Life Lately

A couple of Wednesdays ago, I found myself shaking at lunch.

The door of our washing machine broke that morning—it had been wonky for awhile, it was only a matter of time—and I texted a neighbor to see if I could effectively take over theirs for the day, what with my four loads of laundry on the docket. I was trying to do laundry before we traveled to Iowa to see Tyson’s brother and his family for the first time in fourteen months, to meet our three-month-old niece for the very first time. I save up our laundry before a trip because then it’s easier to just toss everything in suitcases and not have to worry about laundry when we return home. But the washing machine broke. 

Anyway, the shaking. The washing machine was the breaking point, the proverbial straw breaking the poor camel’s back. You know how it goes, when you collapse over a spilled bowl of Cheerios or a smear of toothpaste or dropping a contact lens, but it’s not about the Cheerios or the toothpaste or the contact, they’re just the thing behind the thing?

I found myself trembling at lunch because the washing machine, this silly yet essential thing, broke and upended my entire day. And even though I only had to haul the laundry across the street and a few houses down it threw off my entire rhythm. I spent the morning trying to catch up on writing and emails, but was mostly thrown off by going back and forth to the neighbors and having conversations with Tyson about the annoying, broken washing machine. And our house then was a disaster, it truly was, every single room was full of things that didn’t belong or simply needed to be put away. So I spent the morning adulting and figuring things out and bemoaning the general state of our house and then I ran around picking Nolan up from preschool and getting our grocery order and swapping out loads of laundry at the neighbor’s and reprimanding Nolan when I found him on my laptop which is NOT AT ALL ALLOWED when I discovered it was 1:00 and I hadn’t eaten so I sat down to eat something.

Anyway, I was trembling at lunch.

But it wasn’t just the washing machine. It’s that that week of all weeks was the week leading up to spring break, and then it WAS spring break, and my body? She remembers what happened at this time last year.

The kids had an entire week off for spring break plus the following Monday (because for some reason spring break is one week plus one day now) and that Monday, too, almost pushed me over the edge. Because in my brain spring break was over, yet they were still home, and I was almost convinced they wouldn’t go back to school, just like last year, when spring break was extended for a week and then the world turned upside down which resulted in them being home for the better part of 40-something weeks.

So my body decided to communicate all this to me. It communicated this to me through the shaking and the nights where it feels impossible to sleep and the other nights where it feels impossible to get up in the morning. It communicated all this to me through a scattered brain and the feeling that everything I’ve been doing lately has been like trudging through mud, where everything takes 2-10 times longer than I think it should. My body is carrying the trauma (Oof that feels like a loaded word and yet what else to call it?) of the past year, of this time last year, and it let all out this month, an attempt to alert me that “Hey! We’re not okay over here!” when my brain would rather stuff things down all “La la la everything is fine!”

It’s both completely irrational and also not at all.

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Take Action

Gun control, gun control, gun control. We Americans were tragically reminded this month of the need for reasonable gun control measures, including background checks, waiting periods, and a ban on military-grade weapons. Really, I’d settle for anything at this point.

• Consider a donation to an organization such as Moms Demand Action.

• Contact your representatives in Congress, particularly your Senators and any Republican representatives, to demand that gun legislation be brought to the floor. (The House passed two bills to strengthen gun laws earlier this month.)

• Remember to center the victims in the shootings, not the shooter. I appreciated the New York Times’ coverage of the lives lost in Atlanta and in Boulder.

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Around the Internet

• “That all adds up to a picture where having schools open is pretty clearly safer than having indoor dining open, since you can’t eat with a mask on. In a world where they’re still giving people snacks on airplanes, letting Ted Cruz jet off for a weekend in Cancún, etc., having schools closed represents an irrational social response to the pandemic.”

• Sooooooooooo excited for this. LMM forever.

• Give me allllll the think pieces about the Meghan Markle/Prince Harry/Oprah interview. This one stood out to me.

• “You’re probably going to feel exhausted when you want to feel exhilarated, panicked when you thought you’d feel safe, combative when all you want is to feel soothed. Your social skills have atrophied and you’re probably going to get in some big fights that will seem like they’re about nothing but are actually about everything. You’re going to crave some of the parts of quarantine life you swore you never would. You’re probably going to over-plan and over-schedule and feel an alarming and unexpected need for solitude and have to pull back and re-evaluate.”

• The title of this piece says it all: “Pandemic Moms: Long Days, Short Fuses”

• On motherhood and the Beanie Baby boom.

• “Among all this trauma — Spears’s, mine, that of many women who grew up in the ’90s and early aughts — I can see why a viewer would find relief in concluding that Spears was always in complete control. But it is absurd to discuss her image from that time as though there was not an apparatus behind it, as though she existed in a vacuum where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms, rather than in an economy where young women’s sexuality is rapidly commodified until they are old enough to be discarded.”

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Eating

• One of my favorite spring pastas. (I use the whole box of pasta because who wants a leftover 1/4 box of pasta? Also, I use an exorbitant amount of basil instead of mint because I can’t stand mint: you do you.)

• We make homemade pizza almost every Saturday night and this is my go-to pizza dough recipe. I make it in the morning, let it rise in Ziploc bags in the refrigerator, and it’s ready to go by dinnertime.

• This feels like some sort of mid-century throwback, what with the cake mix and the Jell-O and all, but it’s THE BEST light, bright, lemon cake. Everyone raves about it. I have to give a nod to those 50’s housewives with their new-fangled processed foods because they knew that ish is delicious. I’ll be making it for Easter—it’s even better topped with raspberries or sliced strawberries which as far as I’m concerned balances out the processed food part.

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Fun Things

• This salt cellar makes me feel super fancy. I ditched my salt and pepper shakers and now keep a pepper grinder and this next to the stove, with Kosher salt in one half and regular table salt in the other.

• We finished our basement bathroom and I’m in love. <3

• I’ve tried to get the kids into podcasts before, but none of them clicked before we began listening to Wow in the World. Now, I often hear them listening in their bedrooms on their own Echo Dots while they doodle or play with toys and it makes for the best quiet time ever.

• A couple more shout-outs to Target for this perfect spring tee and these shoes, which keep my ankles warm like a boot but are comfy like a sneaker and make it look like I tried when really I didn’t at all. 10/10 highly recommend.

• Okay, because Target is my BFF I’ve got one more for you: these roller skates are the kids’ new jam.

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We’re on the verge of April, on the verge of Easter. I don’t know what my body will continue to try to tell me in the coming month. Hopefully, there will be less trembling. Or maybe that’s the wrong thing to hope for; maybe instead I should hope that I continue to pay attention to it.

I wrote last year, on the eve of Easter, that it made sense to me that Easter was the first holiday we as Christians would be celebrating in the pandemic, a holiday that involves, as Glennon Doyle says, “first the pain, then the waiting, then the rising”, and that this time last year we were waiting for our very own rising. I’m not sure many of us knew just how long that wait would be.

Yet here we are, with many of us vaccinated and many, many more of us ready and waiting to get those shots in our arms when we can. A year (Has it only been a year?) later and what a hope, what a rising there will be. Trembling bodies, hearts, minds, and all.

The Course of a Week

“Do less. We can focus on 50-70% of the stuff we did before the crisis hit.”

This statement was included in an email I received last March about self-care. I saved these words and came across them again recently. My immediate thought was, Oh, please let that be true eleven whole months later.

Even though we’ve been at home (always at home, forever at home), it’s not exactly like we’re staycationing over here. My capacity feels eternally diminished. There are entire days I could scream over the mundane, when I don’t want to make another meal, deal with another fluctuating emotion, step over another LEGO on the floor, or sit for another virtual meeting.

While 50-70% felt impossible during the early days of the pandemic, when the news cycle never stopped with updates on COVID-19 and restrictions and school announcements and all the things, it still doesn’t always feel like we’ve moved past it all. Let’s be honest: sometimes 50-70% still feels like altogether too much. 

On the heels of my first thought came this one: If 50-70% still feels impossible, why do I also feel as though I never stop moving?

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My kids recently went back to school in-person. I’m not used to it yet. We spent 40-plus weeks together and the reality that they’re back to their regularly scheduled programming has yet to sink in. I’m still distracted, unaccustomed to these uninterrupted blocks of time to complete my work.

Until recently, multitasking was less a lifestyle choice, but a necessity. I’d turned it into an art. Not like Renaissance art, with precise lines and a defined one-point perspective, but sloppy, splatter-y, fling-paint-at-the-canvas kind of art. Y’know how Jackson Pollock paintings often have cigarette butts embedded in them? That’s what my multi-tasking felt like: a canvas that’s been flung with paint and embedded with ashes.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Life Lately

My brain is broken.

At least I thought I was broken but then I read this and felt better. Which actually means I am broken but I’m not the only one. I shared a snippet of that article in my Instagram stories and received a half-dozen messages from friends re-iterating the same thing: “My brain is broken, too.” “I feel this on a deep level.” “This is everything.” And lots of “100” emoji. I mean, I guess that’s comforting.

I mix up words that sound sort of similar but totally aren’t (Like “bacon” for “band-aid”. I…don’t know.) and have a hard time focusing on…anything. I also have no appetite which feels like my body has forgotten even how to eat and have become one of those annoying people who say things like, “I forgot to eat lunch.” And then makes a smoothie as if that’s a replacement for solid food that you chew.

I thought my brain would be better once the kids were in school but it’s not. In fact, it feels worse. It’s actually probably the same as before, it’s just that I have the time and space to try to focus now which only shows me how much I can’t. My brain is so used to interruptions it can’t handle long stretches of undisturbed time. Please hear me when I say that I am SO GLAD the kids are back in school. And also my brain forgot what it’s supposed to do when it has longer than 2.5 minutes to concentrate on any given task.

Maybe it’s like that saying around postpartum bodies, where it takes nine months for your body to stretch and grow a human so you need to give yourself (at least) nine months to get back to some sort of normalcy? We’ve been in this pandemic for nearly a year, so it stands to reason that it will take at least a year for our brains and bodies to get back to their pre-pandemic selves.

Also, we’re still in it. It’s absurd to think my brain would work like capital-b Before when, despite my kids being back in school, we’re still in the thick of a global pandemic. I still need to make sure we have clean masks, school could be disrupted at any time, and our summer plans remain somewhat up in the air.

I’m trying to give myself a break, trying to go against that clanging gong of society that beats a steady cadence of “Produce! Produce! Produce!” I need more—and longer—breaks to accomplish even simple tasks. I’m preaching to myself here when I say maybe that’s not a bad thing.

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Take Action

I was made aware this week by Anti-Racism Daily that there is an anti-trans bill making its way through my own state legislature. This bill seeks to ban those assigned male at birth from participating in girl’s and women’s school athletic programs. I encourage you to read the link above; it does greater justice to the issue than I can here. In fact, there are more than a dozen states with some version of this bill. Using thinly-veiled transphobic language, these bills do enormous harm to transgender youth, a population who is already stigmatized in society. Furthermore, we know how beneficial organized athletics are to all children’s physical health and mental well-being, and even more so for transgender youth. The thought of banning any child from being able to fully participate in school sports is nothing less than shameful.

I emailed my state house representative, urging her to stand against her Republican colleagues who authored this bill and received the most wonderful response. I urge you to do the same—particularly if your state is one of the many on this list. You can find your own state representative here.

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Around the Internet

• I am always and forever a Glennon Doyle stan.

• This whole piece, but this line sums up every parent sending their kid back to school right now: “When she returns to school on March 1, I will be terrified. And thrilled.”

• For anyone else who feels like the news around vaccines and normalcy are grimmer than they need to be.

• “But as we approach the one-year anniversary of remote education in America, I find that I am losing sympathy for the educators’ position and their myopic vision this far along into the pandemic. We can open schools safely, and we have the evidence in hand to prove it.”

• “But phyllo dough, at least the kind I bought, won’t work in this situation. It’s rectangle and you don’t manipulate phyllo dough like you do puff pastry. Phyllo dough is Mediterranean, isn’t it? Figures. You never tell a Mediterranean – especially a woman – what she ought to fit into. I know better, so I pull out a jelly roll pan and place all the sheets on that.”

• This, though.

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Eating

• I made these baked onion rings on Super Bowl Sunday and while they were a little time-consuming, they were also super yummy. A few notes: soak your sliced onions while you prep everything else (a quick soak helps the flour stick better). Also, put your flour and panko ingredients in (separate) plastic bags—then you can toss the onions in and just shake them all up to coat. And last I threw my own spices in, not the spice mix she listed. Roughly a 1/2 teaspoon each of onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt, and pepper.

• This cupcake recipe is everything. I made them for the kids’ birthdays but now I think I need to make them for no reason whatsoever because they’re that good. Also because I have what I think is scientifically known as a “crapton” of sprinkles left. (And because I can’t not give notes: I used regular whole milk, regular cream cheese, and canola oil.)

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Fun Things

• This headband is my new favorite accessory.

• We’ve been having some epic Uno Flip battles as a family. I don’t consider myself much of a games person but I will play this all day long. Since there’s no reading, (unlike another of our favorite games, Apples to Apples Jr.) even Nolan can join in since it’s mostly matching up colors and numbers/symbols.

• Speaking of those cupcakes above we celebrated some birthdays around here! I can’t let this section pass by without saying we now have two seven-year-olds and a five-year-old in this house. We celebrated COVID-style by visiting an outdoor ice maze, meeting some friends at a nearby sledding hill, and a small birthday drive-by. Since all three birthdays are at the exact same time (only two days apart), my house was still destroyed from making six-dozen cupcakes to pass out and all. the. gifts. they still received. At one point our living room was ankle-deep in assorted wrapping materials and presents. By now I’ve learned that party or not, I need a solid week to put my house back together at the end of February.

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Despite everything, the weather has been saving me. My brain might be broken but at least the sun is out and the snow is melting which all puts a smile on my face. Also, someone spontaneously paid for my breakfast on Wednesday and it made my week. Two weeks ago I was unsure if the subzero temperatures we were experiencing would ever break and now here, on this side, it looks like we could be in store for an early spring. Spring is just exactly what we need right now. And while I’d love to wrap this up with something profound, what I’ve mostly been thinking lately is some version of this:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alyssa Limperis (@alyssalimp)

Doesn’t add up at all.

Made With

Made with love.

I think of this phrase often when I pull out my knitting needles to work on whatever project is tucked away in my knitting bag.

I think of grandmas baking trays of cookies for their grandkids. I think of my own great-grandma crocheting a baby blanket for me, a dozen great-grandchildren in. I think of friends who take pride in making Halloween costumes for their kids each and every year. I imagine the patience and sweetness and, yes, love, going into each and every one of these endeavors.

People, nothing I knit is made with love.

Don’t get me wrong, I always knit with plenty of emotion. But love? I don’t tend to knit when I’m feeling beatific and peaceful. No, I pull out my projects when my hands need something to hold onto. When the rest of me feels as though I may fly into a million pieces, knitting becomes, quite literally, that something to hold. This past year has shown me just how steadying having two knitting needles in my hands can be. I’m usually trying to find my sanity through knits and purls, not knit it in there.

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I learned how to knit about a year ago, on a cold, mid-February Sunday morning. I’d been interested in knitting for a while. I watched several women at my church—old, young, and in-between—carry their knitting around in bags, getting in stitches during coffee hour or in the sanctuary. I saw them nod along to sermons or sing along to hymns without even stopping to look at the work in their hands.

It was Nancy who caught me on the stairs one day as we arrived at church the way we always did, in a flurry of too many children and winter coats and mittens.

“Would you like to learn how to knit?” she asked without even a hello. There was a sparkle in her eye as we walked down to the church basement and the kids sprinted ahead for cookies and small cups of juice.

“Yes!” I said, stunned at this random invitation being extended to me, somehow offering me exactly what I’d been thinking about for months. Call it an answered prayer that I’d never even bothered to pray or divine intervention if you will; we were in the middle of our church. “I’ve been wanting to learn for a while!”

“Meet me on the couches in the adult library next Sunday,” she told me, “Don’t worry about anything. I have extra needles and yarn. I’ll teach you.”

The following Sunday we met on the worn, cast-off couches. She arrived armed with a pair of needles and a brilliant purple skein of yarn to show me a basic knit stitch. It felt awkward and wrong in my hands. I kept forgetting if I needed to have the yarn in the back or the front of the stitch, mostly because I didn’t even know what that meant.

“Under, not over,” she would say from where she stood behind me. She put her hands gently on mine to correct me, though the yarn always felt like it moved too fast for me to understand what was happening. It was intimidating, me vs. those two awkward needles and a pile of yarn. I was convinced that although women had been doing this for centuries, it would be me who would be a failure, me who would never, ever get the hang of it. But, by the end of our twenty minutes together, I had a couple of lumpy rows of stitches.

Read more about my knitting adventures over on Coffee + Crumbs.

Not For Me

A few years ago, after a scroll through Instagram, I decided I was going to become a gardener. Or at least I was going to plant some things and weed them and water them and that would (probably) make me a gardener.

Never mind that I don’t care much about plants. Never mind that my thumb is definitely brown. Never mind that I don’t even have a houseplant to my name. (If a 30-something woman in the suburbs doesn’t own a houseplant, does she even exist?) Never mind the few times we’d subscribed to CSA boxes and I low-key hated it because I am a Meal Planner to the nth degree and getting a random box of food every week threw me in all the ways. (Especially when the box was filled with zucchini which is The Worst Vegetable Ever.)

Never mind all of that.

It’s going to be fun for the kids! I thought. They’ll learn things! It’s science!

My aunt had given me some old planters which were sitting in our garage, collecting dust and spider webs. I hauled them out, hosed them down, and dragged the kids to the nursery a couple of miles down the road. Two three-year-olds and a one-year-old and me, who had not much more of an idea of what I was doing than they did. We wandered up and down the aisles as I loaded our cart with carrots and onions, broccoli and basil. I remembered potting soil after I was in the checkout line, then stood in front of the bags wondering both how much I needed and if I could lift them. Then back to the checkout line where the one-year-old started to fuss over being trapped in a cart and how boring this all was.

An hour and well over $100 later, I loaded up the minivan with children and seedlings and hauled them home.

Read more about my gardening mishaps over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.