A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
My daughter, who is 5 months old, cries a lot. I mean, she cries an average amount for a 5-month-old human, which is more than an average person cries, but not unexpected. (By this measure, she also pees in a diaper a lot and eats puréed carrots a lot.) For the past three weeks, however, there has been one absolutely fool-proof way to make her stop crying, no matter what. Like, she bonked her head pretty hard the other day and started screaming at a decibel that would impress a siren, but I whipped out the fool-proof method, and she INSTANTLY stopped. The fool-proof method is this: I sing the first bar of “That Would Be Enough” from the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
First of all, I know “Hamilton” is not cool anymore, but that doesn’t stop me from knowing all of its lyrics. Second, I am quite sure this won’t work forever. The fact that it has worked for three full weeks feels like I’m cheating at parenting a little bit. Third, I’m not suggesting that singing any Broadway songs will necessarily make you or your children stop crying. It doesn’t make ME stop crying. Watching T cry and then stop crying to this song, however, has started to feel like a pretty heavy-handed analogy for living as a human being, though.
Here are the first words of the song: “Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.” T stops crying right after the first “look around.” It is as if she is actually looking around.
What do you see when YOU look around? I mean, really LOOK. I don’t mean this on the existential level that Eliza Hamilton’s character meant it — because at that level, you would see some huge, scary, mysterious things that might overwhelm you. But if you were a baby, and you looked around right now, what might you take stock of?
Actually, this is a trick my current therapist taught me that she called three-three-three. It’s the practice of choosing three categories of things and finding around you three things in each of those categories. For example: find three things that are blue, three things you can hear, and three round things. This is great for getting present — out of the terrifying future or the thick past. I have pulled myself out of a number of panic attacks with this trick — and closing the practice by naming three things I’m feeling in my body.
Sometimes when you really look around, you MIGHT feel lucky to be alive right now. You might see your walls that keep you safe and warm; your window to the growing green world outside; your computer or your phone keeping you unprecedentedly connected. It’s OK if you don’t feel lucky to be alive right now, though. It can be hard to feel lucky. So the song expands.
“Look at where you are. Look at where you started. The fact that you’re alive is a miracle.” This has become a pretty fun TikTok meme, but it also reminds me of a scene in the Tom Hanks “Mr. Rogers” movie, “A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood.” In the scene, Mr. Rogers (played by Hanks) is sharing a restaurant meal with the story’s protagonist and says, “Would you do something with me? It’s an exercise I like to do sometimes. We’ll just take a minute and think about all the people who loved us into being.” The protagonist doesn’t want to do it, but the movie insists, and there is a literal minute of silence as the whole restaurant stops to participate. I absolutely cannot even REFERENCE this scene without crying hysterically (which I am doing right now), and I like to play the video for myself when I want to try the same exercise.
Look at where you are.
Look at where you started.
The fact that you’re alive is a miracle. It’s the definition of a miracle. Out of all the possible lives that could have been, you became. And that’s amazing.
The last lyric of the part of the song that I sing to T is the whole premise of this newsletter. “Just stay alive. That would be enough.” Of course T doesn’t understand what those words mean, but maybe she can sense how they calm me to sing them out loud. For now, you are staying alive, and that is enough. For T, who is a baby, it is so obvious that just to stay alive is enough. For us, who are adults, it’s harder to believe.
But I invite you to remember: “enough” is the default starting place. It’s not necessarily the ending. You begin right here in this moment with “enough”: enough to survive this breath to the next breath. If it is possible to rest in “enough” on your way to whatever “more” you go on to inhabit, please do. You are not a deficit. You are taking up space, and that is amazing.
Love,
Sophie
Add this to your to-do list.
Plant a seed.
Get as close to the floor as you can. (Lie on your belly in the grass or dirt if this is available to you.) Take three breaths down there.
A drawing.
I got kinda into plants a few years ago and it hasn’t gone away. This watercolor (which I recently parted with, after it hung above my desk for a few years) goes with this essay about looking at and enjoying plants.
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.)
I just returned from taking T to the doctor. The doctor said that the two things that people say about babies that are true are, “It takes a village” and, “It goes so fast.” I think a lot about how every single day for T is so incredibly long. I kind of remember — or I remember remembering — what it was like for the days to stretch on for ever and ever, and for it to feel like a lifetime until my birthday would come around again. For T, a lifetime literally will pass until her birthday rolls around again, and she’ll be so different then, as she is every day. As her consciousness develops, my hormonal chemicals are loosening their grip on me but my empathy for her personhood is happy to take over in their stead. For instance: I used to have so much trouble not being near her, but not for any reason that was rational. I didn’t really feel like she knew that I was gone, because it seemed like all adult humans were roughly the same to her. But my chemistry was in full swing, telling me that nothing was more important than keeping this little mound of atoms alive. (It’s WEIRD how fast you are like, “Oh, yeah, I would totally die for this little living being.” I did not feel like that until after she came out, but it was only, like, four hours after she came out.) Now, some of that irrational hormonal stuff is ebbing, but I can see that she knows me, and that she’s affected by me. I can do things that will make her cry, and I hate the idea of making her cry. So now I have so much trouble not being near her, and it’s because I don’t want her to hurt, because I can see that she’s a living being with thoughts and decision-making capacity, as shaky as it may be.
Extras.
My friend Ari sent me this Substack (a weekly newsletter on creativity and attention by writer, dancer, and quilter Marlee Grace), which is lovely.
And my friend Jen sent me the newsletter for this site (Home Culture, a blog by Meg Conley), which is lovely.
I watched a lot of sketch comedy this week, because I was trying to teach about it for my humor writing class. I really loved the sketch “Too Much Tuna.” I had never seen it. I don’t know how I missed it, but wow, did I ever love it.
And then I also watched John Early’s episode of “The Characters” and was literally laughing out loud in my bed. Luke was like, “Stop doing that.”
Last week someone emailed me to say that they liked Petey and that I could recommend some more music. HAPPILY.
If you don’t have Indigo De Souza on heavy rotation yet, get on that.
“Everything Matters” by AURORA.
I recently discovered “Reincarnation” performed by by Roger Miller and am alllll about it.
“Galveston” by Why Bonnie.
Janis Ian is an amazing genius, and “Better Times Will Come” is eerily prescient.
Luke and I watched “Broadcast News” finally, and it was weird. Like, people interacted in a way that felt weird. Did people REALLY interact like that at some point? It is hard to say. But it is a pretty good movie with some genuine surprises, and it was exhaustively researched. (It’s streaming on HBO Max.)
I am thinking a lot about insects. Please check out the Instagram page of @arthropodarchives.
I made a newspaper for chickens. And I am going to tell you about it next week after it gets put outside my house.
Holding my two month old while reading this and very casually sobbing, as one does. Thank you for loving T into being, and for loving this newsletter into being, too.