elasticity

on sleepless nights and hard weeks, and where to pull from

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Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878, Mary Cassatt

It has been one of those weeks. Everything is exploding, in tiny ways all at once, like a fully inflated balloon pushed to just one more pump of air, then just one more, then just one more.

Things have been breaking and leaking and needing replaced or fixed, except we are already renovating our master and the threshold for home maintenance has been slammed up against — this is a cosmic requirement, I think. Nothing ever breaks one thing at a time. This week it was the refrigerator and the plumbing under the kitchen sink, on the day I was making baked Alaska for Sam’s birthday (much freezing needed, many dishes required doing). Last night I had the moment of seeing the dripping out from underneath the cabinet door, knowing the kitchen sink pipe had leaked and everything had flooded, when I had already thought I had met my wit’s end for the day and so had Sam and I wondered where I’d pull from to fix it. It was a big long day after a stressful week that had followed a few recurrent sleepless nights.

Because we are not in our master bedroom, we are much closer to the front door, where our large dog Leonard is on watch duty, barking when he sees fit. Those occasional wake-ups would be fine enough, except that he is also, and I’m sorry to mention this, having recurrent diarrhea all through the night for the third night in a row because I fed him the back-up food four nights before. Turns out he has the world’s most sensitive stomach, which is nowhere near his fault and he’s just a baby — well, he’s one and half, but I think he’ll be a baby still until he’s two or until I decide he’s not only when he’s very old. We thought we had reprieve yesterday, after feeding him turkey and rice and pumpkin for days, mixing in a little bit of his usual kibble slowly. But I dared feed him just his kibble last night, thinking we were in the clear, only to start the process over again. The solution has been that either Sam or I sleeps downstairs on the lumpy couch in the office, where he has easy access outside, which has avoided the diarrhea on the carpet we had on the first day before we realized what was happening, but has confused Leonard greatly. He comes to sit on me throughout the night, as he recovers from his bouts outside, excited that we’re somewhere different and seeking comfort for his upset tummy. He’s 85 pounds and the couch is small, and I don’t sleep much at all. I feel very frustrated or very sympathetic in rotating bouts, but when he wakes me throughout the night with the softest little bark he can muster, telling me he needs to go out again, I want to cry because he’s doing his best and I love him so much.

On top of these things lay many others, one very significant I can’t share quite yet, and many intersections of all of my least favorite things: anxiety-inducing conversations, the ones where I have to reveal that I’m not alive just to please everyone, as well as situations I have to interject or be a problem to get the care I need, and the mounting marination of unanswered texts and tasks I want to hide from. I find these times, also cosmically, often align with the same times others in my life are having those times, and we all just do our best to keep afloat.

And none of this, of course, is particularly bad — it is completely subpar-level irritation. Run-of-the-mill and a tale as old as time, but it is there, and as I’ve tried to write a few things this week, this was what kept wanting to come out.

Maybe what I’m getting at is that there’s much to say here about capacity — I feel like I stumbled on something secret and magical when I fumbled in the dark at this for the first time. Essentially that capacity grows as life demands it, and anything outside your current established capacity feels very hard. I remember distinctly, when I did my first season of TV, that I simply couldn’t imagine doing anything except my job and the bare, bare minimum of survival. It was so much, and objectively it really was, that to imagine cooking a single meal or leaving the house on the weekend to go to the store felt genuinely impossible. God forbid something, anything, needed tending to in my personal life, or something broke, or my pet was sick. But as the seasons went on, all of the sudden I was able. All of the sudden I could do my job, just as demanding as before, except now I had other thoughts and other tasks I welcomed on my to-do list. Pretty much anything could come up, and while challenging, I would find time and energy for it. I could compartmentalize, I could execute, I could rally in the middle of the night like nobody’s business. I think this happens to many people at some phase in their life — college, motherhood, caretaking, illness. Before you experience it, to imagine a life outside of your current capacity feels daunting and horrible. But inside of it…quite exhilarating once you’ve busted the walls down.

But I would argue it must always be temporary, to some degree. You cannot live happily at max capacity always, or at least, I don’t think I could. I felt impressive and driven, responsible and endlessly capable, but I don’t think I ever felt particularly kind. I never felt soft or easy.

And these days, I feel soft and easy. I feel kind, and like I have a lot of room. There are downsides here, too, in this place. It takes less to feel like too much, as this week has. But something I’ve retained is the knowing that I was once stretched far further, and I was okay — and I think that’s where I pull from now. Knowing I am elastic. Watching others stretch and stretch and do impossible things. It’s the quiet understanding of infinite capacity, even if not worn in.

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