~ Exciting news (for me, anyway)! I will now be offering a paid subscription model for my newsletter. In addition to the free monthly newsletter, paid subscribers will receive at least one extra newsletter, a curated Spotify playlist, special interviews, and more. It only costs $5 a month to subscribe - “the cost of one cup of coffee,” as they say! Click here to subscribe! ~
I’ve been thinking about ownership as the intersection of love and commerce. When we feel a fervent devotion to something, we desire to hold onto it forever: what’s theirs is ours, now, too. An alleged lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair is currently selling on eBay for $450,000. Someone loves her writing, her legacy so deeply that they will forfeit a fortune for a lock of hair, just to feel like part of her is more theirs than the abstract adoration they carry for her at a distance. The hair will, purportedly, bring them closer. (They wouldn’t be alone in this follicular union: some of Elvis’s hair sold for $115,000 in 2002.)
My 20s were an endless abuse of the abyss of time and now that I’m well into my 30s I am keenly, disturbingly aware of its passage. When I was 11, I was on a horseback ride in Montana and the horse took off from the group, cantering faster than I knew how to handle. Nearly thrown off, I grabbed onto the saddle’s horn, my body flying off the left side of the horse, horizontal to the ground, scream-flying 6 feet above it. At the end of each day now, I feel as though I’m in that same terrifying position, grasping onto the edge of an allegorical clock, perpendicular to space, my legs thrust into the next day, week, year, but my head fully fixating on the quickening passing of the minute-hand. Youth isn’t wasted on the young, time is.
The occasion for this new panic are two-fold: the pained urgency of moving a career forward, by inch or by crook, and bearing blessèd witness to the passage of time on my two tiny people. I look at Rowan in his big-boy bed, his sweet 4 year-old face refusing the advancing battalion of fatigue, full of "one more page” and stalling tactics, and I still hear his 2 year-old baby-talk, I still see his smushed baby face, a ghost beneath this new, sharper jawline.
Rowan’s absolutely outrageously delicious baby butt is no longer; its topographic crevasses of flesh, its desert dimples have vanished in a deciduous flourish, and in its rude stead now sits his father’s petite peach of a butt, trotting hither and thither. What can I do, but commission a painter to render the ghost of his perfect baby butt in acrylic and send it to me on a canvas to stare at all day on my desk, whenever I work?
I don’t want these things to disappear. I find myself desperately wanting to remain fixed in time. I keep thinking back to the man I asked on a ski lift two years ago, a total stranger with grown adult children on the chair ahead of us, what his favorite years were of his kids. He threw his head back and laughed, the snowy light bouncing off his teeth. “Oh, man, oh man. I sure loved 2 to 5. Those were the best years.”
I felt reassured, in that moment, as I had a baby and a 2 year old waiting for me in a warm cabin mere miles away. The best days were just ahead. And now, literally three seconds later, I’m here, with a 2 and a 4.5 year old.
“These are the halcyon days, you know,” I warn my husband in sotto voce, a wide-eyed, crazed crone. “We are living right now in the moments that we are going to look back on when we’re holding wrinkled hands on a park bench somewhere someday!!!!”
“I know,” he agrees serenely, somehow unmotivated by psychological injury.
To illustrate this further, we all watched the Pixar short Bao for the first time a few weeks ago and I positively BURST into a weeping, sobbing MESS when the (SPOILER) dumpling grows up and walks out the door. I am not going to be okay when Rowan and Zoe go off to college. (Friends: gather round. I will need you.)
Separation, Edvard Munch
Zoe’s adoption is official now, which means she is “ours,” to have and to hold. The sense of finality is both extraordinarily comforting and bizarrely anticlimactic, as there was no conceivable way I would have been able to live without her once I met her. And yet, both Rowan and Zoe surprise me daily in ways that I know they are not mine at all, they are all of ours, here in the messy ether of Earth, taking up space and asserting their tiny-fisted wills.
Dazzling mastermind Rachel Cusk writes in Second Place, “Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.”
I recently read an intriguing speculation about the reason pirates are shown with eye-patches is because when they went below deck, they would just switch their patch to the opposite eye that was already adjusted to darkness, outsmarting and outpacing whatever the darkness had in store.
So much of the pandemic’s past 19 months and fostering process in general has been mentally attached to this very idea of keeping a patch on, an eye towards the future, when we just can climb our way out of this thing and really enjoy it. But I don’t want to see this sticky splendor all one-eyed. We’re in whatever we’re in, for better or for worse. I can’t hold onto it, but I can write about it, can grab these flying feelings and try and pin them down so that when I’m on that park bench, I can pull them out and read them again, and wait for it all to come flooding back.
MY NEW SUBSCRIPTION MODEL
I will now be offering a paid subscription model for my newsletter. In addition to the free monthly newsletter, paid subscribers will receive at least one extra newsletter, a curated Spotify playlist, special interviews, and more. It only costs $5 a month to subscribe - “the cost of one cup of coffee,” as they say! Click here to subscribe!
THREE THINGS
In light of the introduction of my new subscription model, here are three newsletters that are so fantastic I pay for them:
Hung Up by Hunter Harris, an absolutely incredible, funny, sharp newsletter about pop culture
Room Snacks by Leila Cohan, an illuminating look at the process of TV writing
LA Weather by Tess Lynch, beautifully-written essays about, ostensibly, LA Weather, but so much more. I save these to read late at night when it’s all quiet, they are so good. She’ll be launching a paid version soon - subscribe now!
A BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Second Place by Rachel Cusk, which is so chockablock with page-by-page revelations that I have to throw the book down in my lap and stare cross-eyed, mouth open, into the middle distance at least every 3 pages. For fans of: art’s powerful breadth, being frustrated by entitled men, societal isolation, and a uniquely middle-aged sense of unsure footing.