Sekali lagi

There's no perfect way to start. It's the most important thing someone with a laundry list of anxiety-related neurodivergences needs to hear. It's also the last thing they want to hear. What do you mean there's no perfect way? To do anything?? [Insert JLaw Hot Ones gif] Even more imperfect are restarts, do-overs, beginnings-again.

I turned 40 in February. It's been 10 years since I lost my dad, and I'm as old as he was when I was born. Ever since 38 (the age my ma had me), I've thought about how it would be to navigate this stage of life with four children, each with distinct, headstrong personalities, without the easy distraction of settling them in front of portable digital screens and the paranoia of content collapse. Would I have made the same choices? Would I have the same patience? The same temper? Giving a brand-new child "the childhood I never had" is something I'll never do(-over); the only child I'm interested in (re)parenting is me.

Community-care over self-care is something I consider often. There's no such thing as taking care of just me: someone else has to make the food I'll order when I take myself out for a nice meal, someone else has to massage me when I go for a spa day. In my household we take turns making dinner so we get to have days where we care and days where we're taken care of. We're all in an interconnected web of care, (sub)consciously (re)parenting each other in ways we might not immediately perceive. I do your laundry, you do my dishes. Ceaseless chores, perhaps, but ones that mean we have clean clothes and warm meals to keep us safe, which means we can help keep more people in our community safe, inshaallah, physical or virtual.

Keep showing up, I guess. It's not perfect. But it's what any of us can really do.