sunrise (emoji), sunset (emoji) (Patreon)

(public post)

hallo loves

i got a weird text today, from an unknown telephone number, after i landed from edinburgh at heathrow airport in london.

(fyi, this was a photo from the plane that i posted today on twitter and instagram. i don't often take them, but we are in the so fucking often, why don't i? it's a part of life. here it is:

for what it’s worth, this is my family in our natural habitat. @british_airways flight #1445 direct from edinburgh to london. i compose emails about the patron pop-up this weekend in camden, @neilhimselfworks on the second draft of a script for a secret TV thing, ash watches the muppet movie for like the 14th time. all in all, we are managing and life isn’t too bad. we don’t have lives exactly like anyone else i know and we still haven’t figured out how to really do...well, anything. not perfectly. but we are surviving and we are doing okay in our imperfection. that’s enough, for now, i think. and in some incarnation as my younger self, i may have described this scene as the absolutely pinnacle of peaceful perfection. and maybe it is. who is to say? #Art #Life -#ArtLife#Travel #Parenting#WhateverWorksHoney

.....

anyway, back to the weird text.

it said:

I am looking forward to seeing you tonight for 5:30 pilates. 🐛🦋

first of all, it is 4 pm and i am in a fucking airport in london with a hangry husband and a shit ton of lugagge and no plans for the night other than to deal with my fucking family and my luggage and perhaps if i am very lucky get access to a glass of wine before sleeping.

second, i don't do pilates. 

thirdly, nobody i know uses these emojis.

(sidebar: i used to hate emojis, and then something changed. i think it was the christmas, maybe three years ago, when i was at a dorky holiday party with a bunch of MIT and harvard people and we played a weird overhead projector game that involved doin gthe best job og re-creating popular christmas songs from emojis only and i was so fucking cocky because i was like "i understand emjois and i am a Great Poet" and all these harvard and MIT dorks wipesd the fucking floor with my lame attempts and i was emoji-shamed and i started to see emjois in a new poetic way. neil has never used an emoji. no wait i think he has used one once. i think emojis now contain a kind of higher power.
i am actually so into the ferris wheel emjoi lately (IT CONTAINS ALL OF LIFE) that if you were to hold a gun to my head right now and say AMANDA YOU MUST GET A TATTOO i think i would get a giant tattoo of the ferris wheel emjoi, the apple version, on my forearm)

.......

anyway.

i was like

who is sending this text?

then i saw there was a text history, even though this was a foreign number, and i scrolled up to see who had accidentally texted me or was high enough to think that i wanted to go to pilates with them and turn into a butterfly. 

then it all came together.

.........

it was a woman named jana, who i met for only two days back when ash was one day short of one mother old. it was october 15th, 2015. (thanks iphone history).

...........

i met her on the beach. 

neil and i were in florida, we had just driven there from tennessee after giving birth to ash at the farm (the sorta-commune where i had him in the woods with a bunch of nice midwives).

we drove to florida because we wanted to introduce him to our cousins judith, sidney and helen. helen is the 99-year-old holocaust survivor from "a mother's confession" who made the blanket with the mistaken identity. she's on neil's jewish side of the family, and lives (still, though sadly no longer with sidney, he left this plane of existence) in florida in a nursing facility in sarasota.

so that's where we were....staying in a rental condo on the beach in sarasota that belonged to a friend of ours, named ron. 

i will never forget that day, and the night of that day.

............

sunset happened, and i took ash for a walk out on the beach to see it. 

and while i happened to be out on the beach, this nice lady started chatting with me, and we found out we were staying in the same block of condos. 

and then she took some pictures of me and ash on her phone. i don't remember, but maybe i even asked her to, because that would have been like me, because i didn't have my phone and it was, you know, a beautiful moment.

she offered to text them to me. then i told her some truth. even though i'd just met her, because i do that. that i was on my own for the first night since having a baby. 

neil was flying or driving to some gig out of the state and wouldn't be back for about twenty-four hours, and i didn't know....well, anyone.

it would be fine, i said, but yeah, i just had this baby, and i'm alone in this weird place, and it's weird. i gestured to the condo we were staying in and she gave me this look, and she said, i have two kids, and i know what you're feeling, and if you need anything, just text me. 

..............

then she went home to her condo with her family and i went home to my empty condo three doors down with my nice tiny almost-one-month baby snuggled in my arms and i prepared myself for a night of eating toast and lying in bed with this baby and hopefully getting a decent amount of sleep.

jana-the-mom sent the sunset photo a few minutes later and i was like THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!!!! THANKS! 🙏 

...............

she was nice. that was nice. i thought.

then night fell, and ash started crying uncontrollably. and wouldn't stop.

this had never happened.

he always stopped at least after fifteen minutes, or after a good dose of boob, or after getting walked around in my arms and cooed at. but he simply would. not. stop. crying. and this was the kind of screaming, inconsolable crying that makes you go: something is wrong.

so i was like, eh. babies cry. he'll stop.

and then he didn't stop, and the crying got worse, and an hour went by, and i started to get really worried.

really worried. and i texted my friend who was a pediatrician and she said: take his temperature. and i had no thermometer. and i was like: i am a bad mother. and she was like: can you go get one? and i was like: i am in the middle of nowhere florida and i have this baby and i have no car. and she talked me off the ledge and told me it was probably fine, but warned me that it could also be a bunch of weird things and at this point i was like: maybe he is just insanely sensitive and has an acute sense of missing his father who has abandoned us for the first time to go to another state. 

but the humor didn't last long because he kept crying and it kept getting worse. 

and i remembered jana. 

and i texted her and i said: i'm so sorry to bug you....do you have a thermometer? i don't have one here and i'm just a little worried about the baby - he won't stop crying.

and she wrote back: 

we don't. i'll be right over.

...............

i'll be right over.

it was one in the fucking morning. yes: i am the kind of person who will bug an almost-total-stranger at one in the morning to ask a favor like this.

now you have to realize, this woman didn't know me. she had met me for all of ten minutes on the beach and had a short exchange with me and that was, you know,  it. and it was now 1 am in the morning and she said, i'll be right over.

..................

and over she came, and she saw my red eyes and my freaked out baby and she held him and she talked to me and she told me all the stories of her kids getting sick and we both looked at this red-faced, angry, inconsolable baby, and i can't remember if ash stopped crying while she was there or  not but at that point it didn't matter because i....

wasn't alone.

.......................

she spent enough time with me that i didn't feel alone. maybe it was an hour, maybe more. i was so tired. i don't remember, i just remember i was so, so, so grateful for the kindness of this stranger in this unusual hour of need.

.........................

ash was fine by the morning.

maybe it was a passing fever, maybe he picked up on my anxiety at being alone. maybe he just....really is a sensitive soul who missed his dad. who fucking knows. he was fine by morning.

by sunrise.

........................

fuck. you guys.

our tribe is so fucking broken.

there is just never any reason, given the billions of people on this planet, why anyone - any new mother, any suicidal wreck of a teenager or adult, any person on their deathbed - going through something difficult should have to go through it alone.

and yet.

every day in every way, we live these totally isolated lives. so many of us suffering in our cellular little boxes packed up against one another with such anemic chances at connection. how has this happened?

...........................

nothing has underlined this brokenness to me more than being a traveling musician who loves to surf the global crowd, in terms of help and connection (whom, often, gets scorned and punished for asking). and more recently, being a mother. the network tightens around you. mothers enter this new echelon of asking, and being asked. whether it is fair or not, whether it actually makes complete sense or not, i do not know.

............................

i was talking to chris cunningham, my friend from edinburgh, yesterday, while we were keeping an eye on ash zooming around a huge public space. 

and i asked him if he'd ever lost any of his children. yes. he lost sam once, when he was a toddler, in the huge park in edinburgh, he said.

what happened? i asked

and chris said sam did exactly as we'd told him. if you get lost: look for a lady with a pram.

(they call strollers "prams" here in the UK. it's weird)

.........................

and there is this weird thing about people trusting mothers.

i don't know if it's so much that mothers are inherently more trustable that sketchy strangers, but there's a few things going on there. one: if you are actively keeping a child alive, the chances that you are high and a criminal or on your way to GET high and be a criminal is...well, certainly not impossible because shit like that happens all the time, but LESS LIKELY. you're just LESS likely to be a criminal going to get high if you're pushing a stroller. and second, moms pushing strollers are just TIRED. ALWAYS. if you're pushing a stroller, you're just tired. which means that you're less likely to do something bad to some poor other child, because HOW COULD YOU HAVE THE ENERGY BECAUSE YOU ARE FUCKING TIRED. 

it's probably some combination of those two things that makes people feel safe about moms.

......................

i sort of resent it. moms aren't all safe, and non-moms aren't all bad. 

we're just terrible generalizers, aren't we.

.......................

i wrote her back and i said:

WHICH PILATES CLASS? i'm in london!!!

....................

she wrote back and said 

hahahah

she had the wrong amanda

..................

but she didn't.

xxxx

AFP

p.s. here's a picture of neil against the sunset on that beach with ash the next night

he came back....

i only found it because i'd texted it to jana in that text thread. 

p.p.s. and i sent her a picture of ash, almost four years on. sometimes technology is really wonderful. technology can be nice.

p.p.p.s. isn't it weird how i went to post the sunrise emoji followed by the sunset emoji BUT THERE IS ONLY ONE EMOJI FOR BOTH OF THEM

PROVING ONCE AGAIN THGAT EVERYTHING IS ONE 

pppppps 

*edit*

i lied 

i was tired when i wrote this 

and i wrote it on my laptop 

now that i’m on my phone 

oh shit 

there totally is a sunrise and sunset emoji 

🌅🌄

not only that there’s these 

🌇🌆

i love you bye 

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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