Last night on my walk I heard the sound of the cicadas and I suddenly realized that it is nearly late summer. This year has at once crept along and also flown by-very much like my years spent at home with my babies. The days would stretch on, especially in the very beginning when it seemed like I just finished breastfeeding and suddenly she would be hungry again and I honestly felt like I would be this lumpy mess of a human being who would manage not one thing in a day for the rest of my life.
I tell this story a lot, but when Betsy was about 2 a friend of mine was talking to me about her teenage daughter putting on her coat and I said, “I just cannot imagine that there will be a day when Betsy can just put on her coat.”
And now in the summer of 2020 we are teaching Betsy how to drive.
It goes so fast.
Anyway, this morning I was reading this insightful (and quite funny) piece on Grub Street called “Life After Sourdough,” and it reminded me exactly of what life first felt like 5 years ago.
I have a terrible tendency to loop everything back to my divorce- it is the prism through which I filter everything, I know, but the thing is, living through this unprecedented time feels like everyone is going through a grief so very similar to mine at the end of my marriage- as the year goes on, and we have to accept change that we did not want, we grieve so hard this thing that we have no control over, that we cannot change no matter how much we wish things were different.
This article, in which Rachel Sugar discusses how four months ago she was excited about her sourdough starter, about how she has tried to find a hobby that is useful and time consuming but also sort of easy- “That would require constant attention but also demand nothing.”
It hit a cord.
Five years ago, I wanted to fill all of my time with something- I tried so many different things. I took my life down to the studs and built it back up again, trying new things, pushing myself past old boundaries that I had invented for myself. It sounds sort of pleasant, stated that way, but it was hard.
I was unmoored from all that I knew myself to be. That is a scary place to be.
What has become of that is who I am now. I am a much more confident person because I have tried so many different things, and failed a lot, and I truly believe that most things can at least be understood if not mastered by reading and asking a ton of questions.
I’m never going to know the answer to the question that I’m searching for- as Rachel says, “It can’t stay like this, I’d said for months, but it turned out it sort of could.”
Sometimes I tell myself, “This is just a thing that happened. There isn’t any great mystery to it- people get divorced all the time.” And sometimes I look back at the past five years, and see all of this change in how I approach the world, and I’m just floored that I ever think that it just happened.
"It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
