Presence
Dear Reader
I am thinking a lot about home. This month’s newsletter is about that.
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Starlight
All night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.
Ted Kooser, 2012
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Christmas Night Sky
December nights in the subtropics are blinking Christmas lights and flashes of lightning. It’s beautiful.
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Rooms
Twice in my life I’ve cleaned up the life of another because they left before doing it themselves.
Mostly, I wept their tears for them.
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About Our Italian Greyhound
My mother says he will be fine, he was bred for neurotic women.
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Text From My Male Friend
Up for a chat or you in bed reading to your husband?
I love that this is his picture of us in the evening.
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My 12 Year Old Son on the Importance of Working with Autonomy
“Sometimes in group work I don’t put in any effort if I am being bossed around by another kid, he says. I am not getting micromanaged by someone six months younger than me. I am not having it”.
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Talking About Pocket Money
Me: I don’t make the pocket money for the kids about doing chores. It is just money to live life, because we’re all part of this together. But, if you want more money than that then you need to do extra work.
Husband: It’s Andie’s UBI1.
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Auditing
Lately, I am doing a lot of introspection about my mothering. I traced my regrets all the way back to the first year. I now wish I had given up dairy. At the time I fought the suggestion because I thought I was already giving up enough to be a mother. Food allergies in breastfed babies felt to me like excessive criticism of oneself. But, turns out she is lactose intolerant. So, the colic was probably stomach pain.
That’s probably enough mother guilt for 2021.
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On the Young Adult Child Visiting Home
First Thanksgiving
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world - which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing - whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air - I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.
-Sharon Olds
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Is ‘Good Enough Mothering’ Good Enough?
Recently, I have seen three different people critically evaluate the idea of ‘good enough mothering’ and so, I am thinking that the concept is having a bit of a zeitgeist moment.
Dr Becky Kennedy spoke about not using ‘good enough’ to avoid accountability:
We all need to be self-aware enough to ask, Where do I fall on that scale? Being “good enough” makes me feel like, “I’m going to mess up; I’m going to do things, and at least some of those times I’m going to repair after”.
I don’t even have to be perfect at the repair. But the repair moments are huge. I hear what you’re saying, though: There’s no perfect parent. But I also don’t think “good enough” parenting is defined by Eh, it probably ends up OK. We have to hold ourselves accountable.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke2 spoke about the consequences of denying the existence of bad mothering, and how that therefore denies the damage done by it, and also, the possibility of exploring its causes.
It’s a cultural myth that all mothers do their best.
The capacity for love (in our society) has been very damaged.
Families are fracturing because it is very difficult to raise children and work. We are all trying to survive and we’ve lost a lot of intimacy. Capacity for intimacy was generally higher in the past. But, we've been in a long period of ‘fucked up’ parenting. If an advocate of family intimacy, then can’t be in favour of the 1950s nuclear family model either.
Being loved gives you a sense of your own self-worth.
Disconnection from one’s children is the cause of so much misery for people. Strengthen the attachment with your babies for the sake of your future happiness.
Dr Petra Bueskens gave a guest lecture for the Child Psychoanalytic Association of Australia that I attended recently, and described how brittle we are at the moment in the face of any criticism of mothering.
Positioning the neglectful parent as the mother is now considered taboo.
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On the Role of Self-Reflection in Parenting
This whole interview with Dr Becky Kennedy in The New York Times by David Marchese is excellent! But here is a particular gem.
People say to me, “How do I not have an entitled kid?” But entitlement, what does that mean? It’s the entitlement to not feel frustrated. Because when a kid is like, “You didn’t get me a first-class ticket,” it’s not that they expect “first class” so much as they feel that they shouldn’t have to be frustrated. It’s so easy to look at kids like that and think, What a [expletive] kid. But I would take the other side: That kid must be having a terrifying experience in their body to feel something that they’ve learned they should never feel. Using money to always avoid disappointment can lead to that. This is not, like, Families with money, poor you. But those parents almost have to think, Where is frustration built into my kid’s life? So that when those frustrating moments come, the kid’s body says, “Oh, this is part of living; I know how to do this” instead of, “This should not be happening; I have no skills to deal with it.” Which is actually very sad.
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It’s a Time For Brutal Honesty
Yes, it is entirely possible to transform the ways we work and to shift expectations around our jobs and careers. Our current dysfunctional relationship to work is not some natural state; it’s a culture we’ve forced on ourselves. My favorite bit of research from the book is a testimonial from a 19th-century English hosiery manufacturer, who wrote about how workers absolutely hated the constrictions of a newly industrialized environment:
I found the utmost distaste . . . on the part of the men, to any regular hours or regular habits . . . the men themselves were considerably dissatisfied, because they could not go in and out as they pleased, and have what holidays they pleased, and go on just as they had been used to do.
We’ve always bristled at the way work confines and restricts us. If we harness that fundamental yearning, change is possible! But. We can’t do it alone. This is why the question—What can people do to cultivate a better sense of work/life balance?—is so frustrating.
There are plenty of things a person can and must do to craft a healthy, flexible relationship to work. You can start by honestly assessing how much you work, and compare that to an honest assessment of how much work there really is to be done (for example, is some of that work performative?). You can then sort out which work is rigid and which is flexible and begin to craft routines around it. You can take a brutally honest look at what you value about your personal life and your job and find ways to bring that relationship into balance. Personally, this process has been really difficult and has included the revelations that I’ve been, at times: a shitty friend, an absent partner, so laser-focused on a narrow definition of career success that I barely even know what I like outside of being told I’m “doing a good job” at my job. If you’re honest and intentional, it’s a hard but ultimately rewarding exercise.
But it only goes so far. All the hard planning and self-inventorying and commitment to decentering work and cultivating a rich personal life means very little if you are trapped in a system that refuses to give you space, and actively rewards those who refuse to erect boundaries between their work and personal lives.
From Charlie Warzel in ‘We Are Running in ‘Degraded Mode’ in The Atlantic.
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On the Relationship Between Coziness and Messiness
Whatever the origins of the aesthetic of coziness online might be, it started out as a feeling, not a collection of objects. The aesthetic tries to conjure the feeling, and I have two questions: How well does it succeed, and why do we want that feeling so bad?
Instagram representations of coziness are primarily about safety and comfort, but they are also about order and control. Everything in its right place. The house is cleaned, the candles lit. No unexpected intrusions can disturb the feeling. Just as important as what we see -- the couch, the socks, the candle -- are the things we don’t see: Mess, disorder, the unpredictable reality of the world outside.
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I also think of coziness as a heightened, almost erotic feeling of belonging. You are in your own space, and if there’s anyone in there with you, they are allies who truly know you, because you wouldn’t share this sock-footed intimacy with just anyone. This is, I think, the melty core of coziness. This is the dragon we’re all chasing.
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Instagram does a bad job of representing the actual experience of being human. That’s where the overlap between my momfluencers research and this coziness obsession of mine is located — around the impossibility of expressing the actual experience through pictures on a screen. Family life is so thick with meaning, and I am forever fascinated with the way we expect momfluencers to do that justice with tools — their iPhones — that are completely inadequate. Same deal with coziness. In both cases, what’s being attempted is the commodification of the uncommodifiable. It’s challenging work.
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I’m reminded of an edition of Blackbird Spyplane from earlier this year where Jonah is basically giving the most rigid taste-cops of his flock permission to spill wine on their own tables.
He argues in favour of the “Life Well-Lived Mindset” (L.W.L.M.) and, Hashem bless him, he’s trying to help. Some people who spend a ton of money making their spaces perfect have no idea how to go about living in their spaces. Circulating in the rarefied milieu that he does, I’m sure Jonah has met his share of these types, and with the trademark gentleness and humour of BBSP, he’s suggesting to them that obsessive control over their material surroundings might be antithetical to a feeling of convivial belonging! Make a little mess, Tyler! It feels nice.
Cozy season on social media might be a cry for help.
From Kathryn Jezer-Morton in her newsletter, Mothers Under the Influence.
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Talking About the Shadow Self
Me: In a strange way, I think she wants all this chaotic energy. Maybe she missed it. Moving there has given her instability.
Husband: And we shall call it ‘therapeutic instability’.
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On the Problem with Nuclear Families
I’m not a huge fan of Brooks’ conservatism, but this is a very useful article for discussion of a few of my favourite topics - connection and individualism; inequality and mothering; capitalism and feminism; and reciprocity and emotional intimacy - and also, because it ends with a call for redefining kinship3 and ‘forged families’, which is a big part of my own thinking these days.
Some key points below:
When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.
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A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.
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Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We’ve seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We’ve seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality—all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can’t quite return to a more collective world.
His article raises two important, and somewhat, contradictory points too:
Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.
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Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up, told me recently. “The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of ‘the village’ to take care of each other. Here’s an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother’s house, their grandparents’ house, and their uncle’s house and sees that as ‘instability.’ But what’s actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child.”
From David Brooks in The Atlantic with ‘The Nuclear Family was a Mistake’.
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While Discussing Her Film/My Favourite Film of 2021
When she writes, she often sits on the great island of her bed and does nothing else. One reason she liked the Jungian dream work, she said, is that the analyst’s language matched some of her own philosophy. “She says it’s like throwing chum out, seeing what surfaces,” she said. This is what writing feels like for her. “It’s an amazing moment when you realize there’s a channel. In my case it was just like sitting down for four hours. That was it. Something comes to you. You write. You don’t read, you don’t use the phone, you don’t do anything else, because then the psyche starts to trust the time.”
“So many writers have an aversion to just sitting down and waiting,” I said.
Campion nodded and then paused. “I think it makes them afraid.”
From “Inside Jane Campion’s ‘Cinema of Tenderness and Brutality” in The New York Times Magazine by Jordan Kisner on ‘The Power of the Dog’.
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I Am Also Going to Watch the Peter Jackson Documentary, Get Back, With My Husband Because He Loves the Whole Chemistry of Making Music in Bands Together and For Me, Not So Insignificantly, Paul McCartney Was Also Having a Quite Hot Moment in His Life at That Time4
Things to love about this:
Scotland
Farms in Kintyre
Cups of tea and coffee
Being out with our cameras
Jumpers
Beards
Brown eyes
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Through Which Known and Strange Things Pass
Cole’s attention to the texture of things makes for extraordinarily vivid writing. He evokes doom in the paintings of Caravaggio and imaginative abundance in the photography of Marie Cosindas and Lorna Simpson. He conjures the sensory pleasure of having a human body when he writes about nature, nowhere more luxuriantly than in his essay Experience: “With my eyes I see the bright light on the water, with my ears hear the thrum and splash of the water, with my nose smell the grass and alpine flowers. I bring water to my mouth and I can taste its mineral intensity … My fingers touch the stones rough and smooth, the bedlike grass, the marblelike pebbles, the fugitive water.” For Cole, such moments in art and literature and nature are, in the words of Seamus Heaney, like a “hurry through which known and strange things pass”.
From Black Paper by Teju Cole review - a spark of hope in dark times by Simukai Chigudu in The Guardian.
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The Only Phone Messages I Listen To
Subscribe to Patti Smith’s phone messages. This is the best. Play them aloud, while you are pouring a cup of tea or coffee in the morning, like she is your mother. “Though things have been a bit scattered, you can count on me that I will keep in touch with you”. How reassuring.
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About Parenting Teenagers/Young Adults and How Exhausting It All Is
Mother/Artist Friend: “Like I know they’re amazing but also — fuck off”.
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On Trust
We’re paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Finally
Thank you for all the lovely messages. For some reason I am overcome with shyness whenever I receive them and so take forever to respond to them, but know that they make my day when I receive them, and that I love reading them.
Universal Basic Income.
I’m paraphrasing here because
Queer kinship is an excellent way of redefining this.
‘Get Back’ was one of the style aesthetics my husband and I used for planning our wedding outfits