Dear Tired: The Self Will Not Be Forced Under
On the exhausting and consuming nature of caregiving + the churning space-time continuum + the only way I've ever found to "live and work with a divided consciousness" as Louise Erdrich describes
“In a major discovery, scientists say space-time churns like a choppy sea.”
Lit Salon
The Self Will Not Be Forced Under
These are tender, aching days. The sun outside is hot. The grass is dry. The sidewalk shimmers with the intensity of July and the air rings bright with children’s voices. But inside this house, we have had blankets and tissues, liquid Tylenol and Advil in 5 ml doses every six hours. We have tears and snuggles and lotion between the toes and many trips to the potty chair. We have had moonlight streaming in through wavy windows and night terrors when the pain peaks.
As I mentioned in last week’s Lit Salon, our foster grandson, Z, who is two years old and who has been in our family for almost one year now, had surgery last Monday to remove his tonsils and adenoids (and in the days before surgery, Z developed a fever of 104 and a severe rash thanks to hand, foot & mouth disease). None of this was easy. Since June, Z and his single foster parent, who is also my youngest child, Billie, have been living with Jon and me. They will stay here until September, when Billie will close on the new house they bought, which is, strategically, around the corner from ours. The three of us, Jon and Billie and me, have been bonded in service to a tiny, fragile person with oceanic needs, many which predate our knowing him.
These are tender, aching days.
And I am reminded, in my thirty-fourth year of motherhood, of Louise Erdrich’s beautiful The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year, which I consumed with an insatiable hunger when my children were small:
“The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby’s needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children’s faces.”
The self will not be forced under.
The self will not be forced under.
The self will not be forced under.
What does this mean for those of us whose lives are filled with storm surges of caregiving? (Which for me and for many others comes on top of full-time work?) That’s part of the root of this week’s Lit Salon question, from a writer who calls herself Tired, which I’ll get to shortly. But first, a question of my own—because if the self includes the creative self, and, in Erdrich’s lovely, brutal meditation, it most certainly does, I must ask: If the self will not be forced under, then … what becomes of the self? What does it do? Does it flail unendingly in a relentless sea?
No. Instead, Erdrich says this:
“We live and work with a divided consciousness.”
Ah yes. Yes! That’s what we do. I know this. I have been working with a divided consciousness since my first baby arrived thirty-three years ago next month. My nest, empty for a flash so brief I might have dreamt it in 2016, quickly filled back up in late 2018 when Billie and their partner Tao moved home from China to live in our attic. Just over a year later, the four of us were were locked down together for Covid. By then, Jon and I already had two grandbabies. As the pandemic stretched on, we welcomed two more. Back then, Billie was not yet a parent, but serving as director of children and family services for the Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, a post they eventually left, but their need to care for children did not. That’s when they got licensed for foster care. Which is a beautiful and grueling endeavor for a single person. It is also holy ground for Billie and me, so much so that sometimes, in the exhaustion and intensity of it all, I believe we are the expanded fullness of ourselves, our whole selves over all of these years, once mother-child, now two adults, mother-grandmother-friends, with all of the same hunger and need, all of the same tipping away of the world. Erdrich writes:
“It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike BEFORE that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”
Yes, space-time does indeed churn like a choppy sea, and I have never needed scientists to confirm that for me. Einstein, who did believe in time, did not believe in distinctions between “then” and “now.” Long ago, Einstein said: People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” In essence, everything is always happening all at once, which only makes Erdrich’s words more poignant:
“Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too—how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts.”
This brings us to this week’s letter writer, and their burning question about writing while exhausted, which involves the divided consciousness Erdrich points toward. I don’t have all the answers, but I know what works for me, which might also work for Tired, and for you.
Dear Jeannine,
I’m tired. So tired. All the time, just tired, tired, tired. And I don’t know how to keep going with my creative life in the face of this chronic exhaustion. I’m 28, and since graduating from college, I’ve published several essays and poems, and I have several projects in progress, too, including completed a hybrid memoir-in-poems manuscript that needs more revision. But I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get back to any of this. I am the adoptive single parent of a special-needs toddler, and these days, when my son finally goes to sleep at night, all I want to do is stare at Netflix or mindlessly scroll Instagram. Everyone tells me that this time goes fast, that things will settle down, that I’ll get less tired. Everyone tells me life is long, there will be more time in the future for the things I miss, like long hot showers, a quiet mind, and, yes, writing. But I’m not sure. My son is doing incredibly well, all things considered, and so am I, in terms of what matters most: we’re healthy enough, have a safe, secure place to live, plenty to eat, and a vibrant network of family and friends. But, even still, it’s hard to imagine that my creative energy will bounce back (or even creep back up) to what it once was just because my son turns a year or two or three older. What will happen if my creative self goes fallow for some long, undefined stretch of years while I wait for that magic moment when I wake up and “have more time?” Because I just don’t see it anywhere on the horizon. Should I just surrender, and make peace with the fact that although I used to love to write and had some real aspirations and traction, I gave up that future when I adopted my son? There’s a Buddhist saying that goes, “In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of the things not meant for you.”
It hurts to think this, but maybe writing was not meant for me.
Signed,
Tired
Dear Tired,
I remember—so vividly—an afternoon about thirty-two years ago. It was summer, and I lived with my one-year-old daughter and her father in a lonely old house on a hill overlooking a bright blue lake. I remember how the grass was soft and green and overgrown, and the picnic table needed scraping and painting. I remember the cellar door outside the house—yes, a real cellar door—and how I always wondered whether we should somehow seal that off, ensure that no future toddler or child could ever get