#6 What's Next?

Gosh I'd love to know. Also: stock up on 🫖, ignore your kids, and do you know about the Japanese version of IKEA??

Oct 13, 2024

⭕️ 50% Off Tea, Cocoa & Chai This one is for my Portland people! New Seasons is running their annual sale and it’s a perfect moment to stock the tea shelf. Sale is on until October 15.1

⭕️ Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often Perhaps a timely opinion, given the Surgeon General’s recent advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents (gift link).2

⭕️ Are Chickpea and Bean Pastas Good for You? It depends.3

⭕️ A Perfect Striped Shirt Don’t sleep on Muji’s apparel! This has a nice heft, just the right drape, and comes in a good range of soft colors (I can’t do high-contrast black or navy + white that’s traditional for this style).4

Walking to fill my head.

I’ve been going on a lot of evening walks because I need to ground back into the world outside of my head after living in a computer screen all day.

We live close to a couple of historic neighborhoods in Portland, with tenured trees and a mix of styles: porch-heavy craftsman, gingerbread Tudor, red-roofed mission, pat little Cape Cods. The houses are close together and close to the street, so the landscape constantly offers something new to notice at walking pace. I like to check in on my favorites to see how they shift through the seasons, and what that might mean about the the people who live there.

Who creates a Martha-esque stack of warty pumpkins? Who fills the yard with blow-up mummies and spinny-eyed witches? Who lets the fallen leaves stick around for next spring’s pollinators? Who broadcasts their values to the world via yard sign? By a posted poem?

Another thing I think about is: Could we live here?

We’re in a cusp-y space right now. Almost to a moment of huge transition. The boys are flying through high school, just charging towards the moment of leaving to seek out the rest of their lives. We have a few more guaranteed years left in this house (our landlords are angels and have reassured us that we’ll be able to stay until the boys finish school).

But then what?

I saw Daisies a couple of weeks ago at PAM CUT and loved it.

On these walks I think, is a life in this little bungalow the future we’re moving towards? Is it a life outside this city? What are we moving towards?

I know I can’t grab after it, whatever that future is. I’ve pushed with great intensity for things in the past that I thought I wanted: moving to New York with babies, going to grad school with babies, that research trip to the Czech Republic, securing teaching jobs, developing curriculum that held too many big ideas to actually put in action, trying to find a partner on dating apps, organizing a perfectly routed Thanksgiving road trip to San Francisco (with car camping), creating an online Waldorf curriculum during the pandemic — I almost always choose the hardest way of doing things!

I copy out pages of text by hand in order to understand it. I conduct bottomless research until I run out of time to do the thing I was researching. I cling to the vision, no matter how hard it is to realize. I think this has made me a great set or costume designer, but maybe not a great stage director.

I’ve always thought it’s not worth it if it’s easy. The hard way must bear better fruit, or at least be more admirable.

And sure, the hard things I’ve done have usually been worth it, in some way. But they almost never lead to the thing I thought they would. The best things in my life have usually shown up beyond the limitations of my imagining.

I wasn’t planning on getting back together with Sebastian after a 3-year separation and single parenting.

For a long time I worried about finding another place for my family to live, struggling with both the small space and the cost of rent. Then, like magic, the square footage increased, the rent went down, and we stayed put.

Every career move I’ve made has happened to me more than I’ve made it happen — the first big one came by way of a friend who saw my potential and championed it; the second in a moment of crisis (unexpected job loss and a possible housing loss looming), again through a friend who made the connection between my skillset and our local Waldorf school; the most recent was the difference between spending six months applying for dozens of jobs, and then one day getting recruited by an organization that wanted me — even though I knew nothing about the staffing industry.

These things that I didn’t push for have given me more stability than I thought I could have, when I was 30 and trying to figure out how to support a household on my own in an expensive city. They’ve made my life rich and full of beauty and connection. They’ve created space for my family to root down, grow up, and learn how to be good to each other.

I never saw any of it coming.

This isn’t to say that I wasn’t helping it all along! I was working and expanding, constantly. Working on keeping my heart and mind open. Working on communication and saying what I needed (rather than assuming it would be known). I was learning new skills, putting them into practice, showing my work.

But I wasn’t forcing myself into some prepackaged way of being, in the ways I’d attempted in the past.

I think I’m going on these long walks, usually in silence (I don’t need any more input), to clear my head. But really I just end up filling it with questions: Could this be us? Why not us?

The obvious answer to “Why not us?” is that a shoebox bungalow in Portland costs $600K+, that we don’t have a down payment saved, and my student loan debt, despite making the payments I can for over 15 years now, still totals what a similarly-sized house outside of Portland would cost.

And, life is long and surprising.

I’m trying to stay open to possibility right now, at this moment of almost-transition. I’m a planner, a vision-haver and -holder. I want to see it in my head, check all the angles and underbelly, so I know how to approach it. I can’t see now how it will happen, the blurry future, and that’s deeply uncomfortable. But the now we’ve created is warm and beautiful and the result of a lot of hard work. Now is lovely.

Now is a beeswax taper burning on the desk of my studio desk — the room of one’s own I’ve been desperate for. It’s my bookclub around the fire pit in my backyard. It’s seeing a movie on my own in the middle of the week. It’s having a fully stocked pantry and a fridge full of food prepped for the week. It’s a bowl full of apples on the piano. It’s an early afternoon espresso, a walk in the sunshine, my neighbors’ gardens. It’s the kids enrolled in all the activities they want to be part of. It’s tickets to the ballet. It’s reading on the couch on a Saturday morning with the cat curled on my chest. It’s knowing that maybe I don’t have the perfect words right now but if I keep going at it, eventually I’ll be able to say it like I feel it. It’s the sweetness of a husband who loves and so thoroughly supports me. It’s sons who say “I love you” a dozen times a day. It’s a house that others feel good to be in. It’s having learned a lot and knowing there is always more to learn.

Now is the place I want most to be and I’m working on getting there.

I like to pick up gift teas (like this special chai) and stocking stuffers for the boys (individual cocoa packets) during this annual sale. And I’ve been drinking many cups of Breathe Easy this week as I try to push through a cold. 🤧

I didn’t spend that much time playing with my kids when they were little.

I put a lot of intention into creating spaces and situations that would support their play, and sometimes I’d be “the little old grandma who is cooking dinner, or washing dishes, or sweeping the floor, or knitting a sweater,” but I never felt compelled to entertain them when they were young.

We never had child care and have always lived in small spaces — which means we’ve spent a lot of time together and had a lot of influence on the boys. I was also 22 when I had Pan and was very much still learning how to be an adult, figuring out what I wanted to do, building my career, scrambling for basic securities. Perhaps “ignoring” them was a survival mechanism?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the choices we’ve made as parents recently; what’s worked, what’s played into them becoming who they now are. This is something I think I’ll be writing more about, soon.

We really like the Banza brand — which you can get for a deal at Costco! They’re made of chickpeas, hold their shape well, taste mild, and make a great baked pasta.

Whether as pasta or in original form, we should all be eating more beans!

Do you know about Muji? The easiest way to describe it is the Japanese IKEA — but with apparel and stationary and luggage and more. The vibe is minimalist, well-crafted, timeless, and reasonably priced.

Most of their stores in the U.S. have closed over the past couple of years; I’m lucky / it’s dangerous that the downtown Portland brick & mortar is mere blocks from my office.

Other pieces I have my eye on right now:

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