Hi!

My son recently got a new bike for his birthday and the other day he decided to bike alongside me while I did a short run. We did a loop down to the art museum near our house and all of the magnolia trees around the entrance to the museum had just started to bloom. It reminded me of a poem I wrote in the spring of 2020, right as the pandemic was starting. I love magnolia trees but they will now forever be connected with that spring in my mind, the appearance of their blossoms a marker of the pandemic’s anniversary.

When my son was a toddler, we spent many days playing outside of the art museum. We would get bagels from a nearby takeout place and eat them on the plaza under the magnolia trees. We would climb up and down the big steps that lead up to the museum. We would take his toy cars and race them back and forth across the wide stone benches. We would pile up the fallen flower petals scattered over the ground and then send the cars soaring off the edges of the benches and watch them dive into the piles.

It was strange to be in that same spot with this kid who is so different now, so grown up and independent, but is still the same little boy who likes to pause beneath a blossoming tree and note its beauty. I felt like my heart was going to burst, though not nearly as much as I did when trying to keep up with him as he raced along the mostly downhill path back home. A lot has changed in the four years since I wrote, “To My Son.”

You can find “To My Son” in the Isolation Edition of Capsule Stories, or in my chapbook, Mother Nature. 

A quick reminder that I am organizing a zero-pressure, no-commitment writing group that will offer two opportunities a month to meet. The idea is to provide dedicated writing times for anyone who would benefit from having a set time and day to add to their schedule. Think of it as an accountability or productivity group, or a writing community. This is not a workshop, a class, or a critique group. It is just an opportunity for people to sit down and write. If you would like to learn more or join the email list to receive the monthly schedule and meeting links, please fill out the form at this link. Or if you know anyone who might be interested, please feel free to pass it along to them!

Thanks as always for reading and for all your support!

Surrender

This feels like an odd sentence to write, but let’s go for it anyway: A silver lining of the pandemic was how it permitted you to let go of the little things.

My son turned three just before the pandemic started, an age that brought with it a new refusal to eat any food that wasn’t beige, starchy, and mostly served in cracker form. I resisted this change at first, doing that thing you’re supposed to do where you continue to feed your child the same stuff you are eating, but making sure to have one thing on the plate that they would enjoy and think of as a safe food. I would choose what to serve and he could choose what and how much to eat, I told myself, and then I would sit there silently fuming as he discarded anything with color or nutrients. But when the whole world suddenly shut down, I said, “Fuck it; let him eat pasta.” I made pasta pretty much every single night for the better part of a year and I stopped worrying about it.

It can be hard to remember, and if you didn’t have kids at the time, maybe you don’t even know, but in the spring of 2020, you couldn’t even go to a playground. The one up the street from our house was draped in caution tape and had a handwritten sign hanging from the monkey bars that read Playground Closed. My son’s preschool shut down. We couldn’t see family. We couldn’t go to the library or a museum. We couldn’t meet up with friends to play. My son and I would take walks so that we could be exposed to sights other than the walls of our own house, and whenever someone approached from the opposite direction, we would step way back off the sidewalk and I would gently remind him that we were giving people space so that we could all stay safe. Inside myself, I was screaming. Entertaining a three-year-old for a full day is tiring work. Entertaining a three-year-old for a full day without anywhere to go, or anyone to see, all while trying to maintain some sense of calm during a confusing, scary time across the world? It was absolutely excruciating.

The only thing that mattered was that my kid felt safe, cared for, and loved. I moved through the days with that triad guiding me and I let go of everything else. He watched too much TV. He ate zero vegetables. He didn’t learn even the most basic table manners. We ran around the yard and we danced in his room, we colored, read books, and played games. We went on treasure hunts and made up silly songs. We cried together sometimes, laughed together a lot, and ate more pasta than I’ve ever eaten in my life and I love pasta. We determined that if you put peanut butter on graham crackers it counts as a sandwich and you can call that lunch at least five days a week.

Eventually, we got back to some semblance of normalcy. We started expanding our dinner options, pushing for better table manners, and worrying again about raising a person that other people wouldn’t be revolted to be around when we went out to eat at restaurants. Recently, though, I decided to abandon family dinners.

Picture this: it’s 5 o’clock and my husband is due home from work anywhere between 40-75 minutes from now depending on whether or not someone stops him on his way out of the office to ask “a quick question.” My son is starving and wants a snack, but if he doesn’t have one, he’ll be hungry enough when we all finally sit down to dinner that he’ll eat pretty much anything you put in front of him. If he does have a snack, he’ll take one bite of whatever I serve for dinner (even pasta!), say “yuck,” and declare himself full. So I tell him no snacking which means enduring his sour mood at best, a full meltdown at worst all while the baby cries to be nursed, clings to my legs and pulls himself up, or races off toward the stairs to practice his climbing while I’m trying to chop onions and keep whatever’s on the stove from burning. Meanwhile, the dog is leaping all around us, begging to be fed even though he just got fed because he always wants more and in his leaping, he steps on the baby, or steps on my son’s bare feet, or gets between my legs while I’m trying to move back and forth between the counter and the stove and he trips me up to the point where I nearly lose my balance, but definitely lose my cool and I start screaming at him. Now we’re all crying. Finally, my husband gets home, we plop all the food down on the table, and everybody scarfs it down as quickly as they can because we are all starving and miserable. Then we have about 10 minutes before it’s time to get the baby in the bath and begin the evening’s bedtime routines. What a blast!

It wasn’t worth it, this sad bit of family togetherness that I was trying to force into our days by insisting that we all sit down to dinner together. “I’m not doing this anymore,” I told my husband one night and we agreed it didn’t make sense for this moment in our lives and that was that. Burden lifted. Now I feed the kids early. I cook while the baby naps and my son does his homework, or while they are both up and free from obligation but still in good moods because they aren’t overly hungry yet and can happily keep each other company. We play music and dance around while I wait for the oven timer to go off. We read books or build towers out of blocks for the baby to smash to the ground like a tiny Godzilla. The boys eat when they are ready and usually, I eat with them, standing in the kitchen while the baby is in his high chair and my son is perched on a stool at the counter. When my husband gets home, he eats while we all play games, build Lego, or continue the dance party we started earlier but had to pause during our dinner break. Our evenings are fun and relaxed, and we are all spending more and better time together. By letting go of the thing I thought I had to do, I got the thing I wanted instead: quality family time, fewer tears, less stress. On the weekends we all sit down to dinner together because our time is more flexible. (Though I’ll admit, we often say screw it and just eat together in front of the TV while watching a movie. This too feels like better family togetherness than sitting around the dinner table scolding my son for chewing with his mouth open and pleading with him to just try a vegetable damn it while the baby drops food on the floor for our increasingly overweight dog to gobble up.)

Maybe someday we’ll get back to family dinners, or maybe as the boys grow their evenings will become increasingly busy with activities and everyone will eat at different times that best suit our individual schedules and needs. I’ve decided it’s not that big of a deal. If our lives don’t have space for one kind of family time, we can choose a different kind. I realized recently that I feel most overwhelmed by motherhood and ready to burst when I’m butting up against some arbitrary idea of what our lives are supposed to look like. My son once asked me what makes breakfast food breakfast food and I didn’t have much of an answer beyond, because we eat it for breakfast. A lot of life feels that way when I stop to think about it—so much of what we do is because that’s just what we do.

There is a part of me that wants my children to look back on their lives someday and see all of us sitting around the dinner table, happily connecting as we talk about our days, current events, our plans for the weekend—a memory you could superimpose on a Norman Rockwell painting. But that’s not what our dinners have looked like, and what’s worse than the lack of a happy memory is the presence of an unhappy one where our evenings are defined by everyone, myself included, melting down and feeling frustrated with each other. I am content in the knowledge that instead, my boys will remember their childhoods as ones where our frustrations were balanced out by lots of laughter and stupid jokes, evenings where we roared like dinosaurs and had epic negotiations over how many times in a row my son was allowed to play the song, “Timber.”

“We never really ate together as a family,” they might say, looking back, “but we sure did dance a lot.”

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.