Sometimes things just suck
It’s unpopular to preach about patience, but sometimes patience is the pair of old socks you need.
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day
Dear Friend,
I toyed with the idea of writing to you about apple picking. But what is there to say? You pick the apples, you eat the apples. There are such things as apple doughnuts. The excellent apple signals that it’s fall. And it is, now, almost officially: the equinox is tomorrow. My college love Ari and I used to throw an annual party this time of year. We carved pumpkins, and decorated cookies, and wore sweaters, and invited our friends. There were cranberries and swirly leaves. It’s “Gilmore Girls” weather. It’s time for a not-totally-up-to-the-snow-because-it’s-busy-being-so-dang-cute-type of hat. And maybe I’ll find my way into that topic another week.
I also thought I might write to you about something a student said, which I will recount for you here, but we won’t dwell. To understand the anecdote, you must know that I keep decks of conversation cards in my desk at all times, and that on Friday, the following question came up in the deck: “What is your favorite way to waste time?”
I read it out loud and immediately paused. What was it to “waste” time anyway? Almost all the kids took the question to mean, “What do you do to experience leisure?” They talked about playing “Animal Crossing,” listening to music while riding in the car with friends, watching soapy reality shows. But one student said, “I really don’t think doing the things that I enjoy is a waste of time. I don’t know that there is a better thing to do with my time, than spend it doing things that make me happy. So I guess my favorite way to waste time is to clean my room. Because I don’t really get the point of that, but it’s fine.”
This was deep and true. But I can’t add anything to it of my own. He was right: it’s never a waste to bring yourself pleasure in this one short life you have to live. In fact, let’s put that Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day,” here for good measure. It’s never the wrong time to read it:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
So there. Mary Oliver has added something to my newsletter. But so far it’s just Mary Oliver and that student, and the fact of certain hats. I get a paragraph in and I get stuck, because really, I just want to talk about my back.
It’s killing me! I’m not sure where this lower back pain came from— it set in in the midst of a walk on Sunday, and it seized my whole body. There were no non-painful positions. I was leveled.
And I’d had big plans for that day, too. I’d wanted to go to a book signing by my mentor (and my daughter’s namesake) Peggy Macnamara at Women and Children First. Then, I’d wanted to go to the antique mall and see if I could find a velvet sofa or an ornate chair for our newly empty upstairs living room.
But an explosion occurred in my back. Like a small army of tiny men set up camp on my pelvic bone and started punching furiously and constantly. None of the plans could come to fruition. And besides, when I took a COVID test on Sunday, it was (still) positive. Not only positive, but QUITE positive. Fourteen days into COVID, and no end in sight.
I think I’ve kept you mostly in the loop through my incessant body complaints, but if you’re arriving late: I spent a week and a half with the stomach flu; one day happily drinking La Croix in the backyard with my girlfriend; then, immediately, another fourteen days (and counting) with a bad (though not deleterious) case of COVID. And yes, I DID infect my girlfriend with COVID during that nice day, causing her to miss a week and a half of plans she’d been excited for. (I have no idea how a person is supposed to not feel shame and regret about getting and transmitting COVID.) I also took my daughter to the playground one day and let my guard down long enough to be stung by an errant yellow jacket. And then the back thing. The universe is having a field day with me.
The back pain has been especially insulting, since it’s preventing me from being able to pick up my baby. It is also preventing me from picking things up off the floor of her room. Her dad, Luke, is a person who is notably excellent at not wasting time — by which I mean, he does not see the point in cleaning up a bedroom, and so he won’t do it unless he is asked. I can’t ask Luke to clean up a bedroom, since I am asking him to do every other important thing that my body isn’t letting me do — taking out the trash and the cat litter; giving T baths and putting her to bed and dropping her off at daycare and taking her to the doctor; cooking dinner AND doing dishes. You’re right, that’s a lot of things. Needless to say, all the physical pain is complemented by the tremendous guilt and shame that comes from needing help from the people I love. The help keeps coming, but I’ve been asking for it for weeks on end, and there’s no end in sight.
Although, I have started going back to school. I feel that this is maybe irresponsible, but the school rules are that if you have COVID, you isolate for five days, and after that, you return to school wearing a mask, whether or not you’re still showing a positive rapid test. (I get the sense that you are not supposed to come to school with a fever, for the record.) After the five days, you can’t get paid for missing more work, and you have to arrange your own substitute and lesson plans. I felt like I was supposed to go back to work, no matter how I felt. And THEN, more shame, because wouldn’t I tell you (wouldn’t I tell ANYONE?) to stay home? To keep resting? To not bow to whatever societal pressures are saying that work is more important than healing?
I mean, it makes sense that the rest of the world is tired of bending over backwards and finding accommodations for the reality of COVID. It’s been a tremendous ask, spending three full years figuring out how to keep the machine running while acknowledging how often it needs to slow, or pause. I get it. I have no soap box to climb up on to. Only the aforementioned guilt, shame, second-arrow shame (that’s the shame you feel for being ashamed), and back pain.
All this to say that sometimes things suck. And you can look through your catalogue of tools — asking for help, moving through difficult emotions, exercising self-compassion, resting as much as possible, being transparent about your needs — and find that you’ve exhausted them all, and that you still don’t feel better. Sometimes you don’t get to feel better. You just have to endure. Life is not always comfortable, and things don’t always go the way you want them to. It’s not ideal to ask you to be patient; but life requires patience anyway. Not all the time, but sometimes. There is not always a hack for suffering.
And basically, that’s OK. I would love to be writing this letter to you from the other side; it would be more uplifting if I could say, “And I was patient, and the pain subsided, and now I’m having a great week!” But maybe it’s more important to be writing from here: a place where I have chosen to believe that things will get better, and that I don’t get to know when, and that I am going to be patient. Accepting is not the same as conceding. Often, accepting goes hand-in-hand with a kind of faith.
Also, it’s nice to be able to write to you and talk about how much things are kind of sucking right now. (By the way, I know they don’t suck THAT much for me. You know, in a grand scheme kind of way.) So, with that: how are things going for you? Do you want someone to hold the space for your sadness or hurt or suffering? I can do that for you. I can’t fix it, but I have space to hear it. Thank you for holding space to hear about mine.
Love,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
T got her helmet. The sad thing about the helmet ends up not being how much it costs, or how much she hates going to see the helmet guy, but how much I miss smelling her hair. Having this taken away for 23 hours a day has made me feel more grateful for the things I haven’t had to give up yet (holding her against my chest, listening to her babble, washing her shoulders in the bath), and it’s made the phrase, “Enjoy it while you can” — which every well-meaning parent with older kids has said to me lately — make some amount of sense. I think it’s actually a kind of grace that we don’t get to know the lasts when they arrive. The last time you pick her up, the last time she calls you “mama,” the last time she wants a story. Most of the time, you don’t get to know — you just have it in the back of your mind that there is nothing without a last. The helmet has created a landscape where I had a last head smell moment, and knowing it was the last one for a few months at least was sadder than when I breast fed for the last time, when she fell asleep in our bed for the last time, when she used her disco chair for the last time. Some of this is nicer not to know. A baby is a million deaths every day, because they just grow and grow and grow. Which, in a cruel twist, is what we want them to do.
This Week In Sophie
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Fiiiiinally, I have a daily cartoon in the New Yorker this week, AND Sammi and I have a cartoon in the print edition this week, too!
Sophie, I really, really feel for you! I'm so sorry that the last few weeks have been so tough :( And I can relate to what you’ve written about - getting to the point where maybe we just need to endure things and be patient that they’ll get better (or that we'll get better at dealing with it all). It’s totally not a fun place to be but sometimes its just the place we’re in and that’s okay. The last few weeks I’ve had that ‘my body is breaking down on me’ feeling, as some chronic issues and unexpected new ones have been showing up and unfortunately, I’m a little in my head about it….body stuff can get kind of loud and overwhelming? Ugh. Especially when you feel like too much is happening at once.
So, I’m sending some SERIOUS healing thoughts your way and also gratitude as well!! Because I think I needed to read this today too - thank you! And I really hope that your back starts feeling better and that covid exits your body for good!!
Dear Sophie: Everything you write inspires me. For one, how does Mary Oliver know the grasshopper is a female. Had to look that one up: "Note that a female grasshopper has a tapered abdomen. A female grasshopper's abdomen looks like a tube. This tube is known as the ovipositor, which the female uses to lay its eggs." My mother used to call us "grasshoppers" as an insult. But I always loved grasshoppers, still do, but I understand the problem with those huge locusts. They're Biblical. In truth, I love grasshoppers. And I'm glad they're in this newsletter. Happy fall, when grasshoppers are out in spades.