Gender, overthinking parenting, and Queen Mab

Between two buildings of Queen Mab’s school is the memorial Zen garden—a brick courtyard surrounded by kindergartener-high black-eyed Susans, with a long L-shaped sand table and an even-longer water feature made of massive rock slabs that looks like it was lifted straight out of Turkey Run State Park, populated by a few stray goldfish. During recess on hot days, the kids take off their shoes and socks and wade in the water, or scoop mountains and rivers into the sand table, which they flood with water carried from the little waterfall in a cracked green watering can.

One particularly blistering week near the beginning of the school year, Mab came home almost every day wearing the extra outfit from her cubby, with the clothes she had worn to school folded damp in a plastic bag. So every day I had to send her to school with new extra clothes.

Friday morning, though, we forgot the bag of clean clothes on the desk in the entryway, and didn’t realize it until I unbuckled her from her car seat at drop off. Mrs. R eyed Mab’s pink shorts and thought they were short enough that she’d probably be fine, if she was careful.

So I kissed her and told her to keep her pants dry, then drove home.

On the way, though, I started to worry that she would fall in the waterfall and get really soaked and then have nothing to change into. I imagined how she would have to play to avoid that. Carefully. Not with the wild freedom that she always moves with, as she absorbs herself into whatever world she’s currently created for herself. In short, she wouldn’t have nearly as much fun at recess if she had to be self-conscious about keeping her clothes dry, and I didn’t know how many waterfall-hot days they had left.

I supposed I could let her deal with it as the consequences for forgetting her stuff, but to be honest I had forgotten it too, and I’m an adult and been forgetting stuff my whole life and I still haven’t learned my lesson (for example, I forgot to bring the printout of her kindergarten dental form to the dentist only a few weeks before. The receptionist graciously didn’t make me suffer the consequences of my mistake and force me to home for it—she printed off a new copy herself).

Mab’s only five—she has her whole life to learn about forgetting stuff, but only a few weeks out of these few years to go outside with her friends and splash in the waterfall during recess. I was just reading yet another online article about kids’ development suffering from not playing outside—climbing on the rocks and sliding into the water would probably do her more long-term good than suffering the consequences of forgetting her stuff, anyway.

It’s only an eight minute drive. So a less-than-20 minute round trip to take her stuff to her. What did I have to do that morning? Not much. Just sit outside with my iced coffee while B eats sidewalk chalk.

I could give up 20 minutes of that for her.

So I did.  

What sorts of lessons did I teach her, by saving her from the consequence of forgetting?

I taught her that I’m here for her as much as I can, as much as is appropriate for her at this age, to help make up for what she lacks. I taught her that her time is valuable to me, too. I taught her that it’s important to me that she have the freedom to get messy, because as Apple Jack said, “Gettin’ messy is often a side effect of hard work,” and fear of getting dirty will paralyze her.

Someday (probably sooner than later) she’ll notice the approving tone when people see her all dolled up in her favorite froufrou outfits and her stealthily-applied eye shadow originally purchased for a dance recital and say she’s “all girl.” And she’ll want more of that approval. I don’t blame her—I like approval, too. And she’ll start to figure out what being “all girl” means.

I hope she knows that I don’t care if she’s “All-girl” or only 73% girl or just 18% girl (that 18% is made almost entirely of tulle, by the way) or always neat and clean and careful about her appearance—that I will go out of my way to make sure she doesn’t have to. If she gets mud on her tights and tutu because she’s chasing bugs or doing somersaults down the front yard, that’s fine with me. In fact, I hope she does.

When I picked her up from school that afternoon, of course, I discovered that the dash for extra clothes had been unnecessary—Mrs. R was right, and her shorts were short enough that she hadn’t gotten her clothes wet playing.

But as she climbed into the car, she gleefully announced, “Mommy! Mommy! Guess what?! I touched a fishy!”

“Ooh! What did it feel like?”

“Cool! It was so soft and smooth!”

Ten years from now when she forgets something my response may be different, but right now this is what I want her to learn. That exploration and adventure are worth the risk, and that fish are soft, not gross. And it only took me 20 minutes to do (and a lot of overthinking)

Parenting, prisms, and Corpus Christi

Last Sunday my family and I visited the church I grew up in. My parents are still there, the sort of people you could call pillars of the congregation, who between the two of them have taught almost every Sunday school class and participated in almost every ministry over the past twenty-some years. Because of that, even though I haven’t been an active member for over ten years, I still have an “in”—I mention my parents’ names and immediately everyone knows where I fit in the picture. People who have never met us know where my sister and I live and who’s had a baby recently.

I like coming back to the place where so many of my ideas about life and God and community were shaped. I have a lot of wonderful memories of love and friendship in those halls, and there are many people there who I look forward to seeing. My parents worship there. There’s hot chocolate mix and hazelnut creamer to put in my coffee during social hour—it’s like caffeinated Nutella. But there’s a reason—a lot of reasons, actually—why I haven’t been an active part of that church since I graduated from high school. Some of them I’ve mentioned in other posts, and some of them align with the theories of handwringing bloggers bemoaning the departure of millennials from the church.

My kids’ initial response to the service (it’s not like they’ve never been to my parents’ church before, but it had been awhile) was how I imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder accidentally stumbling upon a rave. But they caught on pretty fast and Queen Mab told me later that she “liked the music.”

When it was time for communion, I decided to stick with our own family rules and let the kids participate as they do in our home church. If you’ve seen my facebook posts about my kids and communion, you know it’s important to them. Mab wants to be a priest or a pastor when she grows up so she can give communion, and B will randomly point out the window at Church Across the Street to announce “Body’a Ch’ist” and will put tiny invisible pinches of something in my palm while whispering, “Body Ch’ist, daketa you.” So even though it’s not a thing at my parents’ church to give communion to little kids, I figured that since they both had been baptized (as infants, but whatever) and it wasn’t like there was anyone policing the aisles (the plates were being passed by guys from the youth group) I would go with my own best judgment.

Mab passed the plates and got her little cracker and juice cup like a pro, and B saw what we were doing and stuck his little hand in for a cracker as well. But then he did something he’s never done before.

Instead of putting it in his mouth, he tried to feed it to my dad, then to me. We both tried to explain to him that it was the “Body of Christ,” and I even tucked it in his palm with the usual “Body of Christ, broken for you,” to try to make it clear to him. But he just grinned at me and shoved it in my mouth, repeating, “Body’a Ch’ist,” and I realized—

He thinks this is a game. He thinks we’re only playing communion and doesn’t recognize it as the real thing.

I’ve always wondered what B means when he says “Body’a Ch’ist”—how does he define it? I’d been worrying that maybe he just thinks of it as “snack in church,” but apparently his definition is more nuanced. He’s taken it from Episcopal priests and Lutheran pastors, familiar faces and complete strangers, as a thin white cracker or hunk of chewy brown bread, standing in line or at the altar, beside a firepit and in the middle of 6^th Street, but this was the first time he’d refused it (not counting the time he held the bread in his cheek until the end of the service, then when the rector came around to say hi and held out his hand to B, carefully pulled out the soggy wad and laid it in the open hand. Sorry, Father Bradley!).

Apparently the ritual makes the difference.

My feelings on this are mixed. I’m happy that he’s learning to appreciate something that I’ve come to value deeply, and that his understanding is a *smidge* deeper than I’d been afraid. But in Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi, she describes stories propagated to encourage lay piety and adoration of the Host which featured an innocent child refusing to participate in the Eucharist, thereby revealing that the Host had not, in fact, been properly consecrated due to the priest’s impiety. And I don’t particularly want my kids to actually think that this other way of celebrating communion is fake.

Ways of celebrating communion have been on my mind lately, because within our own home church, there are many parents who are making different choices about their children’s participation in communion than we are. It’s been traditional in this congregation to wait until 5^th grade, but participating younger is allowed. Our pastor would give it to every child who reaches for it, but she respects that other parents have their own reasons for letting their children wait. These conversations in our home congregation brought to mind a lesson my dad gave once about communion, years ago, at that very same church where B refused communion, standing right where the praise band was set up on Sunday.

He told us about coming to our denomination (which was then known as the Independent Christian Church) from having grown up Nazarene, and worrying about the new denomination’s practice of weekly communion. In the Nazarene church, communion is monthly, or even quarterly, which made it a special event, outside the everyday, and he was afraid that if he participated every week, it would lose its sacredness.

He discovered that any sense of specialness that was lost by partaking weekly was made up for by the constant reminder of Christ’s love and presence. But then, instead of announcing that our church’s way was the best way and he was glad to have switched over to doing it “right,” he pulled out a prism on a chain and let it hang in the air, catching the spotlights and scattering them like sparks.

Both practices, he explained, brought out different facets of communion and enhanced its beauty.  I’ve never forgotten the image of him in a dark suit, holding out that glittering prism.

It makes it harder to snark about a way of worshiping that I left behind a long time ago when I remember that this particular way of doing church is one of the facets on the prism that helps diffract the light into brilliant rainbows. A flawed facet, sure, just like all of them, and yet still clear enough for me to have met God there, over and over, in the songs and the prayers and the people, until I stumbled my way down the path that led me where I am now.  And it reminds me that the different choices that other parents make for their children often emphasize different truths. While I want my children to value the things that I value, I also want them to learn to respect the perspectives that other people take and to see how those perspectives help transform white light into dazzling colors. It’s not that everything is true or that everyone is right, but I suspect that there may be more ways to be right than to be wrong. 

Perspectives

It occurred to me a couple weeks ago, while reading The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (which is one of the loveliest books I’ve ever read) that the reason I’m a lousy poet and the reason I often have trouble seeing God is probably the same reason—because I’m not in the habit of looking at things sideways, or upside-down.

Of course, sideways and upside-down are relative—as any astronaut will tell you, it all depends on your coordinates! But most of us default to the same set of coordinates, and then wonder why there aren’t any nice God-shaped-data-points on our grid. Because it’s the wrong grid altogether.

I’m pretty good at doing this with literature—otherwise how would I come up with a reading of a text that none one else has considered seriously yet?—but with everyday life, with loads of laundry and the dishwasher and potty-training, I keep too busy to pause and crouch down and look at what I’m doing from underneath. Which is something that Norris is exceptionally good at—her description of laundry as liturgy makes me almost look forward to folding towels.

Anyway, I wasn’t really sure how to proceed with this thought, so I stuck it in the back of my mind, made a note that I should probably try writing poetry again, and kept right on with the dishes and job applications and refereeing sibling melees.

In the middle of all this, though, I looked out the living room window and got a surprise. A yard full of August Surprises, in fact.

I’ll be honest—I’ve never really got August Surprises (or naked ladies/lilies)—they’re kind of weird and stark. I like my flora to be lush and effusive—I love a pergola overflowing with clematis and unpruned Rose of Sharon bushes. The area between the front of our old house in Lafayette and the sidewalk was an overflowing block of columbine and purple coneflowers. August Surprises, by comparison are basically decorative toothpicks.

But I went out to take a look at them, and it occurred to me that their long, narrow shape would make a nice little mural on the edge of a wall in the bathroom. So I took a picture with my phone. Then another picture, just to be sure. I had to take pictures from lots of angles, of course, so that I could compose my own clear image of them with paints later. But the more different ways I looked at these lilies, the more compelling they were.

Finally, I crouched down and took this picture.

While I was down there, suddenly I got it.

From above, at a normal adult height, yeah, they do look a lot like decorative toothpicks on an oversized burger. But from down here, eye-level with the flowers themselves, they suddenly become tree trunks in an ancient grove, or arching pillars in a cathedral.

***

This evening while I was cleaning the kitchen, I felt like sitting down, but I had already folded and hung up the kitchen chairs so I could sweep. So I sat on the floor.

My house looks different at a toddler’s eye level—tall and spacious. The furniture looms, and under the table suddenly becomes a tantalizing place to hang out (well, to a toddler—I was distracted by the pieces of spaghetti I had somehow missed when cleaning up).

Our basset wandered in, and I leaned forward to lower my head down to her level. Then all the way to the floor, and back up. There’s a bunny I know who, whenever he encounters a new space, does a high-middle-low check, stretching his body up as high as he can to smell the air up there, then down to his own level, and finally sniffs at the floor, too. Investigating space in another axis.

I got myself off the kitchen floor before anyone came in to ask what I was doing—last time I was flat in the kitchen it was because I had nearly shattered my tailbone on an unseen puddle of dish soap. 

Beloved

On Saturday, after a successful but exhausting week (which included a last-minute Skype interview and solo-parenting through one church service and three overnights) I was all Giving-Tree-ed out.* So I decided to take the afternoon off. And by afternoon, I mean a just little over two hours, mostly during B’s nap.

I still felt guilty, even while defiantly telling myself I had earned a little break. After all, the last time I was entirely child-free was during the two hours I was presenting at a panel at Kalamazoo, back in May. I spent most of this break shopping for new clothes, which is about the most stressful indulgence I can subject myself to, because while I get to pick out new clothes (yay!), I spend most of the time wandering through racks of trendy clothing in despair, so overwhelmed by choices that I no longer even know what I like and feeling irrationally horrible about spending money on myself, even for clothing that actually fits and isn’t threadbare, especially since the only time people expect me to be in public wearing anything nicer than pajamas is once a week for a couple hours at church. This task, clothes shopping, is difficult by myself, but absolutely impossible with the kids.

However, after finally finding some decent clothing, including a couple of pairs of pants that fit, were comfy, and looked cute (this took over an hour—it would have taken much longer but I had limited myself to the one store that I had a coupon for), I drove to the library.

While it took me almost an hour and a half to find five articles of clothing, it only took me about five minutes to find five books. After I grabbed three in a row, I decided it was time to go home before I cleaned out the religion section.

That evening I started reading the thinnest of my five books—Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, and tripped and fell right into this paragraph:

“[T]hough the experience of being the Beloved has never been completely absent from my life, I never claimed it as my core truth. I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. It was as if I kept refusing to hear the voice that speaks from the very depth of my being and says: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.’ That voice has always been there, but it seems that I was much more eager to listen to other, louder voices saying: ‘Prove that you are worth something; do something relevant, spectacular, or powerful, and then you will earn the love you so desire.’ Meanwhile, the soft, gentle voice that speaks in the silence and solitude of my heart remained unheard or, at least, unconvincing” (33).

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about failure. In the month since I posted that, I’ve had some tiny successes here and there since then (positive but noncommittal responses to a freelance job application and essay submission, and if anything comes of them, I’ll let you know) but overall I still feel like I’m in a holding pattern, waiting for something that will validate all these applications and submissions and make me feel like I have somehow earned the right to go do something fun for an afternoon and to wear new clothes.

I know intellectually that I am valuable no matter what I achieve, or don’t achieve, but the longer I go without achieving any of the accomplishments that I have spent the past eight years using to determine my value** the harder it is for me to believe that.

Last week in the lectionary reading we heard the story of the Israelites’ daily manna, and the guest preacher discussed the necessity of finding manna from God to get us through one day at a time—little things, like paragraphs we stumble across in books, for instance. (There was more to the sermon than that, but as I mentioned above, I was solo-parenting in the pew and missed most of it). I’m holding on to that paragraph today, and to the little book that leaped off the shelf into my hand Saturday afternoon. I don't feel like the Beloved, but I still am anyway.

Dear Reader, we have infinite value, and we are Beloved. Always. 

*I hate The Giving Tree so much. That’s another post, though.

**“Value” in this case narrowly defined as success in my particular program, of course, but you spend that many years defining yourself by a single set of standards and it almost can’t help but bleed over into the rest of your identity, even in spite of my conscious efforts to avoid that very thing.

Failure and I

The other day Queen Mab and I were working companionably in the front office—I was sitting at the desk writing up documents for yet another job application, and she was at her little plastic table behind me making a hand puppet out of a paper bag.* Suddenly she burst into tears and appeared at my elbow, clutching her puppet and demanding that I do part of it for her because it was terrible and ugly and she hated it (more or less). I gave her some suggestions and sent her back to her table.

After several iterations of this, though, I pointed out the easel next to my desk. David made it for me our senior year of high school. It was the first big thing he made out of wood. Even at the time that he made it, he was frustrated by its many flaws, and today he can’t even bring himself to look at it, because with skill and experience he’s come to see even more of them.

With bonus Mr. B

But if he hadn’t made that flawed easel eleven years ago, he wouldn’t have learned how to do better, and he wouldn’t have built me a perfect blue pine bookshelf in an hour the other day when we got tired of storing my books in boxes on the floor. I told her that if she practiced something now, even if she wasn’t good at it, that was the only way to get better.

Also, my bookshelf has a wizard.

She finished the puppet, whose shirt was a little aggressively colored out of frustration, but overall is a perfectly satisfactory creation for someone who hasn’t started kindergarten yet.

A couple days later, I realized the irony and hypocrisy of this conversation. Because I have spent most of the summer wallowing in my failure to get someone to give me a paycheck. This is a new experience for me.

If it hadn’t been for being on the track team in high school, I would have had little-to-no experience failing up to this point—the things that I really cared about I always ended up accomplishing (even if not quite as well as I would have liked). I married the first guy I ever dated, completed all the degrees I set out to complete, conceived, birthed, and nursed two children in *almost* the exact way I had hoped, attended every conference I submitted an abstract to except one (oh, Iceland—someday I will see your volcanoes and glaciers!), and the one article that I submitted for publication was accepted easily (albeit a year later :-P).

Note how many of these things depend on luck or the preferences of other people rather than my own amazingness.

Of course, because I’ve always been so successful at the things that really matter to me (and even a lot of the things that didn’t matter so much), I dread failure.

After countless job applications (literally—I long ago lost count of the applications I’ve submitted), the occasional “what did you do today anyway?” from my husband (not in so many words—he’s generally more tactful than that!) and frequent episodes of losing my temper in an ugly way at my eldest, I feel like the inverse of that “All I Do Is Win” song as lip-synced by Emma Stone on Jimmy Fallon—all I do is fail.

This, of course, is not entirely true. The other day I made two amazing loaves of bread, a quart of fabulous frozen custard with raspberries from the farmers market, and a surprisingly yummy experimental soaked-flour zucchini bread recipe using zucchini from my garden. This afternoon Mab and I had fun practicing fractions on the front porch (pedagogical insight: fractions make a lot more sense if you replace the word “circle” with “pizza.”). 

All of these things are successes. But they are so small. Today I wanted to walk the kids to the library and playground, but for various minor reasons (excuses?) it didn’t happen. At least I renewed the books online.

All my successes are tiny, but my failures come in every size.

This, I think, is the part where I should talk about how I’m going to be ok with these little successes, that failures now are somehow preparing me for something better later like I told Mab, that that’s what life is made of, that little successes are really big successes etc etc. Also, if this was a testimony or something like that, after I come to terms with what I’ll call my “redefinition of success,” something surprisingly wonderful will happen.

These things are probably true (except maybe that last one—I don’t live in an inspirational baseball movie), but I’m just not feeling it today.  

But I'll try again tomorrow.

---

*I wrote this paragraph the night before I started writing the rest of this, just thinking about Mab and that easel, but then I sat back down this afternoon and saw the word “failure” at the top of the page, and suddenly it resonated with me. A lot.

Wanna-be mystic

Last week we went to a New Members Class at church, which was less a “class” and more a “getting to know you” between us (my husband and I and another new member of the church) and some of the longstanding members of the congregation (and by longstanding, I mean at least one person there was a fifth-generation member). Everyone was asked to share about themselves, answering a set of questions ranging from the mundane “What do you do during the day?” to “Where are you on your faith journey?”

The hardest question for me, and the reason that I was glad to go nearly last so that I had time to think, was “What about church are you passionate about?” Everyone else had such great, specific answers—they had ministries they really cared about, and people within the congregation that they cared about, their families, and so on. And so while I listened to their stories, I pondered what it was about church that I just had to be there for—what’s the image of church that my mind keeps coming back to again and again?

***

There was a period of time when I couldn’t shake the sense that God was purely fictional. But I never had that feeling about Jesus. I could concede that he wasn’t necessarily who I had been told he was, but he still felt Real.

Even long before that time, I was deeply jealous of the medieval mystics I studied who encountered Jesus in intimate visions—I would love to share a pot of tea with Julian of Norwich (she seems like a tea drinker) or wine with Margery Kempe (maybe coffee if it’s before lunch, since someone with fourteen children probably needs all the caffeine, but she doesn’t seem like a tea drinker to me at all) and talk to them about what they saw. From books like Eating Beauty by my former professor Ann Astell (whose book is just gorgeous and who would also be a lovely person to drink tea with), I realized how much of these female mystics’ connection with Jesus came through encounters with the Eucharist.

The convolutions that medieval theologians got themselves in to try to construct an iron-clad defense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was more silly/desperate than anything. But I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when they describe their experiences to me, even if those people have been dead for six or seven hundred years, and somehow these women (and many others of a mystic-bent, both male and female) did meet Jesus there.

When I first read these narratives of seeing visions of Jesus in the Host, or hearing his voice, or being denied by the priest, only to be served by Jesus himself, it was totally foreign to me, whose experience was limited to cracker chiclets and grape juice in plastic cups, informally passed up and down the rows in wide, shining plates (identical to the ones we had just used to collect offering) after a two-minute devotional. The lights were lowered and there was meditative music, and at some point it was moved from before the sermon to after. I think it was supposed to be less like service-filler and more like the climax, but for me, that just made it feel more like an afterthought. As far as I could tell, it was simply intended to be a weekly reminder of Jesus’s sacrifice.*

Later I was a member at a church where communion was still symbolic, but the weight of their practice was on “guarding the Lord’s table” against it being taken “unworthily.” This meant it was held infrequently and at odd times (almost never during the morning service), and so after nearly ten years there, I could count on one hand (and still have fingers to spare) the number of times we communed there.

In contrast, while the medieval church had also guarded the table even more fiercely, even those who only watched the mass without communing were expected to experience the presence of Jesus more intensely than I ever had.

During the Grail Quest, Sir Lancelot is struck down by a giant hand (or dwarf, thanks to Sir Thomas Malory’s fortuitous misreading of Old French) just for daring to cross the threshold of a chapel during the elevation of the Host. He then spends several weeks lost in visions. While ordinary non-Grail-Quest-knights were obviously not expected to see the Holy Trinity suspended over a priest’s head as a matter of course, this narrative demonstrates that Lancelot is blessed like other mystics who have had similar visions of the hidden spiritual reality of the ritual, not that he is insane.

***

The priest of the Episcopal church we attended in Lafayette for a few months before we moved, when inviting the congregation to participate in the Eucharist, told us that “we don’t know how it works! It just does.” Which sounds a lot like what Church Across The Street’s denomination says: “In this sacrament the crucified and risen Christ is Present, giving his true body and blood as food and drink. This real presence is a mystery.” 

When the Great Thanksgiving begins, I get a little thrill down my spine—like I should take off my shoes. Usually I just pull a kid in close and tell them to hush, look up front, and watch, because this is important.

I don’t always feel like I believe. But every Sunday as I stand or kneel and put a little wine-soaked wafer on my tongue, I still taste and see that the Lord is good, and he’s there.

* I did a quick Googling of the theology of communion in the Restoration Movement, which was where I grew up, to see if there was more conversation about it than I was aware of, and there was little discussion of the significance of communion beyond that it should be done weekly—I’m sure there is a rich theology behind that practice, but it was not foregrounded in my experience.

Kalamazoo ftw

So the problem with going to the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo this year was that I enjoyed it way too much. I like standing up in front of a room full of thoughtful, interested people and telling them about an idea I had, and then listening to other people tell me their interesting ideas, and then all of us discussing it together. Which sounds strange, coming from a 100% introvert like me, but really. And I felt like a for-real, legitimate scholar again, which is a feeling I haven’t had for a while and so was pretty exhilarating.

Of course, it helps that I spent most of my time at the Arthuriana booth hanging out with people who I only see once a year, at Kzoo. I actually only went to one panel—mine—and when I wasn’t at the booth, I was wandering the exhibit hall or watching the cygnets on the pond with B. He came to the exhibit hall too—his first word was “book!” and his first sentence was “read da book!” so naturally I had to show him around. I bought a couple books—one of them because as soon as I walked in, my best friend took me by the elbow and dragged me over to it and put it in my hands :-) and one because it’s by an author I’ve been wanting to read and seems to hit the sweet spot where my personal interests and my research interests intersect. I bought nothing because it was on some sort of obligatory reading list or bibliography.

I also bought myself a hot pink t-shirt with a dragon picking his teeth with a sword after finishing off a knight. “Sometimes the dragon wins.”

Traveling overnight by myself was fun—I realized after I got home that this had been the first time I’ve done that since college, and the first time ever that I’ve stayed in a hotel room without any other adults. Taking a trip with just me and B was peaceful and pleasant—he and I are pretty laid back and prefer to just entertain ourselves quietly when in the hotel room and take in the scenery when out and about, so we’re perfect travel companions. Even if he does kick all the blankets off. Violently. All night.

So much space! Just for us!

Leftover Bilbo's pizza by the pond. Also a closeup of where he lost his unicorn horn.

I had been dreading going, to be honest. It seemed like it was going to be a big hassle just to give one little 15-minute talk for a line on a CV that no one was going to care about, but I’m glad I went. It felt more like a little vacation than a trip for work because it recharged parts of my brain that had gotten sluggish over the winter. I got new ideas for research and writing projects out of the discussion at the panel, plus new enthusiasm for working on them, thanks to some time spent talking shop with other academic-types. I hope it helps me build on that sweet spot, so that maybe someday the things I research inside and out and the things I care about will be the same things. That would be lovely.