Dear Somebody: The Biggest Dream

From my illustrated essay, The Biggest Dream, for Chickpea Magazine

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

MONDAY

Chickpea Magazine, Issue 38: Ease

An image of my essay, “The Biggest Dream,” for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine

An image of my essay, “The Biggest Dream,” for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine

For Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine, I wrote about meal preparation as an act of love and care, especially among immigrant and first-generation families—and in my own, as I’ve known it. 

I think about food like I think about most things: pragmatically. I always liked to eat and cook, but that’s evaporated since becoming a mother. Now, meals feel overwhelming: a neverending physically-and-mentally taxing chore necessary for nourishing my young family. I’ve resented this task for who I believe it asks me to be: a devoted mother who easily slaps together healthy, delicious meals without stress or sweat—not because I don’t want to be this person, but because repeatedly, I’ve failed at actually becoming her. 

I first spoke to Cara, the editor of Chickpea Magazine about this piece because I was interested in exploring the perception of care. A single act of love can communicate a wildly different message to the recipient than the message the giver intended to relay; our culture, environment, and personal histories all factor into how we give, perceive, and receive care. For many first generation children, care is not easy to receive. It takes a good deal of work to crack ourselves open enough to even see that it’s there. 

In this essay, I look back on my last pregnancy, which I carried while finishing my final year of graduate school at Washington University. I explore the inevitable clash of multiple generations and cultures living under one roof; parental love shown through the monotony of meal planning, grocery shopping, meal preparation; and how food saves us in the places where, often, language fails. 

This was also the first time I drew my father, pictured here making granola with N, while me and F (in my belly!) talk to my mom, who is, of course, of course…making chai. 

I grimace, almost daily, about my kitchen: it is small, dim, and feels crowded if there are more than two people in it. The magic of drawing is it allows me to see what my eyes cannot: the walls that opened up to let my family grow; the hundred-year-old bricks that still stand strong; the love and care blooming in this tiny kitchen that is, for now, just the right size.

You can read “The Biggest Dream” in its entirety in Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine. Many thanks to Cara for the opportunity. 

TUESDAY 

I finished Laurie Frankel’s Family Family, which I loved, and can’t wait to read the rest of her work. I wrote about This is How it Always Is in a previous letter (“Tiny miracles everywhere,” see below) and will read The Atlas of Love next. 

I finished Happiness Falls by Angie Kim and am amazed at how well her brain works. 

I’m also reading Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, which I am frightened by and want to put down—but I read on because of Knoll’s sharp, intelligent writing, and the truth it exposes about living as a woman, especially in America.

WEDNESDAY

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. —Friedrich Nietzsche

THURSDAY

I’m still thinking about these gorgeous sketches by Winsor Kinkade and the art of American illustrator Alan E. Cober, which I only discovered because he did the cover art for this thrifted copy of The Sword in The Stone that I’ve had on my dresser for over a decade.  Illustrator Fatmia Ordinola’s work is lush and makes me feel the way it looks: vibrant, buzzing. 

FRIDAY

Imagine: 
I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine: 
There’s still the month of June. Tell me, 
what op-ed will grant the dead their dying? 
What editor? What red-line? What pocket? 
What earth. What shake. What silence.

—from Hala Alyan’s Naturalized

See you next week,
M

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Dear Somebody: Our mothers and fathers.

Maja, gouache and colored pencil on 16”x20” Arches paper. Currently on view at the Washington University Graduate Center

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

MONDAY

Most days after lunch, I go for a walk with my dad. I put on my shoes and coat and wait for him by the door. I’m impatient, feeling like a little kid waiting to be driven to school. Sometimes my dad does drive me to school, just like he did when I was growing up, the only differences being that it’s now 25 years later, I’m in graduate school and married with a kid, and he’s retired. 

I’m in my mid-thirties and he’s nearing 70, so it feels a little silly that my dad still takes care of me. It makes me feel even more childlike than I normally do. I get frustrated when he won’t let me carry a heavy bag home or cautions me against walking too fast. He frequently reminds me of things that are impossible to forget, namely that there’s a baby in my belly and I need to take care of myself. Before dinner he slices guava into pieces, sprinkling each with salt, pepper, cumin, and red chili. We eat them in silence, crunching the seeds.

Most evenings after dinner, I power walk around my parents’ apartment in an effort to lower my blood sugar. I start by the living room window and walk straight into the kitchen, around the tiny dining table replete with folding chairs, past the cabinet filled with dozens of glass jars holding seeds, nuts, and flours, past the couch where T and my mother sit talking or reading the news, and straight back towards the window again. If N has already taken her bath, she joins me. “We’re doing exercise!” she shouts with glee, running faster with each lap, cajoling me to keep up with her. She holds my hand with one hand and her belly with the other, mimicking the way I support the baby swimming inside me while waddling around the cozy apartment. 

These walks are the markers of my days: the one I take alone after breakfast, the one with my dad after lunch, the one with my daughter after dinner. They will come to an end quickly, I know. In a few months, the baby will come, and after that, graduation. My parents will move back home and there will be no more walks with dad—after lunch or at any other point during my days. 

I consider this small sorrow daily, usually while putting on my shoes. And then I wait for my dad by the door. 

TUESDAY

“Care is like ephemeral art—an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture of mac and cheese and baby wipes and no tears shampoo and socks that never match and chore charts that never work and all that just gets blown away with the winds of time. And like art that isn’t static, isn’t permanent, can’t be put up on a wall and admired in a museum—care is devalued. We stumble on it sometimes in the wild and it takes our breath away, a momentary glimpse of the tenderness with which we hold and protect and nourish and delight in our loved ones; just like one of Goldsworthy’s mandala’s, there’s a divine structure to it, a feeling of inevitability. It’s as ordinary as dirt and as sacred as the kind found at Chimayo. It’s here, there, and everywhere, so kind of nowhere.

Caring for someone you love is, of course, a reward on to itself, the deepest of them, but it need not be labor that happens in such embattled circumstances. It could be absorbed and still revered, invisible and still funded, ephemeral and still prized. It could be held as the center of our existence, rather than the thing we rush through to get to our “real work.” We could see and honor the seasons—caring for children, caring for elders—and the variable capacities—the neurodivergent and disabled and chronically and temporarily ill.”

—The art of care mostly disappears from Courtney Martin’s The Examined Family

WEDNESDAY

The perfect way to begin this morning is by listening to the Our House demo with Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell while making N’s lunch and rubbing the sleep from our eyes. 

THURSDAY

We’ve heard a lot about quiet quitting lately, but this post by my friend and artist Lisa Congdon, about loud quitting, really stayed with me. In it, she writes: 

So far in the past 9 months, I’ve quit alcohol, food restrictions, teaching college, my podcast (more on that to come), two boards of directors, working on Fridays, working on umpteen client projects at once, coffee dates with people I don’t know, most public speaking, writing any more books, several friendships, and most weekday evening plans. I have not felt as happy, “balanced” (if such a thing exists) and such a sense of spaciousness in nearly 20 years. 

I’ve begun to think of this as “loud quitting” — intentional, communicated, assertive (as opposed to passive), and unapologetic. So, to be clear, this not necessarily the opposite of “quiet quitting,” which is about not going above and beyond in the workplace (which I also support) — just simply my way of overtly claiming and taking control over my time in a way I haven’t in my entire life — because, for most of my 55 years, I thought it was literally my duty to please/serve others. 

I contributed a comment about my own long string of things I’ve quit this year, and it’s obvious that neither Lisa nor I are the only ones. The past few years have all added up to this one, where we’re rediscovering what our values and boundaries are—and that’s always something worth celebrating. 

FRIDAY

whose influences, we said,
    made us passive and over-polite
whose relationships with our fathers
    we derided at consciousness-raising groups
whose embroidered pillowcases still accuse us
    on the shelves of our modern lives

they have become interesting old women
they are too busy to write often
they wish we wouldn't worry about them
they are firm about babysitting
they are turning out okay

—Our Mothers by Leona Gom

If you'd like to support me, you can pre-order my upcoming book of illustrated essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself, for yourself, a loved one, or both! My art prints, stationery, and books are available through BuyOlympia. You can also pledge your support for this newsletter by becoming a future paid subscriber. 

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Another year over.

A portrait of my mother and N, for Issue #53 of Uppercase Magazine

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

MONDAY

When my mother first comes to visit me on the farm, she’s in awe. She’s lived in the suburbs for her entire adult life, ever since she emigrated to the United States as a young woman. For the last 30 years, she’s been surrounded by streets and sidewalks, the chatter of neighbors, the early morning rumble of school buses picking up their children. Here, it’s quiet.

"Look at all this land!” she says, walking around the 20 acres of wood that surrounds us. “Wow. It’s so green. So beautiful. Look! There’s deer there.” I look, but my eyes miss their delicate limbs as they disappear into the maple trees. Instead, I see the weeds inching past my knees, the stone driveway in need of leveling, the demolished kitchen I spend my days re-tiling. We wash our dishes in the bathtub. We spend our nights tilling the earth, weeding the greenhouse, or clearing years of neglect from the yard. It’s difficult for me to imagine the future, but I know it will take many years to love this neglected land into something new.

–An excerpt from my latest column, Being, for Issue #53 of Uppercase Magazine

TUESDAY

"To be reminded of your cosmic insignificance therefore isn't just relaxing, but actively empowering. Because once you remember the stakes aren't anywhere near that high, you're free to take meaningful risks, to let unimportant things slide, and to let other people deal with how they might feel about your failing to live up to their expectations."

–Oliver Burkeman on Cosmic Insignificance

WEDNESDAY

Today, on my birthday: this is what I look like. This is what I look like nearly all of the time: like I'm sleepwalking through life.

I've got one year of graduate school nearly finished, one forthcoming book of essays written and under my editor's care, and one beautiful baby who loves waking up at 4am.

Sometimes I look at my little family and feel like I'm in a dream. Sometimes I get off the phone with a friend and I think about how lucky I am to have such meaningful relationships. I've built a life my 15-year-old-self couldn't even have imagined. I feel myself changing nearly all of the time. Things are hard and beautiful; challenging and all the more fulfilling because of that.

Low on sleep, but life is full, full, full: this is a lucky life.

THURSDAY

Over the past half-year, slowness has settled into me. I've become a lot more comfortable with taking the long road, letting go of ideas that dictate where I shouldbe and how it should look.

It is especially difficult to be patient with creative work, which can be quite isolating and lonely, and which relies on a strong connection with your honest, artistic self. I'm continuously rebuilding this relationship. While I do so, interviews with those I admire have been especially comforting: Shaun Tan on taking the long road, Caver Zhang on gradual acceptance, and Lois Lowry on reading as a rehearsal for life.

FRIDAY

Lucky Life isn't one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace and of pleasure as I lie in between the blows.
Lucky I don't have to wake up in Philipsburg, New Jersey,
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking
Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking S.S. Philip and James
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.

Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study 
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures 
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky the waves are cold enough to wash out the meanness.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.

–from Gerald Stern's Lucky Life

xo,

M

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