It's okay to be tender right now

If you're down bad reading on your couch, finding your people and your books, you're not alone.

Art by @joolsannie

This week I find myself in a tender place.

Do you?

I’m out of hot takes. There are a lot of hot takes, and many that I have enjoyed. But I can’t muster any at the moment. The feeling in my bones is one of wanting to crawl under a warm blanket, and that is what I’ve done a lot of this weekend whenever I got the chance.

---

Hello, thank you for joining thousands that read MR every month! You can subscribe here

Paid subscribers get access to subscriber chats, all our interviews and thoughtful essays, book club, and other paid content that helps keep us sane in these times. You can subscriber for only $4.50 a month, using the links below.

It’s a great time to support independent feminist journalism.

---

Instead, can I tell you something wonderful that happened this week?

I have written before about some friends and neighbors of ours who opened a beloved bakery in our neighborhood. It’s the best kind of cozy and light-filled place where you can get a coffee and a pumpkin spice muffin, or a biscuit with homemade jam.

Well, this weekend, two doors down from the bakery, they also opened a new bookstore. A bookstore. Where there was once a dry cleaner, there now is a mauve-pink space with gorgeous floor-to-ceiling custom shelves. There are skylights and big, brass art deco chandeliers to read by. There is a coffee bar inlaid with turquoise tiles. And there are so many books!

dutchbabybakery

A post shared by @dutchbabybakery

We went on Saturday morning, mainly because my six-year old daughter was dying to go to the opening. I set some expectations going in that we were going to buy one book only (and one for a birthday party gift). But when I walked in, I knew immediately that I was a goner.

The place was packed. There were all my neighbors—it seemed every family in the neighborhood had turned out.

And on the shelves, there was Borges, there was bell hooks, there was James Baldwin. There was Octavia Butler, there was Judith Butler. There was Diana Gabaldon, there was Terry Pratchett. There was something for everyone. In the children’s section my daughter plopped down onto the middle of the floor to read Wild Robot. And my heart caught in my throat when I caught sight of Charlotte’s Web with the same cover as the copy that my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Mackris, read to us.

All around, my neighbors were saying good morning and talking excitedly and pausing in corners to ask what the other was reading. This is how we will do it. I thought to myself. We will keep being together, and we will keep reading and keep learning.

Susie Kaufman

of

seventysomething

, who has been through a few crisis cycles in her time, taught me this week that in times like these there is the “Do Something” response, and the “Grieving” response, and we are seeing a lot of those right now. But those are not the only options.

Kaufman points out there is also Thinking, and its correlate—the “Learning” response.

She writes: “Americans are poorly educated and notoriously ahistorical. There is so much we need to learn about democracy. How it has been known to sicken and die, how to nurse it back to health and infuse it with new life.”

I wasn’t the only one who was feeling as though the timing of the bookstore opening was miraculous. You did this for us just when we needed it, I overheard a shopper say to Kara, one of the owners.

Of course, the bookstore had been in the works for some time. But during this last year of paralysis and fretting, they laid the plans to make this good thing. That kind of knocks me over. And this was on top of an immigration crisis they went through over the summer that had one of them stuck in another country for months. So, it wasn’t exactly easy to do such a thing.

Kara, one of the owners, told me that the 170 crates of books (170 crates of books!) that she ordered arrived the day before the election, and can you imagine summoning the energy for such a literal heavy lift at that moment?

She told me that over the next several days many generous friends volunteered to help shelve the books, even as it felt like the world was turned upside down. And do you know, she told me, they actually didn’t want to leave? The books felt familiar, and safe, and lovely; and shelving and organizing them with care gave them something good to do. A way to show care while it felt like things were unpredictable and out of control. She practically had to shoo them out.

And then voila, the store was stocked with 170 crates of books, and the following week the doors opened.

I keep thinking about care this week, as I feel myself turning inward and wanting to have my family close by me. I want to snuggle on the couch with my daughter and watch movies. I want to stay in on Saturday morning and eat waffles together. I even cooked a homemade meal this week—and my partner is usually the one to do the cooking.

I have heard several people say that this time reminds them a bit of the early pandemic lockdown. People might be as bad or worse than usual online, but in person, we are a little kinder with each other, a little more patient with strangers, a little more wanting to draw our loved ones close.

This made me start to think that maybe we are more prepared for this moment than we think we are.

For the last eight years, we have been moving through one crisis to the next. It’s not really that fun to live through historic times, it turns out! I, for one, could do without some of the excitement.

But we have also learned and changed a lot in that time. Part of why the tenderness of this time reminds me of the pandemic is a heightened sense of awareness around bodies and suffering and the care that holds everything together, in spite of it all.

Collectively, we have now been through the pandemic, and then Ukraine, and then Gaza. And now so many vulnerable people in America are much more vulnerable too, including women who are losing their rights, including the right to have their lives protected.

We have been awash in daily reminders of the tender vulnerability of our bodies, and how they are the site of everything wonderful, and everything tragic. It’s almost unbearable at times.

But it also reminds me about this research about post-partum, one of the most tender times in a human lifecycle, that I wrote about here. Researchers have found that the tender post-partum time of learning to care for a baby is when the adult brain is its “most plastic.” The brain is actually able to re-organize itself.

But get this: it’s not just those giving birth—there’s growing evidence that brain changes can happen to anyone who is doing intense care work.

Fathers, adoptive parents, grandparents, and even nurses in the NICU might experience shifts that make them “more effective guardians” and activate brain regions linked with empathy and understanding. (It also activates regions attuned to risk, which helps explain my, um, intense safety neurosis when my child was a newborn.)

New parents sometimes describe a sensation that their brains have been “scrambled.” They kind of have. This New York Times piece by Jenni Gritters explains how the brain actually “prunes” itself and changes its appearance to the point that researchers can easily identify post-partum brain scans from those of peers.

So here’s my unsupported theory: This collective heightened awareness around care and suffering has been a lot to bear, but what if it might also change us, or even our brains, in ways that work for our good?

An article in Lancet claims that there is evidence that the pandemic “triggered enormous displays of pro-social behavior” with neighbors coming to the aid of each other while isolated in quarantine, and supporting community front-line workers.

All of those enormously successful Go Fund Me campaigns, which depressingly reveal the shortcomings in our systems? They also reveal some deep lines of empathy and a desire to relieve suffering, often between people who don’t know each other.

I know, I know, all of that happened and yet here we are now. Another thing I keep thinking about right now is how change doesn’t happen as fast as we want it to. How hard that is to sit with. For some of us, much of the change we want to see won’t even be in our lifetimes. This can be a lot to swallow for those of us who were raised on myths of White Saviorism and American Exceptionalism. Like, this really was not part of the plan!

But this has, nonetheless, always pretty much been the case. James Baldwin said “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” He also said: “The day will come when you will trust you more than you do now, and you will trust me more than you do now. And we can trust each other.”

This week Amanda Montei wrote about Adrienne Rich, and how she wrote about “the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored” and “the difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into.”

I feel more tender, and more galvanized, around the things that I care about, than I did a decade ago. Maybe more of us feel that way all the time.

One of the books that I brought home from the bookstore is Kate DiCamillo’s beloved Tale of Despereaux. It’s the story of a mouse who is born too small, with ears too big, and is born with his eyes wide open. My daughter and I have been cuddled up on the couch reading it together.

Despereaux is born into a dire time in dire circumstances. He is the only one of his litter to survive, thus his mother names him the French word for sorrow or despair. His body and his disposition aren’t “right” for mousekind, so he is stripped of his right to live and banished to fend for himself. Sound familiar?

I know that Despereaux’s story is about loss and also about love and forgiveness and bravery, because I read some mild spoilers to make sure it would be suitable for a young child. No one really knows what the next years hold for us, though. Or the years after that, for those of us lucky enough to have them.

But wouldn’t you like to be one of those that has too-big ears, that allow you to hear music that sounds like honey? Wouldn’t you like to be one of those with wide-open eyes that let you read the great books and know the great stories, instead of just nibbling at the paper?

---

Dear readers, one of my favorite things of the last year was reading “All Fours” with many of you here in our MR book club. I think it’s time do the next installment. One thing I’ve learned is that I can get through almost anything while reading a good book. Even better if it’s with friends!

I’m proposing “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” by Rufi Thorpe. It’s described as an“exceptionally tender, sharp, and funny story about young motherhood and unplanned pregnancy and love, that also involves professional wrestling, and yes, OnlyFans.” I bought it at my new favorite bookstore on the rec of my bestie and MR reader and book editor, and it had me at Page 1.

Would you be up for it?? Watch for a chat thread with details.

---

Something else good

Y’all, the universe giveth and it taketh away. But right at this moment, Timothée CHALAMET is on my street somewhere—I’m assuming in a Haddad’s truck where he reads Proust and has La Mer applied to his perfect face every 60 minutes. And he is filming IN MY BUILDING. This is not a drill. So I have to go this very minute to begin my low-key stakeout, and I shall return and report.

A 70-year old neighbor already made my day when I saw her this morning and she noted all the excitement of the film crews setting up and I told her that there were some real A-listers. When she asked who and I started to explain who Timothée Chalamet is, she shouted: TIMOTHEE CHALAMET! Oh my god! And had a proper fangirl freakout. And. Isn’t it just great to know that there are some things that still bring us together, and bring us joy? We still have Chalamet, y’all.

---

If you’re enjoying our work, hit the “like” button, comment, share it with someone else—that helps our work find more readers.

Now is a great time to support independent feminist journalism that actually centers women and women’s experience!

You can support our work with a paid subscription starting at just $4.50 a month.

---

MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.