I’m teaching a poetry class this term. In the class, I assign two journal entries per week. It’s good to write, I tell them. Clears the head. Helps you make sense of life. Is a time capsule for the minutiae that gets lost somehow in the weird pull of time. And I think to myself that all of what I tell them is true and that I might as well get to it, myself.

I’ve been teaching from home, online for almost a year now. We’re still in a global pandemic. It feels like we’re moving back toward normalcy, but we aren’t– we’re just adjusting to whatever normal means now. Masks and social distancing and being alone for the holidays. In this time that I have had to sit in my office by myself to stare at a screen, I have not written anything at all. I promised myself that I’d write twice a week. I don’t know if anyone reads this blog or would be able to find it, so it’s like starting from scratch, even though I will admit that I went back and re-read what I’d written years ago.

Adeline will be four years old next week, which means that we are just a week away from inauguration day. I was so sad that she had to share her birthday with the inauguration of DT, but the next day in the hospital, I remember scrolling through social media, crying with some kind of overwhelmed something beyond description for all of the people who showed up for the Women’s March. I held an infant girl in my arms while I watched a million women in pink pussy hats and almost as many men come out to say something about women being so much more than decoration, flesh vases for dick flowers as Hannah Gadsby would say. And now her birthday will mark the swearing into office of the first female Vice President of the USA, and not without the most contention that the US has faced since the Civil War.

I used to take comfort in thinking about the 1960s, that whenever my country felt like it was spinning out of control, I remember the stories of my mother’s late adolescence, which included where she was when Kennedy was shot (it was my mother in law’s 16th birthday), and then folks took to the streets, and the US went to a goal-less war in Vietnam. But now here we are, disagreeing about what is real, about the definitions of our goals, and in between the flashes of violence, we are reminding each other to keep distance, distance, distance.