Labor Pains

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon among mothers, myself included. It seems that as soon as they have finished labor, they completely forget it. I ask my other mom friends for advice, and their eyes glaze over, they tilt their heads. ‘Hmmm, did I have an epidural? I can’t remember if my water broke.’ The same often goes for developmental stages. I look for sympathy among women my mother’s age and it seems they don’t recall the specific struggles of a toddler, or the pains of pregnancy. I can remember trying to recall my labor pains directly afterwards and them slipping from my memory like so much water in my hands. Speaking of water, the other evening I had quite a scare. I still have five more weeks until my due date, but I was convinced in the middle of the night that my water was leaking. It was the strangest feeling and I called my husband down from his office upstairs so that we could freak out together on the bathroom floor, frantically googling until I had scared myself enough not to sleep a wink. There’s so much emotion with childbirth. I didn’t have as many crying fits during this pregnancy, but that night I was laughing and sobbing all at the same time again. I don’t think it was leaking, nothing more came out and I had no contractions. The whole experience scared me enough that I went into extreme nesting mode. We spent the weekend at Ikea and I washed miniature baby clothes. It reminded me that there are many different ways to deliver a baby, no less valid than another. I had stupidly assumed, being a second time mother, that my labor would be the same. Charley came one day early, I had felt prepared and ready. But there’s no guarantee this one will come the same way. He could be early, he could be small, he could even be a C-section, and I have to be okay with that.

I had fallen into the trap of thinking everything would go just like with my first, both the good and the bad. That in many ways this kid would just be Charley 2.0, and I have to remind myself that might not be the case. Every kid is different, sometimes especially siblings. I used to look forward to the differences. ‘I can’t wait till I have a smaller baby that isn’t so active’, I would tout. Or ‘Maybe the next one will color with me?’ But instead, the closer I get to labor, the more fearful I become of things being different. It feels like the great unknown all over again, stumbling into the great void of parenthood. Just when you think you know something, you realize you have no idea.

More or Less Like Family, Part III

By Molly Bradley Read parts I and II

“Mama! Mama? Mamaaaa!”

Already Khady’s wake-up call felt routine. She’d done the same the first morning, calling urgently through my door. I’d thought something was wrong until I saw it was just that she wanted me awake. If she wasn’t sleeping there was no reason her tubaab should be. With my braids, now, I was pretty much just another Khady.

I rose and stuffed my grimy contacts in as fast as I could and came out to assuage my anxious alarm. We had breakfast, and only got a half hour or so of the morning soaps before my father came in. He stood and watched with us for five minutes or so, impassive to a disconcerting degree. There were more physical shenanigans happening on a show this morning, ones I could understand. There was dancing and falling and laughing and more dancing.

Finally I looked to Khady. “Are we going?” I asked her, glancing at Dad.

She looked up from where she sat by his ankles, tugged his pant leg, and said something swift in Wolof. He bowed his head and muttered something in reply.

“Yes, he’s waiting for you,” Khady said.

“I’ve been ready,” I said in my defense. As soon as I stood he led the way out of the room and out of our sandy yard.

We took a path out of town that I’d never noticed before---not that I’d spent a lot of time outside the house. Still sand, sand, sand---then suddenly sand with growth on either side of the road. Somehow growing out of the sand. First just dry, unhappy grass, and then shrubs, bushes, trees. Growing.

Somehow we managed a little conversation while we walked. We’d never really spoken before, only nodded our hellos in passing. He was rarely around the house.

He spoke slowly enough, and I had just enough Wolof, to answer some basic questions: Was I alright? Did I need anything? Was Khady being good? Was I hungry? Had I brought water? (No---I should have, but I was, for no reason, playing stoic. Maybe I thought I needed to challenge myself some way or another, if I wasn’t doing anything else.)

The road seemed endless. Finally at one point we cut through the bushes to the right, up a gentle rise to an area sparsely studded with trees and, as it turned out, other homes. I wasn’t sure if these belonged to Mouit. Were the people who lived here part of the community? Did they commute, so to speak, to town to get things they needed? Or did they just survive out here on their own?

I wished I had more words to ask my father.

Despite the nothing substantial that we said, the walk was companionable. My father greeted the few people we saw as we passed. He seemed to know everyone.

Finally we came through a more densely wooded area into. . . green. Bright green. Rows upon rows and fields upon fields and hills upon hills of green. I had no idea this was out here, in the middle of this sandy, desert-like land. I had no idea how it could exist out here at all. Even when I’d gone with my sisters to gather wood the previous day, the “woods” had turned out to be very, very short shrubs with sturdy branches. Nothing like this. It was idyllic enough that I almost didn’t believe it: almost too green, too perfect. Endless bursts of green all in neat rows. The Jolly Green Giant was growing children in the ground, and all you could see were the tops of their curly green heads of hair.

We walked awhile through the fields. My father greeted every man working there---there was at least one person tilling every field. I trailed behind, so lulled by the color I almost forgot why we were there.

Finally we found Mamadou. I’d spotted him before we got there. He was wearing only a pair of loose linen pants and a hefty bandana on his head, to soak up the sweat. It was beyond hot.

Mamadou raised a hand in greeting and I raised mine back. My father gestured for me to sit on the ground at the edge of the field. He walked slowly toward Mamadou, keeping between the rows of onions, placing one foot carefully before the other, watching them as he walked.

He and Mamadou talked for a long time. There was a good deal of gesturing back and forth between the two halves of the field. Once my father left, Mamadou told me why.

“He thinks I am not taking good care of this side as that side,” he said. He sat beside me and got out the bowl he’d brought his lunch in. “You see that side is more green. This side, not so green.” He was working on this side today.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“You can take the weeds.”

I scrambled to my feet. There were weeds everywhere. I started by bending over each row, but quickly I got down on my knees and got efficient about it, crawling down the rows. Mamadou laughed.

“You really want to do a lot,” he said.

“I just want to help.” I was hardly doing anything. There were so many weeds. And there was Mamadou, doing the real work (that he explained to me as he did a first round): pumping the water up from the well, filling two buckets, running with them back to the row he was working on, and dousing the soil. The running kept things quick and efficient, because he had to cover the whole field four times, really drowning the onions at each pass. The running was also necessary because one of the buckets had a leak. The more water he lost, the less there was to cover the onions, and if it didn’t do the trick he’d have to do the same patch twice in a row. If he had to do that every time, that would make eight times watering the field in its entirety.

He kept at it and barely paused. It was hot, and the prickles on the weeds started to sting my fingers, but all I had to do was glance at him to feel embarrassed and start tugging again, reinvigorated.

The water started to sound really good coming up from that well. I wished I were working on the same row as Mamadou, at the same time, so I might catch some drops from the leaky bucket on my hands or feet or head. The four remaining water bottles on the floor of my bedroom back in the village kept materializing before my eyes.

Finally he finished his round on the less-green half.

“We go back now,” he said. “You can’t be in the sun for so long.”

My indignation was smothered by relief before it had really even arisen.

 ***

At the house that afternoon, Binta found me helping Khady wash clothes. Really Khady was washing them. I was trying to imitate her motions: soggy cloth grasped in both fists, enveloping the knuckles, and the knuckles of one hand scrubbed vigorously over those of the other. When she did it somehow the cloth, or probably her hands and the water, made a sharp and satisfying squelching sound like a brazen bird.

I couldn’t do it. Khady laughed at first but then became impatient.

“Just let me,” she said finally, and I resigned myself to brushing the suds around the rim of the plastic tub of water.

Binta sauntered over with a lilt in her step that could fit only her.

“Viens,” she said. Come.

I ought to have curbed it long before, but my immediate reaction to commands like this was to ask, “Why?”

Whether she took it as the curiosity it was or the insolence I didn’t intend, Binta didn’t let on.

“Viens boire attaaya.” Come drink attaaya.

Attaaya was a strong, sweet black tea boiled so many times over it almost caramelized. It smelled like it, anyway; the little cobalt blue or easy green teapot on the stove would start to shiver, and warm amber bubbles would begin to peek over the surface. Then whoever was tending it would come turn the fire off, take the teapot by its hot handle with a rag, and pour some into the stubby fluted glasses on the tea tray. The method was then to pour the steaming liquid back and forth from glass to glass, keeping one firm on the tray and lifting the other as high as possible, sending the liquid down in a perfect graceful arc. The height gave the surface of the tea a thick foam of those caramel-colored bubbles that tasted as good and sweet as it looked.

I’d never tried the technique myself. I wanted to learn but knew the first time would be a catastrophe of hot liquid streaming across the floor. This rural village with its limited stock of tea would not be the place to learn.

Binta led me to the bedroom she’d moved into with a sibling, or maybe Hangout Girl, or maybe a sibling and Hangout Girl. I was still pretty sure Hangout Girl didn’t belong to this family and did, in fact, have a home of her own, but I believed this on blind faith. She hadn’t missed a family gathering here yet, be it mealtime or TV time or watching-the-tubaab-struggle-to-cut-the-fins-off-the-fish time.

In the room were my oldest brother, the baby Mama, and, naturally, Hangout Girl. The room wasn’t tiny, but small enough that once I was inside, Binta could take me by the shoulders and sit me down on the bed in only a few steps. She sat down beside me, plucked the baby up from where she was rolling on the bedspread, and put her in my lap.

Hangout Girl was sitting in a chair next to my brother. She started snickering. “Mama mak ak Mama bundaw.” Big Mama and Little Mama. She pointed first to the baby and then to me as she said it. Fair enough. The other Mama was here first.

My brother was brewing the attaaya on a makeshift portable stovetop, something like a Bunsen burner. He took the teapot off the flame. The tray with the glasses was on the ground. He lifted the teapot to the level of his eyes and began to pour. Once the head of the stream made it safely into a glass he lifted it high above his head, meeting my eye and grinning as he did so. Sort of showing off, sort of showing me.

“I’m sorry, I never learned your name,” I said in French.

“Malik.” He finished pouring from the teapot and began to pour the liquid back and forth between the glasses. I smiled. Two brothers named Malik. This Malik was older, but he asked the same questions my Malik at home had asked me when I’d first arrived in Dakar, when I’d first become part of the family.

We ran through the topics and drank our tea. With four of us---not including Mama---we each only got two rounds of about half a glass, rather than three ample servings.

Different families do it differently, but typically attaaya is served three times a day, with three rounds each time. Guests tend to complicate the system and leave everyone with a little less tea.

I didn’t mind so much---but then, it was a bonus for me, an extra cultural treat in my day whenever I was offered attaaya. For them, it was the norm. They had to give up a little of their lives to give me this brand new one with all its experiences.

I’d gotten used to thinking of these temporary homes as home, and these fleeting people as family. There were so many of them there to take care of me there was nothing else to call them. What was I to them?

When they had no more questions for me we sat in silence. Companionably enough, but it still seemed strange. Then I realized why. I’d thought I was slipping into their world as it was, simply a new addition to what existed. Really they were simulating it for me.

Whole worlds

Two volumes, four books, 2724 pages, hundreds of high-quality illustrations. These are the stats for The History of Cartography, an encyclopedic tome published by The University of Chicago Press between 1987 and 1998. The volumes are still available for purchase, but they are now also available for download as a series of PDFs, because, as the publisher’s site explains, much has changed since this work began:

“In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.”

Things like this rarely happen these days, as we have generally given up on trying to contain the whole world between two covers. And this is certainly for the best, since a conversation about the history of anything can only benefit from more voices than one book, or one series of books, can contain.

But what struck me most when I came upon this work, which was published between the time I was born and the time I went to middle school, is the sort of sustained attention it must have required. Although it includes the work of multiple contributors and editors, it’s hard for me to imagine the kind of commitment and hard work that brings such a project to life over the course of more than a decade.

Since offering up my New Year’s resolution to finish what I’ve started, several friends have asked me why and wondered what I really meant. Does it mean I have to finish every book I start, even if it turns out I really don’t like it? Does it mean I have to finish a faltering project, even if it seems doomed? Of course not.

What I really meant is that I’d like to move beyond the wonder of beginnings. I love beginnings. I love the excitement of brainstorming ideas and the hope and optimism that comes with getting started. But after the thrill of beginning wears off, the middle is much less glamorous. It requires simply showing up and doing the work, or “being boring,” as Austin Kleon says in Steal Like an Artist.

Endings, too, can be a challenge. Whether it’s finishing Moby Dick or sending a long-term project out into the world, endings require a sort of reckoning between what you’d hoped for and what really came to be. Sometimes things turn out better than expected, sometimes worse, but an ending is almost always different from what you imagined when you began.

As I set out to finish what I’ve started, in small and perhaps increasingly bigger ways, my intention is simply to embrace all of the middles and ends that are required, just like beginnings, to make things happen.

Blowing in the Wind

Dear Sibyl, I was recently left by a guy that I thought was going to be a long-term boyfriend with a future.  We had only been together for five months but we had been chasing each other for half a year before then and I know he had been interested but thinking he had no chance for way more than that. When we finally got together, we were the dream couple to all our friends and the times we spent were most often in mutual genuine bliss.

Then one day, he invited friends over on a Friday at 1.30 am when I had said that I was tired from a long week. So I was a bit pissed off and went home. He broke up at 4 am with a text and confirmed that in a conversation the next day saying: 'We have nothing in common, he can't see his friends (far from true), I'm reactive--he's proactive, it won't work out so he'd rather end it and it's better for me as well.'

I was devastated. Most friends said it's just gonna be a few days. So I took it with dignity, kept my public appearance, including Facebook, happy and optimistic and left him alone for about 5 weeks. But believe me, I was devastated. I had no idea what was going on and friends told me he wasn't being himself either. So I had hope he'd come to his senses.

Then I saw him at a festival. Snorting mountains of cocaine. Everything became a bit clearer to me. Throughout the weekend I learned that he had re-started cocaine the night before he broke up, been doing loads of drugs since then and that he had lost his job. He did continue to want this breakup but deliberately stood next to me very often and started crying during songs. I have told him now that I don't want any contact for a few months. That included that I didn't want a 'Happy New Year' email either. I thanked him but told him again no-contact.

But now I don't know what I will do after that. I can't avoid him forever. Will he come to his senses? Would it be a good thing if he came to his senses? Should I try and stay friends? Should I avoid him in my life---tricky because we have zillions of mutual friends that I don't want to lose. I think that it's not a lack of love but a fear of failure and of commitment that he's suffering from. I know the cocaine phase is temporary. So is the unemployment. Part of me wants him back after that. Another part thinks that he can't be trusted ever again.

What do you think?

Yours,

Brokenhearted in the U.S.A.

Dearest Brokenhearted,

There are so many ways to cheat on one's partner.  You can disengage emotionally and start up an internet friendship with a long lost fling.  You can sleep with a member of their family, their best friend, or a random person you meet out dancing.  In your case, Brokenhearted, the cheating wasn't sexual at all.  His mistress was cocaine.

When I was a teenager, my best friend lost his mother to cancer, and I, to my great surprise, lost them both.  I adored his mother, and had fully believed that my fervent prayers to save her would turn her illness around, right up to the very end.  By the time she died, however, I was not surprised, having visited her several times in her final days.  But I was completely shocked how my friend reverted into himself, eschewing my friendship for people who never knew his mother, and would not bring up his pain.

I wouldn't take no for an answer.  I wrote him long letters, parked outside his house and waited for him to come home from school, and, when he did let me in, sat with him for hours in silence while we inexplicably watched tennis on his tiny television.  It was all he wanted to do.  Or so I thought---I slowly learned that all the times I couldn't find him, he was off with his new friends, consuming as many drugs as was humanly possible in the provincial area we lived in.

Since that experience, I've learned to look for the presence of mind-and-mood altering substances any time a person has suddenly disengaged in a primary relationship, especially when there is a precipitating loss of some kind.  For whatever reason, your boyfriend's unemployment was more than a temporary career setback---it was a huge loss to his sense of self.  Instead of being able to let you in to that pain, he turned to something to shut it off, in this case, cocaine.

The only bright side is that he broke it off with you the moment he chose drugs over connection with you, even if he wasn't truthful about what he was doing.  This is actually sort of admirable, because most people in the throes of an addiction just take down whoever is closest along with them.  You dodged a bullet, and when you realized the kind of dangerous behavior he was engaged in, you wisely instituted a no-contact policy.

The piece I have to gently warn you about, Brokenhearted, is your assertion that his cocaine use is a "phase".   Drug use is not like body piercing or thinking you're an evangelical Christian.  It's not a phase, it's an addiction, especially if it's been caused by depression because of his unemployment, caused him to do something so drastic as break off a healthy relationship, and if he is truly snorting "mountains" of it at festivals.

I know that in your pain of losing him, you wish he could come back to you, untouched by your time apart.  But he will not be the same person then, even if he does.  He has started down a long road that will take him a good while to return from, and in fact, he should be a different person, if he really digs in to the recovery process.

So, my suggestion to you is to only invite him back into your life if he is a) in some kind of recovery program, and/or therapy, b) willing to discuss why he sought out drugs instead of connection at that time in his life, and c) interested and able to hear from you how it hurt you to lose him in such a way, and what boundaries you need going forward.  Finally, he should agree to never break up with anyone ever again via text message.

In the meantime, tend to your own broken heart.  Think less about him and his choices, and mend your own wounds, sewing them up with the support of your friends, with new experiences that bring you joy, and comforting practices like staying in to intricately braid your hair and read your favorite book over again.

Your boyfriend made a sad mistake, choosing cocaine over you.  Don't follow him down the rabbit hole.  I have seen many people throw away their dignity for the lure of the seductive drug user.  There's something desperate in those hollowed-out eyes, and we are sure that if we can just harness that desperation, we can turn it into passion---for us, rather than the substances.  Instead of chasing that dragon, stay close to yourself, on your own side, in the realm of human, rather than chemical, connection.

Soberly,

Sibyl

It Always Was

I wasn’t the girl who grew up dreaming about her wedding.  I didn’t play pretend wedding and neither I nor my Barbie dressed up as a bride.  In college when a girlfriend was having boy drama, I was the one telling her she was enough on her own.  I didn’t look for love, I didn’t pine for it or dream about it. It was a non-question, as was marriage, I didn’t think about it except in the abstract. And then, exactly 10 years ago this week, this guy kissed me. And that was it. It just was. It was everything and nothing all at the same time; so perfectly ordinary that it was extraordinary.  From that moment, that one perfect moment, we were together. We just were.

Someone asked me once when I knew we were serious, when we had that conversation. I had to think about it then, and I thought on it again on this milestone. The truth is, there never was a conversation. I’m sure of it. Perhaps there was a word or two before we got engaged, but I don’t remember them.  There was certainly nothing prior to that and nothing that ever involved questions of ‘Should we do this’ or ‘What are we’ or ‘When will we’. It seems odd, most relationships have those status checks. I can’t explain it except to say we just were, from very early on.

That’s not to say our relationship was placid. It isn’t now and it never was. I’ll say we’re spirited conversationalists.  We’re not afraid to air our grievances and then move on. But in all those conversations and discussions, there was never a question of ‘what if we weren’t us’.

I’m don’t think I believe in soul-mates or fate, which is why it’s so hard for me to understand how someone so perfect for me, in ways I could never have guessed or anticipated, would be a part of my life. It would be easier I think to say it was fate.  Easier to say our relationship was destined to be.  Without that predetermination, the chance involved means we could have easily missed each other. I could have gone to a different party, he could have gone to a different school. We might never have met and then he might never have kissed me on that cold January morning.

But he did.

Ten years ago I didn’t know; I didn’t know what my life would be like today. I couldn’t have possibly imagined if I tried. Ten years ago I wasn’t thinking about marriage or the future.  I just knew it seemed right. I just knew, in the way you know the sky is above the ground. I just knew I was in the right place, with the right person. Just as I know it now.

I still don’t know what the future holds. I get dizzy thinking about what my life might look like ten years from now.  I don’t know where I’ll be or what I will experience in the next decade; I couldn’t dream it if I tried.

But I do know who I’ll be with.  I know who I’ll cuddle under the covers with, who I’ll wake up when I’ve had a bad dream.  I know who I’ll trade ‘you are’ comeback lines and lame jokes with. I know who I’ll debate over beers and cuddle with during movies.  I know who will get me ginger ale when I’m sick and chocolate when I’ve had a bad day. I know who I’ll talk with, argue with, laugh with, and dance in the living room with.

I know who will be holding my hand.  I know who will be kissing me.

Because it was never a question.  It always was.

Starting Over

By Rebecca D. Martin When we moved into our last house, the first piece of furniture we bought was a sofa, big, comfy, and at the top of our price range. We promised each other that, if we let ourselves buy it, we’d commit to filling it with friends. We would open our home. We would give the sofa back, in a way. Share it with others. My husband and I are introverts with big ideas and true intentions.

A year and a half later, we bought a used dining table, full of chipped-up charm. By then, our illusions had shrunk to a manageable reality, and we made no promises about numbers or chairs or dinner guests. The reality was that I had moved four times in five years. I was worn down by building new relationships in each new city. So for long, long stretches, both sofa and table held only the two---and then the three---of us, resting weary together after long weeks of working, mothering, and missing friends in other towns.

Did we fail? Did we fall clean over our good intentions of being hospitable? It probably depends on who you ask, but if you ask me, the question itself is the wrong one. Hospitality is, after all, about people. It isn’t about meeting a year-end friend quota. It isn’t about succeeding or failing. It’s about sharing life. And life can be downright messy, complex at the best of times, convoluted or worse at the most difficult. In this life, we put down roots where we can, but who knows which way they’ll grow? We intend to stretch out arms of wide welcome, but we end up reaching for help and support or comfort and calm, instead.

And now here we are again: another move, another home. The sofa settles comfortably into the new living room, and I pop out the dining table leaves to give them a good wipe-down. We think with hope about the people we will meet in this new city and what friends might fill these seats. Our intentions are true. But our expectations are open. We’ve learned that relationships will grow in their own way. Community will develop where it’s able, when it’s needed.

In the meantime, our job as a family is to put down roots and grow strong together. We sit down around the weathered dining table, join our tired grownup hands with soft, sweet, chubby ones, and offer thanks for what we have right at this moment. Just the three of us: it is a good place to start.

Resisting Autopilot

The other day, I heard an interview on NPR with David Esterly, a master woodcarver who just came out with a book, The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making. He talked about what he believes are the two halves of creativity: one half consists of coming up with ideas and planning things out; the other half exists within the making itself. This second half (his favorite), is a spontaneous, intuitive relationship with the process—responding to the materials and adapting mistakes into solutions. I had the radio on while I worked on a cut-out for an animation I am making. I usually have something on for background noise, except when I’m drawing, because I always think of drawing as the hard part. Once the drawing is done, the pressure is off and the radio (or podcast) comes on.

I draw on yellow tracing paper, which I flip over and transfer onto a piece of medium-weight black paper. I used to draw directly onto the back of the black paper (and occasionally still do), but the cut-outs always come out messier that way, and when I’m using multiple colors, it becomes hard to line them up correctly without a master drawing. The trade-off is that the immediacy of the line is lost with all the tracing that goes on. As I sat, cutting out along my prescribed, traced lines, listening to Esterly talk, I wondered, am I really doing anything creative right now?

The weird thing about getting good at something and developing a neat little personalized system is that it makes it easy to go on autopilot.

As part of me listened to the radio, another part of me started thinking more about what I was doing. Though the drawing is there as a guide, there are numerous subtle decisions to make as I cut. Most of the time, I don’t really make these decisions, but let them happen automatically. The cut-outs come out just fine. But this time, I really thought about what I was doing—How thick should this line be? Should this small gap be left black or cut away? Shouldn’t these lines be more parallel?

I think that the sum of all these tiny nuanced decisions shows in the finished product. There is a tension in the lines that makes it feel more alive. And focusing my attention that way made me feel more alive, too.

In her book Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg talks about how creative acts can be a form of meditation. Sometimes when I am making a cut-out I am impatient, just wanting to get it done and see what it looks like. But sometimes, like this time, I go deep into it. Time passes differently, the way it does when I play with an animal, or really listen to music. I really experience what I am doing; I experience the uncertainty of being alive.

To listen to the David Esterly interview, go here: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/06/168632372/re-creating-the-lost-carving-of-an-english-genius

You can see more of my work here: http://mollymcintyre.com/

Looking Forward: Growth.

A couple of months after my niece, Calla, was born, my brother and sister-in-law sent a photo of her on a sheepskin rug, staring straight into the lens with wild, wide green eyes. I was still in New Zealand, living in my front-yard trailer, when the photograph arrived in my email inbox. “She’s switched on,” said my WWOOF host, admiring the shot on my computer screen.

As Calla grew, more photos came. There she was, bundled in sky-blue snow gear. Strapped in a swing at the playground. Setting foot in the ocean for the first time, wobbling on tiny, tubby legs. One video showed her demonstrating a newfound ability to operate the bedroom humidifier with just a touch of her fuzz-covered head.

When I moved to New York in 2009, Calla turned one. As her aunt, babysitter, and---as my sister-in-law once kindly referred to me---her real-life fairy godmother, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of witnessing the numberless spectacular and bewildering transformations that occur in the first few years of life.

“Can you imagine one day we’ll have a real conversation with her?” I remember asking my brother.

Today, three years later, we not only have conversations, but discussions. The baby who once did little more than babble can now ride a scooter, sit through chapter books, make correct use of the word confidant, and identify several obscure varieties of pasta. (Anyone familiar with strozzapreti? She is.)

Calla's a new person every day.

A few weeks ago, she took my hand and pulled me onto her bed, yanking a blanket over our heads. She held a glowing egg-shaped nightlight in her hand. “The grown-ups will never find us here,” she said.

“Am I a grown-up?” I asked her. “How old do you think I am?”

She squinted, lost in thought, and guessed. “Eight?”

---

I ran a Google search recently using the question, “can a person remember being born?”

Apparently, and not surprisingly, the answer in most cases is no. In fact, what I gathered from my search was that for the majority of us, first memories extend no earlier than the age of three---and can occur as late as the age of seven.

It’s unlikely, then, that Calla will remember her first time in the ocean, her penchant for the Milly Molly Mandy book series, our egg-lit conversation in her bed.

She’ll have no recollection of the many drastic metamorphoses that have occurred in the past four years.

I will, though, and I look forward to telling her about them.

I’ll also remember this as a time of significant change for me, as well. The difference is, I can recognize it. And feel it. And think about it. It’s mind-blowing, for lack of a better term, to be conscious of major changes as they’re happening, to feel yourself growing---having new experiences, learning, experimenting, being uncomfortable. I---like my much-younger niece---feel like a new person every day.

It’s kind of like being a child again. I imagine, in wild, stunning ways, it’s a little like being born.

The Passing of Time

We lost my childhood golden retriever this week. He was almost fourteen years old, a very long and full life for that breed. I say lost, but my parents had to make the decision to put him to sleep. He had a large tumor and was in pain and very sick towards the end, not the dog we remembered and loved at all. Making the decision seemed far more difficult than just letting him go. I think we all hoped he would just pass in his sleep. Their house is quiet now. No nails scratching on the wood floors, no doggy gruffs and barks. But I think what we are mourning even more than Lucky himself is the passing of time. We are reminded in an instant how quickly 14 years can pass. He spent 5 years living near the beach in Indiana, 5 years in an apartment near a lake in Florida and 4 years at their house with the nice fenced in backyard. When you subdivide time like that, it makes it go by even more quickly.

It’s been almost 4 years now since I moved to Florida, and got married. And even though I have my own house with my own dog, I am crying over the good times. The years spent in Long Beach with Lucky, just five short ones, when I was a teenager and took him for walks everyday. I needed that dog, we all did. I am mourning the memories, and at the same time wondering, where are my memories of Florida? Is it because there are no seasons, no markers in the passage of time? So many of my great memories from growing up involve the seasons. Or perhaps it’s because I am only just starting my own family. Maybe all those memories were really about the four of us, my parents, brother and I, and of course, Lucky. In many ways his death ranks right up there with my grandfather’s in terms of importance.

I think we are all grieving and scared. Scared that in many ways this is just the start of deaths to come. We are all aging in a way that is much more noticeable now. And in the middle of it all is Charley, so young and oblivious, wondering, “Are you otay mama?”

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

By Sibyl Perhaps you read my column the other week about diving in to the creative life and were intrigued, but need an extra push of inspiration.  Or maybe you are already engaged in art-making pursuits of some kind, and could use some encouragement for your efforts.  Either way, read on for Sibyl’s picks for what to read offline to spark your creativity until you positively surge with it.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger For an entire decade, I read this book yearly, usually in a single sitting on a rainy evening, pacing around my apartment saying the words aloud to myself in a very low voice, or curled up in an ancient armchair with all the stuffing showing.

This book sees all your neuroses and lets you keep them.  The story and the characters wind their way around your fears about the selfishness of the creative life versus the selflessness of the religious life, and sews a protective cloak around them.  It reminds you that if nothing else, you need to do it for the Fat Lady.

Letters To a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke This slender missive was first given to me at the tender age of 19 by my favorite older cousin, who had just quit her life on one side of the country and travelled to the other on a wing and a prayer, following her creative whims.  It sometimes gets flack for being exclusionary (he makes the argument at one point that you are only an artist if you NEED to be, can do nothing else, which is obviously a bit dangerously black-and-white), but what I love about this book most is that it upholds difficulty.  Rilke asserts, again and again, that if you are finding adversity, you are doing it right.  He instructs the young art-maker to trust his sadnesses, seek out the important, serious struggles and try not to judge the outcomes.  Great advice for those days when you inevitably feel like if it’s too hard, you should just pack it in.

Wild Mind: Living The Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg Technically, this book is geared towards writers, and there are excellent writing prompts at the end of every chapter. However, there is tons of advice that is good for any artist seeking to find practical ways to loosen up and find the freedom to create.  Goldberg advocates for creating from instinct, and writes about all the ways we clog up our first impulses, with suggestions for how to remove those barriers to vibrant creation.  She also argues for committing to a specific arts practice rather than allowing yourself to get preoccupied with fifty different things.  Since I am a firm believer that commitment, even if you fail fully at it, always leads to depth, I love her application of this to the creative life.

The books that I have suggested in this column have one thing in common: they are all short.  The last thing you need is a huge engrossing tome that allows you to avoid creating.  Read, get inspired, then put the book down and make something! The more of yourself you put into it, the more uniquely powerful it will be.

Sometimes, visual imagery inspires like nothing else.  Therefore, here are three companion documentaries to go with this reading list:

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (2001) When I had a newborn, I watched endless documentaries about artists, yearning for the time when I would have a baby off my boob and be able to go back out into the world to create.  It was actually a lovely time of incubation and learning, and I discovered Rivers and Tides in that period.  I think I watched it over and over for an entire week, whenever my baby was feeding.

The pace of it is enchanting, as Goldsworthy is followed over a year of his work, which takes him all over the world creating ephemeral sculptures out of natural materials.  The most evocative piece for me was that the way Goldsworthy works makes him face failure on a daily basis.  This is something that is absolutely imperative for an artist: to become so familiar with failure that while it is devastating every time it happens, you learn to trust it, to use those mistakes for even greater works of artistry.

Who Does She Think She Is? (2008) Watching this documentary, which follows several female artists as they struggle to create in the midst of mothering, is an inspiring experience.  The personal stories are interspersed with astonishing facts about the lack of representation of women, and particularly mothers, in the art world.  Seeing these women have the courage to create when everyone said they were selfish, unrealistic, and irrelevant was incredibly empowering to me.  My favorite was a ridiculously talented sculptor who has FIVE children, and does her art-making during naps and after bedtime.  This documentary would really be interesting to anyone, not just mothers, because you'll find yourself saying, "If she can do it, with a baby on her hip, and one pulling on her leg, so can I!"

1991: The Year Punk Broke  (1992) In the summer of 1991 the seminal noise-rock band Sonic Youth invited filmmaker David Markey along on a two week summer festival tour of Europe, with their little-known opening band, Nirvana.  The result, a documentary that will rock your face off, was playing on repeat in my buddy Ben's basement for most of our teenage years.  To be fair, I have not re-watched this since about 1997, so I'm going on hormone-fueled memory here.

I'm a little afraid to re-visit it, actually, since doing so sent artist Andrew Kuo into such a tailspin that he was forced to ask, in graphic form, "Wait, did punk ruin my life?"  If it did, I don't want to know.  Maybe you weren't a baby punk in the 90's who swore she saw God when Sonic Youth's guitars sustained a single note of noise, creating a wall of discordant sounds around you for minutes at a time, but if you fancy my Sibyl columns I think that baby punk might live within you, without you even knowing it.  Watch this doc and let the manic expression and vibrant fury of these bands stir in you the desire to smash the world with your art.

Grief: Mapping Your Online Community

I learned the phrase “Community mapping” at age sixteen while volunteering in a small community in rural Paraguay. At the time, the notion of mapping the resources in a community seemed clear. Quickly drawn on a piece of paper---the community school, church, homes, the dirt roads connecting the dots, and the fields that spread in the spaces between houses. The stick-figure buildings my host family drew to mark the previously listed sites represented the physical locations of where community manifests. They leapt off the page as a visible sign of the strength and resources held within this community.  At sixteen, I transferred this model to my life in Colorado---my school, my home, my family’s cabin, and the places where I spent time with my friends.  My map made sense, I didn’t question my places of support and where my community came together. The intervening twelve years of moving and creating new communities---including online---threw a wrench in my map. It no longer fits on one page or within a single community. I access much of the pieces of different communities in online spaces, including gchats from friends who still inhabit past homes on other continents, Facebook messages from childhood friends, and following twitter feeds of friends-I-haven’t-actually-met, who share a common journey.

Grief and loss often throw the individual into an unknown emotional space, where the “community map” becomes increasingly important. It creates a sense of one’s resources and places of support; showing the individual the strength of their community(ies). For many, the communities of support blend between in-person, phone, and online communication.

Admittedly, the online space trends towards the more positive aspects of life, as Jenna Wortham notes in her article, Talking about Death Online, “This is more than trying to decide how carefully polished you want your online image to be. . . . It’s about the way social software is slyly engineered to get us to participate---we are encouraged to brag about our lives, and present ourselves as living our best lives each day and year.” Between updates about babies, engagements, jobs, and school---loss becomes just another post that slides by not really resonating.

Engaging with more difficult, heart-wrenching topics, such as grief and loss via social media opens the individual up to vulnerability. For many, loss creates moments of intense need to reach out to one’s community. The online platform is not necessarily designed for in depth sharing or support, as posts and tweets have character limits. The feeds stream by, not allowing the adequate time or ability to respond to a friend’s post. As Jena Wortham writes, “However, when it comes to talking about death and grief in a non-abstract way---that is, when dealing with the loss of a family member, a partner or close friend---it gets much, much trickier. It doesn’t have an appropriate reaction face, a photo that you can reblog, a hashtag.” I often wonder as I see friends hesitantly posting memories of their lost parent how our ability to comfort each other spills into this medium?  How much of our ability to empathize in person actively translates with each “like” we give to their posts?

As a firm believer in allowing each individual to chart their own path for grieving and healing, online spaces may become mechanisms for both. In my own process, I try to push the boundaries of what feels comfortable to share on Facebook, twitter, etc. I don’t shy away from posting pictures of my father, marking what would-have-been his sixtieth birthday, the sixth year since his death, or my travels to places he would have loved. However, the accompanying text is often positive, such as “missing your adventures” rather than engaging with the harder, empty feelings of loss. While I can’t express my “full self” in this online space, I trend towards sharing what I can with this online world. As my community is spread throughout many places, online becomes the place that I receive (and provide) support from so many communities at once. Online, I am reminded of the people beyond the Facebook photos who love and care about me---through likes, comments, and quick emails after they see the post.

Beyond our individual experiences with grief and healing---Facebook has become a community in itself, creating a way to memorialize those who have died. Two of my “current” Facebook friends are people who have passed away. Their profiles remain places where friends and family leave notes---sharing life updates, memories, or simply typing “I miss you.” In a world where visiting gravesites may not be practical, the online memorial space may bring us closer together.  In her blog post, Online Mourning and The Unexpected Refuge of Facebook, Cheri Lucas (another Equals Record writer) discusses her experience with a friend’s death;

“A few hours after receiving the news, I wrote something and shared it as a Facebook note. I posted scanned photos from college—precious moments of youth, debauchery, and experiences I had never shared publicly—from nearly 15 years ago: onto his profile, our friends’ profiles, and my timeline. I sat in front of my computer, clicking on photos people tagged of him: images that conjured memories, that stunned and confused me, that made me feel grateful for knowing him, that devastated me because I realized I didn’t know the man he had become.

Alone, I sobbed. Yet I sobbed with Facebook open—his life revealed and exposed in bits on my screen, his friends spilling tears on his profile. I sobbed at home, by myself, but also with everyone else. I had never given in to the community of Facebook until that moment. For the first time, its communal space had comforted me.”

The possibilities of online spaces to bring us together are endless, we can share memories of those who have died, sharing our own healing processes, and of course, share our joys. Yet, as Wortham also notes, we don’t yet know the outcomes of creating online communities that don’t support the whole breadth of human emotions. However, we should trend towards sharing our authentic selves, our whole journeys---and in return, we should support others who do just that---comment on posts people share about those they have lost, about their difficult moments---engaging with the full spectrum of emotions, will only make the blissful moments stronger.

Much of my community is online, thus my grieving and healing cannot be completely separate. However, as with all pieces of grieving, this is personal---and we will each have to carve out how we interact with our online spaces. Yet, striving to make these spaces open to deeper human interaction, will only bring us closer to each other, and as a community---closer to healing.

Just Somebody That I Used To Know

Dear Sibyl, One of my best friends who I have known since kindergarten is slipping away from me.  I'm in my mid-30s and we've have a pretty distant relationship for at least the past 10 years.  I see her several times a year and love her very much.  We have so much past behind us and obviously care about each other but it seems that she puts no effort to be my friend.  When I reach out to her by phone or email, she does not respond.  And when we see each other in person I feel like she doesn't seem that pumped to be with me.  

We both have kids now and I thought that this would bring us closer.  Both of our dads died in the same month and still we can't seem to find a way to communicate like best friends.  It's strange and sad for me.  I don't feel that there is a way of talking about this with her.  It just doesn't really work to ask someone if they don't like you anymore.  

I want her to be a close friend but I don't know how to do it, our friendship seems so empty and what feels like one-sided.  I am certain that we will always know each other since we are basically family.  I think we have a lot less in common now than we did when we were kids but I still love her very much.  What can I do to make it less awkward and more friendly?

Sincerely,

Long Lost Best Friend

Dear LLBF,

When my teenage best friend slept with my first love boyfriend, I not only forgave her, I put her in my wedding as a bridesmaid seven years later.  At the time, I thought I was being so very magnanimous, but now, seeing how that friendship fizzled out over the years as I struggled to keep the connection with letters, emails, and phone calls that went basically unanswered, I think I had a lot to learn about boundaries and letting go.

For so long, I considered myself a pitbull in relationships---intimidating at first, but once you got in, I'd hang on by my eye teeth forever.  I believed that that was what it meant to love someone---to hold on no matter what happened, but over time I found that what I had sunk my teeth into was simply a hungry ghost.  She floated away from me, and in her wake I found that she was actually a pretty terrible friend.  I had been afraid of letting go of our intimacy because I feared I'd lose a part of myself in the process.  What I realized is that I'd always be the young girl who loved her, trusted her, forgave her, and kept reaching for her, but she had moved on, and I needed to as well.

Luckily, as an adult I have worked hard to create a few incredibly honest friendships, the kind where if we have a phone conversation and the other person seems distant one of us calls back pretty soon after to say "That was so weird.  What is really going on?  I think it's me, I'm in a strange place today.  Sorry I made fun of your boyfriend's hair.  He's Sassoon fabulous."

The juxtaposition of these two friendships, one in which I was striving to make something work even though all I was getting was indifference at best and poor treatment at worst, and the others, in which we are so concerned with keeping short accounts with each other that we go the extra mile to check in about the smallest bit of disengagement growing between us, is what I keep thinking about with your question, Long Lost Best Friend.  What you have found yourself in, all these years later, is a non-reciprocal relationship, in which you are doing all the pursuing, and she is distancing as fast as her legs will take her.

The simple fact that you don’t feel like you can share that you feel disconnected from her is a huge red flag to me.  In order to find the friendliness you seek, you actually have to dive further into the awkwardness.  What have you got to lose?  At this point, you don’t have a real friendship, and it’s leaving you with grief and, I imagine, a growing resentment of some kind.  So, my suggestion is that you plan a date with her, sans kids, to sit down and say, “I’ve noticed we’re growing apart, and it’s sad to me.  Do you think it is just an inevitable part of growing up, or has something gone wrong?  I’d really like to work on this with you.  Either way, you are always in my heart and will be in my life.  But I’d like us to be close like we used to be, when we’d be so excited to talk to one another that we could barely wait for the next chance.  Have you felt this too?”

Hopefully, she’ll say, “Yes!  I’m so glad you brought this up.  It pains me too.  How can we make it better?”  And you’ll have a chance to ask her to respond to your emails and phone calls more frequently.  Or, she’ll tell you what she’s been holding on to, some place that the relationship broke down, and the two of you can work it out.

However, she may claim that she doesn’t know what you’re talking about.  This is the time that you stand firm in your reality, and say, “Well, I miss you.  I’d love it if you called more often.  If you can’t do that, I understand, but we’ll lose a connection that we’ve forged over many years, and I’ll be grieving that loss.”  She’ll think you’re brave for stating your truth, and will be flattered that you hold her so highly.  Then you can relegate her to someone who walked alongside you for awhile, hand in hand, but is now on an adjoining path, still moving in the same direction, but with distance between you.  It could free you up to form a closeness with a new best friend, who has the capacity to give you the intimate friendship you crave.

With Love,

Sibyl

Let go of time.

It’s official---we have a legitimate walker in our house.  Our 1-year-old is suddenly, out-of-thin-air toddling around like the tiniest Charlie Chaplin.  She has that hilarious stance: butt jutted out, feet duck-splayed and little arms curled up by her sides.  Sometimes she flaps them just for good measure, as if flying might be next on her list.  Her forward motion is augmented with a side-to-side wobble that threatens to send her scooting to the floor in either direction. I so desperately want to fashion a miniature bowler, cane and moustache and perpetrate it on her.  Occasionally, she revs up the engines a little too high, which can result in face-planting that ranges from controlled to . . . less so. Watching this process, I can feel the anxiety welling to the surface.  I have visions of gluing packing peanuts all over her entire person.  After all, I didn’t spend ten months eating algae-based DHA and another twelve torturing my breasts (THEY USED TO BE AMAZING.  AMAZING.) so that she could crack open her fragile melon with one ambitious step over the dog.  Incidentally, she has negotiated some kind of détente with the Ruby thus far, which seems to involve using her for a taxi, a way station, a pillow, a jungle gym---you name it---in exchange for the dog gaining unfettered access to her head, hands and feet for incessant licking.  It is, all at once, achingly adorable and also disgusting.  But here we are one year into her life and she has six teeth, can eat an entire avocado in one sitting, has finely honed comedic timing and ambulates.

I have spent a good portion of the past three years worrying.  I worried I wouldn’t get pregnant.  I worried she wouldn’t be healthy.  I worried she wouldn’t develop appropriately.  I worried she wasn’t getting enough milk.  I worried I was working too much or too little or some combination of both.  These days I worry she is growing at lightning speed and I am not appropriately savoring every moment.  Having said all that, I would like to take this opportunity, at the start of a new year, this second year of my daughter’s life to stop worrying so much.

Today I was driving through Brooklyn, rushing from working in one location to another.  As is typical, I was contemplating about 1400 tasks and projects while simultaneously replaying Isadora, elated, walking across our living room in my mind.  In this particular scene, she scurried toward the front door, plopped down on her tush and hastily gave herself an enthusiastic round of applause.  This memory prompted an audible laugh.  But my next thought carried the sheen of sadness, “It’s all going by so quickly.”  At that moment, the light turned green, and I noticed the side of the building next to me as I passed.  In large, block letters, someone had stenciled onto the brick, “LET GO OF TIME.”

In 2013, I intend to release my tight clutch on each moment with my daughter while not wasting any more of them at sea with concerns.  This is what parents do.  I am not terribly unique in this.  We claw after the days that slip away and busy ourselves with anxiety over things we can’t control.  But perhaps if I keep reminding myself to loosen the grip now, at the beginning of all her beginnings, I can open up space for even more delighting.

More or Less Like Family, Part I

By Molly Bradley The village Mouit was like living on a beach without the water: just a vast expanse of shore with buildings spattered here and there on the sand, with no logic to it.

We were there for a brief stay to explore another part of Senegal. The group of students I was traveling with would reunite in the nearby town of Saint Louis at the end of the week, but for now, we were scattered in separate families in the village of Mouit. We’d left our host families in Dakar to be hosted yet again: a home away from home away from home. Instead of feeling further removed, it all started to feel pretty much the same. Family became a very relative term.

Aside from my parents, I grew up with just one sibling (and, only later, a dog). My family is by no means quiet, but it’s not large. Four people can only be so rambunctious.

Unexpectedly, the family that adopted me in Dakar was even slimmer. I called my homestay parents Aunt and Uncle, Tata et Tonton, because my ‘sibling’---twelve-year-old Malik---was their nephew. It felt more or less like family.

So it was alarming when approximately nine and a half flailing sets of limbs accosted me as soon as I walked in the gate of my Mouit homestay family. Nine of them were chattering children, spanning roughly seven through twelve years old. The half-set of limbs only constituted half a set because it belonged to a baby carried by one of the girls, and the baby didn’t quite have control of all her components. Her eyes stuck to me that whole first night.

They dragged me to meet my homestay parents. Neither spoke French, but both were all easy smiles and steady nods. The village was Wolof, but my language still wasn’t up to native speed. I tried to gesture a Hello, Thank you for having me, I’m very grateful, but fell upon no convenient mimes for those words, save a wave for the Hello. We stood smiling a few moments, motionless. Then my father left the fenced complex. As chief of the village, he presumably had better things to do. My mother smiled, shrugged and shuffled off.

Good to be home.

The complex was made up of a few small rooms, each a separate low boxy building. My siblings indicated my room, where I could put down my bags.

“This is Binta’s room,” said one of the girls, in French. Only the girls had accompanied me into the room. They were all watching me.

“Her room,” another girl said, pointing.

Another person had materialized. This girl was older: it was in her height; the way she held her face; her body. This fifteen-year-old (I asked her age later) was more womanly than I would probably ever be, judging by my own body at twenty years of age.

Binta watched me with a slightly curved mouth. Either that was her neutral face or she was smiling just a little, watching the adopted tubaab try to clumsily inhabit her bedroom. Binta commanded the space. I felt flustered by it.

“Thank you,” I said to her. “C’est vraiment gentil.” That’s really nice of you.

She just curved her lips and walked out.

 ***

I spent the evening with more siblings than I could count in what functioned as the family room. It was where the kids spent all of their time when they weren’t in school or doing chores. This was because it had a TV. Mouit was a unique village in that regard: it was typical of rural Senegalese villages in most ways except for the fact that it had electricity. Like most places in the world, the TV sapped not only electrical but human energy. It had most of us hooked most of the time. There was no end to the soccer and the Senegalese soap operas.

I finagled some conversation out of a few people. For the most part, any questions I asked were met by a rush of eager voices that I didn’t have time to distinguish before they fell abruptly silent again.

There were a few older teenagers, mostly boys, already in the room when I came in with the younger kids. They occupied the mats to the right of the television, backs against the wall, alternately watching the screen and flipping open their cell phones. Every now and then, when they got their phones out, a few of the younger ones would look over with obvious envy.

Toward nine in the evening, a man walked in. He looked relatively young. He stood in the doorway awhile, watching the screen. No one glanced his way. I was at the very edge and toward the back of the mat where all the kids crowded. Eventually he sat between the door and me, his back against the wall, on the concrete floor.

Given how close his face was to mine in the dark, it seemed odd not to acknowledge it. I turned to him and said hello in French and asked his name.

His mouth moved, and he let his breath play in and out of his lips before he said, “I’m Mamadou. I don’t speak French.”

Was that English? It was definitely English.

“I’m from the Gambia,” he added.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m from---well, I’m American. But my family lives in France. I grew up there.”

“America, France,” he repeated. “It must be beautiful.”

He asked me my name.

“Mama,” I said with a wry smile. “They named me after the other Mama.”

“Oh, yes, the baby,” he said. Host families commonly named their tubaabs---white people, or foreigners---after an existing family member. Ordinarily this family member was one older than the tubaab, which made chronological sense---you name someone new after someone who’s been around longer, right? I, however, had been named after the baby, who was still staring at me in the dark.

“But, no,” Mamadou said, “I mean your American name.”

That was a first. We’d become accustomed to giving out our “Obama names” whenever anyone cared enough to ask. Obama delighted people here. It was the most recent great thing about America today, amid all the other great things, thought most Senegalese. Obama was now synonymous with America.

“I’m Molly.”

“Molly,” he repeated. “Molly.”

He was silent awhile, but in the glow of the TV I could see his lips still moving, playing with the name. Even though English is the official language of the Gambia, the names are mostly the same as those in Senegal. After all, it’s just a little crumb trapped in Senegal’s big gullet. It sits there small and quiet, almost blending in.

 ***

He was from the Gambia and he was making his way upward, traveling steadily toward the top of Africa. He’d left his family three, four years ago, he said; what was left of his family, anyway. It sounded sinister when he first said it, but he clarified that several of his brothers had already left to do what he was doing now: working to make a little money to send back to their family, and a little money to get themselves somewhere else.

Mamadou wanted to go to Europe. Or America.

“England. I think England is nice,” he said. “Maybe I will go there, then America. Or maybe France, but I don’t think I will like France so much as England, or America.”

“Why?”

“I was told it’s very like Senegal,” he said.

He kept saying that he just had to get to Europe, and then he’d list the places he would go: Germany, maybe; England; America. . .

I began to suspect he may have thought they were all next door. I had neither the opportunity nor the heart to correct him. A few times I said, “Well, America’s really far from England, so. . .” He only paused, said “I see, alright,” nodded a little, and went on.

I noticed that a few of my siblings were glancing over at us from time to time. Not really when Mamadou spoke, since a lot of the time he spoke it was to no one, commenting on a character in the soap, or to wish---somewhat rhetorically, since he said it so softly and was paid no heed---that the television were tuned to a different channel. But when I replied, a few bright eyes in the dark flitted our way, then briefly about the room as though to see if anyone else had heard, then back to the TV. No one but the two of us, though, said a word.

We talked intermittently through the few hours we sat there in the family room. My host family was hosting him, too, for four months while he worked in the onion fields owned by my host father. There were a lot of fields, he said. My father, the chief, owned several. Mamadou worked and watered them from five in the morning until about five in the evening. Then he came home for dinner and a night’s good rest. I went to bed around the same time he did---nine-thirty, ten---while the rest of the family sat up later. It was a little embarrassing that, at the end of a day during which I had not exerted myself at all, I had no more stamina than a man who’d worked twelve hours carrying heavy buckets of water in the hot sun. I decided it was mental fatigue, the Wolof and all. Yeah. I had to believe I was doing some pretty challenging stuff in Senegal.

Looking Forward: Solitude.

I landed on the North Island of New Zealand in November 2008. I was alone, except for a mammoth North Face backpack, stuffed to capacity with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap and two dozen chocolate-chip Clif Bars. I planned to spend the next four weeks by myself, farm-hopping, if you will, as a participant in an organization called WWOOF (“Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms”).

For seven nights, I slept in a trailer on the lawn of a couple in their sixties, who sold produce at local farmers’ markets and ate only raw food. Bedtime came early at this particular household, and I spent hours each night reading by flashlight in my bunk, a hot water bottle nestled at my feet. I felt fragile---emotionally, because the quiet made me nervous, and physically, because I was too unsettled in my new surroundings to stomach the mountains of raw vegetables that were served for dinner each evening.

The next ten days were spent on a small family farm so implausibly lush, I was certain I’d found Tolkien’s Shire. There, I met Jo, a single mother who---on a daily basis---baked bread, practiced yoga, milked goats, trimmed roses, tended an unwieldy flock of chickens, and kept a vegetable garden. She taught me to make pavlova and strawberry jam, clean chicken coops, care for the animals. And at the end of each day, I retired to a cozy cabin in the backyard. I was alone, but exhausted. My body ached in a way that felt satisfying, even pleasurable. I slept soundly.

I ended my trip on Great Barrier Island, where I washed dishes at a local fishing lodge in exchange for a bed and free meals, many of which happened to include lobster. The people there were patient, generous, relaxed. The fishermen---who wore rain slickers and thick white beards, just as I expected fishermen would---took me to sea and taught me to properly cast a line, never batting an eye when I ultimately chose to eat gingersnaps on the boat’s deck rather than participate in the unsavory task of gutting the day’s catch.

One morning before I left, the lodge owners allowed me to take their station wagon to the beach (a terrifying experience, as I’d had no prior experience driving on the left-hand side of the road). When I finally arrived, nauseous and a little shaky, I found the sands deserted, with not a single other beachgoer in sight. And so I spent that afternoon alone, with a book and a sandwich and a sweater to guard against the wind.

I might, at one time, have found this solitude frightening. But on that day I felt adventurous. Like a daring traveler. A wanderer. A pioneer.

Today, as a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time alone. Depending on my mood and the rhythm of the day, I find this both liberating and lonesome---there are times when I can’t stand the quiet; there are others when it’s nothing short of sublime.

Solitude, I’ve found, is its own kind of wilderness. Becoming familiar with the terrain requires a certain amount of exploration, and a bravery I can’t always find.

But what a pleasure it can be to surrender sometimes---to wander, to get lost, to accept the challenge.

XIX. Savoie

When I go to the Chambéry train station to pick up Clémence for her weeklong visit, I have a panicked moment where I think I won’t recognize her. We were practically kids when we were together before, strangely privy to witnessing each other’s lives for a handful of weeks that summer. We’re still in that part of life where six months can turn you into a completely different person. Who knows if we’ll still know each other after two and a half years?

This is what I’m thinking about, shivering in my red coat on the platform as the snow falls on my shoulders. I keep peering down the tracks, first left and then right, not knowing which direction her train is coming from. I tell myself that in these last couple months alone in Chambéry I’ve just become unaccustomed to having friends around---that’s why I’m nervous. But still.

Each time that Clémence and I see each other, one of us is always speaking in a language that we don’t entirely understand, fumbling through unfamiliar verb conjugations and fast-spoken idioms. One of us is the leader, and the other is the follower. The follower must do and say as the leader does and says. Since that first time that she spent a month with me in Ohio, Clémence has not been back to the U.S. We are always in her country and her language. And for that, I constantly feel like a child around her, stumbling along in her footsteps.

But the second she steps off the train, I spot her strawberry blond hair and her funny white eyebrow that changed color after she went to college. We catch each other’s eyes and beam.

In that moment I remember that even though we don’t actually know that much about each other, we love each other in a way that feels unconditional. I rush toward her and she rushes toward me and we collide in a hug like in a scene from a movie.

T’es voilà! I say, tears streaming down both our faces. You’re finally here.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Samantha Shorey is an essay writer and film photo taker from Portland, Oregon. She recently moved to a small New England town to get her masters studying communication and culture at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research focuses on the way people create authentic identities online.  Samantha's blog Ashore looks at everyday life through metaphors and a camera lens, mostly in close-up. She believes photos should look more like memories and in Motown records on Sunday mornings. Even though I love (I mean, really love) browsing bookstores, back-cover paragraphs just don’t work for me. They’re all plot synopsis, and no “this book made me realize that love is the bravest choice!” or “this book made me ugly cry on public transportation.”

So, I asked my friends Laura and Meg for a recommendation over coffee at Stumptown in New York. Both of them are heart-stirring writers, and they’re my go-to girls for books that make me feel.

After our chat and a little iPhone voice-memo magic, here are five books to make you feel hopeful, encouraged, understood, inspired, and interested---respectively.

Recommended by Laura Marie Meyers | Little Things and Curiosities

Love Walked In by Marisa De Los Santos When people ask me for book recommendations (which happens a lot because I’m a full time writer!) my number one choice is Love Walked In. I’m a sucker for characters that stay with you long after you’ve finished the book---as if you might actually run into them somewhere. With names like Cornelia and Teo, they were so unlike anyone I’ve ever known that I wanted to find pieces of them in people around me. This book follows so many different types of love that you’re not really sure which is the most important---whether it’s the love of a child, or the love of a family member, or the love of a lover. It’s about every type of love.

And really, I’m a sucker for the title. I love the ide of love walking in---as if it was somewhere else and then stepped through the door. Like Love was out doing it’s own thing and it wanted to drop in on you one day. Love walked in? “Oh! Hey, Love! It’s been a while, fancy seeing you here!”

Recommended by Meg Fee | The Wild and Wily Ways of a Brunette Bombshell

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed Dear Sugar is a collection of advice columns written by Cheryl Strayed, previously written under the pseudonym “Sugar”. Advice columns are usually all about the person asking for advice and not the person giving it. But, she totally turned the thing on its head and decided to talk from her own personal experience.

I think this book is so great because every time you think you know the advice she is going to give---it isn’t. Her advice just calls attention to what the person is actually telling her. They already know the answer. She tells people that they have to be guided by their truest truth, and that is an immovable thing.

Two of my favorite pieces of advice from her are: “every last one of us can do better than give up” and “we have to reach in the direction of the life we want.” I think about that last one a lot. Real change is happening on the level of the gesture. It’s one person creating a tiny revolution in their own life.

Recommended by Samantha Shorey | Ashore

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six.” If you’re that type of person---and I definitely am---then High Fidelity is a book for you. Rob, an English record storeowner, narrates the story in the days after his live-in girlfriend moves out of their apartment. Hornby’s writing is funny, full of emotion, and punctuated by music references and “top 5” lists.  I’d like almost any book about heartbreak, but this one especially captures the messiness and uncertainty of this in-between age---the unquietable desire to love and be loved, but the fear of being tied down. In times of happiness and in times of sadness the question is the same: is this all there is? or will something better come along?

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck Walkable City is the perfect book for cocktail party conversations with the hip and urban. After reading it, I’ve started quite a few sentences with “did you know _____?”. (Did you know that additional highway lanes often make congestion worse because of “induced demand”?). Being from Portland, Oregon, I have first-hand experience with a lot of the things that Speck says make a city walkable---and ultimately, wonderful. His argument is so compelling because it has less to do with buying into “being green” and more to do with the tangible things that make life better. Cities have corner coffee shops, chance encounters on the sidewalks, easy errands, and less time spent in traffic. All of these are the reasons why cities like mine and San Francisco, Chicago, New York and even Charleston are attracting disproportionate numbers of the bright and creative.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion I’m pretty sure Joan Didion is my spirit animal! Slouching Toward Bethlehem is a collection of her essays about California and the counter-culture movement, written in the style of “New Journalism”. It isn’t removed third-person newspaper writing---her sentences have such extraordinary presence and clarity. She’s inspiring to me as a researcher too, because she’s acutely interested in the way people live their every day lives.

One of the personal essays in this book, On Self Respect, is the most important piece of non-fiction I’ve ever read. In it she writes “People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.” Without it “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out . . . their false notion of us.” As a people-pleaser, it’s a bit of tough love that I’ve always needed.

On finishing what you've started

I started thinking about resolutions early in December, and I finally settled on something specific just in time for the New Year. I knew I wanted to dig deeper and put down roots. I wanted to focus on paying attention and following things through. I had a sense of what my intentions would be for 2013, but I knew I needed something a little more tangible to measure my progress and keep myself on track. Our little dining area is crammed with shelves and shelves of books, a combination of the two libraries and reading histories we brought into our relationship. Over the course of a meal, it’s not unlikely that we’ll pull out one or two, a bilingual dictionary or a novel or a theoretical tome, and mull over its past or flip to a familiar passage. I love our little library, but I’m always aware that it’s laced with a funny little secret.

The truth is, there aren’t so many books on those shelves that I’ve actually finished. Sure, I’ve read zillions and zillions of pages, if you consider them all together, but finishing one whole book is another thing entirely. If you pull out any of the books that are my own, you’re likely to find a bookmark stuck halfway through, or a worn first few chapters followed by crisp, untouched pages through the end. In some cases, I even stopped just a few pages before the end.

It’s not that didn’t love those unfinished books—in fact, I’ve claimed many of them as my favorites. Mostly I’ve just been drowning in reading assignments for the past few years and never felt like I could give my full attention to one whole book before sailing into the next. And maybe, in some cases, I liked those books so much that I didn’t want them to end.

Whatever the reasons may be, those unfinished pages are calling to me, especially now that I’ve got a little more time to attend to them lovingly, rather than whizzing through their pages in a race to some imaginary finish line. I think I set each book aside with a pang of guilt, but also with a glimmer of hope that I’d come back to it sometime in the future and finally do it justice.

A change in my reading habits is just one small example of the attention and depth I hope to cultivate this year, but I think it’s a good place to start. I’ve left plenty of loose ends dangling over the past few years, and I think it’ll feel just right to return to those characters and stories and ideas, one by one, and find out how things turned out.

How to See in the Dark

Sibyl, In the past few months, my family has suffered two major tragedies, and a few minor ones.  Now every time my husband leaves the house and doesn't answer his cell phone I think he's dead.  Most of me knows this is irrational, but until he gets home or contacts me, I'm a bit of a mess.  I can't afford the $170/hr to see a shrink, but sometimes I don't know how I'll move through the world without feeling at any moment someone I love could die or be hurt.  How can I move past this?

Sincerely,

Irrational

Dearest Irrational,

I have good news and bad news.  Since I know it would calm your anxiety to get it out of the way, let's start with the bad news.

You are not going to get past this.  It is going to become part of who you are.  These traumas, whatever they are, are changing and shaping you.  Who you become in the face of them is up to you.

We'll get to that.  Before you can worry about who you're going to be, you have to survive these first traumatized months.  First of all, explain to your husband that for right now, you need him to answer the phone every time you call.  He doesn't have to talk, he can answer with a text that just says "I'm here".  But for right now, that is what you need -- to know that he is alive.

It is perfectly okay to be Irrational right now, when life makes so little sense.  It’s okay to be a mess.  It’s okay to put your hands on his face every time he returns to you, and say, “I thought I lost you.  You’re back.  We’re home.”

If he really objects to this imposition, put a time limit on it, "I just need this for the next 2-4 weeks.  Then we can reassess."  Trauma is a huge relationship litmus test, so if he can be there for you in this, you will only get closer.

Now for some good news: you don’t have to go it alone.   Of course you can't afford $170/hour for a therapist.  Who can?  That fee is absurd.  I don't know where you live, but I bet there's a clinic or a graduate school nearby that has therapy interns that could see you for as little as $25/session.  If you live in California, and any of your recent tragedies are from violent crimes, you can get therapy through a program called Victims of Crime.

So, with a little bit of research about clinics, schools, and resources in your area, you can see a therapist that you can afford to help you through this time.  You'll have to go through this dark period of your life no matter what, but you shouldn't have to go through it without a guide.  Therapists are trained to walk alongside folks who have experienced tragedies while holding the lantern to help them see the way.

So, with your supports in place, you'll be able to dive in to the crux of the matter.  These recent tragedies have pulled the veil off of your life and you are seeing humans for what we really are: ephemeral.  Our lives, no matter how bright and beautiful, will one day pass away.  It is a horrible panic attack-inducing truth.  But it is also what makes our lives have a sense of urgency, what propels us to ever do anything of consequence, what gives us something worth fighting for.

When my beloved father died, I spent a grief-stricken winter laying face up on my bed, immobile, staring at the one lonely snowflake I had hung from my ceiling, reciting my favorite poems and feeling the chill of a world in which my anchor had been pulled up.  I was adrift.  And terrified.

So, when it came time to register for classes at my university, I signed up for an intense course in Death and Dying, in which we read 12 books about death; theological, philosophical, and personal texts.  The professor's father was dying as he taught the class.  He and I spent several afternoons in his office, laughing at the absurdity of death and sitting in silence at the horror of it.  It was insane to immerse myself so fully in my grief, but I had a therapist I trusted and my fiancee by my side, so I dove in.  I needed to make sense of the world before I could commit myself fully to living in it.

Perhaps you are not about to take such an undeniably intellectual pursuit.  However, do something to make sense of your world, or you will find yourself trying to control it in odd ways.  Pulling out bits of your hair and lining them up in straight rows, restricting certain foods to cheat death's knocking, calling your loved ones obsessively -- I've been there, I know this behavior.  But how you face these tragedies will direct a good portion of your life.  Don't judge yourself for however you experience grief, but strive to get the better of it.  Just the fact that you wrote in to this column shows you are ready to face these fears.

Finally, do something that makes you feel really alive.  Take up boxing, write a poem every day, hike the hills behind your house, sing at a monthly open mic night.  Whatever it is, choose something that brings you close to the core of life, but does not throw you over.  Grind your feet into the earth, finding your shoring beneath you.

Remind yourself why you want to remain a citizen of this world.  Give yourself visceral experiences of the beauty of this life, despite the pain we inevitably incur.  Love so fiercely that death has no lasting sting, just a dull ache that reminds you that what you’ve lost lives on in you, propelling you to further bravery in loving.

Love,

Sibyl

Reflecting on milestones: 2012

This column first appeared on Stories of Conflict and Love earlier this week. I have always been attached to the process of documentation and the rituals of recording memories. Different notebooks have held disparate thoughts across eras of my life, with their pages threading together class notes on violent conflict in Africa to poetry to to-do lists to workshop outlines to endless nights of worry. For the past four years, I have lived out of a suitcase, shedding belongings and an attachment to 'stuff' and hoarding memories instead. The notebooks have been the only possessions of mine that have traveled everywhere, truly everywhere, stretching suitcases till they bloat. And even though they now sit neatly on a shelf in Boston, there was no arrangement or system to how they were organized. The only rule was that every page had to be filled before a new notebook was commissioned to be my wandering companion.

January 16, 2012 was the beginning of a new notebook, for no reason other than its predecessor running out of pages. On that day, I copied down Mary Anne Radmacher's poem, "Living Eulogy:"

Under that, inspired by Katie, I started making a list. Every year, Katie tracks goals she'd like to meet before her next birthday. Page 1 of this new notebook mirrored that format and, below Radmacher's poem, I started outlining my own hopes for 2012.

Some were laughably simple, almost thrown in there the way you write "laundry" or "grocery shopping" onto a to-do list: for the painless joy of crossing those items off. #12 on my list was "throw a party." There had been plenty of parties in my nomadic life. There was the table dancing in Guatemala---ceaseless dancing on tables, it seemed. There were the nights in Cairo when we all gathered in that penthouse apartment and sang our lungs out to Queen. I remember the night Elijah walked me to Tahrir to hail a taxi and I could still hear Bohemian Rhapsody in the background. But then the moving, the ceaseless moving, took its toll and the parties were mostly farewell parties, for me and for others. #12 on the list was not (just) about buying Solo cups and cheap wine. It was about being embedded in a community long enough, feeling its grounding enough, to host snippets of it in my home "just because." Not because anyone was leaving, not because it was a birthday. Because it was community.

And there were parties. #12: done.

#15: Take a night photograph I am proud of. You see, this one correlated to #25: Learn to shoot my camera on manual. I "knew" how to use my camera on manual. I taught photography workshops for crying out loud. But it always felt a little foreign. The photos always felt nicer on 'automatic'---as though anything nice in life ever came out of automatic. The night photos, in particular, always felt shaky. All of me felt shaky at times this year. Shooting the camera on manual, dragging it along and having the weight of its strap tug on my shoulder at night, was a challenge not because of its mechanics, but because of my own wobbliness. And then Milos happened. Greece and I have the kind of relationship that melts anxiety, such that this photo can be taken, such that elbows can sit steady and skirted legs can plant themselves firmly on salty ground and hair can billow in the wind and I can hold my breath long enough to defeat the blurriness.

#15: Take a night photograph I am proud of. Done. It is not a particularly original image. Add a cat into it, a skewer of souvlaki, and some cheesy reference to "Greece is for lovers", and it's a generic postcard. But it is clear, unshaken, and taken by me, and that makes it a cherished first. Done.

Then there were the trickier dreams. #21: Create a home. This is not a to-do item of the "laundry" and "grocery shopping" variety; it is not the kind of goal one can fulfill by focusing hard enough or trying harder or by finding the perfect rock on a Greek island onto which to perch her elbows to take a not-blurry night photograph. The irony behind this wish is that I did not expect it to be fulfilled until the fall came, and the suitcases were unpacked and put away, and I lived in Boston with the ability to firmly derive my identity from being a graduate student. Jerusalem snuck up on me. It insisted on not being ephemeral. It demanded lasting love. It required commitment: the purchase of the space heater, the unavoidable conversations with everyone on the street from the baker to the laundromat operator. The evaporation of any desire to avoid conversation. I did not think 2012 would hold two homes, but it did. Some would argue that the very existence of multiple homes speaks to the lack of a solid, meaningful one---but, in this case, I'll take the polyamory.

I cannot pronounce #21 done; no home is ever 'done', the process of making one is never complete---let alone the process of creating and sustaining multiple homes in one's heart. But #21 is the kind of item I would never like to cross off a list and pronounce 'done' in the first place. I simply wanted to know it was possible.

Some of the items on my 2012 wishlist stand unfulfilled, but I am determined to give them another try. See #14: Keep an ideas notebook. I have a noisy brain, the kind that I am trying to make peace with, rather than silence. Particularly in moments of euphoria, ideas zoom through it and most of them remain uncaptured, evading me in the moments of calm when I try to revisit them. When Kim sent me a notebook with "Ideas" scribbled on its cover in February, it seemed like the perfect moment to slow down and start jotting down the thoughts born out of elation or enthusiasm before they become too fleeting to ground. The pages of that notebook are still blank. I still want to try in 2013, because I want the mornings after ideas to be just as alive and enlivening. #14: not done, decidedly not done. But still salient enough, necessary enough to stay on the wish list for another year.

Then there were the wishes that remained unfulfilled, but I am willing to let them stand as such. They either became less relevant as the year passed or I grew readier to live without them. I never entered a contest (#7) with my writing or photography in 2012, nor did I send 12 handwritten letters (#25). I wrote new columns in 2012, including this one, and I published photo-essays, but I never quite went through with clicking submit and having my work evaluated by a panel of seriousness. I penned endless cards and thank you notes and Christmas wishes and Congratulations on your marriage, but 12 handwritten letters never quite happened. I could dissect why that was, I could investigate the desire behind those items in the first place, but they do not burn brightly enough any more to necessitate that. As such, #7 and #25: unchecked, peacefully so.

Unlike those items, there were those at which I failed abjectly, and disappointingly. #1: Worry less. In my final Gypsy Girls Guide column, on January 3, 2012, a mere day after my birthday, I wrote that I wanted 2012 to be the "year of the exhale." I knew then, as I know now, that a human being cannot go on worrying at the level and meticulousness that I do. I was aware that it was time to let go of some of the anxiety, of the post-traumatic stress, of the grief, of the intensity of conflict zones, of the emotional minefield of work that I did not know (or want) to do unemotionally. I wrote then:

It is not journeys I long for this year. It is not novelty or fireworks I crave, though I welcome all of this into my life and am open to it if it comes. In 2012, I am willing a quiet mind. In 2012, I want to banish Ray LaMontagne for Damien Rice and his belief that I can “look into my eyes and see that noone will harm me.” Some former smokers say that months after quitting smoking, an exhale comes and they breathe deeply, making it all worth it. In 2012, I am living for the exhale.

2012 endowed me with journeys, novelty, fireworks---and some exhales, too. But I was naive to think that those would come without more moments that cut an inhale short, trigger a gasp, or make me hold my breath till I turn blue in the face. Exhaling was beautiful and needed, but if I am to keep writing, and reflecting, and living with intention---as Mary Anne Radmacher would have it---then I need to learn not only to wish for the exhale, but also to master creating it myself and living patiently with the moments that render it elusive. I failed at worrying less this year. In the scheme of life, this is a more costly failure than having failed at other items on the wish list. I am slowly realizing that in my life, item #1 from year to year will continue to be Worry Less, until it, too, is rendered unnecessary. Until this wish has been scratched off the list, edged off by other priorities, sufficiently conquered, or---perhaps more realistically---until I make peace.