Category — Uncategorized

I loved this list of yearly failures. Accomplishments? That’s Instagram. Failures? That’s blogging. Right? Because blogging is about the camaraderie that comes when another person reads your messy thoughts and says, “Me too.”

At least, those are the blogs I read.

So far, this year, I have failed at returning to writing books. Failed at waking up for yoga at least seven mornings. (Sometimes several in a row.) I failed to make the dinner that Josh chose and left the ingredients in the freezer. I also failed to make the cookie recipe that is sitting on my counter along with the ingredients. I failed at saying exactly what I was thinking.

There were many more things on my list when I was making it in my head, but I failed at jotting them down.

What did you fail at last month?

Ina Garten has given the world a fantastic chicken recipe…

[Side note: I’m talking about the first chicken recipe from years ago. The one where you stuff a whole lemon inside. It is everyone’s favourite holiday dish in this house. Except me. Because I’m a vegetarian.]

…and she has high fived everyone who is equally phoning in the morning. Yes.

I started the fall working on a new book. Midway through the fall, I stopped working on the new book and started spending the hour scrolling Goodreads, playing Wordle and Letter Boxed, and not accomplishing anything. I mean, I have a 61 day streak going on Wordle, so it’s not nothing. But it’s… kind of nothing.

I’ve been mostly okay with that. I wasn’t okay the first few weeks when I felt like I should be doing something more with my time before I started work. But this is what I can do at this point in the pandemic. I can play word games and read books and watch television and talk to friends via Zoom. Go to work, cook dinner, clean the house. And not much else.

After Sandy Hook, my friends put me down as their emergency contact. We figured that I lived closest to the school and worked from home. In the event of a true emergency, everyone was okay with me packing the car full of kids and getting them out of there. We talked out possible situations. We even had a rendezvous point set in Western Maryland in the event of a nuclear situation. We were prepared.

There was a shooting at the twins’ school this week. We got an email from the principal that there was a “medical emergency” that they were dealing with and the school was in lockdown. We texted the kids to find out more, and they let us know that the medical emergency was that a child was shot.

I got in the car and drove to the school. By the time we knew about the shooting, it had been a half hour since the child was found, and every road around the school was lined with police vehicles and helicopters were hovering overhead. I parked so I could see the front doors and waited for news. SWAT teams entered the building. Police officers closed off access to through traffic on the main road. The twins texted that they were sitting on the floor in the dark. It took about two hours from when lockdown began until the suspect was found. We found out later that the SWAT team entered a classroom and arrested the shooter in front of his stunned classmates.

And then it took several more hours before the kids were released. I sat in my car, turning the engine on and off to stay warm. A kind neighbor walked car to car with his elementary school-aged child, passing out bottles of water and granola bars to the waiting parents. I started sobbing because it was this enormous moment of kindness on such a scary day.

In the evening darkness, five hours after the lockdown began, four and a half hours after I parked in view of the school, the twins and a few of their friends made their way very slowly to my car. I had been in close contact with their parents — I was the emergency contact we designated all of those years ago, certain it would never happen to us. Never happen to our kids. But what if, right? What if it did? We should have a plan.

This week, we had to use the plan. I never really thought we’d have to use the plan, but like so many parents in America, we had to use the plan.

I want every gun manufacturer to have to sit in a cold car, shaking for four and a half hours. I want every person who puts up the plans for ghost guns on the internet to watch flashing police lights for four and half hours, unable to get to their loved ones. I want them to have to drive home four stunned teenagers. I want them to feel what I felt.

I want them to feel that fear and uncertainty. And sit with it. And own their part in the gun-violence-in-schools story.

The Atlantic had an article that was passed around the Internet a few weeks ago about how it’s okay if you never get “baby fever.” The sub-headline: “A deep, sudden longing for babies is certainly real, but it’s not a prerequisite for having kids.”

And just in case you were wondering, infertility was mentioned as a possible cause of this feeling:

In fact, some researchers think baby fever is a reaction to infertility struggles, not a ubiquitous maternal urge … It’s a consequence of you wanting to have children and not being able to have them.

Okay.

But what wasn’t really discussed was the flip side: Your baby fever never breaks. You go through life with a scorching case of baby fever that burns long after the point that family building is on the table. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way — many others of you have written about it, too. If infertility was the cause, then family building should have been the cure. But… it wasn’t. I still have baby fever; I’ve just learned to live with it.

At the risk of sounding bananapants, I keep a record of every e-book I buy. The reason is that you don’t actually own your e-books in the same way that you own your paper books. You license them. Which means that a book that you “buy” with real money can be removed from your account without the money being returned. So I keep a record of the title and date of purchase.

On a colour-coded multi-tab spreadsheet. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that while I’m not subscription averse in the sense that I have a Washington Post subscription, this article about our rental future filled me with dread. I like things being simple. Without a lot of bells and whistles. To me, something easy is not connected to the internet or automated. I like holding onto things for a long time. This article made me very very tired.

Though, of course, the thing with predictions is they are just that: musings about a possible future. I’m sure my grandparents — who rented their telephone — couldn’t imagine this strange world where people not only owned their telephone but sometimes didn’t even have a landline because they only used their mobile device.

Going back to updating my book spreadsheet.