A little behind

 I'm a mite behind, but I have a plan to catch up a bit, and actually, this is my project so technically I control all the dates. I take it back, I'm right on schedule.

The next decade is devoted to roommates and folks I've shared households with. 

As always, it is tough to pare a sentiment down to a postcard, but I'm enjoying the limit, enjoying the effort to find the heart of what a person taught me or shared with me. It's never the only thing, but eliminating waffling is a good discipline for me. 

And the other thing I'm very very slowly letting go of is "getting it right". Is there a better way to say what I want to say? Probably. But I should go ahead and say, hey, person, you matter/mattered to me, influenced me, helped me, and if it isn't perfect, ah, well., nothing is.

It's very very slow, though. I still want to write little jewel-like poems for everyone. And instead sometimes I have to content myself with the equivalent of a hand-turkey drawing. 

On the plus side, hand turkey drawings are usually adorable!

#10 - Pete

 

You are the person who taught me to be an actor

that it's in your bones

that you ought to make art you want to see,

make yourself laugh.

All my previous grownups taught school,

worked in banks or sold things.

To see you build a play and...do it?

was a revelation.

You changed the trajectory of my hopes.

Many thanks and with love,

Elizabeth

#9 - Cassie

 

To me, you are always the cool girl -
singular style, you know the new spots,
you throw the best parties,
raise clever kids.
But also, I appreciate
Your curiosity.
I always want to know what you think -
what you're thinking about -
Literacy? Ballet? Editing? Parenting?

Some folks our age have run out of ideas.
You still inhabit galaxies.

#8 - Drew

 

All my favorite gifts come from you.

My bicycle - sweet Helena!

The shoe rack of Ultimate Glory,

and a shared childhood,

memories that shore up mine.

You make the hardest things easier.

I hope someday I can show up for you

even half as much as you have for me.

With love,

Elizabeth

#7 - Jill

 

If Jill was a garden,

that garden would have giraffes

or llamas, fun and whimsy.

I used to think you were lucky.

But seeing you choose joy, choose delight,

seeing the work you do

to shape giraffes from greenery,

I see your skill.

Every walk we take, 

we move forward.

With love,

Elizabeth

#6 - Mr. Thomas

 

This is my face at 15 when asked

to write a five paragraph theme.

You, with dry wit, calm guidance, and very restrained amusement,

will not be surprised

how much I've learned to love form,

Simplicity. Structure.

They have proved enduring and practical.

Some lessons do sink in, eventually.

With gratitude and thanks,

Elizabeth

Decades: how's it going?

My goal is to send one postcard per week to someone in my life who matters to me. I try to write a single (short!) poem on each card. My original draft plan takes ten weeks at a time, chooses one person per week, and I think about that person all week. I write in a notebook, I write multiple drafts of what I think I want to say. It definitely takes lots of drafts to find the heart of the matter, and even once I've sent the poem, I can be plagued with some version of - oh, no, that's not what I wanted to say.

I've even considered sending some of those folks an explanatory letter, either because I've been out of touch with them or because I think the poem, coming out of nowhere, won't make sense. Or even, I assume the bulk of the writing will get obscured by postal cancellation markings and make even less sense.

But there's no getting around the fact that normally, I use too many words. And the size of a postcard means, simply, I can't. So no cheating with additional letters to recipients. I put this blog's address and my instagram handle on each card, with the hope that if someone is confused, they have access to more context.

Here's what I'm discovering so far: as long as I know at the beginning of the week who I'm meditating on, I'm really enjoying the practice of exploring memories of them, of their influence, their wisdom. A postcard is good because I can never really distill what these people mean to me, so whatever I choose to say is at least something, a little murmur of thanks. 

I'm trying to let go of writing "good" poems, and instead just write whatever seems best at the time. This is difficult for me. I'll let you know if it gets easier.

Oh, I've fallen a little behind, but I choose not to worry about it. I'm doing this for myself, to thank others, to take stock. Having a map to complete this a bit at a time helps, but life keeps life-ing, so I choose to catch up when I can, as long as I still get some thinking time about each person. 

How's it going? It makes me feel lucky, thinking about all of you, all the people I'm lucky enough to know and spend time with and be taught by. And it reminds me to be a person who is grateful and delighted by you all. Thanks, everyone.

#5 - Dad

 

How do I encapsulate

how we loved each other?

When I say: I knew you loved me,

I can just as easily say: you knew I loved you.

The only way I have survived your death

is that I was forced to survive your illness

as you ebbed farther and farther away.

The only way I survive your absence

is to look in my own child's eyes,

and try to love her

as well as you loved me.

#4 - Tiff

 

You and your sister first taught me how to love a child,

love no matter what, love no action can undo.

So I had my own child, and life has been

often murky, a late Turner of uncertainty,

But with sunlight always discernible.

Landscapes will sharpen in time.

Love will always enlighten.

Thanks for the lesson.

With love, Elizabeth

#3 - Susan

We are adventurers, you and I.
Who would have expected stillness from either of us?
Expected (relatively) unchanging addresses?

Is it any surprise our minds are sometimes far away?

No fear - even eagles make nests
and sit in them, for a time.

It does not change their wingspan.

With love, Elizabeth

 

Decade One: Kid Times

 As I think about life and who's been important to me, I keep looking for photos. This is tricky because there are plenty of things that were incredibly important to me that I have no photos of, and conversely things that I have a ton of photos of that I don't care about or don't remember.

But here's a super fun memory photo:

This is, I *think*, my fifth birthday, which my mom arranged as a "dress-up" party. In my memory, this was COMPLETELY AMAZING. I wore an old dress of my aunts, I think, with that enormous silk bow in my hair, and everyone else had fun hats and gloves and such - you can see the fab chunky necklace on the kid next to me in blue! It's 1979, and we are dressed to the nines and eating chocolate cake.

I have no idea what else we did at this party - we were in fancy clothes so we couldn't have done much, but everyone looked great. 

#2 - Eddie

From you, I noticed
Silence is a kind of listening - 
Music is a kind of speech.

I'm hankering for squash casserole,
stories of my grandparents,
and Friday night jam sessions in the GA mountains.

With love, Elizabeth

#1 - Peter

 

#1
To Simon Peter

How do I begin?
Heave my heart into my mouth
wrestle it to paper?
Can I gild these words so the joy of you shimmers?

Your handwriting on a page - 
an illuminated manuscript - 
has always brought me glee.
I must begin with you.

The farthest stars can still shine brightest.
My delight of you ripples forwards (anticipation)
and backwards (jeweled memory),
you are the shift in all these seas.

With love, Elizabeth

Decades, the project

 So. 2024. This year I turn 50. I have lots and lots of postcards I never sent. I have lots of people I'd like to partially thank for what they mean to me. And I would like to start writing again, at least a little. 

This is the start of the Decades Project: With Love, Elizabeth

Each week I'm sending a postcard to someone in my past (or present!) with a short poem on it and "With love, Elizabeth."

50 postcards, for 50 years of life, 50 weeks out of the year.  Oh, the year has 52 weeks, you say?  Yes, I decided I get my birthday week and the last week of the year off.

I've already made a list of the 50 people, I even tried to pick approximately 10 folks from each decade of my life, though I'm not making myself send them in that order.

I'm trying to keep the project open for lots of reasons - a postcard isn't a lot of space, I'm not sure how this will go, etc., but I am setting myself two small...let's call them goals, not even rules. 

1. I spend the week thinking about that person and making multiple drafts of a postcard poem to them. 

2. While I hope the 50 postcard poems will connect, I'm more interested in the person I've picked that week. Something in the poem has to be person-specific. It may not be literal, but they are a gesture of thanks for the impact the person has had in my life.

Oh, I might jot down more info here on occasion. But the info and the experience is meant for me, to inspire me with gratitude and thankfulness for all the people I've been lucky enough to know. This is unlikely to turn into any big thing. It's just, a weekly hello to people I love. And a way to wear down my excessive stack of extra postcards.

Itchy

It's starting to feel as if there's no point to me.  You know those times when everyone else seems better at what you do than you?  That's what I'm in now.  The part of me that knows how to play, how to function creatively, is stalled out, and that never feels fun.

I can't even put words together in interesting ways right now: "that never feels fun."  Where's the lift in that, the scope or the poetry or the sigh or the wail?  Where's the balloon release of it?  It just sits there, metallically, like a piece of something you dismantled that you couldn't find a place for when you put it back together, it sits and glowers at you for failing to find its purpose.

This is when you look in the mirror and only see grey hairs, only see the age, the weight, the milage of your face.  There's no wisdom there to balance it, no earned grace or maturity, just someone past their prime aging badly.  You're the mom on the teen show: tolerated, humored, sidelined.  Your chance to be integral to the narrative has long since passed, and you are a minor character in your own life, ricocheting from reaction to reaction, always in motion towards or away from some more important character's views.

This is when you go running and instead of endorphins, there are shin splints and sore hip sockets.  When you run you think of all the years you didn't, and you realize you can never catch up, never run far enough or long enough to outpace all the bad decisions you made then.

You can't do your taxes, it's too depressing.  Facing down the slow slide of your money into nonexistence would take a backbone you don't have.

You can't leave town and get a fresh perspective: you're in that wilderness between the youthful backpacker and the aged tourist, and your responsibilities hold you firmly in place.  Maybe you were never a butterfly at all, but the pin that holds your moth body to the placard is just as inexorable, just as inescapable.

You need some imagination, some belief.  You need some romance and some sleep.  You need to be the one who tells a story and holds everyone rapt - it doesn't even need to be your own story, it just needs to be your pacing, your artistry that holds them.  You need to matter.

But today you don't.  Today, the best tactic you've got is to furl your wings and pack them away for now.  And somewhere inside, very privately, you nurse the hope that there will come a day where you unfurl them, let them catch the wind, stretch them very wide, leap ahead, and find yourself again airborne, laughing, laughing, laughing.

That face

I've been very quiet.  I can blame it on being the mother of a brand new baby in terms of having less free time, but that's only part of the equation.  The other part of the equation is that being a mother to this particular baby has been so delicate and beautiful, I have trouble writing it down.  She's terrific, and now, close to a year old, she's full of smiles and hugs and wanting to be near mama.  It's incredible.  And lucky, so lucky.  I know people who don't want kids, can't have kids, have kids and regret it, have kids and love them hard but have given up much of who they are for those kids.

And folks, none of that is wrong.  It's just life.  The hard thing about writing about kids especially is that it's such a charged issue, such a sensitive subject, that anything I say has the whiff of being a judgement on someone else.  Instead, within reason, I honestly think the vast majority of parents are just trying to do what's best for their kids.  Whatever choices those parents are making, if you were following their every footstep, their decisions in context would probably make sense.

This also allows for the fact that parents screw up a lot.  I have begun to see that as long as parents love their kids and don't concentrate on the screw ups, the screwups aren't that important (barring injury, bodily harm or mental abuse, of course).

OF COURSE I see parents doing things and think, whoo boy, no way, that's not for me.  But I do try to live and let live.  So I've been careful not to write much about the choices we're making, because I think it opens one up to a kind of criticism I just don't need, and implies a kind of criticism of others that I heartily dislike.

Soooo, that having been said:

We're so lucky.  My daughter is absolutely capable of whining and crying, but overall she's a happy, cheerful, curious ball of love.  She sleeps pretty well overall, not when we're traveling but when we're home and on schedule, and she's usually very interested in other people and new things.  She seems smart and capable and healthy (my god we're so lucky with that one, it's so out of our hands), and far from being a drain on my energy, she's been really enjoyable to watch develop.

Now, what I've let slide is my sense of self.  I find it very tricky, trying to provide for my daughter's very reasonable needs and still hang on to my own also reasonable needs.  There's a balance there I haven't achieved.  But I spend time on each side of the fence, and I have a terrific husband who thinks about me as much as he thinks about her.  (This is especially incredible because I don't do the same for him - granted, this first year a lot of the care has fallen on me due to breastfeeding, so his part of that is to take care of me, still, plenty of men don't.  Again, see above: lucky.)

I have to believe that working to be a whole person can only help my daughter as we move forward, that teaching her by example that women have identities and purpose beyond their family will be positive.

See, in my experience, having a kid doesn't make you grow up because of lost sleep or needing more money or anything like that.  You're forced to behave better than you otherwise would because someone is watching your every move, and your every move is shaping them.

I can't afford to behave childishly anymore.  I've got a child who does that, and I have to teach her better.

Shoulda Seen That Coming

Oof.  So I went to see a big shiny musical yesterday.  And it was lovely.  It had people in it I know from being in other big shiny musicals.

I find it really difficult not to feel terrible about myself when I go see people who work all the time, because my brain bounces back and forth between - why can't that be me and clearly I am not working all the time because I'm not talented enough.

Neither of which are useful things to have running through one's head, no matter what the truth might be.

But I was thinking, hey, I just had a baby, I get time off for good behavior, right?  I'm not on stage, but at home I have this cute little awesome person that I adore, and that's worth not being in a trillion shows.

Then, waiting to hug people I knew afterwards, it became clear that the woman who played the lead (beautifully, I must add)...(WAIT FOR IT)...has a baby.

A baby.

So, folks, yes, the answer is that I am just not that great, just not on the career path.  Because turns out, having a baby apparently only keeps me from working.  Other people, more successful, talented people, work all the time.

Don't start with me, I know despair isn't attractive.  I just have no other response to this series of information.

Next week I start rehearsals for a show I'm understudying - and I genuinely don't feel bad I didn't get cast, because the woman I'm understudying is phenomenal, and I love her.  I can only hope going to rehearsal helps me feel less like the hack I feel right now.

(By the way, the baby is still really cute.  Mine, that is.  I still love her to bits.)

Too much

Sometimes, it's not that I have nothing to say, it's that I have so much to say, all contradictory, and not nearly enough time to write it all down.  But if I write the one thing without the contradiction, it won't represent what I really feel, it will just be a blip from one minute side of the question.

This is probably why I resort to bullet lists so frequently.

Anyway, there's a lot going on, most of it good.  And now I need a nap.

No, need a nap.  Turns out there's a difference between need and want.

Then he broke the faucet

I thought last week would be hard, because I was at home with my daughter pretty much on my own, for eight days.  I had a little break half way through, and an assist from a friend for an hour here and there to go running, but it was just me and her for eight days.

It wasn't hard, turns out.  I had cleared my schedule for the most part, so I could really focus on her and on whatever needed to happen.  There were very few distractions, and everyone I went to hang out with was very understanding about having an occasionally vocal four-month-old around.

Turns out, what was hard was this week, when I abruptly came back to being around the entire world (instead of my selected super-understanding cohort of specially sympathetic friends), the "real" world, if you will.

In the real world, I am now only an accessory to the cuteness of my daughter, and have ceased to have very much personhood.

It's not her fault, by the way.  She's a baby, and she's not unreasonable or fussy or difficult.  She's smiley and adorable and really only makes noise when she's hungry, dirty, or bored.  I want her to grow and turn into a person I'd like to be around, so I want to give her the things she needs, because then she'll be healthy and secure enough to be interested in the rest of the world.

It just turns out, sometimes it's really hard to give a child all the things they need and have enough time left to be much of a person yourself.  It doesn't last, by the way - thought I am sure there are always decisions between what you need for yourself and what your child needs - but the really intense time is now, and we're moving through it fairly well.

Just not today.  Today I feel like I had to press "pause" on life, and today I miss my life.  Today I worry if I'll ever get to be in a play again, or sing worth a damn for any band or musical, or write more than a thank you note, or even read an entire book without having to stop a trillion times.  Or even have a conversation without interruption. (Or fit into my old clothes.)

"Nope!"  laugh other parents out there.  "No, you won't, sugar!  Get used to it!"

My husband came home from 10 days away and had to literally leave the house within the hour to start working on a different part of his work-life.  He's great, he really works hard to make sure I'm able to do things outside the house, but the reality of his situation is that within 24 hours of achieving his graduate degree, he had other fires to work on putting out.   (Also, before he left, he broke the faucet. Sigh.)

I get it, I do.  I try really hard not to feel far down on his list of priorities because he constantly tries to put me and her first.  It's just...

By the time it's ever my turn out of the house again, I will probably have no skills/interests/talents/viability left.

I don't really believe that.  Do I?  Maybe just today I do.

And let's get into the hardest part, the probable reason for this glum mood -  it was really hard to get my daughter to sleep tonight.  She cried.  Hard.  I had to put her down crying.  She calmed down and went to sleep, but my last psychic glimpse of her, this tiny person I'm giving up myself for, was of a truly distraught tiny creature, unhappily wailing.

It hurts me.  It's so hard to have her cry like that.  I hate it.  The fact that she went to sleep within five minutes means she was crying because she just wanted to fight the sleep, and I know that, and thus I know I'm still doing the right thing for her, but she's often such a happy thing, that listening to the crying is draining emotionally.

Because here's the thing.  If you feel, however wrongly or in passing, that you're giving up your self for another human being, and yet the feedback you're getting implies that you're not doing a very good job...

...then it's a rough day.

Y'all, I love her so much.  Here's hoping she wakes up with a smile.

In happier news, the faucet is already fixed.

What's going on

I don't trust myself to write a lot intended to be shoved out here in a public space right now.  First, with an infant taking up nearly all my waking hours, everything is changing moment to moment.  I'm thrilled then I'm sad then I'm bored then I'm frustrated then I'm charmed then I'm terrified.  Additionally, I have a ton of hormones still running through my system that I neither understand nor control.  Apparently I will have them until I stop breastfeeding.  Awesome.

For instance, this morning I was convinced I am a terrible mother.  And I bet if I didn't write it down, I'd forget about it, and someday I would look back on this period and think, hmm, I did a pretty okay job, all things considered.  But of course if I write about it right now, instead I'll color my memories with the self doubt that listening to your child cry engenders.  But if I write about it, I might be able to make sense of it in my mind.  But if I write about it, I might begin, and the sound of crying may force me to stop halfway and I'll have yet another abandoned post.  (There are quite a few.)

Also, earlier today my husband asked: is there anyone you can talk to about any of this (meaning the parenting decisions I'm making)?  And when I thought about it, I realized: in a way, the answer is "no".  Because parenting philosophies are really personal, charged decisions and everyone gets defensive about whatever choices get made.  But every kid is different.  So while yes, someone out there has probably lived through a similar situation, I don't know that person, and the people I do know are more likely to be aghast that I'm trying any sort of sleep training this young, or never needed it because their child never had problems sleeping all night long. (Sheesh.)

It's knowing that if I ask one set of people, they'll tell me I should abandon my current course altogether, whereas if I ask another, they'll tell me I need to toughen up.  Neither feel exactly right for this kid at this time.  But I can't guarantee any of what I am doing is helping.  I'm just guessing in the dark right now, trying different stuff, which unfortunately ruins any attempt at consistency.  Consistency is supposed to be the best tool at your disposal.  But how can you be consistent when you can't tell what works?

It. is. tricky.

And then sometimes my daughter will push up with her legs and stand on my knees, and smile and smile, and make little squealy raptor noises, and then it doesn't matter that I'm surviving on so few hours of sleep every single night, it doesn't matter if she cries when it's naptime, the erosion of who I am doesn't matter because it's being replaced by who I'm going to be with this new person in my life, once she figures out who she is.

Because though I can't really call it a two-way street yet, I added a lot of love to my life when we had her.

Which is worth every item of clothing I have being covered in spit up for the next year or so, right?