Friday Muse: A reckoning, I reckon

Everything is completely under control // Plus, some new classes!

This week I kept wondering why I felt so existentially exhausted, and then I’d think, “Oh, yeah, the world …” I know I’m not alone in this, the exhaustion and dread tugging at us in quiet (and not-quiet) moments. It is also unseasonably HOT in my area of North Carolina; the children in my son’s fifth grade class (including my son) seem to be absorbing the general unrest; and— as I wrote an editing client earlier— “there are tons of cicadas making a buzzing house alarm sound from the trees. I feel like I'm in a tense but languid Tennessee Williams play. But other than that, things are ok!” Oh, also, my computer is finally dying after eight years and someone in my house accidentally knocked over the flat screen tv and broke it. So. At least Best Buy is happy.

My workspace/dining room table currently. Completely under control.

I am tempted NOT to reveal my ragged edges here and instead to maintain an illusion of professional chipperness, but … you know. The “both/and” has always been more my style.

This morning I sat down to write, and I flipped through a book by Kate Zambreno that I recently bought, Mutter (Semiotext(e), 2017). I’m enjoying this book. “Finding it satisfying” is probably a better way to put it, given its serious subjects— mental illness and a complicated mother-daughter relationship among them. But another (perhaps uncharitable) thought I had was, “Ugh, she uses a form that I’ve been writing in for several years, and she even has some of the same interests as me— orphans, mothers, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass … What’s the point?”

(I couldn’t “write write” this morning. I felt like I had too much in my head that needed to get out, so I wrote three morning pages and felt better. Felt somewhat better.)

I share all this to suggest that if you, too, are feeling some of these things— “I’m tired. My house is a mess. What’s the point of writing?”— you are not alone. And that precisely is the point. Connection. Another way for me to look at Zambreno’s book is to think, “I love that I’m part of this conversation about mothers and orphans, mental illness and Natalie Wood. I love that I am one of a community of contemporary women who are experimenting with form as we share how we try to figure things out, try to weave it together into art that pleases us, that shares this otherwise unshareable set of experiences.”

Only connect, as E.M. Forster wrote. That’s why we do this.

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Now I’d like to share five things that represent the other side of my “both/and” this week:

1. Grace extended to me by other mothers, including a mother at swim lessons who saw me struggling and stopped me to say she knows it sometimes feels hard as hell and she was certain I am a good mother, which immediately made me start crying. (Causing my kid to then see me and say, “When someone being nice to you makes you cry.” Yes.)

2. Stepping outside, a white butterfly flutters back and forth in front of me, and I think of my grandmother.

3. My own mother, who has tried so hard to “be somebody” and has succeeded, but is now also tired, but who still extends kind regard and support to her children. To me.

4. My kid listening to an audiobook that they loved and reporting to me in their intelligent, exuberant way what was so great about it. (E. has been listening to the “Pages & Co.” series by Anna James.)

5. Friends and family who are having to do the hard work of forbearance, of walking through the hard things. Cancer and exhaustion and life complications. And who, even with all that, reach out to tell me that they appreciate me. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate you.

6. Oh, wait— I also wanted to tell you about this great Facebook post by the poet Nickole Brown who informs us that a group of cicadas is called a “superfluidity,” explaining that they are not a harbinger of endings but of beginnings. Brown writes, “Words matter. Call them a celebration, a jubilee, life’s own flash mob. Or use their collective noun: a superfluidity. How beautiful is that? A superfluidity of cicadas.”

7. And! people who wrote me to tell me they appreciated my April series on keeping a writing notebook, thank you for telling me! Thank you for being in community with me. So that is seven things. Feel free to write your own 5-7 things. It might help.

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Finally, here’s one of the pieces I was able to draw from my April notebook:

Toward Whom

Your child reports from school that someone

said the n-word just to say it, and someone else

hates his mom and says he’s suicidal, and someone

else … Oh, I don’t know. The boys seem angry

and the girls seem quiet, just like when I was in school.

(Though my kid tells me not to assume people’s genders.)

Your child gets silent lunch for whispering during

a lockdown drill, and there are so many things wrong

with that sentence. Even now, your bedroom chair piled

with crumpled clothes, your head full of images—damaged

children, broken adults, young people sitting vigil

being dragged from their seats—you wonder

toward whom you are blooming. Toward whom

can we bloom if not our own light?

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And!! if you’re still here— there are some new late spring/early summer courses up at Muse. A new series of generative workshops; a Zoom-based workshop on hybrid forms; and self-guided version of my class, “Approaching Mystery: Writing Flash Memoir About Wonder and the Unexplained.” Check the class out here.