Brittle

I feel brittle these days, a discomfiting awareness of angles and haste and chill. Each time I sit down to write, I freeze, erase, and leave. This is never a good sign, this drying up. Some of it is busyness, surely. Between holidays, teacher days, and illness, neither J nor O has had much in the way of full weeks of school since September. I need space and can’t seem to get it.

Parenting is a motherfucking bear. It is hard and relentless and it’s really easy to fuck up, and sometimes I just want to wash my hands of the enterprise. Yes, yes, yes, it’s wonderful and all that jazz, but the daily slog of thanklessness and question marks and laundry and limits is and feels mammoth.

I daydream often and in a deeply soulful way, of land and horizons that are away and vast. To space and slowness and kindness and quiet. To muddy Wellies and reinforced overalls and great gusts of wind.

Daily, I feel half here, half elsewhere.

I want to get off this hamster wheel and away from arrogant billionaires and lying terrors who are never held accountable and too much least-common-denominator behavior. I saw a headline recently about how worrisome it is that people are spending so much time alone, and I get the concern, yet I want to yell, “are you fucking kidding? Have you looked around and/or been in public lately?” There is only so much ugliness people can witness and take, both personally and societally, and shit, I understand the desire to hermit.

I want to have the time to feel bored. To make things, to finish a book, a lengthy thought.

I have a deeply-rooted sneaking suspicion that the world is on some epic, crucial fulcrum. You can keep Jonesing, struggle, or opt out. I prefer C.

When I was little, I wore dresses that twirled and I did not like to be dirty. I also did not like to be wet unless I chose to be wet, via shower, pool, or opted-into slip-n-slide. I woke up early to shower and style my hair, you would not have found me gardening.

And then, as life goes, and then just like Nanny always said, “you can bury your troubles in the garden.” And I’m in the dirt as often as possible, working quietly and trying to make space to hear the quiet inside voice that gets ignored on the regular.

I don’t think that I expected, when I was young, to change so much during life. But I have changed, in many ways. Maybe that’s what middle age is about: coming to terms with and choosing how to honor who you were, are, and may still become.

Anyway, this blog doesn’t seem particularly “good,” but at least it’s something, I suppose. Buon weekend, all.

Little good to say, so back to Ireland

Jack still doesn’t have a physics teacher so we’ve hired one (if that is not antithetical to the mission of public education…), I just watched a professional dog walker let four pups pee and crap all over my front garden (non-yard green space is EVERYWHERE around), a guy laid on his horn this morning when I stopped for a school bus letting elementary schoolers board, and I was nearly hit by another driver who seemed to feel it her right to turn left because she wanted to. Italy has elected a hard-core right-winger who cozies up to people like Steve Bannon, Berlusconi, and the other right-wing Italian political parties, trump is still not in jail, and high schoolers in VA are walking out en masse today because Gov Youngkin is trying to enact anti-transgender legislation. You go, students! I am totally with you!

I am really pretty sick of all this crap, and I am also sick of mosquitoes and still heartbroken over Federer’s retirement.

So, back to Ireland. We paused as I was about to share Day 6 of my Ring of Kerry tour. We began by driving through Cahersiveen, home of Monsignor O’Flaherty, a significant member of the Catholic resistance to Nazism during WWII. He was responsible for saving ~6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews! Thank you, Sir!

Then to Killorglin where, every August, the Puck Fair is held. As I learned, most Irish towns have annual festivals of which they are enormously proud. Killorglin’s is one of Ireland’s oldest festivals and involves men heading into the local mountains to capture (kindly) a wild goat and bring it back to town. There, a chosen girl anoints the goat king (King Puck), it is tied in the center of the festivities, and everyone drinks and celebrates (and cares for the goat) for three days. The goat is then returned to the spot it was found and released.

Signs were everywhere, for the Fair was quickly approaching. I was quite sorry to miss it, frankly, but maybe another time. As you can see in this article and the following photo from said article, it was extremely hot at this year’s festival and King Puck received hourly vet visits and plenty of cold water and shade. Delightful!

I do regularly wonder if the chosen goat is enormously confused during its three days away from its flock, if it is then happy to return, and if the others know and/or miss it during its absence. Hmm.

American kids and American guns

What if a gunman shot up your child’s school and what you had left were text messages? Or a shoe? Or just the memory of saying goodbye that morning? Or any of a number of things parents hold onto when they’ve lost their hearts.

I have been horrified by gun violence in America for years, and my kids have both had to participate in countless drills at school over those same years. Last spring, I happened to pick Oliver up from school just before a gunman opened fire on another school nearby. On our drive home, he received a message from a friend asking if he knew what was happening at Sidwell and in the neighborhood. The school locked down (many kids still there), police cordoned off all surrounding streets, helicopters flew in, and ultimately we found that Burke was being attacked. I remember Oliver and I sitting in our backyard, listening for hours to the rotors of the circling copters (we live close to school), and me thinking “shit this was close; keep it together for Ol.”

Yesterday morning, I received the first of the above texts from Jack. Halfway through our hour of exchange, I heard helicopters fly in. Shit.

J is at any age where I rarely share anything remotely private about him, but I feel the need to publish our exchange because it is both so simple and also everything. Only later yesterday afternoon, as we rearranged his room and put out his new plants, did we acknowledge to each other how scared we’d been.

I, he, all of us are so fucking sick of this.

One parent compiled some of what they heard their kids and their friends saying once home. Their words are lacerating, and I agree with them completely.

“Even though no one was hurt, it’s not true that nothing happened. Everyone was terrified. People were crying. It was so scary. I don’t want to go back tomorrow.

Don’t pretend like nothing happened. Why is everyone so numb to this? We are so ***king scared. This wasn’t a tornado warning. It’s not fine."

"If this is so terrible, treat it like something that’s terrible."

"If you go to school in America, this is going to happen. We have been training for this since kindergarten. That doesn’t mean that today felt like nothing. I thought there was a possibility of dying."

"Do you know how long an hour is when you think you are going to die?"

Why do put our children, parents, teachers through this? Why do we accept this as ok? Guns are worth this? “Freedom” -such a bastardized word now- is worth this?

Ultimately, thankfully, there was no gun. But there could have been. And look what the threat of one did. And for good reason. The odds aren’t really in the kids’ favor.

Another day of school lost. Another hope of normalcy lost. Kids hiding in kilns (yesterday). Kids showing substitute teachers how to lower the blinds and properly lock the doors (yesterday). Kids shushing each other (yesterday; all the time). Teachers finding long poles to wield should an intruder break in (yesterday; all the time). Parents showing up at school, terrified (yesterday; all the time). Parents and kids texting, with fear slipping into the efforts to mask it with love and strength (yesterday; all the time).

Today, a long-term sub Jack has didn’t show up. He’d called a kid a hideous slur, so good riddance, but shit. Jack said, so casually it was like a sharp knife to soft butter, “yesterday I could have died, and today I have no teacher.”

What are we doing? WHAT ARE WE DOING?