Hi, 2020

I look out of the window to towering trees under a silver sky.  I see a pond that was frozen but is now a pool of sparkling slush because of all the rain.  I’m really happy with the mild winter so far because if it were cold-cold I would not have ventured a yard past the house.  I would have watched the outside from indoors and not have missed a thing. I live in CT now, trading in the familiar Brooklyn cityscape for thick woods where wild turkeys traverse the property.

This year, I gave up a lot including misconceptions about life and what I could do in it.   I wrote the first draft of my novel this year.   No one will ever read that.  It was a long winding thing where characters had a lot of conversations inside of cars or at kitchen tables as if I were afraid to put them in the world where things could happen to them.  The small thing that happened was that I figured out who they were and what they sounded like on the page.  

I always felt the most like myself when I was writing late at night. The sensation is like hearing your future-self have a conversation a room over.  The speech is so clear but still so unbelievable.

My daughters grew so much.  The make each other laugh now which fills me with such wonder for the world. It wards off all the ugly.

I lost my grandfather in the spring. The last time I spoke to him, I was in a cafe in Bedstuy on a Sunday and it was incredibly loud.  I kept having to ask him to repeat what he said and I almost gave up until he made a wise crack at the end in the way that he was known for.

Mostly, I worked from my laptop answering emails, nursing and holding the baby.  I juggled my attention from Luna to Willow to writing.  Plus my paid work.  Plus my astrology studies.  I loved it all.  Sometimes it fried my nerves.  In her essay, A Writer Because of Her Children, Not In Spite of Them, Alice Walker says, “‘I wrote nothing for a year…that didn’t sound as though a baby were screaming right through the middle of it.’”  Girl, I get it.  I wrote a minimum of 5,000 words a week. When I stopped, it was painful to read what I’d made.  I felt awe and remorse.  I was not proud like I expected but resigned to the process that doesn’t care about my feelings.  I’ve committed myself to all of this and it is so hard. I guess that’s love at work.  

But I am supported.  I don’t take the sacrifices my ancestors made lightly.  The sacrifices my parents made echo daily especially now that I’m a parent.  My husband believes in me so much and I am so grateful to my brothers who inspire me all the time.

Here’s to this next decade.  I’m lucky to be living it.

T