March Update

Birthdays, books, bears

A quick hello from my desk to yours! Each one of these bullet points could be ended with the exclamation “Life! Am I right?” So just imagine that for yourself.

• Mark your calendars: Saturday March 21 from 7-10pm is the annual CAKE auction, at the Revolution Brewing Taproom! The Chicago Alternative Comics Expo is a fully volunteer-run nonprofit, and this is the event’s only fundraiser, so all hands on deck if you love living in a city that is such a community hub for cartoonists. Check out CAKE’s instagram for a preview of some items being auctioned off, including a whole riso machine?! Original Jeffrey Brown Star Wars art?? And I’ve offered up a house portrait! I sadly can’t attend this year (out of town on a Kid Spring Break adventure) but I can’t recommend this event more heartily. Also, CAKE is coming up quickly: May 2 and 3 at the Irish American Heritage Center. So many comics to buy!

• Last week I celebrated my 41st birthday! 41 is a good age, feels about right. I was never someone who wished to be older when I was young, or younger now that I’ve earned some sturdy rings in my tree. Last year was a decade birthday, honored with a long-planned-and-saved-for dream solo trip, and this year was appropriately more humble. My husband and I took the day off, walked around all morning and talked. I cried about life and art and the passage of time into a very good breakfast. I got a fountain drink and a big-ass popcorn at a matinee showing of Send Help and cackled with glee. We picked up the kids from school and went to a cajun boil restaurant for dinner and wore plastic bibs and gloves. This life is bigger and better than I ever would have dared to dream for myself.

• Last weekend was my eldest child’s tenth birthday: I made their birthday portrait, baked their favorite chocolate meringue cake, wrapped a big lego kit and a beginners model wooden ship kit and gifts from grandparents and aunts, taped streamers and balloons to doorways, and wrote a long letter to them. They are an amazing young person, quick witted and deep feeling and so caring. It is so easy to love them! What caught me off guard was the grief that hit the night before—Tom and I both were struck with big, messy tears. It took time to unravel, but crossing this double-digit threshold felt like the end of an era. We are Capital-D Done parenting babies and very young children. We are parenting a fourth grader, a second grader, and a pre-k kid: done with the many unplanned years of full-time parenting, done with daycare, done with middle-of-the-night hungers and non-stop toddler illnesses, done with intense body caregiving, done with soft knuckles and sweaty limp naps, done with that close body-to-body intimacy and porous tenderness. As these many ends trickled by they were each acknowledged and sometimes grieved/sometimes celebrated, but the specific labor that I spent the last decade of my life consumed by is over, and the weight of that only just landed. Obviously parenting continues, but now we’re on to crushes (!) and academic ambitions and complex friendship dynamics and all the joys and heartaches of Childhood, with teenage years coming around the bend.

Happy with this bear

• It isn’t not weird to be spending my days drawing a graphic memoir about parenting very young children after I’ve crossed this threshold but I literally couldn’t have started any earlier. Lord knows I tried. The book is chugging along at the speed of the Glacier Express! (I just googled “world’s slowest train.”) The finished pages are strong but patience is needed to counter my quick-reward impulses. Alas.

• As part of a cool school project where kids were taught about different kinds of community support actions (direct, indirect, advocacy, and research) and then had to plan their own service project, my daughter created and sold art to raise money for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and donated $205! Kid art is so great. This is, obviously, a monster with rock eyes and flower teeth.

  

  My two 2016 babies

• In the Sounds and Seas is also fast approaching a decade since its publication! S&S is officially out of print and my publisher isn’t going to do another run or a paperback edition; I’ve thought about self-publishing a collected paperback, or approaching another publisher for a collected paperback, but…I don’t know if anyone is begging for a decade-old comic that received little commercial or critical attention. Might be time to let this song be sung? So many endings!

• Hey, the world sure is bad! I’ve been getting a lot of solace out of reading, as always. I have re-read the first 15 pages of “The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” by Byung-Chul Han about five times; the time I have to read is limited and this one requires serious consideration, so each time I have a minute to read I feel like I need to start it over. It has felt like a balm, naming a thing I’ve been struggling to wrap my arms around for over a year, something I have called a secular crisis of faith but that wasn’t quite right either. Maybe when I finally get to the end of this very slender book I’ll be more articulate about it, but man the idea that “ritual makes time habitable in the way a home makes space habitable” is really doing something for my brain & heart. I also recently read…It by Stephen King? My “find the longest audiobook available with no wait on Libby” track record isn’t the best. I am glad I read it but didn’t love it, and also I was surprised by how comforting it felt to read about people actively proactively working to fight a monster that preys on young children instead of, you know, reading thousands of documents from the FBI and then doing absolutely nothing. 2026, what a clusterfuck.

  

• Teaching is also a balm. I can’t more enthusiastically recommend surrounding yourself with people who are wildly more talented than yourself! It’s thrilling and heartening when so much else about the future seems so dark. My weekly 12 hour teaching day is A Lot—this semester has zapped my daily life executive functioning and drained already-minimal social energy, how do full time teachers do this?!—but it’s absolutely a net positive. I’m so grateful to be present with this community of young artists, who are just the best.

• My family and I are more than a month into our economic protest: we canceled all streaming services and digital subscriptions, bought a used dvd player, and have been borrowing shows and movies from the library. I bought more New Things this month than I hoped—birthday presents, kid shoes, and this month I also put together emergency go bags for everyone in my family—but perfection is the enemy of progress. This is a good practice, ethically sound to not give money to Bezos & the Ellisons & all the Once-ler tech villains, and helpful as prices to feed and clothe a young family keep going up.

• Surprise, a few diaries! Signing off. I wish you nothing but the very best in all things. xox m