Top five most popular posts of the year

I thought I’d throw the five most popular posts from the year back your way in case you missed them, or wanted to re-visit. And I’ll say this: I really can never predict what you’ll seize on. Which I LOVE. There is no algorithm! Just you, me, and lots of words and surprises.

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Without further ado, the top five of the year…

Countering tantrums with sacred attention, January 13, 2021

We need to see each other. We need to look with ten times the magnification with which we are looking at this tantrum. We need to celebrate each other’s steadfastness and resilience, our neighborliness and creativity. We have shown up for one another in quiet, slow, manatee-like ways for so many months. So many have died—of covid, yes, but also cancer and heart attacks and a thousand other things probably exacerbated by stress and loneliness.

So much has been lost. Beautiful things—like banter with strangers and bellying up to a bar to laugh and cry with a friend. But toxic things, too—so many delusions about this country shed. We are not as far along on our moral arc as we may have thought. We are not as in control, either. Control being, as we are being reminded now, an addiction of wounded, unwise souls.

Internally rearranged, March 31, 2021

It’s not that I can’t see the light down there at the end of the tunnel (call it herd immunity, call it 2022, call it whatever you want). Today my kid went to school for the first time in over a year in a real classroom with a teacher with a body and came home bouncing. She said it was “better than the beach.” I want her to run into that future full force, to enjoy every second of the visceral life she deserves.

But even as she crossed over the threshold into the school, part of me wanted to freeze the whole scene, to say something that would help her understand how completely awed I am by how she’s adapted. And that she’ll always have this—this year when she planted the doomed loquat and fell in love with multiplication and was mostly shockingly kind to her sister and the cat. The smokey skies and the talk of germs and the learning to ride a bike—it’s all inside of her now. It can’t be seen from the outside, but it’s hers forever.

Motherhood and multitudes, May 5, 2021

Being a mother is to be the center of a universe. In some ways, that’s beautiful. Sacred even. It deserves recognition and awe. But the truth is, I mean the scientific truth is: the universe, in fact, has no center. Turns out: “Ever since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding. But despite its name, the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion that burst outward from a central point of detonation.”

Mothers are not central points of detonation. We are stars, too. Big, bright stars that shed a lot of light on the little planets around us. Sometimes our true light isn’t understood or appreciated for years. Sometimes we barely honor its strangeness ourselves.

There is no going back, June 9, 2021

I think we are all watching ourselves breathe in the night right now. We are aware of how unpromised all of this actually is, but also exhausted from being so awake and so fucking grateful that—though so much is going wrong—we are still alive at all. Some of us are embracing the vigil, leaning towards the questions we first asked during this traumatic year: who do I actually want to be? how do I actually want to live and lead? what actually matters—not just to me, but to humanity?

The unbearable beauty of parenting, September 1, 2021

There is a humbling solidarity in the mundane parts of parenting; I know all parents struggle with maddening aspects of raising a human without a fully developed frontal lobe. But there is also a sacred solidarity in the transcendence; I know all parents have dwelled, even if just for a moment or two, in this thin place. They have looked at their children’s various appendages, or heard them say something, watched them sleep, and known that unbearable beauty.

More and more, I’m learning that when I stumble into one of these thin places with my children, my job is not to cling to it, but to fully take it in, let it overcome me. Surrender to the unbearable beauty. That’s what my life, in part, is for. Not to amass these moments, to objectify them, to try to orchestrate them (a fool’s errand), but to learn to fully experience them when they come, to let them work their way through my dumb flesh, to let them remind me why the precarity and pain of being alive at this particular time is 100% worth it for one moment of my children’s becoming.