I’ve written before about how matrescence is like kintsugi: having a baby shatters you and the living you do after you have the baby puts you back together with shiny gold holding you together. But I haven’t articulated how putting yourself together is a long process.

Meg at Sew Liberated writes today about the twelve year project of making a skirt that she started when she was a new mom and only finished recently. Her oldest is 12.

Part of the kintsugi of matrescence is finding the pieces. I misplaced a lot of mine in the time after my son was born. He’ll be 5 in October. I’m gathering the pieces but a lot of them are still in a pile waiting to be stuck to the me that’s here now.

I find them in moments when I’m doing something and suddenly feel more me than I have in a very long time. When I stay up late coding. When I watched the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday concert. When I talk through a research design with colleagues.

Putting yourself together is an ongoing project; we’re each a big Katamari ball of experiences and interests. (How’s that for a dated reference? Have I mentioned I’m 40?) In my case, at least, that ball got blown apart. It’s encouraging to find all its bits are still within reach.

Are you familiar with the poem/book/animated short film WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT?

I highly recommend it. Kids wander through all types of terrain trying to find a bear. They come across many obstacles: long, wavy grass; thick, oozy mud; and others. The refrain is this:

We can’t go over it, we can’t go over it, oh no, we have to go through it.

Katy Peplin’s recent newsletter about being in the middle and getting discouraged made me think of the bear hunt.

Everything in life is a bear hunt, isn’t it?

But of course, while the kids are in the middle of each obstacle, they’re having fun. The mud goes squelch squorch. The grass goes swishy swashy.

It’s just another variation on the journey being more important than the destination.

What are we rushing toward? Can we find joy in the hard parts?

I promise I’m going to write about what I learned from sewing napkins soon. But first: my personal history with sewing!

I’ve known how to machine sew for a long time (and how to hand sew for even longer). My mom is an accomplished sewist and made a lot of clothes and costumes for my siblings and I as we were growing up. She even made my prom dress. I didn’t sew with her, but I learned a lot of techniques just from being around while she sewed. Mainly how to be a perfectionist about your sewing, which has both benefits and drawbacks. (She never presses seams open or leaves a pinked edge. All her seams are French seams. Gorgeous, but intimidating to a less experienced sewist.)

I didn’t actually use any of what I’d learned from watching her until I took a required tech class as part of my dramatic art major; I chose costuming (this is where W. shakes his fist because in his day you had to do both cost shop AND set but by the time I got there 3 years later, you got to choose). One of the assignments was to design and construct a garment. I made a dress to fit me, lightly inspired by this Drusilla costume from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The process involved making a paper pattern on a dressmaker’s dummy (heavily padded in my case), then a muslin, and then finally the real thing. I finished the edges with a zig-zag stitch and pressed the seams open, because that was what I had time for. I wished I’d been up to French seams but it just wasn’t going to happen.

The dress had darts out the wazoo: bust darts at both the sides and bottom of the bodice, back darts, darts at the back of the waist. I made sure it fit me just right and I wouldn’t settle for anything baggy or saggy. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t have time left for French seams.) The director of the costume shop saw it and said I could do haute couture with that level of fitting.

I loved making it. I was very proud of it. I also learned that you really need to include a slit in the skirt if you’re going to make a long sheath dress, or your stride will be limited to teeny tiny steps. (I did not include a slit. In spite of it’s excellent fit, the dress didn’t get a lot of wear because of this.)

I wanted to sew more but I was saving all my money for traveling to *BtVS* fan parties (that’s an account written by a journalist of the first Posting Board Party I went to) so I didn’t grab a machine until my mom noticed one at a yard sale down the street from her. The machine and its cabinet were going for around $70, so I bought them.

I sewed exactly one thing on that machine, a costume for me to wear to go to the movie Troy. (Remember when Legolas and The Hulk were brothers?) It was actually a costume that, if historically accurate, would have been no-sew, but I was afraid a no-sew version would fall off. So I made myself a chiton with some success.

And the next time I used that sewing machine, the needle got stuck in the bobbin. And so I did not use it. I kept moving around with it; I think that machine moved with me five times.

At the North Carolina Maker Faire in, I don’t know, maybe 2014? I sewed a quilt square for a big communal quilt somebody was building there. I loved it. It reminded me that I actually loved sewing, and I wanted to do more. So I promised myself I would.

But I didn’t.

When I finally got the machine out for the first time recently to try again, after great success winding the bobbin and threading the needle, the same thing happened. I tried cleaning and oiling the machine, but that didn’t fix the problem. I decided to give up on that machine, for which I could not find a manual online and which was lacking many features of modern machines, such as numbering on the thread guides to tell you what order to thread it in.

So I asked for a new machine for my birthday, and I got one!

And I decided to use Craftsy’s Sewing 101 class to help me get back into it, since I hadn’t really sewed in 17 years.

Which is how I ended up making those napkins.

And I’ll tell you what I learned from making them soon, I promise!

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links on this page.

Hello, everyone! How are you doing?

Over here, I’m on Day 6 of being In My 40s and it’s going just fine. I had an amazing birthday party: I rented a big gazebo area at the neighborhood pool (which is a fancy pool with an expensive membership fee but that membership fee is cheaper than a summer’s worth of camp, so…). I invited a lot of people and some of them came. I got to see some friends for the first time since before the pandemic, as well as invite family out to a place they hadn’t been before (i.e. the pool). We weren’t worried too much about COVID because of being outdoors and it was just really delightful. And it also felt a little like a celebration of me finishing the PhD, too. Also, I swam for a while in my mermaid tail and got to talk to some kids who really liked it and wanted me to go underwater so they could go down and watch what my swimming looked like under there. 🧜‍‍♀️

I also sewed those napkins! Remember? And for my birthday my friend Casey introduced me to pre-filled bobbins, which I’m very excited about. Next up, I’m going to sew a pillow to put on my desk chair. The fabric is MANATEE fabric and I’m psyched.

I did some important businesslady things today. Most importantly, though, I made a to-do list for the businesslady things I need to do tomorrow. Here’s where I stand right now:

1. I’m doing consulting for Quirkos, a company that provides qualitative data analysis software. I have had a bit of a crush on qual since Day 1 of my Field Techniques in Educational Research class and it’s the primary kind of research I’ve done, so I’m excited to work with an organization that is dedicated to supporting it.
2. I’m developing The Quiet Space, a project to provide structure for scholars and other knowledge creators so that they are free to focus on creative work.

In September, once my kid is settled into preschool, I hope to get in touch with some other potential consulting clients.

I talked with my doctor on Friday. My thyroid numbers are moving in the right direction, but still not where I want them to be. I worried that a change in my prescription dosage would be too extreme, so we agreed that I would up my intake of l-tyrosine. My glucose and hemoglobin A1C are high, meaning I’m pre-diabetic. I also have a lot of intense PCOS symptoms like acne, hirsutism, and oligoovulation. My primary focus right now, aside from caring for my kid, is working on healing this so that my PCOS is well-managed. I’m using Amy Medling’s book Healing PCOS to help me with that.

Aside from that, I’m reading Harrow the Ninth, which is super fun.

What’s new with you?

Austin Kleon writes about his desire to be a pirate-gardener,

I’d like to stay happily at home, in the studio, planting my seeds and cultivating my garden, and when I get bored, like Ishmael, and “I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” then it’s time to take to the seas and do some pirating, steal a few seeds from foreign lands to bring back to my own garden, where I’ll stay happily until I get bored again.

I think the gardening affords you the opportunity to pirate.

Three makes a pattern, so this is the year that blogging about who I want to be in this year of my life becomes a tradition. Shout out to my friend Little Willow, who inspired the idea by making her New Year’s resolutions on her birthday.

Part of the tradition is looking at who I wanted to be last year and seeing how close I got. The big one, being a Doctor of Philosophy, happened in April/May. The rest were, fittingly, not so much in focus.

But the microbusiness. The microbusiness! I’ve been taking strong steps in that direction, lining up my first consulting client, creating a little trickle of passive income with my Notion templates, and dreaming big about what the future holds for The Quiet Space.

Hard as it was with the pandemic and my grandmother’s death, 39 was still on the balance a good year. (This is the moment where I acknowledge that the year I was age 39 was actually the 40th year of my life, since we live a full year before our birthday. Yes, Daddy, I know we use zero-based indexing for ages.)

So what’s next?

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.

I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.

I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentler. I recognize, however, that this is a systemic problem that requires more than individual action, which is why I joined the Alliance for Climate Education mailing list and will start donating to them monthly as soon as I have something resembling a steady income.

I think four is a good number, so I’ll stop there.

Who will you be this year?

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links on this post.

Kristen Arnett is Florida’s and the Internet’s Lesbian dad. Her puns are a delight and her “The existence of ___ implies ___” joke structure cracks me up every time she uses it. I have no idea when or why I followed her on Twitter but I’m glad I did. I love her Twitter presence so much that I thought I would probably love her books, too.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into MOSTLY DEAD THINGS but I feel like I’d seen the phrase “darkly funny” tossed around in reviews.

I was surprised when every part that I bet other people found funny made me sad.

MOSTLY DEAD THINGS is a great book and humans who read should try reading it.

It operated on a very visceral level for me for a few reasons.

1. It’s set in Central Florida. I lived on the east coast of Center Florida (mostly on the Space Coast) for the first 7 years of my life, years that loom large in how I think of myself and what feels like home. I lived in Tallahassee for another couple of years. Even though I’ve spent almost 80% of my life living in North Carolina, I still consider myself a Floridian. The feel of Florida - swampy and magical at the same time, hot and sticky but in a way that works with nostalgia, full of things that can kill you but are also kind of cool - resonates with my heart and is all over this book.

2. The characters in it are mostly in a very specific lower middle class Florida-version-of-Southern (probably white) culture. This is the kind of culture I was familiar with for most of my life, despite my family being genteel poor (and only kind of poor but like sometimes living on federal assistance so definitely not wealthy). The main character Jessa-Lyn has deep nostalgia for her youth spent burning Christmas trees by the swamp, hanging out by the lake, drinking water out of a hose at her best friend/only love Brynn’s trailer home. I think this is what my summers might have looked like, had I stayed in Florida. For special occasions you have homemade pie on pretty paper plates.

3. It is so infused with nostalgia and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Arnett and I are very close in age so our referents for the things people wore and the way they did their hair as tweens and teens are basically the same.

4. The dynamic of a mother who is capable of lots of cool stuff but doesn’t feel like she’s had the opportunity to do it resonates with my family history across multiple generations.

5. My last real connection to Central Florida is dissolving last week as my mother and uncle close the sale of my late grandmother’s Melbourne house.

This is just a sampling. Basically this book squeezed my heart and pushed on bruises. It eventually patched it up but, you know, mostly in the final act.

Highly recommend.

🦩🐊

Tonight is the New Moon in Cancer. Next Wednesday is my birthday. My Sun, Ascendant, and Mercury are all in Cancer. I don’t believe the stars determine our destiny but as with all magical tools, I do believe they can help us set and live up to our intentions.

Cancer, the Crab, is a watery sign and ruled by the moon. I’ve always felt a connection to water, from when I was a tiny toddler fighting the undertow on Florida beaches, still now as I bob about with my kid in the pool after his swim lessons most days.

The moon is connected to water through the tides.

At Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida, they do mermaid shows, in which performers wearing fabric mermaid tails do water ballet. They also have a mermaid camp for grown-ups led by retired performers. Going is one of my dreams.

In one of the earliest episodes of The Mermaid Podcast, host Laura von Holt attends mermaid camp and interviews the retired perforners. One of them tells her, “The water is a teacher.” I have held this idea in my heart since I first heard it a couple years ago.

The water is my teacher. It can take the shape of any container. It can grow hard and expand when it’s cold. It can boil and evaporate when it’s hot. With persistence, it shapes land over time. It can be still. It can move rapidly. It can nurture life. It can reflect light. It can provide shade. The water teaches me to be flexible and persistent, to move how I need to.

The moon is my teacher. It never truly disappears. Sometimes it is in Earth’s shadow. Sometimes it shines the sun’s light down on us. It appears to change in cycles; it is both never the same and always the same. The moon teaches me to accept change as a constant and to retreat and shine as the time is right.

The water and the moon are my teachers.

Good morning, friends.

I have a new-ish morning ritual. I creep downstairs so as not to wake my kid. I get out a glass. I go to the fridge. I get out a can of sparkling water. I get my thyroid meds. I count out my morning thyroid meds and supplements: one levothyroxine, three liothyronine, two l-tyrosine. I open the sparkling water and pour it into the glass. I open my bottle of liquid kelp (which I obviously need because I am a manatee) and squeeze four drops of it into the glass of water: one. two. three. four. And I sip the water and take my pills. Sometimes I play a game on my phone, sometimes I read. But today, I thought.

I sat in that sleepy barely-awake feeling, in my quiet kitchen, with the sky grey outside and the house cold because I keep it that way for sleep, and stared into space.

And three words came to me.

THE QUIET SPACE.

I’ve had an idea for a week or so and was trying to find a name for it. It’s a project/offering I want to put into the world, building on the Notion templates I’ve created. It’s something that takes my skills for organizing and my understanding of doctoral student life and academia and blends them to create a gift for the world.

And that gift is quiet space.

I wanted to do this as a video rather than a blog post but my kid is still sleeping.

The Quiet Space is a set of offerings that will create structure and space for scholars of all descriptions to focus on creating knowledge instead of managing it. The first offerings will continue to be Notion templates; I have a few more to put together. (I may also experiment with Google Sheets or ClickUp but for now I’m focused on Notion.)

Here’s the idea:

You, a knowledge creator, have a lot going on in your head. And administrative work, such as organizing your readings, tracking your revisions, managing copyright permissions - this stuff eats up space in your brain. It fills your brain with chatter about the best way to do these things. How should you create the structures to deal with them?

But what if the space that stuff ate up was open? And quiet? What if it was space you could use to move your ideas around and play with them? What if you took the time you’ve been spending banging your head against a metaphorical wall to figure this out and instead spent it outside looking at the clouds?

My offerings will be designed to open up that space for you, Scholar. I’ll see you in The Quiet Space soon.

❤️,

Kimberly

[Image caption: White clouds move across a blue sky over a silhouetted group of trees and some orange grass. In the bottom right corner, a stone path curves away into the distance.]

Back in May, I had some bloodwork done. I discovered that my thyroid hormone levels were in the normal reference range but were, in my opinion, suboptimal. Combining those numbers with a slew of symptoms that had snuck up on me a little at a time (as they always do), I talked with my doctor about upping my thyroid support supplement dosages (iodine & l-tyrosine). We agreed that I would increase those and we would follow up in July. If I was still symptomatic and my numbers were suboptimal, we would talk about increasing my thyroid prescription dosages.

My bloodwork appointment for that is next Tuesday. The doctor sent in the lab order today and emailed me a copy. It didn’t have the thyroid tests on it. I asked her to please add them. She did, but warned me that when people have normal results on these tests, insurance plans often only cover them once or twice a year, so I might have to pay out of pocket.

I’m lucky and privileged to be able to take that risk without worrying it will cause my family hardship.

But I’m also angry on principle. Because if I already felt so terrible when my levels were normal-but-suboptimal, how miserable would I feel if we waited to modify my treatment until my levels were below normal? How sick does a person have to be to “deserve” treatment?

Wikipedia tells me:

In case of medical tests whose results are of continuous values, reference ranges can be used in the interpretation of an individual test result. This is primarily used for diagnostic tests and screening tests, while monitoring tests may optimally be interpreted from previous tests of the same individual instead

I wish that had a citation, but I’m going to take the point anyway. I’ve been diagnosed with this condition for 10 years. We always use these ranges for monitoring because I’m already diagnosed. I’ve noticed a correlation between symptoms and the test results but because it’s easy to swing too wide in a dosage switch I like to pair symptoms and results to help determine my next move. I am frustrated and exhausted by the fact that being chronically ill is a constant fight, that so many things can stand between me and wellness no matter what actions I take.

I’m glad my doctor will order the test; I’ve had doctors who wouldn’t. I’m glad my family can afford to pay out of pocket; we haven’t always been able to. But I am livid for myself and others that we have to work so hard to get what we need to merely function, never mind thrive.

(I’m aware that there are many different things that prevent people from thriving. This is the one I’m feeling hardest today.)