AN IMPERFECT POST ABOUT INTERRUPTIONS AND REPAIRING THE SOUL

I’ve started and stopped this post probably eight times this month. It’s been a post about the desire to become an ex-pat in France and then about end-of-school exhaustion and then about gardening. I got interrupted, needed to calculate final grades, cook dinner, visit my aging mother. These are not necessarily bad things, nor things I resent doing. But the lack of uninterrupted thinking and writing time takes its toll.

It’s a power thing (I’m going to argue in an underdeveloped way). The world believes it has the right to our time and attention (particularly women’s), and thus can take that time and attention at will. The definition of the “world” here extends into industry, education, and care-taking as expressed through technology: I don’t have the right to turn off my phone or ignore my email or ignore the needs of those around me in favor of my own.

This way lies exhaustion.

I keep wondering why it’s so hard to think.

Every woman I know gets this.

(Interruption here: one hour on the phone trying to solve mom’s computer issues without being able to see her screen and without real knowledge. How did I end up as my mother’s tech person? Could I choose not to answer the phone? Of course not. She’s 87.)

How do we claim time for ourselves? For me at the end of the school year, it has always been about claiming space: if I’m in France or Greece or Vermont, no one can get to me. I don’t have to deal with any demands except my own. 

For years, my husband travelled in early June to read AP exams for ten days and that was space for reading, quiet dinners, and long days of pleasurable silence.

Exercise is a claim to space (except when the person next to you on the treadmill periodically breaks into song. Truth). It’s just you and the machine and your breath—a kind of meditation.

All the writing gurus online say that we just have to take the time we need. We can’t wait around for permission. Sure, but—

(Interruption here: “Hey, honey? Do you know where... fill in the blank.”)

Maybe I’m just incapable of living successfully with another human.

We’re not traveling this summer by choice, but it does shift June’s dynamic. I keep reminding myself it’s OK to shut the door, let my husband take care of the dying dog, ignore prep for the fall, refuse to answer the phone, not take anything but wine to the party. I keep repeating that it takes a month to get over the school year before I relax and feel like myself. The repetitions and permissions are soul-saving, and my soul needs a lot of saving at the end of May: it’s all torn up along the edges, like a flag that’s battled a storm. June collects September’s through May’s pieces and stitches them together into whatever whole remains possible after all these years of repeated fraying.

(Interruption here: the dog pooped all over the comforter, so the bed needs to be stripped and everything run through the laundry on the sanitary setting, which takes two hours. This will not change when my husband goes away. Instead, I will also have to wash the dog, which that sweet man is currently doing on the back porch.)

Quiet, a glass of wine and a book—and no interruptions. What do you do to repair your soul and deal with the demands that fragment you?

Thanks for reading.