As summer motions for autumn, I adopt patience into my practice. The seasons don’t turn overnight; they ease into the next. My dilatory response to recent activity has rendered me a curious desire and bold attempt to sit with things. I don’t enjoy things as they are; I wait for the next best thing I fool myself into believing. Right now, my son has plagued the silence per usual but this time by plugging in two Alexas in the same room, side x side, and telling both of them to count to 500. As Alexa counts, I draw up my thoughts.
I am disconnected from the world of fiction wondering if I’m finally closing the flap of my own book. Drawing up characters, building dialogue, and structuring plots have been few and far between. Is this something writers grow out of like like a pair of Wrangler denim or a teenage love? Dribs and drabs here and there, but I’ve been primarily carving time out for journaling. I hold all this; it has to go somewhere. Might as well land on a page or two.
Tellingly, motherhood makes you malleable. It jacks you up if not in the best way, in the way you never saw possible. I thank my progeny for these deeply lived, heart-stopping, -twisting, and -warming experiences. If you’re jacked up, you’re likely mutable, nostalgic, and spiteful, grieving an archaic version of yourself that you lost touch with as though they have become someone you now envy. That debatably funny free spirit who unapologetically shared life through social platforms now belies this neurotic perplexed soul who squanders minutes on an overthought grocery list and thinks pulling weeds from the rock garden is the hottest pastime.
During this paradigm shift with AI doing our jobs for us, the more writing I want done. I take its illusory emergence as some sort of fad, but its disruptive force is here and staying for better or for worse. As a last-ditch effort, I’ve applied myself to newer disciplines and punctuated on current ones. But it’s important for me to acknowledge that what one does is only a fraction of what or who they are.
Maybe it’s for the best, maybe it’s not for anything.
Teaching back-to-back classes, burning the candle at both ends, I’ve been writing guided meditations that sound like affectations as cues roll off the tongue. I’ll put students to sleep on a good day. Other days, some will walk out as I try not to take any of this seriously. My self-absorption puts me in check as I’m too careful of any spiritual bypassing. Another sweaty sports bra, another downward dog or spiral. It doesn’t wash for you? That’s cool; I have my sights set on humbling experiences nowadays.
There is something that is working, though. I’m learning to laugh things off when the day upends. The other day during a back-and-forth bicker, my son told me, “I’m angry, too,” before I dwarfed in size and my heart swelled. I softened and kissed him on the forehead. We are layered with calcified sheets and devastated by all this social-political information that wonderment has been sucked up dry.
Our ego, the residue.
As I wear and take off these well-worn hats as a mother, teacher, and storyteller, there lies distress in being performative and having answers to things like, “How are you?” I’ll turn to the misguided child in tow and say, don’t follow me, but continue to clutch his hand. Most days I feel like I’m giving bad yogic advice while watching my empty words land flat on the bare feet before me. Most days, I prepare to be misunderstood and forgotten yet continue to ask myself, “How is everyone affording therapy?”