Things That Happened in 2021

January: Welcome back to season two of COVID! It's horrible, honestly just the worst. January is full of terrible news: the long-term care facilities are doing very badly, the schools are closed, the weather is grim. After quarantining for two very long weeks, we kicked off the year up at my parent's farm, which was the right choice. Putting my feet into open-water Lake Huron on January first felt mystical and strange, like I'm a character in a book. The bulk of the month is spent sitting on the couch watching my junior kindergarten student flop his way through Zoom school—zchool?—and knitting.
Knitting project: Nurtured Sweater by Andrea Mowry

February: Uh, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I put a lot of energy into creating a character? I take a crazed six-week-long swing at a grad school application that ultimately goes nowhere? I honestly have very little memory of this month, probably because most of it was just a holding pattern of knitting, cold weather, and Zoom kindergarten. It's a smear in my memory, a blur of short days that feel interminable. It's possible that February is swallowed up every year, but this one is especially gone.
Kitting project: Solasta Sweater from Pom Pom Quarterly

March: My sister moved in with her partner. While I missed her, it was also nice to have the workout space back, because while she lived with us, I worked out in the hallway outside the bathroom. I ran Movie March Madness for the fifth year in a row and continued to really enjoy it. Spring returned, which was a relief. It's weird doing these round-ups in Covid years because really, nothing happened, and I felt every emotion about it.
Knitting project: I designed my own stripey socks!

April: Noah came home and stayed home, which was annoying because I did a lot of paid work this month! We muddled through another half-semester of zchool, which was slightly better—the days were longer, we could all get outside, we took breaks and stopped giving a fuck about staying on top of EVERY session on EVERY day and just let things get a bit loose. I bought a million pink plants and created a kitchen windowsill fit for a hobbit. I emailed my MPP asking to fast-track the school-staff vaccines.
Knitting project: none, but I did get the seedlings started FINALLY

May: My work had a one-day online conference that look literally hundreds of hours to pull off, and it was exhausting. The remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in the ground; I cried for hours. I always feel weird saying that I was affected by that discovery, or by Kent Monkman's painting "The Scream," but really, histories of children being ripped away from their parents to experience brutal trauma and maybe die just...hits me where I live, you know? May was a shit show.
Knitting project: Ostensibly it was the Flax Sweater by Tin Can Knits, but with so many modifications that it's basically my own thing.

June: I got my first COVID vaccine and was a nervous wreck from the moment I booked the appointment to the moment I broke down crying while waiting in line. Medical anxiety is a real bummer, y'all. Anyway, I got it, and it was fine. I also ripped out literal tons of garlic mustard from our backyard—like, probably at least five hundred pounds of garlic mustard. I started going for evening walks with audiobooks and it was amazing; I highly recommend this as an activity, especially in the pre-summer stint when the solstice light is just right and the leaves are on the trees and it feels possible to exhale, a little.
Knitting project: None? I think? Huh, weird.

July: Mike's parents collected Noah for a weekend and we went up to the cottage to help my parents with their renovation: there was much paneling and spaghetti sauce-making, but it was also SO NICE to have a break from our darling, labour-intensive five-year-old. I got my second covid vaccine and felt something loosen inside my soul. Things grew in the garden; we went swimming at the pool; we ate ice cream and played on the skateboard; Noah played with his friends; I read the Percy Jackson books. It was all fine and pleasant. It felt like a regular summer.
Knitting project: Free as a Bird shawl by Andrea Mowry

August: My garden was weird this year. The tomatoes all got blight, the zucchinis underperformed, the bunnies ate most of the peppers (note to self: put them in pots next year!), but the garlic, squash, and pumpkins were all just fine. Gardening, especially vegetable gardening, is a skill that I covet, and over the last two years, I've grown some stuff—just enough to make me anxious about how much stuff I would have to grow if the shit truly hit the fan. We visited Toronto and saw some friends. I sewed a blouse. I heard back from MPP about school vaccinations for staff (see: April), which earned a MAJOR EYE ROLL.
Knitting project: Fluorite Socks by Andrea Mowry (wow, I knit a lot of her patterns this year!)

September: First, we had an excellent Labour Day weekend with The Regular Gang, some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly a year. Then: Noah's back to school! God, I love this part. I know Covid is still very much a thing, but sweet Lord, after five months of home school and then summer holiday, my very favourite child needs to be elsewhere for sustained periods of time. With him out of the house, I'm free to start working out again, which I do, and also to have naps in the middle of the day, which I also do. Septembers are always so nice.
Knitting project: Earth and Air sweater by James Watts

October: Work ramped up in a serious way. I got another client, which felt great, but I was also like, "I'm so busy!" and I felt overwhelmed. But the work I'm doing is good and interesting, and the people I work with are so smart; I'm learning something at every meeting (mostly it's just "slow down and be less frantic, you loon"), and so I don't regret it, even though it does feel like I'm treading water. We go swimming at Thanksgiving. I apply for the library board, but ultimately didn't get it. I started doing social media for a local climate-action group, which felt cool.
Knitting project: Pop Radio Socks by Summer Lee

November: I started driver training! After literally twenty years of having my G1, I'm finally ready to start driving, I guess? My classes was horribly slow and most of it comes down to "every other driver is incompetent, check your blind spots, and don't hit anyone" (there, I just saved you $700). I do an incredibly labour-intensive project for my anchor client and it totally burns me out—the debrief meeting is just me and the two other project leads chuckling sardonically at how much goddamn work went into this thing—and it makes me wonder when I will be ready to move on from this job. It's my birthday, I turn 38 on a Tuesday, who cares.
Knitting project: baby Pritchard sweater by Christina Danaee

December: Noah got his first covid vaccine, and things really felt okay...until they didn't. Most of December was wrapped up in rising omicron cases: when I took the train into the city on December 10 for friend-time and shopping, things were just starting to feel tense; when Mike went in six days later, ostensibly leading the way for Noah and me to join him a few days later, I was like, come home today. (And he did!) While we planned to host both sides of our families on Christmas, the dearth of rapid tests and high transmissability and general abdication of leadership by anyone in government—the same people who begged the electorate to let them be in charge!—led us to playing it safe-ish and hosting only Mike's parents for the big day. I did 100% of the Christmas dinner with a raging sinus infection.
Knitting project: Madrigal Mittens from Pom Pom Quarterly

I dunno, guys. We can all agree that 2021 was a weird year? There were some good times and some really terrible ones; we had a full fall semester of school, which was great, but the spring really kicked our asses (and early 2022 isn't looking so hot either). A few people I know went in very weird directions with covid and the whole corporate-control narrative, which was upsetting and alarming, but most people were pretty much on the same page as us: trooping through vaccinations and doing 95% of our socializing outside. I did a lot of knitting and some gardening; I also felt totally overwhelmed by our messy house, which I admittedly did very little to rectify. I got more work than I had in years, and I loved it; it also totally wrinkled my brain. The end of 2021 feels like a yawp into the void, a thousand mothers shrieking in fear and rage and frustration...but there was some really nice days, too, days that felt normal and sweet and funny and comforting. In a bad year, it's sometimes all I can ask for.

The Wheel

 One of my favourite fantasy tropes is when someone solemnly tells another character that everything turns according to The Wheel. It happens in the Dark Tower series, when Roland educates young Eddie that ka, roughly understood as destiny or universal force, only has one purpose—to turn—and that the many worlds are aligned along a wheel that is slowly breaking. It happens in the Wheel of Time series, when "the wheel weaves as the wheel wills," a statement that sounds so grand until you realize that it is, in fact, utterly incoherent. Even the much-satirized "time is a flat circle" line from True Detective can be read as a wheel metaphor, if you were so inclined, which I obviously am.

Regardless of how you gussy it up, the basic idea is: things come and things go. 

As I've gotten older, the idea of linear time has lost its sheen. Now that I've realized that adulthood isn't a destination one can arrive at (unless you count your own coffin, which is so grim), I'm free to the embrace the idea that I first encountered Katherine May's book Wintering. May takes the position that seasonality is a constant, that we all have our own winters—emotional, relational, physical, and, y'know, climatic—where we withdraw, slow down, and rest. We can emerge from these winters like bears from their dens, blinking at the buds on the trees that have been there, undetected but vital, since the previous autumn. Winter is a state of mind, a necessary slowdown, and a rebuke to productivity and hustle. 

By encountering winter, not as an apocalypse but as a slightly difficult gift, we can greet it as a friend when it arrives. This is a radical departure for me, because I don't really enjoy winters in the seasonal sense, and the emotional-physical variety are often hard for me to shake off. But it is possible, and once I do, I find myself revived and refreshed, ready to do and make and be with an energy I feel I've earned. 

Over the past few years, I've become more aware of the Wheel of the Year, a relatively ancient way of understanding time's passage. Each year is divided by eight major days: the two solstices and equinoxes, plus mid-holidays (Beltane, Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh) that celebrate harvests and spring's return.  In the olden days, each spoke of the year would be a festival, communities coming together to remark that the end of October really is sort of spooky, or that we need a bit of coziness in mid-December. 

I like the Wheel of the Year. For one thing, it has its roots both in the Celts and the Slavs, which are the twined branches of my family tree. Following this tradition feels like it actually belongs to me, unlike some of the mashed-together rituals I've adopted because they are around me, but not inside me (although any excuse to eat a dumpling or a latke, am I right?). It has a relatively gentle pace. The days are spaced roughly seven weeks apart: just enough time for something to shift in the natural world, like the leaves coming off the trees, or the major job of harvesting and preserving the garden mostly done. 

In fact, it was my conscious effort to tune into the natural world that actually gave me more reason to pay attention to the Wheel of the Year. These eight little micro-seasons each have their own rewards and their own special beauty: who doesn't love the unexpected brilliance of a blue-sky day in February, or the crocus and forsythia popping out in early spring to reassure us that all is not lost? Daily walks with my kiddo over the last few years have brought my attention to these little changes, like the bushes that go from glossy green to neon pink over several weeks, or the dog-hot days where the only time to play outside is early morning or late afternoon? The grasses that grow in September, the snow in November, the brilliance of the night sky in August? The slow flow through the year means there is no beginning and no real end, either: it's just the next thing, and not too far off. 

Annual cycles are part of many calendars. The Christian liturgy even has its own seasonal colours (violet for Lent and Advent; black for All Souls' Day!), and the Hebrew calendar has a casual four New Years in its calendar, with two—Rosh Hashanah and Passover—being the heaviest hitters. Annual cycles show up in other places, too: when you're building a passive solar house, you have to be aware of where the sun will be and when if you want to keep your house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And we still have vestiges of harvest season built into daily life, like the summer break from school that was originally for farm kids to go help out, or even Daylight Saving, which was satirically suggested by Ben Franklin as a way of preserving candles. (Ugh, dude.)

But my sense of the sacred isn't bound by stained-glass windows or tractor ruts. And of course, surprising no one who has been reading this blog for more than ten minutes, I do find myself yearning for community festivals, for weird rituals, for street dances and sidewalk dinners, for bonfires and midnight swims. The idea of roots so deep that time can't shake them loose can be very appealing, and while I likely will not be erecting a May Pole any time soon, I wouldn't say no if someone invited me to join them. 

What I like the best about it the whole idea is that nothing is permanent, and while that's a major downer in some regards, it can also be a huge relief. Difficult seasons will pass. The family in the throes of the terrible twos will emerge one day into blessed little-kid life. Illnesses have good days and bad days. I feel lonely and isolated one week, and celebrated and connected the next. The wheel turns long, as well: as our parents get older, so do our kids. We start over in jobs, in hobbies, in houses, in cities. We are beginners, novices, experts, and then beginners again. When things are wonderful, the urge to grab hold is strong; when things are shittier, we're more eager to move past it. Either way, the sun comes up.

I'm not a neo-pagan and I don't know where this wheel is rolling. But I do know that embracing the fact that everything comes and goes and comes again is giving me a sense of peace. I know that I will get older and things will change; I know my son will grow up and leave home; I know people I love will get sick; I know I will someday too. But when I remember that we always have the bright yellow shock of forsythia in spring, the quilt of the August starlight, the red sumacs in the ditch and the honk of geese as they wing back and forth in shoulder season, I feel startlingly reassured that all is not lost.

On Writing

Has there ever been an identity as fragile as that of "writer?" 

I have "been a writer" since I was in middle school, and my mom, exasperated with my daily habit of abandoning my nightie on the bathroom floor each morning, assigned me a page of writing every time I did it. Exasperated right back, I churned out nonsense stories about fairies and dolls come to life, a magazine where the cover model was a pig, and other from-the-brain-of-an-eleven-year-old masterpieces. I kept writing in high school, when I took Writer's Craft twice, earning a 95% in the class each time; I also journalled frequently, using loose leaf paper to try to figure out my friends and myself as though we were case studies in a psychoanalyst's training manual.

In university, I turned in papers that smelled a lot like the ones I'd written in high school—chatty, observational—and got barrel-scraping marks. No one told me that you weren't allowed to say "I" in university! No one told me that original thought wasn't done, and that any idea I had had to be cited from a previously published source. As someone who'd amassed a great deal of knowledge over the years about relatively obscure topics—Fatty Arbuckle, European graffiti—I was in the habit of being a voracious reader, synthesizing everything, and letting the source material fade. Plus, I was disappointed that university libraries didn't have a ton of texts on things I was into, yet seemed to have many linear feet of bookshelves devoted to, like, German Expressionist cinema, or Catholicism. Snore. 

But it was also in university when I started this blog. I finally had a place to install all my snarky thoughts and ramblings. Not trying to mold myself to the unversity-essay voice—striving for intelligence, and utterly devoid of jokes—I let my run-on sentence freak flag fly. In 2013, I wrote a fairly bad first draft of a science fiction murder mystery (!!) I have not yet had the heart to revisit; more recently, I've been trying to sort out my feelings about ritual in human life. At this point, my process includes long and animated shower discussions with myself, and precious little actual typing of words.

Despite the fact that I've never been formally trained as a writer (unless you count a lot of annoyed red pen from TAs who marked my essays) or as a journalist, I've done both and done them relatively well. I developed a real love of interviewing, which has introduced me to some fascinating people/characters. And I've been lucky enough to have some friends, editors, and clients who reach out and actually ask me to write for them, an event that never fails to both terrify me and boost me up. Writing has always kind of worked for me: I'm a much smoother writer than I am conversationalist, a much more organized thinker when I can get it down on paper, and I enjoy the process of turning "in here" into "out there."

I struggle with imposter syndrome, though. I struggle with the fact that for the last five years, this blog, and my writing career in general, has been a bit of a ghost town. Parenting, marriage, health, pandemic and, just, you know...life...has been overwhelming sometimes, and keeping 'er breezy on the blog has been a challenge. It's hard to be authentic and honest sometimes. Back n 2009, the biggest offense I encountered was Chuck Klosterman's book deals. Now, we've actually been through some shit. 

Every time someone else introduces me as a writer, I get a little squirmy. I haven't been paid to write articles for over a year now, and my professional time has been mostly administration and evaluation work—an area that I enjoy immensely, but doesn't activate my brain in a writerly way. (Again, very few jokes in those roles!) At what point do I stop considering myself a writer, or a future-writer, or a one-day-maybe writer? Someone with intentions to write isn't a writer, after all.

And then I think of the authors who take many years between books—decades, even. I think of all the writers who have day jobs, and there are legion. Of the many, many people who never make a buck off their writing and do it anyway: bloggers, fan fic authors, writer's-group members who produce work for a tiny audience. I think of the folks who write only for themselves, who finish a work, not by sending it to an editor, but by putting in a drawer. I think of my dad, who wrote haiku poems, and my mom, who writes beautiful emails. Those people are writers, too. They are my people.

Whenever I have an identity crisis about whether or not I'm a "real" writer, I try to remember that the vast majority of writers don't do it for money, prestige, or recognition. Their work is like drops of rain that nourish the soil of their lives, but are invisible on a sunny day. The garden grows regardless. In fact, it can't grow without it.

Even in fallow seasons, I'm allowed to call myself a writer. Even when I haven't been paid for it in a while—fuck, when I haven't done it in a while—I can understand that time as something that's still integral to the work. It's a period of gathering my thoughts, getting more experience, or paying attention to new ideas. It's reading time, which is incredibly important to writing. It's time to talk, to realize that my fumbling words need smoothing out. Even if the writing I'm doing is mostly on Facebook or letters, it still counts. 

Writing has never been my full-time job, but I'm not convinced I'd ever want it to be. I enjoy the loosey-goosey vibe I currently have with the process: sometimes it's a cyclone, and sometimes it's a drizzle. I can't rely on it to keep the lights on. But when it shows up—when I cultivate it to show up—I love the splash it makes in my life.

It Solves No Problems

When I was twelve, I somehow contracted parapertussis, a "less severe" form of whooping cough that still left me coughing so hard I would routinely vomit. Let me tell you: as a freshman high school student, brand new to the area and totally unacquainted with anyone at my new school, entering with a highly communicable and public disease is not really The Move. There is a childhood vaccine for pertussis, of course—it's part of the routine TDap-IPV shot, administered at 6, 18 and 48 months of age—but for this little-sister version, there is no vaccine. There's not even really a treatment, although antibiotics can help a little if you start them early. It's basically just cough until you stop coughing.

I'm going to get it out in the open: I'm pro-vaccine. I'm pro-medicine, generally. I'm not naive enough to believe that my position is universal—I know that for fat people, women, people of colour, poor people, and those with hard-to-identify and harder-to-treat conditions such as chronic pain, inflammatory disorders, fatigue, and rare syndromes, the experience of going to the doctor and emerging with an effective treatment is a wishful dream. But when surgery removed my dying ovary, or when experimental treatment saved my dad from certain death from melanoma, or when organ donation allowed my friend to give a stranger a second crack at life, or any number of routine and miraculous interventions occur in and around my life, from EpiPens and c-sections to spinal surgeries and chemotherapies, it's hard not to feel grateful for the fact that smart men and women are engaged in the practice of discovering, inventing, refining, and delivering some of the most staggeringly advanced medical care I could possibly imagine.

And truly, I believe vaccines are a part of this medical ecosystem. Like, jeez, do you know what measles actually do to a body? Why the fuck would I want that? Like all medical interventions, I know that vaccines are not a 100% foolproof endeavor on any level—people can suffer immediate and long-term side effects, bad batches have been made, and they are more "plate on top of the leftovers in the fridge" than "triple-layer Saran Wrap" when it comes to breakthrough infections, but by and large, the shine outweighs the shit. They're safe, effective, and they don't fucking cause autism. 

But we're now in an age when vaccines are under scrutiny again, and the quicksand is shifting, and things are bleak indeed. When I look back at this post in 2030—from the comfort of either my forest goblin-hut or my underground bunker, depending on how things are going—I'll be like, "Oh, right...Covid." Because Covid, as a general experience, has been chock-full of psycho-social mayhem, and people playing into and across type in sometimes-surprising (but often depressingly predictable) ways.

Take, for instance, the Ostriches: folks of any age with their heads in the sand, denying the fact that the world needs to change to accommodate this public health moment. These are the people who won't wear masks in sandwich shops and who stand too close at the bank; in their most terrible form, they protest at hospitals. They also include the Live-Forever Crowd, the 20-somethings who have never been really sick, and who are convinced that the virus is for old people. As someone who was exposed to sickness in my 20s, this gang really roasts my beans: it comes for us all! Get the jab, Jaxon! 

With the Anti-Authority folks, subsets include punks of all ages whose default stance is "you can't tell me what to do!" along with the former Noam Chomsky readers who see any alignment between government, health, and media—also known as "the story of why you should get vaccinated"—as some form of sinister collusion that they reject on principle. These people are often knee-jerk reactionaries, who might be convinced into coming around if enough of their punk/suspicious colleagues do so. They also might not! The Paranoiac is another subset of this; they're rejecting the vaccine as being part of a plot to control "the masses" as though the masses have not proven, over the last 18 months, that we're about as controllable as a bag of spilled rice. Also: they don't like being reminded that the Koch brothers don't know who any of us plebes are. Sorry! (But they really don't.)

The Amateur Statisticians have scrutinized "the numbers" and can tell you that the chances of them personally contracting the virus are very small. And even if they did, the chances of them actually dying from it are even smaller. And the chances of their kids dying from it is practically a speck, so why bother taking a day off work? And to this I say: you're not a goddamn scientist, Roseanne, and Long Covid is a thing. Even if you don't actually expire from the virus, fucking around with a disease that has some pretty heavy post-viral shit is a bad idea? And maybe passing it to your kids? Fuck off.

The women who rely heavily on their naturopaths and their crystal necklaces, and who have borderline orthorexia, are The Nice Ladies. These are the women who had a bad run with an inattentive doctor for a few years, resulting in a missed lump or an inflamed colon—extremely real reasons to be suspicious of re-engaging with mainstream medicine, as medical PTSD is a real thing—but who now eschew all forms of medical intervention in favour of the vitamin aisle at the local health food store. And frankly, these are the ladies who probably don't know many people who have dealt with Covid directly; they don't know a lot of nurses or warehouse workers or LTC facility staff. 

And finally, we have Trolls, who show up in comment sections with malignant glee, spouting off about vitamin D and ivermectin and saying "it's just the flu." Always, always block and ignore. They take pleasure in pissing people off, they're almost always male, and they're just people with dirty souls.

I have varying degrees of sympathy and compassion for each of these types. Nearly everyone is trying to ensure their own safety, weighing the value of their own personal position against the outcomes of getting well and truly sick. Sometimes they have more than one objection—they're suspicious of both western medicine and the CBC! They're sometimes installed in echo chambers, shrugging off dissenting views as being "brainwashed" and feeling the horror of realizing they're alone in their stance. They're isolated, often, and while being online might feel like a balm ("others like me!"), in the real world, the friction with those who regard them as selfish, misinformed, stupid, or arrogant is exhausting. Do I have compassion? Sure. I do.

But I also know that not one of these types, either as individuals or as groups, are scientists or doctors. They're often super intelligent, but they're just not trained in this stuff. They're not equipped to make a good call. Because: most of us aren't! It's not a value judgement—I'm not a bad or dumb person because I don't know how nuclear medicine works—but it does mean that I rely on medical experts to make decisions on my behalf. So I rely on governing boards and bodies to ensure that my medical experts are well-trained and ethical operators. And I rely on governments to regulate the governing bodies. And the system is imperfect—like, yes, it is shitty that Pfizer is earning twenty-six billion dollars this year in vaccine revenue, when people who worked on actual Covid wards reused masks all day and couldn't get a vacation day for love or money. I know that there are big, obvious, glaring problems with the whole system. I don't excuse that for one minute.

But you know what doesn't fix the problem with the system? You know what doesn't make Covid go away? You know what doesn't instill a sense of community, trust, and mutual uplift with the people around you? You know what designates you as unallied with the chronically ill, the medically vulnerable, the elderly and children in your life?

Refusing the vaccine. Refusing the vaccine solves no problems. So tell me: how are all these smart, wonderful, scarred, scared, isolated, paranoid community members going to solve Covid without it? Don't just cough until you stop coughing.

Your Late-Summer Horoscope

Listen, lovers: the wheel of the year turns ever onward, and we are between spokes now: Lammas just behind us, kicking off harvest season (as anyone with a garden knows), and the fall equinox in a few short weeks. For now, the summer is hot, the days stay long, and the sky is pink with smoke. It's the most beautiful apocalypse I can imagine. Let's dive into some made-up horoscopes for the coming months. 

Aries: My fantasy these days is that someone figures out how to plant billions—trillions!—of trees all over the world. Do they shoot them out of drones? Do they air-drop them the way they seed lakes with fish? Do we have to plant each one by hand? And what happens when they fail, as many seedlings do? My attempts to reckon with what the future holds for my sweet kid—the one who did not ask to be born on a hot and thirsty planet—and with what his adulthood will look like without those billions or trillions of trees, is something I grapple with daily. Maybe your homework this quarter is to plant a tree or two?

Taurus: I am constantly on the hunt for great YA stories. Books written with The Youth (tm) in mind are some of my favourites, and if there happens to be magic, great. I have read SO MANY magical-young person books, and I truly enjoy the genre: give me teen feelings, but gimme some stakes where someone might get blown up. If there's a semi-sentient castle or a lively juju bazaar or an alternate history where noted heartthrob John Calvin becomes the Pope instead of creating his own church, all the better! Magic-teen books are now slightly embarrassing, but honestly, you can keep your Elena Ferrantes because I am over here with my TJ Klunes. Anyway, Taurus: stop apologizing for the things that give you joy; in fact, seek out those not-very-cool things that you suspect will make your life much more joyful.

Gemini: The best thing I ever heard about grief came to me via a podcast, during which the guest remarked "grief is not an emotion. It is an attempt to reckon with that which cannot be undone. All kinds of emotions may attend that reckoning." This lands in my soul the way nothing else about grief has. It feels true to me, because my grief is often attended, not just by sadness or loss, but by rage, relief, tenderness, and surprise. Grief is often explained by mechanics or metaphor—the five stages, the ball in the box—but the thing that always startles me about grief is that I can be startled by it. I can read the opening of an article and dissolve into tears; look at a photo and feel my heart squeeze. I can't anticipate it the way I can other emotions, and that is grief's unkindest thing.

Cancer: I recently read this fascinating article about mother trees: mature trees in the forest that send out nutrients to other, less-established trees. Responsible loggers will do their best to find these mother trees and log around them, leaving them to remain in that role as new saplings replace older growth. I find this unbelievably beautiful and unbelievably sad: these trees are powerful givers, but there must be something to give to. I wonder if mother trees get lonely. Humans anthropomorphize everything up to and including electrical outlets, but these trees, alone in a denuded forest, create an ache in me that is hard to reckon with.

Leo: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is my favourite of the Harry Potter books, and let me tell you, that's not a popular choice! (Most people go for books 3-5, if you're curious.) The selling points of HBP are many: the introduction of one of my top-five character, Professor Horace Slughorn, who is a total Slytherin diva and I'm here for it; Harry, high as a kite on liquid-luck potion Felix; and the opening chapter depicting a series of conversations between the actual British PM and the Minister for Magic, the alternate head of state for magical folks. Rufus Scrimgeour (battle-scarred; yellow-eyed) takes over as Minister from Cornelius Fudge (hapless; wears a green bowler hat) and I have long been fascinated with Scrimgeour's portrayal in the books: slightly dangerous, highly experienced, and maybe also kind of a lion? I have no idea and I love it.

Virgo: The only way I can recommend Niagara Falls is if you go to attend a student-housing conference held in a hotel, get absolutely blotto, and then climb into a heart-shaped bathtub, fully clothed, with some of your conference peers. I can recommend Halifax highly if you go with your mother and she drives over a huge cardboard box, wedging it under your rental convertible, forcing you to slither under and de-wedge it. I can recommend Los Angeles if you take the subway while you're there: it's new and beautiful and entirely pointless in a city where 84% of people drive. The best part of anything is often unexpected, slightly deranged, and wholly ridiculous. Dress accordingly, Virgo: you don't want to get shmutz on your outfit.

Libra: "I was bullied in middle school" is a true statement that is also a total failure: I was bullied, it's true, but those six words do not exactly capture the experience of being ostracized and taunted when I was eleven, entirely at the mercy of my classmates and bus-ride peers, ignorant to what I had done to provoke the bullying (nothing) and what I could do to stop it (also nothing). When I did EMDR therapy a couple years ago, that period of bullying, which lasted about two years, was a huge wound, much more massive than I had ever realized. It was also foundational to understanding myself, especially in ways that relate to more recent friendship and relational pain, and the behaviour I do, both healthy and not, to ease it. Seek your wound, Libra.

Scorpio: Yours is the sign I associate the most with gothic lusciousness: you're all velvet bras and pan-fried mushrooms, red wine and black nails, embossed wallpaper and credit card debt. I love you Scorps because you're Morticia Addams in a RHOSLC world, and we need your arched eyebrows and affection for a centre part when things are overly sunny. However, every Scorpio I know is also a high-key ball of stress about what other people need from them, so know when to turn the flame all the way down—no, lower—and just...stop taking care of other people. Put on your velvet bra for yourself, Scorpio.

Sagittarius: When I turned 30, I held a Viking funeral for my 20s. At that point, I was like, "wow, I have been through some stuff," and while that's still technically true, the shit that I, personally, went through in my 20s was like a puddle compared to the emotional hurricane of my 30s. I think perspective is always a key factor in life: things will come in waves, and when you're being buffeted by the tsunami, you're just trying to hold on, to survive. You're not in it like, "ah, one day I will look back at this and marvel at my growth!" You're like, "what the actual living fuck am I cursed or just a bad person. WHAT IS HAPPENING." So, Sag friends, when you find yourself on an island where the water is calmly lapping at the shores, where there are no big waves on the horizon, when you can just sit and reflect? Do it!

Capricorn: One of the greatest gifts of the modern age is how fuckin' good children's television is. The vapid pablum of my youth, designed primarily to sell me merchandise, has been replaced by a modern wave of pure-hearted edutainment: our household flagship is Netflix's Storybots, but there are dozens more: Kid Cosmic, City of Ghosts (a true gem), Hilda, and even dumb shit like Booba and Oddbods. I watch a fair amount of TV with my kid, and this new crop has dispensed with much of the physical and verbal violence that was part of the 1980s-kid-show DNA: it's gentler, funnier, smarter, and more interesting. You, Cap, are on that path as well.

Aquarius: A love letter to my kid, who is being a huge turd for unknown reasons right now: I'm sorry we: let you watch TV; sent you to play with those kids who bullied you; fed you processed food; had so many fights in front of you; gave you a video game console when you were five years old; made you walk everywhere because we didn't have a car; didn't give you a siblings; didn't get you a pet; showed you the trailer for 2016's Ghostbusters and gave you nightmares; didn't enroll you in swimming lessons; didn't let you sleep in the car. We parents, we fuck up constantly. I hope you know you are so loved, even in the depths of turdliness, and we are here for when you surface and become the next version of yourself, as we all do.

Pieces: Did you know that pretty much all of the main characters in Finding Nemo are disabled or chronically ill? From limb difference and PTSD to addiction and memory loss, these are fish who have been through a lot. A lot! And they're not always nice to be around: Marlin is a nightmare, let's be honest. And yet Pixar is so casual about this, as though it's totally normal to populate a movie with characters we might turn away from if they were humans, and then demand that we fall in love with them (to the tune of $940M in box office). This is not wholly unproblematic, but Pixar has done a good job at depicting really complicated physical and mental states, from Carl Fredrickson's use of a walker in Up to Riley's depressive episode in Inside Out. I'm glad that we have these entrypoints for these conversations, for folks to see themselves onscreen, even if it's as a fish. Where do you need to see yourself, Pieces?

The Nine Types of Rest

The Nine Types of Rest was conceived by Steph Barron Hall in 2019, and was designed to correspond to the Enneagram types. Regardless of type, I find them useful as a checklist for needs and wants in times of overwhelm and stress; not everyone needs every type, but I will bet you a dollar that something on this list appeals to you. 

1. Time Away
Vacation time. Books from the library, websites, reviews. "You should definitely check out this restaurant." A flight, a bus ride, a long car ride. Mixtapes. Luggage. Arriving and unpacking into drawers, setting things on nightstands. A beer, a cocktail, a joint. Sitting on the porch, the deck, the patio. Stepping out into muggy heat, dazzling sunshine. A walk in the sand. Menus. Rain. Strip malls and bargain stores. Historic districts. Museums. Waterfalls. Babies napping in the carrier or in the stroller. Late dinners. Room service. Hotel pools. Sounds in the night. Really big parking lots. Souvenir shops. Tantrums. Endless photographs. The water tastes different. New transit systems. Coming home, smelling the way your house smells, getting under your own covers, dreaming again. 

2. Permission Not To Be Helpful
The best thing about going to my parents' house is that, at this point in the life cycle, being helpful feels like a choice. It's one I usually make—yes, of course I'll do the dishes, or round up the recycling, or put together a quick lunch. Of course I will look up the hours for the store, or help unpack the groceries, or flip the laundry. But there's also the luxury of knowing that if I want to, I can say no, or I'll get the next round, or I'll get to it later. Permission not to be helpful makes the choice to do so more of a gift than an obligation, and I appreciate that very much.

3. Something "Unproductive"
I refuse to monetize my hobbies. It's not that I don't think my knitting, pickle-making, or baking is "just okay"—on the contrary, I'm good at all that stuff—but the chance to do something that is only for me, because I want to, is a gift. It's not "unproductive" in the sense that nothing is produced, or even that it can't be leveraged (I have definitely traded knitting and canned goods for other wonderful things), but it's "unproductive" because anything I do with it is outside of capitalist time/goods-for-money systems, and that's the way I like it. It's a very, very small fuck-you to the endless yawp of hustle culture.

4. Connection to Art and Nature
I am not very good at remembering that forests are a thing, nor am I very good at walking around in them (my what-if brain goes into overdrive, offering up such goodies as "what if I roll my ankle and fall into the ravine and I can't get up and I die there" or "what if I pass a guy on the trail with my son and the guy turns around and murders us silently somehow" or "what if I forget my snack"), but every once in a while, the stars align and I enjoy my nature time. My 2020 highlight was a hike I did with my mom in the Dundas Nature Conservancy, where I allayed my anxiety by counting the number of 70-year-olds I saw hiking, and reminding myself that, if they could do it, then I, a 30-something with no underlying health conditions, could probably walk around for an hour under some trees. Anyway, I am not outdoorsy but aspire to be; this particular rest is not restful for me, really, but a girl can dream.

5. Solitude to Recharge
Sometimes, I just need to lie in bed and scroll through my phone. I read the archives of advice columns, I find weird Instagram accounts, I remember people I went to high school with and look them up. When I get bored of that, I lie in bed and do the crossword, or read stale magazines. I read library books that are due soon. I listen to audiobooks and doze. I pull the covers around me and punch my pillows down, flipping them to the cool side. I shove the covers away and stick my leg out, letting the breeze of the room soothe me. I keep my door firmly closed; the sounds of the house swirl around me, and I let them.

6. A Break from Responsibilities
Actually, I lied: the best part of going to my parents' house is getting to take a break from deciding what to cook for dinner. Even when I get pulled into the kitchen/offer my help, I'm off the hook for the planning. I don't have to shop for the stuff. I don't have to leaf through cookbooks, deciding on rice bowls or ramen or pulled pork or big salads. I can just show up, do some chopping, and then eat a meal! It's ridiculous how happy that makes me. I love helping without leading.

7. Stillness to Decompress
I am not really a "yoga person," in that I do yoga maybe 12 times a year and every time I'm surprised by how terrible I am at it: my hamstrings are like an overtuned guitar, and my stomach and boobs prevent some seemingly basic poses from being properly executed. But there's a moment in every yoga class, when the focus is on the breath instead of the movement, that makes my lungs feel like two huge balloons. The inside of my head is a cavern, instead of a buzzy hive. I stop thinking about what's next, what I have to do, or if I'm performing my own life properly; instead, I just breathe.

8. Safe Space
My favourite thing in the world is the sound of someone laughing from the next room; I like my own space, and knowing that someone else is nearby and happy.

9. Alone Time at Home
One of the biggest pandemic struggles, for me, was the fact that were were just together all the time. My partner worked from home; I was working from home and doing the bulk of the daytime childcare; Noah was attached to both us like barnacles; there was nowhere to go if we did go out. But I am a person who needs some alone time at home. I need uninterrupted time to write, to make things, to be creative. I like being alone during cleaning or big cooking projects. I chat to myself—it's how I process things that weigh heavy on my soul, or work through thorny creative blocks. I like to exercise in my underwear, which was less appealing when my home-gym was in the throughway for my sister's room. I try to give Mike a few hours a day of the house to himself—these are usually work-day hours, which aren't the same as true solo hours, but at least there's no kid in the background, weeping because the wrong kind of carbohydrate is on his plate. And I need that alone time as well, more than a few house a week, more than a day a month. All rest is like that, these days, but this one feels the most pressing, the most like there's a deficit.

Crush Energy

As I get older and more attuned to my ovulatory cycle, I am here to sing the praises of CRUSH ENERGY. You know this energy, if you are a living adult human in the world (but aces to the back, I guess): the stomach-drop, the hormonal flood, the flush. The daydreaming, the too-hard laughing, the absolute electricity if there happens to be flirting (ahhhh, flirting), the eye contact that is weird and also absolutely full-throttle amazing. Crush energy can be courted in places like classrooms, bars, and coffee shops; it needs to be downplayed in arenas like work and the parent-teacher meeting. Crush energy exists independently of your relationship status—while you may never act on the charge you get from standing slightly too close to someone, to feel it is a human delight. (If you're truly blessed, you might feel this crush energy from your own long-term partner, but I suspect this is rare, and comes with a complicated relationship dynamic that involves a bit of awe and distance; it is hard to feel jet-fueled crush energy on someone with whom your farts have commingled.)

Crush energy is the emotional counterpart to the physicality of making out, that time-honoured high school practice of staying clothed and being absolute disgusting horndogs. I was the kid who aced every sex-ed quiz, starting in grade five, so I knew exactly what was happening when I kissed someone; at the same time, knowledge of the vas deferens did nothing to help me negotiate the titillating combination of fear and horniness that came with every makeout session. I loved kissing in high school—if there ever was pressure to go beyond that, it wasn't from guys I really liked, so I felt secure in my decision/destiny to wait until I was "a bit older" to really get busy. The fear stemmed from the well of teen insecurity, doing something new, and the taboo of exploring your budding sensuality with another fifteen year old. If I'm being honest, I still love making out—it's in my top three favourite things, for sure—because it can bring all the emotional and physical highs of....a lot of other things...without the emotional and physical mess.

I am, historically, absolutely awful at interacting with crushes. I have had crushes dating back to high school, who, when I see them now—as a 37-year-old married mother—I will still sprint away. (Ask me about the time I hid from an old crush in the aisles of an art supply store!) I experience this as a crush hangover, a residue of awkwardness and inability to interact that I've carried with me to this very day, despite the fact that, in the last 20 years, I've convinced several many men and women to want this body and/or brain. Crushes, when I was younger, were scary because they might lead to dating, and dating might reveal what an absolute mess I am. Now that we're all in our late 30s, the messiness is no longer a shameful secret, but something I post about daily on Instagram. Thus, crush energy has shifted significantly as I've gotten older, but the ones that I started when I was young are still running on my most outdated software.

Crushes are independent of any relational hierarchies: crushes can happen on celebrities, total strangers, passing acquaintances, friends, friends-of-friends, co-workers, bosses, neighbours, whatever. It's possible to maintain those exact relationships while still nursing a crush. After all, there's no prerogative to actually act on anything here. Having a crush on someone can be a funny aside to your main relationship, a secret that you keep that elevates you and you alone.

When I younger, a crush could be kick-started almost exclusively from the killer combo of quirky handsomeness, a sense of humour, and a certain je ne sais quoi that might be described, in full detail, as "cool guy." (My crushes on women are often complicated by their hotness factor—do I want to make out with her, or just borrow her body for a while? Is she just really stylish, or should we kiss? Are we friends? Are we gal pals??) I was also firm in my self-conception that I, as a person, would not attract crushes to myself. I was forever a moth, never a lightbulb. I'm still not entirely convinced that anyone has crushed on me the way I've crushed on others, but y'know what? There's still time. I'm planning to be a hot-ass crone.

Now that I'm older, I find myself still drawn to that same trio of characteristics, but the "cool guy" factor is different now. Former Beastie Boys have it—lifetime membership to that club, as far as I'm concerned—but the dads at the playground who goof off with their kids, or the guy at the coffee shop who seems to be working on a business plan, or the local non-profit farm educator, are also in that category: interesting dudes who have their shit together, or are working on it. If you took a poll of my friends, a top sexiness factor would be "does he have a therapist?" and the only right answer is yes. (We all need therapy, no shame. If you're a dude in your 20s, 30s, or 40s and have never had a therapist, go get one! It's great! You'll get to feel your feelings, the ones you've been stuffing down for the better part of three decades!)

To me, the true gift of crush energy is the potential it carries, and how transferable it turns out to be. It acts as an inebriant in my own relationship: interacting with a crush onscreen or IRL allows me to come back and be a little flirty with my husband, a little cute. Inside my relationship, we ebb and flow, as all marriages do, with attraction and desire and kindness and fun; crush energy is a battery cable for those feelings, but you still get in your own car to drive it. Crush energy is potential, it's sensuality, it's a life-force that can knock us backwards when we're used to a lower level of intensity. But if it's a wave, it's one we can learn how to ride responsibly, like those surfers who also do activism for coral reefs. Crush energy begs us to pay attention, to feel sexy, to notice what we like in ourselves and what that part of us is drawn to. It's aspirational, it's physical, and fuck: it's fun.

39 Questions

What is normal

Who do I love?
Who loves me?
Who inspires me to do new things?
Who makes me roll my eyes and mutter under my breath?
Who makes me feel sad at what is lost?
Who has a them problem, not a me problem?
Who has a me problem?
Who makes me feel like an imposter?
Who makes me feel like myself?

What do I feel when I'm alone?
What is my strength?
What makes me laugh?
What makes me angry?
What is my fuel?
What can I do to help?
What am I not showing myself?
What do I believe?

Where do I do my best work?
Where do I feel most relaxed?
Where would I like to be touched?
Where is my studio?
Where in my home?
Where is my garden?
Where will I be buried?
Where does the light get in?

When can I be creative?
When do I push myself?
When do I feel alone?
When am I looking back to?
When am I well?
When do I rest?

Why do I want what I want?
Why am I afraid?
Why do those things still hurt?
Why do I get in my own way?  
Why am I so hard on myself?
Why am I still looking?

Why is normal

Covid: Year Two: Friendship

It has been fifty-seven weeks since Ontario shut down for the first time, when the only stores open were grocery stores and gas stations and pharmacies and the LCBO, when people skittered in and out of those stores like they were fugitives, when you couldn't get yeast or flour for love or money. It's been 411 days since the last March Break started, since we got the news that Noah wouldn't be returning to preschool, that someone would be in touch for us to come and pick up his shoes and whatever art projects he had made. It's been nearly as long since my husband took a mid-week train to Stratford, because his office was shutting down and it made sense for him to come here so he could be out of his parent's basement and seeing his kid and his wife every day; since we began fretting in earnest about his parents and their health, my grandmother and hers.

I am tired, friends. I am so tired of my kid and my husband. I know it's not nice to say, but it doesn't come from any mean-spiritedness on my part. They are the peanut butter-and-jam sandwich I've eaten every day for 411 days. They are lovely people, and I want to go check myself into a hotel for a week to be away from them. I want to be with my friends—the moms from the drop-in circles and the ones I DM with on Instagram, the people I'd see twice a year at house parties, the friends-of-friends I'm always delighted to see on the street. I want to get to know my friend's girlfriend better, or grab a casual coffee with the yoga teacher who seems nice, or get reconnected with my high school friend who lives down the street.

I'm tired of every minuscule social interaction being fraught, weighing what I see on social media (are they partying or a hermit? have they posted that vaccine selfie?) with my own activities (have I lingered when I ran into a friend at the drugstore? did my son bring home some horrible germ? are these really allergies?). I'm tired of trying to convince myself that I'm satisfied with seedlings and online shopping, as if I don't desperately want to give my parents a hug. I feel lucky in that socialized health care will mean I will not be bankrupted if I happen to get sick, but it also means that the vaccine rollout in our area has been slow as molasses. 

I am TIRED of Doug Ford and his futile promises that this lockdown will be different, somehow—despite the fact that the hardest-hit areas have been locked down continuously since October—and he is owed back-irritation for defunding public health and canceling paid sick days. I am also tired of the young men and women in my life who are spewing misinformation about vaccines, masks, doctors, COVID treatments and COVID itself. The 30-whatever-year-old men whose biggest annoyance in the last year is that they can't watch a ballgame from a stadium seat, they have to wear a mask when they go to the LCBO, and they can't complete the dating-app casual-sex circuit on a bored Saturday afternoon.

And I not ungrateful for our admittedly non-harrowing experiences throughout—we've been in a safe little city, with less than 400 cases since March 2020, and many of those in congregate living spaces like long-term care facilities, where even the most diligent approach isn't a guarantee against sickness. Our big house meant that my sister could be here with us for nearly a year, another adult to bounce off of (and feel feelings about); it meant that there are nooks to escape to, whole rooms we can dedicate to exercise, kid-play, or seedlings. We are able to go grocery shopping, to attend doctor's appointments, to have ultrasounds, and buy skateboards. We are able to get our mail, have running water, and eat food. We want for nothing.

Except: pandemic life is a grind. It's a grind! When is the last time you felt joy? Just a streak of pure delight, shocking your nervous system with unexpected beauty or pleasure? When is the last time you felt connected to someone outside your house? An intimate moment—a hand on their shoulder, a confession told with heads together, easy laughter? When is the last time you felt peaceful, the jangle of your pandemic-addled nervous system quieted down enough to feel the hum of the natural world, the beat of your own heart? And not in a "are these heart palpitations or is this The Big One" kind of way, either. 

Adult discourse tends to view friends as some kind of vestigial university phenomenon—adults have colleagues and in-laws, not friends. (An aside: the fact that queer folks often say "chosen families"  to mean "my group of best friends who love and support me but who are not blood-kin" tells me what I need to know about the relative status of family and friendship.) However, I will freely admit that I miss giggling like a lunatic with my high school bestie while we drink wine in the driveway, and brunch with The Girls, and the coffee shop outing with a new friend, and a trip to the library with a mom-friend. Not having access to those varieties of friends, and those different spaces, makes life tougher. When the daily circuit is home office-kitchen-bedroom/husband-kid, there's very little room to be surprised by joy.

It feel almost absurd to be advocating for these nice-to-have things at the tail end of an unprecedented year, but fuck it, I'm selfish. I don't want a ballgame or a casual hookup; I don't even want freedom from the "tyranny" of masks or vaccines (what luxury, that this is our so-called tyranny). But what I do want, so much, is to feel like my soul-self is growing and not withering; to feel like the reason I'm keeping my house clean is because maybe someone will come visit one day; to feel like I can commit myself to creative projects because I will have the time (read: school coverage) to actually do them. The birth-to-kindergarten sprint was only really tolerable because I knew, at some point, I would be able to claw back some of the parts of myself that I'd put on ice, the parts that weren't paying the bills or keeping that little human alive.

And then along came 2020.

I read a tweet recently that said "It's wonderful that everyone expects non-stop risk-embracing celebration this summer, but it's slightly more likely people will have two glasses of wine and start sobbing for no reason, then leave the party and walk to the nearest body of water to sit on a bench and watch boats," and friends, I feel seen by this.  It's not so much that I have a specific grief that I can point to (a job loss, a death, a shitty diagnosis, an eviction), but navigating a world where public health has thrown a handful of marbles on the floor has left me feeling like I need to hang onto the walls for a while; it's too bad that the usual walls we reach for —friendship, nature, creativity, time off, time away—are all firmly off-limits. See you at the other end of the hallway. I'll reach out my hand when it's safe.

Aesthetics

When I was twelve, Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet appeared, like a comet, in movie theatres. That was the year we lived in Victoria, BC, and for the first time in my life, I had some degree of freedom: I walked to school instead of riding the school bus, I could go on some very chaste dates (I saw the Fran Drescher vehicle The Beautician and the Beast with Big Frank, who liked me and about whom I was...neutral-positive), and I was free to roam the aisles at A+B Sound, a kind of Western Canadian Tower Records. It was heaven, to be honest—while that year was terrible for my parents, who struggled in work and family life, I was finally free from the oppressive Ottawa suburb where I had been viciously bullied, and I regained a tiny sliver of the confidence that had been chewed up during puberty and middle-school hell. 

I didn't see Romeo + Juliet in theatres—I was a smidge too young, and I was sort of contrarian in my approach to pop culture: if it was marketed to me, I wanted no part of it. But the magazines I read at the time were loony tunes for it, doing fashion spreads inspired by the film, watering down the sexy Venice Beach/Dolce and Gabbana look for the high school freshman crowd, and doing their level best to underline that Leonard DiCaprio was a heartthrob, dammit. (To me, Leo has always been a heartthrob like he's been an Oscar winner [HEYOOOO].) The story was secondary, but the glamour! My Lord. 

I have always loved a well-developed sense of aesthetics, and Romeo + Juliet had this in spades. It featured cascades of specific, beautiful artifacts relating to the inner and outer lives of its characters. It was so precise, from the neon crosses lighting up a church nave, to the unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts, to the hurricane rushing across the sky as Mercutio lay dying on a beach. I know people find Baz Luhrmann over the top and garish, but when I was thirteen and finally seeing the movie in my cousin's dark basement, it looked the way the rest of teenagerhood felt: like I had stuck my finger in an electric socket.

Over the years, other movies and TV have done this dance of aesthetics—Fight Club, The Royal Tenenbaums, Black Panther, Mad Max: Fury Road, Hilda. They are, after all, a visual medium, so telegraphing information about characters through the way they dress, the songs they like, the cars they ride in, the houses they inhabit, is not lazy or frivolous. It is a way of telling us who they are.

We all have our own sense of aesthetics, which are part of the stories we tell to and about ourselves, even if we allow them to remain largely invisible or unexamined. Think of gender-neutral baby clothes and the parents who buy them; minimalists who ditch their couches; the extreme house-plant set; book collectors; thrift store junkies; femmes in lilac lipstick; dudes in spiked jackets. We have such a wide range of beautiful available to us! What we choose is not neutral: it's political, nurtured by the houses and cultures we grew up inside, influenced by the music we like and the movies we watch, influenced again by friends and housemates and the people we want to attract, and distilled down to our walls, our closets, and our favourite colours. 

It can be a dance, especially with people with whom you share space: my husband is a collector (DVDs, records, teeshirts) and sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of items in our house. His music tastes veer towards industrial/punk; we have a lot of horror-movie posters that remain in tubes. At the same time, he pushes back on my desire for less; the compromise, as of right now, is piles of stuff destined for the donation bin "someday," an "aesthetic" that we both hate. 

Sometimes I daydream about a little house—a downtown apartment, an a-frame in the woods—that can be wholly mine. I haven't had a space that was just for me in many years, and I miss it; now every room is designed with an eye to sharing it. I like lots of art on the walls, and struggle with clutter, but I'm not a maximalist. I love colour and am learning, at the age of 37, how to use it in my wardrobe and in decor. And this is political, even if I don't recognize it: learning how to let myself take up space, to have my own sense of beauty, and to remind myself that it matters because I like it, even if I'm the only one who does. I've spent time adopting other people's aesthetics because I wanted to be close to them (the number of horror movies I watched in the first five years of dating my husband!), and I've spent time under my parent's highly beautiful roof, but the fact is, I'm still learning how to do it myself. 

Romeo + Juliet is a breadcrumb: I will never adopt the balls-to-the-wall colour scheme and/or lifestyle that those characters are immersed in, but I will identify the cool blue neon light as something I love, along with Margot Tenenbaum's raccoon eyeliner and knee socks, and Furiosa's steampunk practicality. The idea is not to borrow other people's specific identities; it's to give myself the bravery to figure out my own. I want to look like myself, beautiful in my own weirdo way, drenched in colour and light.

Ritual 1

I've been thinking about ritual, off and on, for nearly five years. Because it's such a big topic, I don't always have a very coherent angle of approach: sometimes I think about it from a personal perspective, like when I wonder how having a really solid cultural support system would have changed things after NS was born. Sometimes I think about it from a theoretical point of view—even learned scholars aren't able to really define what a ritual is, which means it's really juicy for academic thought (and, despite this juiciness, the field of ritual studies is a young one, only really formulating itself since the 1970s). Sometimes I think about how we can improve our rituals—what questions do we think we're answering when we come together in community to celebrate a coming of age, or eat brunch together once a month, or kneel and eat a cracker?—and if we can change them, how would we know if we're stepping forward or backwards? Sometimes I feel like my neurons are firing a billion times a second, and the frizz is fun; sometimes, I wonder if I've totally stepped off the path of reasonable thought and am trundling off to accidentally form a cult.

Some background: after Noah was born, I was sad. I was sad because his birth had shaken me deeply on a number of levels. It was painful, first and foremost—the worst pain I'd ever felt, and for a long, long time. I felt abandoned by my midwives, whose roles I'd thought would be more supportive; instead, I laboured for days with just my husband, having been instructed not to call them until the contractions became more regular (which they never did). The goals I had set for myself—a "natural birth," in the beautiful birth centre downtown—did not come to pass; at the end of it, I had a c-section from a doctor whose name I didn't know, shaking so badly from the anesthetic, and feeling like I had failed. The grief from this pain/failure combo was enormous. Plus: I now also had a baby. It was a tectonic shift in lifestyle, relationships, appearance, ability to sleep, comfort, routine, work, and basically every other aspect of my life. Everything had changed. I didn't know how to talk about it. 

As a culture, we're not great with change. We're especially bad at "change with a side of upset feelings:" death, breakups, friendships that drift apart, the post-retirement phase where things are "really exciting" but there's also a deep loss of identity. I've historically had breakdowns when things change on a Big Level: I had them after I graduated high school and university, and I had one after Noah's birth, too. And I started thinking about the ways in which we see each other and ourselves through this big changes, and realized that, if it's not a party, we don't really want to do it.

Ritual is a box for feelings. You can put your feelings into the box, if you want; you can also use ritual to box yourself off from your feelings, although this second option has diminishing returns. When people (both individuals and communities) create rituals, they're typically pointing to something and saying "hey, this is important." 

For example: for months, my Tuesday morning routine was to go to the YMCA, buy a day pass, drop Noah off at the kindergym, and then do some power yoga. Nothing about this was sacred—he would emerge sticky and crabby; I was just rolling around on the floor—but I grieved the loss of our weekly YMCA outings deeply when COVID began. After reflecting on it, I realized that this weekly ritual  pointed to: time to take care of my body; time apart; time spent in the company of other adults, without my child; time to slow down. The sacredness of that YMCA time was not attached to a church or a deity, but to the needs that it met, needs that felt ignored in much of my life. 

And we can do this pointing with almost anything. Why is Christmas important? Why do I crave my evening cup of tea? Why does Friday takeout dinner feel untouchable? These are little boxed-off pieces of time, and ones that we've filled up with stories: the feelings we want to feel, the values we uphold, the need to predict and make patterns in our lives. And you don't have to put your feelings into the box; sometimes showing up will enable the feeling, or it will simply signal to others in the box with you, "hey, I'm here." 

Because rituals aren't just a feeling; they're not ideology. They're action, which means they work very differently from just my little thinky-thoughts. They can be embodied values, but participating in them doesn't require my brain and body to match. I show up at Christmas, and the values I hold around my family and our traditions are a little more entrenched; I stand and kneel in church, and while my questions and doubts remain, I am there in the moment.An outsider would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

All of us have many micro-cultures, overlapping all day long: our personal histories, the media we consume, the way we structure families, our careers, our ethnic and national contexts, the ideas we love and the ones that repulse us. We have different norms, depending on who we're with—I behave differently with my childhood bestie than I do with my mother-in-law. And we have the versions of ourselves that we want to be, the versions that we've left behind, and the versions that we are, right now. Rituals that work well in one context don't translate across the board. What is normal in church is a big old raised eyebrow in a classroom; what works in the family home may be unintelligible to those outside it. Ritual is a way of creating a shared context; we've lost a lot of those, in modern life.

This is all to say that ritual is complicated. It's a cultural technology that can be controlled, weaponized, wrested away, and suppressed. It's a vessel for the sacred that can also be deeply secular. It's an invitation to be together, and a deeply personal way of understanding our world. 

And this is also to say that ritual is something I want to do with my life, and I'm not sure what that means. Broad strokes might include grad school, designing resources, writing that doesn't include the phrase "thinky-thoughts," maybe a ritual space, a cultural conversation about what ritual is and why we need it. In between those strokes is pure terror: what if I fuck it up, do it badly, cause harm? What if I'm not smart enough or dedicated enough? I think this is really important, and I want to do right by it. I want to create something for myself, the sad person I was after Noah was born, that is a way of holding myself up across time and space. I want there to be less sad people, or at least, better sadness: feelings that are recognized and held, remarked upon and not ignored. I think ritual is a good place to do that.

Doing the Self-Care Boogie

Self Care by Erika Lee Sears, 2020

One of the best part about having smart female friends in their 30s is that many of us are aware of how stupid modern life is, and will validate the living hell out of each other when we encounter it in the wild. One such gift was sent my way this weekend, by a dear friend with whom I've spent hours discussing the joys and pitfalls of parenting, and let me tell you: we all need a good takedown of the Instagram Moms from time to time.

In a nutshell, the article focuses on what bullshit it is that we are still falling for the Instamom at all. You know the type: a gauzy look at a big family, usually in some picturesque setting, where there are plenty of crafts, hug pileups, and eyelet rompers. Tantrums happen offscreen, and there is nary a chicken finger in the freezer. These moms have thousands of followers, big houses, cute little husbands, and, it seems, very little interest in regions like, say, "postpartum mental health" or "racial equality." Their kids ride skateboards and swim in the ocean, or they dance at sundown, or they pile into camper vans for weekends away with their church groups. It is all INTENSELY wholesome, a vision of perfect motherhood that is upheld by a scaffolding of capitalism (you can buy your way into this vision) and patriarchy (there must be something wrong with you, as a woman, if you resist it). 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the internet veil, I'm over here, struggling with a kid who is slowly falling apart from lack of other children in his life, with a house that doesn't magically clean itself, with the scheduling nightmare of trying to cram work in at some point during the day, along with managing the bulk of the cooking and food in our house. It's not all a slog, but it is all work, and the majority of it is unpaid and just sort of expected of a mom. If you consider the running of a house work—and you should—I work an awful lot.

The article I was sent goes nicely with another one, about how we've convinced ourselves that meeting our basic needs is the same as self-care. I know self-care is not always glam—it includes things like therapy, crying, exercise, and hard conversations with hard people—but it tends to happen at a level above, say, the basics. Resting, eating, cleaning, and having social relationships isn't self-care. If animals don't do those things, they die. A pedicure? Sure, I'll give you that. A particularly pretty sandwich? No, babe. You gotta eat something anyway.

We have been sold a bit of a bill of goods, here: women's labour is not dreamy, for the most part. It's annoying to drag a kid in from of the computer for the third Zoom session that day, to ensure that the baseboard of the bathroom aren't in an embarrassing state, to plan and execute a diverse menu through the week that prevent any major nutritional deficiencies, to do our paid work, and to do the worry-labour of noticing the plaque buildup on teeth/clocking any major tantrum seasons and how they might map to childhood mental health/ensure that clothes are plentiful and in the right size/blah blah blah, we know the drill. It's hard to translate any of that to a social media post; should I want to?

And when I think about adding chickens, a ballet body, twins, or whatever else is hip among the Instamoms, my blood runs cold and I take to my bed. Because no reasonable person would consider the act of walking around town doing errands to be self-care, no matter how blue the sky or how pretty the flowers you pass along the way. If I have to bring a backpack to tote things home, then it's not self-care. It's household maintenance. (I hope I don't have to convince you otherwise.) The body, chickens, and babies just represent more responsibility, more shit I have to get done. No thanks, ladies. I have enough on my plate today.

I, like the author of the Harper's article, will likely not give up my habit of following the Instamoms any time soon. Despite my annoyance, they do offer a slice of beauty; I just have to remember that, no matter how authentic they seem, they are a packaged product with a point of view and a politics. They're about as real as a Marvel movie, but the scrim of reality—this is just our little home!—belies that fact. Show me the tantrum, the fight you had with your husband, the meeting with your advertorial sponsor. Or don't show me that, and float on into the night, as real as a magazine cover. 

I made a list of things that are truly just for me: things I listen to, watch, cook, do, and buy. It includes things like Stan Rogers songs and cozy blankets, weird cookies and slow walks through fancy grocery stores, my handknit sock drawer and the flavour of cardamom, clean white sheets and reading in bed, iced mint tea and Hilda on Netflix. Some of those things still don't pass through the filter of pure self-care, but even if they're work, I can do them with enough joy and focus on my own preferences that I'll let it slide. I need that list; I think we all do, these days.

If 2020 taught us anything, it's that families work best when they're connected to the outside world—childcare, schools, libraries, the early years centres, grandparents, the kids down the street, the friendly barista. Take away enough of those supports, and life starts to look like the Instamoms: just a family in a house. But it's not the right picture, and it's not the whole picture. I want to know if the Instamoms ever lock the door against their six kids, sit on the toilet, and scroll the way we plebes do. My heart says they do; what do they see?