This feels like a non-cohering nothingburger of a post, but I keep trying to write it, so here it is.
A month ago, I had sex with a guy I wasn’t dating. I was disappointed his wife couldn’t make it – I initially thought I was hitting on them both, but the hitting-on took place over months in between everyone living busy lives, so I guess some wires got crossed when we actually set a date for sex. She did watch us through the camera attached to the pet feeder though. After the sex he probed on whether I was up for repeats. I was, but only a few more times. I had to garden.
“You have to garden?” he repeated, with incredulous humor.
I tried, badly, to explain. “I know how stupid that sounds. But it really takes a lot of time, and I can’t seem to stop. I’m kind of asexual and can only get it up for interesting new experiences, so I’m reluctant to schedule more than a few additional dates when I feel so behind at home…”
Every time I go out to the yard, I think it would be an amazing place to spend time with my kid… if it got 100 hours of personalized attention from me.
It seemed dumb to give it that attention. I believe in maximizing time spent on my core competencies, and gardening is not one of them. It’s inconvenient work, too. I have to do it when there’s light to see what I’m doing by, but daytime is also when I have childcare. When the baby goes down for a nap, I hurtle out and spend my precious free time clearing more ground with a hand cultivator, sowing, watering, removing rotten fruit, clipping vines encroaching over the fence, hauling compost, and talking to ChatGPT about mulch.
Why do it? The sensible but incomplete answer is that I wanted a nice yard, don’t have the financial slack to hire a pro, and wanted a lot of control over the process.
A less sensible answer is that once I started caring at all about this neglected plot of land over which I could have dominion, it felt inevitable that I would pour my life into it. It was hard to walk away. Gardening is not like any other work I’ve done. Probably ten thousand years of selection for tolerating working rice paddies for fourteen hours a day does something to you.
- A few days ago the baby was napping when I woke up, so I tilled some earth first thing in the morning, and I came back feeling unrealistically great about life.
- Pulling weeds out feels so compulsive-good it’s hard to stop even when my body hurts. At first I could barely tell the difference. Now I can instantly spot bristly oxtongue seedlings hiding in a patch of clover.
- The first time I saw the clover I’d sown come up in fragile green furls, I felt far more awe than after childbirth.
- When I close my eyes, I see seedlings coming out of the soil, the way I used to see Tetris blocks after playing too much Tetris.
What else devours my time? Cooking and cleaning, obviously. Having reasonable finances and transitioning the baby away from formula depends on cooking regularly. There’s more to clean, and the consequences of not cleaning are worse.
Less defensibly, so does keeping an eye out for secondhand furniture (and baby toys) on Facebook Marketplace. I used to not notice lack of beauty in physical reality. Now, because the house is my job, I feel twenty times more sensitive to inefficient layouts or plainness. This narrow shelf by the entryway is slightly dangerous for the baby – let’s install a cool floating shelf instead. The cushions on the sofa are annoying to wash if the baby makes a mess – should we get throw blankets? Ones that complement the rug?
(So that’s what wanting throw blankets feels like from the inside!…)
My writing and painting projects suffered. They didn’t suffer when the baby was born – only when I started attending in earnest to the house and the back yard. I’m not that concerned, though. The project part of me is deeply, cheerfully selfish. When I am falling behind as a parent, I feel piercing agony until I catch up on whatever duty I’m neglecting. And if my personal projects haven’t been getting enough attention from me, I feel piercing agony until I make progress. There aren’t that many choices to make. Life isn’t easy, but balance is.
But I don’t have a piercing agony alarm for when I get lonely. So my extradomestic life has not made the cut. I feel unreachable on a fundamental level, like my cells all agreed to not leave the house, spiritually as well as physically.
It’s awful. In Berkeley, there are hundreds of people in my social network who would have been life-changingly good for me when I was thirteen or twenty. Now it takes heroic effort to have dinner with them. Someone who could be my best friend would find it hard to get a hold of me. This seems almost horrible enough to scream, fuck my back yard, I can’t afford to become unreachable. But you see, today I carried my one-year-old out and pushed her in a swinging chair while she (giggling, kicking, smiling at me adoringly) ate a fruit bar, and I know I prefer the nice back yard.
In my twenties, my social circle was a target of intense optimization. I wanted to keep meeting new people, identify my 20 favorite people at any given time, and invest in that changing list. I wanted lifelong friends, yes, but I knew active churn was required to get a really good set of them. Rationally I still endorse this, but I can’t make myself churn anymore. I write for others, I read others’ missives, but it’s like talking through a pinhole. When interesting people message me, I often feel harried instead of enthused. When I force myself to meet new(-ish) people, I have a good time and endorse having met… but it’s just as draining to make plans the next time.
I don’t feel ready to stop exploring. I’m only 31, what the fuck, surely more optimization is possible. The Lindy effect applies to friends, too – it’s not safe to plug up the inlet when attrition continues apace. But my brain is telling me that I’m done. That I went nova and blasted off the outer layers of my life, leaving only my mind, my child and partners, and a handful of old friends.