2020 - Year in Review

1. What a shit pile of a year. There was this whole global pandemic. And the closing of school really gutted me. I spent the spring and summer literally choking on my anxiety. I coped with audiobooks and jigsaw puzzles.

This is the Great Wave, coming for all of us. That’s what my anxiety about coronavirus said, anyway.

Thanks to generous monetary support from my parents, I took the unpaid year of leave offered by my own school. We kept our kids home for the first semester, enrolling them in the district cyber school option and doing our best to keep them off YouTube and engaged in class. It was a disaster. (As of the second semester, they are back in the building, and it still makes me uncomfortable but that was THE choice.) I spent much of the fall ripping mad at the cyber academy leadership and the teachers, though less the teachers than the admin, because of how short it fell of both its promises and, I dunno, just normal and accepted ideas of good education that could have been translated to cyber but were not at all. Willa mostly hung in there, but Emmett had a horrible time connecting through a screen. I had some freelance work to do, but not much. So I mostly worked on my own writing or helped the kids and either way I felt like a shitty mom. Good times!

2. I read more books in 2020 than I have perhaps ever read in my life. Again, it was a pandemic. The final months of the 2019-2020 school year were very hard but also filled with lots of time, and I spent a lot of that time reading books in a plastic adirondack chair in my yard. All those books I always WANT to read but never got to? READ THEM. Best of fiction includes, in reverse chronological order of when I read them: Eligible by Curtis Sitteneld was such a delightful rom-com, I listened on audiobook; How to be Both by Ali Smith was the kind of book where after a few pages you know you are in the hands of a master; The Book of Boy by Catherine Gilbert Murdock was a middle-grade book we convinced Willa to listen to before bed in between Harry Potter books that was unlike any middle-grade or YA book either Jeff or I had read and utterly delightful in its oddness; Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler was too close to home in so many ways, I had to send it to its room a few times to put myself back together again enough to continue reading; Nimona by Noelle Stevenson says a lot about trauma, and I wans’t expecting that; Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, another audiobook that I just LOVED (and built a puzzle to); Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi was stylistically so beautiful that I wouldn’t have cared if the plot was lacking, but also the plot was so terrifying and beautiful; The Classroom, a small-press collection of short stories by Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich, is on a short list of books that actually satisfies my desire for literature about school; The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle by Christina Uss was another homerun read-aloud-at-bedtime book; Daisy Jones and the Six by is another audiobook that I absolutely enjoyed the shit out of, just so pleasurable; Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns was the book I read in three days over the winter break, and what a weird little gem from the past.

It was also a big year for poetry. I went after the Sealey Challenge in earnest because I wasn’t teaching: I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Character Limit by Brendan Joyce; Which Had Once Been Meadow by Ann Jäderlund captured me with its tiny, specific world (all books are pandemic books); Feed by Tommy Pico has such voice and depth but also delightful shallowness; finally read I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On by Khadijah Queen, and I should not have waited so long; Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros, a reread that hits a lot differently now that I’m not 25; Lucy Negro, Redux by Caroline Randall Williams reimagines history and uses language to play with it, one of my favorite favorite books of the year; Stay by Tanya Olson made me cry more than once, another of my favorite favorite books of the year and probably all time; A Daughter’s Geography by Ntozake Shange, excellent work by an all-time fave that has been sitting on my shelf for years.

As befits a year where I did not stop reading, I also read a lot of non-fiction. I may finally be a person who likes nonfiction. I especially liked: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino because of course I did; Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public School by Noliwe Rooks further radicalized me by unfolding a lot of the hidden history of our schooling system; The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenburg was such a page-turner; Tomboyland: Essays by Melissa Faliveno, I liked all of the essays in this collection.

A small note here that yes, it has been the year of Harry Potter. As JKR eats shit all over and rightly bleeds fans, Willa got SUPER into the stories. Jeff has been reading the entire series aloud before Willa’s bedtime. We are about 2/3s of the way through the last book right now. So if you were thinking of reading all of Harry Potter aloud before bedtime, I can confidently advise you that it will take about a year at the rate of a half-hour a night (with a few breaks for shorter boos, for sanity).

3. (I’m not going to write much about my kids beyond what I’ve already shared. It was just a really rough year, and they don’t need me to blast that all over this blog that, like, three people read.)

4. I wrote a LOT. I wrote essays, including finally finishing that beastly big essay about the time I burned down a couple of feminist institutions. I wrote many, many poems, and found a complete rough draft of my manuscript about teaching at my current district. I blogged a lot, too. A good year for writing.

5. Jeff and I rewatched all of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and it was worth all the many hours. We also finally finished “She-Ra,” and I have to say that the level of trauma and damage on that show is INTENSE. (See also my notes about Nimona above.) We quite enjoyed “The Great,” that sometimes true story about Catherine the Great on Hulu. “I May Destroy You,” also pretty good, yeah, we can see what all the buzz was about. I continued to enjoy “The Magicians,” and I’m delighted the final season is finally on Netflix so I can finish it this year.

6. I continued to be very into scented candles. I’m especially into this one from 837 North Candles and this one from Oh! Candles, both local shops.

7. I did a LOT of Brawl workouts from my basement this year, livestreamed from the Barre Code. I’m in really great shape. Except for how I somehow tweaked my hip in the fall and now I’m a few months into physical therapy trying to put it back to rights again.

8. My absolute favorite song of the year is “Waking Up Down” by Yaeji. It came out just before the pandemic, and I can think of no other song that more accurately captures the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other feeling of existing through a pandemic.

I’m also super in love with Nadia Khan and Jamila Woods. Listened to a lot of Tori Amos, too, and there was a new Rufus Wainwright album and a new Fiona Apple album. A fine, fine year for this child of the nineties. Oh, also Sharon Van Etten! This whole fucking album, amazing!

9. I crafted a lot. The kids and I got really into weaving for a minute there. We made these sweet wall-hangings to decorate my new office, which used to be the guest room, but I knew I couldn't handle not having an office while working from home while the kids learned from home and no one’s coming to visit us anyway.

I reupholstered a chair and repainted and contact-papered an old bookcase. I learned how to epoxy-enamel a table. I did a lot of fabric dying, including ice dying. In this picture, I hand-dyed the nightgown and leggings I’m wearing, and that side-table is covered with epoxy enamel that I poured with my own hands—twice actually, because the first time it didn’t come out too good. Nothing like being stuck at home for MONTHS to inspire one to absurd heights in one’s author picture.

10. In conclusion, fuck this year but I also got a lot done and rediscovered parts of myself that had long gone dormant. Who knows what I forgot to put on this list. Who knows when things will ever get better. At least we are safe and healthy and together.

on Being Seen

“The Sisters Dream of Battle” by Martha Edelheit

Our house is shielded by many trees, and I have a deficiency of modesty (in more than one way). I don’t concern myself very much with whether someone can see me, naked, through the windows of our bedroom. I mean, I still pull the blinds closed in the back of the house after the sun has gone down—I’m not asking for someone to watch me change into pajamas and wash my face.

When I was newly postpartum, I was hyper-aware of the windows in our bedroom. I covered myself, cowered, anytime I was less than fully clothed in front of them, day or night. I wasn’t afraid, but my body was. It was an animal fear of exposure. Too much of me was too soft and too slow; I was just too vulnerable to be seen.

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When this school year began, and I knew I wasn’t returning to the classroom, I told my husband I had to move out of our shared office. I needed an office of my own. I want to build an actual writing career, and that is just outside my wheelhouse. I write, sure. I know how to write poems, essays—both lyric and less lyric—and curriculum stuff. But pitching and publishing is a whole different thing. I can’t do that in full view; again, I am too vulnerable to be seen trying these new things.

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My hip continues to be really fucking jacked up. I told my massage therapist I was going to pursue physical therapy, as it feels not quite like but not unlike what this exact same hip felt like after pregnancy wrecked me and physical therapy fixed me. Weeks later, and I had another appointment with her so I knew I had to make some phone calls to make this plan actually happen before I saw her and she asked a follow-up question. And I had to make those phone calls while also fielding detailed questions from my children about what physical therapy is and why I need it. I had a teletherapy appointment with a doctor to get the prescription, hiding in my (new) home office in the hopes of some, any privacy. I never like it when they eavesdrop or look at my computer over my shoulder or crowd around me as I look at a meme on my phone. But it’s become intolerable now that we all have nowhere to go. Plus, you know, the part where probably some part of what is happening inside my hip is emotional pain. Please can we not talk about my emotional pain.

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I have a phone appointment with a therapist to see if we will be a good fit this coming week. I am some horrible combination of depression and, like, traumatized? I think “trauma” is too strong a word for how I feel now that I am some months away from having to go into my school on a regular basis. Jeff thinks my resistance to using the word “trauma” is proof of how little I can look the problem directly in the eye. Regardless of whether it counts as trauma or something slightly lesser than trauma, I am pretty comfortable saying that my school district is both toxic and abusive. And I don’t know how I’m going to look at myself while in this house under the all-seeing eyes of my family. My family who love and support me, but oh my god, there is nowhere to go. I am vulnerable and I do not want to be seen.

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I feel often now like I felt when I was postpartum and naked. How many tender spots have I carefully plastered over and reinforced? When will they begin to feel less tender?