Rest is a Mother

On making messes and letting the ball drop

Just as August faded and we surged into the rolling gold of September, my body faltered. Sputtered like an old engine and ultimately failed to ignite. I lay inert in the bed, a bit of scrap metal. As we fell headlong into fall, I fell apart.

I was only just starting to move around like my old self again after my surgery (which I wrote about in my last post) when I was hit by a mysterious virus. It pummeled me with chills and muscle aches and splitting headaches, but worst were the fevers raging up to 103 degrees. You literally can’t do anything but lie still in that state, sweating, submitting. Lying there, I thought of the glass case at the cheese shop where I used to work in Brooklyn, back when I was trying to make it as a musician. The way the cheddar would sweat when it was left on the counter too long. The beads of condensation on the cling wrap around the prosciutto. Those animal parts, motionless but still creating their own atmosphere. 

It’s a big month for me as I prepare to release my new album on October 4. I had been gearing up for the calendar flip, knowing that once September hit, I’d have to throttle it, pushing hard through the next few weeks of promo and release show prep. But a tiny tick bit me somewhere I could not see, and its saliva mixed with my blood, and an infection spread through me like wildfire, and my white blood cells tanked, and my iron dropped to anemic levels, and the blood test said anaplasmosis, and September softened like ice cream in the sun til it was just a sticky puddle at my feet. 

The frame of your days becomes so small when you’re unwell. Your energy contracts, and with it your capacity for plans, adventures, activities, tasks, errands, and to-do’s. Walking a small circle in your yard, stretching your legs to ward off blood clots from all the bed rest, becomes the day’s big feat. The screech of a blue jay is music. Two chipmunks chasing each other in roiling yin-yangs of velvet fur is the best entertainment you’ve seen all week.

I have to admit, I am so bad at resting. I resist rest. I resent rest. I hammer my fists against it, go kicking and screaming into the bed, but in the end I have no choice but to surrender. Rest is a mother in this way. No matter how many tantrums you throw, no matter how much you curse her, she will still wrap her arms around you and show you the mercy of her love.

I have a friend who runs marathons, who always seems to be running a marathon, and someone asked him once, what are you running from? I wonder if the reason why I hate rest so much—in addition to having six planets in Capricorn in my birth chart, if you believe in that kind of thing—is that I’m afraid if I slow down and stop, something bad will happen. That making and doing and planning and creating is a kind of running. Running from, perhaps, the fear of letting it all fall apart.

I think of that scene in the 90s movie She’s All That when the popular golden boy gets up onstage to perform an improv art piece, and he kicks his hacky sack around saying, don’t let it drop! Everybody’s counting on you! The music pounds, the lights strobe. He’s sweating, concentrating on keeping the knitted sack in the air. But sooner or later, he says as it falls to the floor with a thud, the ball has to drop.

This time of year, the floors of our house are covered in the small yellow leaves of the locust tree. The leaves get stuck to our shoes and hitch a ride onto the hardwood, finding their way into every room. My first instinct is always to get out the broom and sweep it all up, to keep the floors clean. But being ill, I couldn’t do it. I watched the leaves pile up, and at some point, I started to think of it less as a mess and more as a forest. As in, the forest was moving into the house. We were living among trees.

In letting things fall apart a little bit, I had actually invited the world in.

On one of the worst days of the illness, when the fevers fed into nausea, Z placed a trash can next to my side of the bed. But first, he lined it with a plastic bag because the can was made of mesh. It was such a loving, thoughtful act. It made me think of when I was a teenager, and I came home drunk from a party once. The room was spinning, so I dragged a trash can into bed with me. Within minutes, I hurled—but I hadn’t realized the can was made of mesh. Vomit seeped out onto the sheets. I remember groaning and stumbling over to my mother’s room, calling out, Mom! I got too drunk. She came out and changed the sheets, changed my clothes, tucked me in. Then, as she smoothed back my hair, she said something I’ll never forget—even after all these years, even in the state I was in. The words wove themselves around me, trellised with love. She said, Thank you for letting me watch you grow up.

As I lay in bed twenty years later, curled into fetal and moaning, this dredged-up memory came to place a hand on my forehead. Here were two people telling me, we still love you for your messes. We still love you when you’re not superhero-ing your way through the world. You are worthy of that love, even when your body is a dropped ball.

I did almost no gardening this year. After having a baby, it fell far down the priority list of how to fill my meager pockets of personal time. It hurts sometimes to look at the perennial plot I so lovingly set up in 2022—the rings of mold on the bee balm, the unchecked catmint, the bleeding heart so big and untended, many of the stalks have snapped. It feels like a visual reminder of my failure, all the things I couldn’t do because I didn’t have the energy or skill or time. 

And yet, every day, River toddles out to the garden to pick the flowers off the mint (more flowers!), flowers that I should have picked off myself to encourage more growth. He stuffs them in his mouth with glee, then moves on to the chartreuse leaves of lemon balm. Never mind that half the plant has bolted, gone stringy and dry, under my neglect—he finds the still-juicy leaves and gobbles them up, then goes back to adventuring around his ever-expanding world. He doesn’t care that his mother has let the garden go. He reaches into the mess of green and finds something that will feed him even still.

The antibiotics are working, but I’m still getting my strength back. I take more naps, and I don’t have the energy to go running after my toddler. But as River wanders off with bits of plant hanging from his mouth, running down the hill of our yard, falling and running and falling again, I hang back and think, Thank you for letting me watch you grow up.