The various crises that have beset me over the past few years—and now my leaving behind any academic hopes or dreams (not by choice—I am unemployed!)—have made it difficult to for me to write. But I’ve been putting together a plan for a bit of coaching and doing some online teaching, both of which have reminded me of the pure joy in writing I found in the early days of aspiration and rejection. So my efforts have been to do things that are like that Wendell Berry poem—fox making more tracks than necessary and sometimes in the wrong direction etc—to find that joy again. One of those efforts has involved writing this newsletter, as it reminds me of writing a blog way back when, a blog almost no one read but which gave me something I really needed in those days.
First, some news/links:
I’ll be reading at a virtual event for the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop on August 15th alongside some of my brilliant colleagues there:
My gushing review of Diane Seuss’s new book of poetry is up at Southern Indiana Review
My novella “Lighthouse”—to be published in an anthology of four thematically- and stylistically-linked novellas with three other (brilliant) writers—has been announced and will be released in 2025 with ARP books.
Be in touch if you’d like to work with me. I’m still getting my act together website-wise, but am open to clients who need help with manuscripts of any length or at any stage—both fiction and nonfiction—as well as available for coaching.
Old Homesickness and its Return
The typo in this title appeared in a draft of student work I was reading this week, and I thought about it for a while—the way our memories are files, the way time files memories—and possibly it can pull together a few of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past month. I’ve finally finished an essay I started on New Year’s Eve about a time capsule my childhood best friend and I made as children—and also it’s about time and childhood kin and about being a writer (and whether being a writer is worth it). And this week marks the ten-year anniversary of my arrival in Riverside, in California, and in the States.
Anyone who has spoken to me at all in these ten years knows that this was not a happy move for me. I have shared too much on this account. I had left behind everything in my life and not for my own projects or reasons. I had left it behind, and I had no way back.
I used to joke to my husband: “happy anniversary to my tears!” I described the feeling of flying over the deserty-looking mountains when we arrived as flying over a gash that seemed to sever me from my previous life. I felt despair, once, looking at the rows of children’s backpacks hanging in the outdoor hallway at the school where I knew not one person, not one teacher or child or parent. I glared at palm trees; I hated the blue sky. I missed thunderstorms, and trees, and, especially, winter. It was homesickness. I was sick with it.
That first end-of-July-beginning-of-August we did some touristy things in LA for a few days, taking a holiday with the kids, and then drove in a rented van all the way to Riverside, which, like the flying over of the gashes in the landscape, appeared to me to represent some kind of geographical disaster, as the heat was 20 degrees (F) higher in Riverside, and the feeling on my face when we opened the van door was as though I had opened the door to an oven.
(a photo I took in 2014 at the citrus park in Riverside)
Anniversary Feelings
Because of my divorce, I have had several experiences of anniversaries the last few years that really rattled me. My subconscious knew—and my body was upset—before I was conscious of the date when my wedding anniversary was on the way; the same thing happened around my birthday, the anniversary of the month our marriage took a turn toward irrevocably ending.
So I have been thinking about the body’s recall of dates or times of year. Every year at this time I go through a small bout of near-depression1, and it occurs to me now that this may not be just the heat or the lack of moisture or the freeways or the unrelenting sun or the feeling of being marooned indoors for most of every day but is also an experience of emotional return. I am returned to the feeling of being trapped. I am returned to the feeling of hostility—that California wanted me out of it, and that I wanted out of California, but that I was stuck.
It is no longer my predominant feeling of living here—a place that now actually feels like home—but I do feel it, every year, at this time. And so I’ve been thinking about the way a body is tuned to time.
For over twenty years, I experienced the days around the clocks springing forward in early March as a time when I feel very happy and hopeful. Something changes in the light and suddenly I think everything will be okay. When we are moving toward the longest day of the year and have not yet peaked, I am like a flower in a garden in a bliss to feel the sun on my leaves. It’s not just the light, though; it was in early March in 1999, that, in a euphoria that turned to mental health crisis, I saw the world as overwhelmingly gorgeous and good and walked around saying to everyone with a look on my face that became more alarming every day, all of us in our snow boots and coats, that it is finally spring, isn’t spring so wonderful.
I am trying to find a way to see this as beautiful. Something fascinating and tenderly moving the way our bodies file events and keep track of time.
Attacks of Nostalgia
When my kids were very small, I was overwhelmed and exhausted and having a hard time getting through a single day. I felt I would never be the good kind of mother I had idealized, the image I’d internalized, and knew myself to be flawed in some way that would affect not just me but my children. I had a Catholic friend then I told I was praying for patience, and she said that one should never pray for patience because God will only give you more tests of your patience.
One day in August, with the other moms who lived in the student family housing in Toronto, I trekked with my baby and my toddler one kilometer to a public park with a big wading pool. My memories from inside my life and my experience were not happy or easy. This was just another day I was trying to find my way to the end of. The pool was cool and the area was shaded, but most of the time I remember being worried that my newly walking baby and my spirited toddler would fall in or wander off or otherwise get hurt. I was so worn out that on the way home—merely one kilometer!—I had to stop in at a bank to cool off in the A/C and sit down for a minute.
Someone had taken a picture of a mother at the park that day, crouched with some children over a chalk drawing, laughing happily with them, a long arm reaching for some chalk, a loving expression on her face, hair tied up in two cute buns—a beautiful image of an ideal mother—and the photo was of me. I marveled over the photo for so long I remember all of its details; first of all, seeing all the perfection of motherhood the image seemed to see, and how happy her children looked, and secondly, seeing that this mother was pretty, which I did not believe I was. But I was the mother in the image!
(This is not that photo)
I thought of this when I saw someone posting an image of a tradwife family—maybe ballerina farm—saying something like “are you telling me you don’t want this?” It is a commonplace to say you shouldn’t compare someone else’s outside with your own inside or something—some reminder of the poison of envy—but how often do we and maybe now more than ever believe that the aesthetics and beauty of some image of life could, if we inhabited it, make our lives feel fuller or happier or…
I had an attack of nostalgia for that old life, though, this month, when first I took a visit to Winnipeg and stayed with one of my dearest friends who has very small children and the beautiful happy life I felt I’d lost when we moved to Riverside. Walkable neighbourhood, enormous shade trees, and a toddling baby that I could spend time with unencumbered by my maternal exhaustion and anxiety. I had a second attack of wistful nostalgia when my oldest child—now about to be in her final year of high school—started baking constantly for a week, because when I was baking and listening to the CBC in a kitchen in those days I felt closest to some ideal of a mother. And then we visited my family in Hamilton, and a friend who owns the bookstore near our old neighbourhood took us for a walk through the woods that used to be just steps from the kids’ school. We lived just steps from a forest.
And in those days I knew I would miss the days I was in when they were over—everyone told me so—and I tried desperately to love those days, to be present for them—why couldn’t I do this?
But then am I in danger of missing the life I’m in now, by getting caught in nostalgia, by getting caught in that old feeling of being trapped?
Yer Not the Ocean
Yesterday, I took two of the kids and one of their friends to the beach, and with my twelve-year-old I swam and jumped and was thrown around by the waves for hours, and my daughter mentioned that during our trip to Hamilton she had swum in a lake for the first time in her life. I had spent my childhood swimming in lakes, while her life—her home—is southern California. Her beaches are Pacific: cold, vast, filled with waves and salt and surfers. Not placid or ringed with trees in full green.
I was grateful to remember in my body what it was like to be twelve, fully present for in the physical joy of swimming for a whole day, unaware yet of my body as an object or aesthetic image (or an image that was lacking in grace and beauty, which was what I mostly felt) and just being in my strength. Whenever I am at the beach, I am moved by a much-needed feeling of what’s good about human beings. Later, I told the teens with me that “the ocean is a kind of medicine,” and they both giggled and asked me what was wrong with me. But look at us all here—the families with adults at play, the joggers, the group of girls on blankets, reading, another group of girls burying themselves in the sand, me singing that song from Moana to annoy the teens, the couple staring out into the expanse holding hands, and even the people who come to do their photoshoots, sometimes even a staged a wedding proposal for such shoots. It’s not expensive to come to the beach and you can stay there all day.
As the sun was beginning to set, I was so cold, and, like a young mother at the park with her children, gave her a ten-minute warning. I said, “you are going to want more time after that but I need you to listen. It has to come to an end.” She tried to negotiate with me that it was the last time they’d have at this beach this summer, since school was starting soon, and they’d be at their dad’s, and it was so fun. I agreed with her, but could not make the time not pass. It was so fun and then—we had no choice—time passed, it had to—that day had to end—it was over.
Consider donating to Doctors without Borders.
I’m all too aware that depression is not purely environmental, and that there is a phenomenon of seasonal affective disorder that afflicts people in summer rather than winter. Also I’m burnt out—lots of financial stress and future-worry in addition to the many world events that are I’m sure affecting most of us on a pretty deep and constant level.
That was a beautiful read, from a fantastic person, thank you, wish you nothing but happiness and joy.
How lovely to read your newsletter and to be reminded that others are as affected and conflicted as I am about motherhood, womanhood, aging. I so identify with everything you said.