Blog
Included in Wallace’s notes is this statement: “They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.”
Sometimes it feels like freaking out is the only rational response to life, and so I do it quietly while the rest of you are asleep.
December 24, 2022
I’m writing this on Christmas Eve at 5:47 am, while you’re still warm in my bed next to your Dad.
Heat. What else do we take for granted more? Aside from freedom, maybe. Love. Groceries.
On the worst possible day, when temps hit 7 F with a “real feel” of -16 - a record low in my memory - our heat malfunctioned. When you live in a house built in 1820, you never take heat for granted and ever since we moved into this place it has been our biggest concern. The original house was heated with several fireplaces, the remnant chimneys of which stand crumbling in the attic, just covered by the rafters. A pellet stove that we installed now heats our whole house, minus the ductless unit we installed last October to heat our kitchen. For two days the stove was overheating itself unbeknownst to us. A house fire may be one of the biggest fears of my life, so I was unwilling to rest until the issue was resolved.
The radiator was invented in 1850, but central heating wasn’t established as an implied part of American living until the mid 1900s. Yesterday as we drove (quickly) to the hearth and patio warehouse where our crucial replacement part awaited us, I thought to myself how we belonged to a different faction of folks. Folks who struggle more because their life is built of processes and equipment that takes more effort, more time, more physical energy. I thought to myself, we don’t live a life where we can just throw money at our problems. And I thought of all the people who can do that, and do it all the time, and then those who never do, and never can. And I felt like crying. How broken I sometimes feel after just one full day of handling the demands of my life - my life, which is so privileged and so full of things. Waking up, cleaning, preparing food, getting myself showered and dressed, feeding myself (doesn’t happen, usually), getting to work on time, tending to my husband, making sure everyone is warm and loved, keeping the house warm, keeping the floors clean, being with friends, caring for others. And then! Creative expression? Even now as I sit here typing this, I am only because you’re all still asleep, and I am well rested for the first morning in weeks.
Our bank accounts have been in deficit for years. Just this past year, we took out a personal loan and used all of our certificates of deposit to pay credit card debt which has now climbed its way back up to $10,000. Maybe more now, since Christmas and since the pellet stove replacement part. Your uncle Joe and Daddy worked together last night to install the fan on the stove which is the only reason we got our heat back on, and this also saved us the impressive cost of the installation person who would have had to come out here after Christmas and put it in, if your papa and uncle could not have. I am so thankful for them. There has been no greater relief in my life than having people like your father, uncle, and grandad around. Daddy, your Daddy Paul, who is a woodworker, electrician, and generally very competent “do it yourself” guy, and then your grandfather and uncle who are mechanical engineers, it has all been the perfect counterbalance to my non-technical brain which floats around in a completely different hemisphere of thought and practical application. I will never turn my head or forget the relief and problem solving I have been able to experience in my life because of having these types of thinkers around me.
Which also leads me to - proximity. If you ever decide to have children later in your life, I hope that you will do so within a community. I cannot tell you how important it has been for me and your father to raise you and your brother with your grandparents and your uncle around. It is so difficult to move day after day in and out of the routines of caring for everything and never feel that responsibility lifted, to never feel that it is spread out and shared. Your dad and I talk about it all the time, and we don’t know how people do it. We can’t say with complete confidence that our marriage would be healthy if we did not have that separation time, if we did not have that responsibility lifted, if we had to always be moving through life in a dense fog, totally self-abnegated.
Your Dad and I joke about the early days, reminiscing about our boredom. We miss that. We miss waking up on a weekend and laying out the options of what to do that day in front of us, and choosing to do nothing, to just lay about and have long drawn out breakfasts. We wake up now on weekends at 7 am to take you to ballet lessons and drive your brother to the park and then to the bakery and then we spend the rest of the day cleaning the house because the squalor is too much for us. We pass out early and do it again on Sunday. Christmas is the only time of the year when I realize how much sleep I actually need. It is easy for me, for some reason, at Christmas, to avoid plans and stay home, and this is when I’ve been able to realize how tired I really am.
You went up to bed with me last night while your dad and uncle Joe stayed at the table laughing, we heard them as we burrowed under the big comforter together and you nuzzled my nose with yours and said, “I love you so much Mama wolf” and I said I loved you too, and we fell asleep like that, like two wolves in their hideout, on a cold Christmas evening.
The heat is fixed now and we are warm in the drafty old house that is nonetheless ours on Christmas Eve, and as I finish up the dregs of yesterday’s coffee, I wait patiently for your stirring. And there, I can hear your brother. He’s up.
January 29, 2023
At a certain point, it occurred to me, not after a lot of reflecting, so it didn’t take me long to figure out is what I mean, that the person I was speaking to when I was sitting down to write was you.
When I’m gone, I want to be able to leave you with these letters for whatever they’re worth. How different it would have been for me, I think, if my own mother had been able to write down her thoughts and share her innermost self with me, or that I could have at least known what those thoughts and that self was, many decades later. I was incapable back then of hearing them or being the recipient of them, just as you are now, too young to understand. Had my mother been able to do it, those words would have comforted me as an adult, especially during the hardest years of life, I think, when one is a young mother.
One day I hope you will get to understand and experience motherhood, if you want to. If you have the desire and think you can be a good mother to a child, if you think you can take care of it and make sure it has what it needs. So you can know what it feels like to be in this role, to experience life with this blessing and this burden, of being the lifeline for a human being in this world. I cannot imagine if my life had not gone this way, but I could also have never imagined that it was going to be quite like this.
And what is it like? Well, I’ll give you a 1x1 screenshot. Last night, your Dad and I went out to dinner with two of our friends while you and Roman stayed with grandma and granddad. We came back to pick you up around 10:00, Roman was fast asleep in his crib, I scooped him up in my arms and he stayed asleep (somehow). You were wide awake, in the bathroom, blowing your nose in a big handful of tissues. You were dressed in a long sleeve pants and shirt set, with a Disney printed nightgown over it that Grandma had given you. You followed us down the hallway, half in a daze, to the door saying that you were starving and that we needed to feed you. We took you both out to the car, buckled you in, took you home. You fell asleep in your bed after some crying and protesting. Dad and I collapsed into bed at 10:45. Roman woke us up crying at 7:25 for his milk, and you were up shortly after that. Today we have been at home, inside. I took my walk down to the pony farm and back and you stayed back at the house to play dress up and wear all of your ballerina leotards at once. What have you been doing while I was gone, I asked you? “I changed, and Daddy was on the bike, and I was jumping on my bed.”
You are sitting with me now, beside me at the table as I write this. You came downstairs in your pink short sleeved leotard, a pink ballet skirt, pink tights and pink ballet slippers. You are eating fettuccine with olive oil and cheese out of a small glass mixing bowl. When I ask you what you are thinking about, you reply “nothing.” Then you change your answer because I ask you again, like I’m disappointed that you aren’t thinking of anything, and you say “I’m thinking about unicorns and bunnies.” Which is what you say every time someone asks you if you had any dreams last night, and what you dreamt of.
“Hey Mom can I show you something?” you are always asking me now. “Hey Mom can I ask you something?” “Hey Mom, look” you say. And point at a chair where you’ve put your winter coat over top of a stuffed dog. “And I’ve got a baby bottle for them,” you say, tucking a plastic baby bottle toy into a pocket on the coat.
Sunday March 5, 2023
Oona Rooney,
Earlier today we got dressed in light jackets and pants and I tied your rainbow shoes, and we took a blanket out on the lawn. You said, “Mama, we could even have a picnic today” because it was about 50 degrees outside and the sun was shining. You wanted to lay back on the blanket and “look up at the sky and the stars” you said. It was 11:00 in the morning. We did, we lay back on the blanket under the big maple, the one that used to have the swing on it when we first moved to this house. You ran and got your round tortoise shell sunglasses from the car and put them on. We lay on our backs like we were at the beach.
“Look Mama, over there! At that cloud!” I got up on my elbows and turned to look. “What does it look like?” I asked you. “A very high and magical mountain we could climb,” you said in a whisper, and shook your head lightly back and forth. It must be all the voices I do when we’re together, but you’ve become so theatrical. Every other word you say seems to come out of the mouth of Daisy Buchanan, with a kind of breathy Southern drawl.
I’m sitting with you now on the bed while you watch one of your favorite films, “My Neighbor Totoro.” You sit so intently watching the story unfold. You don’t know it but I am always watching you out of the corner of my eye to see your little expressions, when your eyes widen and when you whisper something inaudible to yourself.
“I’m going to rest, do you want to rest with me?” I ask you. You lay on your back on the end of the bed.
I never had a friendship with my mother, she was just too difficult to talk to, we never shared values or ideas. We really didn’t get along most of the time. Her attempts to love me came through as over-tending. Asking me how I was all the time, which was just her way of trying to break me open and figure out how to talk to me, I realize now. She was a woman of little self esteem, at least for a long time, maybe not now, and so many ideas she had in her mind came out unformed. She held fast to religion, unable to defend her thinking and her beliefs when asked. She learned to care for people because it was the one language she could use which was never met with scorn. People began to expect it from her - that she would care for them, that she would be silent and serving. She would communicate that she loved me, usually through notes she would leave in envelopes in my bedroom, but she would not really speak to me, ask me questions about my life or my thoughts. She learned to avoid arguing, to avoid the process that must be gone through to reach true understanding. She would criticize, instead, when I shared my thoughts unprompted, and then shut down. Everything I stood for and all the new information I had exposed myself to as a young woman through reading and then traveling, I wanted to discuss. She could not engage with me in that way, intellectually. It always bothered me so.
You are burying yourself under the covers beside me now, we’re going to fall asleep. I love you. And I hope that one day, as we already do, when you are grown up, that we will understand one another, and be able to sustain a friendship, and to share values and beliefs and to confide in one another. I will always respect you. I will always listen to you. I will always meet you where you are.
Monday March 6, 2023
I told you last night that I was writing letters to you. I'm trying to collect these letters so that I can give them to you one day. I have an awareness of my mortality in a way that I never have before, because I am a mother and I watch you two growing every day, and it reminds me of how quickly time passes, how quickly life passes, and that I am probably in the middle of my life at this moment, I am halfway through it. When I write these little letters I am grasping at these moments, and trying to stop them in mid-air. I'm writing these to you because I know that one day I will not be here and I want to give you somewhere to go to talk to me, and I will be listening, and I will be there in conversation with you. These letters are evidence of that, I hope. Of my willingness and my interest in talking to you, in talking with you, in being connected to you even if in memory and in air. And these letters I hope carry my love.