Fall Composting
It’s only taken seven years of motherhood and four years of homeschooling to start to feel like myself no matter what activity I’m doing or role I may be seen to be enacting.
We’ve moved into our third AirBnB of the last 2.5 months. My partner and I have gotten really good at packing and unpacking, but I do feel like I lose one or two weeks of brain space each time we move. First the week before the move with laundry and folding and finding tiny children’s toys between couch cushions, and then a week of settling in with somehow more laundry, jigsawing our kitchen items into a stocked kitchen and going through every bin a hundred times as I forget where one thing is (over and over). It throws off our homeschool schedule, resets any exercise or creative routine back to zero, and restarts another round of learning new street names and ways of getting around. The good news is that this AirBnB does not seem to have an insect problem and we’ve booked it through New Year’s, so with some luck we’ll go from here into our permanent house. House shopping has ramped up in earnest.
We’ve sold our old house. People keep saying congratulations, which I never know how to react to. It is what we wanted and planned, it is what we need to move forward on finding our new home, but it is still a loss. A final closing on a chapter of our life. Sometimes I find myself half imagining how the new owners have changed the house, what paint colors or furniture it has, whether more serious changes have been made. Once I have my own home to remake and nest into I think this idle dreaming will pass (or be passed onto our new home instead).
Living in temporary AirBnbs these past months (and looking towards several more months of it), I see how difficult it is for me to cement personal routines while in a new place or a place that isn’t “home.” I wonder why. Am I just too focused on exploring the area with my children? Which may be another way of saying, am I too focused on finding ways to distract us from the fact that we are sold the only home we knew together?
As a homeschooling mother moving into a new area, there are a lot things to spend time, energy and brain power on. It’s so easy to fall into another evening looking up things for my children online–swim lessons, homeschool co-ops, planetarium visit, family spanish classes, election-related curriculum, etc. It could literally go on forever.
I’m sure our weekly exploring will decrease a bit as it gets colder and when we (hopefully) move into our permanent home. We’ll spend more time playing in our own yard, exploring our own neighborhood. Rooting into place. Perhaps that’s part of it—I’m not just exploring to keep us distracted, but also exploring to keep us from rooting into any of these places I know we’ll only be for a month or two. I yearn to root and begin to feel a sense of belonging to a particular place again. All I want is our new home with all of our stuff put away in its proper place (although this experience has made us question having stuff) and no roaches1. We aren’t behind on our planned timeline of finding a new home, but I’m still so impatient. I don’t know if “our house” will appear. I so want it to. This uncertainty is overwhelming for me often.
With all of the above I’ve found it difficult to show up to write. Back in early 2024 I was writing four or five mornings a week. Now I’m lucky if I write two or three times a month. Whenever I show up and write, I feel my inner self reviving. It’s a reminder I still have a voice. It’s strangely easy to go through life not always feeling voiceless and not being completely silent, but still not fully touching my inner vein of thoughts and, perhaps, wisdom. I can spend days, weeks, even months if I’m not careful, thinking and talking about and tending to the surface level of everything in my life, without ever going deeper. Seeing my inner voice after months of turning away from it is always startling—is that me?!?
At the same time I can sense some changes happening for me. It’s feeling a bit easier to feel just like “me” and not like a mother, a teacher, and an individual. I’m beginning to feel like myself no matter what activity I’m doing or role I may be seen to be enacting. It’s that slow imperceptible change. It reminds me of Sarah Shotts’ concept of composting ideas.
Here are three things I have enjoyed in the last month:
I read the graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls over the weekend. It is a memoir of three generations: her Chinese grandmother, her mother and the author. It is also connected to the history of China during and after the Communist Revolution. It is about political trauma, personal trauma and how it impacts a family for generations.
I keep thinking about her story, but also about the sheer amount of work it took to make the book. She worked on it for a decade which included historical research, learning Chinese, several trips to China, and unearthing a large amount of personal and familial trauma. Not to mention the writing and drawing of a few hundred pages. It’s so outstanding to me. Both in how well done it is, but also in that she achieved what I have so much trouble doing—committing to a personal project before I know what the outcome of it will look like; committing to a large amount of consistent hard work over a long period of time. It’s like I never learned how to do something for a long time without someone else telling me to. Stutter Over Silence has been an experiment along these lines.
I have enjoyed Sara Schroeder’s art journaling class, Visually You. It’s easy, low pressure and getting me playing and being more open about my work and about experimentation. The exercises (with Sara’s wise encouragement) have been helping me drop some of my perfectionist expectations and fears. To simply play and explore and make mistakes. To see mistakes as opportunities for learning and finding something wonderful and new.
I’ve been easing back into my weekday morning movement and workouts with help from the new Substack How To Move. The newsletter is anti-diet and provides ample alternates if the suggested move doesn’t work for you. I love exercise that is simply about moving your body to make it stronger and feel good (not making it look any certain way). I like exercises that can challenge me and build strength without taking an hour or inducing buckets of sweat. (I leave the sweating for running days, which I have yet to reintroduce… but I’m thinking about it which is the first step). So far adding these workouts to my Find What Feels Good yoga app has helping me feel active in my body and energized over the week.
So I’ve been laying in the leaves of my creative inner life this fall, slowly composting the sustained upheaval that is this prolonged move while noticing all the joyful things that have been happening. I’m practicing allowing and being open to whatever is there. Progress feels very forward and back as moving from place to place resets things a bit, but it’s feeling a bit easier to feel just like “me” and not like a mother, a teacher, and an individual in separate spheres. It’s only taken seven years of motherhood and four years of homeschooling to start to see glimmers of this… everything takes so much longer than you’d want it to, everything meaning authentic growth. I’m beginning to feel like myself no matter what activity I’m doing or role I may be seen to be enacting. Perhaps this is the gift of approaching midlife?
We did leave that other AirBnB and the new ones have been insect free so far, but we did see a couple near our unit at the storage facility… the saga does not end.
All images published in Stutter Over Silence are original artwork created by the author, Katie Gresham, unless otherwise noted.