Good enough for me;
Good enough for right now, yeah;
Good enough for me;
Good enough for right now.
–Tom Petty
Last spring, I decided the only thing to fear is fear itself, and I dove headlong into setting up this blog and writing essays for publication. For a month I had a fabulous rhythm. I wrote longhand in my spiral notebook during the day while I was parenting, and I edited the work when I typed at night after the kids went to bed. People I love complimented my writing, and I got an essay published online. It was glorious.
Then I had a surprise job offer. My campus was planning to close in late 2020, and I had internalized that I would become unemployed. Despite asking to teach online, I had little hope it would happen.
But then it did. Surprise!
I had a week to prepare material for my class, and then I taught a course while simultaneously completing an orientation/mentorship course. All while I was uncomfortably pregnant. The blog post I drafted for May 22nd was lackluster. My memory of my husband’s comment about that last embryonic post is “meh,” though in fairness I’m sure he was a bit more polite than that.
When even your soulmate finds your writing uninspiring, you pause before posting it on the internet. I paused, and then I stalled like a decrepit Pinto. Or, more accurately, a dilapidated VW bus.
Then George Floyd was murdered. The week it happened I was teaching about the idea of “us versus them” in my critical thinking class, and I had to address BLM. Each post was painstaking, as I wanted my students to connect with how exactly the situation matched what we were learning. My class had many Black students, and I wanted them to feel supported, but I also had to walk a fine line to avoid inflaming my conservative students. While the discussions went well, they sapped me, leaving nothing left for me to give this blog.
As the summer marched on, I taught two more classes. I also metamorphosed into a whale-shaped couch potato. And the world caught on fire, or at least my corner of it did.
The smoke from the California and Oregon fires hit Seattle like a hammer to the head, or like tuberculosis to unsuspecting lungs.
I know what you are thinking. “Wow, this chick is melodramatic as hell.” You aren’t wrong. I mean, what’s a little caustic, death-bringing air compared to a pandemic? On its own, hazardous air is mainly annoying, but when you add it on top of a pandemic it sucks. Air that limits your ability to breathe, while you are locked in avoiding a virus (that limits your ability to breathe), while you have a baby engaged in a hostile take-over of your abdomen (limiting your ability to breathe) is not recommended.
In retrospect, I have many stories to tell about the summer and fall of 2020, and even a few from the first quarter of 2021. So. Many. Stories. At the time I wasn’t convinced I had stories anyone wanted to hear. Who wants to read about the ridiculous antics of an overwrought, overscheduled, white chick whose biggest worry is being pregnant during a global pandemic? At the time I thought other voices needed to be heard. I still believe other voices need to be heard, and I encourage you right now to go find a Black author to follow. However, I also think I have stories to tell that might help people, and I enjoy telling them when I can carve out the time.
Even the CliffsNotes version of my last 10 months is too long for one post, but suffice to say the smoke incapacitated me, I had an emergency induction for hypertension at 38 weeks, I sang “Baby Shark” in the ambulance as I was rushed from hospital to hospital for postpartum preeclampsia, postpartum anxiety knocked me sideways, and before I knew it 2020 was history. I’m slowly adjusting to parenting three kids while working two part-time jobs and two volunteer positions and trying valiantly (but perhaps futilely) to stay sane, and I have become enthralled with Buddhism. I have a river of stories cascading through my brain, and I am excited to share them with you.
TLDR: I’m back. I can’t promise I will post every week because I really am BusyDrMom, but I’m going to do what I can, and it will be good enough.
