Part of the Problem

Sometimes, this is how it goes with young children: You surrender to the end-of-the-school-year chaos with its many events, volunteer requests and amped-up energy. You tell yourself, I will give myself over fully to these first two weeks of summer when there is no camp and limited childcare and everyone is making the awkward transition out of the regular routine of school days and into the languid, loping heady days of summer. I will go with the flow and happily put off the things I need to do and fully enjoy this time with my children because I have a plan in place. Camp will start. Childcare coverage is increasing. I have allotted myself enough time to accomplish the few work tasks I have designated as essential for this summer. All is well and I will not be overwhelmed. But then your kid gets sick and you get sick, and everything goes to shit and now you’re absolutely overwhelmed and totally scrambling.

Hello, it’s me. I’m overwhelmed and scrambling. I went into this summer knowing there would be very little time available for my own writing, but I had not expected to go over a month without at least sending out a newsletter, but here we are.

This one brings some news that I am very excited to share, though. I’m going to have a book published next year! Hooray! I wrote a poetry collection based around the monthly poems project that I started last year. Those twelve poems, combined with another fifty-some-odd poems, most of which were written in the last twelve months, will be my first full-length poetry collection, which is honestly a thing I never expected to accomplish. The book (tentatively titled April, And Back Again) is due out early next year from Publishing Genius. I am so thrilled and I can’t wait to share more about it in the next few months.

In the meantime, I’ve got an essay about the start of summer and storytelling, and the things that have been on my mind while the country (like my perfectly planned work schedule) continues to go to shit. You can read it below if you’re so inclined.

Thanks as always for reading and for all of your support!

Part of the Problem

I read while sitting at a picnic table in my parents’ yard. Behind me, a wooded mountain falls away into the distance. To my right, a field stretches out toward a weather-worn barn. The grass is wet from days of rain and fog. The picnic bench beneath me is wet too, dampening my shorts. But the morning is bright and pleasant. The sun is shining and in front me, my children play happily together, kicking soccer balls and throwing themselves onto the ground laughing.

This is how summer should be, my kids finding their own way out their boredom, rolling around in the grass, growing flushed and sweaty in the heat of the sunshine. This is why we came here, just me and the boys for a week while my husband transitions to his new job. It is the first week of summer and most everyone we know is away on vacation. I dreaded the thought of being stuck at home with my son’s bad mood as summer boredom flared suddenly in the wake of school’s ending. With my toddler’s incessant requests to sit on my lap and his recent refusal to eat anything but crackers. I am impatient and irritable in the heat. I struggle to shut down the task-minded side of me when I am at home. There is always something that needs doing, needs cleaning, always something else scratching at the back of my mind for my attention and care. I snap too easily. Sigh too often. Tromp around the house grumbling about all this mess like some fastidious troll awakened from slumber. I am not at my best in the summer, but I am trying to be better. Hence this sojourn to the mountains of Western Maryland where we run around outside, eat ice cream every night, and play excruciatingly long games of Monopoly.

During these games, my dad tells us about the house rules they played with when he was growing up. Which properties on the board everyone wanted most. The little taunting quips he and his friends would make as they played. He is turning seventy-five this year and I don’t know how his childhood remains so sharp in his memory. I am only forty and already my early years are so blurred around the edges that I struggle to recall them. My dad can still give you the name and the favorite expression of some annoying kid who lived on his block sixty-three years ago, and I can barely picture, much less name, the freckle-faced siblings my brother and I hung out with basically every day for years because they had a pool. (Were they fun? Were they irritating? It didn’t matter. It was Texas. From April through October in Texas, you could be any kind of kid you wanted if you had a pool as currency.)

My dad is a storyteller by nature. A note taker. A man who will tout the value of always having a project in the works—something you’re thinking about and working on. A man who will tell his grandson, sorry, but he can’t play Monopoly right now because he’s currently busy looking through his books. A man who will fall asleep sitting up with a book in one hand and a pencil, extending toward a page’s margin, in the other.

He tells us more stories while we play cards. We teach my son Crazy Eights and play while listening to music, going around the circle and taking turns to choose which song comes next. My toddler drives toy cars back and forth and chooses “This is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas twice in a row when it’s his turn to pick. Everyone tolerates this. Everyone tolerates everything and each other surprisingly well for the entire week.

At night, I sit in the dark upstairs to keep my son company while he tries to fall asleep. He misses his dad and a stuffed animal that he brought along for the trip but that has mysteriously gone missing. I check my email and review submissions for the literary magazine I run. I scroll through my phone past videos of ICE assaulting and kidnapping people, past headlines about bombings and death, funding cuts and dementia, the best easy meals for summertime. I take in what I can tolerate without falling apart, and then tiptoe across the room to kiss my son’s warm cheek as he softly snores.

I go downstairs to drink wine and watch a movie with my parents. My mother falls asleep on the couch, not because of the wine or her age, but because this is what she has always done. This is her version of falling asleep with a book and pencil in hand, a part of the story I will always tell about her, how a small smile plays at the corners of her mouth while she’s dozing. How I don’t believe she’s ever once seen a movie all the way through even though she claims she is just resting her eyes.

The days are long and humid, and I don’t sleep well at night in the too-soft bed on my own. I am up early with the kids, which is usually my husband’s role. I run around all day playing all manner of sports and games, sweating and huffing and aching in muscles that I haven’t used with this much regularity in years. Back home, my husband says it’s so eerily quiet that he plays NPR through the house’s speakers to feel less alone.

I wake one morning and learn my book has been accepted for publication. A year’s worth of work will be recognized in print. The story of the last year of my thirties. The story of my son as a seven-year-old and his brother as a toddler. The story of the creeping horror of the 2024 election and its aftermath. Of my creeping depression. Of the seasons turning over, one after the other, life moving forward while simultaneously falling apart.

I am overjoyed and relieved, but also unsure, as I have been repeatedly for months now, of how best to hold those feelings alongside my persistent sense of despair. Everything is awful, but everyone I love most is doing well. Everything is awful, but I am healthier than I’ve been in years. Everything is awful, but actually I’m doing pretty great. I don’t know what to do apart from being quietly thankful for my good fortune and vocally outraged by the horror and injustice we are witnessing. To keep on documenting the life I am living, the world I am observing, and the stories I want to pass along to my children about this moment. Stories about our family. Our life. Their childhoods. Stories about how beautiful it is to sit here, reading a book that takes my breath away while they laugh and play in the dewy grass. The day brand new. The world not yet lost entirely.

The future stretches out far beyond this field, these woods, this mountain. It is a project to think through, to work on. It is a story waiting to be told.

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.