March 12th, 1959
When what we took for granted becomes a fantasy.
 |
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been.’”
― Kurt Vonnegut (Thanks Jess Thoms for the quote).
I wake up to the sun streaming through lace curtains, a warm ball of fur, my cat Emma, scrunched in my armpit. The soothing, soft rumble of your inhale fills the space next to me. I tip toe into the kitchen to make breakfast while you sleep—coffee and a heaping bowl of cereal, half bran flakes, half granola, for you; a green smoothie and lox frittata for me—while you sleep. We eat together, the windows cracked open, it’s surprisingly warm for mid-March. Birds chirp from bare branches freckled with buds eager to bloom.
After three tedious cigarettes paired with three cups of re-heated latte, we venture out into the early afternoon. Your birthday falls too early for the real flowers of Spring, so I take you to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’m bored within ten minutes but I let you embrace your inner Pisces; your mind wander to distant places as we sit among the flowers. The signs say no smoking and I hate breaking rules, but just this once I play ignorant and let you fill the fresh air with tobacco.
It’s time for lunch, not because you’re hungry, but because you need to swallow your pills with food. I take you to Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe, they’re known for their bagels but you insist on the bran muffin, your go-to lunch. They even warm it up for you, cut it in two and melt margarine in the middle, just the way you like it. We sit on a bench outside so you can have a smoke, I hold your coffee and we alternate holding your cigarette while you use your one working hand to eat your steaming muffin. I’m embarrassed by the crumbs accumulating in the crevices of your jacket collar. I dust them off and close my eyes, take a deep breath for patience, let the feeling of the warm sun on my face transport me elsewhere. But it’s nice. This mundane moment feels nice.
The last section of Vanderbilt before Grand Army Plaza is steep, so we hail a cab to drive us the short distance to Prospect Park. We spend the rest of the afternoon on a park bench. You ramble off your neuroses, occasionally commenting on a passerby’s wardrobe choice that they inevitably hear because you can’t gauge how loud you’re speaking. My irritability and embarrassment builds, but I keep taking deep breaths to mitigate me snapping—the young adult yelling at the innocent-looking disabled woman in a pastel floral dress isn’t a good look. Plus, it’s your birthday, I’m trying to be a good daughter.
I take you to Miss Ada for dinner, not because you like Israeli food but because they’re accessible. We go early—you can’t stand too long in line and a noisy restaurant would overwhelm your senses. Plus, we have a classical music performance to get to at BAM. I oscillate between dozing off and fuming with anxiety at the way you watch live performances—leaning forward with your elbow resting on your knee; head held in-hand, pensively observing the action on stage, blocking the view of those behind you. But you love classical so I don’t interrupt your concentrated observance.
We end the night at home with slices of cake from the Little Cupcake Bakeshop: banana chocolate chip for me and Brooklyn Blackout for you, because it’s the richest chocolate cake I could find. I sing you Happy Birthday and you put down your cigarette to blow out the lone candle. 62 candles is too many for a single slice. We argue over what to watch: you want Late Night, I want Gilmore Girls. Because I have physical control and I’m a spoiled brat, I win. We messily eat our cake on the couch with Lorelai and Rory, finally freed from the fear of judgment that permeated our day.
To many, March 12th is the day the world shut down. To me, it’s my mom’s birthday. Every year, I do the mental math of calculating how old she would’ve been, which inevitably leads me into a spiral of ‘could’ve been’ scenarios. It feels fitting, then, that this day has come to mean something similar for most people—a day that symbolizes the “what if?”
Now that we’re a year in, everyone’s experienced a pandemic birthday. We’ve settled for soggy takeout and muted celebrations (quite literally, over zoom), and faced the logistical nightmare of planning a distanced park hang without a bathroom. The strategy to relieving birthday blues (and prevailing strategy to surviving quarantine in general) has been to dream; to imagine what you would do if the world didn’t stop turning on March 12th, and perhaps hope that one day you’ll fulfill your COVID birthday wish.
While, in theory, fantasizing is a soothing salve for grief, it doesn’t come so easily for me. I can’t imagine my mom flying out to Brooklyn to celebrate her birthday because her disability prevented her from visiting me in any of the cities I’ve lived in over the years. Her 62nd birthday is unimaginable, not because she’s dead, but because the scope of my imagination is limited by the isolated nature of the life she lived. Every birthday, even in “normal times,” meant making accommodations and settling, because of a physical and cultural society that wasn’t built for her body. I wish, not just that she was alive, but that she had been able to live more when she was alive. Sometimes having the perfect dream only makes waking up to reality more painful.
March 12th has always been a day of grief for me. I feel it’s taken a similar tone for others too. We have lost so much—jobs, people, control, freedom; we are collectively mourning. But we haven’t lost our ability to dream. The fantasy that I indulged in here, didn’t picture mom without a disability or some movie-esque mother-daughter relationship, it was real. Her birthday wouldn’t have been perfect, it would’ve been disappointing, but that dysfunction would’ve been oddly comforting, because it was us. I would’ve taken the broken birthday for granted, just as I under-appreciated every “flawed” part of our life before the pandemic.
Mom was the biggest dreamer I know (she was a Pisces after all). So in honor of her, and the new moon in Pisces tomorrow, try dreaming. Not of some ideal life, but of real life, the one you were really living before the pandemic. And in that fantasy, maybe you can find some hope, that one day (soon) some of those not-so-perfect parts of your life will resurface, and this time, you’ll embrace them.
Happy could’ve been Birthday Mom.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
Forbes - 20 Sleep Essentials For A Restful Spring Forward
Even in normal times, springing forward for DST is tough (so much so that car accidents and heart attacks go up the week after). Now we’ve got COVID-Somnia to contend with.
As someone who has been sleep-deprived since infancy (thanks Mom for letting me stay up until 1AM every night), I’ve become a hound for sleep remedies in my adult life.
Here’s what I’m using:
Good Day Chocolate 5mg — My bedtime snack hack: let them soak in a cup of milk to tone down the crunch (and to sweeten your milk!).
Casper Glow Light — It’s a sunrise alarm and portable night light, and just plain fun.
Oura Ring — A personal sleep lab in a stylish ring. It monitors pretty much everything: my heart rate, sleep stages, sleep position, you name it.
Vitruvi Sleep Blend — Maybe I love it because lavender was mom’s scent, but more likely I love it because lavender puts me to sleep. (They’re Canadian!)
Lush Dream Cream — It feels and smells like what it is, sumptuous cocoa butter and oat milk, yum. (They’re Canadian too!)
Pukka Night Time Tea — Valerian steeped for too long is no joke.
Forbes - This New Agency Is Harnessing Data To Improve Black Women’s Access To Wellness
I interviewed Jasmine Marie, the founder of breathwork platform black girls breathing, on her new creative agency, house of bgb, which aims to fill the void of data on Black women’s needs.
“We've always had to craft ways to take care of ourselves so that we could survive,” Marie says in regards to the Black community. She describes how during slavery, Black people were unable to visit the hospital when they were sick due to the color of their skin. “You have to figure out a way to take care of your people,” Marie tells Forbes. “That's always been in our culture—using tools from the earth to heal the body.”
Reading 📖
🔮 What advice would you send your March 2020 self? (Mine would include finding an apartment with windows, packing more clothes and getting a microwave).
⚰️ We’re all grieving the Last Good Day from Before—make space for that grief and avoid compassion warfare —
“Those who’ve lost more resent those who’ve lost less while those who’ve lost less may think they don’t have permission to mourn. [But] when we normalize and respect our own losses, that gives us the energy to respect other losses.”
🍄 If you’re having trouble daydreaming, or struggling with depression, psychedelics might help. They’re set to be the next cannabis, the latest Indigenous tradition commercialized by the wellness industry. (This one’s for you Richard).
✨ Where do the dead go in our imaginations?
“They continue to live with us in the moments when we are sad and terrified. They cheer for us. They give us unbelievable strength and the courage we lack to carry on in situations,” -writes Anakana Schofield.
📕 Mom filled my childhood imagination with Dr. Seuss. So I’m embarrassed to only be waking up to his racism now.
“Painting Seuss as a victim of rabid “wokeness” is like saying police brutality is a recent epidemic that began when people started uploading cellphone footage. It’s in the news because white people just started noticing.”
👑 Mom also LOVED all things royal (when Diana died she didn’t get out of bed for a week!), so naturally I’m reading every take on the interview.
My favorites cover Diana, Markle’s mental health discussion, trauma and Harry’s white privilege:
Will Harry write “a new chapter in his family’s history and bequeath his children a legacy of antiracism”?
“Megan Markle talking about suicide has incredible cultural impact. The same was true with Princess Diana and her struggles with eating disorders; that broke through a lot of stigma as well.”
👯♀️ Will the 2020s be the next roaring twenties?
“The 1920s and 2020s already resemble one another…the presence of pronounced inequality, a rural-urban divide, and a financial bubble,” writes Steve LeVine. Plus, “by the end of this year, economists are expecting a consumer spending binge.”
💉 People with obesity are used to being fat-shamed by doctors, so how do they feel having their weight make them eligible for the COVID vaccine?
🙅🏻♀️ Asian Americans in the U.S. are tired of swallowing their bitterness.
“I’ve been shamefully ambiguous as to how prejudiced white America is to Asian Americans, giving white supremacy the ‘benefit of the doubt’ it did not deserve,” writes Kathleen Hou.
👨🍳 Everyone’s saying ghost kitchens are the future of dining. But without the restaurant, does the food just become “the soggy equivalent of ‘content’”?
🍽 All the time at home has changed the way we eat (think—‘the big meal’), but don’t worry, your weird pandemic eating habits are probably fine.
🛏 How to not get a good night’s sleep.
Watching 📺
A family dramedy, dark comedy and murder mystery all packed into a twenty minute episode? Yep, it exists, and is called Undone—an Amazon Prime animated series from the same creators of Bojack Horseman that’s been lauded as one of the “best” shows of recent years.
“Undone has humor and story enough to make it more than an art object, and it’s rooted in specificity. But make no mistake—it is magnificent art,” says NYT critic James Poniewozik.
Alma is a 28-year-old cynical, depressed young woman whose life is pretty mundane until she gets into a massive car crash and starts having visions of her dad who died when she was a kid. Is she in a coma? Or mentally ill? Or is it the magical thinking of grief? It’s a story about the could’ve beens that “interrogates the boundary of death to probe the meaning of life,” says Poniewozik.
If you’re like me and hate animation, hear me out, Undone uses rotoscoping—actors are filmed first and then drawn over by animators—so it has a more realistic feel. It also makes everyday scenes feel, “more buoyant, as if they’re living underwater,” says Poniewozik. (This works particularly well when Alma wears her hearing implant and we get a submarine-like sound—bonus points for disability representation!).
If your imagination is aching for visual inspiration and an alluring, fantastical story, this is your show.
Listening 🎧
Caregiving for my mom was a central part of this week’s fantasy birthday story because I don’t remember a time when it didn’t shape our relationship. Which also means I don’t know myself as anyone but a caregiver.
This TTFA episode explores the long-term effects of being parentified as a kid (when a child is forced to take on parental roles). Here are some quotes that hit home from Nora McInerny’s interview with Gina, a caregiver from the age of six.
“I’m an able-bodied person so I was aware of how lucky I was that I could do things he couldn’t. I felt grateful but I also felt guilty about it. There was all these aspects of life he didn’t get to experience. People thought I’d feel relief with him gone, I was relieved of the burden of having to take care of him. There was no relief, I just felt really sad.”
“The one thing I still struggle with is identifying what I need. When my husband asks me what I want for dinner, my mind will go blank, it’s almost eerie, ‘do I need food? I wasn’t even aware I was hungry.’”
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.