I’m still here

When we adopted our dog Ruthie in May 2023, one of the details mentioned about her was that she was good at entertaining herself. At the time, this seemed like a positive trait. We’re a busy family and it was helpful to know we wouldn’t be inviting another resident into the house who’d complain about being bored all the time and ask me to play “family” and force me to be the “mom” that catered to their needs as the “baby” – a game that feels too much like reality to be any fun.

We quickly learned that having a dog who “entertains herself” is much different from having a human child who “entertains herself” by, say, coloring quietly in the other room so that the human mother can, say, binge watch “Orange is the New Black.” A dog who “entertains herself” is like a house that’s advertised as a “handyman’s delight.” It’s a red flag.

Ruthie “entertains herself” by stealing items off countertops and tables and running around the house with them hoping to be chased. If no one chases her, she “entertains herself” by dismantling whatever object she’s grabbed. We’ve lost a lot of good placemats out there. We now have to be Roku remotes in bulk. We’ve lost a lot of good Roku remotes, too. If you let her outside, Ruthie “entertains herself” by digging holes. She loves hole digging even more when it is wet outside and the hole is full of water. She seems to find baths very entertaining as well.

Like Ruthie, I have been entertaining myself in unorthodox ways since summer vacation began a month ago. I’ve been to the dentist! I steam cleaned the couch! I’m taking a U.S. history course! I got a mammogram! I keep crossing off items from my summer to-do list (a list, by some miracle of the universe, that Ruthie has not yet discovered and shredded). One item that I have not crossed off my summer to-do list is an as-yet undetermined creative endeavor. Which curiously, when revisiting an old post, was the same problem I had last year.

Maybe I could make something with the thousands of color-sorted bottle caps I’ve amassed in the garage. Maybe I could finally settle on a paint color for the living room. Maybe I could make 70s-era Grandma-style crochet blanket wall covering out of fuse beads.

But summer is half way over, the maybes have been stacking up. I haven’t started or completed any projects. I haven’t figured out something to do felt meaningful and fulfilling.

I mentioned this to my therapist last week – about how summer had been a much-needed break from the intensity of the school year but that I had this nagging and growing pit in my stomach about how I hadn’t landed on a summer project. And because she’s a therapist, she had to pick at that scab a little bit. Which sounds a lot shadier than it is- she’s wonderful. But it’s also kind of her job to aggravate the wounds a little bit to figure out what’s underneath.

First, she suggested that maybe I was the summer project I was working on. I blushed and laughed uncomfortably and said that hardly felt creative or worth the investment, which might explain why I’m in therapy to begin with. Then I confessed that I really missed writing – well, specifically writing in this space. I journal all time. But writing and then sharing. She asked me why I thought that wasn’t happening. And I said that maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was afraid I didn’t have anything worthy to share. And then she said, “well that sounds like something you could write about.”

So here we are.

I was looking back at the archives of this site, which will be 12 years old in August. How appropriate that I’ve reverted to being a self-conscious adolescent. In the early years, I wrote so much. In 2012, I wrote 40 posts in just four months. In 2013 I wrote almost an average six posts a month. Then it was two to three posts a month. Then once a month. Last year I updated the site just three times. I know I’m the only one keeping track. I’ve considered recently whether I should just give up on the whole enterprise. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time. And anyway, who cares? Does the world even need another middle aged white lady blabbing on about life’s trials and tribulations? What the hell even is a tribulation*?!

The decision to give up nearly made itself this week. I tried to navigate to the site and found it was gone. Instead there was a page that said something about a database connection issue. Troubleshooting the missing website seemed way above may pay grade and tech savviness. OK. I thought to myself. That’s that.

But then I thought about the years and years of stories. Three-hundred-plus posts documenting a decade of motherhood and humanhood. Gone. Even if nobody else cared about its absence, I realized that I cared. And that I was a someone, too. And maybe that was enough to invest some time into resurrecting it.

(It occurs to me now, as I’m writing this, that maybe the therapy is working?)

So I got in touch with the helpful folks at BlueHost and a couple of online chats and a 20-minute phone call later, MyInsideVoices returned. As if they were ever really gone.

I listen to them constantly.

There are voices in my head – we’ll call them guilt and shame – who have suggested that perhaps as a person in my position: white, middle class, educated, etc. doesn’t need to be taking up more space than I already do. People like me have already taken up so much space through history. There are so many other people in the margins with beautiful ideas and insights. “Nobody needs to hear from you,” the voices whisper. “You are just white noise.”

There’s a very loud voice that insists in a matter-of-fact tone that there just isn’t any time to write the way I want to write. That it is futile. The voice is irritated that I would even consider attempting the enterprise again. “You know how this goes,” she says, all contempt for my sincerity. My naiveté. “You chose to be other things. You don’t get to be a writer.” And she’s not wrong either. I’ve been drafting this post in my head for weeks. When I sat down to compose, pen to paper first, it took days. The typing and revising of a single paragraph was interrupted no less than three times when Ruthie stole a dish towel, an old tooth brush, and a random piece of paper. My children stop me mid-sentence to complain about their siblings, to request snacks, to lounge on me as if I’m an armchair. There is no process. No flow. Only one labored word after another and a prayer that it will all make sense at the end.

But other voices are in there, too. Wanting to capture moments and observations and make meaning of them. They are so emphatic that there are answers to questions to be found in the conversations I have with 5 year olds, or the epiphanies I have in the classroom or the things I notice just walking through my neighborhood. If I just sat down, pen in hand in front of a blank page. Opened up to a white screen and started typing. That’s where I find Truths. “Don’t give up on us,” they whisper.

I try not to let them down. I journal. I commit to writing a poem each day the month of April. But they are not satisfied.

A couple weeks ago, Brad and I had a kid-free weekend. We had tickets to see Mike Birbiglia at the Warner Theater, and with time to kill ahead of the show, decided to check out an exhibit at the Renwick Gallery of female fiber artists. Wandering through the galleries filled with quilts, weaving, embroidery and abstract sculptures and reading their stories, I felt this welling up of emotion. One artist shared that she’d started sewing because it was something she could work on in short bursts, as she had time. A mother of five who worked as a telephone operator and hospital attendant took up embroidery during a stay at a mental hospital. A sharecropper took up quilting and painting when the former plantation home she worked at was turned into an artists’ retreat. A grandmother transformed a quilt she was working on for her granddaughter into a memorial for all little girls who’d died crossing the Mexico-U.S. border.

The work of all these women on display at the Smithsonian was strangely familiar. I’d grown up with it. My mother is a quilter. She sewed dresses and curtains. She cross-stitched and made stuffed geese and bunnies. Her mother crocheted and embroidered. One of my parent’s oldest family friends is a weaver. Growing up my sisters and I would marvel at the room-sized loom in her house. The dish towels she created are among the sturdiest and most beautiful I own.

These women made things that were very practical. They labored over items we use every day. My mother and grandmother I don’t think ever would’ve called themselves artists. They were both caretakers. My mom is one of seven children; she had six children her own. Both were nurses. Despite how busy they must have been, how many needs they had to meet at home and at work, they were still called to create. To use their hands to conjure something beautiful out of fabric, thread, or yarn. And standing in the middle of these rooms, surrounded by this ingenuity and beauty, the passion and storytelling represented in each stitch, I felt kinship. They were me. They were my mother and grandmother. My sisters, aunts and friends. They were all humans with a story to tell, a truth, who had to fight for the means to share it in any way they could.

Outside of all the roles and titles we are yoked with at birth and through choices we make, at our core is the steady drum beat of our collective humanity crying out: We are here. We are here. We are here.

It’s the Beech Tree all over again.

I think I need to make peace with the guilt and shame. Unlike the blankets my mother and grandmother made, writing hardly feels practical. It won’t keep anyone warm. I don’t feel worthy of this space- even though it’s one I carved for myself. I am still, at this moment right now, shushing the voice that tells me it’s stupid even try. To let it go. To focus on the day-to-day minutiae rather than the big questions. This particular labor is too big and too difficult. I know she is desperately trying to protect me from disappointment.

But I think wanting to create and wanting to be a part of a community of sharing might is central to being human. At least, that’s what those fiber artists seemed to be sharing through their work. We have stories that need to be shared. We have voices. We are not just one thing. We contain multitudes.

So today I’ve decided maybe it’s OK to contribute my own few stitches to this tapestry. To maintain this place so that I can expose my thread-bare soul and attempt to sew it back together. So I can shout into the void and listen for the returning echos. Me, too. Me, too.

Because I am also all these other things- mother, wife, teacher, cleaner, cook, chauffeur, etc.- it will just be small. The littlest garden sprouting in a divot in the sidewalk. A place for poetry. A place for quick musing.

A place to remind myself: I’m still here. I’m still here.

*According to Merriam-Webster “Tribulation: distress or suffering resulting from oppression or persecution. Also, a trying experience.”