Remembering Maria, Chris' mother, who passed away 10 years ago today. It is still so sad that she is not with us, but I feel very lucky to have known her and to have felt her support and love for as long as I did.
Giving myself a half an hour's treat: reading the first chapter of Kazuo Ishiguro's Buried Giant this morning while finishing my coffee in a quiet house.
Enjoying egg-lemon soup at lunch-time. A student and I made it yesterday for a potluck, and we split the left-overs. I hope she enjoyed her left-overs today, too.
Trying to forge ahead through some serious tiredness by going to the walking track. I am grateful to the audiobook of The Night Gardener for giving me some momentum and keeping me going as I walked.
Writing postcards to Chris' family. I want to be better about sending Chris' father, uncle, and aunts postcards each month this year.
Making some brain-space for myself by tidying my home office. It's far from truly tidy (will that ever be achieved?) but I feel like I could think in my room again. This is important because I'm heading into crunch-time for a paper due in a little under 3 weeks.
Finding this quotation from Gloria Steinhem on the Facebook feed for Lapham's Quarterly today (in honor of International Women's Day, I think): "...a rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or
dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying." Obviously such a state of affairs is not a good thing, but this quotation resonates with some things I was facing last year at this same time and I take comfort and strength in it. Such criticisms are made to feel personally shaming to individual women, and it is (sadly) empowering to realize that they are a general strategy--it helps, even at the distance of a year, to wash off some of the shame and to be ready, the next time it happens, to call people on it yet again.
No comments:
Post a Comment