Coffee with Girlfriends/That Old Other Feeling
People are suffering and I’m missing coffee with girlfriends. Mike and I are so committed to reducing our risk that it feels like our little family pod is totally alone. Like I don’t have any friends anymore, like not really, because we are being weirdly risk intolerant. Being not like the people I see out an about when I drive between our home and my mom’s home, the other location.
My shrink Trish tells me I need to allow myself to feel the sadness so that it can move through and not wind up as a back spasm or weird behavior displacement. Like last week we almost registered Ax for home school, almost adopted a dog, I almost committed to a new teaching gig, almost gave myself bangs, almost bought a house in New Zealand — well, that last one was a fairly remote almost but I did legit look on Zillow. Plus check interest rates.
And I did order haircutting shears. But I have a relatively small forehead and quite a few cowlicks in the front so bangs are a bad idea even if my forehead is getting alarmingly mobile these days.
So I almost a lot of things this week. Almost. But I didn’t. I stayed the low-risk course, the no big moves, no sharp turns course I was taught to maintain especially when emotions are high — and They. Are. High.
So. Pandemic, right? Awful. Appalling. And also racism — I am against it. Seriously. I got invited to a kind of consciousness raising type mixer where I think I get to be a kind of token white person or I’m not sure, but I’m honored. I said, “Hell yeah I’ll come. Thank you! Educate me!” So that’s a plus. But jeez so much guilt. Which doesn’t help anyone but it’s feeling a little like if I write about cutting my bangs then I’m maybe too much on the side of the oppressor or not an ally enough because I’m not focusing on racial inequities? I know I am missing something but it’s got me kind of tripping.
And so my friend who invited me who is, of color, I’m pretty sure she calls herself black, was like, “Ok, ok, don’t be trippin.” And I felt extremely white because like, I was trippin and I think trippin is what I do a lot of the time. But I’m open to changing for sure.
So anyway that was sort of all off brand as I pride myself on having zero political or potentially triggering content — I really do — and so if I’ve offended or triggered anyone just, sorry. That’s never the goal. Love is always the goal but there’s so much story that gets in the way even between me and other white people and then, the sad truth is that I don’t roll with that many people of color these days. So I’m grateful someone reached out to me. That’s the point. I’m grateful.
Is it bad to say that people are sick and dying and suffering but I don’t want that to be the headline of my daily life? That I still want to write about cutting my bangs — or not! — and taking my kid to see the butterflies at the Natural History Museum and what a great job they did of distancing us and routing us through zone by zone with this nice little gong chime thing every few minutes? How lovely the tinkling fountain there was and the dappled sunlight through the butterfly-friendly curated habitat? How Ax got excited to tell me how he could tell whether a monarch was male or female?
Is it okay to tell you that our friends from New York who drove across the country with their three kids got us to the beach for the first time this summer because I’d been too scared to go after the first couple times we got overly breathed on there?
That Ax said “that was the best day of my life!!!” after playing — outside, at a good distance, mostly — with these three kids he hadn’t seen in two years and didn’t really know, for a couple of hours?
How am I to make sense of any of this? I can’t. I told my dog-lover friend Cherrine I wanted a dog so I could worry more about the dog and less about the world and she said, “You’ll just worry about the dog and the world.”
Plus Mike and Ax think after all the good service Cleo our cat has provided with the lap-sitting and the training us so nicely to constantly let her in and out that it would be disloyal at this point to force another four-legged into the family. They might be right.
I also know that if I gotta do something — something — to get some fun and excitement going in this bubble, a dog will be a more acceptable choice than a move to a foreign country or risky play date. But I’m not gonna push it. I’m not tripping. Keeping it mellow. Feeling the pink fluffy love behind all this froth. I’m gonna keep going.
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