THE FEELING: Astronomical Dawn

"Fifty cups of coffee and you know it's on"

THE FEELING is by life and lifestyle writer Kate Carraway and is about wellness, happiness, relationships, health and healing, meditation and mindfulness, rest, pleasure, self-care, self-help, and the self-imaginary.

Pals,

An update: I’ve been around, but not around here. How are you? Hi, hi, hi.

It’s my favorite time of year, an astronomical dawn, the Just Before: the pre-Memorial Day moment, the warmth of Actual Spring shifting in the light of a crystal prism, setting summer on fire.

(Okay, figuratively, it’s astronomical dawn, which is the first, blue-black slice of the morning, but literally, it’s more like “civil dawn,” five a.m.-ish, when the light is scattering and the earliest waker-uppers among us, the Four A.M. Freaks, have to accept that we aren’t always going to beat the sun to the punch.)

It’s also lilac season — Leezy Seazy — which I live for. (My daughter Strawberry followed an ant around at the park the other day, and I asked her if the ant had told her what its name was — they usually do — and she said yes, “His name is ‘Lilac,’” except she pronounces it “Lee-lack,” and like, damn, that’s a name.)

Summer! The jelly sandals that I ordered several moons ago — I need to be seen for this, I need to be seen for the way I was there first, and am so often first, even when it’s about something stupid that is going to hurt and only look good for the duration of a Lee-Lack bloom— will be here tomorrow.

(I have this vision for wearing the jellies with mesh socks, which I do own, for my patent loafers and my one-strap flats, and a “pearl” anklet, which I do not own, and shouldn’t, but I know that’s too too too much.)

Anyway. It’s been such a while. I’ve been caring for Strawberry, almost-mostly full-time (but — would my husband, Sweet-Thing Simon, who uses almost-mostly every moment that he’s not at his Big Job either cooking, walking the dog, or caring for Strawberry, agree???), all this time. There are only three months left, until she goes to preschool full-full-time.

(Which will be weird, I think, because my day starts so early to accommodate my thousand-layer self-care routine, and because writing only ever goes until noon, or one, latest, at which point you eat a juicy fruit, go for a run, and/or hold your dog’s ears in your hands, and then? Something? I’ll do something-something-something, whatever I used to do, until pickup. Wander midtown with a takeout coffee cup in my teeth, pawing through my bag, some crush of totes and fresh flowers falling off my soft, round shoulder? Is that what I did? I was always doing something.)

So I have been with her, with her and with her, making more and more eye contact until her Precious Moments-style golf balls roll away from me to examine something more interesting, some lilac or Lilac. Strawberry update: I’m sorry to report, sometimes genuinely sorry, that she remains easy/the easiest, charming, a great hang, fascinating (I mean, to me). Industrious, focused, “businesslike,” per my dad. Two days ago I put her in a sundress because it was so hot (she has refused dresses since she could talk, even before), and she twirled and twirled, and asked Simon and I to twirl, too. “A family of twirlers,” Simon said. I don’t know what that means, but I think he’s right.

So, that. I also just finished a work project that consumed me and delighted me. To be simultaneously consumed and delighted! To be held, and free, at once! I don’t know. I don’t know what could feel better than that.

Does everything good also feel like being in love? Is that the metric? “It’s good if it feels like being in love”? Hmm.

And on that topic, and on this general topic: Simon had a knee replacement in November. It was his second, replacing a previous replacement that failed. And: this one also failed. In the knee-replacement world, Simon is an infant, and while his original injury was gnarly — lacrosse-related, what else — I find it a little fucky that two replacements in a row simply failed. They’re not really ever supposed to fail, not when you do all the physio, which he did, which your girl was all over: the pushing, the pulling, the horror rewarded with two or three Mini-Eggs. I have developed some unproven, fact-free theories about this replacement-rejection being related to his nut and shellfish allergies. (???) Or: Leg Ghost. (???) I don’t know. It was awful. He was in so much pain. Just: grotesque, awful pain.

Oh, also, around that time, when Simon was working a lot-a lot to prepare for several months off (in finance jobs you don’t normally get real time away; when Simon seems squirrely about agreeing to turn his phone off “for a while” on vacation, he will re-remind me that some jobs simply don’t accommodate my ideas about discharging and untethering, and while he is too polite to say so, he means, “big jobs,” important jobs, jobs that justify the salary and the status, the kinds of jobs I’ll never have or even really understand, not really), several things in my 100-year-old house fell apart all at once. So! Oh! Oh, I did all of that, handled it, managed it. This feels incidental, now, but even aside from the money stuff — which becomes abstract, anyway, since everything can be declared either “unavoidable” or “an investment” — the stress of having to make meaningful decisions very quickly when you have no knowledge of or experience with the subject matter, is, actually, just like the money, both too big and too abstract.

So, it’s been busy, busy in the tick-tock, this-and-then-this-and-then-this, kind of way, and busy in the way of keeping a heavy atmosphere afloat with just your weak, wobbly arms, the arms that were meant for takeout coffee and fresh flowers, not real work, not Big Jobs.

The care I provided for Simon before and during and after his knee replacements — which was across the areas of administrata, emotional, physical, and Mini-Eggs — isn’t the hard kind. I wrote this, here in THE FEELING in 2021: “When the trajectory with Simon, at the beginning, turned into black ice on a black diamond, fast-fast-fast-fast despite not knowing each other at all, in some rare moment of cool reality I asked myself if I would be willing to take care of this man in a permanent, diaper-changing, spoon-feeding, tragedy-situation, and my first, firm thought was that I would be honored. So, you know.”

It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t close to that. It was significantly harder this time, to care for Simon, and Strawberry, and our dog Jem, at once — because Strawberry didn’t exist last time, she hadn’t even been extracted from my ovaries and whipped into being and placed, I hope lovingly, by an embryologist or lab tech, in an industrial freezer — even with the rag-tag team of people who helped us. (Although, I booked a bunch of hours of cleaning and dog-walking and personal-support working for the beginning, really blew that budget to smithereens, and then was on my own for the rest of it, and the rest of it was months.) It was harder in the relentlessness, doing all of the childcare by myself for so long, but the hard-harder-and-hardest was seeing Simon in so much pain, and then so much despair, when the surgery, performed by “the best” guy in “the best” hospital in “the best” city, didn’t work. Again!

It is very in-ter-esting to be consumed by care, with and without “delight.” I was never in a position to do that in the first part of my adult life. I escaped two things: the obligations of daily care, for any creature other than myself (and for most of that time, I did a really shitty job with just me), and grief. It’s notable to me, how I’m one of the only people I know who hasn’t lost someone very close, a first-degree loss. Not exactly. I hold that fact in my hand like a piece of beach glass and wonder over it. Everything else has happened to me — everything that my various privileges can’t deflect, the problem bouncing silently and shamefully away — but not that.

I think of these eras of care as descents, like entering an underworld, where the rest of your life, and just “life,” still exists, but is either distant — and the travel is slow and expensive — or simply inaccessible. In the fall, I stood in a field, on a walk with Jem, pausing between renting stuff from the surgical-supply store and hauling in bags of ice and buying fresh Hot Wheels at the drugstore, and told my friend via voicenote that I was beginning my descent. It was very submariner. (Nautical dawn: between Astronomical and Civil, a medium-blue.) Very low.

But also, it’s really something, to be pulled into those outer reaches of care, the outer reaches of either providing care or receiving care, and to want to be there. It meant a lot to me to do a good job, on this. Post-kid, post-pandemic… I needed to feel like I was asking for nothing, and giving everything (I mean, within reason, like, I still need to do my [REDACTED] hours of self-care every day).

The same way that I knew I would be a good parent — that I could prove something to myself and provide something real and good to someone else — I knew I could do this, well. And I did it! I did a good job. My shadow-self is, still, so “soft.” I’m both the youngest child, the Roman Roy, and the only child, the Rory, which is a real combo. I am The Best Seventeen-Year-Old Ever, you know? One of my best friends said to me (and I carried it, quick-quick but carefully, deep into my emotional archives) that I was at my best when I was taking care of other people. I didn’t believe her, then. But I did it. I mean, I still feel lost, in the underworld, and am still so aware of “my life” going on, all that time, without me.

And when I come back to it, to “me” — in January; in March; literally yesterday; again in September — I come up gasping for air, for daylight, for dawn.

xx

Kate