive whatever comes next.

Being Shiny

By / February 3, 2021

It was an interesting conjunction. I’d posted a tweet about the character Chrisjen Avasarala on The Expanse and statement necklaces. This one:

I’ve never been one for big necklaces, but the combination of using Zoom for more interactions and watching Chrisjen Avasarala on The Expanse has me browsing through statement necklaces that I don’t have the budget for and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to wear.

https://twitter.com/SandraTayler/status/1357005498059350016

It was getting some interaction with twitter friends. At the same time I was in a Zoom writer date and during one of the pauses a fellow writer asked me what I was working on. I started talking about the work I’ve been doing to prep for the next class I’m teaching online. She then said something like “Wow you’re so amazing” with a tone that also suggested that she felt out of place and insecure. I was immediately hit with a desire to shrink. I felt like I was being too shiny, too impressive and I needed to tone myself down so that I wouldn’t make my friend uncomfortable.

So here I am sitting and looking squarely at that desire to not outshine others, and my own words about not feeling brave enough to wear a statement necklace. I think both are things I need to get over. I’m consciously trying to claim my own competence and to not apologize for having it. Even when that competence is based in acquired experience and study rather than an official degree or certification. This is part of granting myself permission as I wrote about a few weeks ago. Shrinking myself to fit in doesn’t actually make anyone else feel more secure in themselves, while me stepping forward to own my abilities might show them a path where they claim theirs. If I’m standing tall, I’m in a better position to help others and make space for them to grow too.

I think again about the character of Chrisjen Avasarala. She owns the screen every time she is on it, dressed gorgeously, making hard choices, willing to apologize for mistakes, but never apologizing for being herself. I can try to be a bit more like that, with or without necklaces.