A Note For You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
Dear Friend,
I loved the forsythia that came with our house, and how could a person not?
First, there’s that name, sounding like the villainess you root for in a dragon-fantasy novel. Then there’s the fact of forsythia’s yellowness: it's a flowering shrub that can tower to twelve feet, and when it flames to life in spring, it’s all buttery bloom, at first; quite ostentatious. Our particular forsythia bush scraped against the back windows of the house. My mother-in-law wanted to significantly cut it back and I protested.
“It symbolizes excitement! Anticipation! A new start! Doesn’t that seem right?” I’d said.
“Sure,” she’d said. “But I keep walking into it.”
But I loved it. Beneath it, I felt like I was in the eponymous Secret Garden, overgrown and romantic. The next year, an oriole landed in it, and I put half an orange in its branches. Birds loved it. We ate summer dinners in its shade. Bird feeders hung from it, nasturtiums got tangled up in it, and when a chestnut-sided warbler flew into our window, we tucked him into one of its elbows while he healed.
Then, a few years ago, I demanded that we get a bean arch. This was because of a plot line on the television show Joe Pera Talks To You that was about a bean arch. (If you haven’t seen this, please stop what you are doing, for the love of God, and watch it. The whole season. This post can wait.)
At last, this year, Luke built the arch, and it is beautiful, but our yard really doesn’t have a lot of sun, and it really doesn’t have a lot of space, and I wasn’t really consulted, and none of that matters because the thing was done and anyway, he built it right under the forsythia.
“I worry it won’t get enough sun,” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“We could always cut down the forsythia.”
And this was ridiculous, because we could NOT cut down the forsythia. That was my initial thought. But “no” is my initial thought about a lot of things.
Do you find that this is true for you, too? Are you a person who bends? One of my most distinct memories around this
relates to my first communion dress. On your first communion, you get to wear a white dress; and I pictured something poofy and promlike, which was amply available at the Sears where we tried things on. I don’t know how the parched 1920s-style A-line even got into the pile, but it was such an obvious no. Nevertheless, I tried it on, and learned an important fashion-and-life lesson: a lot of things look one way on the hanger and, well, you get it.
Not that it is that important to be by far the best-dressed and dare-I-say hottest seven-year-old receiving her first communion in all of Portland, Oregon in 1993, but I was.
A difficult thing you learn as a grown-up is that, if you’re lucky, you’re going to have to get rid of a lot of things you love. There isn’t enough space in a single life for everything you love. And that’s really painful; actually, it’s kind of tragic. There is only so much actual square footage in the basement, there are only so many meals you get to eat and books you get to read and vacations you get to take; and, worst of all, there are only so many hours. It’s devastating because there is so much in this life worth loving. Another way of looking at it, though, is that there are a lot of right choices to make. The only wrong choice is to try to shove too much into too small a space. Your life, you might as well face it, is finite.
And so is our yard. I couldn’t have the bean arch and the forsythia. Luke cut it down on a Saturday morning while my sister was in town.
“I think we appreciated it while it was here,” Luke said.
“It will take some adjusting,” I said. “Where’s our big umbrella? We need a shade source,” I said. Change is hard and a spiders’ nest had established itself in the umbrella. I worried we’d made a mistake.
The next Friday, I spent all morning (it took the whole morning) burning the chopped-down forsythia in the fire pit we’d built in our yard, back when owning a house was brand new, before all the drama with the bees, before we had any chickens, before there were even any raised beds. The fire pit was the first thing we made, with our friends, because you need a place to burn things, and everyone knows that — or, at least, we felt it was obvious. I listened to an album called “To Learn.” This felt appropriate.
To learn:
How to parent a toddler while still growing up.
How to believe in the human capacity to heal.
When to trust that people can change, and when to have firm boundaries.
Spanish or American Sign Language (or both, would be my preference).
At least 13 credit hours of Psychology.
Beekeeping?
The burning of the Old Sophie, the one who, I guess, was (and I know this sounds like a college creative nonfiction thing to say, but) somewhere in this forsythia, who just needed something loudly ritualistic and obvious like a fire in order to feel that her life had been sufficiently known, honored, and released.Whether or not it is dangerous to burn those big Costco boxes that things like grapes come in.1
I threw branch after branch into the fire, and considered how much you have to burn to make even the smallest amount of room.
Yesterday, with all that direct sunlight, the beanstalks started wrapping their little plant tendril fingers around the arch. They’re starting to climb. So do with that what you will.
What are you burning? What are you growing? I look forward to hearing about it.
Love,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
I am writing to you today while watching T pull all the sea creatures and insects out of the drawer in my card catalog marked “sea creatures and insects.” I guess my feeling is, what else was this drawer for?
I asked Luke recently, on our first (and only) overnight getaway from T (our more-than-friends Kat and Brendan watched her) what his favorite thing about Current T was, and he said it was that she is building scenes “that make logical sense to him.” He means, she likes to gather items and put them in a line. Scenes. Like: a plastic frog, a toothbrush, a nail clipper, and a crayon, in a neat line on a plumped-up pillow. Lately, the scenes will feature all animals, or all items that are sort of blue. Then he said, “In another way, I’m kind of sad about it, because her scenes used to have their own language that was totally mysterious to me. It’s sad to lose the mystery.” He is doing a better job of having this parental experience of being sad about her getting older. I don’t feel sad about her getting older yet, which makes me feel like I’m doing it wrong. I know I’m supposed to be like, “Oh my god, it’s going too fast, I can’t believe she’s not a baby anymore, I miss the baby version of her.” I don’t know. It feels to me that it is going at the appropriate pace. I continue to find raising a baby / toddler to be the loneliest experience of my life. (Have I shared this with you? I don’t know. I think I sometimes do share it, and I sometimes find that connective and sometimes I find that it makes me lonelier. I’m not DEPRESSED, and I don’t regret having a baby, and I love T completely, and I think she is AMAZING, and I am not, like, NEGLECTING her. This is just an account of my emotional reality, which I share because I bet there is another person out there who feels something similar. And then there are 35,000 other people who feel something totally different, and all these feelings are normal and OK! OK?) (My grandma told me I shouldn’t have told you about my pooping last week, so I’m sorry about that.)
Prints Charming
PRINTS ARE CHANGING.
First of all, if you in the “Get Mail Membership” tier you will begin receiving these prints as a part of your membership. Stand by for a special email.
Here’s the updated product description:
This 5x5” print features the phrase, “You Are Doing A Good Enough Job.” The image will change every month, updated on the first Wednesday of the month. These are hand-printed in a single batch of 25 per month at my home-studio on high-quality art paper with the special kind of ink that is just for art prints (I have this printer that I bought specially for making art prints! See the photograph! It’s proof!) After I print them, I cut them individually by hand; and then I sign them with a fancy pencil, and then I hand pack them into these pretty brown envelopes, along with a bunch of special goodies that you can’t predict, hand-cut out from booklets, magazines, sticker books, and other places. I stuff the envelopes up, because mail should be fun. Then I hand-letter the envelopes. If you tell me what to write, I’ll put a note in the envelope, too; so this might be the PERFECT little something for your friend who’s feeling a little bit down.
Why not buy a print? Buy it for a friend! I fill these envelopes with lovely little goodies that are impossible to predict. If you buy it for a friend (and at $10 HOW CAN YOU AFFORT NOT TO), you can also get a hand-lettered note sent along with it! You know someone you love needs this. Here’s the link. .
So, say you'd like to JOIN the Get Mail Membership Tier! Great. Now’s the time! It says that you have to pay $250, but that’s not so. Just delete that price and enter anything above $50, and welcome to the club!
Maybe it definitely is, but I did it, and I’m still here.
A Burning Bush?
dear sophie,
thank you for this. in my life right now, it is timely.
this week, my girlfriend and i are moving out of our building, which i moved into in 2015 and she in 2017. for the past month or two, we have been packing, planning, sorting, deciding, all kinds of action verbs, focused mainly on what things will we put into storage, what things we will no longer own, and which things will we take with us on our travels. (for june, july, and august, we will be home-free! or, the world will be our home! and also the homes of various loved ones will be our home, and some other places also.)
so, the questions "what are you burning?" and "what are you growing" are right on the nose for us, as rini takes today to decide what clothing she'll need for california next month and the UK the month after and much much more! (not that we're going to burn the clothes we don't need with us for the summer. metaphor!)
i shared this passage with her and she wrote back "That’s perfect, thank you":
"A difficult thing you learn as a grown-up is that, if you’re lucky, you’re going to have to get rid of a lot of things you love. There isn’t enough space in a single life for everything you love. And that’s really painful; actually, it’s kind of tragic. There is only so much actual square footage in the basement, there are only so many meals you get to eat and books you get to read and vacations you get to take; and, worst of all, there are only so many hours. It’s devastating because there is so much in this life worth loving. Another way of looking at it, though, is that there are a lot of right choices to make. The only wrong choice is to try to shove too much into too small a space. Your life, you might as well face it, is finite."
i second rini's words. that's perfect, thank you.
thank you for adding all of these words and thoughts and ideas into this seemingly finite life.
i say "seemingly finite" in part because even a finite life can contain the infinite. you know how there are infinite numbers, like 1, 2, 3, etc? i also like thinking about how there are infinite fractions between 1 and 2. between the ages of 1 and 2, there were infinite moments (if you go by numbers). between 1pm and 2pm today, same. infinities upon infinities. so i like thinking about that. though it doesn't make more stuff fit in our storage unit! for that, burning and growing. or, gifting and storing.
thank you for sharing as always,
myq
We are in the process of buying a new house and selling our current one and it’s amazing how much of what we’re getting rid of never really fit here. I have yet to get rid of something I truly love but there is a certain sadness to getting rid of things I bought in the hopes I *would* love them.
I think unless you’re lucky enough to already be in group of friends with kids when you first become a parent, parenting is a very isolating experience, especially for those of us who had kids during the pandemic. My son is 4 now and we’re only really just starting to make connections with other families. I always felt more relaxed when I could do things like go to my new moms’ group which disintegrated when COVID hit.
I also don’t think there’s a right way to lean into enjoying childhood especially while they’re still very small and so physically dependent on you. The vigilance can eat away at your enjoyment in ways you can’t feel until they’re older and you’re not quite as exhausted. That sense of time passing quickly wasn’t available to me especially since back then I was the one only working part-time and doing more of the parenting. I started to “feel sad” in that way shortly after my son turned three and suddenly seemed tall and mature in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.
Parenting is lonely the way we do it and it’s hard to say when and why that feeling ebbed for me. I think it’s impossible to see the person they will become until they’re there.