For a brief moment (toddler’s aren’t really known to slow down, so...) my daughter and I were sitting on a bench looking out at these trees, California live oaks. One moment I was hunched over, for the millionth time that day, making sure she didn’t trip over a train track or put a rock in her mouth, and the next I found myself staring out at this magical woodland. I felt a pause, a calm, and then nostalgia (I’m always feeling nostalgic) for hot and sweaty summers running around Topanga Canyon in oversized Elizabethan dresses with friends from theater camp, warm fall afternoons busily moving from one side of our high school campus to the other amidst such trees off Mulholland Drive, and hiking Temescal, Runyon, or the many other trails throughout the Santa Monica Mountains with my dad and sister. At once I felt a longing for my adolescence, a sadness that it’s gone and that life (and the world) looks so different now. I didn’t realize until this very moment that it’s not just California palm trees I have an affinity for— California live oaks hold a special space in my heart, too.
Like many parents struggling to raise their children in a pandemic, I’m feeling lost, exhausted, and like I’m failing my daughter by not giving her playdates and waterparks and museums and dance class. I feel like I’m failing myself by not getting the laundry done, the dishes done, the mail sorted, the business launched, the website updated, the friends called, the yoga class zoomed. Is she getting enough stimulation? Is she bored? Is she learning? Is she growing? Am I making the most of my time? Am I doing enough for myself? Should I have kept my job even though I was losing my mind working and raising a child? We could use the money. But I could use my mind. Have I wasted a summer? A year? I know it’s out of a desire to connect, but I dread the questions: “How are you doing?” and “What are you up to?” or “What’s new?” IHAVENOIDEA .
And then once the thoughts kind of settled, I was able to see the trees, really see them— how the leaves shimmer the same way the ocean does when the sun hits the water, how the branches wind up like a child’s arms asking to be picked up, how the tree trunks lean in and out like they are in conversation with one another. My daughter probably won’t remember this particular moment, or any trips we’ve been taking to the gardens around Los Angeles lately—and maybe I wont either. But I know we have many more benches to sit on and trees to look up to making the unsorted mail and laundry meaningless, and cementing her childhood memories and my new past, which I will undoubtedly feel nostalgic for.