Paul Davidson
Weeknotes 109: Super Bugger
Content warning: these are even soppier than usual.
Let’s open with some Piglet nonsense:
- Pretending to be aggrieved when the baby “kicked her in the heart” with such force that she was bounced 5 feet from The Chef’s belly.
- Chatting with the neighbours on the walk home from school and they’re grousing that they get letters all the time about bumps and cuts when I hear a knee-high stage whisper, “that’s because she’s clumsy and falls over all the time.”
- Sitting in the school yard with her buddy seeing who can be the loudest dinosaur with, importantly, the biggest footprints.
- The heaviest thing she can think of is a bus.
- After three nights with grandparents, she returned to us singing the songs of Frozen and speaking in an American accent.
Much of my morning pages waffling of late has been a result of writing around the thing that’s bothering me. I was listening to Fly by Low on a spotty internet connection, the connective stutters adding to the aural decomposition and I arrived at my midweek nadir. So this time, I wrote it down. And on the page it looked so small: a rut.
Resilience is the name we give to the ability to climb out of a rut. And it’s been missing. Looking at the lines I could see the shape of Covid trauma. The little of the everyday that was kicked away and isn’t back yet. The bigger things that have been postponed. Later, after reading Ana Rodrigues’ beautifully written matrescence essay, I could see how much the miscarriages had taken too. Both together have been hard, but they feel of the past?
The next day we started booking a holiday. A few planned joyous nights away. I stopped procrastinating on the post-Covid jog and went for a very slow run. At work, the audit finished and two of the senior managers involved sweetly and earnestly checked on my stress levels. A few split days meant late night emails, which raised red flags. It’s a big ole corporation I work at. Which just means it’s more people to care. Everyone is people.
We stayed over for Granddad’s birthday and instead of saying goodbye, he could spend his early evening getting happily drenched at bath time. And after Piglet was down we could have beers by the fire. There’s an energy created by sitting on a warm couch chatting with people you love that refills resilience.
The constant rain against the windows at work the next day was an elegiac crescendo for my mood music. Which climaxed when, that night, I felt the baby for the first time.
With The Chef working over the weekend, Piglet staying with undisguisedly happy grandparents and our house repelling water, I made the most of International Men’s day by doing DIY while listening to TMS. Coving instructions took four different YouTube videos to get into my head. Looks alright now though and the wonky offcuts have been recycled out of evidence already.
This Max Böck essay on the indieweb is extremely true. In my continued chivying along of my own efforts, I have a domain name now (thanks to the tech support of both Blot and namesco). Welcome to pauldavidson.co.uk. RSS feeds should remain unaffected. I’m also now using album.link1 for the music links. It weeds out the Spotify dependency when I’m sharing here. And lastly I use forest.link2 when I’m after an introduction of random. My only complaint is that it’s very male and very White3. So I spent a morning planting trees from my feeds which don’t match those criteria.
Via Matt Birchler↩︎
Via Giles Turnbull↩︎