Okay, y'all, let’s try something new! I have been actively working to let go of things that don’t serve me and streamline my life and work. There are so many apps and options, it’s overwhelming. Keeping up with the WWG portal which took many, many hours to create but still resulted in a clunky, choppy user experience is just not going to work. If you are a current When We Gather member you should have received an email with more details. If you’re still thinking about joining or want to keep up with my writing, please enjoy this sneak preview of WWG and consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can survive this capitalist hellscape and experience little joys in life like electricity and true luxuries like an occasional babysitter. Substack members, your access hasn’t changed and will likely improve greatly! Patreon folks- I’m begging you, please move on over!
A Place for Grounding
I have always been looking for something stable for my kids, something outside of me, an imperfect and fallible individual. When my eldest was a baby I tried to return to church, and I enjoyed the vibes, the music, and feeling of community, but it turns out I’m not a Christian so a very Christian church wasn’t really a sustainable option. I’ve tried to find stability for my children in my own family or on their paternal side but have come up short in finding someone they can go to when the humanity of their parents failed them. We started an annual beach trip to one specific town, quaint, memorable, and grounding. I committed to the trip even when we couldn’t afford it with the exception of this year and 2020, we have gone to this little town each May. I thought if they had this one albeit random location as a touchstone there will always be a small place in this overwhelming world where they feel safe and can find peace.
Making that commitment for my children, I unknowingly made it for myself. Now there is a place that even just mentally I can return to where the air smells of saltwater and the sand surrounds me and what’s terrifying in the world feels a little less so. A place where I can be comforted by warmth and still remember that nothing is ever perfect: like that time at the beach house when my 2-year-old picked up a snake in the yard (he thought it was a rope!) or the one year the tide consistently left behind twenty times as many jellyfish as usual and no one. could. relax. at. all. But I also appreciate this coastal area as a rare place where we, to date, have never been treated unfairly or experienced overt racism. No one has followed me around gift shops like they have in every other place from Baltimore to Honolulu, we’ve never had suspiciously bad service at our favorite beach town restaurant. A place where we can be grounded because no one is requiring us to be less Black or more busy or to put on real shoes.
Maybe most valuable is the way an annual trip to a particular place can remind you that things can and will change. Try as we might to cling to our comforts, everything is subject to the influence of time—both at the destination and in life overall. Around the midpoint in my process of marital separation we took one last trip to the beach as a family of four. It was a disaster. Going back to the place that had been cozy and imperfectly magical for years prior helped highlight dysfunction and make it even clearer that I could be okay, and maybe even happy, without my husband. This place that doesn’t know us, but that we know so well, gave personal insight I wouldn’t have found elsewhere. It’s an intimacy I imagine people find with close family or in their hometowns. And because we know it so well, the way this beach town has changed has a marked influence on how we experience the passage of time and the results of human impact on the earth. Massive beach renewal efforts turned our grounding place into a sort of eerie oceanside construction site not long after powerful hurricanes wiped out the formerly trusty pier. Time and its impact are clearer here. More jarring when you go away and come back. But the shore remains and the waves welcome our return despite what ails the beach.
Designating a place for grounding and resetting, I can find answers to my biggest problems and be reminded that there are problems much greater. I can only hope my kids learn to see it the same way—a place for clarity on multiple fronts. As they’ve gotten older, I’ve talked with them about the reasons we go back to the same place over and over. I tell them that eventually we’ll get to take more vacations but for now, we’ll keep prioritizing this one. It’s a small part of why we came back to the East Coast when I wanted to head west. I longed for the place that has given us so many solid memories, good and bad, to refer back to when life feels out of control. A place for grounding where we fight off jellyfish and snakes as we find peace in the sand and waves.
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