overdue offering
on living the unexamined life
It’s been so long since I wrote here that I had to move blindly around the Substack dashboard until I remembered how to post. This has happened to me before — a shift and a resettling and then having to find my way to the page again. Sometimes I can write as life is happening to me, and writing is how I see the path, like headlights in the dark. But other times I have to live life unexamined, and then when I feel my feet beneath me enough to look back, I take a look and write what I see.
I have been living the unexamined life in these months since I last wrote. One foot in front of the other, not yet wanting to name what any of it means. I do not mean to be cryptic, only to say that this phase of parenting feels like a painful shedding, and it is so lonely parenting teenagers because the things you struggle with most are not your things anymore. They are theirs. You cannot talk about it.
I’ve read so may good books this year, the first of which was Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo back in January. I highlighted a line when a character said, “This was, perhaps, what it meant to have a child grow up. That distance finally achieved, in itself a kind of necessary estrangement.” I feel that uncomfortable necessary separating between my kids and me, but more than that, sometimes I feel such an estrangement with the rest of the world and with my past selves. Motherhood is a molting.
I’ve always been good at seaming together whatever experiences I’m having and making sense of them, but I think maybe this is not the season of life for that. Because of that, I forgot how to write because I cannot go on in the way I always have.
But I am still here, and I’ve been marking my days in other ways, scribbled weekly in a journal, the first new years resolution I have kept in quite a while. This is not a place for thoughtful reflections, just facts and details. Sometimes it is boring like what we ate for dinner all week. Sometimes I press flowers in the pages to mark the seasons and my garden play. Sometimes I keep shreds of receipts and various odds and ends to remember I have a life, and even when it feels stuck, it is a living and breathing thing. These journal pages are for me so that when I reach the end of the year, I can see the ordinary and know where my hours and days went.
I wish I had something else to say to you tonight, something tightly cohesive and tied with a bow. I have felt flooded with other people’s content in these last few months, so much so that I Brick my phone for longer periods now and let the buzzing quiet. I think part of why I haven’t written is that it feels like so much of the world has too much to say nearly all the time, and eventually it only feels like noise and words. I’m exhausted by “content” if we can call it that. Like when you turn the radio dial down to see the streets in front of you, I’ve needed quiet to see my life.
I will not make any of this mean anything, but I will just put it down here - as an overdue offering to whatever channel opens when I write and an offering to the forces I trust to eventually make meaning of things that right now need room to breathe before I shape them.
A list of recent images I don’t want to forget: Noisy ninth grade girls sleeping over in my living room and giggling loudly way too late. Slicing summer peaches for baked oatmeal. Watching a foreign film with my son, up way later than I want to be, knowing these invitations aren’t guaranteed. Eating cherries on the beach while we read in silence side by side.
There is so much I want to teach them that I cannot. Things they have to learn on their own. I watched my son perform at an open mic night tonight, a feat I wouldn’t have dared at 16. It was a local spot full of people there to hear someone sing Billy Joel or Jimmy Buffett. But he stepped up to the stage and sang a song by The Smiths. I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again? The crowd was only half-listening anyway, a brewery with those tall industrial ceilings that make everything hard to hear. They mindlessly clapped when it was over, then chatted through the next performance too.
We’d argued earlier in the day about things that felt important in the moment, ways I was trying to teach him how life will go. But for that minute on the stage, my heart outside of its cage in that painfully exposed way that only parenting can do, I realized we are one and the same. Because the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life. Other people can’t tell us what to do. We never know where we are going or what any of it means. But if we are brave enough, we can sing. The notes are stuck in my throat, and I cannot hear the melody, but this is me singing anyway.
Molting indeed!! ❤️ Thank you for this offering — I always appreciate your writing.
Beautiful, my friend.