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.

writing the details.

It’s so easy to feel like we aren’t getting anywhere. The routine of daily life erodes awareness, and when the details are lost, it starts to feel like treading water. My antidote is to write things down. Write whatever you want, whenever and wherever and however you want. It doesn’t matter the means, only the act of capturing details. A few minutes spent looking over the things I wrote yesterday, a year ago, five years ago, and suddenly I’m swept away with it all - the vastness of life and all that has flowed through my own.

I’m here to say that I had an excellent week. I caught myself thinking it in the background often: I’m having a great week! I was filled with hope and excitement and ambition in a way I haven’t felt in quite awhile. And do you know what the secret freaking sauce is to this great week? WRITING (and other things, but especially writing). More generally, I did the things that fill me up. I went for lots of early morning runs and felt both tired and strong. I read. I actively avoided multi-tasking while at work, and created the space to work on tasks more deeply. And I made an intentional space for writing (with a new writing partner!). I hauled my butt across the city just to write, and there was definitely some magic in that.

I’ve been longing to write again, on the blog, like I used to do years ago. I’ve tried so many times to restart over the past three years, and I just haven't been able to make it stick. I was just thinking this morning about how it feels like all the times I tried to quit smoking. The shame creeps up around your shoulders and neck and ears, and you can’t tell anyone you’re quitting (again) because you can’t take the eye rolls and patronizing OKs. Except when it comes to writing, the eye rolls and patronizing comes from the monkey mind inside my own head.

this is the place for that!

It’s 4:30AM, and I don’t want to be awake, but here we are. What can I do? Nothing. I’m awake, and I know very well that sweating the lack of sleep does nothing (good) for me. So I’m up, laying on the couch, typing on the computer, beneath the glow of the Christmas lights we hung up months ago that are still encircling the window in the living room. Rat (the cat!) is sitting on the chair the next to me, trying to understand if it’s breakfast time or if he should go back to sleep.

I have had so much on my mind lately. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, big and small. I don’t/wouldn’t even know where to begin, but I’ve got the urge to document some thoughts. And in a crystal clear insomnia-induced moment, I thought: this is the place for that!

So, hello. Hello? I don’t know. I haven’t blogged really in a few years--a few posts here or there, but not really. I used to do it all the time. I remember when I first started, that strange and fraught year I lived in Medford. Working all the time at jobs I hated, a new relationship (newly long-distance), no money no money no money worried about money all the time. I was just beginning to own my thoughts, to express opinions. It sounds strange to say it, but that was something new for me then. It was stressful, to say the least. I don't know if I was very good at it. I had a lot of sleepless nights that year, and I can remember sitting up in my poorly lit bedroom, writing and writing and writing. I also burned a lot of midnight oil that year searching for medical studies I could sign up for to make more money, but that’s a story for another day.

once a year.

Where do I begin? Poor neglected blog. My writing has wound itself in so many directions, and somehow this spot didn’t feel as necessary any more. I’ve allowed myself some single-minded focus, much needed I think, but here is the consequence. Saying yes to some things (whole-heartedly!) means saying no to others, inevitably.

Nearly a month ago now my birthday came. It was a simple day, which suits me. Jacob and I wandered around nearby Andersonville for most of the day. It was hot, so we ducked in and out of shops and drank iced coffee and shared a sandwich. We got dinner that night at Band of Bohemia where I tasted each and every beer. It was perfect as far as I can tell.

hopeful and fearful.

I feel compelled to say something. What? I haven’t been here in ages (or months, more literally). I lost my way a bit with my writing. I took a class this fall, and wrote some things, and was fired up for more, and then it petered out when the class ended. I’m still writing in the mornings, though not as consistently as I have been.

When I feel caged, mostly by myself, I get the urge to come back here. It’s such a silly thing, my self-imposed trap. I work to make money and let days blur one into the other. There is more, you know. How often do you wish to distract yourself?

I’m not much for resolutions, but I do like to think about goals and intentions. I’ll try harder to read more this year. I’m planning to keep a more careful fitness log because I’m going to run a marathon. I’m craving deliberateness and intentionality.

The sun is shining bright in Chicago this morning. I woke up at 6AM, and lingered in the half-awake and half-asleep place for another two hours. I dreamed up scenes from something I might write. When I woke up, Jacob juiced a grapefruit, and I drank the juice.

It’s the new year! It feels hopeful and fearful, right?