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?