Channeling my inner mama bird.
Of birds and teens.
I’ve been thinking I’d like to come back in my next life as a bird. I used to think being a cat would be pretty cool and suit my affinity for lolling around all day in the sun and doing nothing. That could be a pretty perfect existence.
But lately, it seems being a bird would have its advantages. First of all, I could poop anywhere I wanted – no one would be trying to corral my waste in some smelly plastic box filled with gross sand. I could even poop ON people which might be fun. There’s certainly been times in my human being life I’d wanted to straight up poop on certain people.
Or, if I was like the birds who hang out in the tree alongside my driveway, I could use the objects below as target practice. Me and my bird friends would laugh and just cover cars in our poop when we were bored or our wings were tired from flying all the time.
Also, birds seem pretty happy. It’s early morning and I’m lying in my bed with the windows open and it’s a goddamn bird party outside. It usually starts around 5am, with a tentative twerp or two and then suddenly, the chorus begins. They are just yammering away, chittering and tweeping back and forth like it’s the middle of the day.
I envy the exuberance. The obliviousness to pandemics and sheltering in place. Birds don’t have to self-isolate or worry whether they’ve got masks when they come in contact with others. Yesterday, I knocked on a neighbor’s door to talk about a fence between us I want to replace, and after I knocked I started to panic that maybe I should run back home and grab a mask. Earlier in the day, I went for a hike in the woods and was surprised at how many fellow hikers were wearing masks along the trail.
If I were a bird, I wouldn’t have to worry about how this isolation was affecting my children – my 17yo in particular. I never thought I’d say this, given my history with the population, but I really feel bad for teenagers right now. My easy, affable teen – the one I felt the universe gave me to make up for the more difficult teens I’d had the pleasure of wrangling – is struggling under quarantine. And I don’t know how to help him. Neither does he, we’ve talked about it extensively.
He is a kid who, until two months ago, had spent every single day after school playing a sport since 6th grade. While he’s not a weekend party guy (again: thank you, universe), he loves working out and throwing a ball around with his friends or going to Chipotle or Five Guys. He’s always energized when he comes home.
Now, he doesn’t know what to do with himself every day. He can only throw the lacrosse ball at a pitchback in our yard for so long. Virtual school is not helping. He has class Monday and Tuesday (his block schedule “A” Day and “B” Day), and then that’s it. He’s got to find creative ways to fill the other five days of the week.
For a while, he was painting – watercolor is his medium. The wall over his bed is covered in artwork he created in a burst of painting for about a week or two. He’s baked a couple of times. He’s also in the middle of bingeing all four season of Silicon Valley on HBO.
One activity he’s really embraced is going to the beach to watch the sun rise, which initially I found funny. Initially, he went to watch the sun set, which was when he realized that in the east, the sun does not set into the ocean. He woke up early the next morning to watch it rise out of the Atlantic, and had grabbed my good camera to document the event.
I woke up early one morning two weekends ago to him standing next to my bed in a damp sweatshirt trying to get the dog out of my bedroom.
“What’s going on?” I asked, and he explained he’d just come back from the beach and was going to take the dog out.
“I couldn’t sleep so first I went for a run down Ocean Avenue,” he said. As it happens, the six-mile run began around 4:30am, which he said he timed perfectly in order to see the sun come up around 5:45. “Then I took a dip in the ocean and came home,” he said, and shook his hands to indicate they were numb from the icy cold water.
“Dude,” I said, “you can’t just go running down Ocean Avenue alone in the middle of the night and then jumping in the ocean all by yourself.”
That’s when he told me one of his fellow lax brahs had met him for the sunrise and early morning swim, and I felt a little better. But still.
This week, I’ve gotten a number of calls and emails from various teachers and school officials to report he hasn’t checked into classes and is behind on his work. Each time one message would arrive, I’d scream my son’s name and tell him to come to wherever I was to read and/or listen to the message.
This is not helping matters, either. I need to let go of worrying about his GPA and getting into college and focus on getting him through the pandemic in one piece.
In a way, I’d like his high school to just give all of them a pass on this year. As if junior year of high school wasn’t stressful enough. And now, with SATs, ACTs, college admissions up in the air, my 17yo has got crappy virtual learning and isolation to contend with. It truly stinks.
I saw a robin hopping around on the edge of my yard yesterday and watched as it took flight with a long earthworm dangling out of its mouth, and imagined she was heading towards her nest to feed her baby robins. They were probably waiting for her to return, their little pointy beaks open and waiting to be fed.
I’d like to channel that mama bird energy and focus on caring for my little chick’s basic needs as well. Feeding him. Keeping him safe. Teaching him, when the time comes, how to fly. Mama birds aren’t obsessing over whether their baby bird is flying as high as a bird from a nearby nest, or where that baby lands. She just wants to make sure her chick is safe and twittering happily with all his bird friends.
Tweet.
xoAmy
Harissa Sausage Dinner
(A Maddie Walsack original recipe)
Wash and drain a can of garbanzo beans, and let them dry for a couple minutes. Get rid of any skin that comes off of them when you dry them, but don’t worry about any skin left on the beans.
Cube a couple of sweet potatoes, I used two but that’s up to you.
I whisked about 5 tablespoons of olive oil with half a lemon, and then added a tablespoon of harissa to that, and poured over the sweet potatoes and beans on a sheet tray. Added s&p. Then I added spicy sausage to the middle of the tray.
Then I roasted for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees, until the meat was cooked through. I shook the pan every 10 min so that the beans and potatoes didn’t stick.
Friday Faves
UPDATE: Here's something interesting I wanted to share: remember the stye? The giant postule that developed along my upper right eyelid not long after my daughters ran away from home? Well, it seemed to have damaged eyelash production, so now I have a clump of lashes towards my inner eye and then a significant gap and just bare lid before the lashes pick up again mid-lid. It's not like I've put mascara on in two months, but at some point I'm going to want to and now what? Advice?
Another update: I weighed myself for the first time since mid-February. I think it will be a Christmas baby.
Have you heard of a Rage Room? Apparently, they are a thing but I think in these pandemic times, it would make sense to have one in your own home. Just a walled off area in your basement or maybe a shed out back where you can go absolutely mental and then get on with your day.
Apparently, the NYTimes "Modern Love" column editors have received over 70 essays with this title. Regardless of its now-unoriginal title, this piece is hilarious and hopeful about love conquering all (even a global pandemic).
I LOVED this narration of a recent article in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine written by the chef and owner of the recently shuttered East Village restaurant Prune. Heartbreaking how hard she worked over 20 years to make it successful and provide her employees healthcare, only to have to close down in a few short weeks because of the coronavirus. But it's also hopeful at the end, when she talks about what she envisions will come next. Head out for a walk with your headphones and enjoy.
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