A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
I can’t believe I haven’t asked you this sooner but: when is your birthday? And how do you feel about birthdays, in general? Has it changed over time, or have you always felt a variation of what you feel now?
It’s a little controversial, but I LOVE birthdays. All of them. I love holidays in general; celebration can be an antidote when the world is unbearable, and I’ve written about this at some length in the past. Birthdays are a great holiday, because what is more worth celebrating than the fact that you just happened to be born in time to share the earth with someone you love? Talk about a miracle!
My friend Carol (who reads this newsletter, and so for one of you, should be addressed as “you”) writes an individualized poem for every person who celebrates a birthday on the Prayer Porch. (The Prayer Porch is another topic for another time, but you should know that it is composed of, like, 40 people; so writing a poem for every one of them is a heavy lift.) On my birthday, Carol wrote me a poem about a bird and I cried like a snot-fountain when I heard it. (Not unrelatedly, I was incredibly pregnant.) On Carol’s birthday, LOTS of us wrote poems to celebrate HER. Having been on both ends of this ritual, I’m not sure whether it feels better to be celebrated or to do the celebrating, but this is a fact: both feel great. To emotionally survive, we need both.
So, of course, it’s not for nothing that I bring this up now. Tomorrow is my partner / roommate / husband / co-parent Luke’s birthday! Our relationship is among the best things in my life — and all of the best things in my life are relationships, it turns out. As you probably know, we have a somewhat non-traditional marriage, in that we are polyamorous and date other people. Our family is given and chosen, and it is big. Sometimes that feels exhausting, but mostly it feels like living inside a vast network of root systems, like oak trees have. By this I mean: so long as none of the other roots are rotting from inside, no one and nothing can really hurt you; and even if you don’t survive, something about you will live on forever in the collective.
Our particular root system has gotten a lot stronger since the pandemic began, and I’ve lately been feeling frustrated that I don’t ever see relationships like ours on television. When I started experimenting with relationship structures almost a decade ago, I wasn’t absolutely positive that this kind of relationship could work. Now that I am living in this awesome root system (I think I’m really committing to this metaphor, folks), I know for a fact that it has the potential to really serve a lot of people who don’t feel like they fit inside the standard nuclear-family narrative, and I am frustrated that there aren’t examples in the media that model how this kind of family can be normal and healthy. (Whoops! How did I end up here on this SOAPBOX!? Well, no matter: could you please tell your TV producing friends to make this happen already?)
I’ve digressed. What I WANT to say is that Luke is a pretty strong and healthy tree, and he’s a big reason my root network feels so dang secure. Every year around his birthday I think about all the things I learn from him that might be useful for other people to know, which I consider a valuable way to celebrate another person. I am going to do that here; but first, a quick get-to-know-you paragraph about Luke for people who don’t know him.
Luke is from Massachusetts, and he has had a hundred million* (*at LEAST twelve) jobs so far. Currently, he works as a contractor, with a focus on electricity. (He doesn’t like plumbing, but he will do it; in a twist of irony given the metaphor I chose for this newsletter, a tree root is growing into the plumbing under our own house, so Luke recently vacuumed up hundreds of gallons of poop-water in our basement, and he didn’t complain even one time.) In his childhood, Luke had a cat named Bella, whom he loved. In his adulthood, he cried blubberingly when we had to put our cat Jean down. Luke cries at movies and plays, and he cried when our daughter was born, and he otherwise is pretty stoic. He loves Bjork and he has dressed up as Bjork more than one time. He has only bought one thing ever off of Amazon, and it was my book. Every time I go to the fruit market, he requests I pick up shiitake mushrooms. Half the times I go to the fruit market, he requests I pick up ginger root or corn. He is interested in the writings of Nietzsche. He dislikes quiche. Tomorrow, he will be 38!
Here’s the first picture of Luke that’s on my camera roll. It’s from 2015:
Now that you know Luke (lucky you!), congratulations! You get to start learning things from him. Here are five to start you off:
Cook mushrooms in a cast iron skillet in a pool of olive oil. As it cooks down, add generous amounts of lemon juice and soy sauce. Eat this dish. Now you like mushrooms. (Luke also taught me to look for chicken-of-the-woods: a BRIGHT ORANGE mushroom you can find in the summer in most climates, that LEGITIMATELY tastes JUST LIKE CHICKEN when it is fried. Also, it is HUGE, so you can make a meal for a lot of people with it. If there are bugs on it, just brush ‘em off. Then bugs can find other food.)
When someone shares difficult feelings with you, repeat back what you heard, and then tell them it makes sense.
Go to restaurants owned and run by immigrants. You are probably overlooking a lot of great places to eat because you don’t speak the same language as the person who owns the restaurant, or English isn’t the primary language on the menu. That doesn’t mean they don’t want your business, and it certainly doesn’t mean the food isn’t good.
Go out of your way to meet and get to know your neighbors. Invite people over to your house just because they live near you, and ask them about their lives. Join your neighborhood association and participate in your proximity community. Give some of your time and resources to the place where you live.
Tangible stuff is both interesting and not that important. Give away things that are valuable to you to PEOPLE who are valuable to you. Gather stuff that is free (alleys!) or used (thrift stores!) and allow it to accrue emotional value. Then give it away.
Those are just some of the lovely things Luke practices. I feel really lucky to keep learning from him.
Back to you. How do you like to celebrate your birthday? What about other people’s birthdays? What was your best birthday? What was your worst? Tell me everything. I am excited to also celebrate you. (Seriously. You think I’m kidding. But hit “reply” to this email and tell me your birthday, and I’ll put it on my calendar. Let’s get you CELEBRATED!)
Love,
Sophie
PS - If you subscribed to a paid tier of this newsletter — thank you. My first paid subscribers only post is IN THE WORKS and I think it is awesome? Also, I have started putting together in-the-mail packages for the “Get Mail” tier. If you want access to these things (or if you just want to support me), you can subscribe by clicking here. (Keep in mind that you can subscribe to the “Get Mail” tier for any price between $51/year to $250/year; you’ll be prompted to choose your own amount when you select that option.) (This newsletter in this shape will always be free.)
PPS - I am waaaay behind on pen-palling, texting, emailing, Instagram messaging, etc. If you have recently sent me something and haven’t heard back, I want to assure you: I WILL GET TO IT AND I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN YOU! Thank you so much for being so patient with me all year long.
Add this to your to-do list.
Decide and write down how you like to be celebrated. It’s good to tell people what you like to receive; and if you find yourself uncelebrated, then you’ll know how to celebrate yourself! (I like to be given pie and flowers.)
Sweep under your bed.
A drawing.
This is an art that I had to dig to try to find, and it actually accompanies a blog post called “Your Work In Not Good Enough” from 2017. So if you’re needing to have some more explicitly good-enough-job-like content, that post is there for you!
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about new parenthood. Skip it if you don’t want to read about new parenthood.)
T loves being in water. Early in her life (Day 2 or 3), I wasn’t able to produce enough breast milk to feed her and she cried ceaselessly; the only way to get her to stop was to submerge her little body in a warm bath (which was very scary at the time, because it felt like just touching her with water would automatically drown her somehow). Now we are way past that, and I have had two new water-related experiences:
We took a walk in a deluge. We had an umbrella, but still, it was pouring. T’s legs and arms got soaking wet immediately. I caught her reflection in a car mirror and saw that she was beaming; her mouth wide open in a smile. I took a video of this.
I’ve started taking her in the shower. Showers and baths are what I miss most in new parenthood, and for one week, I woke up earlier than T to sneak a shower in before she got up. It was blissful. After that, she started waking up an hour earlier, and now here we are. But I decided last week to see what would happen if I brought her in the shower with me, and it was a resounding success. So many things to love about this experience:
It feels sweet to have her skin touch my skin in that full-body way, where her belly is pressed up against my chest. She is SOFT!
She reaches her little hand out to try to touch the water stream, like it’s a toy. She never seems to tire of trying, even though it’s futile.
She gets water in her eyes and she doesn’t care, and it’s funny to watch.
I put her in an infant bath chair while I wash my hair and I let the warm water go over her and she looks blissed out and sometimes goes, “Babababa.”
I wrap her up in multiple towels while I dry myself off and she is cute in all the towels, because they all have hats.
She also likes being gently blow dried, which makes her definitely different from our cat Norman.
Extras:
At my hair dresser’s suggestion, I started listening to the podcast “Sounds Like A Cult,” and I think it’s pretty fun, if you like learning about pop cult-ure (see what I did there?). I liked the one about Trader Joe’s, and the one about “The Bachelor,” and the one about Instagram therapists.
I also watched the Netflix documentary about Abercrombie and Fitch and felt that nothing was new information, but it was fun to watch and remember the early 2000s. (And if you are unaware that A&F had fucked-up hiring and firing practices based on whiteness and hotness, then this documentary might have new information for you!)
I’m giving money to the New Orleans Abortion Fund because of trigger laws in Louisiana. Here’s a list of other places to give money right now in the wake of the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Apparently we’re not allowed to fill our bird feeders right now because of the avian flu (THIS MAKES ME SO MAD AND SAD), so I recommend planting native plants.
It’s Teacher Appreciation Week. I work with a lot of teachers (whereas I AM a teacher), and I can say for SURE that teachers are working their asses off for very little reward; especially now. If YOU know a teacher, say thanks this week!
PS, “Abbott Elementary” turned out to be VERY SWEET AND GOOD.
A few weeks ago, I wrote this thing for RIYL about how we need more bases for sex stuff.
Costco has Beyond Meat jerky, and, um…