Letter to a decade of my life.
and some notes on pregnancy, motherhood, creative work, and releasing the past
“Do you think there’s anything not attached by an unbreakable cord to everything else?
— Mary Oliver, “Upstream”, 2016
3 days left in this year; 3 days left in a decade.
As this end approaches, so does the end of my second full-term pregnancy — and with it the same itching expectation and dread that I remember having almost exactly 2 years ago when our first child would be born early in the new year on the 1st of February. Our second is due the first week of March.
Here I am, full of hormones and a baby kicking me and nostalgia for this string of ten years on a necklace in the night sky: the biggest, brightest, most painful, most joyful, saddest, most fruitful time — that is to say, in all, the fullest — of my life.
I have thought about the planets, me on the planet, about God, about this ten years that hosted my Saturn’s return, about my transit throughout it all. Days and nights I spent working myself to the bone, about the moments that felt like it was worth it, and about the stacks of receipts and memories of panic that tempt also to say it was not. About being sober in every occasion, when around me was intoxication. About grief. About love. About holding my offspring on my body and letting her eat food I create from nowhere, a matured plant. About examining my ancestry and the paths that come together in me, confusingly and also irreducibly. About feeling angry at people and then forgiving them. About needing others’ forgiveness. About the church, my dear and my thorn. About realizing when I was wrong, and then over the years coming to know clarity — for the first time in my whole life understanding what is actually right. Ruminations from the dark heart of aspiration and fear of literally anything in the 20s to the nod of acceptance, the builder mind set on hope, the instinct and focus of parenting, the freedom that limitations in the 30s bring. I consider it an ascendance.
I feel lucky to count these years as “coming-of-age”. For most millenials, this is true of the decade about to end. With no choice in the matter, we grew up. Most of us.
At the end of this bouldering year, I have stopped not just to think about the year that’s passed, but the ten that have passed sequentially: the bonds that have been built, the winds that have brought in new seeds and what has grown or not grown, what fell where and how the path has been spread out, treading a wet forest under our feet, the distance we have gone, to the house that we are building. Sometimes a slog, sometimes a train hustling metal underneath it at hair-raising speed, sometimes a nap, sometimes feet up by a fire, sometimes fire under our feet.
These have been years filled with people, the salt and soils of this earth, the words of songs and the voices of so so many I’ve relied on and loved, with technology, with school, with frightful/fitful society, with failure, and gain.
Seven years ago in December, I went to see Ann Hamilton’s “event of a thread.” Ann Hamilton created in the Park Avenue Armory an epic stage for play and reflection. On her oversized swings that made adults bodies into miniatures, we all pumped our legs with the effort of our childhood selves. Each swing was intrinsic to the system, connected by “a thread” to a wide, arching fabric that magically danced above us, across the entire warehouse.
It was a visual, lively allegory we had to be there to create — for the way in which each of our pulls and swings makes the fabric of the world dance and sway on an axis. The swings could not move without us. The fabric could not move without swings. Every crease and movement of the fabric was a unique creation in a moment, for all of us swinging; and the hem of a garment that belongs to the universe, the universe we composite: dancing, swinging, moving and creating the rhythms of one shared Life.
This is how our becoming is framed in the fabric of time, points of movement and dance, thin sheets of light rolling past each other and punctuating time, the effort of our being in effect.
I am not burying these years, but I am releasing them.
When I think about these ten years, I can scarcely close the page. I may not look back, but I will not lock the door.
In 2019, I leaned into some rituals. I needed them, to stop me and to listen better. Advent felt like Advent, a fast, each week of waiting in the dark, every candle a deliberate shedding of hope that light would come, Christmas a feast. I pursued that. I stumbled upon this wonderful sermon by Sam Wells which I was maybe even present for in 2014 at Duke Chapel: “Advent goes to the bottom of our waiting. But Advent doesn’t stop there. Advent goes under and around our waiting.”
Recently, a friend on Facebook — a pastor — posted a video about how Advent is Mary’s Third Trimester. A time of hope and waiting, yes, and also a time of restlessness and discomfort.
In her short five minute video, she made the point that “Advent and the Last Trimester” is a season of discomfort — you’re up at night with insomnia and having to pee, your back suddenly freezes up under the pressure of a growing baby and uterus. It is the end of your pregnancy, and yet it feels like the longest stage — you feel as if you’ll be pregnant forever and that labor will never come.
Pregnancy is an experience of one body and one mind, and that’s why there is no way to share it fully with another person, not even fully with a loving partner. My mind turns to Maria so often who “held these things in her heart” because I am not great at holding anything to myself and also I am in awe that pregnancy is one of the hardest things to carry on a journey. It is truly personal, quiet, and often this burden of love you feel simultaneously will end your life and complete it.
None of these things makes any sense to share with others, who can’t see the beginning or end of it with you. All anyone can really feel for you is excitement and joy, and that’s really important. The support of others makes or breaks the ease of this transition — a supportive community and family underlies every possible hard decision I’ve made in the past few years. To travel for work while maintaining a steady breastfed baby schedule, to keep up two jobs for over a year while raising a newborn.
Even that doesn’t make sense so, perhaps you get the idea. It is not about sensing, but it is about instinct. Often times I’m compelled to look at my first daughter and think of how I could not have known her while she was growing within my body, and yet when I see her, I feel I could never not have known her, heard her, breathed her in, all my life. There is nothing like this feeling. It is the brightest possible light in the world that says, “Everything is coming. Doubt cannot stop what is becoming alive in the world. Everything that is coming will come and be alive.”
The change in a parent’s life, particularly for a mother, is also inexplicable and only discoverable on a personal level. To be a mother is, if not an attachment of blood, is an attachment of soul and mind. A woman who is consciously parenting finds that attention and time must be expanded beyond her perceived ability, and this instinctually arises in the brain as well as in her heart. Suddenly the hours and minutes are changed, because they are not ours alone. Sometimes I wish for time alone but when I have it all I can do is remember her and wish for her. This kind of love is both gnawing and soothing.
In intensity and duration, I can’t think of anything more powerful than motherhood has been for just these two years so far- and soon to be to two. Nothing has ever demanded so much of my physical attention or devotion.
Sometimes the duration of things in our life is a shooting star, and sometimes it is a stretched landscape as long as a life.
In these years, I became — I was in college, graduated with honors, found relationships, fell out of relationships, moved out on my own, worked for what I had, made things, went to grad school, more relationships and more falling out of relationships, started jobs, completed works, published and released work, learned about community, traveled around the world with awe training my camera on people in every walk of life throughout the highest peaks and most forgotten places, worked really hard, compelled in religion and also shedding so much to sharpen my true beliefs and purpose, left jobs, collaborated with generous and starlit people, fell in love and married for love, bought a house, incurred and paid debts, wept my share, found out what happiness is and to never apologize for seizing it purely, fought for justice and saw how long the fight is, saw people I love lose their marriages and sometimes hope and grew with them, worked and worked and worked, won some things and lost many others, traveled some more, and birthed a child into the world.
And so on and on the planets go. Walter Mercado, who very recently died at the of of this year, was a fascinating figure. I love that his views seemed to encompass worlds of beliefs and traditions and gender and specialness, his bringing together a uniquely Latino form of Catholicism and astrological casting in one predictory and mystical wave of the scarf. His forecast for 2020 was made apparently, before he passed. And we have it post-humously. He said Aries should light a paper on fire with the things we thought were negative that happened this year and our problems will dissolve into the fire in the new year. (Maybe we should all do that, regardless of astrological sign?) I like the notes he put about taking baths in a ritual way, I like to take baths in a ritual way and I’ve always used them to cleanse and heal myself, too. I, too, may burn a candle on New Year’s Eve this year and release this year. It was so thick.
I wrote about 30 pages handwritten pages with the help of a guided inventory this end-of-year. It helped me a lot and I’m so grateful for it. I feel like I wrote down what happened, what was wonderful, what was difficult, and what I want next. It cleared a space. I recommend doing inventories like this — in particular when you’re trying to piece together a particularly busy year in your mind and refocus for what’s next. (For what it’s worth, this is the one I used.)
“The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot says it best for me,
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
What voices whispered in my ear for years of this decade?, or before, that made it seem that it was all folly? That it was impossible that horizons were coming to expand how I saw what was in front of me, that transformation was life’s gift — in any disguise or form? So many times, I faced this voice. We all know it. Some of us call it the devil. A voice that tells you there is no hope. (I have said many times I feel like this is so much stronger in the 20s, because believing in ourselves seems so hard then, when we have so little to back it up in evidence — except our dreams. And maybe even we are told we are egotistical. In reality, we are egotistical, but we had to be because the self-doubt and imposter syndrome is equally as powerful at that time. Our egos are fighting for our dreams at that age. How exhausting!)
What I can say about a decade is that when we arrive where we are going, very often we find cannot go back again. From 2010 to now on the precipice of 2020, I feel this deeply. Perhaps as Eliot says, of the Magi discovering their pursuit, the Christ child, following a star through cold nights and fires going out, to end up where they were going, for a birth, that,
“this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,”
Even if you try to return to the place you came from, you don’t find it the same or it doesn’t find you the same. No longer at ease in the same. Whatever the magnet was, let’s say what drew you, perhaps is now gone. Your poles have changed. Your tastebuds are different. You grew an entirely new skin. That’s how powerful time is, and it works in us to keep things right. Not a hourglass, a pendulum. It works that way for a reason.
Say you could meet your ten-years-ago self. Maybe you think you’d want to spend the afternoon chatting with them, sitting down for coffee and whatnot, giving some advice or just reminiscing, looking over their smooth undereyes and gorgeous but lightly broken out skin. But I’m thinking it might be less like a reunion and more like a farewell.
You glance over across the crosswalk; as the light changes, you are going separate ways. You recognize their eyes, a flicker of something very familiar, even some felt thing you deeply love or loved. You brush shoulders in passing, do not turn back, and then they are gone. You course onward.
a few nods of respect to these works which have shaped and sustained me, not in order, but just reflections:
Most important songs to me this decade:
1 Vito’s Ordination Song, by Sufjan Stevens
2 Faking the Books by Lali Puna
3 Sorrow by the National
4 Airbag by Radiohead
5 Nothing Can Change This Love by Sam Cooke (first dance)
6 Signal by Sylvan Esso
7 Cases of You by Joni Mitchell
8 Cranes in the Sky by Solange
9 This Year by the Mountain Goats
10 Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
11 Never Been Wrong by Waxahatchee
12 Love More by Sharon Van Etten
13 Sawdust & Diamonds by Joanna Newsom played live
14 Suzanne by Leonard Cohen
15 This is America by Childish Gambino
16 Walkin’ by Thundercat
too many
Most important movies/cinematic events of this decade (that came out this decade) for me:
1 Tree of Life, dir Terrence Malick
2 Stories We Tell, dir Sarah Polley
3 Pina, dir Wim Wenders
4 Of Gods and Men, dir Xavier Beauvois
5 Minding the Gap, dir Bing Lui
6 Kings of Nowhere, dir Betzabe Garcia
7 Citizen Four, dir Laura Poitras
8 Twin Peaks the Return, dir David Lynch
9 Annihilation, dir Alex Garland
10 Mad Men, created by Matthew Weisner
11 Her, dir Spike Jonze
12 12 Years a Slave, dir Steve McQueen
13 Tangerine, dir Sean Baker
14 Arrival, dir Alexis Villaneuve
15 There Will Be Blood, dir Paul Thomas Anderson
And yes Mad Max & Parasite & the Master
idk we could go on
Favorite/other media for the decade:
1 Young comedians online— Cole Escola, John Early, Kate Berlant, Chloe Fineman, Bowen Yang, 2 Dope Queens Jessica Williams & Phoebe Robinson, Naomi Ekperigin, Meg Stalter, etc! (instagram & twitter & podcasts)
2 The Bachelor franchise (TV)
3 Schitts Creek (TV)
4 Killing Eve (TV)
5 Fleabag (TV)
6 Reply All “Yes Yes No”(podcast)
7 This American Life(podcast)
8 Dolly Parton’s America (podcast)
9 Search Party (TV)
10 Atlanta (TV)
11 Veep (TV)
12 Queer Eye (TV)
12 All the amazing things my friends make and produce — journalism that exposes so much and sets down history for us, documentary that creates a way for stories to reach audiences all over the world, essays about personal identity and wrestling with the realities of our world, and incredible music. In awe of all.
Most important books/lit of this decade for me:
1 Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
2 Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante
3 The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
4 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
5 The Body and the Earth by Wendell Berry
6 Just Kids by Patti Smith
7 Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahesi Coates
8 Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli
9 On Photography by Susan Sontag
10 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
11 The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day
12 Shewings/Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich
13 Collected Sayings of the Desert Fathers
14 The Body’s Grace by Rowan Williams
15 Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
16 Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
etc!
