Ah, Boxing Day. The day I remind you (at length) that I forgo sending presents and instead send you all of my opinions. Get excited. But while past epistels have gone the full 12 rounds, I’m hoping for an early knockout this year because while I was born to be wild, the cliché clocks out at about 9pm in my world. And in said world, it’s 8:51pm the night of my self-imposed due date. So get your fill of my final nine minutes of wild before I call it an evening and relax to a show about nuclear reactor meltdowns (or royal family meltdowns or media conglomerate meltdowns) and leave you to whatever TikTok monstrosities happen after 9pm these days. Your move.
Speaking of self-imposed due dates, miss Noa Eleanor was born on May 27th, 2019. Which would have been spectacular if that was when we were expecting her to arrive. Instead, we expected “the second week of June,” which we said so many times we apparently convinced ourselves that it would be completely appropriate to A. Plan a summit in Seattle for a handful of my internationally-based colleagues on May 28th, and B. Fix an old sprinkler system over Memorial Day weekend, because surely she wouldn’t arrive in May... we said. Even as the pipes burst, and we had to wrench off our main water supply at street level, and our yard transformed into a mud pit that would make a pig’s wildest HGTV-inspired vision board look tame, we still joked – like the blasé, fate-tempting, 3rd-child-parents-to-be we were – “lucky it was the yard’s water that broke and not mine!” Har Har HAR. Fifteen minutes later we got in the car, went to the hospital, and had a baby.
The grand positive is that she is spectacular. Noa is the baby you don’t want people without children to meet because she lures them into believing that babies are easy and engaging and infinitely patient. They are not. We earned this baby. Quick backstory on her name: the female name Noa means “movement/motion” in Hebrew, “from love” in Japanese, and “to free/release” in Hawaiian. And while that’s all objectively adorable, we have this thing with initials – Theodore Asher (TAS) is the sidekick to big brother Owen Zachary (OZ) (which will track for my antipodean readers), and we couldn’t leave our girl without a special nod of her own. Our names list was long and highly contentious (see last year’s missive), but NES felt right the moment we landed on it. Outside of her early arrival, the only milestones she’s been eager to hit are height and weight; she is way too content taking it all in and being doted on by every human who enters her orbit to worry about silly things like sitting unassisted (and I am way too deep in 3rd-child parenting to be concerned in the slightest). Our lives are hectic and loud, fueled by caffeine and mac’n’cheese, filled with wonder and laughter and shouting and tears, dreams and dramas, sticky fingers and stuffy noses, pitchy songs and rainbow drawings, topped with dancing and building and running and crashing and so, so overwhelmingly full of love. It’s a beautiful chaos and I am embracing it. This wine has helped.
My 2020 mindset is to let go of what’s gone, be grateful for what remains, and look forward to what’s coming. To “go get there” as Beyoncé says. But have you ever felt nostalgia for a moment you’re currently in? Have you been immersed in your routine and suddenly realized that all of these people, this place, this particular blend of normalcy, will all disappear? And that you’ll miss it? I do this. I imagine my future-self looking back on my present-self and missing the moment I am actually still in. This, of course, is not a unique phenomenon nor original observation – it’s why we post photos from our vacations and enjoy scrolling through our own insta as much as anyone else’s. But I do find it compelling that it’s not the flagship moments of my life that I yearn to drop in on. It’s not even moments I found worthy of a photo or journal entry. It’s not the peaks, the pits, the transitions – it’s the unimportant, the unremarkable, the boring.
The word nostalgia is a Greek compound of nóstos, or “the act of returning” and álgos, meaning “pain or ache” and I think that is perfect. It truly is an ache. I feel it for van rides to soccer matches in 2004. For inane conversations over highly questionable drinks at the Gypsy on NW 21st. For nights between ports on Semester at Sea. For Saturday strolls to Broadway Market and cutting through the North Bondi grassy knoll. These were not the insta-moments that made my social feeds, they were the in-betweens. The daily minutiae that bridged the gaps between the “big stuff” worthy of celebrating, mourning, and sharing. The middle moments where the work happened and the relationships solidified and the life lived. So how do I capture this? How can I put a bell jar over it so that when I do hit major milestones, when I do get there, I can pull up these formative moments as vividly as if they were preserved in resin? Today I watched my boys “negotiate” who got to send a marble down a track they spent the day building while Noa cooed contentedly from her mat on the floor. (She puked a little. I didn’t get up. 3rd child vibes.) I could hear my dad doing dishes in the kitchen and my mom transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer. Minutiae. And I want to bottle it.
So here I am with future-me feeling all nostalgic, but the truth is that current-me’s life would cause the word chaos to curl up in a weighted blanket to de-stress. To add to my aforementioned list-o-chaos, on December 3rd, after weeks of extreme pain, fatigue, and weight loss, Jonny went to a doctor, which turned into a trip to the ER, which resulted in a 16-day hospital stay capped by emergency surgery to remove 47cm of abscessed small intestine. (Yeah, so I buried the lede this year. But I promised you a wild nine minutes and I dare not underdeliver!) He came home December 19th, but has continued to sleep most waking hours and receive antibiotics and nutrition through a PICC line in his arm. He can’t lift more than 15lbs (aka: not our 99th percentile baby), which means I’m a month deep as the solo-parent with the fulltime+ job ultimately responsible for the health, happiness, and deliverables of direct reports on both sides of my commute. Things have been really, really, real over here.
And yet, this holiday season has been one of the most vivid and abundant and joy-filled that I can remember. Why? My theory is that, by becoming laser focused and cutting out unnecessary distractions, by dropping societal pressures and honing in on meeting the true needs of myself and my family, by spending my limited energy-budget on positive, edifying tasks rather than on anything low priority or emotionally unproductive, I’ve traded in breadth for depth. (When my screentime dropped below 30 minutes a day, I thought Siri might pop up to see if I was okay.) And this just might be the key to bottling the mundane moments – you have to be there for them. Look up. Reign in distractions. Focus.
Guys, we’ve rallied behind the wrong idea of self-care. True self-care isn’t the “treat yourself” solution that the booming anxiety consumerism market would lead us to believe. Look, I’m not coming for your aromatherapy oils and weighted blankets (and I’ll spare you my thoughts on the ethics of treating anxiety with stuff in the first place), but self-care is not about taking mandated breaks from living in order to do basic things like bathing and reading a book. It is about building a sustainable life that you don’t need to escape from in the first place. Bubble baths and chocolate cake should be used (and used often) to enjoy life, not to escape from it.
And often it’s the opposite of indulging – it’s doing The Thing I want to do the least. It is enforcing a morning routine, cooking healthy meals, and easing up on my own relentless internal pressure to be everything to everyone. It has meant disappointing some (sorry, Siri) and letting non-essential things slip (like being okay with a dirty kitchen or a Boxing Day email that goes out a day late). It has meant putting my oxygen mask on first, parenting myself, and making proactive choices for my own long-term wellness. It has been dropping toxic relationships and surrounding myself with friends and colleagues who force me to level up. Like, seriously level up. My success has been in direct proportion to the quality of relationships in my life. It is committing to ruthlessly prioritizing the mantra “What do I have? What do I want? What am I willing to give up?” It is realizing and appreciating how wildly capable I am and continue becoming.
I truly believe that happiness is not a goal, it is a byproduct of a life well lived. And this year I was gently reminded that “well lived,” while marked by the milestones we strive to achieve and celebrate, is earned in the daily minutiae and realized through true self-care. It is up to you not to miss the happiness it produces, to appreciate the beauty in chaos, to sacrifice breadth for depth, and, in doing so, trade escapism for enjoyment. Noa has had it right all along.
Happy 2020, everyone. Go get there.
Laura
