Class Act

Nov 17, 2023

In August, four-and-a-half months postpartum with my second child, having mostly passed through the deepest part of the newborn fog but still fumbling through something shrouded (maybe more like a light mist?), I signed up for an online writing course.

Fresh off of maternity leave and very, very tired, I was not voluntarily writing much of anything at the time, short of grocery lists and portal messages to our pediatrician and the words “I’m just really tired lol” over and over again in text messages to friends. So, I paid my deposit — not because I urgently want to become a better writer (maybe later), and not even because I wanted to see if there was anything still in me that could string a sentence together, but really to discover if I could still find ease and meaning in doing so.

It would be less a rich creative endeavor, more of an endoscopy: I wanted to send a probe down into that dusty dark part of myself and see if the lights were still on, to make sure that it hadn’t been subsumed by fatigue and identity shift and the sheer relentlessness of care.

Of the five classes in the course, I managed to show up for two.

If you want material for some good old-fashioned, low-stakes existential handwringing, I recommend the following:

In the wake of having and raising kids during the pandemic, spend a couple years questioning whether you’ll ever have an ounce of creative energy again, whether you’ll ever even care about writing again.
Stake out the precious time and energy and weekly spot on the shared family Google calendar (and the funds) to make space for your Creative Self, whatever that means, only to…
Participate at less than half-capacity because of ear infections and stomach bugs and utter, brain-swallowing fatigue — because your beautiful beloved sweet little kids, in part the very reason you found yourself here in the first place, remain ever-dependent and blissfully unmoved by your desires outside of them.
For extra credit: note that the class you’re mostly missing is about “writing motherhood,” the irony of which makes both you and your therapist (a mom herself) laugh. Good! Now you get to pick a treat out of the jar.

It was tantalizingly easy to despair over What This All Meant.

Thank goodness for Zoom recordings, though, right? Days after the fact, I followed along as the wonderful Gila Lyons thoughtfully led our group. (Thank you, Gila.) Dutifully, I set my timer for the ten-minute free writes. I kept up with the readings. I followed the conversations and practically pawed at my screen with the urge to chime in, before remembering I was watching a static recording of a discussion that had taken place some 36 hours before. (As it turns out, watching a group of other mother-writers talk about Rachel Cusk without being able to participate in the discussion is, for me, its own small torture.)

One day, it took me more than an hour to make it through one Paris Review essay because a hummingbird kept flitting in and out of my periphery. That hummingbird was my motherbrain, vigilantly footnoting every other sentence as I read: snack signup, Thanksgiving teachers’ potluck, formula shelf life. And below the flotsam of daily care, that tug of awareness pulling me away like an undertow: the simple fact of my kids, who were not next to me yet somehow continued to exist out in the world, out of sight but squarely, unignorably in my mind.

Appropriately, an excerpt from that same Paris Review essay:

The private actions of the mother’s mind—her scholarship, perversions, miscellany, narcissism—are swamped by the bureaucracy of parenting. A ticker tape hurtles across the mother’s brain listing all of the things she must remember: spoon, bathing suit, milk, booster shot, sign-up, pickup, 3:15. These lists are a form of paying attention, which is a form of love.

It feels a bit like being pelted with dodgeballs. Or maybe like being pelted with dodgeballs while also trying to contemplate art. Cusk described it as a divided consciousness, where the mother is constantly trying to broker a peace deal between these two disparate parts of herself — but to me it feels less like a clean demarcation and more like I’m trying to hold a swirling, foaming, soupy vortex of selves in the same glass without anything bubbling over. A vessel where creativity and self-indulgence might somehow co-exist alongside, and in tandem with, the minutiae of care, which feels like the opposite of art. This is the challenge: to be in conversation with oneself, to be reflective, generative, while a chyron runs below the fold, a running tally of preschool closures and pumping schedules and the safest way to cut apples.

And how many packs of wipes we have left and what time the baby nursed last and whether we’re out of the toddler’s favorite fruit bars and every single word of The Quiet Noisy Book.

And how he now prefers to uncap the toothpaste himself, and how she likes it when I count down and go weee before pulling the onesie over her head, and the unfathomable eldritch magic of that one Imogen Heap song.

And also, the birthdays that I made.

And also, every contour of the small bodies that mine built.

And all those endless discrete chores and tasks and rituals that, when stitched together, become the soft, warm quilt of nurture.

Which, I remind myself both lovingly and reluctantly, might also be — at once in spite of, and because of itself — a kind of art.

📖 Reading: I’m halfway through The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and I’m patiently waiting on my copy of The Baby on the Fire Escape to arrive from A Cappella (love y’all), and I’m still thinking about A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

🍳 Cooking: Real heads know that soup season extends to breakfast soup, too.

🌿 Gardening: The vibe is: jewel tones. The chocolate cherry sunflowers are blooming in all their goth glory. The blood-red Merlot lettuce and the rich purple bok choy look so saturated and lush against the acid green arugula. The very last of the tangerine-hued dahlias are popping open like little fireworks. It’s been an exhausting, depleting fall and I kind of can’t believe I managed to get these plants in the ground, but I’m so glad I did.

👶 Parenting: Lately the toddler has taken to randomly asking, “Are we awake?” What should we tell him?

Thanks for reading Holding Patterns. If you subscribed to my Tinyletter a while back, I’ve brought you over here with me. If that’s not okay, you can unsubscribe (no hard feelings). See you next time.