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My favourite book I read this summer was All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai.  It’s a really hard book to describe without ruining anything along the way, but an easy book to talk about out of context (meaning, even if you haven’t read the book) because at its heart, the book is Mastai processing the loss of his mother at a young age.  I mean, yes, it’s also about time travel and alternate realities, but peel away the quirky and it’s a love letter to all the people we will love and lose.

So there are four things I want to talk about with the book.  Again, you don’t need to read the book to understand them, and reading about them will not ruin reading the book yourself.

Okay?

So the book opens with an idea that stems from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.  That “when you invent a new technology, you also invent the accident of that technology” (p. 14).  So you invent the car, and at the same time, you invent the car accident.  Can’t have a car accident without the car.  And the reverse; as we invent things to prevent the car accident, we are also inventing the problems that could arise out of those solutions.

The main character — the narrator — states on page 15:

I’m not a genius like Lionel Goettreider or Kurt Vonnegut or my father. But I have a theory too: The Accident doesn’t just apply to technology, it also applies to people. Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence.

So when you connect with a person, you also create in that moment, the possible bad outcome of that relationship.  We can debate the term “bad,” but at the very least, you will lose that person after a long time of loving them.  That will hurt.  But you could also have that relationship negatively impact your life, from changing your self-esteem to moving you away from places where you would have otherwise gone.  You may not even know that the relationship is tugging you in the wrong direction, or all the otherwises that were in your path and now they’re not.

We talk a lot about the people we’re happy that we met because they changed our life for the better, but we spend much less time talking about the people we regret meeting.  The people who have had a negative impact on our life with their “accident” looming larger than their invention-like side.  It’s a weird thing to think about: The people you wish you had never met.  People you’re sad were at one point in your life.

We can paint a rosy picture, claiming that every interaction is meaningful and adds to who we are as a whole; positive or negative.  But this book so beautifully explores that cost of loving someone, or, at the very least, letting them into your life.

Your thoughts?

You know know that optical illusion with side mirrors on cars where the objects you’re seeing are closer than they appear?  That’s how my calendar feels right now.

When I make plans, dropping activities and events into future dates, they look completely do-able.  Under what circumstances would I not be able to find an hour to help the kids write their d’var Torah for their B’nai Mitzvah?  Or grab dinner with a friend?  Or write a blog post?  And then I’m figuratively driving up to the date, and that object still looks tiny on the calendar, but it’s looming large over my life.  An hour for the d’var Torah?  Where am I supposed to find an hour for the d’var Torah?

I feel like I am doing something very wrong.  Like I used to know how to drive, and suddenly I’ve forgotten what all the sticks and pedals mean in the car.

I know that all of this will change by the end of the fall.  The B’nai Mitzvah will be behind us.  We’ll be settled into new school and work routines.  A slew of holidays won’t be derailing my schedule.  But even knowing the date doesn’t make the lead up to that end point any easier.

My calendar doesn’t feel like it’s made of paper anymore.  It feels like the same weight as a stack of tires, dragging my head down.

The New York Times had a fascinating essay last week about living an ordinary life.  That we’re pushed to want to be extraordinary, but the most satisfied life customers are ones who don’t aim for fame or huge accomplishments.  They’re just trucking along, living in the moment, being happy with what is in front of them rather than always focusing on trying to achieve something enormous.  They’re like pre-Gandalf Bilbo Baggins, happy to stay in his cozy hobbit nook in the Shire, vs. post-dragon Bilbo Baggins, who craves adventure and itches to do something really big again.

(The essay used the characters in Middlemarch, but I’m more of a Tolkien girl.)

The author points to a passage in the book and states,

It encapsulates what a meaningful life is about: connecting and contributing to something beyond the self, in whatever humble form that may take.

Most young adults won’t achieve the idealistic goals they’ve set for themselves. They won’t become the next Mark Zuckerberg. They won’t have obituaries that run in newspapers like this one. But that doesn’t mean their lives will lack significance and worth. We all have a circle of people whose lives we can touch and improve — and we can find our meaning in that.

I was thinking about this essay this week because my happiest moment was picking apples for the week with the kids on Saturday morning.  Not really remarkable to anyone else, but it made me smile as we made our way back to the car with 12 pounds of apple in tow.

The essay ends with words for students heading back to school:

You don’t have to change the world or find your one true purpose to lead a meaningful life. A good life is a life of goodness — and that’s something anyone can aspire to, no matter their dreams or circumstances.

It is a good life.  Sometimes a Bilbo-y Baggins sort of life (pre-Gandalf) because I prefer being at home.  But a good, ordinary life.

I used to be a very “good” mother, by my standards.  Once upon a time, I did all of my work while the twins napped or when they were at their grandparent’s house.  When they were awake, we were playing, and when they went to bed at night, I made them baby food.  And all was well.

They grew up and started to go to school, and I did all of my work while they were in kindergarten, pausing at 3 pm so I could be at the pick up door the moment they stepped from the classroom.  They aged into homework, and I helped them with math while I cooked dinner.  And all was well.

They switched to middle school and I decided to pick up more hours.  A lot more hours.  Why not?  I enjoyed the work and they didn’t really need me for homework anymore.  We were going to have to pay for college in a few years, and there was that retirement thing to worry about.  But now the work happened while they were at school and after dinner and on weekends.  It happened when they wanted me to hang out or take them to the pool.

And suddenly, just like that, I no longer felt like a “good” mother.  It’s funny how you snatch that status from yourself so quickly.  I slid into badness, and it erased and replaced everything that came before it.  Or I would think to myself, “You were a good mother, and now you suck.”

To be clear, while there is teenage-appropriate whining about my time being stretched thin, and general grumbling when I won’t drop everything to bake a batch of cookies, there is no one in my world who describes me as a bad mother except myself.  It’s my own little, judgmental moniker.  Everyone else is a good mother.  I am a terrible mother and a distracted wife and a long list of negative adjectives attached to various life stations including sister, daughter, and friend.  Everyone else has better work-life balance, better boundaries, better methods for getting things done.

The point is not for you to jump to my self-esteem’s aid and say, “But Melissa, I think you’re a good mother.”  First and foremost, your opinion about me (“you” being everyone who is not me) is not as important to me as my opinion about me.  But secondly, I’ve been thinking about that old version of blogging; where you put it all out there and admitted your foibles.  That version of blogging that made us feel less alone.  We have lost that side of things; now the Instagrammable life rises to the top and it’s all we notice.  We think that’s normal.

So no contradictions of my feelings, please, though I will take company on my blog front porch.  Sit down if you also suspect that you are not doing sections of your life particularly well at this moment.  Me too.

My heart is in Florida this morning with friends and family who are weathering the storm or watching from afar with little sense of what will be waiting for them when they finally make it home.  It is unfathomable.  You get warnings sometimes, sure, but there is nothing you can do beyond the most basic steps of making sure you have food and water, boarding up windows, evacuating.  And then just waiting because there is nothing you can do to stop it from barreling over your life.

Once upon a time, there used to be one news story; one big event that dominated the news and the whole world seemed to focus on it.  But now it feels like the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, like a big crowded mass of news stories standing in front of a grave; North Korea and DACA and Harvey and Irma and the earthquake and Charlottesville and… the list goes on and on.  There is no world focus; no time to comment on one event before the attention turns to the next event.  Before you’ve had time to contribute to one relief effort, another one lines up.

People keep repeating that this isn’t unusual.  That it’s not that there are more bad things happening; it’s just that we have faster communication and therefore know about more things.  But it doesn’t feel that way.  At least not today.

Sending so many good thoughts southward, and holding whole states of people in my heart.