Each of us does the hard thing we're given.
Even when it is not the hard thing we would choose.
This month I’m focusing on the topic of belonging: what does it mean to feel like you’re part of something bigger than you? To be a member of a community or group and to be celebrated for who you are without feeling the need to conform or fit in? Each essay in April will feature a story that ties in with this theme of belonging and inclusion. I hope you enjoy them!
I’m sitting in our hunter green armchair, a hand-me-down from Ben’s dad when Ben and I were first married. It’s covered in tiny embroidered squares of cream and burgundy, a dated pattern. But I don’t care. I’m not interested in fashion or interior design. As long as my home is relatively tidy and clean, it can be filled with mismatched kitsch and older furniture.
Glancing out the back patio door, I notice the morning rush across the street on Maysville Road—a hub for commuters crossing from one side of the city to the other. A Fort Wayne Community Schools bus slows, its air brakes hissing at the four-way stop. Behind it is a lime green city garbage truck, the engine groaning as it idles.
Next is the man on his Harley, classic rock blasting on the radio at 7:30 AM. Even through my glass doors, I can hear the familiar tune of “Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC, and I sip my ginger turmeric tea, shaking my head. A cherry red smart car tentatively approaches the intersection now, then a white nine-passenger Econoline van—what Ben calls “Yoder Toters,” because they’re stereotypically known to carry a horde of Amish folks—glides toward the intersection.
A developmentally disabled man well known and loved in our neighborhood, Ron, leans against his ten-speed bicycle propped up with its kickstand at the four-way stop, waving and nodding at passersby. I note that Ron looks the same as he did thirty years ago, when I was a kid growing up in this same neighborhood. As much as some things rapidly change, Ron has stayed the same: familiar and friendly and ever-present.
The conglomeration of people, as diverse as the vehicles they drive or ride in, strikes me as strange in this moment, because five years ago, these streets were eerily vacant. It was March 2020 then, and the entire world fell asleep that month. While I cradled a newborn, others holed inside their homes to work remotely, if they could. Kids stayed home for e-learning, which really meant playing “educational” games on their personal, school-issued laptops.
I’d never felt more lonesome than I did back then. Before 2020, when I was up at 4 AM with a ravenous infant, I’d have the distraction of mild traffic to occupy my fuzzy mind. At least then I could imagine where those people were going, what they had planned for their days, what their evenings might be filled with: soccer games and piano lessons and meals on the go or maybe shared as a family, grading papers and chuckling over a bad joke, zoning out to binge-watch their favorite show.
Who knew that one day I would not even have the bustling city street as a companion in my solitude? When even the roads were empty, I was left alone with stark loneliness, a void that I could not fill with anything outside myself.
I am no stranger to silence, and, in fact, I welcome it. Some of the most profound experiences of my life have happened in silence: when I wrote a list of eighty qualities I wanted in a future husband (Ben somehow checked all the boxes); while deliberating on a name for our firstborn child (Felicity); when conjuring up the thematic layers for my first book about grief.
Silence itself doesn’t frighten me. It’s the absence of any shred of light within myself that jolts me away from any semblance of inner calm. And when COVID-19 shattered the world, snatching lives without discrimination or warning, I could not bear the dawn of silence each morning. The sudden withdrawal of human life from my periphery communicated the harsh truth that I was truly alone, sequestered with my five young children, without reprieve or consolidated sleep.
Auggie was only one day old when the world decided to quarantine for two solid weeks. Sarah was eight, newly diagnosed with autism. Our house was brimming with little bodies squirming and fussing and constantly in need. Some might wonder why I felt so alone when I had a brood of children at my feet around the clock.
And that’s just it: I never had the space to remember who I was without them, who I was as a person aside from the roles I’d grown into: wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, writer. I needed to reclaim my own space, my own time. I needed room to settle into myself again, to remember who I was without the expectations of others.
I gave myself permission to attend to my inner voice and the groaning, aching needs of my body. Self-soothing was not something I’d ever mastered as a child or teen or young adult, so I figured it was well overdue that I learn this basic regulation technique.
I could tell you how I began to turn my life around by drinking more water and drastically changing my diet. How I started walking one rotation around our neighborhood park before getting winded and calling it a day. How I furiously journaled in cheap, dime-store spiral notebooks, filling page after page with nonsense and anger and grief. How I slept a little longer on weekends, took quick naps. How I began scheduling tea and lunch dates with friends now and then.
What this essay is really about, though, is how I am now sitting in that same worn green armchair five years later in a silent house, with only the distant hum of the clothes dryer filling the space around me with sound. My youngest is now five years old, and my oldest is approximating fifteen.
Ten long years of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum hormonal fluctuations. How does a woman explain this dramatic shift in one essay?
What I can tell you is that, every time people marvel at the way I live and how I accomplish all that I am able, every time they remark, “I don’t know how you do it all,” I shrug and tell them, “You’d do it, too, if you had to.”
The thing is, each of us does the hard thing we’re given, even though it’s not the hard we would choose for ourselves. You’ve done it. I do it every day. My hard is not your hard. Yours is not mine. But we all have something inside us—is it grit? is it grace? maybe both—that fuels our resolve to survive, and even more, to revive.
It’s the pull toward life, toward living, that I’m aiming at here today—the teeming, overflowing movement of human activity on the road adjacent to my neighborhood, the first sign of daffodil and jonquil and tulip leaves popping above ground after another long stretch of winter, the burst of color from blooming red buds and crab apples and dogwoods and magnolias. It’s the first sighting of a migrating wren or thrush or warbler. These are what awaken my senses and soul.
It’s not that I am a superhero. It’s that I get up every morning, even when I don’t want to, and I remind myself that an entire day lies ahead. I get to make of it what I want. I get to choose how I will respond to the moments I find myself in. I have the freedom to waste my time, or spend it engaging in what it means to be fully human and fully alive.
There is no such thing as, “I don’t know how you do it all!” There is only this: I do the thing in front of me. I do the hard thing when it is the right thing. I get up, again and again, and I keep finding fragments and fractals of what I know makes life worth living.
Your financial contribution helps supplement our family’s expenses and offset the costs of ongoing medical care for our daughter Sarah that requires 20 hours of unpaid caregiving on my part. I want you to know how much your support means and how it helps our family.
We each do our own hard. That's such a powerful idea, that hard is actually relative, and not comparable against itself but against its holder. We define how "hard" something is for us, not by looking at other people's hard, but by evaluating our history of hard and slotting this hard in where it belongs. In doing so, we create room for own grief and frustration and we also make space for little things that make our hard less so. You are amazing, and I don't know how you do it, but you're right, I would too if I had to, so let's rephrase. I'm in awe of how you handle your hard. 💪
"...each of us does the hard thing we’re given, even though it’s not the hard we would choose for ourselves."
This is so true for me. I would never have voluntarily chosen the hard that found me, but I would have lost out on some of the best experiences of my life.
Your writing, yet again, resonates so deeply. Thank you for sharing your gift.