Thirteen

I don’t know if this is still an expression in Korean parlance, but in 2007, an elder at our Korean church announced that I was a woman “who was no longer alone.” Meaning I was pregnant with you.

As was pretty on-brand for me in my twenties, I resented the phrase. Pregnancy did not automatically change me from “no longer” anything, especially as determined by an elder male. That was for me to determine.

Some weeks later, I was sitting at my work cubicle and struggling to stay awake. I know, I know. You’re like, Mom, can you not with the tale again about how you were all working and grad schooling and commuting and incubating a human. WE GET IT. You’re Pioneer Woman.

Okay but this is important. Because my boss called me into his office and waved a report at me that I had “written.” He basically said there was nothing in it he could use. You’ve probably never had someone tell you that, or maybe you have, but since you are not a “hard-o” like I am, let me assure you. That reckoning should have been devastating and I should have been way insulted. Instead I was just so tired all the time that it just made me feel…sad. For my boss. Because he was depending on me to do the dang thing and I was just a tired fail potato that housed a Costco sized M&Ms every afternoon.

I went to the restroom (as I did in those days every 12 minutes) to pull myself together.

I stood in the stall and held my belly and felt the full freight of my sadness. And then I felt you. You turned and for the first time I could discern the outlines of your head, your back, your legs all tucked. Sacred encounters can happen anywhere, and there I met the holy and the wholly lovely person who had been with me for all the conversations and the commutes and the interminable classes at night. I was no longer alone.

I had no idea. No clue. Not even a speck of the dustcloud that trails after the miracle on which a love like you floats.

You are musical and hilarious. You are still a nature baby, held in the thrall of frogs and turtles and other amphibious creatures. You speak fluent sarcasm and can carry a bit with an ease that amazes me. We recently met a family at the dog park whose Boston terrier named Monte has spawned an entire fiction series that you will oftentimes play out while riding with me in the car. You are so beautiful and don’t know it. You are learning to love being you.

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You spent this year fighting a personal crisis of which only you and Daddy and I will ever know the true depths. You will meet people in life, good and loyal friends and partners, who will learn about this crisis, but they will only understand it as ones learning about the events of a history instead of marching across the battlefield in combat. I hope you will remember what we learned in fighting this war alongside you, and that you will always know the miles we would travel to help deliver you to safety.

Throughout this past year, none of us have been alone. We have been always together, and the edges of where we began and ended became blurred by the seasons that bled into one another that we have called this long quarantine. We dream of a time when we will be free of the restriction and the fear and the stupid masks. But we also know there will be a loss that accompanies this freedom, and that loss will be the togetherness we will have called Never Being Alone. I would not relive this year for all the M&Ms in the world, but I will not soon trade in the marvel of once again finding myself with you.

How to Practice Radical Self Care in 26 Easy Steps

  1. Spend 214 days with offspring in some version of quarantine.

  2. Do all the emotional labor of parenting. Every time the emotional labor cart wheels by, look at the emotional labor offerings like they are chocolate mousse or key lime pie and point to them and say, Yes, that. I’ll have a big slice of that emotional labor. Please just make sure my co-parent/spouse gets none, as that would mean he knows what I’m dealing with and we cannot possibly have that.

  3. Engage not with rando hate soldiers on social media, but by all means, do get into a verbal tussle on Twitter with that dude you met eleven years ago and go deep into the stacks of his thinly veiled Tweets about white supremacy because this is what will serve all mankind in this present age.

  4. Sleep not.

  5. Eat all Halloween candy in freezer and purse and all secret hiding places by October 2nd.

  6. Become so haggard that when you go to get your highlights updated, your hairstylist says, “Okay, so just so you know, highlights won’t cover all this gray. Like that’s not what highlights are able to do.”

  7. Teach and write and walk the dog as these things are your actual jobs.

  8. Clean the bathroom but only whilst listening to the most sad-ass podcasts where the endings are all an ambiguous muddle or unimaginable tragedy. Bathrooms are only at their cleanest when you have cried human tears into the sink over a stranger’s story.

  9. Now this part is really critical so don’t mess it up: Lose all contact with your therapist. Don’t you dare think your problems in the midst of a global pandemic are worth talking about because we are ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

  10. Exercise only if it’s useful to someone. Like oh, you want to mail that package? Let me just walk it to the post office and stand in line like I’m in a socially distanced meet and greet at ComiCon.

  11. Order some more stocking stuffers for the kiddies on Poshmark because retail therapy.

  12. Look at husband, open mouth and say, I think I need to actually run away from home?

  13. Hear Husband say, Yeah. Why don’t you do that.

  14. Believe what Husband actually says was, Oh, are you sure you need to do that now? Because we might all perish like a bunch of trampled dandelions the second you leave us.

  15. Double check that it’s okay to leave for the weekend.

  16. Secure room in most amazing AirBnB in Western MA.

  17. Secure rental car for getaway.

  18. When asked if you mind what kind of car you’re given by Enterprise, say, Oh heavens no, and when given the keys to a white minivan, take that hot rod and get the hell out of Dodge.

  19. Secure appointment for hot tub + massage (wearing mask, obv). Luxuriate like you are posing for the front of said spa’s brochure.

  20. Watch a gazillion hours of “Gilmore Girls” as if you don’t know what all shakes out with Luke/Lorelei/Rory/Logan.

  21. Take a hot shower and another and another.

  22. Download book on Codependency. Expect to see picture of self as you turn every page. Highlight some things. Ponder codependency.

  23. Eat vegetables cooked by another human. Eat more! Drink them even, you crazy veggie crazed rascal!

  24. Frolic in leaves and among them, swirl in all their splendor like you are Fraulein Actual Maria.

  25. Momdance in minivan while driving home.

  26. Return home so happy they barely recognize you.

Documenting the Quarantine ed. 4: What I Miss

I was inspired by writer Austin Channing Brown to consider what I missed from Ordinary Time that is not Quarantine Time. In no particular order:

  • Riding the subway to work and listening to a playlist that I curated in order to take my mind far, far away.

  • Not being aware of how my TMJ appears to think it needs to hold up the entire North American continent with a tautness that is, frankly, admirable. (Also, if anyone has any pain relief for TMJ, I am all ears).

  • Dairy Freeze. I think 65% of my grumpiness is knowing it will soon be warm and I will not be queueing with all my neighbors and their dogs in wait of a Reese’s Razzle in a waxy cup with a tall white spoon.

  • Clear breaks from caretaking. Each and every day feels a bit like parenting babies where there is no weekend and no real guarded sanctuary of rest. There is just caretaking: for my children, my students, and my dog (who has regressed to new levels of diva infantilism). It is interrupted by moments of having to do administrative things or clean the bathroom floor or walking through the cemetery. I miss going to night class and buying myself a coffee just because. They were little totems in my week, little flags in the sand of where I staked my territory of being a human with singular interests and joys, and not merely a mom in servitude of others.

  • Massages. Not that I got one very often, but merely the possibility of paying a stranger to kneed my back like a stubborn slab of bread dough is a huge luxury I took for granted.

  • My students and their three-dimensional human forms and colorful ideas and incisive questions. This semester started out difficult and it persists in being really difficult but I miss the living, breathing, electric classroom experience.

  • The library. The dining hall. The buskers in Park St. Station. The sweaty barista at the Arlington Starbucks. The hopefulness I felt about Election 2020 and which I hope I might feel again depending on whom Biden taps as a running mate (?). Concerts. Holding other people’s babies.

    I could write endlessly about the things I miss, but the present reality is blessed and full all the same. My house is rarely quiet, a reminder that there are people in this house laughing and FaceTiming and making friendship bracelets to deliver—delivering us indeed to a little freeze frame when we all were as tightly wound as the embroidery threads my children cross and loop and knot with conviction. We are still good friends, same as we ever were, we are just a few threads unslipped through knots for now. Ready and waiting for the chance to wrap around one another’s wrist again soon.