Staying sane & brave & soupy
Really, how are we going to do that?
H💕ppy Valentine’s Day, readers! I’m Carolyn, a writer, poet, podcaster, and parent. Rhyme/Schemes is my space to do a close reading of the world around us, finding the rhyme & reason in art, culture, literature, the wilderness of parenting, and, politics, which is never separate from the rest.
This week we have: 1) My podcast up for a prize🎙️ 2) Coping and not coping 🫣 3) Caregiving as resistance 🍜 4) Introducing a read-along project. 📖 5) Valentine’s Day haiku 💌 If this supersized post gets truncated in your inbox, you can read it on the web or in the Substack app.
It’s an honor just to be nominated!
My podcast, Extra+Ordinary: The Fight for Reproductive Justice, has been nominated for a Chronogrammy! Okay, okay, I nominated myself. But I need you to nominate me too, because the top 5 most-nominated entries go on to the final voting round.
This round closes Saturday, February 15th (tomorrow, from the day this is published):
Nominate Extra+Ordinary here! And if you haven’t checked out Extra+Ordinary, the entire first season is waiting for you on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify! Thank you.
Deflector shields at full power
Just a few weeks into the 47th presidential term, and my defenses are already feeling wobbly. Like the starship Enterprise, my deflector shields can’t hold up indefinitely under sustained attack.
I was feeling so proud of myself in December and early January for making adjustments in preparation for another epoch of chaos and pain, mindfully tweaking my news consumption habits, picking up a craft project, getting connected to more tractional local politics.
Probably it’s helped? The embroidery was fun! But even when I take the news in at a remove—through analysis, summaries, roundups, and not from social media or breaking headlines1, and never hopefully not when I’m waking up or going to bed—there’s no escaping how dreadful it is. I find myself wrestling with sudden bouts of deep sadness in quiet moments; when I am reading taking in the world, I sometimes find that I’m rigid with tension and unable to look away, stuck in my parasympathetic nervous system’s “freeze” mode.
My illusion of a serene approach to resistance has been shattered. I’d like to picture myself in Warrior II pose, strongly rooted, bravely and stoically gazing at what I must confront. Guess I’ve never done Warrior II in actual combat. Not even in front of a high-wattage fan.
But that’s what practice is about, right? “Keep trying, you’ll get be-e-tter!” as Daniel Tiger teaches us. And in my Headspace meditation sessions, the teachers emphasize that the goal isn’t to eliminate our thoughts or emotions, but to change our relationship to them.
So I guess I have to accept that I just won’t be okay all the time when there’s so much not-okay around me.
Still: I refuse to let them steal my joy! I refuse to let them derail me! I’m seeing in so many other people’s reflections on this month that they are in a similar mindset—take care of self, take care of others, and keep coming back to community. I find it beautiful and comforting to see so many others on the same wavelength, all reaching for one another. (
recently posted an exquisite essay about Meal Trains that will warm you just like a soup.)Which brings me to:
“Babies against capitalism” Part 2: Coup Edition
You can read part 1, about how caregiving is antithetical (while also foundational to) capitalism, from last week here:
Babies against capitalism
I’m currently planning a “Frozen 4th” party for my little one’s birthday. Yes, my baby will soon be four years old, and like the basic baby she is, she loves herself some Anna & Elsa.
In light of the last few weeks’ chaos (coup?) I want to also connect my thoughts around care-giving (labor) and productivity to our political practices. It’s not that I want to say Caring for each other is all we have left … because that’s not yet true (gulp) … but that caring for each other feels like one very real and very significant the thing we can count on in a moment when little else seems reliable.
Whether it’s a virus running through your household or a pandemic around the planet, counting on each other is … everything? And when we’re looking for what we can do in the face of overwhelming, collective crises, caring for each other actually feels like a blessing and an opportunity. At least to me it does.
Not to suggest I am now or ever have been some sort of Mother Theresa. I’ve probably missed more Meal Trains2 than I’ve made; it’s one of those simple things—like flossing, or dropping an envelope in a mailbox—that for me are sometimes the hardest to get done. But this winter, we have given and received numerous soups, stews, and in one case, a big batch of chicken piccata.
I’d been passively fretting about some neighbors who were really in the trenches with a Bingo card’s worth of shitty stuff happening all at once—when the Dad, solo-parenting one morning to due to said shitty stuff, texted to ask if we could pop over to watch the monitor for their sleeping (and sick) baby for twenty minutes while he brought their older kid to school. Yes! We were so happy to be able to make one thing easier.
Can we bring you some soup tonight? I asked, too. His reply was something like, I’m in no position to refuse.
Being able to help was the best thing that happened to me that week. I’d be embarrassed if he knew how good it made me feel to cook for them.
His words I’m in no position to refuse got me in the heart. I feel that desire to decline too. It’s such a reflexive reaction—I’m fine, it’s okay, you don’t have to, we’ll manage, don’t worry. We’ll order takeout. We have some leftovers. I’ll cobble it together. The kids can have cereal for dinner.
In fact, when the viruses came for us a couple weeks later, another friend asked us if we needed some chicken soup. They’d just made a big pot! I left the question unanswered, unsure if I was sick enough to “deserve” it, I guess? The soup found its way to me anyway. I hope they felt good about themselves, ha! It was excellent—the biggest chunks of veg and potato I’ve ever fit on a spoon—and I felt, if not any more deserving, very lucky and special.
It put me in the mind of one of my daughter’s favorite Disney’s-Frozen-spinoff-stories, where younger sister Princess Anna takes care of a bedridden Queen Elsa on her birthday. “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday,” Elsa apologizes. But Anna says that getting to take care of her older sister was the best birthday present ever.
Read-along for bravery
Besides soup, the other activity which has been grounding me is reading, especially in that old-fashioned medium called books!
Reading Cultish, for example, helped me understand some of the ways smart, kindhearted people get manipulated into harmful cults. Though its focus was on groups like Heaven’s Gate or even CrossFit, it touched on QAnon too and felt surprisingly insightful for the politics of MAGA.
Now I’m deep into How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, and again, I’m finding it surprisingly soothing. How can a book about fascism (and how its political tools are being used in America today) be soothing?
It chips away at the disorienting, surreal fog of a very changed world. Starting in 2016, I remember feeling over and over again that I could not really understand what was happening. The deliberate boundary-breaking, shameless norm-ignoring behavior, and its lack of consequences were hard to make sense of, and that sense of not-understanding, for me, was closely related to how frightened I felt.
“What is happening?” I said, all the time. I wish I’d read this book then, and I hope that if you were or are feeling dazed, you’ll join me in reading it now.
I’d love to share this experience with others—connection, again, being the thing that’ll bind us when “the politics of Us and Them” tries to keep us apart. So I’ll test things out with How Fascism Works. If people enjoy hearing my summaries or takeaways I’ll be glad, and if you want to read it, too, then heck, we can call it a book club.
And if it’s fun for me and at least some of you, we’ll keep going from there! I’ve got a want-to-read list of books a mile long, including titles about writing and creative work in dark times.
I’ve already begun working on my first post on How Fascism Works, which you should find in your inboxes or apps next week.
Valentine’s Day Haikuery
My trusty typewriter braved the snow with me last weekend to await lovers and loving people at
’s Chicory Naturalist, where anyone picking up a valentine could request an original haiku from me on the subject of their choice. I always love the magic of this process—the subjects call forth words and works that otherwise would never be.
I want to be clear that I’m still paying for the journalism that reports those initial stories! Political analysts still need actual reporters to find out the facts to be analyzed.
If you’re unfamiliar, Meal Train is a platform where people can sign up on a calendar to bring meals to a friend or family in need. It’s a pretty terrific advancement on the ol’ spreadsheet.