Season 2, episode 10: the breakdown //
Wednesday, November 25, 2020

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

--

Every morning for the past couple of months, I’ve gotten up before my family, usually before the sun, not because I want to but because I’m unable to sleep past a certain point. For the first time in my life I’ve come to love the dark, those pre-dawn hours that are mine alone. No matter how tired or discouraged I am, there is undisturbed quiet, coffee with a splash of cream, a soft blanket across my lap, everyday miracles that I jot down in my notebook. This week I read studies about gratitude as a predictor of better physical health, gratitude as an antidote to anxiety. And it’s true, especially now. Gratitude helps a lot. 

But for the past few weeks, no matter how grateful I feel at the start of the day, by evening a sadness edged with despair settles over me like a low cloud. 

In this month’s Wall Street Journal magazine, Yale Professor Martin Hagglund wrote,

“What is both interesting and challenging about breakthroughs is that you can’t have one without some sort of breakdown. Progress only happens because certain things start calling into question our paradigms.”

If you’ve been following this pandemic Odyssey, then you know that it’s been a year of breakdowns for my family and me, that ultimately led us to abruptly leave our home in Oakland, spend a month on the road, and settle for the foreseeable future in Hamilton, Massachusetts, the town where my husband grew up and where his parents and two of his siblings still live.

In the original Odyssey, Odysseus gets a lot of help from gods and mortals, and yet there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that he was grateful. This is one point where our story diverges sharply from the original. Though the journey here hasn’t been easy, we don’t have any doubts that it was the right call, and there isn’t a day that goes by when we don’t feel deeply grateful. With my mother-in-law taking over the job of schooling the kids and supervising distance learning, and the daily attention of grandparents and an aunt and uncle, our children are happier than they’ve been in a long time. Nate and I are working together not just on Shelter in Place, but in recreating family rhythms to help us love and appreciate each other better. Life is settling into a stability we haven’t had since the pandemic began. 

Shelter in Place has gotten a little more stable, too. We’re excited to announce that we’ve signed a deal with Hurrdat, a Media, Marketing, and Entertainment company. We have our first apprentices, and we’ve formed a creative partnership with the blog Karma Compass. You can hear more about all of those things on our website. We’re still working toward our goal of making this work sustainable, but with some stable freelance work and a growing base of supporters that includes so many of you, the path to getting there is slowly taking shape. 

And yet each day, even as I’ve made my morning list of things to feel grateful for, that fog of sadness creeps in.

It comes out in snippy conversations with my husband, or overreactions with the kids, or passive aggressive comments around my in-laws. It’s a painful reminder that no matter how grateful I am, I fall short on a regular basis of being the person I’d like to be.

It came to a head this past week, when I was making pizzas with my 3-year-old Mattéa, who was standing on a chair gleefully sprinkling cheese on the pizza next in line. My brother in law came into the kitchen and asked if I needed help just as the timer for the pizza in the oven started going off. I scrambled to find something to transfer the baked pizza from the hot pizza stone it was cooking on, but the only thing I could find was another pizza stone, so heavy that I struggled to hold it in one hand. I opened the oven door, but it stopped short and hit the edge of the chair where Mattéa was standing. I should have just closed the oven door and moved her. But instead I opened the door partway and reached into the 550-degree heat. I scraped at the base of the bubbling pizza with a small metal spatula, and attempted to shove it onto the second pizza stone in my other hand. But I couldn’t reach in deep enough to free the pizza entirely, and was losing my grip on the pizza stone I was holding. I huffed in irritation and said--not for the first time--that I wished I had my pizza peel--and then yelped as the underside of my arm touched the hot oven door with a sickening sizzle. 

“I’m sorry we don’t have a pizza peel, and that this kitchen is so inadequate” my brother-in-law said, understandably exasperated, not yet noticing my burn. “You find a way to be critical with every meal.”

I rushed to the sink to put my arm under cold water, my head splintering with pain from the burn. I started to defend myself, but stopped. He was right. I’d been critical and touchy for weeks, and I didn’t even know why. I’d made comments here and there about things I missed from my own kitchen, or ingredients I could get back home in California that I couldn’t get here. It was petty and small of me, I knew, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. 

That night as I was putting my kids to bed, my 3-year-old said, apropos of nothing, “I miss our cozy little home.”

The comment surprised me. She’s been happy here, delighted to have Grammy’s daily attention, and access to baby dolls and art supplies and princess dresses.

And that’s when it hit me. This has been a year of breakthroughs, but as a family, we’re still very much in a breakdown. We’ve been trying to have a good attitude about our life now--and it is good, to be near family, to have support in a time when we desperately need it. 

But no matter how grateful we are, moving--even temporarily--is always hard. When we left Oakland, we left a home we loved, a neighborhood that embraced us, a place that made us feel free to be ourselves. When we return, it’ll be to a different life than the one we left. Friends and neighbors have moved away. Favorite restaurants have shut down. Life has gone on without us.

Thanksgiving was perhaps the time when we felt most proud of the life we’d created in California. Sixteen years ago when we had our first Thanksgiving in Oakland, to soften the blow of missing our families, we invited friends and acquaintances who, like us, didn’t have local family. We did what we could to make the day feel special: we splurged on champagne and a cheese plate, served the meal in courses instead of all at once, decorated the table with local leaves and flowers. After one particularly exhausting year of spending twelve hours on my feet, sweating near the oven, Nate and I had a startling revelation: we were creating our own tradition, and there were many other foods that we loved far more than turkey and stuffing, foods that didn’t have to be cooked the same day. When my chef sister-in-law moved to California, she and her family became part of our annual celebration. Over the years we created our own menu: six courses that with jewel-like salads, fresh seafood, duck and pork belly confit, and lemon meringue ice cream cake--dishes that could be prepared in advance, but still felt special. The Bay Area is a culture of innovative food and cooking, so it wasn’t hard to find guests who were excited to join us, often with their own culinary delights. We’d take turns prepping and serving courses, so everyone got a chance to sit and relax, and no one was stuck in the kitchen. It was a day of what the Spanish call sobremesa, that special time when friends are relaxing around the table after a great meal, lingering in the conversation and the enjoyment of being together.

A quick side note here to say that I know many of you are recoiling in horror right now, hearing our total disregard for tradition. To that I will say that while there was certainly no Truffle Tremor triple cream cheese or lemon meringue ice cream cake at the first Thanksgiving, I recently learned a bit of history that made me realize that our non-traditional Thanksgiving was closer to tradition than we’d originally thought.

The foods consumed on that first Thanksgiving didn’t include much of what we think of as traditional today, most of which came into vogue in the 1800s. There were no ovens or sugar or flour for baking pies, and potatoes would not come into the scene for another century. Historian Edward Winslow writes that at first Thanksgiving, the natives and pilgrims feasted on deer, shellfish, roasted meat, corn, and local fruits and vegetables. While there are accounts of the pilgrims hunting for foul, it’s just as likely that they ate duck, geese, or swan as turkey. 

Also, come eat at our table some year and you just might be sold. 

As much as I enjoy cooking all of those fancy foods, it’s not just the food that I miss this year. It’s what the meal represents.

We’d been raised in families that valued hospitality and cooking, and now we were making those values our own. What began as a sad day of missing family became a celebration of the life we now had. It was a breakthrough--to realize that what we’d seen as a loss could be reframed as a new celebration. Over the years we welcomed dozens of people of all ages into our home. It was an apex of hospitality that we looked forward to.

It was also a meal where we felt free to be ourselves. For centuries people have been coming to California to start over and find a new way of living. We hadn’t realized that that cultural value meant anything to us until we were back in a place steeped in tradition and history. And though it is good and right for us to be here now, and there is so much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, there’s no getting around the truth that being here means a breakdown of the life we knew and loved. 

My mom often told me growing up that change--even good change--is almost always perceived as loss.

There’s no excuse for my bad behavior these past couple of weeks, and I am trying very hard to be pleasant this Thanksgiving. Being near our Massachusettts family during the pandemic is a good change. It’s a life that is, most of the time, incredibly sweet. I am grateful every day for our life here. I’m thankful my brother-in-law has offered to take on the turkey, and that my in-laws are humoring me by letting us start the day with a cheese plate. 

And I miss our cozy little home. My mom was right. Even good change still feels like loss. Gratitude helps, but still, we’re in the breakdown. I have to hope that a breakthrough is coming.

--

I’ll be right back with more of this story right after this short break.

Shelter in Place is proud to be sponsored by Brick and Mortar, old world style wines with California roots. Their wines can be found at Michelin star restaurants like the French laundry and Meadowood. You can find their canned wines at Safeway stores in Northern California. Use the code SHELTER when you order from brickandmortarwines.com to get 10% off and support this show.

--

It’s the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing, and since I’m now living in the state where it happened--a state that cares a lot about history--I want to take a moment to ponder more than just the food at that first Thanksgiving.

That first winter in the colonies had been a harsh one, and almost all of the Mayflower women died. The surviving four women, 22 men, and 25 children who sat down to eat that meal must have wondered if coming to the New World was worth it. They’d lost so much in the journey. There must have been a lot of grief and loss mixed up in their gratitude.

And it wasn’t just a loss for them. Historians think that twice as many Native Americans as colonists sat at that table. That peace between the pilgrims and the natives only lasted a generation. This place was home to the Wampanoag people for over 12,000 years before the pilgrims arrived. Thanksgiving is a reminder of the betrayal and bloodshot that would follow. Since 1970, native people have gathered to remember their ancestors in Plymouth, Massachusetts. If you haven’t heard Mark Charles speak about our nation’s need for a common memory on holidays like Thanksgiving, you can hear him in episodes 74 and 69 of Shelter in Place season one. 

Whether we’re talking about that first Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving today, it’s not just about good food and gratitude. For most of us, it’s way more complicated. Some of us have lost loved ones in the pandemic. Others are celebrating this day alone. My mother-in-law has been welcoming friends and strangers into her home for decades; I know she’s missing that tradition today.

In a study surveying the mental health of 700 adults in San Francisco last May, half of the participants reported feeling more stressed out in the pandemic than at any other previous time in their lives. 

But the study also showed possible signs of a breakthrough: though anxiety is on the rise, gratitude and generosity are, too.

75% of the participants reported feeling more grateful for their health than before, and while this trend is true across all ages and ethnicities, it’s the most marked in those who are ages 51-65--the same group that experienced the biggest surge in anxiety. Two thirds of the participants have been inspired to give to charitable organizations. 33% are donating more now than they were before the pandemic. 

There have been breakthroughs in relationships, too. Dads report being more connected to their kids, partners more connected to each other, and a third of the study’s participants said that even their interactions with strangers had become more meaningful. People are more willing to seek out mental health support, and more than half of the participants said that health and happiness are more important to them than money. 

This is not to say that everything is fine--everything is not fine, especially for low-income workers, who worry that they’ll be fired from their jobs if they show signs of depression or anxiety, and who typically have employers that don’t offer mental health services. There’s still a lot of breakdown to get through before we can find our way to a breakthrough. 

A few days ago, when I was feeling especially low, I went for a run. It was a gray, rainy day where the sun never showed itself, and the ground was covered in puddles. I put my earbuds in and turned on a podcast I love, by my friend and longtime writing group member Nina LaCour. It’s called Keeping a Notebook, and it’s about writing. Nina is a wonderful writer, a bestselling, award-winning author whose most recent book Watch Over Me came out this fall. She was a guest on Shelter in Place back in April, in episode 34: Writing in Place, and we aired a bonus episode of Keeping a Notebook in early May. Keeping a Notebook was a huge inspiration for me when I was starting Shelter in Place, and Nina has encouraged and supported me from the very beginning.

As I splashed through puddles, my shoes and socks soaked through, I listened to Nina talk about disappointment, about how it’s been hard to feel hopeful in these dark times. She had a breakthrough of sorts when she’d realized that darkness was a part of her characters, no matter how hard they tried to be good. She said to let your characters be messy, let them make mistakes, let them be cruel or devious, let them be fully human, so readers can embrace their own complex internal landscapes and accept the difficulties in their own lives. And she said that when she was discouraged herself, she tried new things to experiment or be curious or reach out. She reminded herself that this moment was one moment, just a small part of something bigger that we can’t yet imagine. 

In that moment when I was feeling so dark myself, Nina’s words felt like a gift. They made the breakdown a little less painful. The sky cleared just in time for the sunset, and the day that had been wet and gray glowed with the pink light of evening. It was just the littlest thing, but it felt like a small breakthrough, a reminder that there would be other days, other Thanksgivings, other years. And even when we’re feeling stuck in our sadness, we’re not helpless. We can be curious, and reach out, show our gratitude to someone who needs  it. 

In his book, Manners in the Homeric Epic, I.M. Hohendahl-Zoetelief writes about Odysseus’s failure to be grateful. He writes,

“Thankfulness is not a spontaneous emotion; its development initially costs a certain amount of energy, whereas ingratitude, as the absence of that emotion, does not.”

This Thanksgiving, I’m trying to be grateful, even though it’s easier to be an ungrateful jerk. And since I’m ending each episode with an invitation, I want to invite you to join me. 

Start a daily ritual to help you work through the breakdown. It could be taking a few minutes to music, or create art, both of which have been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. My family has been enjoying the Adobe coloring books, which you can download for free from a link I’ll include in our show notes today. Maybe it’s cultivating a new daily practice of gratitude. If you’d like an easy, practical ways to do that, you can download a one-page pdf I’ve created for you to put on your fridge or on the nightstand next to your bed. You can find that at shelterinplacepodcast.info.

We’ve got a special treat for you this weekend, a bonus episode that I contributed to for the Transmission Times. It’s a short, beautiful episode that captures so much of this breakdown and breakthrough. Make sure you’re subscribed to Shelter in Place so you don’t miss it. 

I also want to take a moment to say that if you’re really struggling right now, our sponsor Imagine Mindfulness offers an affordable online course that might be exactly what you need to make it through the year.

As always, if you listen to the very end, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, which we hope will make you laugh. But first I want to thank one of our newest supporters, Aimee Otto. 

Aimee, even though we’ve never met you, your name has been a household name at Shelter in Place for months. You’ve posted so many kind comments on social media, shared Shelter in Place with friends, and sent me an email that I still think about and appreciate all of these months later. We never imagined that we’d find ourselves in the same town as you, and though this pandemic has prevented us from having you over, I do hope that we can meet each other soon. Knowing that you’re in this with us feels like a little piece of home.

Finally, I want to invite our newest Shelter in Place apprentice, Sarai Waters. Sarai came to us through our partnership with Karma Compass, and has already inspired us with her experience in film, her perspective on the past, and her vision for the future. We’re so excited to welcome you to the team!

If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode,  leaving a quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts helps others to find us. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at the handle shelterinplacepodcast, and on Twitter at laurajoycedavis. If you’d like to sign up for our newsletter and download our one-page pdf on choosing gratitude, you can do that at shelterinplacepodcast.info.

You’ll also find show notes and information about incredible sponsors Brick & Mortar and Delta Wines and Imagine Mindfulness, as well as ways to support the show at shelterinplacepodcast.info with one-time, annual, or monthly donations. We’d love to hear from you. 

Shelter in Place is a Hurrdat production. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for today’s episode came from Storyblocks. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Fatima Romero-Afi and Sarai Waters. Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.

Grace: Hi guys, it’s me, Grace. I was just gonna tell you that we’re really happy about Thanksgiving, and I’m going to talk about Thanksgiving a little bit, how we have duck and crabs and cheese, and we have a lot of really good stuff, and we have a really fun time. A couple of friends come over and we watch a movie. Last time when we were in Oakland we watched Sound of Music. You might hear a little noise in the background. It’s Mattéa reading. Can you say hi? 

Mattéa: Hi. 

Grace: And then Gabe’s folding his clothes. We are just really excited also because we don’t have any school, like, online. We all get to play on Thanksgiving and it’ll be a really fun day. Gabe: And no school for the whole week!