May Muscle Memory
Feeling Echoes of Years Past and How Other People Can Jar Us Out of Our Ruts
Happy Full Moon, folks! This one is late, filing it just under the wire, only a few hours until the full moon day is over… but we are coming off the heels of Mother’s Day, my son’s first birthday party hang, my son turning one with a honking cough that sent us calling for pediatrician aid, and…. whatever happened in the first week of May before that.
May has been a lot, folks. Has your May been a lot?
I’m feeling especially pensive this year, perhaps because I now have the luxury of a tiny bit of breathing room in my life as a parent to reflect back on how all encompassing the first year of motherhood has been. But also, my Mays for the last several years (6 to be exact) have been PACKED full of highs, lows, love, drama, loss, and triumph, so the end of the semester and its slide into summer has not been, shall we say, calm for me— at least for quite a while. Maybe next year!?
I’ve been thinking a lot about muscle memory—where we store our tension in our bodies, where we store our grief, how we feel echoes and reverberations of momentous and life changing shifts, even years later.
To recap, my eventful Mays of yesteryear have included the following highs and lows:
Last May, 2024, I gave birth to my son Jonah!!! Which was terribly exciting, joyful, and full of love, but also ushered in two very green parents, and both David and I were like, ERM, what do we do now?! (People should talk about those moments more!) Additionally, I had a C-section and lost a lot of blood at the end of it (in fact, a recent episode of The Pitt dramatized my exact complication, which was a little spooky to watch as an observer), so while my team at Mount Sinai West was beyond aces, there was some real physical trauma to overcome. This is only really becoming clear to me in hindsight, and it affected some stuff that was stressful in my first few weeks of motherhood like my breastmilk coming in. Eventually, it arrived! Jonah recovered from some early jaundice and became a terrific eater! Everything turned out OKAY. He had his first haircut recently, and loves playing in the bath. Things I wish I could have told my May 2024 self. You will be an above average mom, and your kid will be a charmer and a total rockstar.
The year before, May 2023, I was in California, attending my stepmother-in-law’s funeral. We still miss her so much. She was a powerhouse, a lovely woman who was warm and intelligent with a sharp wit and a zest for travel and life. While the circumstances were so sad, the funeral itself was an incredible celebration of her life and the countless lives she touched and shaped, and we all felt cleansed and cathartic at the end. I taught some of my final classes of the semester on zoom that May, from our aunt and uncle’s kitchen, starting just after 6 a.m. PST.
The year before that, May 2022, I was celebrating the end of our first year back in person after COVID. I taught in a mask the entire year, and perhaps at the end, on the last day, took it off so that my students could see my whole face. One student who had improved dramatically in her writing over the course of the whole year (I had her both fall and spring semesters, and she was one of my hardest workers) brought me a bouquet of flowers, which I carried around all day as if I had won some kind of teaching pageant. A fellow colleague told us she was going to save the English Department by running for chair, and gave me a dozen eggs from her chickens upstate. I went and had coffee with a friend downtown out in the park near the Flatiron Building, and a woman came by and asked us for spare change, to help her feed her kids (one of whom was with her). I didn’t have any cash on me, but I asked her if she wanted food. When she said yes, I handed her the carton of eggs. I still think about her.
The year before that, May 2021, I was finishing up the hardest year of teaching I had ever done, a fully online COVID year. I got to go to the Anderson Center for a Writing Residency at the end of May, and it really helped me get some lift off, and change the narrative of my life as a writer and educator from the incredibly difficult and demoralizing year that I’d had. At the Anderson Center, I wrote the almost final version of the ending of the Taiwan book, and felt good about a complete draft of the memoir for the first time… perhaps ever. (It would still take a few more years to get into print, but hope springs eternal)
The year before THAT, May 2020, we were in the throes of COVID-19, and none of us knew that it would change the face of our country and world for months and years to come. The end of the semester felt like a failure, like air exhaling from a forgotten balloon, like throwing in the very sad towel after 8 weeks of teaching online with a wing and prayer. I gave myself a haircut for the first time, gave my husband David a haircut, and felt untethered and isolated and alone. I think I drank a lot of wine that May.
The year before that, May 2019, my father was dying. I was teaching at two CUNY campuses, applying for the job I have now, planning a wedding, teaching at Gotham Writer’s Workshop, and working at the Baruch Writing Center. It was a blur. It was all a blur. I was supposed to show up for Jury Duty a week or two after my dad died, and called the number on the form, just to see if I could push it back another week or two, because it just seemed so hard to get to that part of Queens from the part of Queens where I lived. When I called, I explained that my dad had just died to the woman who picked up and she said, “Oh honey, don’t you come all the way over here. Write what you just told me on your form and mail it back and we’ll give you a 6-month extension.” And I said thank you, and walked to the mailbox with my form, thinking of how grateful I was for the kind people over at Jury Duty.
Why do these memories matter? Because May, for me, is a month full of layers. And I want to shed some of this baggage to make more space for joyful memories in the future with my son on and around his birthday.
Also, I’m working on fiction now, and I’m trying to think more about how people live in so many moments simultaneously, and how memories can bubble up and live with us as we try to muddle through the next moment, shaping our perceptions and actions and sense of self.
May is a lot for me. Do you have any months that feel like a lot to you?
The other thing I wanted to think about this month, but maybe I’ll save it for next month, is coaching — and the fine art of getting jostled OUT of our muscle memory and our ruts into something new, some place that feels a little more creative or generative.
I might be embarking on a coaching swap with a friend in which she encourages me to schedule more writing time and guard it as sacred, and I encourage her to get more confident and swagger-licious as she queries agents and tries to market her (lovely) work.
I have long taken for granted that if I want to publish my work and make a tiny amount of money at it (humility alert: the IRS might think my writing business is a hobby), I need to peddle it to agents, write pithy copy about my writing, and network….. so I want to share my “writing as a business” marketing/querying/submitting tips with her.
And my friend feels apologetic and less confident doing these things, but as the mom of two kids with the same full time job as me, she has managed to carve out impressive writing time to help her start and finish her fabulous writing projects (novels, several!). So maybe I’ll report back on how the mutual encouragement is going next month with some querying tips.
On that note, a tiny bit of self promotion:
On Thurs 5/15 at 5pm, I'll be at this Massachusetts Historical Society Hybrid event (in person AND on zoom): "Breaking Silences: Using Intimate Biography to Uncover the Lives of Thomas Wen Yi Liao and Mary Mon Toy."
It’s being moderated by my Emerson mentor and biography rockstar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall! And I’ll be speaking with Marnie Mueller, a wonderful fellow nonfiction author.
Here's the info to register for the zoom event (and the live event): https://18308a.blackbaudhosting.com/18308a/Breaking-Silences---Virtual-Research