Top posts of the year and more

One of my intentions, sometimes realized, sometimes not, is to fully metabolize my life, meaning, I try to honor the “endings.” When I publish a newsletter, for example, I often read it top to bottom in the same way I know you are on a Wednesday morning, just to feel what is going out into the world. When I leave my dad after a visit, I try to say a thoughtful and tender goodbye, not just rush out after looking at the clock on the wall. Before I go to bed each night, I try to tell my girls’ I love them and make them really feel it. I’m human, so of course sometimes I rush through things or forget to honor the moment, but I notice that I always feel better when I close the energetic loop.

So here I am, trying to do the same with this beautiful community. We’ve got another year of writing, reading, giving, learning, sharing, and muddling through it all together—isn’t that sweet? I really can’t possibly express my gratitude for the lot of you—the gorgeous comments that always make me smarter, the way you invest your hard-earned money in keeping this engine “coulding,” the way you sometimes hit reply instead of forward and I get to see the notes you write to your loved ones explaining why they have to read my piece (this is such a delight of a mistake for me and it happens pretty often!).

Here are some of our “stats” for the horrible, beautiful year coming to a close…

A family that makes art together...

Ruth Asawa drew and painted ordinary things a lot, because that’s what she had on hand and she liked the idea of making people see them with new eyes. I do that, too. I think it’s the great constraint and freedom of family life—that there are beautiful things everywhere—fruit and flowers and children’s faces and all kinds of detritus—and any of it can become a piece if you just go for it. Asawa said, “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

Memory / care

Even though my grief is entirely, uniquely my own, I can do nothing alone. I love my dad beyond life. And he is dying. And I know you know how I feel, and you absolutely don’t have any idea how I feel. And that’s the paradox of loving and dying in this one finite life we are all lucky enough to get relationally destroyed by over and over again. It’s so unbearably, idiosyncratically sweet and it’s brief and out of our control. So sing.

The growing edge of agency in midlife

Control feels like trying to get other people to behave in ways that will allow me to live the life I want to live. Agency feels like behaving the way I need to in order to live the way I want to live. Control feels like Jenga. Agency feels like water color. Control feels like knowing too much. Agency feels like knowing only one beautiful thing. Control feels like desperation. Agency feels like pleasure. Control feels like gripping. Agency feels like arabesque. Control feels like stomach ache. Agency feels like steady gaze. Control feels like arrogance. Agency feels like sovereignty. Control feels like outside. Agency feels like inside. Control feels like puppetry. Agency feels like modern dance.

The hungry ghosts of fading men

But undergirding the patriarchy is something that I didn’t understand as a teenager, riding next to my dad on our weekly sojourns to the grocery store, talking about Buddhism and boys and basketball. And that something is dependency. Our society’s discomfort with the power of women, is in part, a discomfort with dependence, and the vulnerability of it. Women still do the vast majority of the caregiving for dependent bodies—the drooling babies and the differently abled and the aging parents. Therefore, women see us at our most vulnerable. We are dependent on them for our survival. And that scares the shit out of insecure men, doing anything they can to deny their own inevitable limitations, softness, decay.

“Kneeling before a locked door”

When you are your knees—both in the intimate and political contexts—you discover that words won’t save you. This has also been the sermon of my dad’s dementia. What saves you is breath, tenderness, the accompaniment that comes from true friendship, your own indefatigable imagination, making things. I got a big soapy pail of water yesterday and cleaned patio furniture for an hour and it felt like praying. I unfolded parchment paper to reveal some flowers I’d dried back in the spring and started arranging them on a piece of cardboard. I cooked some soup and then fed my mom and big brother a modest dinner.

artist, activist, and teacher Jen Bloomer

creative care pioneer and gerontologist Anne Basting

child development and awe expert Deborah Farmer Kris

essayist, minister, and chaplain Lynn Casteel Harper

grief expert Carla Fernandez

author and applied behavioral scientist Elizabeth Weingarten

science reporter and parenting expert Melinda Wenner Moyer

journalist, mother of twins, and sibling witness Susan Dominus

critic and author Amanda Hess

writer, podcaster, and ritual innovator Casper ter Kuile

As I look at this list, I am so moved by all the wisdom and beauty of these thinkers and movers. I am also pained to realize how monolithic the pool of wisdom I’ve been pulling from has been—these are majority White women. I’m going to do better next year making sure I am spotlighting wider range of humanity.

If you want to peruse the books by authors I’ve interviewed in the many years of the Examined Family, including this one, go to our Bookshop store. There are so many good gift ideas on these digital shelves!

As always, please leave comments and requests below. What did you love most about how we gathered and explored this year? What would you like to see more of? I managed to pull off two reflective writing retreats and so many of you signed up (over 300+). Should we do more of that?

I also want to remind you that there is a post where you can introduce yourself to the rest of the community (we are over 22,000 strong!) here. I’m going to pin this to the top and pay more consistent attention to it in the new year. Head on over there and read a bit about who is here and you will be blown away. We live all over the country and the world (Canada, Uganda, Portugal…). We are designers, writers, nurses, doctors, coders, philosophers, teachers, artists, executive directors of nonprofits, community organizers, philanthropists, lawyers, thoughtful neighbors and friends, and caregivers for a wide variety of loved ones (many of whom are disabled or sick, sending you massive love and solidarity!). We are young and old and everything in between. Add your response!

If you have been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, now is a great time. Here are some of the super generous things other subscribers said when they went paid.

Sending big closing-the-loop love to you all. I hope you have a joyous, restorative, and peaceful new year. I’ll be sending out my now treasured tradition of a list of end-of-year reflections next Wednesday (Christmas Eve) so be on the look-out for that.

In the meantime, you can listen to this deep, delight-filled conversation on sandwich generation caregiving on The Mother Of It All: