Rights
I’m trying hard to move through the world like I have the right to write about the snow. When you become a parasocial character, especially a scary one, especially a female one, people bat you around like you’re a Sim. Like you’re not going on job interviews, brewing coffee, hanging out on dating apps, trying to make a life happen. Like you don’t have a couple of different journals of to do lists- certifications, bills, doctors appointments, car maintenance.
I’m trying hard to think thoughts like I’m a real person who writes for the reasons most people have been interested in writing- because you live a life and then you think about that life and you want it to make sense and you want to learn the lessons because you want to get better at living a life you want to live.
I’m trying hard to remember I get to look out at all that white out the window- crusted on top with ice, speckled with bird tracks, frosting faded red plastic planters- and I get to write about how it feels like the snow is in my head. In Ohio we’ve been having blizzards and freezing temperatures since Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving I spent in an Airbnb in Cleveland’s Little Italy, watching Martin Scorsese movies and eating takeout pasta and cookies. If it sounds lonely, it was lonely in a wonderfully easy way. The next day I drove down the highway to get to our extremely outer ring suburb and 3 different cars were abandoned in drifts in the median. That’s the kind of winter it’s been near Lake Erie.
I’ve never liked having to be so representative as a lady. I’ve never liked representing a tribe or a family or a kind of politics and that’s often the first social duty of girls and women. Be the culture, wear the traditional clothes, know the recipes, do the dances, get the grades, make us feel proud. I’m no good at that part of womanhood. I really want to be a subject not an object, and that’s fine that that is what I want, but it doesn’t do anything magical to make other people want to think about me imbued with subjectivity.
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I’m just trying to give that to myself. To look out the window and let myself be a person impacted by cabin fever, by a long winter, by scary driving conditions, by too much family time, by the suburbs, by all the changes I set in motion with Maria Catt a decade ago. I don’t know how to give myself subjectivity in my writing without self mythologizing. I just want to be able to think on the page.
A deer came all the way up to our back porch stairs last night. I can tell because of the deep tracks. I don’t think there was any food they could have been pursuing, so maybe they were just using the cover of night to do deer detective work. I once broke up a deer fight in the backyard- some young deer dudes were stomping their feet and rearing back over a bird feeder. When my son sees the deer during the day he asks about Santa- if Santa is coming, if the deer can fly.
I’m also trying to take seriously “Be not afraid.” That’s the biggest can of worms ever, the idea maybe we have a duty to cultivate not being afraid. Especially as a mom I just think, this whole system of procreation succeeds because of moms being scared, certainly it doesn’t succeed because of the relaxation of dads. So….every member of humanity who got to childbearing age did so because of their mom’s anxiety but somehow spiritually we have to not be led by that? If that seems like a macro question, it’s not, because as any mom of a school age kid will tell you if you don’t tackle your morning anxiety you will be irritable with your kid or your husband and even though your anxiety gets your kid to school your irritability sends your kid to therapy later on. The kid survives long enough to be old enough to want to go to therapy because of your anxiety, then they talk about your irritability due to your anxiety to aforementioned therapist.
When I was writing Maria Catt people thought I had all kinds of ambitions but the ambition was to get through my work shifts, get my degree, stay level. Hard to stay level in February. We have a couple of cardinals in the back yard, little dots of red, fluffy with an undercoat that keeps them happy. They strike me as level. That’s that Bible verse, matching your anxiety levels to the sparrows, who have a lot of ongoing problems being tiny birds but hop and eat and hang out with other birds in total trust.
It strikes me that I’m more impactful and thus have to be more responsible than a sparrow.
