Everything in Life is Slowing Down While a Virus Speeds Up

Evenings in suburbia are so quiet and with canvases like a Rothko

Dear Reader
Writing in a pandemic…

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What Can You Say?

Bill Callahan: I’m always trying to write. But a feeling that I’ve heard a lot of people echo back to me is that there’s nothing worth writing about, except the pandemic, and what can you say about the pandemic?

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Swimming I

While swimming topless with my husband, in a way I consider to be relatively discreet, my almost-teenage son swims past me and whispers scoldingly, Public decency!

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Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

Have you seen the film, The Lost Daughter? I adored it. (I took so long to finish this newsletter that by now everyone has seen it). What an amazing exploration of ambivalence in motherhood. And isn’t it interesting to hear how people interpret this ambivalence¹? Some seem to find it very difficult to understand.

For example.

She keeps Leda’s feelings unknowable - allowing Colman to develop her slow burning disintegration on screen.

And by the same reviewer. (Male reviewer, just saying).

It’s hard to maintain sympathy for a woman so deeply closed, even when she’s played by two great actors.

Interesting. Because, here is how he describes the younger version of this mother in the film.

Jessie Buckley plays the younger Leda, a free-spirited young mother, wife and scholar; her performance has more warmth, necessarily. She is playing the woman before the wounds.

Before the wounds? I think not. Compare it to this description of the same performance by a different (female) reviewer.

..younger Leda is frazzled, irritated, overwhelmed trying to balance her career ambitions with parenting two small clingy daughters. When a hot-shot celebrity scholar (Peter Sarsgaard) shows an interest in Leda's work, it's catnip to the downtrodden woman. She wants to be free, she is sick of responsibilities, sick of all of it.

Gosh. If you could relate to the ambivalence - this unresolvable tension between creativity and career with the unremitting demands of mothering young children in a nuclear family - how much more readily would you be able to sympathise with the mother?

I really liked this insight shared by the film’s Director, Maggie Gyllenhaal on how people want to treat this kind of ambivalence.

I think it's very difficult, even for adults, to hold the ambivalence of parents and mothers in their mind. And so I think we've seen lots of films and television shows where the spectrum of what's normal is pretty slim. And, in fact, I think despair, terrible anxiety, confusion, along with the kind of heart-wrenching ecstasy is all a part of the spectrum of normal.

There's a whole tradition of movies about crazy women by great directors with phenomenal actresses ... there's some fascination with watching very interesting, powerful women go crazy. This movie is not that. This movie is about offering and challenging the audience to see if, as sane people, we can relate to her.

My favourite piece on the film, so far, is this one by Emily Gould in Vanity Fair because she talks about something important in women making art about motherhood. The piece also includes a link to a video break-down of a scene in the film by Gyllenhaal that is well worth a watch² as well as these quotes.

In most films, a child’s bath time symbolizes tender innocence and womblike safety. But this film, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, captures the essence of bath time’s reality. You are on your knees, back bent at a weird angle, counting the minutes until the slog is over. But if you turn away at the wrong moment, your babies could slip under the water. This is motherhood: interminable stretches of boredom spiked with bursts of existential horror. It’s enough to drive anyone off the deep end.

Movies often deploy mothers and children less as characters than as shorthand: Moms represent all-encompassing love, kids stand in for vulnerability. In The Lost Daughter and two other new films with mothers at their core, symbolism and sentimentality are put aside in favor of nuance and realism. Instead of reassuring audiences that mommy is always a bastion of safety, these filmmakers have created mother heroines who are unpredictable, erratic, and even a little bit frightening.

And.

All of these films present their mothers as full human beings, even when their needs are structurally opposed to those of their children—something that is rarely depicted, maybe because it is still barely acknowledged as real. An indelible scene in The Lost Daughter shows young Leda (Jessie Buckley) beset by her daughters, struggling to get work done as they misbehave. The older one hits her, and we sense her rage as she puts her into bed for a time-out, then slams the French doors of the bedroom so hard that a pane of glass shatters, shocking them both. It’s hard to explain how, exactly, this is accomplished, but Gyllenhaal’s camera somehow withholds judgment of Leda in this moment. Lashing out is not illustrative of her being a “bad mother,” nor does it make her sympathetic, a victim of her untenable circumstances. It is just, the film argues, something that happens.

Watching this scene, I felt a sense of recognition so profound it’s best described as revolutionary.

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My Own Thoughts on the Frightening Bits of Motherhood

My latest article for The Guardian was published this week.

These years in the thick of raising teenagers are a little like the first years of parenthood. You, once again, feel overwhelmed and incompetent. There is also the aloneness.

Sometimes, when I admit to another parent that this is hard, harder than I expected, they lower their heads near mine and, with eyes widened, whisper urgently about something very worrying they are contending with as a parent. Their voices convey the relief of an honest conversation but also, the ache of big problems that cannot be immediately fixed for a child.

The aloneness we felt when we were raising babies was about maintaining the façade that babies weren’t softening us too much or that the days were filled with nothing but joy. Now, the aloneness is about being discreet. Teenagers have a right to privacy and rebirth as they muddle along. While adolescent impulsiveness is entirely predictable, poor choices are still judged very harshly by the rest of the world.

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Little Meaningless Delights

Hey, Anne Carson writes a gratitude journal.

CARSON: Yes, endlessness involving a lot of disinfectant. Speaking of COVID journals, a cheesy thing I started doing during the pandemic was making a gratitude list. You know, that psycho-therapeutic mechanism whereby at the end of the day you try to think of all the things in the day that you’re grateful for, to counteract despair and depression. As cheesy as it is, it’s really effective. I liked doing that.

DEAN: How micro-detailed did you go? Was it like, “I’m grateful for my cup of tea this morning,” or “grateful for the blue jay that just flew past”? Things like that?

CARSON: The more micro it is, the more beneficial, I found. You just go back into these little meaningless delights of everyday life, and it makes you feel like a Buddhist.

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Swimming II

My husband, my friend and me are all swimming at night in another friend’s pool. That friend’s teenage son is walking bored around the pool in the darkness with a hood pulled up over his head. He waves something in his hand, maybe a stick, and suddenly sings a Gregorian chant to us. It is one of the loveliest moments in my life.

File this under Reasons for Incorporating Teenagers More into Your Life.

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Modesty

Have you seen @garden_marcus clips on Instagram?

Honestly, I love that man and his garden. It’s not just the way he ties reflections on kindness and patience to his gardening, it’s the sheer modesty of his garden. Beautiful gardens like @thelaundrygarden are an absolute pleasure to look at, but now is a time when we’re acutely aware of all the lopsided advantages it takes to have a garden like that, right³?

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Who Am I?

Darling, who am I to you?

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Slow Work

This in The New Yorker is a good contribution to the big discussion on rethinking capitalism. But the thing I really took from it is not just that slower work requires genuinely slower productivity (ie. time to prioritise, bosses), but to do that we need more highly skilled bosses! I will say that again - we. need. more. highly. skilled. bosses. You work too hard because your boss is not skilled enough⁴ to prioritise.

The bigger challenge of Slow Productivity is that it requires systems to manage work that’s not yet assigned. If you’re a boss, and an important task pops to mind—“We need to update our Web site with new client testimonials!”—you can no longer simply e-mail the request to one of your underlings and move on with your day. Slow Productivity would require you to log this item into a system where it can be properly prioritized and ultimately assigned when the right person has the needed time available. If it’s a significant project, perhaps it can be stored on a kanban-style board that tracks both pending and ongoing work. When someone finishes an objective, a collective decision can be made about what to assign her next, and the board is then updated for all to see. Smaller administrative tasks might be better served by a more direct system. Imagine everyone on your team puts aside one hour a day for completing small tasks and answering quick questions. Further imagine that they each post a shared document containing a sign-up sheet for a day’s block, including only a limited number of slots. If you want someone on your team to, say, give you his availability for an upcoming client visit, you must find a free slot in which to record this request. He’ll then see it and give you an answer during that day’s administrative block—freeing him from the burden of having to manage all of these obligations in a single, overwhelming pile of unstructured urgency. All of this, of course, would be a pain. It would be so much easier in the moment to simply e-mail your colleague to assign him a project or ask him a quick question. But in the world of work what’s easiest is rarely what’s most effective. The downsides of haphazardly inflating work volumes are sufficiently severe that we should be willing to entertain elaborate solutions, even if they are, at first, complicated and annoying to implement.

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Slow Food

I will tell you who is not embracing the slow food movement - pied currawongs. Lots of wildlife struggle in suburbia, but not the currawong. So, it is interesting that a bird experiencing such abundance in my garden has embraced the short cut of a cat biscuit in spite of it inevitably not meeting its nutritional requirements. I guess it’s the perfect storm of a very bold bird and a very disinterested cat.

Maybe the currawongs are just trying to finish raising adolescent chicks and are at the point where they’re running out of enthusiasm for this year’s breeding season. They are also nature’s step-parents, raising channel-billed cuckoo chicks left in their nests, so possibly I should be more sympathetic about that effort.

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Sitting in Our Rooftop Garden

Sitting in our rooftop garden
looking down below
Sitting in our rooftop garden
waiting for the sun

Isn't it lovely watching
a plane go by
What a lovely couple
are you and I

Sitting in our rooftop garden
a few drops of rain
The lights in the city blinking on
just the same

No sugar in my coffee
how's your tea
In our rooftop garden
above the city

Let's not see any letters
let's not answer the phone
Let's just pretend that
there's no one at home

In our rooftop garden
in our rooftop garden
In our rooftop garden
up on the roof

- Lou Reed

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Congratulations, He’s a Boy, Again, Again

My son is about to become an adolescent. He’s been raised for the past decade and a bit of his life in a thoroughly modern, feminist way. Wearing his hair long. Nail polish when he wanted. Tutus and cowboy boots as a toddler. While being quite a boyish boy by nature, he’s also pretty, so everyone has always assumed he’s a girl. He’s not been particularly insulted by that because like that quote from Iggy Pop, he has not been raised to see femininity as shameful.

Recently, many in his friendship group hit puberty and found queer identity. My son has celebrated their self expression. He’s also embraced their language.

My resolution for this year is to stop being misgendered, he told me without irony. It made me chuckle. So, he just got a shorter haircut⁵.

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Perhaps I Love Too Easily

Lynette said to me, ‘How very short your hair is! But it shows off your beautiful eyes.’

I could see that Julianne had also fallen in love. I think women carry this faculty into later life: the faculty for love, I mean. Men will never understand it till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never. Even today, there are ten or twenty women I love: for a turn of phrase or wrist, for a bruised-looking ankle where the veins have blossomed out, for a squeeze of the hand or for a voice on the end of the phone. I would no more go to bed with any of them than I would drown myself; and drowning is my most feared form of death. Perhaps I love too easily; I can say Lynette has left a mark on my heart.

- An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel

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Seeing/Being Seen

My son and I really enjoyed watching Reservation Dogs together, if you are looking for a comedy series with some surrealism and some heart to enjoy with young teenagers. This is a nice discussion of the series in The New Yorker and the significance of stories about dispossession being made by Indigenous artists. (If you want delight look up Indigenous reactions to Reservation Dogs on YouTube or TikTok).

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This Too Shall Pass

A father from the other side of the world is talking briefly to me about his parenting trials. His teenager has COVID and while he is telling himself it will all be ok, he is bracing himself, too. We all are.

I have never felt more like a single parent, he says. I know exactly what he means. We are both now repartnered, but I know exactly what he means.

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On Managing Expectations

Tig fist-bumped herself into the crowd, much happier there than with her own family, Willa noted with the habitual pang. A thousand times she’d asked her mother after this wildling was born, could a mother and child just have bad chemistry? She’d spent years putting careful love letters into Tig’s psychic mailbox when what the girl seemed to want in there was birdsong, or a bucket of frogs.

And.

She ended up walking a little distance behind Tig and her friends, watching with a voyeur’s lonely heart.

And.

“I thought,” she said, “eventually, we’d get to stop worrying and retire in some kind of reasonable comfort. You two would come and visit us. With grandkids. From places where you had your own houses and jobs.”

“Uh-oh,” Tig said. “Mom’s having a visitation from the Ghost of Capitalist Fantasies Past”.

- Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver⁶

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The Ubiquity of ‘Boundaries’

This really touched me. Drew Barrymore⁷ in a recent interview:

I have... since my kids were born, other parents, schools and society have brought up the word 'boundaries' and every single time I heard that word, I felt bad because I did not grow up with them.

So I had no resources or experiences to pull for what that even is, let alone how to execute it and be confident about it. And it just– it's a word that's thrown around with such confidence and at times, arrogance and a lot of the times, the way in which people say it tonally, as if it's something you are already supposed to know.

I didn’t have parents, I was the parent to them. It was all totally upside-down. So I didn’t know what I was doing. When people would talk to me about parenting I felt like an outcast. 

It took years for me to pluck up the courage to say, “Can you speak to me as someone who is desperately trying to learn? Can you teach me?”

There is so much pressure in life, particularly on mothers, to get it right, to get it perfect. It confuses me when people get so righteous about parenting. It makes me feel defensive and small.

I WANT EVERYBODY TO LIVE VERY CLOSE. I WANT TO BORROW, I WANT TO BIKE OVER IN HOUSE SHOES FOR A GAME OF CARDS ON THE PORCH WITH SOME TEA OR DIGESTIF. I WANT ANIMALS AROUND AND WIND CHIMES ABOVE OUR HEADS. SOMEBODY IS COOKING, I BROUGHT THE BREAD. PLAYERS COME AND GO, A CANDLE IS LIT TO KEEP AWAY THE BUGS. DOGS NEED TO BE FED, “TURN THE RECORD OVER”. SONG PLAYS THROUGH THE SCREEN DOOR, CHATTER TRICKLES OUT FROM THE KITCHEN. SOMEONE COMES BACK FROM SURFING, PULLS A BAG OF OYSTERS OUT FROM THE BACKSEAT OF THE CAR, LOOKIE HERE. THERE IS LITTLE DISTINCTION BETWEEN WHAT’S MINE AND YOURS. WHERE WE SLEEP TONIGHT AND UNDER WHOSE ROOF MATTERS NOT VERY MUCH. WHEN WE PART, WE SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN IN THE WATER OR WALIING TO THE MAILBOXES. WHEN WE STAY TOGETER: ON THE SOFA, ON THE FLOOR, INTO DEEP LISTENING AND BURNING MIDNIGHT OIL, THEN IN THE MORNING ONE OF US WILL RISE AND CUT SOME FRUIT. MAKE SOME COFFEE AND TEA, BUT NOT THE SAME PERSON WHO DID IT LAST TIME BECAUSE IN THIS HOUSE WE TAKE TURNS. IN THIS HOUSE WE DANCE.

- Anna Fusco

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From the Pastime Comes the Purpose

This is lovely advice for living this year from Philippa Perry⁸.

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Joyful Retirement

Marius van Dokkum’s paintings of a full life ageing.

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Next Film I Want to See

Bless Pedro Almodovar for his enduring interest in motherhood and also, for the opportunity to practice my Spanish. And for this film poster.

1. Also interesting is that the film is quite layered and absent of a lot of explanation, so like a good artwork each person can get their own insight from it. For instance, my friend really took from the film its exploration of solitude versus loneliness because of the kinds of things in her life she is puzzling over right now. Whereas I really got from the film that reflection on the impact choices made in the early years of mothering can have on your relationships with children when they are young adults.

2. All these reviews include a lot of spoilers, so I’d recommend maybe not reading them before you see the film.

3. I currently feel similarly about looking at beautiful women who have very involved beauty routines. No judgement. I just find I feel even more tired than I already feel, when I look at them. And, of course, their purpose in existing is not to please me, but when the intention of the image is to gain my attention - they’re influencing or being art or something - I find it has the opposite effect on me. It’s not escapism or aspiration for me right now. Frankly, I am more transported by the beauty of women lounging.

In some ways middle age, with this stage of career and the raising of teenagers, is reminding me of a type of ‘slowing down’ that was required of me when I had babies and was breastfeeding all the time. I have, once again, folded inward. I am focused on immediate proximity.

Or maybe it is just the times? Everything gets quieter in pandemics.

4. Or possibly in some cases not equipped to properly prioritise.

5. He is in a very arty friendship group where being straight and identifying as the gender you were born is currently the minority. What perspective that must give him. The beginning of adolescence is such a time of over-calculation. It means he relishes some time away at D&D with his ‘straight boy’ friends, where he can be himself, or what is likely going to be him.. a straight boy, in an unconscious manner. But opportunities to experience not being the dominant culture are therefore also critical for him.

6. This series of amazing quotes came from another friend randomly sending them to me.

7. Gosh, a lot of celebrities in my newsletter this time. I think this is because I am on summer holidays and I am reading the internet, as well as books, at alarming rates.

8. I just read and loved her book, Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy.