Tue 11 Oct 2011
for the small, failed things
Posted by bon under coping stuff, issue stuff, pondering stuff
[24] Comments
we pulled up the garden in shirtsleeves this weekend, somewhere in the middle of multiple pumpkin pies. it was warm, crazy warm for Thanksgiving. after two days of hail, and winter jacket weather, it felt like Wonderland.
i ate the last peas of summer, warm green time-travellers hidden in withered, weathered shells. a few last tomatoes clung to the vines we ripped out: they ripen on our kitchen sill. the long and winding rope of the squash plant we tried to leave intact: its prickly, flowered length had just begun to yield. one tiny gourd, the only one of the season. that our benign neglect brings forth vegetables at all still amazes me, but this was not a banner year.
i almost missed the gourd entirely. Dave pointed it out: pear-shaped, green. we thought we might leave the little thing to grow a bit, yet. then a hasty tug.
oopsie.
it is on the windowsill, with the green tomatoes. it is too small to put out on the deck with the gourds and pumpkins we procured at a more successful grower’s this weekend: small as a chestnut, it would be gone in a gust of wind.
i do not know why i care. it’s a gourd. can anyone speak to the purpose of gourds? but it was there, and now it is here.
the small, failed things always get me.
***
i am all elbows these days. overwhelmed, gulping, i push out space for myself like a skater, gouging those who get too close. i feel cornered by time, by demands. i wing everybody close.
overwhelmed, i say, and the small voice comes out like a shout, an attack with expletives.
i want to sit down on the ice and draw a circle around myself, and say stop. let me catch my breath. let me watch and take it in, all this bounty, these things i should have been more thankful for today. please. let me stop.
sometimes i feel like a collection of small, failed things i do not know how to leave behind.
we make ourselves out of a thousand half-baked parts, cobbled out of context. some serve us well. some are woefully inadequate, and always will be.
they have histories, these things, invisible vines that tie us up, that choke us. and we protect them, elbows up, with the same strange tenderness as the small living things that do not reach their potential.
i failed at Thanksgiving this year.
yes, there were turkeys, two of them, and family and friends, and pie. an abundance. but abundance comes with work. with accommodation. with stress. and it is the last that dogs me: i wasn’t even responsible for either turkey, yet i found the sum total of it all too much. when we sat down to give thanks at the end of it all, i choked.
i wanted to say, i am thankful it’s mostly done. please do the goddam dishes. i didn’t. i *think* i said i was glad that everyone was there. i hope i did, because i was. i said something lame about the weather, too. but i felt like a small, failed thing by the time we made it to that table.
the math of stress that i learned in my youth – jobs to be done = exponential multiplication of pressure and panic until all to-dos are erased from equation – has hidden sums that i need to untangle. i do not know where to begin.
i understand them as a part of who i am, a part of the way the world is. and so the petty jobs add to petty jobs until the time available feels divided into shards. my elbows go up, to protect what space and time i can. overwhelmed, i squeak, and the mouse roars.
i do not want to be the sum of small, failed things, forever in their thrall.
but they are what i give thanks for, this morning after Thanksgiving.
because i may think i do not know where to begin, but they point the way. you cannot change in yourself what you cannot see.
i see the stress today, small and lumpy, kind of ugly. it hides in a tangle of late summer vines of historicity, never fully grown. whatever energy or purpose it was started for is stunted, now.
i look at it, and try to own how it grew. i tug, attempt to disentangle vine from vine.
this will be my winter gardening. a daily job. i want eventually to pluck these small, failed things, one by one, tenderly. i want to set them on my windowsill; reminders, but no longer part of the living organism.
until then, i have the gourd. i hope it lasts. i need to see it.
and in spring i will try again to grow something that thrives and feeds, and does not choke.
October 11th, 2011 at 12:36 pm
wow, bon. just…wow.
by the way, I like your gourd. doesn’t look failed at all. just a something from a something else – like all things.
hi, bon.
October 11th, 2011 at 12:46 pm
“i understand them as a part of who i am, a part of the way the world is. and so the petty jobs add to petty jobs until the time available feels divided into shards. my elbows go up, to protect what space and time i can. overwhelmed, i squeak, and the mouse roars.”
YES. This. Always. Every day. My challenge comes with reminding myself that I have *chosen* this life, that in fact this is what I wanted, and that feeling overwhelmed and pushed and stressed is solely because of the choices I’ve made.
I do try to let things go. My house is messier than any living environment I’ve ever had, just because at a certain point in the day I have to say “enough. It is enough” even though every part of me cries out to pick that up, put that away, what if someone stops by. But it’s hard. When my whole image of myself is wrapped up in being the organized, responsible, together one, it causes a great deal of stress when the outer appearance doesn’t match that.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Great post as always Bonnie!
Hannah, I feel like you just posted exactly what I was thinking!
October 11th, 2011 at 2:12 pm
…about the gourd, Charlie. maybe that’s it. as a windowsill gourd, it’s perfect. as soup, it sucks. maybe the failed things are fine in themselves, just not sufficient to the tasks they been put to. i need to figure out how to change my responses so that they are sufficient to the tasks they’re put to, as – rail though i might – i don’t seem to be able to change the goddam tasks.
unpacking myself, though? it’s hard. it’s hard to see the responses that don’t work as the problem, rather than focusing on what triggers the responses. like you say, Hannah, i actually CAN usually say “enough” and let things be. but i don’t know how to stop SEEING the work, just waiting. that’s where i struggle.
i suppose it’s hard to see what we are raised with as a choice we’re making. i’m still stumbling on that. i think i’m wired, both by habit/inculcation AND by personality, to prefer things DONE. there’s good in it. it means i’m good at delayed gratification. it means i’m decisive. but. it means i stress, when there is more to do than i can/want to devote time to. and lately that is always.
so i’m trying to see that stress not maybe exactly as a choice, but at least as something i can choose to engage with or not. tips welcome. and if you’ve ever walked this path, hand-holding appreciated.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
I think that gourd is cute.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Nicole, it’s totally cute. the tenderness towards things that do not reach their potential fascinates me. i run deep with it, extending it – as here – even to my own flaws. i’m a runt of the litter booster. i’d have made a terrible farmer.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
Bon, that gourd, in its tinyness, is perfect. I think alot of things don’t ever get “finished” to fruition, it doesn’t make them less beautiful, less important, less worthy of admiration. It’s little. It’s perfect.
Friend, you know I love and admire you ALOT…but I DO think you are too hard on yourself for your failings. Or even for the fact that you feel overwhelmed at times. I am not trying to undermine or minimize these feelings, I am just normalizing them and telling that you that feeling overwhelmed, in a house with 2 kids, while you are working AND studying AND forging ahead with your online work is noble and powerful and necessarily a huge undertaking. Breath….breath. I promise, you are accomplishing wonderful things that all of us can see….even if you can’t quite make out the trees in the forest just yet.
They may not be my (or Charlie’s or Hannah’s) particular challenges…but we all have them in some capacity. We are all a jumble of starts and stops and breathless weeks, months and years. Some years are worse than others.
I think it makes you a work of art that is gloriously human and incredibly robust…not small, not stunted and certainly not fragile.
Some things are small and perfect, just the way they are. Some things are tall, with short brown hair and sparkly eyes and spend their days creating the life that they want for themselves…those (ahem) things, are perfect too…even if they don’t realize it themselves.
October 11th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Maybe the gourd stayed small because it wasn’t given the room it needed to grow. Maybe we – all of us – need to learn to prune away the good to make way for the very best & give it room to grow.
For me, the myriad obligations pile into a crushing mass, like the proverbial straw on the camel, regardless of how fun or inconsequential those tasks seemed to be when I volunteered for them and despite my best intentions to NOT over-commit. That overwhelmed feeling creeps up behind me silently like a small, cute kitten but pounces as a fully grown, massively oversized LION and slams me to the floor.
I feel your pain, sister. Such is my October and I HATE IT. Every potential obligation for November for which I have NOT already committed is being denied. I just need a month to BREATHE before all the fun of December hits!
October 11th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Also, letting things be what they are, instead of expecting them to be something they are not, is hard.
This, I find, is especially true of ourselves and our families.
October 11th, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Great post, thanks for being humble and sharing.
October 11th, 2011 at 8:50 pm
You had me at “all elbows.”
(And loud voice saying to all those hands pulling: Just give me space to breathe! )
I just read and nod, and wonder at how you put words to these days.
Lately I have felt so overwhelmed, I have halted all productivity. One day I sent the kids to school and watched True Blood dvds. And it wasn’t even a guilty pleasure, it was tinged with regret and that miserable angst “I have so much to get done, I cannot even move forward today.”
I agree – being the sum of small failed things sucks. Let’s not own that. Onward to removing them and remembering them. Thank you for this… The faith of your supportive friends here is special too…
October 11th, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Take it one hour, one afternoon, one day at a time. You are probably at the very worst point of the complications of having it all – your kids are small yet, you have a very cerebral (does that work?) job and the studying and planning are also high level and high tension.
Bon, I’ve been there. My squash got frozen, my brain got frozen, I did a bit of all of it, badly, and I was overwhelmed and hating my incompetence. And it got better.
Your little gourd is beautiful and so are you.
October 11th, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Well, love. Yeah. Me too. Except somehow it’s easier to see through the overwhelm when it’s not your overwhelm, so here I am with the only things I know to say.
All we know for sure is that the world looks a little brighter when you’re well-fed and well-rested. So deem all the rest too much to manage, and then do smaller things like a big huge spinach salad and an early night to bed.
Now I sound like my mom. That’s the infuriating thing. She really is right. It’s a little easier, honey, just a little, if you get to bed early AND I MEAN IT.
(written at 11:51 with hours to go)
(sigh)
October 12th, 2011 at 11:02 am
Thank you for this in so many ways. Wish I had more energy and/or attention to say more right now, but all I got is thank you.
October 12th, 2011 at 3:53 pm
As a species, gourds are very successful. They’re cucurbits, they’re one of the very first cultivated foods. They’ll escape into the wild at the least opportunity, and wild ones (if you happen to live in a place with wild squashes) will interbreed with cultivated ones before you notice — you find out when you bite into a squash from your garden & it’s crazy bitter! (So says Gary Paul Nabhan in “Gathering the Desert.”)
So you could let the little dude dry out, save the seeds, and replant next year so he can try again.
October 12th, 2011 at 8:56 pm
“i ate the last peas of summer, warm green time-travellers hidden in withered, weathered shells.”
Love that.
October 12th, 2011 at 9:00 pm
aw. you guys.
Jennifer…i will totally dry him out and give the seeds another try next year. that’s…exactly right.
and yes Kate, i’ll go to bed. xo.
October 14th, 2011 at 1:18 pm
This… just all of this, is so much of what is in my head, so much of the time. I feel like we’re sisters.
October 14th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I feel like my own words are failing me as I try to express how your words made me feel. How they tugged at me from all sides, like a pestering child saying “mama me too, me too”. I hope we find a moment to ourselves to draw that circle on the ice. We both need it.
October 15th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
yes.
ever so much recognition, from me.
October 16th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
This has become my life, too.
And knowing this about myself makes me feel even more stress.
Fighting for my own time, feeling I should be giving it all to my children, instead.
Thank you for the permission here to say, I’m not the only one gulping in water.
October 17th, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Feal and loss of control are funny things, the way they can shape our thought processes. The seemingly inherant behaviors/thought patterns we display aren’t actually static. They’re changeable as you’ve acknowledged. It’s a true challenge to change one’s own perspective but well worth the effort.
Loved beginning to get to know you.
October 22nd, 2011 at 5:40 am
You have your hands in the earth, which is so wonderfully and literally grounding.
About six weeks ago, during one of the worst breakdowns of my life that I don’t know I can ever write about … I was randomly on twitter for one minute. A tweet from you popped up, about going to the orchard and getting the best apples.
I still don’t understand why I cried so hard at that tweet, Bon. Something to do with your Apple Earnestness. Wholesome. Just living in the real world.
I wanted to get back to that again. I love how you are real – thank you. Sorry for the epic, odd comment. X
October 24th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
This was amazing, Bon. Thank you. : )