Yes, that Ani.

I was in college at the University of Washington at the time, performing experimental theater in the city on the nights that I wasn’t using my fake ID to get into the Wild Rose (the only lesbian bar in town). I also occasionally sang in a band called Caddygrumpus, who was locally known for what we called Circus Funk (or was it Folk?). Honestly, I don’t remember our genre specifically, but I can still sing most of the lyrics to ‘Extraterra-sexual Being’.

I’m trying to locate this story’s timeline, but all I can confidently say is that it was somewhere in between Intro to Deviance and the Oral Interpretation of Poetry.

[insert Ani here]

Of course, Ani is a human being who deserves to walk around just like everyone else does, without any awkward gawkers taking an immediate and unscheduled break to run across the street to a different clothing store and pretend to VERY INTENSELY examine a rack of shiny vinyl silver pants very close to where someone else (who could have been, I mean I-don’t-really-know-I-wasn’t-even-paying-attention, Ani Difranco) looked through some equally fashion-forward pleather offerings.

Forethought? NONE.

Common Sense? GONE.

My brain had very simply, exploded. I was in proximity of someone that I regarded very highly, and whose work had come at a critical time for me —when I had started to dismantle the version of world that had been told to me, to realize something truer.

No words were exchanged, but that makes sense. At that point in my life, I was too scared to be honest. And I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own story to narrate even the most basic impulses.

If I could have, something honest to say would have been: Hi! I rushed over here just to see if it was true that you were here. And it is! Frankly, I don’t know what to say now because I don’t actually know you; I just really love your music. It found me at the beginning of the Great Unraveling, which I am still living. Your music keeps me steadier in my unknowing —joyful in the falling. Anyway—my manager is really going to be pissed that I just left! So I gotta go. But I’m here too—looking for that thing that moves within us; listening for the things that feel true. You are part of that for me, and I’m so grateful! May we all light the way for each other! Ok, bye! And, insider’s tip: anything you purchase in this store is going to fall apart in a week.

Instead, I said nothing. I just committed myself to the pretense that I had sprinted into the store only to become immediately enraptured by slowly clicking through the same silver pants one-by-one, never once looking at the person —the actual human being—across from me.

I never told anyone about this, actually. Because what was there to say? “I stood two feet away from Ani Difranco once, and pretended she didn’t exist?” Great story.

But that’s the truest version of what happened.

I’m well into my crone years now, and I can say that that memory is not that embarrassing anymore. What a sweet little dummy I was.

I have tickets to see Ani in Ojai tomorrow. I bought the tickets months ago for my partner and I. We’ve seen Ani twice together. The first time was almost twenty years ago in Los Angeles, where he enjoyed the first song or two until his edible kicked in. I left the concert, glowing. He left, absolutely off this planet and wishing our friend hadn’t given him her super-strength homemade lemon bar. The second time we saw Ani was when she opened for the Avett Brothers at Red Rocks. That one? Way too short. I needed him to see HER SHOW. So, this was going to be it.

I keep buying aspirational tickets for date nights for us. I have done this for years, and what usually ends up happening is that I have to find another date, because our daughter won’t go to sleep for anyone else. Sleeping is just not her thing. Ever since she was an infant, she’d poke her own eyeballs when she started to get sleepy. She doesn’t get very grumpy, which is actually great. On the other hand, she just never, ever wants to sleep and doesn’t do a lot of it. We recently went to Paris for a wedding. When we finally said it was time to go home at 3AM, she just asked “Why?” like we were the insane ones.

And so, this wonderful nugget has had one of us with her every single night of her life for bedtime. We have tried leaving her with other people (like my parents, for the aforementioned Avett Brother concert), but she stays awake until we get back.

So I keep making plans, thinking: surely, by THIS date, she’ll be ready. But today is not that day. Trouble is, I had no alternate plan.

I thought the ticket would be scooped up quickly, but none of the usual suspects could go with me. I extended the offer to my queer friends; to friends-of-friends; to out-of-town friends; to an online community I am a part of. But, I didn’t really want to go with someone that I don’t know well. I want to go with someone I am comfortable with. So I can go non-verbal, and just soak up the sounds.

Yesterday, as my daughter and I sang full volume in the car; her picking one song, me picking the next, the choice became obvious: my date is my daughter. We love listening to music together and she’s definitely not going to get tired at 9PM, like my other friends would.

Her first concert, and she is so pumped. She went to sleep tonight with almost no hesitation; we’re going on a girls trip tomorrow, and she knows she’s going to “freaking fucking'“ love it. [She has recently started saying this—and yes, we’ve told her that she can use those words with us, but that they’re really not that appropriate to use with other people.]

I looked at our tickets tonight, and started laughing. We don’t usually spring for good seats, but I guess I was feeling really optimistic when I bought them. They’re in the third row.

Tender-tittied milk machine
tiptoes through the dark to find the nipple balm,
steps on a half-chewed rawhide in the dark,
limps through the living room, fuck that dog,
warm compress pressed to one cracked breast,
grabs a bite of cold bagel left on the counter -
who knows when - peers at the baby by the light of a cell phone,
is she breathing?

Does not adjust the knit cap that is half off,
doesn’t dare flush the toilet filled with pee
and blood and water from the peri bottle
gently sprays her vagina with numbing serum
lays a pad of frozen witch hazel and aloe into her adult diaper
takes the stool softener, cries when she shits.

Parched, famished, sobbing.
Can’t reach the water bottle; the baby is latched.
Can’t reach the remote; the baby is sleeping.
Can’t change her own diaper; the baby is screaming.
Sits in her own piss, angry at daddy for getting groceries

for walking the dog
for cooking some eggs
for yawning
for talking on the phone
for taking a shower
for putting the long-sleeved onesies on top of the short-sleeved onesies
for saying “We need to get some systems in place”
for washing the dishes instead of watching an episode of Killing Eve
for airplaning the baby’s open mouth onto her sore left nipple
for asking which of the baby’s clothes can be put into the dryer
for commenting on how much trash and recycling they have
for sleeping soundly
for not having tits
for a functional pelvic floor
for the blow job gratitude

Listen, Mommy had one good afternoon.
The new normal is full of fleeting desperation.

- April 13, 2021

I remember thinking that I would never write again. That I had become something beyond language.

To make the world was to know grief. The splitting atom was me. The animal who walked the house, topless and alive, smelling everything, ears pricked for urgent sounds, the desperate hunger, the fire that burned from within was taking all of me with it. To be the body that nourished, the river into the hungry desert, flowing, but where was the self?

There was nothing to hold onto. Any urgent metaphor will do, anything racing towards destruction and including the days after.

I remember holding this tiny baby, sobbing. I said to my partner: “I miss the days we won’t get to have with her.” Holding new life, I remembered my own death and wept.

The needs were so immediate; the currents so strong. The devastation so complete.

I suspect there are other ways to oblivion, but motherhood is a portal that holds the window open for a while. The dance with the divine is dark and mysterious. I am in awe of ever being a part of it.

All of us have walked the portal from the inside—as vessel or traveler.

Do you remember the darkness and what came after? The miracle that you are?

It doesn’t matter.

When you are sitting at the bottom of a well when it’s cold and damp and your whispers are being carried away by the white noise of a sound machine and the isolation is severe - baby or no baby - I have sat there too. If you are there now or if you have already forgotten;

I want to hold your hand and weep for the days that we will miss and feel blessed for the ones that we have.

Happy Mother’s Day.

But as soon as he leaves, I settle into the delicious rhythm of doing nothing and my attention lets itself get battered around by the soft wind of its own interest.

I can stare at grass for an hour and feel accomplished.

When I am not witnessed, I do soft things. I feel no obligation to productivity and submit to a gentle, eddying impulse. In the quiet of nearly nothing, I abandon vigilance for what is slow, boring, and occasionally hilarious. It feels like the point is not to know. Nothing can be whatever it wants, and it has no interest in explaining itself to anyone, including me. So, I sit in it, and don’t ask questions.

Doing nothing can be mistaken as paralysis, and there is plenty right now to paralyze a person. But this kind of non-activity feels essential.

To be honest, I am more paralyzed by the outcomes of my own productivity. Is it enough? Will it happen again? Because I will tell you something: when I am productive, when I have produced a THING—especially one that comes from the nothing—I have been known to amaze myself with my own beauty.*

So, why am I not producing things all the time?

Why, when I am alone, do I like to be a potato?

I recognize that a lot of this is driven because I am deeply, profoundly tired. I had a child at 45 years old; the emboldened fascism of the country’s leaders and the collapse of systems that have long been failing everyone has been exhausting. The firehose of information is relentless. And if I’m not careful, and forget to periodically go soft and participate in the world (which includes interacting with its people), I can get sucked into the same old traps of feeling overwhelmed, ineffectual, and isolated.

My partner cannot focus if there are, as he calls them, Things To Do. What is included in the list of Things To Do can be vast—and there are a variety of things on his list that seem to me, nonessential. It might be too strong to consider them as such—I mean, I don't look at a full trash can and insist that nothing should be done with it. But many of the things on his list appear, to me (at least), as Easy to Ignore.

I am excellent at ignoring the nonessential (including things that feel essential to others). If I desperately need to go blank screen and deep into the nothing, I am able to reclassify many, many things into the Easy to Ignore, even if temporarily. And, personally, I am quite offended if anyone finds my potatoing less essential than their—whatever-it-is that they need to get done today.

I assure you, it is not.

When I’m left alone, I get things done— idiosyncratically.

My first love once called me “barely controlled chaos.” He said this as a dig. And it felt like a dig at the time. Why couldn’t I be like everyone else and just do the thing in a way that telegraphed ‘reason?’

But at this point in my life, being “barely controlled chaos” is something I want to be admired for. What I want is for someone to say: “I don’t understand how you make so much beauty out of all of this…confusion.” To which, I’ll say: “I know! Isn’t it weird?”

Because the truth is that my not-knowing has often been what has saved me. When I just write down the lyrics for a song inspired by a soup packet and don’t question it, I end up in a professional recording studio. When I enroll in a class that I can’t afford on a whim, I get an unexpected raise to cover it.

Not knowing, of course, is different than being a potato. But they are related. The wisdom of a potato being, as you would expect, not exactly intellectual.

And I do understand that it certainly must be frustrating to live with someone who does not synchronize to a more collective rhythm, but there is a rhythm that I’m following and it is not that of an Oompah Band. When I leave the laundry half-folded only to go check in on the hummingbird nest, I do not question it: I only know that I need to check on her, and I do.

As a non-musician, is this jazz?**

So let it be known here that I will forgo lists for leaves and hummingbirds. I will be examining the milkweed for caterpillars. I may start the dishes only to abandon them halfway through to water the plants. I will sit and listen to them drinking (especially the Calethea Rufibarba, who is astoundingly difficult to please). I will do that, yes, but first I must leave a rambling audio text to a friend (because she is wonderful and needs to know) and then try on those purple pants to see if they still fit—donation bin. I will finish the dishes after walking through the kitchen to make myself some tea, only to realize that I already started doing that forty-five minutes ago.

And if the potato happens to be reading a good book, forget about anything else: the potato will read the book. At the expense of almost every other task. Except showering. During which, the potato will keep reading.

I know that this is not a way to succeed in life, exactly. (That that statement in itself implies an affiliation to culture of which I’m immediately suspicious.) But that is why I write this now. To make sense of something that feels vital, for reasons that I don’t totally understand.

I have long stopped pretending that I’m Doing Things when everyone leaves. I’m honest about that. But at this stage of my life, I’d also like to start embracing a different idea: the idea that I AM doing the most essential things by not Doing Things, especially the things that this culture seems to focus on as vital.

Please, culture. Sit down.

I would like to make the case that some things that look like nothing are often the most important things. And it doesn't matter if anyone can see that, even yourself.

And then, of course, when you just leave the potato alone and don’t ask her about it, she may just show you that what you’ve done by letting her sit is, in fact, something more beautiful than one could expect from nothing. And yet…there she is.

Astounding us all with what has come from the deep.

Keep potatoing, friends.

*it is a deeply troublesome feeling. If I’m not careful, I can be lured into the idea that making things is the point, and then get stressed about whether or not the next thing will please me as much.

**I asked AI what music a potato would make and it said:

“Based on creative interpretations, pop culture, and musical experiments, a potato would likely make music characterized by

rustic folk, raw, lo-fi electronic, or quirky, percussion-heavy sounds.

Here is what kind of music a potato might make:

• Raw, “Dirt-Tech” Electronic (Potato Battery Sounds): Utilizing the bio-electric energy of a potato,, one can produce a buzzing, low-fi, ambient drone, or simple synth tones. It would be a very raw, experimental sound.

• Rustic Folk or “Potato-House” Music: Rooted in agriculture, this would be acoustic, fiddle-driven, or banjo-heavy, focusing on the simple life, growth, and harvesting, often referred to as “stomp-and-holler” folk or country.

• Quirky Children’s Songs: Think upbeat, simple, and repetitive tunes with lyrics focused on being a potato, growing in the dirt, or being baked, often with a steady, pounding beat.

• “Tuber” Ocarina Sounds: Because the ocarina is sometimes called a “sweet potato” instrument due to its shape, a potato-based instrument would produce soft, airy, and high-pitched wind melodies.

• Industrial/Metal: Given the “raw” nature of the vegetable, some have suggested it would produce a gritty, distorted sound, such as “fried potato” metalcore.

In short: Expect earthy, crunchy, and slightly starchy music with a heavy underground vibe.”

Above all, free.

I turned fifty last month. Partnered, but unmarried. Unmarried, but with a four-year-old. A new(ish) mother, now in menopause. A post-menopausal woman, still lactating.

Indulging in the delightful mischief of living as I’d like, on my own goddamn timeline— even within storylines as common as child bearing. Witnessing the miracle of my own aging body still peforming small acts of defiance. And why not? There is too much joy in the perimeters to listen to the culture too much. Especially now.

A friend mentioned a women’s retreat in Ireland that she was co-facilitating. I immediately felt a little shock of adrenaline. An impulse to say yes. Buzz. But there was no way I could attend. My 50th birthday would be the day before the retreat started: I couldn’t imagine spending that day without my family. Still, my partner kept looking for good flight deals online, and sent them to me whenever something came up. My friend kept sending me playful reminders that I was welcome. I kept saying, “maaaaaybe….”

The night before my birthday, I boarded a flight to Paris, which we’d paid for with miles. I got on the plane with a bagful of gifts for the flight attendants—books, candles, lip balm. Amongst the offerings, Mary Oliver, Ocean Vuong, and Rick Rubin alongside a handwritten note, thanking the crew for spending my birthday with me and detailing the type of person who might like each carefully selected volume. Somewhere above the Atlantic, I turned 50 as I slept. When I arrived to Paris, three flight attendants presented me with a certificate from Air France, filled in with the date, occasion, and flight number. My first gift.

I had an eight-hour layover in Charles de Gaulle, an airport that confines its prisoners into a single terminal with no possibility to roam. After an hour, I finally asked the lounge agent if I had time to get into the city. Of course, she said.

I’ve always heard that the first time you go to Paris, you should be sure to go with someone who is going to love you forever. And so I took myself to the Eiffel Tower and took a single picture.

I made it back to the airport in time for my flight to Dublin, from where I’d make my way to Cliffs of Moher to spend my birthday on a retreat with six other women. All of it now seemed preposterous: spend my birthday with strangers, away from my family, at an expensive retreat with a suspicious amount of downtime built into the schedule?

Why would I do this?

There was an optional offering at the retreat, which was the addition of a personal photoshoot. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. I have spent the last six and a half years of my life not wanting to be visible, exactly. At my soul’s center, I recognize that I am a conduit for putting into words a deeply sacred silliness; but I have simply had too much grief to know how to live that anymore without choking. Where my own inner guide had provided ballast in the past, I have simply not feel safe enough in the world to speak myself true. I have been deeply, profoundly grieving. And splintered. What felt truer was to work outside of the digital universe—to grow my garden, to walk my neighborhood, to fill the yard with native plants. To live in the void that is covid/postpartum/menopause; patriarchy/genocide/environmental collapse and go deeply into that darkness.

The notion of being visible again meant that I would need to be cohesive, and I wasn’t sure that was something I could be any longer. What I wanted was to be whole, even if shismatic. Not a partial truth. Not something only suitable for “close friends” or a cultivated list. What I wanted was to be a whole person again, regardless of the maelstrom. When I considered how to become whole within it, it was an impossible task. It wasn’t until I realized that I could expand the infinity within myself to its outer limits and be whole by including the maelstrom within me.

The photographer arrived with arms covered in artifacts and a twinkly magic that said no problem, we don’t have to. I was nineteen again, immediately, and started telling the stories from that time; a time when I felt completely free. I wound in and out of genders, haircuts, and cultural markers of significance. The glimmering and the fades. Identities explored: the ones that stuck; the ones that got folded over and pulled deeper. A living lamination of curiosity, all bound up in this one body, dancing within stories that have long faded from my repertoire of fireside offerings. Somewhere I realized, at fifty, that I was telling a story that made sense. That wasn’t jagged at all. That was queerly, uniquely mine.

I told the photographer that I thought it would be fun to marry myself as a concept for the shoot. That I’d like to walk down the aisle, moving through space to Ani DiFranco’s Atom for the ceremony and I’d then like to take pictures by the sea. I grabbed a bouquet of flowers from the vase in the entryway of our stay, which happened to remind me of the women in family: yellow roses (Grandma Jean & Grandma Pat), chrysanthemums (my birth flower), and baby’s breath (my mom).

And then I moved through space in a room, overlooking the Irish Sea, with bare feet and a makeshift aisle of yoga mats. I let every single part of me inhabit the space, which was glorious and I told the story of my wholeness in front of two witnesses and a wide open sky. Though we didn’t think to record the entire event, three short videos were captured. And, of course, I have a lot of stills.

And what is movement but a lifetime of stills, layered next to each other, flowing from one thing to the next becoming one big song exploding out of a body as it moves through the world from one grief to another, stringing it all together, the movement joyfully alive, touching everything by embracing what is there, atom by atom, flowing from one bent elbow into the whole universe?

Atom

The glory of the atom begs a reverent word
The primary design of the whole universe
Yeah, let us sing its praises, let us bow our heads in prayer
At the magnificent consciousness incarnate there

The smallest unit of matter with its orbiting electrons
Echoing off the solar system like a hawk in the hills at dawn
The smallest unit of matter
Uniting bird and rock and tree and you and me

Oh, holy is the atom, the truly intelligent design
To which all of evolution is graciously aligned
The one single structure to which everything distills
The air, the wood smoke there and the hills

Oh, leave me here surrounded by everything that’s real
Far outside the boundaries of the digitized ordeal, yeah
Leave me here awake, leave me here to heal

Human beings are a cross between monkeys and ants
You can see us from your spaceship
Melting the polar ice caps with our arrogance
Summon a congress of angels dressed in riot gear
We’ve got ourselves a serious situation down here

I have this great, great uncle who worked on the atomic bomb
He got a Nobel Prize in physics and a place in this song
And I bet there were no windows and no women in the room
When they applied themselves to the pure science of boom

Yeah, messin’ with the atom is the highest form of blasphemy
Whether you are making weapons or simple electricity
Someone fashion me a pulpit, I have been called to engage
With the maniacal heretics of the nuclear age

Let the religious get religion, let consumers get a clue
Let scientists get perspective, let activists get their due
Let industry get a conscience, let the earth inherit the meek
Let the divinity of nature speak

Oh, the glory of the atom begs a reverent word
The primary design of the whole universe
Yes, let us sing its praises, let us bow our heads in prayer
At the magnificent consciousness incarnate there

-Ani DiFranco

I emerged from that retreat different; changed. And more the same than I have ever been, for the speaking of it.

So, mom, if you’re reading, the answer is: when I’m fifty, I will marry myself in Ireland in a room with two sisters overlooking the sea. You will be there by virtue of a sprig of white flowers and a legacy of women who do not do what they’re supposed to. I will dance to the song of my choice and no one will walk me down the aisle. I will wear a black dress and no shoes, and it will be glorious.