bottomless existentialism

Mercury is in retrograde and my therapist told me she heard something about the universe being in a sort of whackadoodle phase (my paraphrasing) that’s messing with a lot of people, myself included, but she can’t remember where she heard this.

At the same time, wildfires are ripping across Canada and Minnesota. The smoke cloud has drifted into Wisconsin, where the air quality is as abysmal as it’s ever been. Hours before the smoke rolled in, we had just broken through the worst of the second major heat wave in the last three weeks. Now we’re stuck inside yet again—grateful, sure, for our recirculated and conditioned air. Also stir crazy and resentful that the fleeting Midwest summer is being cut short by yet another weather event. My kids are only 2 and 4 years old; they can’t grasp why they’re being deprived of precious outside time with the sprinkler or at the playground and the beach.

For my part, I am reeling a bit. Deep in the habit of daily Al-Anon readings and occasional meetings. I am googling unitarian universalism (???) while still on my usual bullshit: intentions, grounding exercises, lovingkindness meditations, chakra stuff, EFT tapping, a candle in my office, a hand to my heart.

I have mockingly declared for years that I’m on a woo-woo journey, but this journey seems to be reaching a new peak just as the world around me veers deeper into dystopia.

Raising kids has made me more amenable to the notion of a higher power. Yesterday, Adam and I took the kids on an early morning walk around the block to beat the heat and sneak out before the smoke floated toward Milwaukee. My daughter’s ringlets framed beads of sweat around her reddened face. My son’s funny little blonde halo—which was revealed when the barber took a #4 razor to the back of his head—collected perspiration on his skull. Their sweetness was like a perfect scone… or jam on a biscuit. Their little hands linked into each other as they ran down the sidewalk. They’re getting so fast. But for now, they’re boomerangs—speeding away, then zooming back to me. I want to hold them like this as long as possible.

My own growing spiritual void is impossible to ignore when I have these two hungry, thirsty mouths in the house. Bottomlessly voracious.

Occasionally people ask if I’m feeling good now that I have a new hip, as if the procedure took me backwards in time to the old version of me that didn’t need a new hip at all, instead of forward into a different body that gained a new and foreign part. I am feeling much better in the sense that I walk all over the place without pain. I no longer pop prescription NSAIDs like candy. But I am not back to 100% of the self I was before. I’m changed in the way a person changes after giving birth. An undiscerning outsider may not notice the difference, but I can’t ignore the fact that I’m moving through life with a new awareness (and a slightly screwy gait).

Most people can only wrap their heads around the physical aspects. I register understanding on a person’s face when I describe the new pains in the front of my hip flexor, or the slight lengthening of my operative leg that has thrown the rest of my body’s alignment out of whack. These things caused a lot of anguish in the weeks after my surgery, but now that I see they’re not going anywhere, I’ve loosened my grip on them a bit. Those are my options: I can change, or I can stay angry.

I’m starting to experiment more to figure out what I can and can’t do. I attempted a yoga flow that would have been easy for me in 2024; today, it leaves me aching and panting. I am better, yes. But I’m never going to be the person I was before. I certainly won’t ever have the body I had before.

My body. I can’t escape it. I wore a slutty bikini to the beach in Chicago last month. I weirdly bought this swimsuit in the early postpartum days after my daughter was born—maybe I was clawing back toward the person I had been pre-baby. A person who would have been allowed to wear slutty swimsuits in public, because she didn’t have a baby.

The suit fits better now than it did when I bought it four years ago. Back then, it couldn’t contain my big naturals full of milk, so I never wore it. The suit’s bottom is wildly cheeky compared to any other swimsuit I’ve owned. It’s the antithesis of the “full” and “moderate coverage” suits for moms constantly advertised to me on social media. It left both my surgical scar and my ass cheeks exposed to the sunlight at North Avenue Beach—a place where, it turns out, everyone’s scars and ass cheeks are on display, so nobody was looking at mine. It felt like power to flaunt those bits to the whole world and realize no one else clocked it or even cared. That night, I sobbed at the United Center watching Rosalia perform “Lux,” her divine opus.

A better writer would link all these thoughts together in a clean, cohesive way. A better writer would have a smooth segue from climate crisis to spiritual yearning to joint replacement to tits & ass. I know I could be that better writer, but I also know I haven’t posted anything new here in months. I know that better is the enemy of good. I know there is a throughline here, but if you are taking the time to read this (thank you), you may have to work a little harder to find it.

I don’t want to leave my kids with a god-shaped void as they grow up. (Not that I believe in god—at least not in the god I was raised to know. I’m still trying to sort that out.) I don’t want them to lean into nihilism and dismay over the state of the world, and I don’t want them to be ashamed of their scars or their asses. I also know that no church or book or podcast can fill that void with anything good or lasting or real. It is an individual journey; for me, for my kids, for you. All I can offer them is my own love—bottomless and voracious. With my whole ass.