Nevertheless, We Persist

This morning I rearranged my office while in my underwear because I needed to shake things up. My office is cozy at best with a propensity toward absurdly crowded when everyone discards their stuff in it or it becomes a staging ground for various family projects.

In recent weeks my office has also become a vortex of lethargy. One of the perils of operating my own business is that it is all to easy to walk back into the house after the kids have been dispatched to school and collapse on the futon in my aforementioned office. Especially because I often sit on the futon instead of in my desk chair, for no particular reason except maybe there are comfy pillows nearby and the window through which I can gaze out onto Columbia Pike. Oh, and I should mention that I have a sleep disorder, and if I forget to take my medication for it then I get really sleepy when I sit down at the computer. Under ideal circumstances, I shower before my kids leave for school, and the act of getting clean and dressed sets me up well for the day and I’m good to go. If I don’t shower because I’m busy getting the kids ready or because I oversleep, or because I’m just lazy, then it’s that much easier to slip into morning nap mode, because I’m still in pajamas. On bad days I shuffle back to my futon, shadowed by the twin gremlins of anxiety and depression. I had the epiphany a couple weeks ago that the transition to new schools for both my kids was not challenging for me just because of my overactive sense of empathy and my concern for them, but because of my deep need to be part of communities, and the fact that I was leaving the nurturing preschool community that had embraced my family for the past decade, and the elementary school community that we had loved for the past six years. In their new schools I know very few people yet, so I am emotionally adrift.

And then came the horrifying yet disgustingly unsurprising spectacle last week in the Senate. I won’t recount it all here because you’ve probably read and seen and heard more than enough coverage of it. I began reading articles so obsessively I feel like I am now an expert on the life of federal judge Brett Kavanaugh. I consider Dr. Christine Blasey Ford a hero. And, like most women, I have my own #metoo/#whyIdidn’treport story but I am still too scared to publish it here. I have been reading about how to talk with your children about consent, which apparently it’s never too early to do. I’ve implemented a plan with my 11-year-old daughter in which she can always text us at any time from any place if she feels uncomfortable and needs us to come get her and make an excuse for her needing to leave. Of course I am registered to vote and of course I will vote in November, but where I live is already bright blue. Every day I think about victim blaming and shaming, about rape culture, about pervasive misogyny and sexism, about all the very old straight cisgender privileged white men who run the country right now and who have never experienced and will never experience what it’s like to be a woman or a person of color or any sort of person who has been marginalized or mistreated. Every day I read threads on twitter and in comment feeds on news and opinion stories by women and men who were sexually abused as children and whose parents either did not believe them or told them to just suck it up and not cause trouble. If any news cycle was going to cause me to pull the covers over my head and play solitaire on my phone until I fell back asleep, this one would do it.

And there’s more to the story, because there’s always more to the story, but that’s as much as I can stomach retelling right now. Thankfully, however, there is soccer. When I played Monday night, in my third game this season, it was the first one I wasn’t dreading as I drove to the field. I knew that the moment I stepped onto the turf I would completely forget about all these people and all their pain. I play on a fantastic team of strong and supportive women in a women’s league, in a 40+ division. Some women on teams we’ve played are in their 60s or 70s. Talk about resilient. And thankfully, there is rearranging furniture. As I set about my task this morning–which I started envisioning in the middle of the night last night when I couldn’t sleep, but realized if I started then I would wake up my whole family–I thought about one of my college roommates who always cleaned the bathroom when she was avoiding studying for a big test or tackling an assignment she didn’t want to do. We enjoyed an unusually clean bathroom for college students. But moving furniture–and cleaning the bathroom–isn’t just about procrastinating, it’s about taking control. Here is a mess, here is a room where I have not been productive lately and I’m sitting here wallowing in a toxic brew of emotions, and I can clean it up. I can reset. I can take control. So I spent the morning moving the desk to one wall and the futon to another wall and vacuuming up the clouds of dust that emerged from underneath things, and shifting pictures, and throwing stuff away, and prioritizing, and now I can sit at my desk and look out the window and be in charge of myself.

Of course the closet in the office is now even more crammed with junk, but that’s a project for another day. And my neatened desk does nothing to restore my broken faith in our democracy. But I did talk with three new clients today. And I made a new to do list and crossed one thing off. It’s hard these days, it really is. Nevertheless, we persist.