The Season of Unmet Expectations

deck the halls baby

It’s stick season again

and I’m trying be kinder to myself. My friend Donna calls it “the season of unmet expectations,” and this phrase comforts me. I like knowing that no matter what I do or how much I try, the expectations will never be met. Not my own, not my children’s, not my family of origin’s. Not the impossible demands of a larger culture that still wants women to do up the holidays with good cheer and tireless productivity, decorating and cooking and baking, mailing cards and packages, finding meaningful gifts for everyone without racking up too much credit card debt. 

Past xmas overload, with feline

Meanwhile my phone sends me targeted promises of togetherness– cozy throw pillows and gourmet baking supplies, fairy string lights and balsam-scented soy candles. Capitalism tapping into the generational hunger for holiday bliss.

This is when I think about my tiny grandmother Dede and her Christmas command center down in the basement, a maelstrom of presents, wrapping paper, and ribbon spinning her further into anxious perfectionism. I think of my mother and my deep shame as a child when she told me to write “homemaker” on the school form asking about my parents’ jobs. Without knowing why, I understood she mattered less than my father and other people who had important professions.

Then I think of the Wages for Housework movement and Silvia Federici’s argument that capitalism depends on free “reproductive labor”. How the economy’s disregard for domestic work is unjust, unsustainable. And we need collective, feminist, anti-racist liberation to change it.

This is when I go read a poem or two. Calm myself with Hila Ratzabi’s “How to Pray While the World Burns.” Listen to Hadestown and channel Persephone dancing in hell determined to survive another season underground:

Give me morphine in a tin
Give me a crate of the fruit of the vine
Takes a lot of medicine
To make it through the wintertime

But I don’t start drinking. I up my Lexapro and turn on the Happy Lite. Take the dog for a walk in the brown hayfields of stick season and feel the earth under my feet. Reach out to a friend and say I’m having a tough day and do they have time to talk?

I’m trying to be kinder to everyone,

letting it trickle back home. My friend James Crews writes that small acts of kindness– sharing moments of warmth and openness with others– can change the world. His beautiful book about his daily kindness practice shows us the radical power of vulnerability and self-compassion. 

“Self-compassion” is a big word that can feel elusive to put into action. For me right now, it looks like doing less. Spending less time on social media. Keeping my list short. Focusing on my MFA thesis (due soon!) and not taking on extra work. Eating more chocolate and reading more novels, watching “Sex Education” and savoring my favorite character Eric’s iconic moments. 

What do you do to nourish yourself in the dark season? Reach out and share your survival strategies.

DARK BEDS on the road

DARK BEDS book launch: 📷Beowulf Sheehan

Did I really launch a book in October?! This past fall has been a weird time warp with my mom dying in September, just before the equinox. The reading/launch party at the Brattleboro Literary Festival passed in a dreamy whirlwind of sequins, poems, friends, candlelight, Prosecco, book-signing and dancing— my poetry mentors from New England College showed up too. Afterwards I crashed back down into private grieving.

I’ve read poems about my mom at every DARK BEDS event, especially “The Long Goodbye,” which reminds me how hard the late stages of Alzheimer’s are. If you’re losing a loved one to that brutal disease, I see you. I’m sending you love and ease ❤️.

And if you missed the launch, you can watch me reading HERE: I start at about 40 minutes in.

Book tour highlights:

• I felt like a rockstar on the stage of this supercool bar/guitar-shop in Easthampton MA:

  

• I spoke about the intersection of art-making and activism and the healing power of writing our true stories to students at Keene State College.

• I basked in creative synergy with amazing poets and musicians at Sundog Poetry Center’s AMP Night in White River Junction.

Nana¡, Jolivette the Poet Warrior, me, Djeli, and Syd Lea at AMP Night

• I’ll be gathering with June Road Press poets for a virtual solstice reading on December 19 🌟 Details coming soon

• Stay tuned for more DARK BEDS events in 2024— in Massachusetts, Maine, and beyond! Let me know if you have a book group, library, favorite bookstore, or interesting venue where a traveling poet might be welcome.

Jumpstart your writing this winter

I’m excited to share my obsessions and write in community at the wonderful Writers in Progress in Florence, MA on February 17. Join me in person or virtually for Nature & Desire: a generative workshop. All genres and levels of writing experience welcome! Find out more and register HERE.

Learn more at Writers in Progress

2 Poetry Books I Love

• The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On by Franny Choi. Extraordinary poems of grief and wonder, catastrophe and revolution, love and possibility. Franny wowed the audience at the Brattleboro Lit Fest and left us wanting more. Get a taste with the title poem, in Poetry Magazine.

• Landlock X by Sarah Audsley. When I heard Sarah read from her debut at BLF, I knew I needed to see the poems on the page. With lyric precision and fine craft, she weaves her own story as a Korean-American adoptee with the history of international adoption, mixing primary sources and Vermont pastoral landscapes with handmade art collage and spare, startling lines. Check out Crown of Yellow in Tupelo Quarterly

  

2 Novels I Couldn’t Stop Reading

• The Glow by Jessie Gaynor. After losing my mom, I told my novelist friend Helena I needed something captivating but light, the book version of angel food cake. Her recommendation, The Glow, was the perfect confection. A satirical novel about a wellness retreat in New Jersey and the desperate young publicist who discovers it, I devoured the paperback in a few days, chuckling to myself.

“Jane had dated two investment bankers. Both were lacrosse-presenting blond men who spoke of their very recent years at Princeton with a level of nostalgia Jane associated with the Greatest Generation, except they were talking about eating clubs rather than storming the beaches at Normandy.”

- Jessie Gaynor, The Glow

• We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman. I just started this remarkable novel and am re-reading passages to savor its comedic brilliance and delay the moment when it’s over. How can a book set in a hospice be so funny, delightful, life-affirming, and heartbreaking all at the same time? An ode to female friendship and the hilarious mess of being human, loving, living and dying. Also good medicine for grieving.

you need to read this

Thanks for getting into Girl Trouble with me. Take good care and lower your expectations this season.

xo Diana

P.S. “Now there’s no need for regret/ because I’m about to get/ A diagnosis…”. Destigmatizing mental health one brilliant song at a time on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend :)

P.P.S. Seals snoring never fail to make me happy 🦭

P.P.P.S. Deck the halls with poetry— grab a copy of DARK BEDS for a loved one or yourself ✨