Dear Somebody: Our mothers and fathers.

Five things from this week that I'd like to remember

Maja, gouache and colored pencil on 16”x20” Arches paper. Currently on view at the Washington University Graduate Center

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A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

Most days after lunch, I go for a walk with my dad. I put on my shoes and coat and wait for him by the door. I’m impatient, feeling like a little kid waiting to be driven to school. Sometimes my dad does drive me to school, just like he did when I was growing up, the only differences being that it’s now 25 years later, I’m in graduate school and married with a kid, and he’s retired.

I’m in my mid-thirties and he’s nearing 70, so it feels a little silly that my dad still takes care of me. It makes me feel even more childlike than I normally do. I get frustrated when he won’t let me carry a heavy bag home or cautions me against walking too fast. He frequently reminds me of things that are impossible to forget, namely that there’s a baby in my belly and I need to take care of myself. Before dinner he slices guava into pieces, sprinkling each with salt, pepper, cumin, and red chili. We eat them in silence, crunching the seeds.

Most evenings after dinner, I power walk around my parents’ apartment in an effort to lower my blood sugar. I start by the living room window and walk straight into the kitchen, around the tiny dining table replete with folding chairs, past the cabinet filled with dozens of glass jars holding seeds, nuts, and flours, past the couch where T and my mother sit talking or reading the news, and straight back towards the window again. If N has already taken her bath, she joins me. “We’re doing exercise!” she shouts with glee, running faster with each lap, cajoling me to keep up with her. She holds my hand with one hand and her belly with the other, mimicking the way I support the baby swimming inside me while waddling around the cozy apartment.

These walks are the markers of my days: the one I take alone after breakfast, the one with my dad after lunch, the one with my daughter after dinner. They will come to an end quickly, I know. In a few months, the baby will come, and after that, graduation. My parents will move back home and there will be no more walks with dad—after lunch or at any other point during my days.

I consider this small sorrow daily, usually while putting on my shoes. And then I wait for my dad by the door.

TUESDAY

“Care is like ephemeral art—an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture of mac and cheese and baby wipes and no tears shampoo and socks that never match and chore charts that never work and all that just gets blown away with the winds of time. And like art that isn’t static, isn’t permanent, can’t be put up on a wall and admired in a museum—care is devalued. We stumble on it sometimes in the wild and it takes our breath away, a momentary glimpse of the tenderness with which we hold and protect and nourish and delight in our loved ones; just like one of Goldsworthy’s mandala’s, there’s a divine structure to it, a feeling of inevitability. It’s as ordinary as dirt and as sacred as the kind found at Chimayo. It’s here, there, and everywhere, so kind of nowhere.

Caring for someone you love is, of course, a reward on to itself, the deepest of them, but it need not be labor that happens in such embattled circumstances. It could be absorbed and still revered, invisible and still funded, ephemeral and still prized. It could be held as the center of our existence, rather than the thing we rush through to get to our “real work.” We could see and honor the seasons—caring for children, caring for elders—and the variable capacities—the neurodivergent and disabled and chronically and temporarily ill.”

—The art of care mostly disappears from Courtney Martin’s The Examined Family

WEDNESDAY

The perfect way to begin this morning is by listening to the Our House demo with Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell while making N’s lunch and rubbing the sleep from our eyes.

THURSDAY

We’ve heard a lot about quiet quitting lately, but this post by my friend and artist Lisa Congdon, about loud quitting, really stayed with me. In it, she writes:

So far in the past 9 months, I’ve quit alcohol, food restrictions, teaching college, my podcast (more on that to come), two boards of directors, working on Fridays, working on umpteen client projects at once, coffee dates with people I don’t know, most public speaking, writing any more books, several friendships, and most weekday evening plans. I have not felt as happy, “balanced” (if such a thing exists) and such a sense of spaciousness in nearly 20 years.

I’ve begun to think of this as “loud quitting” — intentional, communicated, assertive (as opposed to passive), and unapologetic. So, to be clear, this not necessarily the opposite of “quiet quitting,” which is about not going above and beyond in the workplace (which I also support) — just simply my way of overtly claiming and taking control over my time in a way I haven’t in my entire life — because, for most of my 55 years, I thought it was literally my duty to please/serve others.

I contributed a comment about my own long string of things I’ve quit this year, and it’s obvious that neither Lisa nor I are the only ones. The past few years have all added up to this one, where we’re rediscovering what our values and boundaries are—and that’s always something worth celebrating.

FRIDAY

whose influences, we said,
    made us passive and over-polite
whose relationships with our fathers
    we derided at consciousness-raising groups
whose embroidered pillowcases still accuse us
    on the shelves of our modern lives

they have become interesting old women
they are too busy to write often
they wish we wouldn't worry about them
they are firm about babysitting
they are turning out okay

—Our Mothers by Leona Gom

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See you next week!

xx,

M