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.

+++++

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.

+++++

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.”

+++++

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.

+++++

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.

+++++

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.