Tiny Thursdays

A list of 9 (not so) Tiny Things

film I shot of river on her birthday two years ago

Over the next two weeks we’ll be tightening up the timing of these notes, lists and letters. Now that the second draft of my book is handed in, the urge to be with you more promptly has arrived. The thoughts (which you’ll get a taste of in this letter), reached me at 4 am. In my waking hours, I was reminded of why I started this space and said goodbye to LY. Mostly as a way to keep returning intimately. But also to support my work as a writer more sustainably between books, freelance work, partnerships outside of this space, while single parenting. The transformation borne out of the time I developed and launched The Mae House (last year this time) it feels as if we are in the final stage of its metamorphosis. Or like my manager Lauren once said to me, “The glitter is finally settling.” If you’d like to support the work, research, and care it takes to continue a community I built in 2011, and am carrying over here, please become a paid subscriber. As always, thank you!

On my walk this morning I kept rolling over the idea of starting today’s tiny note with a question; why the f*ck won’t my tween sleep? But in offloading the question a number of blocks (7), I circled to the conclusion a guy I was seeing recently offered to me, “She’s your child isn’t she?”  And what he meant by that in his curiosity and in his bout of care that I am still annoyed he’s somehow removed from my tender grasp…

 I digress (I’m halfway joking), what I’m saying is, he reminded me that although River is very much River, she is also me. At best, the satisfactory sleeping habits I have now were learned through good friends, and also people like that guy. People who leave their phone in boxes outside of their bedrooms, and have extremely productive days with less malaise. What he was saying in the moment of shared interest, is what I know and have learned. 

Many of my friends are just having babies, or their daughters have not yet reached puberty and I am looking at the future when they come knocking at my door with questions and concerns. Or when they read this note and realize I was right about something. The way all my friends with teens were onto something when they warned me. Although I have been a practitioner of good sleep steps the last few years, those were earned. And my daughter won’t go the f*ck to sleep because she is no longer an angel-baby that sleeps through the night and naps at perfect intervals. She is growing with a mind that runs, thinks, and folds ideas when it is supposed to be regenerating. 

I awoke to her reading at 2 am the other day, and the horror (because I crashed at 9 pm with Oak) astonished me. “Whose house is this?” I went back to sleep after drinking a glass of warm water and demanding that she go off too. But I didn’t speak of my tactics; water, walking, maybe even doing a dish or two. I expected her to find her way as I found mine.

Today I am thinking of the way we’re always shocked when something familiar is tangible and real. Along with my tween’s sleep, I am slipping into the years of when did that happen? The distance of time offers a space to be, to think, and to befriend that old approach and look at it objectively. All of this to say, that the tween years require that you wake up anew each morning, placing your old self, with your childhood self, with their younger self, with the one-day adult they would be. It requires that the distance show up fast. But so does that intimacy. 

1. The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are

2. where is the spiritual when the religion is gone? (not sure where I heard it, but I wrote it).

3. Why it's so important to capture family oral histories. (to listen to when audio is live)