Contemplating spaciousness, through smoke
Contemplating spaciousness, through smoke
On the maternal mental load, NY's apocalyptic air quality, and Anne Lamott
In my last post, I found that about half of the people I polled are longing for a sense of spaciousness this summer, above all other things. According to my subscriber stats, about a third of the folks who read this newsletter live in the American Northeast, where many of us have been advised to stay inside this week, as hazardous smoke from faraway Canadian wildfires billows over us. The very opposite of spaciousness.
My back-of-the-napkin math suggests that those of us who sit at the intersection of these two populations are screaming internally this week.
Yesterday, in our neighborhood just north of NYC, the smoke turned the sun red. The blue sky slipped behind a thick mustard-colored curtain. I’ve never seen it so dark inside of our house during the daytime. Photos like the one above filled social media, showing New York City’s iconic landmarks — the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge — all shrouded by the alarming umber clouds.
The last time climate change knocked so loudly on the door of New York, it was in the form of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which came bearing biblical floods. When I think back to this time — my first fall in NYC — I remember the sight of a hundred cars parked beneath the windows of the distillery where I worked in Industry City, submerged entirely in water. Just before the storm, they had been unloaded, brand-new, from ships that had carried them over the ocean, and up the bay to where we sat at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers. I remember the lights of the ownerless cars shining into the darkening waters, their horns bleating helplessly as the brackish torrents coming in from the ocean destroyed their insides. Symbols of luxury and commerce, rendered now and forever obsolete.
Now, NYC is better built to handle floods. But not fire.
We’ve all heard tell of what fire season looks like for our friends and family out on the West Coast and in the arid Mountain West. We’ve seen the images, discussed them with concern and empathy. But embodied knowledge just hits different. Now that the fires have come, there is real fear, desperation, and grief.
The timing, too, is especially cruel. This was graduation week for so many of our young people. Graduation out of the pandemic years, and into this?
As much as I desperately hate the smoke and the lack of spaciousness, the injustice of it all — I also sense opportunity. Tens of millions of people now have more literal skin in this particular climate crisis game. History has shown us that moments like this are often what it takes to shift the Overton window around what we’ll collectively accept. These moments often precede real, often positive change.
They also offer perspective. Before this happened, I was going to write about the larger forces that make spaciousness so hard to access at this time in America. About how the maternal mental load in a country with a tattered social safety net feels unbearable, impossible to set down even in moments of supposed rest. (For more on this, see the
post on gender vis a vis leisure from a few months back that now lives rent-free in my mind.)Even with a partner like mine who is competent and caring in the micro view of things, the macro game of parenting in America feels rigged. Pregnant people can’t split the job of growing a baby 50/50 with a partner, 20 weeks on and 20 weeks off; the entire risk and possibility of the thing falls to one person. (Extra emphasis on “risk” in a country that continues to fail to protect pregnant people, particularly women of color.) This often sets the tone for the years ahead. The long nights of breastfeeding, impossible to delegate. The awkward conversations about parental leave. The toddler years, when a mother, within an hetero couple, all too often cannot get their daycare to call their child’s father instead of them in a pinch. And on and on, this push-pull—between our labors of love, the labor we perform for money, and all of the thankless admin in between. The feeling that mothers desperately rest between sets, but cannot.
All of this adds up to a profound lack of spaciousness for some and not others.
Writing “Should we panic buy an air filter?” next to “Should we buy a new couch?” on our shared planning document shifted the scope and sweep of the story I was telling myself about the world this week. For once, our smothering sociopolitical context is not being determined only by the regrettable decisions of patriarchy-addled Washington lawmakers (and daycare personnel). It’s being determined by the regrettable decisions by a whole lot of people, around the globe. Our borders, whether they are walled-off or not, can’t stop the consequences of those decisions from seeping into our lives, like smoke through our open windows. (If only that were also true of Canada’s superior parental leave policy and relatively robust social safety net.)
As Earth-dwellers, this week has shown us what we all still stand to lose in terms of spaciousness, if our planet is not given her rightful place on our priority list. It is not a welcome call to presence, per se, but perhaps it is a needed one.
As Anne Lamott writes in “Help, Thanks, Wow,” which brought me comfort this week:
“You won’t always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e.e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. You go from being Doug or Wendy Whiner, with your psychic diverticulitis, able to eat only macaroni and cheese, to remembering “I thank You God for this most amazing / day.” You splurge on a pint basket of figs, or a pair of great socks. You begin to feel friendship with your flowering pear tree, an interspecies one-ness with it, although usually we keep these thoughts to ourselves, lest they be used against us at the commitment hearings. In fact, you are able to use the word ‘wonder’ again, even feel it , without despair that the New York literati, or your atheist friends, will find out and send you into exile.”
“Some days” came for me this week, when I least expected them. Until that newly-acrid air rolled in, the e.e. cummings mornings of my glorious backyard were something I too-often took as a given, even during the pandemic—something I could enjoy whenever I got my endless list of maternal to-dos done. Though I try to resist this thinking when I notice it, my lifelong conditioning in our capitalist country still creeps into my life — the notion that we have to “earn,” through paid or unpaid labor, the right to rest in the shade of our favorite Mother Tree.
We don’t. Our place in the family of things on Earth is the given. It is our birthright. That is the blue-sky truth of our lives. Anyone else is quite literally trying to sell you something.
And yet, as noted, men more often then women, and white folks more often than folks of color, seem to have access to this birthright. The concrete birthright of breathing fresh air outdoors somewhere, on our “some days,” rather than toiling over to-dos indoors or in polluted conditions.
Fires and smoke, I’ve learned, also impact our little children more profoundly because they actually breathe more air over the course of the day than adults do. To protect them, parents and educators—often women—have to do even more on a smoky day than we do on a clear one: keep the kids inside even if they don’t understand why, devise distractions, battle the resulting overstimulation and overwhelm for all.
In this way, the maternal mental load and the macro state of our climate are interconnected.
Meanwhile, the privileged and powerful continue to fail to fix this as they move to insulate themselves, or even enrich themselves, amidst the damage.
We deserve to be as hot and bothered about all of the above, and to stay that way, as we are about the smoke.
For now, we have chosen to panic-buy the air filter. I put it on our to-do list, and my husband checked it off, bringing at least one small corner of our universe into balance. I made a mental note to prioritize more time outside for myself, when and if the air clears, alongside domestic to-dos like this in the future.
But this situation is not women’s work alone to manage. Nor is it men’s work. It is not the work of individuals at all.
In my rare moments of spaciousness and stillness, I often set my intention for the day as “knowing how best to play my small part in our collective liberation.” No firm answers yet today. But when and if I get them, I’ll put those on my to-do list too.
NOTES:
I’m grateful for the timely journalism of my fellow mothers here on Substack, who immediately put out guidance on how to protect our children from the short-term impacts of smoke this week. See this piece from
and this one from .In a previous post, I wrote about the notion of mourning and re-making the real village — a deep longing for so many mothers — and about the importance of centering Indigenous history and voices in that conversation vs. promoting different consumption habits as the cure-all of the Anthropocene. (Air filters are cool and all, but they will not save us.) This article talks about how supporting the Land Back movement can have a direct impact on combating climate change. Read about some successful case studies, and how you can be part of this effort, here.
When the smoke began to clear, I texted all my friends “I SEE BLUE SKY!!” Such a simple thing that is invisible until it isn’t. I’m sitting outside in renewed appreciation this morning.