Dear Somebody: A birthday wish.

Me and my birthday girl (2024)

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

MONDAY 

On my birthday, I set out to make F’s birthday cake. She was born the day after I was and I choose to believe that this consecutive sequence of celebrations will bind us for the rest of our lives. It makes me happy. 

F is turning one, and I wish for her cake to be beautiful and healthy. Making a birthday cake for my children each year is important to me. For my sixth birthday, my mother made a cake for me that I remember with great affection: a magic school bus cake with a jellybean-filled top layer and Oreos for wheels. I think about this cake often; maybe this is why. I love cake; maybe this is why. I cook and bake for my family multiple times a day, an act of care—and therefore, an act of love; maybe this is why. Baking is an art and I want my ability to extend past the written and painted page; maybe this is why. All of these reasons are the reason why and because I’ve taken on the task, it’s something I want to do well. What I really wish for is to surprise myself. 

I make a frosting with no sugar, which tastes good but has low viscosity. I worry it won’t support the five layers of this cake, but I’m pressed for time. N and her cousins want to help. They take turns frosting each layer and one by one, I stack them high. The cake leans to the right and refuses to stop. I straighten it repeatedly but instead of a cake, it resembles a sloppy pile of pancakes. My brother-in-law, sitting across from me at the kitchen island, raises his eyebrows at the mess. He makes eye contact but says nothing. 

What is that? my dad asks as he walks in and settles himself at the island. It’s F’s birthday cake, I say, obviously frustrated. My dad’s eyes widen and he tries not to laugh. Don’t ask her what that is, he loudly warns each person who walks into the kitchen. It’s supposed to be a cake.

I roll my eyes, but all of the insecurities I’ve grappled with over the past year flood my eyes. I don’t have good instincts; ordinary tasks are difficult for me; I’m not a real artist—it’s just something I work hard at; I don’t know how to be a good mother; I will never measure up. These thoughts are gauzy, shadow-like. Threatening. But I also have another thought: that tomorrow, F will be an entire year old—and everything I didn’t know how to do for her, I eventually figured out. 

I start over. I take each layer off, scraping the icing off and back into a bowl. Masi, what happened? my oldest nephew asks, seeing the cake he had just frosted now fully disassembled. I know, I tell him. But I’m gonna figure it out. I add corn starch to the icing and stick it in the fridge. After 20 minutes, I take it out and begin again. I decide the cake needs additional support, and my dad, who has finally stopped laughing at me, neatly saws a chopstick in half.

When the layers are all iced and assembled, it looks like a cake. An adorable, small-and-tall cake, perfect for a one-year-old. My younger nephew sets out all the sprinkles and we call N and Z over. Go wild, we tell them and they do. Z pours all the sprinkles within reach on top and N eats the rest. My nephew and I watch them. We look at each other and smile. 

It’s not the rainbow cake I’d wanted for F; it’s something better. My sister baked the layers so I didn’t have to; maybe this is why. My nephews helped me start over; maybe this is why. My dad heckled me and then offered support; maybe this is why. My daughter and my niece listened to themselves, which is the most honest form of creativity—while decorating F’s cake; maybe this is why. I want to be a good mother and I will always try, very hard, to be one; maybe this is why. 

All of these reasons are the reason why and because I want to do the work, it’s something I will do well. On my birthday, on the eve of F’s birthday, what I really wished for, I got: I surprised myself. 

TUESDAY

“The lens is a black eye, and a camera has an aperture. That’s easy enough; but it’s not easy, because the metaphor has blossomed the camera into the brown poet, into we brown poets (the recipients of the instructions): black-eyed aperture. To be black-eyed, yes, perhaps, to have the eyes of a black person, and we can have a lot of conversations about what that means, but at the very least, it means to see black people. Since her earliest poems, Finney’s model for us has been to see black people. To lay her eyes (and pencil) on her beloveds.

But to be black-eyed also means to have bruised eyes, hurt eyes: eyes that have been hurt by what they’ve seen, and eyes that have been hurt maybe for what they’ve seen. And an aperture, in addition to being a part of a camera, is a hole or an opening through which the light comes. Be a black-eyed opening for the light to come through. Be this. It’s my first final instruction. It’s the best I can say first and last. Let’s start here.”

—Ross Gay on the poetry of Nikky Finney for The Sewanee Review

WEDNESDAY

We finished the black comedy Beef a few weeks ago and I still find myself thinking about it. To me, this short series manages to capture a particular flavor of darkness: the self-loathing and self-destructiveness that blooms inside a first-or-second generation child who realizes they’ll never achieve a level of achievement or happiness that can neutralize the many sacrifices their parents made. Beef digs into this internal grappling, in all its complexity and absurdity, with poignancy and humor. 

THURSDAY

I’m reading The Magic Words by Joseph Fasano and helping N write her first poems; I’m listening to Ghibli Sleep, my current writing playlist which doubles as car/calming music for F.

FRIDAY

Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in

—Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine

xx,
M

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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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