First hugs & bad answers
Me to twitter: Does anyone have a Q I could A in this week’s newsletter? Otherwise it’ll all be about how fucked up it is that my toddler has a week of spring break.
Rachel: What’s the biggest space news that maybe got lost in the constant pandemic news cycle?
Me: Fuck if I know, I've been lost in the pandemic, too.
EB: I want to know more about all the animals sent to space!! (RIP Laika)
Me: I think it was all pretty fucked up, honestly.
Hannah: Has a baby ever gone to space
Me: Considering how many astronauts are military men, probably? (No they actually seem mostly fine, idk.)
Well that was a real exercise in diminishing my sense of my own expertise! We drove to my mom and stepdad's house on Sunday to pass the baby's week off of daycare with a little more support and to make up for a year without hugs. (I have a whole new sense of the weight of parenthood after hugging my mom for the first time in a year, how desperately I needed that, and the responsibility of being that for my son.) But it was our first time being away from home with him as a proper toddler, not a baby, and the duffel bag of toys we brought wasn't enough to get him to stay still for five minutes in a new place, and he turned out to be incapable, there, of sleeping past 5:15pm. So we cut things short and drove home yesterday. The last hour of the drive was in the pouring rain, and I had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel not for safety (I took care of that by driving ten under the limit) but to channel my response to the baby's very fair vocal displeasure at two hours in a car seat.
We also saw my grandmother for the first time in almost two years (it's easy to track time by pictures of visits with the baby; I have none with her since he was about six weeks old, even though we lived for most of that time just an hour apart). She's 91 and lives alone, still in the house my mom grew up in, full of her paintings and my zaide's ceramics. I wish she didn't live alone, but this year I guess it turned out to be safer than the alternatives. But when you don't see your grandmother for two years, the fact of her aging is much realer than it can be over phone calls or through your mom's reports. I'm so glad I got to see her, got to give her time with her great-grandson, even if he did spend a lot of that time absolutely shrieking his head off in her back yard. Something about this trip triggered his evolution into his next form—I keep hoping it was just the compounded disruptions of a break from school and a trip to a new place and time with new people, but he might just be this loud and frenetic now for a while. He inherited my lungs and Mariah Carey's upper range.
So we're home and he slept til 6:30 and I picked up groceries and feel reassured to have bananas and raspberries and all the things a toddler needs, which we also had at my mom's house but now they're in all the places I know to find them, and I can be on my own couch and my own bed. If you haven't already planned your first post-vaccination trip away to visit family, I might gently suggest you make it shorter than you were thinking of, especially if you have a small child, especially if you haven't socialized in person with the people who know you best in the world for a year or so. Or maybe we need to not leave ourselves wanting more, after a year of too much wanting. Eat them up past the point of satiety. We sat around the table after dinner talking about music and my mom's teenage years and my sister's job and just everything, and it was amazing and exhausting. I don't really want to have paced ourselves more gradually, but we ripped off the bandaid and I still feel raw. (Did I mention the baby woke up at 5:15 every morning? I should probably be giving that more credit. We ripped off the bandaid and then the baby woke up and rubbed sandpaper on my skin.)
This week I came across some profound wisdom that originated with a 14-year-old. She'd told her mom, "I feel like I'm a broken phone. I keep trying to charge but as soon as I unplug the cable"—I'm paraphrasing—"my battery's empty again." I think the things that charge and deplete us have changed, too. Maybe temporarily, maybe forever. Every time I see someone thinking they can predict how socializing after(/at the tail end) of the pandemic is going to feel—"I'm going to french kiss every friend I see," "Is anyone feeling anxious about going back to parties?????"—I see us trying to imagine the unimaginable. No one knows how any of this is going to feel. Introverts are going to be surprisingly ecstatic, previously calm people will be struck by panic attacks. Good things will feel bad, weird things will feel awesome, we probably won't even know how we feel.
Hugging my mom for the first time in a year, though. I hope you get a hug like that, from whoever it is for you.