Dear Somebody: A lesson in unconditional love.

A paint palette from How it Feels to Find Yourself

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I wake up tired. It’s 4:35 am and our 5-month-old is crying. I sit up, swing my legs over to the edge of the bed, and stumble towards the door. Jack has been up for some time now, waiting for us to wake. He dances around my feet, tip-tapping excitedly, wanting me to sit down and play with him. “I need a minute, Jackie,” I mumble, stepping over him and into the bathroom. He watches as I brush my teeth and splash cold water on my face. I feel irritated for no reason. After a few minutes, I close the door.

By 6:00 am, the baby has been changed and fed and cried a few more times. We’re sitting on the floor playing peek-a-boo, waiting for the sun to show her face. Jack sits by the bedroom door, waiting. Every so often, he looks over to see how we’re doing.

Around 6:45, I get dressed. Jack bounces around my heels as I pull on pants and a hoodie. “Jack. Jackie. I need some space,” I say, more gently than I have before. When we reach the back door, he’s there, waiting. I let him out and he races around the yard, joyfully feeling the cool air on his face. The trees are dropping their leaves now, and the crinkle of each one fills my ears. The scent of morning dew after a long fall from the sky passes over us in waves. I breathe in deeply and will myself into feeling new. I want to be better—patient, kind, more appreciative of all the good I have. Jack walks over and sits down next to me, so closely that his body is on my feet. His head rests under my hands. He waits. 

—from ”A Lesson in Unconditional Love” in How it Feels to Find Yourself

TUESDAY

This interview with Blexbolex about The Magicians; this letter by Ruth Franklin of Ghost Stories about the purpose of art in dark times; this conversation on moving past your own self-doubt between Lizzy Stewart and Andy J. Pizza.

WEDNESDAY

Teared up reading today’s note from Courtney Martin, a letter about her daughter turning 10. I myself can hardly fathom a world in which my daughters are 10, or 11, or anything except so small. In it, she writes:

When we were driving home so slowly that day, I never could have predicted any of this—that, ironically, my firstborn would gift me with nourishing, companionable quiet, and return me to my love of solitude and art, and speak an emotional language so foreign to me it would humble me in all the right ways.

I think about this constantly—how N and F are their own mysterious beings, equipped with their own arsenal of language, philosophy, and thought. How they are not extensions of me. How I am humbled continually by how easily they find and hold onto anything good. How they do not dwell. How deeply they feel about their perceived injustices. How it’s not my job to tell them what they should think or feel, but help them find the words to articulate what they do think and feel. How it’s my job to guide them, yes, but how mostly it’s my job to stay out of their way—so they can show me, and the rest of the world, who they are. 

THURSDAY

In the very little time I have to make things, I have been trying, very hard, to make things. Sometimes this is during F’s nap. Often it is while we go on walks. I walk and write poems in my head, on my Notes app. I text lines of poems or this newsletter to myself. I try to capture what I feel in words, hoping that eventually, I’ll be able to translate it into a picture. I draw on the couch after the girls are in bed. I draw when I should be sleeping. Sometimes I draw instead of showering. 

I fret a lot—not about the time I’m losing, but about whether I’ll still want to make the things I want to make when I do have the time. Whether I’ll still feel the spark. Whether the making part of me will keep waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

Two pieces I made this year that I finally framed, ready to hang in our home.

I took the time to frame these two illustrations this week. We’re going to hang them up in our house. Each one took too long to make by any reasonable person’s standards. If I divide the amount of time it took to draw each one by the rate I was paid, it comes out to exactly nothing. If I add up the additional costs—time with my family, regular hygiene, a semblance of a social life, an earlier bedtime—things start to sound a little ridiculous. I start to feel ridiculous. I have written about this period of motherhood before.

But when I look at these two illustrations together, I see that the making part of myself is alive and well. That it is being tended to. That despite being obviously neglected, my creativity is climbing back into my life. Into where it belongs. That it is creating its own space in the places I have abandoned. That it refuses to be forgotten. That I have not left this very integral—perhaps the most integral part of myself, behind. That what’s good is slow in its making, but that the making part is very good, too. That, however slowly, my art is growing and changing, and I am, too—and that both are well worth the costs.

FRIDAY

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

—Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: Joy is not made to be a crumb.

From a series of collages I made to accompany Ilya Kaminsky’s We Lived Happily During the War (2022)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

F has been teething for two months now, her mouth a continuous gush of saliva and spit-up, her gums red and blistered from pressure. She gnaws on her tiny fists, on cold washcloths, on gummy teethers—anything that promises a bit of relief. Her skin is flushed with stress, but when I pick her up, she smiles. I put my cheek next to hers and she laughs, tears still streaming down her face. She holds onto her joy. 

I tell her that I know it hurts. I explain the intricacy of tooth eruption—the fact that they’re all there, hiding inside her skull, just waiting for their moment to shine—though I know she doesn’t understand. I myself don’t, really. What is there to understand about pain? All I know of pain is that we continue to live through it. We tolerate it, we build resilience or numb ourselves against it. Over time, we discover that there are many things that frighten us more than pain.

I watch F wriggle in discomfort. She sleeps fitfully, crying on and off for hours. All the crying makes her vomit and all the vomit makes her hungry again. I change her wet clothes, her wet sleepsack, her wet sheets. She is quiet, solemn. Her tired eyes follow me around the room and she smiles. It’s a small smile, but it’s there, glinting in the dark. I see her searching, trying to find her way back to joy. 

The room is cold; it’s November now. F shivers and wails through her smile. I imagine she is confused. We have allotted too much pain to this tiny person—someone this small and this good—who tries, in the very worst of circumstances, to feel joy. I look at her eyes: wet, glassy. The lids are swollen from little sleep and too much salt. I wrap her back up. I dry her eyes, her face, her mouth. She smiles. She tries to sleep.

It’s been a tough day. Many hours later, when the moon comes up for air, I think about joy and how it lives inside us. I think about how, despite great pain and discomfort, F holds onto what she knows is hers. To what belongs to her. I think about how hard she tries to live inside joy and how I want to do more of the same. 

T pulls out his phone and shows me a video he took an hour ago. In it, F lays on her stomach, her face tear-stained. The front of her outfit is soaked. Her hair is matted. When T calls her name, she looks up at him and her face beams with the light of a thousand moons. He calls her again and she laughs. She laughs and laughs; she holds onto her joy. She laughs and laughs in the face of her pain. 

I watch the video to the very end, and then I press play again.

TUESDAY

My favorite poem about November and the painting I made inspired by it. This essay on Bill Watterson (found via Laura Olin’s newsletter, a favorite). Israel in 600 words or less. This poem about war, which is also a poem about money. And lastly: What is a whisper?

WEDNESDAY

I was delighted to speak with journalist and author Amy L. Bernstein, for her newsletter Doubt Monster, on creativity and happiness. An excerpt is below:

We often talk about “finding” courage, as though it were loose change under a couch cushion. But what does it take, really, to “find” courage. What steps or actions can we take to help us do what we must, when every part of us wants to look the other way?

Courage is not about summoning bravery or staring fear in the face. I think it’s more about maintaining perspective—remembering that discomfort and happiness are both temporary. Instead, work toward building character, identifying what kind of person you want to be. I want to be someone who doesn’t buckle under pressure, to be somebody who is generous, thoughtful, or empathetic, or looks for the good in others even when they’re not presenting that goodness to me or for me. Those kinds of umbrellas help you make courageous choices and to live with courage, even when it’s difficult—especially when there’s no immediate reward other than the satisfaction that you’re becoming more of the person you want to be.

Read the full interview here. 

THURSDAY

“Writing, literature, language, the body—these things are a matrix, a sacred labyrinthine geometry that helps us reach our own center and return back out to the world and eventually become through death a part of the larger universe. You have to be optimistic to write against your own death. But that does not mean that you don’t also write from a place of rage or tender yearning or icy callousness or to stop yourself from weeping or all of the above at once which is, I think, most often the case with writers who have paid a high price in igniting the engine of their own voice. This mode of optimism has the capacity to transcend the page and enter the reader’s consciousness; once there, it can cultivate in us an unwavering defense of the innate dignity of all types of personhood, knowledge that that dignity exists independently of any external value judgement. This is literature’s optimism. It is expansive. It has many dwelling places.”

—From Whose Time Are We Speaking In? by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

FRIDAY

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

—Don’t Hesitate by Mary Oliver

xx,

M

---

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.