Week Four

I’ve been writing things down since here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here , Week Two here, and Week Three here. Related: did we really just finish week FOUR of this??

Monday, April 6th
I’m so entrenched in this now it seems like this is how life always has been, is now, and shall be forever. 

Probably not though, right?

Our daily schedule looks something like this:

Breakfast and free play before 8:00 am. 8:00-9:00 gives them an hour to get dressed, brush their teeth, pick up their bedrooms, and do Cosmic Kids Yoga. 9:00-11:00ish look like reading and math, a snack ay some point, and their “specials”: art, music, science, etc. Add in a few breaks as needed. Especially for Nolan. Though he’s essentially become another Kindergartener. Caden and Brooklyn’s teacher has been sending out these fantastic Number Corner videos each day and you should hear Nolan shouting the answers at the screen. Their teacher sent me an email last week saying, “I should just add Nolan as another student. Poor kid! I hear him in the background on all their videos!”

11:00-Noonish you’ll find the kids on their tablets. Caden and Brooklyn connect with their teacher through the Seesaw app and it’s Caden’s GREATEST JOY in life right now to send her videos detailing his latest LEGO creation or our backyard or random things in our neighborhood. I let them play games while I make lunch. (Huge shoutout to Khan Academy!)

Noon-1:30 equals lunch and quiet time. Caden and Brooklyn seem to have forgotten how to do quiet time. Mostly Caden. Particularly the whole “quiet” part. It’s getting better. Though it’s frustrating because it took Nolan the better part of the past six months to do quiet time successfully, and JUST when he was really getting into the rhythm of it, Caden and Brooklyn were back home and it completely threw everything off.

1:30-2/2:30 is screen time, a show or two.

After that it’s snack and outside time. Fridays they get a movie. If it’s gross out they can either play or we bake something or paint or whatever but that (thankfully) hasn’t happened much yet.

Really, our afternoon schedule looks how it always has, and I think that familiarity is comforting to us all right now. 

I do pretty well in the mornings. The routine is comforting. I hit a wall by lunchtime. I want time to myself and that’s hard to come by (see: homeschooling, they’ve forgotten how quiet time works). And I have my own list of to-dos that range from writing deadlines to ordering household items from the store to replying to emails to WHATEVER that seem virtually impossible to accomplish right now. Tyson’s been getting done with work between 3:00-4 00 and that helps.

I suppose it’s similar to how it felt at the beginning of the school year, where it seemed so hard to find a new rhythm but then I did. (Related: I’ve been a mom for six years and had JUST sent two off to school and Nolan to preschool for 8 hours a week for all of SIX FREAKING MONTHS and then this happened. It’s just cruel is what it is.) This is new to all of us and nobody has found a rhythm yet, at least not consistently.

Also, have the official screentime recommendations been lowered to “whatever the hell you need to survive” yet? Because while the 2-hour maximum was incredibly easy to meet before—Nolan usually had less than an hour a day and Caden and Brooklyn had nothing beyond anything they did at school—we’re now on overload over here. Between yoga and schoolwork and the screentime-just-for-fun they’ve always had in the afternoon, we’re easily hitting 3 hours a day over here, if not more. And we’ve been saying “yes” a lot more. You want to play on your tablet for 20 minutes until bedtime? Sure. We’re saying “no” to virtually everything else right now.

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Wednesday, April 8th
When I wrote last fall about being sad that Caden and Brooklyn went off to school and that everyone was right when they said “it all goes by so fast” I DIDN’T MEAN I ACTUALLY WANTED THEM ALL BACK HOME. COME ON, UNIVERSE.

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I’m sitting at my desk, in the semi-darkness, and I heard a car drive by with the music blarimg. It reminded me of being 16 and getting my license. This time of year always does.

I actually got my license in February. It must have been warm that year because the snow was already melting— I think it was right after Valentine’s Day. And I remember, not long after, in March and April, the melting snow, rolling down the windows just because it was sunny and 55 degrees, blaring my own music because I could. It felt like freedom.

I think of that every year at this time, when it’s sunny and just barely warm enough to roll down the windows. I’d turn up my music, but these days it’s more often NPR or a podcast and that’s not quite the same. Also, this year, it doesn’t really feel like freedom.

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Thursday, April 9th
I saw a school bus drive by today and it was the strangest thing. Usually my life is full of school buses. Even before Caden and Brooklyn went off to school; we can basically see the high school from our backyard. We can hear the football games clearly in the fall. And less than mile down the busy road behind our house is a middle school and an elementary school. Buses drive back and forth all day, usually, during the school year.

When Nolan was a baby, he would wake up from his afternoon nap just about the time the buses were all lining up to pick up the high schoolers. We’d sit in the glider in his room together or look out the large windows downstairs as he would chant, “Bus! Bus! Bus!”

Anyway, I saw a bus yesterday. I have no idea where it came from or where it was going. And it was as strange as seeing one in the middle of July.

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Friday, April 10th
The other day I drew an activity on the sidewalk in front of our house. It began with hopscotch and then into frog jumps, transitioned into running and hopping on one foot and skipping around in a circle to turn around and do it all again.

I can see it from where I type here, up in our bedroom. There’s a girl outside now, maybe 11 or 12 years old. She’s been going back and forth on our sidewalk for the past seven minutes or so and it makes me so happy.

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It makes a lot of sense to me that Easter is the first holiday we’ll celebrate in this strange new world. Easter to me is a story of contrasts: grief and joy, dark and light, literally a story of death and life.

It feels like we’re holding a lot of those contrasts right now. We hold those swinging, opposing emotions: our own grief and joy, dark and light, and even death and life. 

Today is a dark day. As Glennon Doyle says, “First the pain. Then the waiting. Then the rising.” We’re in the middle of this right now; just at the very beginning of so much waiting. Though, sometimes, we’re still in pain. Maybe, just like the stages of grief, the pain and the waiting aren’t so linear as we’d like to think. 

Still, this year, we wait for our very own rising.

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Joining in today with Laura Tremain’s 10 things on the 10th prompt. Today’s is 10 things you miss.

1. Seeing friends and family. The kids want nothing more than to be able to play with their neighborhood friends. 

2. Hair cuts. There are some split ends up in here. 

3. The kids going to school. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

4. Certainty. Everything is so up in the air right now. We don’t know how long this will last or what our new normal will look like when this is all over. I’m assuming that summer is cancelled and the kids will go back to school in the fall but...will they? Tyson and I will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in October and were trying to decide whether to live it up in New York City or take a tropical vacay. It seems unlikely either will happen now. 

5. Pedicures. But for real.

6. Being able to run to the store for random things. Like, I accidentally bought sugar free coffee syrup yesterday and almost GAGGED into my coffee this morning but I can’t (or at least won’t) just run to pick up another one.

7. Going outside without it being weird if there’s another person in my general vicinity.

8. Eating at restaurants. Drinking at breweries. Getting takeout without wiping the bags and containers down.

9. Options. Like, before I might have CHOSEN to stay home instead of go to that party/event/night out but at least I had the CHOICE.

10. Thinking. As in, about anything other than COVID-19. Also please see #3: the children are home and it is LOUD and I just want a MOMENT to complete an entire sentence in my own head.

So You're a LEGO Mom

Maybe it was when you stepped on a LEGO brick (for the 14th time today). Or when you found little LEGO creations in every nook and corner of your house. Maybe it was when you were warned to “never ever touch” some sort of sprawling creation in the middle of the living room floor. Or when you couldn’t remember the last time you made it out of the store without a stop by the LEGO aisle.

That’s when you realized it.

You’re a LEGO mom.

I remember specifically when it began in my house: Spring Break 2018. My twin four-year-olds and their two-year-old brother were going stir-crazy. They were driving me batty. Preschool had given some structure to our days but no school loomed in front of us for an entire week, and it was a cold one at that. We did what any mom in my situation would do: drove to Target to wander the aisles.

I found some small LEGO sets for $4.99. They were cute. The box said they were for ages “4-99”.

Hmmm… I thought, Let’s give these a try.

We got home and I set my twins up at the kitchen table with their new toys. I even remember taking a picture of them, thinking, Maybe they’ll like this.

That became the understatement of my life.

Read more about being a LEGO mom over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Week Three

I’ve been writing things down since here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here and Week Two here.

Sunday, March 29th
Some recipes:

This focaccia. (Freeze in pieces and warm at 300 degrees for 10ish minutes.)
This granola. (No coconut chips, please. Use roasted, salted pistachios and pumpkin seeds and cut the amount of salt to 1-2 teaspoons.)
Any pasta but especially this one because I’m obsessed.
Brownies. From a box. Because they’re the best and we can only do so much.

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Monday, March 30th
A friend asked me how I was feeling with Brooklyn fracturing her wrists. I can’t remember her exact wording, but something along the lines of whether it felt like more work or more chaos or if I felt exhausted.

You’d think it would, right? In some ways it does. She needs help dressing and undressing and bathing and all sorts of things she’s been able to do herself for years now.

But honestly? I said no. In the midst of the world being turned upside down, Brooklyn’s broken wrists actually feel incredibly manageable. There’s a PROCESS for all this.

I knew which clinic to go to. They knew to take X-rays and how to bandage her arms. That we needed to return in a few days to get casts and that we’ll go back in three more weeks to have them removed. They know that by then her wrists will have healed, that in a healthy 6-year old girl, three weeks is the extent of all this. 

It’s actually incredibly comforting, in the midst of so many unknowns, that there’s a timeline here. We don’t know exactly how long schools will be closed or when restaurants will reopen; we don’t know when everyone can return to work or if the kids will play baseball this summer. But we know that in three weeks, her wrists will be fixed.

Certainty, right now, is in short supply. I’ll take what I can get.

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Guys, we don’t know how to leave the house any more. I took the kids to a drive-thru for lunch. (Which has traditionally been a treat after preschool conferences: we had Nolan’s by phone this morning.) (P.s. He’s doing FANTASTIC!) Of course, we couldn’t go inside. Still, it took a solid 10 minutes longer than it usually does for us to get in the car.

Yes, you need shoes. Yes, you need a jacket if you feel cold. No, you can’t bring 18 toys. After you get your shoes on you need to physically move your body out of the mudroom and go sit in the car. And then buckle yourself in. No, that’s not your seat. Yes, you can unbuckle and go back in the house to go potty. 

We’re broken, is what I’m saying. We don’t even know how to leave the house for the most basic of excursions anymore. Lord help us.

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I was messaging a friend back and forth. She said she’s quiet right now, that she doesn’t have any words and is just trying to process things. I thought it was so interesting because this friend and I are basically the same person, yet I feel like I have nothing BUT words right now. I’m posting things more than ever. Even right here, right now, I come back to this document labeled “Coronavirus” in my Google Docs almost every day. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s words. Lots of them.

I realized I used to have more words when the kids were younger. When they were home basically all day every day, I felt like I had more words, in a way. Absent adult conversation, writing was a way for me to get adult thoughts and feelings out of my head after being surrounded by small children all day. 

And this time feels SO MUCH like that all over again. Especially with distance learning. I’m physically and mentally with the kids so much right now as we tackle schoolwork and everything else throughout the day And, for the most part, they love it! But it takes a lot out of me. To some extent, I enjoy it. But it’s also incredibly draining in the same way three kids under three was draining; just their mere physical presence is a lot.

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Tuesday, March 31st
Our Pastor sent out an email today with 10 self-care strategies shared with him by a Director of Pastoral Care from his seminary. Strategy 5 reads “Do less. We can focus on 50-70% of the stuff we did before the crisis hit.” That sounds about right to me. In fact, that sounds too high. I think it falls down to 30-50% if you have small children.

Jen Hatmaker says she’s aiming for 55% with homeschooling her children. THIS IS ALL WE CAN DO.

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Wednesday, April 1st
(A Lighthearted) List of Quarantine Winners and Losers

Winners:
Homeschool moms: Just take a bow.

Beans: Your time was already coming. This accelerated it.

Athleisure: Leggings and joggers are proof he Lord loves us and wants us to be happy.

Delivery Services: Praise the Lord.

Netflix: Obviously.

Losers:
Jeans: And anything else with buttons and zippers.

Days of the Week, Names of Months, etc.: Time doesn’t matter.

Cars: I usually fill up the van once a week. Now the last time I got gas was 3 1/2 weeks ago.

Carole Baskin: Not sure how she even relates to Coronavirus but it seems like she should be on this list.

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Friday, April 3rd
Caden sent a video to his teacher today of us baking banana muffins (Because: measuring! They’re learning about measuring! Look at us being all math-y!) and the dysfunction was REAL. 

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Yesterday was mostly fine—good, even—and today feels like a shitshow. It’s all too hard and I’m sick of these kids and also it’s gross outside and why. Let’s start over again tomorrow. 

Tomorrow’s a new day, right?

I don’t know. Is tomorrow a new day? It kind of feels like the same day all over again. Like a stupid, scarier, all-of-humanity version of Groundhog’s Day.

It’s just one more up and down on the rollercoaster of feelings. I seem to roll with a cycle of “this isn’t so bad” to a big ol’ “meh” where I just exist without feelings before plummeting to “everything is terrible let’s burn down the house and just start over”. But we’ve been riding this coaster for three weeks now and I’m sure I’ll begin the cycle over again. Also we watched more Tiger King last night and after watching those people, that show makes me feel like I don’t have a single problem in the whole entire world.

So it’s fine! I’m fine. Everything is fine. And I’m seriously considering buying this t-shirt as my new daily uniform.

Week Two

I’ve been writing things down since here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here.

Sunday, March 22nd
“If I’m going to be successful at homeschooling I need paperclips,” is a thing I say now.

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Monday, March 23rd
We started homeschooling today. Technically the governor has excused kids from school through this week, but we couldn’t go another week without a schedule. “Are we doing school today?” Brooklyn asked every single day last week.

We sat at the kitchen table and Nolan actually got really into the letter and number worksheets I found for him and Caden and Brooklyn enjoyed having their attention diverted into creating their own little stories with sight words and working though math worksheets. Those two thrive on that sort of stuff. So we did school for a few hours. Science was a booklet about the solar system. Then we watched the StoryBots episode about planets, so. And library, which would have been their “special” of the day, was listening to the Story Pirates podcast while they played, which basically meant they just played because not a single one of us had any clue what we just listened to when it was all done. It was fine.

I’m tired. It’s frustrating to see all the memes about how “bored” people are. I mean, a lot of them are really funny (this sock puppet eating cars and this marble race that I became significantly invested in gave me LIFE) but also, I would LOVE to be bored right now. I would love the time and the space to sit with a book, or with my knitting, or with nothing at all but myself to figure out how I really am feeling about all this. 

As it is, I feel like I’m go-go-going just as much as usual, if not more, with three kids now home all day. They still wake up at the same time (read: far too early) and need meals at regular intervals (And snacks! So may snacks!) and need supervision and they bicker and they talk so much (the talking make it stop) and I just spent part of my evening printing out some more math activities for tomorrow and it’s fine! It’s going to make tomorrow run so much smoother! This is all exhaustingly fine.

And because we’re living the epitome of both/and right now, I’m both exhausted by having children around and so absolutely glad they are here. They bring a sense of normalcy and schedule and routine and silliness to the day that helps so much right now. If I could choose between having this happen with children around or without I would still emphatically choose with.

But also I wish I could drink a glass of wine or three and sit and take some time to myself.

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Tuesday, March 24th
I’m tired of seeing things to the effect of “maximize your quarantine”. Can we just...not? Even leisure seems to have been co-opted into this big thing to DO. Are you binge watching/learning how to knit/baking sourdough/sewing masks/recording a new podcast? Simultaneously? 

In a similar vein, I’m tired of all the “Isn’t it great that we’re not racing all over and bringing our kids to activities and things all the time?”

Well, no. My kids LOVE their activities. To be fair, my kids are still fairly young. I understand that parents with older kids might be glad to not be running somewhere every. single. night. But we had activities just twice a week: dance on Tuesdays and gymnastics on Thursdays. My kids love those things. And baseball was supposed to start up within the next month. Caden and Brooklyn have been counting down the days until they’re back on the field and Nolan is so looking forward to his own first year of t-ball. Will they even have a season this year? Will the activities I’ve signed them up for over the summer even...ever...happen? Will they have a dance recital?

Of course, I don’t have any answers. I’m out a solid $700 (which I’m sure we would be reimbursed) for activities I don’t know that we’ll ever get to do.

I didn’t see their activities as a burden. They brought us so much joy.

To build off the both/and of yesterday, I’m both sad they don’t have their activities right now AND we’re enjoying being home. It is nice to not have to rush in the morning or eat dinner at 4:30 so we get to gymnastics on time. Our evenings are completely free now but so are the rest of our days.

Still, if I could choose, I’d prefer activities.

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Wednesday, March 25th
Today was maybe the hardest one since it all began. It’s rainy and gloomy and the third day in a row of doing school with the kids and I don’t know, I can’t exactly put my finger on what it was about today, but it’s just exhausting.

Though, as I texted to my friends, just wait a day or an hour and I know I’ll feel differently. The emotional roller coaster is real.

It’s exhausting in a way that having three kids under three—or, to be more honest, having two three-year-olds and a one-year-old because that was so much harder—was exhausting. There’s no time or space to think and it’s loud and there are so many needs to be met and it’s loud and I just want space to think, to be and also, it’s loud. It reminds me so much of that time, before Kindergarten, before even Preschool, when we were all together under one roof and it seemed like there was no escape. At least then we could go to the park.

Beth on the Pantsuit Politics nightly nuance last night said something about how her daughter came in the room just to tell her she had a papercut, and then walked out of the room. How just that one little interruption cost her like five minutes of thought process and productivity. And I nodded in solidarity and thought, yes, it’s just like that. About 37 times a day.

To be fair, the kids have been fantastic through this all. They’re more or less their regular selves: sometimes whine-y, sometimes needy, sometimes loving, sometimes disruptive, sometimes cooperative. They miss school but haven’t complained hardly at all about their activities being cancelled, that their days are different, that our life now looks almost nothing like what it did two weeks ago.

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Caden and Brooklyn’s school sent out a video of three of the teachers singing a parody of “Some Things Never Change” to the kids today and I cried.

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Friday, March 27th
Brooklyn broke her wrists yesterday. Both of them. She was swinging and then pulled her arms in through the ropes and fell straight forward onto her arms.

“Why did you do that?” I asked her. She’s jumped off the swing before but this sounded different. I actually didn’t see it. I’d kicked all the kids outside because they were driving me insane. It wasn’t five minutes before I heard Tyson call, from his upstairs office window, “Oh my gosh are you okay?”

“I was showing Caden something dangerous,” she replied.

Beyond the initial pain (“I think it’s a 10” she told me, when I tried to explain the pain scale at the orthopedic walk-in clinic) she’s been perfectly fine. (“It’s a 1 now,” she said, immediately after getting splints on.)

It’s a strange time to be injured, though. Thank goodness for the walk-in clinic. I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere close to an ER. Also her follow-up appointment has been cancelled because of the governor’s stay-at-home order, though we can go back to the walk-in clinic anytime on Tuesday for her to get casts put on.

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Doesn’t “stay-at-home” sound so much nicer than “shelter in place”? A little less ominous, at least?

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I’m totally and completely worn out this week, just in the same way I used to be at the end of week when the kids were much younger. I don’t want to do anything or talk to anyone. I didn’t get a single thing done today besides the feeding and schooling and caring for children. I know that’s important and that’s “doing” something, too. I know. Still. I’ve been used to some time and space carved out during my weeks and that’s gone now. We’re all going to have to adjust accordingly.

But it was sunny and 60 today and we spent the entire afternoon outside and that made all the difference.

On Knitting

I learned how to knit recently.

I’d been wanting to learn for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It could have been Sarah Bessey’s “Knit One, Purl Joy” piece or it could have been the knitting of all the cozy things I see on Instagram or it could be that I’m restless and like to multi-task and here is something I could do while watching TV or listening to a podcast.

Whatever it was, I wanted to learn.

When we found a new church last year, I knew there was a knitting group almost from the start. There were a few women I saw carrying around their bags full of yarn and knitting projects. I saw the “Stitching for Peace” group on the calendar a couple of times a month.

Nancy was the one who found out I wanted to learn. I’d seen her on the other side of church, needles moving as she sat and listened to the sermon.

“I’ll teach you!” she said. “You don’t need anything. I have needles and yarn. The next time the choir sings just come find me. I’ve taught lots of people how to knit.”

She saw me a couple of Sundays later as we arrived at church, in a flurry of coats and bags and too many children. The way we always arrive at church. She was in her choir robe.

“Ready to knit?” she asked, conspiratorially.

We sat on the couches as she pulled out a ball of purple yarn and some bamboo needles. “I like the bamboo because it’s soft,” she told me. She told me more things, things I tried to file away in my brain, but it was the bamboo tip that stuck.

She cast on and then showed me the basic knit stitch. My hands were clumsy. 

“Do I go under or over?” I kept asking about the yarn. Every way I stuck my needle in felt like the wrong way— or maybe the right way?— since I had no idea what I was doing. 

“No,” she would tell me patiently, as I stuck my needle in the stitch the wrong way again, “That’s the purl stitch, I’ll teach you that later. This way for the knit stitch.”

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When we got home that day, I picked up the needles and the scant couple of rows I’d fumbled through while we sat together at church. My mind drew a blank. I couldn’t remember what to do. I Googled “knit stitch” and watched a video, kept pausing and re-starting to refresh my fingers and my memory.

I got going for a little bit. Then somehow I slipped half the project off the needles, which had me scrambling to YouTube again to search for “how to cast on knitting” videos.

I properly casted on 20 stitches for my scarf only to realize that, several rows in, they’d somehow multiplied to 28. I unraveled it all and searched for that “how to cast on knitting” video again.

I started and I stopped and I started and I stopped and I began to despair of ever getting anywhere beyond six to eight rows of stitches. People had been doing this for hundreds of years but I was never, ever, ever going to get the hang of it. I despaired of the detailed patterns and projects I’d seen online, grieved even the simplest of projects. I couldn’t get this simple scarf to be long enough for one of my old Beanie Babies, much less for Brooklyn, who’d claimed this project as her own and asked after the status of her scarf on a daily basis, perched on the edge of the couch next to me.

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I realized this was the first new skill I’d learned in I don’t know how long. When’s the last time I learned how to do something for the very first time that was absolutely and completely new to me? 

Baking bread? Kind of, but that built on the knowledge of baking I already had.

Yoga? Maybe. But that just seemed to build off my dance background.

I don’t know. Is it accurate to say this is the first time I’ve picked up something completely new since I was a kid? And if so, isn’t that kind of...sad?

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I finished Brooklyn’s scarf. I made it past eight rows of stitches and then I made it past twenty and then it really seemed to come together. And by “really come together” I mean still little by little. I sat in the evening while we caught up with This is Us or gloried to another season of Ugly Delicious, but I no longer had to rip it all apart and start over. You can see the progression; there’s a hole or two toward the beginning, it’s sort of knobbly and lumpy. Then, you can see it: the stitches even out as you go along.

I’ve started another scarf, for Caden, because if Brooklyn got one he wanted one, too. Now it’s his turn to sit perched next to me. “When will my scarf be done?” he asks. He drags over my knitting bag, usually at inopportune times, and sets it next to me, a wordless nudge to keep working. I’ve tried to tell him that it will be probably 70-degrees and far too warm to wear a scarf before I finish, but he doesn’t care.

Still, despite the rising temperatures, knitting has turned out to be the most appropriate ritual right now.

I thought it would be nice to have something to do while watching TV or reading books to the kids on the couch—look how productive I am!—and it is. But it turns out it’s saving my sanity.

It’s not only giving me something to do while we flip on The Good Place each night, it gives my hands something to do while I listen to our governor give his near-daily press conferences in the afternoon. Every time I tune in I grab my knitting, instinctively, to steady my hands. Tyson and I sit to talk—more often than ever these days—and out comes my knitting, focusing my hands and my attention. I need it, that tactile motion and movement in my hands or I feel as though I could fly apart altogether.

It grounds me when I sit on the couch while the kids watch a movie or laugh uproariously at the antics of Booba. I listen to a podcast: “The Daily” if I want to stay informed, “Pantsuit Politics” if I need therapy. Sometimes my hands shake and I grasp the needles tighter. Sometimes I slip a stitch and I go back now, because I’ve figured out what it’s supposed to look like, what it’s supposed to feel like, and I fix it, without having to unravel it all and begin again.

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "All Things New".