Riddled with feelings, what are yours?
Dear friends,
I just finished reading Weather, by Jenny Offill, which is a weird little book but delicious. I love stories that take a close look at someone’s interior life. In this way, the book reminded me of Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh, whose anti-heroine is so grotesque you can’t look away. Lizzie from Weather is motivated by much different things. But she’s weird too, as weird as most of us would look if we narrated our interior lives for someone to read.
If you were doing that, during the quarantine, what would your story be? Mine would be riddled with feelings of inadequacy - as a parent, at work, as a helper to the world - I’m not doing enough, not focused enough, not organized enough, not patient enough, not engaged enough.
These days, that story has the power to pin me to the couch. But then I think about the version of myself I like best and I get up. I shift the course of my story. I space out at the ceiling and after a bit, I’m going to make soup for my neighbors, or try to draw the first object I lay eyes on, or churn out some nice sentences for a client, or make popcorn with my son, or put on my sports bra and my sneakers and head out the door for a run.
What’s tough right now is how fast we can ricochet from one set of emotions to another, from one version of ourselves to another. Like, one day this week I got in the car and a song by an artist named Iris DeMent came on. She’s a collaborator of John Prine, who had died that day. Whenever I hear DeMent’s music, I think of one of oldest and closest friends, who listened to her all the time in college. I started crying, sad for John Prine, missing my friend, feeling the lyrics of the song, sobbing my way down Columbia Road in Dorchester for no specific reason, yet every reason.
What’s wrong, Mom?
We drove through Dorchester into South Boston, toward the water. I composed myself and by the time we got there, the sadness had evaporated. Annoyance toward my kids was there instead! By the time we left - after we played hide-and-seek, after the kids had scootered and wrestled and yelped loudly a bunch, after the sun came out and I did some step-ups on a bench, I was relaxed and happy. So relaxed, I made eyes at a cute cop on West Broadway in Southie. I mean, sometimes I do that for fun.
I wanted to see what the city looks like in quarantine: who’s out, which stores are open or closed, so we took the long way home and I did car karaoke to Rosanna by Toto with the windows down. A pretty good couple of hours.
But then dinner was tough, with yelling, and all I wanted to do was swallow some whiskey and scroll through my phone. When it comes to moods over the course of a day in quarantine, I have great range - so narrating my interior life would be a fast-moving scenario.
Anyway - I’m sending love and patience to you. Also, one of the ways reading Weather felt timely:
You are not some disinterested bystander/Exert yourself.
Here are a few things I read this week about experiencing the quarantine as a parent:
It’s hard across the board.
Rage is correct.
This piece inspired my newsletter today, about telling ourselves good stories by making them manageable ones.
And one story I’d love to be able to tell more about myself (with credit to The Main Event newsletter for reminding me of this poem):
To be of use, by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
XO,
Leigh