the meaningful glow: a weekly archive

contradictions, woodland tides, Wednesday, and chocolate chip cookies.

For those of you who prefer audio, here is the essay portion. I am recovering from a cold and learning how to navigate/edit new software. Thank you for your patience! Please note there is some language used.

My husband has taken our 3 children out for a couple of hours and what is the first thing I do? Collapse on my couch and weep. 

No one tells you about this part. The part where you think you are grown up at nearly 36 but you still want your mom. How I should know what kind of jeans fit me best or remember to care for my eyebrows prior to unibrow status. Have a career. Know that it doesn’t matter what people think. Accept it isn't terrible to want a break from your kids. 

I weep because I do feel terrible. They’ve left and I can’t savor the silence. Instead, I cry. 

I am desperately trying to keep up. To not snap at my children, then beat myself up for doing so. To enjoy every moment while texting a friend, “they will poop alone someday, right?” 

I cry because I am always needed, always tending. Because I have spent countless hours waiting for my child to poop in the potty and everyday it’s a new fear for them all over again. I cry over another of my children’s struggles and the knowledge he will have more; I'm in love with who he is and want him to know he can be anything, do anything, that his brain is only differently wired - yet I still grieve. And it's still hard. And are the tears for him or for me, and because of that am I a jerk? I cry because I see myself in him, the little girl who was always too much and learned how to fold up her vastness. 

The tears fall because I stop breastfeeding my final baby, my period starts early, and I eat 10 brie bites in 5 minutes. I want to read all day but when I sit down I can’t concentrate. I want to be alone. I want someone to take care of me instead.

Is parenting the contradiction or is it my trying to exist as myself and mother, as woman and woman with kids, as someone with a separate identity who constantly puts it away?

Can the two ever coexist? 

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We go to the woods. Days upon days upon years of never being alone has turned me up here, over and over again. I can look up and remember my smallness in it all. The trail is an opening zipper, the release of a corset: the excess I’ve been gripping onto spills out in the waves of light filtering through the leaves. Slowly the girl I left behind, the woman I want to be, emerges.

If the trees had tides, I would show up daily as they receded. A woodland selkie, wanting one moment to be ashore and surrounded by all she loved, the next aching to be alone with the whispering branches. Bark encasing me until my breath rose and fell with Earth’s. 

The forest has a way of reminding me who I am. Its rustling is a gift, a permission to shed my various skins and simply be. 

Permission to stop moving at 100mph. To stop pouring so much of myself out that I have no idea who I am anymore. To stop giving a million fucks about what people think of me and move on. To embrace the fact that at nearly 36 I want to stop wearing bras and you know what, screw patriarchal modesty rules. To know that I adore my kids and also adore time away from them. To accept that I can’t be liked by everyone. I can’t be the perfect mother or wife or friend, and it’s exhausting to be perfect, plus the world doesn’t depend on me to spin. The world will be okay if I fall apart a little, if I shift in the comings and goings of the moon’s pull. If I have uneven shorelines. 

I stop under the pines and watch the current in the river. It moves quickly and the water is midnight blue after recent rain. On this February evening the tide is high, not quite the end of winter or beginning of spring. 

Do all seasons exist simultaneously, but our human lens limits us to only witness one at a time? Perhaps we carry a bit of each. A bit of wintering in the high heat of summer. Autumn's letting go in the emergence of spring blossoms. 

Winter doesn’t have to be limited by our human boundaries. Roots continue to exist, drawing up water gathered months before from the warm dirt muddying my children’s feet. The animals continue to find food, the rain to fall, the bulbs to pierce the frozen ground. In summer the seed pods are expectant under vibrant petals, destined for the cold months as food for waiting birds, for the soil’s cradle until tender shoots emerge. 

Like the forest, the seasons, the sand after a storm, I am not the same one day to the next. A great deal exists within me at once, too. Yet the core of who I am is constant: I am fiercely gentle. I will cry with you and text you crying, wondering if I’m oversharing, but also wanting you to overshare with me because the world needs more of that. I will chase Starlings from my feeder then marvel at their murmurations. I would be happy alone most of the time, but then I will desperately miss and crave your company. I am hard to get to know, but deeply crave to be known. I am prone to deep thoughts and feelings, and it is usually laughter that shakes me loose. Otherwise, it is the trees.

We leave the woods but I don’t leave these lessons. The stories it gives me, my children. The quiet as we are there under its canopy together, the laughter ringing against bare trunks while they stomp in the mud. It is all there, waiting for us to notice. 

The bark laces around my shoulders, murmuring to be full and to give is what the trees have been trying to tell us all along. Why make so much of your contradictions, they seem to say, of the weeping that fills you? It has always been this way, after all, and the birds still rise with sun song on their wings, the tides to embrace the starlit shore.

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life with littles

We had the sniffles but the fresh air still beckoned. When I want to say no, saying yes is often the better choice, for everyone.

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reading/watching/listening

This week has not held a lot of reading. Any time children are sick, and my monthly cycle decided to visit as well of course, my energy levels are on the lower end. Sean and I started a couple of new shows together, Wednesday and Shrinking. I am terrible at keeping up with anything so 2 new watches are a big deal. Since I was a kid I have enjoyed dark comedy, and whimsical broody tales. These are perfect matches. (Also can I say the theme for Wednesday is a delightful earworm for ordinary tasks like washing the dishes or witnessing your child about to do something perilous.)

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on the table

Image by Em Metroka

Okay folks - if you like softer chocolate chip cookies ( think those warm, gooey Otis Spunkmeyer cookies we would get at school events), these are the cookies for you. I love the trick she implements to get the crinkly tops - take them out of the oven and use a spatula to gentle flatten them. Mind. Blown. They are simple to make and I’ve already done so twice, likely hitting a third today.

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As always, thank you for being here. Please feel free to comment, reply to this email, or share. I love connecting with my readers.

Warmly,

Jess

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