Dear Somebody: Creating joy.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

TUESDAY

I graduated with my MFA last May, though it only feels like a few days between then and now.

During my defense, my professors ask me how I’m going to continue my education post-graduation: How will I nurture and encourage my continuous learning? How will I ensure that I wouldn’t lose sight of my pursuit—drawing and writing for children—amidst the chaos of ordinary life? 

Easy, I reply, because I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to draw a four-panel comic every week. This will solidify a regular drawing practice, improve my ability to draw from life, and ensure that my love for drawing not only remains, but flourishes. I am determined. I think to myself, with certainty: Yes. My love will keep this work alive.

That was five months ago. 

As you’ve probably guessed, I spent those five months relearning an old familiar lesson: that love, alone, can’t keep anything alive—not a burgeoning skillset, not an inspired state of mind, and certainly not a five-month old baby.

I’m not sure if it’s all children, but mine requires regular feeding and rocking, every two hours—still, seven outfit changes a day, and constant mopping. She’s a mess and apparently, also sentient. This little bowl of mush needs serious eye contact, tickling, and someone to giggle with. She likes being read to aloud and often. She likes when her older sister is near, which comes to absolutely no surprise to younger siblings everywhere, across the entire spectrum of humankind, for as long as siblings have existed. She likes having her limbs examined. She does not like when I put her down to draw.

So here I am, five months later, with my first four-panel comic—and it’s only three panels. It took me 10 hours to make, from conception to sketch to final coloring, and several revisions—spread out over seven naps, each ranging from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. If I think about how many days it took me (seven, a full week!) I lament, especially when I compare my speed to my life pre-children. 

But none of that really matters because the entire time I was drawing this comic, I was full of joy. Real joy. The kind I text my friends about because I can’t believe it’s real—that the feeling I’m always chasing is here, right now, swimming inside me. 

I feel joy flood down every avenue. I feel joy because I’m drawing and because I feel joy while I’m drawing. I feel joy because I’m pushing myself to try new things within my work, however slowly, however little by little. I feel joy because I’m getting somewhere. I feel joy because I’m trying. 

I feel joy in drawing my children, in having children who are so sweet and so round, in knowing that someone out there may recognize their own child in these drawings. In knowing that maybe a child will even recognize themselves. 

I feel joy because for a little while, my mind is quiet and my blood is steady—and that although joy is a feeling I am always chasing, it’s also something I know how to find. Joy is something I know how to create. I created it here for me, for my children, for you. 

WEDNESDAY

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”

—from Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy

THURSDAY

My new 2024 calendar, still in its plastic wrap, lest I spill something on it before the calendar year turns.

In case you missed it last week, my new 2024 planners and calendars are now available! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

—So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: A baby sister's tiny feet.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

When N comes home from school each day, she runs towards me screaming. Mama!she yells, though we are only a few inches apart. I’m here to see my sister.

She walks over to the couch where I sit cradling F, who is either smiling or sleeping or spitting up, and pulls off the knit blanket that covers her. She pokes around to find F’s hands and then her feet, peering closely. They are so tiny, she says, and lifts each hand before dropping it flippantly, reaching for the feet next. She handles her baby sister carelessly, as though each hand and foot exists independently, as though they aren’t all four attached to their respective limbs, and as if the limbs aren’t attached to a body, also living and breathing, or at least trying to. 

They are so tiny, N says, lifting the left hand, examining more closely now, marveling at each set of fingernails—perfectly shaped, a smudge of moon on each finger. Fingernails that patiently wait, existing only to do their job: to keep each little finger protected, safe. 

They are so tiny, she says, investigating F’s small toes, ensuring that a proper set of five belongs to each foot. She runs her fingers over the heels—first the left one, then the right—heels that are more small buttons than they are heels, heels that could fit in your pocket if you needed, if you wanted them to. She puts a sock back on each doll’s foot and sighs. She has satisfied her daily inspection. It is time to move on.

Mom, she says seriously, in a voice that becomes more and more like a teenager’s each day. But, Mom. Did you remember to make my snack?

TUESDAY

“When our two sons were going to Hebrew school, preparing for their Bar Mitzvahs, one of them asked the Rabbi, “What if I’m not sure that I believe in god?” To which the Rabbi replied, “It’s unimportant that you believe in god. What matters is that you search for god, look for the sacred, and learn to recognize what is holy.” And with those simple words, my kids were not only liberated from their fear of trying to maintain a lifelong devotion to a single, abstract, static “belief,” but they were also given permission to put their faith into their own actions and efforts to be kind. Free to marvel at the strangeness of it all and stand unafraid of their “not-knowing.” To focus on the undeniable beauty as it unfolds in front of them. To watch and wait for wisdom.”

—from Jeff Tweedy’s newsletter, along with his cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s America(no, I do not listen to anything besides Paul Simon)

WEDNESDAY

Thank you for your warm words, comments, re-shares, and pre-orders for my forthcoming journal, Go Your Own Way. 

This is the fourth (!) journal I’ve made and it amazes me to know that soon, it will stop being a book that I made and instead become a place where you see yourself a little more clearly. Maybe it will be a place where you rediscover a part of yourself you hid away a long time ago, and you can’t remember why. Maybe you’ll resurface in these pages. Maybe you’ll swim to shore.

All books, I think, have the possibility of doubling as a mirror: in them—or maybe because of them—you see yourself as you are. I hope this book will fulfill that purpose for some of you, too.

If you’d like, you can pre-order Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence. It comes out October 24th!

THURSDAY

I opened my mail this week to find a boxful of my new 2024 planners and calendars! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

—The Mower by Philip Larkin

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Confronting your inner critic.

From The Worst Boss I've Ever Had, a comic about confronting your inner critic.

Hello, everyone! I know it's been awhile. I'm navigating some unexpected personal news and health changes, but things are finally beginning to finally shift to a manageable place. Though it's freezing here in St. Louis, I'm enjoying the seasons' transition; I hope brisk air is sweeping you into its arms wherever you are. 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

I don't often feel like a mother. Two years into being one, the title continues to feel like a pair of too-big shoes I'm eagerly waiting to grow into. What does a mother feel like? I have my suspicions, certainly. A mother is calm. A mother is well-assembled. Someone that knows what to do. Someone who has answers, and a medicine cabinet full of tried-and-true remedies. A mother knows their way around the kitchen, and a new city, and the inner workings of their own mind. A mother is someone who knows. Someone whose heart has been split open, as I hear so often, by their child––a heart that's now grown so large there's barely enough space for it left in their chest. Is this me? I don't know. My heart seems well-adjusted to its cavity. 

N wakes up sobbing lately. Her cries are like a siren; she sits up and wails with such alarm that I wonder what terrors visited her young mind. When the crying doesn't stop, I go in and pick her up. We move to the light that slips in between the closed blinds. I sing Carole King until she says Mama, no, putting her hand to my mouth. We sit in the big chair, her face buried in my chest, my cheek resting on her head. Already she's so tall, legs like a ballerina jutting out from my either side. Her breath becomes deeper, steady. She is asleep and my arms are full of her. She is asleep and I feel strangely settled. She is asleep and I am someone who knows how to soothe. For her, I figured out how. My medicine cabinet is empty, but my heart is full. I am a mother––this I have known, but for these few minutes, I begin to believe it, too.

TUESDAY

For the WORK issue of The Nib, I made a comic about the worst boss I've ever worked for: myself. You can read the comic here on my blog and order a print issue of the The Nib – please help support this wonderful indie publication!

My 2023 calendar and planners are also now available, through Buyoly and Amber Lotus Publishing. These are excellent gifts for the upcoming season, and a great way to encourage my little business.

*Support more BIPOC makers this year! I love these hand-poured candles by Golden Hour Co. in rainier and oakmoss. 

WEDNESDAY

“You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget. You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise.” 

––Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

THURSDAY

All through autumn I wish for my body to become something new. I want my body to be stronger, less sensitive to these invisible, internal changes. I want it to be stoic, indifferent to the weight of its responsibility. I want it to perform flawlessly. I disregard the fact that it completes thousands of tasks to keep my heart beating and lungs full of air, without my knowing when or how. I am grateful, I think, but I ask it for more. I want my body to be decent. I want it to look beautiful though I know it is doing too much. It is tired and needs rest, but there are books to write and school to attend and so many to care for. 

For months, I offer my body no grace. I shroud it in resentment. I criticize it and wonder why that doesn't amount to change. Why it won't simply be better, the way I imagine other people's bodies to be. I speak to it like I would never speak to another; I allow my imagination to make me even more cruel. After months of sickness, when I finally come to my senses, when I remember how love actually works, it strikes me that I have never taken my body into both arms, never voiced the words buried beneath my anger: Yes, it is you. It is you that I choose over and over again.

FRIDAY

she told me then
that they
"the slaves who were ourselves"
searched for one another
tried to get back
to places they had been before
to them that they had known
needed and loved
to them that knew

she told me then
that this searching
was hard journeying
harder even than
moving over water
than finding strange language
and people with nothing under their skin
hard journeying she told me
this way back to ourselves

––exiles return by bell hooks

xo,

M

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