Both of my kids have been home sick this week. Yesterday, they asked for soup. But of course, they have different favorite soups, so I made two: a pot of homemade tomato and a pot of chicken noodle, after I walked the dog at the end of the day. One of the pots is huge, white,heavy Le Creuset, and full of enough noodle soup to feed a family of ten, I think.
We’ll be eating soup all weekend. I’ll freeze some in the freezer I got a year and a half after the divorce. Mostly, I was the one who bought the new things because I moved to the smaller house, and the things we had fit in the bigger house, the much bigger house. But this time, I was able to fit the small chest freezer I’d gotten from someone I knew for a small amount of money when we were married. And so now, finally, I have somewhere to put the extra food I always make, because I cannot learn how to cook for one. Or three.
But it works out with the freezer, because I can eat the small serving sizes I freeze from the over-prepared food when my kids are not here.
This week at work I hit the post-honeymoon period of a new job. In that space, I really see my own patterns. I saw it in the first stage, too: my enthusiasm, my excitement, my motivation, my inspiration that I bring to things, kind of like a lion after prey. And then this time of almost discomfort and misalignment always arises, for all of us in our jobs. This is often called the hangover stage. The place where we begin to see the systemic issues. The place where we want to be seen and heard better than we are, where we want to not be the new shiny thing but the person with merit whose ideas will have impact.
I had my first phone call from someone above me to help me see something I did. It’s always humbling, though hopefully we get better at taking the feedback and integrating it into our actions, as well as forgiving ourselves for being human.
And in the context of all this, the spring has retreated behind 30-degree mornings and rain and gray, the sun peeking out only a few times. I’m trying to navigate my way into normalcy while the U.S. government is falling apart, being intentionally dismantled in ways that take my breath away and make me worry for the future. That’s generic to say, but what can you say? I write letters. I sign petitions. I make choices with how I spend my money. I join committees that talk about what we might do to protect the rights of groups I care deeply about, whose rights are being taken away.
It is a strange, strange experience to live all of these realities at once. The parent taking care of her sick kids. The woman letting the remnants of a marriage go. One of my best friends turned 61 this week. I’m experiencing all of these things, all at once, and thinking about how complex it is. So much more complex than most of what say would imply.
How do we hold the complexity just enough to be vulnerable but still powerful? To not be shut down by the magnitude of complexity or overwhelmed by the piles and piles of mundane tasks we have to maintain in the meantime.
I know, like the stages of a new job, there are stages to living, both in the ages we progress through, the stages of life, and the rhythm of the day-to-day. The ups and the down, down, downs. And the totally mediocre, boring stretches.
In the years that led up to my divorce there was COVID and shutdown, leading an organization through that time, two job transitions, two moves, a doctorate degree. I remember longing for boredom, hoping that one day again I could find it. And when I met it, when I hit it face-on, after I turned in my thesis and received my doctorate, had bought a home, bought a car, and been through all of the moves, that boredom was one of the heaviest things I had ever welcomed back into my life.
I’ve learned to sit in it. To try to be present and absorb the things that are there. To rest and to write and to read. And to quite simply stare at the fish aquariums I’ve acquired as a new habit. They bring me a strange and subtle joy—the capacity to tend to living creatures and small little ecosystems that depend on me, that teach me what they need, that hold me accountable to something I don’t quite know.
I wonder what the metaphor is here. In the soup. In the freezer. In the fish. In the weather. In the rhythm.
I wonder.
