Looking forward, and backward
at this great mystery that is life.
I hosted a Baby “Sprinkle” yesterday for a close friend who is very pregnant with her second baby, and running around to order cake and flowers and source gift bags and print photos took a surprising amount of my free time last week. It was so worth it though.
The older I get, the more I recognize the importance of celebrating things and people, and it felt really special to celebrate my friend, who I met only a few years ago in our mom and baby class. Time flies, and one day Ava and Parker were crawling around loving on each other in class, and I was thinking Rachael seemed cool, and now here we are, having spent much of the last two years together, getting excited to meet baby sister.
Hosting this event, along with a few other things recently, has made me realize how full my life here has become. We’re coming up on nine years in San Francisco, which is crazy, and even though we’ve just moved to a new neighborhood, I feel more rooted and grounded than I have felt in a looooong time. Probably because we have finally and fully committed to actually staying here, at least for the foreseeable future.
Before we bought this place, pretty much ever since Ava was born, we’ve been doing this thing of Where are we meant to settle down?, and If it’s here, how will we make that work and maybe we just give it all up and move to Whistler? (Jk. It’s like 3 million for a tear-down there, but for a minute we let ourselves dream).
I hadn’t realized how much that sense of not being ‘all in’ was a background noise to my life here for the last few years. Each time I’d look around, at the bridge, the Bay, the Monterey Pines, or the profusion of flowers and succulents and vines bursting out of every conceivable space, I would think God, this place is so beautiful. How could we ever leave here?
The possibility of having to give this all up was right there, gnawing at me, all this time. Unacknowledged, but very much a presence in my thoughts.
Or we’d be at the Farmers’ Market, listening to live music in the sunshine in the middle of February, eating sandwiches from the food truck, watching Ava dance around in front of the stalls full of local produce and thinking, How could we ever leave this all behind?
It was happening with my relationships too. I would look around, at the friendships that have deepened so much in the last few years, at the “mom friends” I’ve made since Ava was born, or our “couple friends” who are now also parents, our daughters growing up together, and think, It would be so hard to give this all up and start over again. We could never come up with a place we would rather be, but it felt crazy to try to settle down in a place that can be so transient, a place that’s so prohibitively expensive and competitive in every way, in this hot mess of a country, so far from our families and many dear friends.
And yet, here we are, finally having done it. Having decided that, at least for the time being, San Francisco is our home and where we will raise our daughter. It feels big to put that in writing, to read it aloud to myself. But what a relief to let go of all that agonizing about the future and to just be here.
Just this morning, driving down to Fort Baker to visit the Discovery Museum, I was staggered by the underside view of the Golden Gate, the city from a distance on a cloudless day, and the Bay glinting blue as far as the eye could see. God, it’s beautiful here, I thought, and that was that. Just gratitude blooming in my chest as I took it all in. How lucky we are to live here.
Meeting our friend Tiffany and her daughter, watching the girls hug and check out each others’ sandals and (attempt to) high five, sitting in the sun and watching them play at the water tables, I felt grateful, at peace. How fortunate we are to have the friendships we have here.
In a few weeks, I’m taking a weekend away to myself. A dear friend of mine, someone I rarely see, but who I feel deeply close to, is having a baby shower at her home in Mendocino County, and it felt really important for me to be there. We met at Writer’s Camp at Esalen in 2018, and, sitting across the room listening to her acerbic poem about life in Los Angeles and thinking This chic seems cool, I would never have imagined that I would one day be traveling to spend a weekend in Fort Bragg to celebrate her becoming a mother.
I’m imagining myself already, driving north on Highway 1 that Friday afternoon, the sun shimmering across the Pacific to my left, thinking back on that week we met. I had no idea then that Alissa, who I met at the same time, would become one of my very best friends. That she would host a baby shower for me at her apartment in 2022, that I would stand up with her at her wedding in 2024, and that just last week, I would push Ava in her stroller from our new home to Golden Gate Park to meet Alissa and her baby girl, that we’d stand side by side and push our daughters on the swings.
Alissa sent me a text after our park date last week, a photo of the girls on the swings and a note saying “Who would’ve thought we would be here after meeting at a writing camp at Esalen?!”
Life is crazy that way. We have no idea quite where we will end up, or who will matter along the way. While all of that uncertainty is part of what makes this whole thing beautiful, it feels really good to have a little more certainty for the time being.
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