Life Lately

My brain is broken.

At least I thought I was broken but then I read this and felt better. Which actually means I am broken but I’m not the only one. I shared a snippet of that article in my Instagram stories and received a half-dozen messages from friends re-iterating the same thing: “My brain is broken, too.” “I feel this on a deep level.” “This is everything.” And lots of “100” emoji. I mean, I guess that’s comforting.

I mix up words that sound sort of similar but totally aren’t (Like “bacon” for “band-aid”. I…don’t know.) and have a hard time focusing on…anything. I also have no appetite which feels like my body has forgotten even how to eat and have become one of those annoying people who say things like, “I forgot to eat lunch.” And then makes a smoothie as if that’s a replacement for solid food that you chew.

I thought my brain would be better once the kids were in school but it’s not. In fact, it feels worse. It’s actually probably the same as before, it’s just that I have the time and space to try to focus now which only shows me how much I can’t. My brain is so used to interruptions it can’t handle long stretches of undisturbed time. Please hear me when I say that I am SO GLAD the kids are back in school. And also my brain forgot what it’s supposed to do when it has longer than 2.5 minutes to concentrate on any given task.

Maybe it’s like that saying around postpartum bodies, where it takes nine months for your body to stretch and grow a human so you need to give yourself (at least) nine months to get back to some sort of normalcy? We’ve been in this pandemic for nearly a year, so it stands to reason that it will take at least a year for our brains and bodies to get back to their pre-pandemic selves.

Also, we’re still in it. It’s absurd to think my brain would work like capital-b Before when, despite my kids being back in school, we’re still in the thick of a global pandemic. I still need to make sure we have clean masks, school could be disrupted at any time, and our summer plans remain somewhat up in the air.

I’m trying to give myself a break, trying to go against that clanging gong of society that beats a steady cadence of “Produce! Produce! Produce!” I need more—and longer—breaks to accomplish even simple tasks. I’m preaching to myself here when I say maybe that’s not a bad thing.

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Take Action

I was made aware this week by Anti-Racism Daily that there is an anti-trans bill making its way through my own state legislature. This bill seeks to ban those assigned male at birth from participating in girl’s and women’s school athletic programs. I encourage you to read the link above; it does greater justice to the issue than I can here. In fact, there are more than a dozen states with some version of this bill. Using thinly-veiled transphobic language, these bills do enormous harm to transgender youth, a population who is already stigmatized in society. Furthermore, we know how beneficial organized athletics are to all children’s physical health and mental well-being, and even more so for transgender youth. The thought of banning any child from being able to fully participate in school sports is nothing less than shameful.

I emailed my state house representative, urging her to stand against her Republican colleagues who authored this bill and received the most wonderful response. I urge you to do the same—particularly if your state is one of the many on this list. You can find your own state representative here.

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Around the Internet

• I am always and forever a Glennon Doyle stan.

• This whole piece, but this line sums up every parent sending their kid back to school right now: “When she returns to school on March 1, I will be terrified. And thrilled.”

• For anyone else who feels like the news around vaccines and normalcy are grimmer than they need to be.

• “But as we approach the one-year anniversary of remote education in America, I find that I am losing sympathy for the educators’ position and their myopic vision this far along into the pandemic. We can open schools safely, and we have the evidence in hand to prove it.”

• “But phyllo dough, at least the kind I bought, won’t work in this situation. It’s rectangle and you don’t manipulate phyllo dough like you do puff pastry. Phyllo dough is Mediterranean, isn’t it? Figures. You never tell a Mediterranean – especially a woman – what she ought to fit into. I know better, so I pull out a jelly roll pan and place all the sheets on that.”

• This, though.

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Eating

• I made these baked onion rings on Super Bowl Sunday and while they were a little time-consuming, they were also super yummy. A few notes: soak your sliced onions while you prep everything else (a quick soak helps the flour stick better). Also, put your flour and panko ingredients in (separate) plastic bags—then you can toss the onions in and just shake them all up to coat. And last I threw my own spices in, not the spice mix she listed. Roughly a 1/2 teaspoon each of onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt, and pepper.

• This cupcake recipe is everything. I made them for the kids’ birthdays but now I think I need to make them for no reason whatsoever because they’re that good. Also because I have what I think is scientifically known as a “crapton” of sprinkles left. (And because I can’t not give notes: I used regular whole milk, regular cream cheese, and canola oil.)

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Fun Things

• This headband is my new favorite accessory.

• We’ve been having some epic Uno Flip battles as a family. I don’t consider myself much of a games person but I will play this all day long. Since there’s no reading, (unlike another of our favorite games, Apples to Apples Jr.) even Nolan can join in since it’s mostly matching up colors and numbers/symbols.

• Speaking of those cupcakes above we celebrated some birthdays around here! I can’t let this section pass by without saying we now have two seven-year-olds and a five-year-old in this house. We celebrated COVID-style by visiting an outdoor ice maze, meeting some friends at a nearby sledding hill, and a small birthday drive-by. Since all three birthdays are at the exact same time (only two days apart), my house was still destroyed from making six-dozen cupcakes to pass out and all. the. gifts. they still received. At one point our living room was ankle-deep in assorted wrapping materials and presents. By now I’ve learned that party or not, I need a solid week to put my house back together at the end of February.

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Despite everything, the weather has been saving me. My brain might be broken but at least the sun is out and the snow is melting which all puts a smile on my face. Also, someone spontaneously paid for my breakfast on Wednesday and it made my week. Two weeks ago I was unsure if the subzero temperatures we were experiencing would ever break and now here, on this side, it looks like we could be in store for an early spring. Spring is just exactly what we need right now. And while I’d love to wrap this up with something profound, what I’ve mostly been thinking lately is some version of this:

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A post shared by Alyssa Limperis (@alyssalimp)

Doesn’t add up at all.

Made With

Made with love.

I think of this phrase often when I pull out my knitting needles to work on whatever project is tucked away in my knitting bag.

I think of grandmas baking trays of cookies for their grandkids. I think of my own great-grandma crocheting a baby blanket for me, a dozen great-grandchildren in. I think of friends who take pride in making Halloween costumes for their kids each and every year. I imagine the patience and sweetness and, yes, love, going into each and every one of these endeavors.

People, nothing I knit is made with love.

Don’t get me wrong, I always knit with plenty of emotion. But love? I don’t tend to knit when I’m feeling beatific and peaceful. No, I pull out my projects when my hands need something to hold onto. When the rest of me feels as though I may fly into a million pieces, knitting becomes, quite literally, that something to hold. This past year has shown me just how steadying having two knitting needles in my hands can be. I’m usually trying to find my sanity through knits and purls, not knit it in there.

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I learned how to knit about a year ago, on a cold, mid-February Sunday morning. I’d been interested in knitting for a while. I watched several women at my church—old, young, and in-between—carry their knitting around in bags, getting in stitches during coffee hour or in the sanctuary. I saw them nod along to sermons or sing along to hymns without even stopping to look at the work in their hands.

It was Nancy who caught me on the stairs one day as we arrived at church the way we always did, in a flurry of too many children and winter coats and mittens.

“Would you like to learn how to knit?” she asked without even a hello. There was a sparkle in her eye as we walked down to the church basement and the kids sprinted ahead for cookies and small cups of juice.

“Yes!” I said, stunned at this random invitation being extended to me, somehow offering me exactly what I’d been thinking about for months. Call it an answered prayer that I’d never even bothered to pray or divine intervention if you will; we were in the middle of our church. “I’ve been wanting to learn for a while!”

“Meet me on the couches in the adult library next Sunday,” she told me, “Don’t worry about anything. I have extra needles and yarn. I’ll teach you.”

The following Sunday we met on the worn, cast-off couches. She arrived armed with a pair of needles and a brilliant purple skein of yarn to show me a basic knit stitch. It felt awkward and wrong in my hands. I kept forgetting if I needed to have the yarn in the back or the front of the stitch, mostly because I didn’t even know what that meant.

“Under, not over,” she would say from where she stood behind me. She put her hands gently on mine to correct me, though the yarn always felt like it moved too fast for me to understand what was happening. It was intimidating, me vs. those two awkward needles and a pile of yarn. I was convinced that although women had been doing this for centuries, it would be me who would be a failure, me who would never, ever get the hang of it. But, by the end of our twenty minutes together, I had a couple of lumpy rows of stitches.

Read more about my knitting adventures over on Coffee + Crumbs.

Not For Me

A few years ago, after a scroll through Instagram, I decided I was going to become a gardener. Or at least I was going to plant some things and weed them and water them and that would (probably) make me a gardener.

Never mind that I don’t care much about plants. Never mind that my thumb is definitely brown. Never mind that I don’t even have a houseplant to my name. (If a 30-something woman in the suburbs doesn’t own a houseplant, does she even exist?) Never mind the few times we’d subscribed to CSA boxes and I low-key hated it because I am a Meal Planner to the nth degree and getting a random box of food every week threw me in all the ways. (Especially when the box was filled with zucchini which is The Worst Vegetable Ever.)

Never mind all of that.

It’s going to be fun for the kids! I thought. They’ll learn things! It’s science!

My aunt had given me some old planters which were sitting in our garage, collecting dust and spider webs. I hauled them out, hosed them down, and dragged the kids to the nursery a couple of miles down the road. Two three-year-olds and a one-year-old and me, who had not much more of an idea of what I was doing than they did. We wandered up and down the aisles as I loaded our cart with carrots and onions, broccoli and basil. I remembered potting soil after I was in the checkout line, then stood in front of the bags wondering both how much I needed and if I could lift them. Then back to the checkout line where the one-year-old started to fuss over being trapped in a cart and how boring this all was.

An hour and well over $100 later, I loaded up the minivan with children and seedlings and hauled them home.

Read more about my gardening mishaps over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.