on moving.

We moved. Actually, we moved three times since I last wrote here. But also we moved 11 days ago. We left Chicago for a small town in the northeastern corner of Wisconsin. For the first time in more than a decade, I’m not living in a city.

This is one thing on an immense list of things I want to write about.

I have had such an overwhelming urge to blog again, so I’ve put it on my list of 2022 goals. Write a blog! Write about food! Write about life! Write about change! Write about parenting! After a brief hiatus during Leo’s newborn days, I’ve mostly reclaimed morning pages. I’ve been diligently writing them (nearly) every morning. A few months ago, they started to look like blog posts, or my version of that - little ruminations, winding mini-essays, or something.

The last time I posted here was September 2019, before the pandemic, before the first pregnancy, before the second pregnancy, before giving birth, before becoming a mother, before leaving New York City, before leaving Chicago. I was me then, as I am still, but I see that woman and her words with such a deep stab of loss for the innocence and the freedom from grief.

Can I start writing again here, or is it time for this place to find its final rest? How can I just pick up again, how can I catch up? Does it matter?

The writing I’m longing for, the writing I want to do, is the writing I’m longing to read. Writing about food, about the seasons, about making space in life for slowness, creativity, learning to be a parent, learning to be myself. The smallest details capture me.

Sometimes I find myself trying to muscle through when things are overwhelming or when change comes or is coming. Leaving the city is a twist in our story that I could have never seen coming. It’s a wonderful twist, full of so much possibility and hope. But there’s also uncertainty around the edges, and there’s grief. So I catch myself trying to muscle through the grief, to leave it unacknowledged and ignored.

I’m grieving the loss of a life we had imagined, and a million other lives we had imagined. I’m grieving the loss of the city and its messy tangle of glorious humanity. I’m grieving change to our daily lives, a new daily commute, Leo spending his days in daycare. What about that moment when Jacob gets Leo up from his nap, and comes around the corner to my desk, and says, give mama a kiss! and his rosy sleepy cheeks puff out in a glorious little smile that brings tears to my eyes just writing about it now? What about that, and a million other moments that I’ve tried so hard to not take for granted, while at the same time counting the minutes to bedtime so that I can finally be alone and quiet in my own head?

I’m trying to let myself grieve all of this. Feel the hope, feel the goodness and love, and feel the grief. Hold them all together.

I read Ross Gay’s A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude last fall, which is a book of poems about death and loss and the beauty of the natural world, and all the life and hope it exudes. That’s the space I’m in right now. Maybe it’s the space we’re all in, maybe the pandemic has given us this moment, or many moments, when we all need to feel everything together all at once, the hope and the grief, together and linked and together. My grief is small, I think. I see friends and people I love dearly losing the ones they love, confronting the frailty of life in brutal ways. I could be crushed by it all, if I let myself. Maybe you feel that way too.

My hope for this year is to embrace joy. I don’t mean something trite or airy or naive. I don’t mean that I hope to put my head deeply in the sand. I mean that life is everything all at once. It is grief, it is dark cold winter, it is loss, and also it is beauty and light and joy. I’m trying to practice that duality, or multiplicity, that it can be everything all at once. I hope to find joy, to seek it out, to spot it. I hope to create it for my child, for other people I love, even for people I don’t particularly like.

Hey-o, I’m back. I’ve been writing all along, but I’m coming back to blogging. I’m going to write about whatever the fuck I want to, however I want to, finally, instead of holding myself to some silly standard and idea of what good writing is or what kind of writing the world needs. Those things matter, of course. But I’m going to write about food. I’m going to write about the quotidian details of life that I love. I’m going to write about being a parent. I’m going to write about all the things that have already been written about, in a million ways, in a million places, and I don’t care.