I'm Still Here

Nine years ago, I curled into my husband on a tiny pull-out "bed" in our son's room at Mary Bridge Children's Hospital, settling in for a second night (after an entirely sleepless first night) as we waited to understand why he had gone into sudden kidney failure. It was the first week of school, days teachers are strictly not allowed to miss, and suddenly that didn't matter at all.

One year ago, I stood at the shore of Lake Washington and watched my husband and son take flips off the diving board attached to the floating dock on the last day before it would be dismantled and dragged to shore for the season. It was the last weekend before the start of another school year, and I felt okay. I felt good. Because what is more joyful than watching my boys toss themselves into the water, all lanky limbs and unselfconscious energy, again and again? 

Two years ago, as we returned fully to in-person school in a brand-new building after a year-and-a-half apart, I swallowed my own anxiety as much I could to help my children with theirs. I also swallowed my rage, which was close to the surface all the time. How could it not be, as a public school teacher who had been vilified for the past year in the media and among previously supportive folks in my own life? Or as a proud mama of both a new middle schooler whose last day of in-person school was halfway through fourth grade AND a fucking fantastic and openly queer kiddo who braved a brand-new school after COVID cut short her time with the classmates she'd known since kindergarten? As a human navigating a world in which folks who claimed to love her kids actively chose violence with their votes?

Well, I didn't really swallow it. I wrote. Therapy and years of self-interrogation have taught me, among other things, how to understand what I am feeling. Trust, when I melt down over crumbs on the kitchen counter or any other stupid thing, I know what it's really about. (Also, sometimes it really is about the crumbs. Love me or leave me.) 

I wrote my rage after an acquaintance asked me how I was doing, and I was honest because we were friends, kind of. And then she told me I couldn't even begin to understand true anxiety during COVID with a very young child. 

Two years later, I'm not as angry; I also remember when I thought I had invented pregnancy and parenthood, when it was all so much more performative. Because it could be. When your kids are little, you can insert parenting into every conversation, the hilarity and the horror. Even the horror leads to a sense of camaraderie, to shared laughter and a string of "Been there, Mama!" comments. But oh, in that moment, what I wished I could have said (even as I knew the gulf between us was too vast to cross in a meaningful way then). Some things get so much easier, yes. But it can also be so much lonelier. The joy, the pain, the hilarity, the heartbreak, the fear -- it all gets stronger. More, not less. 

Was I resentful? A little. I wanted to share my own depths: joy and heartbreak, love and fear. But it's no longer only my story to share, and it becomes something entirely different to bear. And often alone.

Sometimes, silences in a journal or a blog or any other space speak their own stories.

I document my life because storytelling is a thing I was born to do, though the where and the how shifts. I started writing in my first paper journal shortly before Christmas when I was in first grade, when I wrote passionately about the doll I hoped I would unwrap under the tree. I started my first online journal in college, weeks before graduation, and posted only to a select audience. I started this blog as a more public space to document motherhood, to share stories about my toddler for anyone who might be interested in that sort of thing. I was never really a Mommy Blogger -- at least, that wasn't what I was trying to do -- but I did start writing here when Mommy Blogging took off. I read everything Heather Armstrong posted, even long after she became less relatable, even after she posted her unhinged and anti-trans rant last August. When she took her life this spring, I wasn't surprised -- I don't know how anyone could have been -- but I did feel something I still struggle to explain.

I continue to write here, however sporadically right now, because it's what I do. Because I believe in reading and writing as a point of connection. Because small stories matter.

I guess this is all to say, I'm still here. I haven't ever stopped writing, and maybe more will be revealed.