The Ballad of Yesterday's Pancake
Ry and I had a meeting this afternoon (you know, to keep the sizzle alive). Between our kids, the fascism, the fires, the pandemic, our jobs, and two recent deaths in our circles, we’ve both been feeling… well, basically every feeling the Emperor wants us to feel to seduce us to the dark side.
Yes, Katie… let your hate flow through you… and also your confusion… and let existential panic course through your veins… and hey, aren’t you hungry, too?
I had this idea that we should both think of something purely selfish and personal that we wanted to do. The joy shortage is real, even in loving marriages.
He said he wanted more Adventure Time: camping, hiking, fishing, exploring the world away from work, home, and our kids.
Ry. BUBBE. What a god damn gorgeous selfish joyful personal thing to do! I shall send you to the hills. It’s on the calendar.
Then it was my turn. “What do you want?” He asked me.
I reached into my imagination to picture what a personal, selfish, joyful day would look like for me. I came up utterly blank.
“I don’t even know what personal means anymore,” I said, my arm draped over my eyes as I lay across the bed, totally reasonably and not at all in a way I plan to include in my future audition reel for Real Housewives of the Pandemic.
My children are personal. My relationship with them is personal. My work is personal. My marriage and home are personal. The success of those things is personal. So when I say “I don’t know what personal means anymore,” I’m saying that everything’s FREAKING personal, okay?!?
My “personal” to-do list includes shit I do for my kids, my work, my home, my pets, my spouse. The only thing on that list that’s well and truly mine is that I have to return a cardigan to ThredUp by the 16th. Honestly, it might not happen. It’s not a terrible cardigan. It’s just meh, you know? It does have pockets though…
ANYWAY.
“What do you want?”
Honestly? First thought: I want to wake up to a clean kitchen. I hate having to spend the first part of a new day crawling out of yesterday’s hole.
Yep. You heard it here first, folks.
When I asked myself, “What do you want to do to inject pure selfish joy into your life,” the answer came to me swiftly and clear as a bell: Dishes.
Please laugh. One of us has to.
There are so many good reasons to do the dishes: Self-care, being kind to your future self, stress reduction, also ants are a thing. But joy? JOY is not a reason to do the dishes. The only thing I’ve ever found in an empty sink is an absence of irritation, which is not the same thing as joy.
What do I want? The question felt impossible to answer.
I've found that raising kids can disconnect you from yourself (much the same way talking in 2nd person does LOL [much the same way false laughter breaks tension when you're vulnerable] there's that 2nd person again ROTFL [I don't even think you're laughing, much less ROTFing.])
That disconnect happens invisibly. It’s not like an earthquake or a tornado. It’s a leak in a pipe, a crack in the foundation, something that begins to break somewhere along the line, and only fails when you check for it. And that’s in the best of times. That’s just the gig of raising kids: you table your own shit to teach them how to do theirs, for 18 years to life.
But what about now, when paradoxically, disconnection is the thing we all share? What else is breaking invisibly? I’ll take “My Understanding of Joy” for 800, Alex. The answer there: Dishes.
What about my ability to merely be a parent, the person raising the kid? I think that might be breaking too.
If you’re raising a kid right now, you’re not just a parent, caregiver, or “raisin” (anyone “raisin” a child right now - I saw it on Twitter and yoinked it forever.) You’re ALL the things. WE ARE ALL THE THINGS. We’re the teachers: a rookie with no training, zero support, and some capital-b-Baggage with these students. We’re the therapists. We’re the coaches, the teammates, the playmates, the nemeses. We’re barely qualified for any of these jobs, by the way.
Chicken asked me to teach him to play lacrosse. Hey quick question, which one of you dongs told my son about lacrosse? No, I can’t teach him lacrosse. I played “MUSICAL” during lacrosse season. The only way I can teach him lacrosse is if we define lacrosse as “all the words to all the songs in Guys and Dolls.”
Parents, raisins. Playmates, friends. Teachers, therapists. Coaches, OH and did I mention we still have ACTUAL jobs to hold down?
So we are suddenly responsible for every aspect of our children’s lives, even things we don’t know shit about, at the exact moment we are catastrophically isolated, disconnected from the world and, by sheer necessity because we can’t afford a constant breakdown, also from whatever the hell is going on inside the fun-times surprise goody bag of feelings that Spanky the clown left for us at the edge of the woods by the abandoned asylum. Because EVERYTHING’s freaking personal, and I am now ALL THE THINGS.
I feel like the last leftover pancake. Reheated for breakfast, I’m fine. Reheated for lunch, I have to coax them with syrup but they’ll choke me down.
Then someone pops me in the microwave at dinner time, you know, just to take the chill off, and those kids are fucking done with me. “THAT PANCAKE IS NOT DINNER.” You’re god damn right I’m not. I was breakfast and barely lunch.
That pancake has started to resemble the pancakes that come with the Melissa & Doug griddle set, something that you can identify by sight as “pancake,” but retains none of the other definitive qualities of a “food item.”
By dinner time I’m a stale, mostly-devoured plank of matter, incapable of nourishing anyone. Everyone is just as sick of me as I am of being forcibly refreshed, then picked at, then rejected, then trotted out again. Because I stopped being delicious seven reheats ago BUT I’M ALL THERE FUCKING IS.
Hello parents, grandparents, guardians, and raisins. If you have no time for feelings that don’t come with a side helping of productivity (hello vengeful fury, my old friend…) I see you.
If you don’t know what joy looks like or what personal time means, I see you.
If you’re searching for joy, holding down your job, raising kids, and apparently homeschooling now (all of those things, literally never in that order), baby squirrel I see you. I see how hard you’re working and how much you care about these kids who are unspeakably impossible to work with right now. Seriously, SO uncooperative, right??? Like, give a bitch a break. I am working very hard and doing the best I can.
If you need permission to say “fuck everything today but watching TV with the kids with tall glasses of Sprite with tons of crackling ice,” here it is. Because disconnecting from yourself is painful to discover. Disconnecting from the world is traumatic and unsettling. Disconnecting from your relationship to your kids… let’s call that the last resort, okay? Let’s protect that one.
We have no idea how badly our kids need us to just be their raisins.
Hey kiddo. Just here to read books with you, just here to do the voices. Just here to nod convincingly while you talk about Minecraft, which is the proof that the transitive property is horseshit because I love you, and you love Minecraft, yet fuuuuuuuck Miiiiiiiiiiinecraft, but still love you punkin pie!!! Wow, tell me more about your biomes.
Just here to bring you crushed ice at bedtime and then say “No. No more crushed ice. That was your third cup of crushed ice. Go to sleep. I’m exhausted,” because we’re raisins, not saints.
Just here to remember how you like your pancakes cut, to be normal and present and real and solid in a world that temporarily thinks lacrosse is a musical and joy is an empty sink.
And me (Katie), I’m just here to tell you (yes, you) that you’re not alone. We’re all chin-deep in this, pulling as hard as we can to keep breathing. And if you weren’t heartbroken over something right now then we’d need to test for the presence of a heart, stat.
If you’re hanging on by a thread and your whole family is hanging onto you, hanging onto that thread, I see you, you magnificent son of a bitch. I know your insides are all rubbery, stale pancakes. Mine are, too. But I promise you’re still nourishing someone just by being there. Nobody goes hungry when you’re around. You know that’s true. OK, love, that’s all I have today. Anytime you need to scream into the void, I’m here.
xoxo