Autumn’s Meditation Interrupted

my children have ruined October

Oct 25, 2023

“The thing with October is, I think, it somehow gets in your very blood. Unapologetically. Almost ruthlessly.” —Anne Sexton

I came of age in the 90s so I feel most alive when everything around me has the promise of death to it. Autumn is Reality Bites writ real. My favorite season.

Soggy walks, wet leaves, the smell of the earth refusing our concrete, like a swell of wave in the air, demanding our senses pay attention. The embarrassment of yellow ginkgo trees, a flash of color before we cut to the dark, the cold, the dead. One final dalliance before the year leaves us forever.

The original emo poet, John Keats, made the last work of his career an ode to autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

But my children have stripped October of its poetry.

Keats’ “soft-dying day” isn’t soft at all when you have four young boys and the sky is dark by four. Because there is nowhere to go but here and so here becomes a nightmare of popcorn in the couch, claustrophobia, screentime negotiations, fashioning slingshots out of every household item we own. And added to our numbers: the mice have invaded from the park across the street. They are eating our couch because there’s popcorn in our couch. Sunday family meetings have yet to happen on an October Sunday. In October, there is no sign of the positive discipline weekend workshop my husband and I did four years ago.

By now, we should be in routine. The transition between summer free-for-all and school’s free-for-none is over, and yet we’re still dealing with how to pack our bags, how to remember our homework, our lunch, our violin—three of my four children are barely using a fork. All the foods our youngest approved of in September are comida-non-grata now and the menu options have narrowed to a nutritional tundra including peanut butter, crustless bread, and frozen (not thawed!) peas.

Then there’s of course the month’s looming hell-raiser: Halloween. I used to rejoice in pumpkin picking, costumery, gourds on the table, leaf crowns. Now I’m either ordering future landfill or claiming I’ll make the costumes myself in time that doesn’t actually exist which means ordering future landfill but late and so spending money on rush orders on whatever’s still in stock. And I’ll let you guess what gourds have become. It is the cryingest of holidays. Our tears would feed a river on this day.

I can’t even be maudlin and melancholy myself because my children fill up all the space with their whinging. And here’s the worst: I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

Last night at dinner, the noise level of four hangry boys wanting to talk about their day’s highlights and woes built to a crescendo; a pet bird whistling The Addams Family theme song whirled around our heads; I looked at my husband across the table and WS Graham’s poem opener “Gently disintegrate me” floated before me.

There is a terrific entropy happening in myself and in us.

Capture System

And I realize that is what October has become: instead of watching the natural world shut down, I am chronicling our own deterioration through our inability to create systems. Imagine the leaf on a stream, its edges curling like a boat’s hull or a beetle dying, that’s us. I’d say we’re zen in our refusal of systems, but we’re battered and we’re gasping for air.

In a conversation with my online writing group last week, we were discussing how we capture and organize observations, ideas, notes, readings, so that we can use them later in our writing. “What is your note capture system?” asked the facilitator. The flood begins: Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Raindrop & Pocket. The chat aflame and my blood pressure rising. It’s anxiety-inducing to consider the systems I don’t have in place.

In a breakout room, Raksha asks, “what if I don’t have time to develop systems?”

“My kids are alive, that is my capture system,” I tell Raksha and Rob.

And I look to my bookshelf for help.

Memory

Once upon a time, I’d pick up any book that had the word “Autumn” in its title. The season was that irresistible to me. Above me on the shelf, Ali Smith’s novel Autumn begins: “That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have always will, it’s in their nature.”

Six years ago today, my husband and I went to a reading by Karl Ove Knausgaard of his book, also titled Autumn. It is the first in his Season quartet and it chronicles quotidian life for his yet-to-be born fourth child. The book includes meditations on rubber boots, badgers, lice, plastic bags. I was nine months pregnant with our third child and that year was perhaps the last time I really loved autumn.

Since then, my husband and I have gifted the rest of Knausgaard’s quartet back and forth: we simultaneously gifted each other Winter, he gave Spring, and I gave Summer.

As I pull Autumn off my shelf today, relics of the past spill out.

A postcard of David Hockney’s Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica that reads: “B, remember our ride down the Pacific Coast Highway in the muscle car and you in your muscle shirt? -A”

A card from my husband in 2017. It is Valentine’s Day and we are apparently in Morocco. As he is writing, I am sleeping with our first born who must be five as his father is writing this. In the card, in my sleep, he tells me about a cat that broke into our riad and left chicken scraps all over the floor. “In spite of it, I can’t think of a better partner for these (Mis)adventures than you.”

Who stuffed these in here? Me? Him? A child of ours?

There’s an inscription, too, from a friend: “To Alissa and Ben, Your decision to bring a third child into the world gives me hope as I envision children parented by people like you. Love, Robyn, Autumn 2017”

We are at the point in our marriage and the point in our lives when it becomes clear nothing is a trajectory. And to promise it will be is disappointment.

People too, I realize, don’t move in upward arcs. Last night I had a dream we were gathered for Christmas, a flock of birds rose up and my dad walked down to the river at the back of the house—some house. A shark jumped out of a freshwater river and consumed the top half of him. I was the only one to run to him. No tears came, but my face looked like Edvard Munch’s Scream.

Simultaneously, my husband had a dream we were performing in an immersive all day theater experience. All our friends had been invited. We moved field to field, and I was annoyed at his lack of enthusiasm.

There are very clear lines I can draw from these dreams to our lives—they are more than analogies—but I’ll resist the dream analysis. Just know this: we don’t usually share dreams, but October is weird. And when we climb out of bed, stiff with cold and the sameness, we must know each other again, get things squared so all else doesn’t fall apart. Because things are falling apart, they always do.

Reconciled

A student reads to us aloud: “they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things.” At school this week, I’m discussing with my students the reconciliation between the two protagonists in E.M. Forster’s Howards End. After a series of hurts, misunderstandings, bad choices, the two sisters find themselves together, surveying their old things and rooting in their shared memories. Their banter takes on a familiar patter, like spring rain. And the passage snags at me.

In autumn, trees begin to go dormant, with the cooler weather and shorter days, they slow production of the hormone auxin, putting a strain on the bond between branch and leaf. Eventually, the bond becomes so weak, the leaf will blow away. And as trees stop growing, their energy moves from their leaves to refocus on their roots.

There are many passages dog-eared in our copy of Autumn, and one points me to a string of sentences a former self must’ve known I’d need today: “Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it.”

And so, I book a date for this Sunday. We’ll see Teju Cole read this time, he and I. The roots of this family.