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When the quarantine began, I was at a crossroads with work. Not the 100 Men Hall, which I had managed to get on a monthly music schedule and had been pushing towards self sufficiency, but rather work that pays my bills.

On March 15, everyone and everything stopped and it’s as if the world stepped back to where I had been standing all along. I’m not going to lie, it felt good to not be the only one struggling financially.

Then because I could not be productive, it opened up space to just be. During this time I did not plan, strategize, or produce I just began walking longer distances. Hadn’t I moved to Bay Saint Louis to walk by the water?

I heard some people lament the quarantine. I read many social media posts about how people were grieving because of it. Not people who had lost a loved one to the virus, but people who couldn’t work, socialize, attend an event, and travel.

My thoughts were elsewhere. Yes, the momentum I had gained at the Hall had stopped. No, I didn’t know what my next move would be. But I was no longer swimming through jello, instead I felt vast space opening up all around me.

Now we are returning to what most people hope is “normal” and I’m not feeling it. Normal for me was not ideal. Trying to earn a living, operating a nonprofit with limited resources, no time to walk, bike, write and be. I’m not feeling inclined to re-enter that world, yet I spent none of this time re-imagining it either. What I have done is pry open even more space to receive suggestions or directions and hope that takes me where I need to go.

This morning I walked along the Gulf of Mexico watching the dolphins race by, feeding and then thrashing around the water, and then zooming to the next thing. I longed to find a rhythm similar to theirs, one where I could follow my spirit and not my plans.

When Tin was six years old, his school had a Poem in your Pocket day. I was two years into having lost my job, hair and then moved out of my dream house. So the poem I picked for Tin that day was Mother to Son by Langston Hughes.

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Just yesterday morning, I was thinking about what Ahmaud Arbery’s mother is feeling now. How would I feel? I wouldn’t be feeling – I’d be thinking – about the hours spent at swim team practice, the nights spent reading to him in bed, the mornings trying to get him up and ready for school, the minutes spent either putting him or me in time out, and the moments spent searching for the right piece of wisdom I could drop on my son to make sure he stayed safe.

I’d think about how my biggest fear would have come true – my son was killed because he is Black. I would be a hashtag mother. Wanda Cooper-Jones is a hashtag mother. If mothers of white children knew how this fear consumes mothers like me, they might take to the streets, start an organization, put up yard signs, sell merchandise – tee shirts that read:

THEY MATTER.

A while ago I got embroiled in a situation with an ex that caused me to ask repeatedly, ad nauseam, beating a dead horse style, “Why Me?” It took many meditations, consultations, therapies, and a come to Jesus to get me to a place where I realized I was asking the wrong question (read: assholes happens).

So instead of Why Me? I began asking how do I handle this situation? I learned through meditation, perambulation, and disapparation I am capable of withstanding all of it and even more (read: pandemic).

But there is another why, as in why am I so lucky. I have an anthem for this why by Kris Kristofferson – Why Me Lord? I embraced this song when I couldn’t understand why so many beautiful things were happening in my life. Like Kristofferson, I had a profound religious experience where I felt so inordinately blessed by my life and I kept asking why? Why me Lord? Why are these people being good to me, why am I so lucky, why am I so fortunate?

Until I realized why is not the question.

I was married for many years to a man I finally had to ask to give me flowers because he kept telling me he wasn’t going to do what was expected of him and I said, well I would like them. Towards the end of our time together, he began buying elaborate bouquets. But it was too late.

I realized though I could give myself flowers.

Opening myself up to my own love invited others to love me. Just this past week, I’ve received many gifts of flowers and now my house feels cheery and bright.

Why was never the question. We deserve love in its many forms, the presence of a friend, the gift of flowers, the moments that bring us to our knees because we are so grateful. We do not deserve haters, broken sewers pipes, and spider bites that make you itch and burn at the same time.

Life doles out both – lovers and haters – and ours is not to ask why but to discern the difference between gifts we deserve and those we don’t and to make room for the lover while we quietly dismiss the haters.

From my mid twenties to thirties, I thought to myself, I’m not really going to be a writer until I have a child. Where this idea came from I have no idea, but I had asked my grandmother and my mother on separate occasions what had made them happy and they both told me it was their children. I was not surprised by my grandmother’s response, but my mother’s answer shocked me.

I grew up believing my mother should have been somewhere else. She should have been a movie star or married a rich tycoon and traveled the world on a yacht. Her regal appearance helped my imaginings, and also my mother’s drinking made it seem as if she was somewhere else for as long as I could remember.

Not to be deterred, I wanted a child. More importantly, I wanted to be a mother. I thought I’d have a knack for it and that I had a lot to offer a child. So began my quest to get pregnant with a reluctant husband, and after we split, my relentless adoption journey that brought me to my son.

I remember the first time I saw him, I knew beyond doubt that I was born to be his mother. I’ve had that clarity over and over again. Yet, mothering Tin is like trying to stop a house that has a fire started in every room from burning to the ground.

Mothering Tin has pulled me to people and places that are akin to be tethered to a band of liars and thieves.

Mothering Tin has opened up a deep knowing inside of me that is forever tied to all mothers around the world.

Every year, that has passed since I began mothering Tin has been about me trying to keep him safe from a world I am pushing him to be in.

From the get-go, I saw a society that disposes of Black boys like yesterday’s hashtags and schools that try to elevate their own grades by hijacking my child’s joy – and I knew these were never going to help Tin grow into his potential, his light.

It seems every day I move ahead with my plan for parenting Tin while Tin races beside me with his own plan that either stands in the way, alters or annihilates my plan. I think I am gaining ground but when I look at the collateral damage from any single day, I’m running in place, exhausted, and my foresight is cloudy with a chance of a hurricane.

If you asked me should you become a mother, I’d most likely yell a resounding no on many of these days. I’d tell you mothering is a mother fucker and stay the hell away from it!

On a bike ride two days ago, Tin asked me about one of his friends who is always showing off about how smart he is. Tin asked, “Is he smarter than me?” I said to Tin: some people seek validation for being smart. Some people seek validation for being physically fit. But Tin doesn’t need to seek validation for being anything other than being Tin, because he knows he is valued and loved.

Tin turned and said, “Thank you,” then stood up on his pedals and raced ahead of me.

To all you mothers out there, I salute you!

Around Bay Saint Louis, there are signs everywhere of people and businesses returning to normal. I walked into Claiborne Hills yesterday and didn’t see anyone wearing a mask. As much as grocery shopping used to be meditative to me, I have only gone a handful of times in the past two months and each time was stressful.

I’m on a Facebook thread of merchants here and over the past two weeks, each post about reopening ranged from the gleeful to the cautiously optimistic. People are wanting to return to normal.

Each city, county, and state is posting new rules, new criteria, new ways to return to normal. Restaurants can open but only with pick up, casinos still cannot open open despite the large one down the street’s blinking “Opening Very Soon” marquis.

On Instagram, there is a BBC ad for a contact tracing app and how it works. The post said, “You might be asked to download a contact tracing app” to monitor movements and alert you if someone has been in close proximity to a person who has Covid-19.

This year – 2020 – was supposed to be a BIG year for me and many of my artist friends, who could feel in their bones that finally our day had come – recognition, revenue, respect – for the work we have been doing. Instead, on March 13th, the day I kept Tin home from school before the quarantine had officially begun, 2020 seemed disguised as a giant pause button.

PAUSE what you are doing, and then we will resume.

Only now that the quarantine is easing, and the masses are biting through their invisible bits, I look around for normal, and think it has left the house.

The nonprofit I was building – a place to gather, commune, and heal – must be reimagined. My BIG year must be reimagined. I would have told you two months ago I was putting in place many intertwined expressions of my life’s work.

2020 at 100 Men Hall would yield a mix of fantastic music, beautiful cultural celebrations, and a roof to commemorate all life events. For me personally, 2020 would push my writing and my community further along.

Now I see the button doesn’t read PAUSE but instead STOP!

STOP what you are doing, it needs to be reimagined, it needs to yield different results, it needs to bring out something else in you – not what was readily available. There is something else waiting to be born.

As people begin hanging their OPEN signs on their doors, mine is staying closed. However I am supposed to be in the world is unclear once again, and until the mist clears, I’m not coming out. I see normal has changed, why don’t they?

For a few decades, I was convinced that my life was an interminable cliché. Any breakthrough, epiphany and light that went on would immediately be mirrored in a book, film, or someone else’s (read: more famous than me) reality.

Then it seemed my life more closely resembled the myth of Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. Sisyphus was punished for self-aggrandizing, and I, who had reached the peak of my career, became condemned, every time I tried to get there again, to watch it all slip from my grasp.

I thought I was done with Sisyphus, no longer enamored with telling his story as my story, when by chance I stumbled across a post my ex husband had made to his Instagram account. He posted a cartoon of Sisyphus and wrote, “Sums up my first marriage.”

I thought I was done with him, but after reading that I wondered why he was thinking about me after so long a time, and wondering why I cared what he thought about us after so long a time. Coincidentally, an editor contacted me then about entering an essay in a journal entitled “Letter to My Ex.” Fueled, I wrote one, and submitted it, but in the end declined to have it published. Instead, I sent it directly to my ex. Here is an excerpt:

Most of all, I forgive you. I gave all I had to our marriage for 15 years and asked for pretty much one thing in return: for you and I to be a family, to have a child. For years, we fought over this imaginary child. “You don’t want a child, you want to want something,” was what you told me in the North Beach apartment. “I know you will resent me one day for not giving you a child,” you said in our New Orleans apartment. “If you want to have a baby, I suggest you divorce me,” was your argument in the Portrero Hill apartment. Then by the time you were willing, it was too late. I was past 40 and able to get pregnant but not hold a baby. So we began a new version of the argument. “I am not adopting someone else’s child,” you said to me in the San Rafael house after the pregnancies stopped. I see the humor in it now. I did resent you. I feared having a child would mean I would lose you. I did. I feared you would leave me and have a child with another woman. You did. I feared being a single mother. I am. It has been a dozen years since these events ravaged my life and our marriage. I still have trouble connecting myself to the woman I was who did this. Now, it has only been a few years since you and I exchanged those final emails. I have not received a Christmas card since, but imagine your boys are bigger now, while my son is still young. 

Funny how life is short but it’s wide, here we all are sitting in our houses during a pandemic. We were asked to get out of our rut and be still. Thankfully, I learned long ago the only difference between a rut and a grave is the dimension. So I’ve tackled my restlessness and spent nearly a decade learning to be still, learning to accept what life throws at me, but even so, once again, Sisyphus and I share this story in common.

A friend gave me a 5-year mom’s journal five years ago. I have kept up with it because you can only write a sentence or two a day. It’s a gem I will hold onto if only as a reminder that some things change, and some things do not.

I took down the breakfast cup I bought in an antique store in San Francisco many moons ago. It’s precious and my fear that it will break keeps it safeguarded in back of the cabinet. I needed to risk its preciousness. Unlike a mug, you can’t walk around with it. Unlike a tumbler, you can knock it over. So this breakfast cup invites me to sit in one place, still, and take studied sips of the tea I don’t even know I’m drinking when using another vessel.

I cut the first hydrangea blooms and brought them in to put in my Aalto vase. I rarely use the vase because I rarely cut flowers from my garden to enjoy. When I first moved into the 100 Men Hall, I had noticed the old growth hydrangeas in the back garden, and I thought I will take cuttings and put them on my kitchen table. And I never did until this pandemic allowed me to do the one thing I have been yearning to do and that is garden.

So the pandemic has offered me time to write in my 5-year mom journal, use my precious breakfast cup, garden and enjoy fresh cut flowers in a vase rarely used. While this pandemic has been horrendous for many people – losing loved ones, fighting on the front lines, enormous revenue loss – it has offered some of us an escape from a life that was not serving us. I was not really living. I was on a conveyor belt to my grave.

The real question is how to do we retain what we’ve gained when the pandemic is over?

Step 1 – Don’t panic.

Step 2 – Morning walks in nature.

Step 3 – Meditate.

Step 4 – Have a close cadre of friends at the other end of a text, call, email.

Step 5 – Bike rides along the water with people you love at a distance.

Step 6 – Enjoy the respite.

I try not to be a harsh critic of myself. I know too easily how it’s a slippery slope into outright condemnation. The voice that speaks to me when I look in the mirror is an awful judge. After I’ve crossed over into 60 last year, I’ve noticed every possible flaw my body holds – my once beautiful skin is now wrinkled, thin, marked. My once thick arms and thighs are dappled with curdled fat. My ass is flatter. My stomach rounder. And let’s not talk about my once pretty fine breasts – they are definitely shadows of their former selves.

And so it is, that late last year I gave up caring about my body. I decided it was separate from me and I didn’t really want to claim it anymore. So I began a slow descent into my own personal weight gain program. Step one, eat whatever you want whenever you want and make sure to always eat a lot late at night. Step two, eat sweets whenever you can because gluten free treats don’t present themselves often and you deserve them for the crazy schedule you uphold. Step three, give up any love you had of your physical body because it is not doing what you want – being sexy, being agile, being flexible, being comfortable.

In March, I went to the doctor for my annual exam and I was not surprised but disappointed to see that I had topped out at my highest weight in my lifetime. I sighed and continued to follow the same path I had been on. That harsh critic in the mirror said to me I wasn’t looking for love, especially body love, so keep on keeping on.

Then I called about my life insurance, a policy I had taken out years ago before I had Tin and is going to run out in a few years. The insurance agent told me that not necessarily my age, but my weight was too high to qualify for the same status I had before. Not only was I not the same, but two levels down was where he pegged me, right before you get to LOSER status. I told him I had packed on my COVID 19!

And still I struggled to care. And then one day after a long conversation with my friend about weight, I realized I was in a hole that only I could climb out of – I had gone to the other side and needed to cross back. Only you don’t go back the same way you came with weight loss. Oh it’s all sugarplums and lollipops on the journey to gaining weight, but it is the whirling blades on the way back.

I saw this dog sitting outside the yard he was supposed to be guarding. He was beside the the sign that warned of him. He acted like he didn’t even know his role, his place, or why he should be feared. My weight gain was similar, I sat outside my body watching the weight pile on thinking no one would notice, not even me. I realized it was me allowing the weight to accrue. I have been shocked out of my denial. And the first person who appeared is that harsh critic – how could you? how despicable? what is wrong with you?

To this critic I say get over yourself – I know what to do. I started a program last Monday to shed the unwanted pounds — my goal is to be at my fighting weight by summer just in time to take out a new insurance policy for my son. I’ll see all of y’all on the other side of this challenge.

Not your plans.

This was told to me one time in a community meeting – Follow your spirit, not your plans.

How many reinventions have I had?

Joan Didion said, “I can’t remember half the people I used to be.”

Reinvention is reinforcement against a world that is forever crumbling.

Everyone is rushing back to their lives, I don’t want to go. I want less cars on the road, less scheduled time, less pollution, less consumption, less of everything. And I have had to accept that means less of what I was striving for – less security, less money, less certainty.

When I lived in San Francisco, I went to see Jane Hirshfield read her poetry and I was gobsmacked. This is one of my favorites – I read it at my 40th birthday dinner:

Da Capo

By Jane Hirshfield

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.