Ridiculous how hard everything is. No one is immune. Everywhere I look someone is suffering, angry, breaking up, dying. Including me. (Not the dying part… at least not imminently.)

Some people I know fixate all the time on the catastrophe of it all. Others find some sort of off-switch. Hide behind TV or exercise or some sort of activist organization. Me, I think we’re all fucked. And spend each day trying to make magic for my perfect boy while warding off the swooping bats (demons?) of my own despairing, black-and-white nature.

My memory is utter garbage. All the work of maintaining (composure, hope, face, focus, organization, control) wipes out every available space in my mind. So yesterday’s conversation (argument?) is un-recallable. The memory palace of my daily life still holds strong, though. Ask me where that sock is and I’ll know. (Tucked behind the book about bear cubs in spring. Pair in dryer.)

A family member is dying tonight. In this storm. Or maybe it won’t be tonight. Maybe they’ll hold until Tuesday. Or not. It doesn’t matter except it’s all the world. Bright thread of life.

It’s all so achingly hard. The illusion of bright tomorrows has been long annihilated. Maybe by other deaths. Maybe by divorces and car crashes and cancer and that fucking glacier, that shrinks and shrinks every day.

No matter. Life is and has always been suffering. The TV lies to us but our stomachs know the truth. Thank god we’re in good company. Every fellow traveler walks the same path with us.

Amen.

It’s impossibly hard to sit on the edge of my son’s bed, delighting in the trilling word games that are the genius of his growing mind, his language acquisition, his exploding consciousness, and feel the hard stone of the climate crisis sitting in my stomach. We play together with lion’s roar, stinky toes. He mouths rhyming words silently as I repeat them to him again, again, again. He beams with pride. I sniff him, inhale him, brush lips on his temple and hair. I tell him I love him; that he is precious to me. “Precious boy,” he replies.

We all are mortal, each of us. So it has been since the dawn of our days, so it remains for we who stand here on the brink of this great unraveling. My love for my child is no less, no more (though of course infinitely, incomparably, unbearably more) than that of any, every mother who has come before or after me.

Still, the joyful worlds I weave for him, of lush forests and creatures of the jungles and savannas, feel like lies. When my mother read me stories in my youth, did she confront the same sense that they were untenable, unreachable? Did the simple, pastoral landscape of Frog and Toad feel achingly ancient, lost to her? She is gone; I cannot ask her. But I wonder.

The magic of my son is my gift and my burden. His coming hardship, his living in this too-hot world, is an agony for which I have bargained with the devil. “Please, allow me this child.”

I fear that my bargain was too selfish; that he will pay its rising price. Yet we laugh together with such true, pure, mystical glee. Please, God, let that joy be tender for the debt.

I labor determinedly in our garden, seeking to re(dis)cover lost knowledge and skills. Each seedling’s struggle through soil to light is a celebration. I want to save him. I want to save myself. I pray I cultivate in him this wonder, fleeting or hopefully durable. Wonder is the only thing for which I feel honest hoping in these days.

I have traded my life for his. Each parent, all parents, only lucky enough to do so. Have I also traded his life for mine? For this, the love that bursts inside of me? This thing, so sweet, so crippling, so precious, that he has gifted me.

Before my mother died the cancer in her abdomen became like a stone. A heavy rock setting inside her. Each morning in the last weeks of her life she and I would rest beside each other in the pre-dawn birdsong and she would love me, her only daughter. In the fleeting moments before her pain took over she would breathe me in, brush fingers on my temple. I would call her Mama.

We are mortal. We are doomed. But I will take my child out each day and live. I will cultivate. I will seed wonder, tend our garden with him alongside. I will eventually tell him we all will die, or he will discover it himself and, with luck, I will comfort him through its dark revelation. I will be sure he knows the gratitude I feel for his unwitting agreement to pay the debt of my love for him; of my bringing him into this unimaginable world. Forgive me, I will ask. I love you so much.

A few weeks back I blogged on my current effort to assemble a matrix of understanding around my work with The Salmon Project. To build some scaffolding on which I could hang some understanding, or something that feels like meaning.

This effort continues. A few days ago one of my advisors sent me some musings on structure, and suggested that one format this work could take might be a “series of blog posts… to your friends and colleagues… about or stemming from The Salmon Project.” He may not have meant the idea literally, but I’m going to experiment with what it would feel like to use this space to help put form around my thoughts. I’ve been working from an outline for weeks, but it keeps getting bigger and more complicated, and what I may actually need to do is write a series of small essays that can gel into something larger.

This is an experiment, but I’m going to move ahead with it and see what takes shape.

I just opened up an old saved draft and found this post, below. Written when A. was only 5 months old. And I’m startled to find that the observations and the end of it could be written today. There’s something humbling in that, to recognize that I am consistently me. To see that with all my work and effort, the words that spill from my fingertips describe a steady state of being. One characterized by self-doubt, some ego, and a set of passions (writing, for example) that show up again and again. But also, that same sense of weariness of the repetitiveness of my worries and my own mind. But I have to say, reading it made me smile. This is the money quote:

The ping-ponging is one of my signature characteristics, and I’m happy/sad to see it return… The heavy cycling on a certain set of thoughts or beliefs—this is a hallmark of, well, me.

There’s something that tickles me about this. It’s like slapping my own self on the back and saying, “Hey old girl, there you are again. Gotcha!”  (The fact that I even can be tickled, rather than break down into tears, is due, for sure, to the fact that the daylight is back, and with it my stable emotional health.)

It’s also interesting to see how my focus has shifted. In the seventeen months between when I drafted this older post and today I’ve settled in certain ways. I was tormented for a very long time about the “where” part of my equation. And while I still have hopes of living overseas with Chris and A., and while we still talk of traveling, I feel more like Juneau is the home base. Though I’ve yet to really dip my toes into the community, outside parenting circles, I am in a constant churn about what I want to do and how I want to engage here in this place. So my mind is calling Juneau home. And is a difference.

The other thing that is not present in my writing below is my deep sense of concern about the future of our little blue planet, and the implications of that concern for the choices I want to make, personally and as a family. I think that part of the reason I actually feel at home in Juneau is that I feel this place—or at least coastal Alaska—is a relatively good place to be as things get more difficult. This is in contrast to other places that had my attention, like Oregon or Washington. Watching the summer of fires rip through the west really cooled me on the idea of living there. That and the 100+ temperatures.

One hope I have for this blog, should I be able to start practicing and succeeding on its pages a little more than I have, is to begin to explore some of the questions, ideas, readings, and themes that come to me on this subject of climate change and A.’s future. But again, this morning, I’m still just exercising the muscle. So again, I’ll just hit publish. So that this post doesn’t languish for 17 months.

In six days A___ will be 5 months old. I just had to go back and delete and re-write the second half of that sentence because I am so used to referring to him as “the baby” that it spilled automatically out of my fingers. And yes, he’s still a baby. But 5 months is something different and new. He’s full of attention and curiosity and laughter and the light bulbs go on daily for him. (Two days ago he learned to play peek-a-boo. Yesterday he figured out how to find and insert his pacifier in his mouth all by himself.) So while he’s clearly still “the baby” and will be for some time, he’s a different kind of baby than the little ones that are so dependent and so intimately attached to you at all times. When I put him in his jump-up he knows to jump—it’s no longer an accidental behavior. If I stick him in his car seat and pop the pacifier in his mouth he spits it out and gets mad because he knows that I’m actually about to ignore him for some period of time. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that he has an intellect and understands sequences of events, as well as cause-and-effect. It’s lovely.

At the same time that he is developing, I feel I am finally coming up out of water. Lots of things are different in my life. Gone, for example, is my sense that I can always maintain a baseline of cleanliness around my/our house. Also, I find that I need very little clothing. (I’ve been rotating the same 5 striped shirts since A___ was born.) But despite the changes and differences, I’m getting aspects of myself back—good and bad. I find that I’m beginning to fret some of the same old things that I’ve always fretted. What do I want to be when I grow up? Should I run for some sort of political office? Can I write a novel and actually finish it? Should I go back to school? Can I live a rooted life and also experience the adventures and travel that I’ve always craved? These questions are back in my head, ping-ponging around. The ping-ponging is one of my signature characteristics, and I’m happy/sad to see it return. Happy because it means I’m thinking about a different set of things than the immediate needs of my infant. Sad because they’re characteristics of myself that I find tiresome or tiring or that I wish sometimes would go away. The heavy cycling on a certain set of thoughts or beliefs—this is a hallmark of, well, me. 

I want to pick up on a theme from one of my earlier “exercising the muscle” posts. It’s this idea that I am consistent. In that post, I was playing with the fact that all the foibles of my ego and my personality seem to hold steady over time.

But something I find equally interesting is that, when I get to a pinch point and take a step back and really take a hard look at my values and my life goals, they remain pretty consistent. And they are these:

• I believe in the importance of acting in your daily life as if the choices you make matter for your planet and your society, even if the statistical reality is that this is an absurd vanity-slash-fantasy.
• I believe that a sailboat is a critical piece of family infrastructure, because it gives you the ability to travel or relocate from Place A to Place B without any inputs but the wind. (Importantly: no fossil fuel required.)
• I want “remote” property. This can either be remote in the Kodiak sense of the word, i.e. something off the road system; or “remote” in the sense of the word that would apply to about 99.99% of America, i.e. in a very small Alaska community (like, waaaay smaller than Juneau). I see this place as my haven, my canvas, my imagination, my classroom, A.’s classroom, my retreat, my point of safety.
• I want to write. Ugh, this one just hurts every day. I want to write, write, write, write, write. I want to figure out how to get the characters and the scenery and the worries and the ideas that bang around in my head out onto paper. Also, if I’m honest, I want those words to be read by other people. I want to try to find the way to tap into something animating, and share it with others in a way that causes them to pause or dream or recalibrate 3 degrees in one direction or another.

So what I find strange about this list above is that, despite the fact that it has been relatively consistent for at least 20 of my 41 years, I seem unable to make forward motion on most of these. So what I experience is a sense of dissonance, nearly constantly. I am very clear on these things, and have been clear on them for actual decades. But it’s as if I’m in a state of paralysis.

And every time I get to a struggle point in my life—something like a crisis or a sense of real confusion, something that agitates me enough that I have to get really serious or really dark or really quiet for a while to try to figure it out—these things come back to me.

Coming to this realization in the last couple of months has been important for me. The next important step will be not to forget this. And an additional important step will be talking lots with C. about this, to see if there are some of these things that we can undertake within the structure of our family and our relationship with one another.

All week I’ve been making a mental list of the mommy advice I’d want to pass along to my friend E., who is having a little girl in just about a month. She and I were together in Paris less than a year ago, when I was 23 weeks pregnant and she was considering the idea of getting pregnant. Now I have a 7 1/2 month old boy, and she’s about to cross through the veil as well. In addition, another one of my dearest old besties, A., is welcoming a baby boy later this year.

So here are the things that I knew absolutely nothing about 7 1/2 months ago, and would want to pass on to any new mom (or dad):

• Your instincts are the very best guide. Moms and babies evolved together for millions of years. You will know what your baby needs, better than anyone else.
• There are four things that you will need to care for yourself. They are: water, food, rest, getting outdoors. You should ideally have plenty of ALL FOUR every single day. If you’re feeling low, immediately do your four-finger checklist: have you had water? have you had food? have you napped with your baby? have you been outside? Addressing these will almost certainly fix your problem.
• Banish the word should. If you hear yourself asking if you “should” be doing something, and especially if you find yourself stuck in the babycenter comment boards researching it, you just need more sleep, or water, or food, or all three. Should is a watchword for needing self care. Refer back to my two points. You know what your baby needs, and you need the four things.
• Babywearing is the most important parenting thing that I knew nothing about prior to being a mom. Get yourself a Moby or a Boba or some other soft stretchy wrap and use it from day 1. Have a friend show you how to do a solid Front Wrap Cross Carry (FWCC). It will give you free hands, help you go to the bathroom, keep your little one close and kissable. And even more importantly, worn babies cry 50% less, sleep better, and are happier. You will love it.
• Babywearing has an incredible resource in a YouTube channel made by this amazing rainbow-haired dutch woman. It’s called Wrap You In Love (she also has a website). Check it out. Start with the FWCC video either for a stretchy wrap or a woven wrap. You will watch her videos again and again. She is awesome.
• Graduate to a woven wrap as soon as you’re ready.
• Never buy anything new, especially wraps. There are a million buy-sell-trade groups on Facebook for everything you need for a baby. Start with the Babywearing on a Budget group. And the Cloth Diaper Swap. And the Hanna Andersson b/s/t.
• Hanna Andersson makes the best pajamas.
• Kellymom.com is the go-to place for any questions having to do with breastfeeding and pumping.
• If you have ANY TROUBLE breastfeeding, go see the lactation consultant at your local hospital or birth center or wherever. Like, immediately. An ounce of prevention is worth 700 pounds of cure. Like, don’t even wait until it’s “trouble.” Just go if you have any questions at all, period. Just go for fun. Lactation consultants are worth their weight in gold—or in breastmilk, which is waaaaaay more valuable than gold.
• Feeding yourself will be your greatest early challenge. Put food in the freezer, but also think about the most nutrient-dense food items and keep them on hand. Key ones are coconut oil, avocados, quinoa. Get a Costco size jug of coconut oil and put it in EVERYTHING.
• Coconut oil is also great for baby’s butt. It has natural antibiotic and antifungal qualities. Keep a little bowl of it on your changing table.
• Keep bone broth in your fridge and freezer in quart sized jars and drink it like water. It will give you a punch when you need it.
• Your weight will drop off with breastfeeding, so don’t sweat that. In the meantime, eat super fatty foods that are healthy (see above), in great quantity. You need them and the baby needs them.
• The first 3 months are the hardest. Around 3 1/2 months you will feel like you come out of water. Remember that it goes incredibly fast and you will survive the hardest parts.
• Completely ignore people who tell you not to sleep with your baby. We evolved sleeping with our babies. You will not roll over on your baby. You and your baby will sleep better when s/he is in bed with you. It is an incredible joy to sleep with your little one.
• Thirsties Natural All In Ones (NAIOs) are excellent no-fuss cloth diapers. Buy them used. There’s a b/s/t for that.
• If you have to buy diaper stuff new, use nickisdiapers.com. They’re great.
• Burts Bees and Weleda make good butt pastes. Butt paste will discolor a cloth diaper but if it doesn’t have petroleum in it, it shouldn’t mess up the absorbency.
• Blue Dawn is best for stripping your cloth diapers when you need to. (Google it. You’ll need to, eventually.)
• Low water (high efficiency) washing machines do NOT work well for cloth diapers. The old fashioned deep tub, top-loading, lotsa water types are best. If you have an HE washer, do a lot of reading before investing in cloth diapers. Because it’s a huge, lame hassle and you may not be able to make it work.
• Steer clear of anything with fragrances. There’s just too much scary stuff that’s unknown. Use the EWG app to scan barcodes if you need a quick rating. But really, who needs anything other than Dr. Bronners Baby?
• Disana wool diaper covers, if you properly lanolize them, are the most amazing waterproof (pee-proof) diaper covers in the world. Combo’ed with a bamboo fleece flat, they’re also the best overnight diapers. Yeah, there’s a b/s/t for that, too. Lanolizing is easy if you know how to do it. YouTube can teach you.
• Get The Baby Book by Dr. Sears. You’ll consult it 10 times a day for the first 10 days, 10 times a week for the next nine weeks, and weekly from there on out. It’s gold. (Their The Baby Sleep Book is pretty good too.)
• Baby massage is an awesome way to help your little one wind down. And it has proven health benefits for mom, too. You don’t need anything fancy, just some almond or jojoba oil, and away you go. Start by asking baby’s permission, even she s/he is very tiny. S/he’ll let you know if she doesn’t want to do it. The Baby Book has the basics. You’ll find yourself doing it every day.
• Get a copy of one or both of the following: The Continuum Concept and Our Babies, Ourselves. Go back to point the very first point, above. We evolved with our babies. When you are wondering what you or your baby needs, ask yourself how you would have answered this question living in the forest 200,000 years ago. Go with that answer.
• Ignore people who tell you to let your baby cry it out. (See the two books immediately above for more on this.) Check out this book: The No Cry Sleep Solution.
• Wool socks for babies are impossible to come by. If you break down and buy the Smartwool ones, buy the toddler size and try to remember not to dry them. They shrink.
• Etsy is rad.
• There are a million zillion kinds of carriers for your baby. You’ll probably want a soft structured carrier as an early go-to, in addition to your stretchy wrap. Common brands are Ergo, Lillebaby, Tula, Onyababy, many others. Try them on, fit is more important than brand. Further down the line look in the Babywearing on a Budget swap and pick up a mei tai (or mei dai) and an onbuhimo.
• Find a weekly babies-and-moms group, either through your local hospital or birth center or somewhere else, and make a point of going. The people you meet there will become your friends, and their children will become your child’s friends. And it will help you feel normal and supported.
• Watch out for fire-retardant on pajamas. It’s a real thing. They poison baby sleepwear. This is a worthwhile thing to do a little reading on, and a reasonable place to spend a few extra bucks for the organic cotton pajamas from the expensive brands that don’t have fire retardants on them. (Except, there’s a buy-sell-trade for that. Oh, and get on the Hanna Andersson email list because there are always sales.)
• Also, fire retardants are absolutely everywhere. Crib mattresses, etc. Watch out for it.
• This Alaska Public Media archived podcast from the show Outdoor Explorer has good info about getting out in the elements with a baby.
• Hape is a great brand for wooden, developmentally appropriate toys.
• Lamaze makes great nursing bras. But basically you can get nursing bras from Walmart or Target online and they’ll meet all of your needs.

I love you, ladies. Your babies will be the best things ever to happen in your lives.

XOXO Erin

Sitting here at 40 weeks + 2 days, I’m amazed at how big the world seems. You’d think that my view might be narrowing, that I might be getting more and more focused on this imminent moment and utter transformation. But that’s not what I’m experiencing. As I sit here with my computer propped on a big pillow tucked under my even bigger belly, I’m barely even thinking of the baby, the pregnancy, the journey ahead. It’s a Saturday morning and my mind is skipping off down all its regular rabbit trails. Political reporting, musings on the nature of life and love, and a general sense of the enormous expansiveness of the future and all the possibilities it holds. Before we decided to have this kid, and in the first phases of my pregnancy, I was very worried at the idea that I might lose *me* in all of this. But I no longer fear that will be the case. I’m just as much me, just as quirky and neurotic and full of a rich and beautiful inner life as I’ve always been. Sure, that will shift like the world tilting on its axis. But this is not the end. Nothing will prevent me from being me, no matter how small and darling and needy and frustrating and loved that thing may be.

I sit here, two days before the baby’s due date, feeling stupidly inarticulate. You can insert every truism and cliché here. We are experiencing them all. And they feel so damn profound. I wish I had a greater mind, a more extensive literary canon under my belt, something to fuel some unique insight, some earth-tilting observation.

Instead, we’re waiting. Could be two days. Could be two weeks. After that, a lifetime. After 8 1/2 months of feeling superb, walking miles a day, and generally loving pregnancy, I have developed a kinked up sacrum that keeps me from walking very well, and have reached that “done” phase that everyone tells you about. It seemed unimaginable a week ago but—truism!—you reach a point when you want it to all be over. I guess I’m there.

Other not-so-unique experiences: Chris has finally to the guest room so we can both get much-needed sleep. My food intake has accelerated. Rubbing pressure points and applying essential oils does not result in instant labor.

Things that I am relishing: I don’t want to do much other than knit, and that’s okay. I haven’t lost “me”—I still feel feisty and politically and intellectually curious (I spent yesterday morning listening to Sally Yates testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and totally enjoyed myself). Smoothies are a wonderful way to ingest leafy greens and chia and flax seeds and homemade kombucha. Chris gives very good back rubs in just the right places. I can say “no” and feel no guilt about it.

Moochie is miserable. She doesn’t understand why we’ve abandoned our regular walk cycle. She spends the better part of the day between 10:30am and 4:30pm looking miserably at me, letting out huge sighs, and trying to tempt me to throw her grotesque Garfield toy for the 1,001st time. (“No, trust me! It’s really fun! Just throw it!! THROW IT DAMMIT!!!”)

I managed to plant the veggie bed, and the flower planters. And the potatoes. I have about a dozen house plants that need to be repotted, but that is definitely in the “not going to happen” category. (I have that on my list for Brendan Greenthumb when he comes.) I have some work projects that I’d still like to finish, but I don’t feel particularly committed to them and they’re non-essential. Chris keeps reminding me that I don’t have to do a single thing right now, and I’m appreciative of that. Brendan does the same. “Take it easy, sister. And I mean it.” Very hard when you’re the offspring of our mother, but I’m making an attempt.

I tried to send thank you notes to everyone who sent us anything, and pray I didn’t miss anything. Our nursery is full of lovely, thoughtful gifts.

Basically, we’re ready!

Last night I got to spend a couple of hours at the brewery with my lady-friends. I love this ritual of meeting up when I’m home. Of course there’s the part of me that wishes I were home more and could simply see everyone all the time. But there’s something special about a date and coming out to huddle. When someone comes around who has been away you make time.

Again and again I’m amazed by the way that good friendships between women enhance my life; our lives. I don’t know how mens’ friendships work, but I love how good women friends jump right in to the grit and detail and exploration. There’s no banter. It’s “how are you doing? How are you feeling?” And off to the races.

I always feel whole and refreshed after time with my ladies. And I also love that each fills a slightly different niche. There are the friends with whom I’ll take the deep dive about love and commitment; friends with whom I’ll discuss sex; friends to whom I turn with questions about the body, wellness. Friends who I go to for politics.

All in all, this is a blessed life.