Excuses, Excuses

But here I am!!

In Brooklyn, with parenting and domestic duties tangled around me, I watched Take This Sabbath Day, the fourteenth episode of the first season of our favorite TV show, maybe ten times. I wrote about Brad visiting me, about comic relief. I wrote about my small Levi’s and Josh’s spit take. I wrote about Martin and his deep moral compass as a human being and how Bartlet reflected that. But nothing satisfied me. I wondered what my issue was, returning again and again to my computer over the past several months, closing it and walking away. My son Fernando said one evening, “Mom, when was the last time you posted?”

“Hmm?” I said, scraping a dirty plate into the trash, pretending not to hear.

“When was the last time you posted?”

“I don’t know, it’s been a bit.” I explained that I had been busy, that I had stuff with the house and parenting, that it was difficult to find time to write. But I knew the truth. It was hard to do new things and even harder to do them consistently. Acting was a template offered to me to interpret. An audition or job was fun—it was easy—a bright flash and then back to life. But writing is the opposite. Absolutely nothing happens. No one tells you you are brilliant, that you look great in your pencil skirt. There are no lattes offered, banter enjoyed, or deep naps at lunch in your womblike trailer then back to a buzzing set. It’s just you and your monkey mind alone in a room with a mental load as heavy as a Greyhound bus.

“Excuses, excuses…” Fernando said, scrolling, opening the fridge.

“He’s not wrong,” my sister Meegan said later while I unpacked my groceries. My family and I had come to Venice for the summer where things already felt easier—trunks filled with Spindrift and exactly zero miles walked.

“Not wrong?!” I said. “You’re one to talk.”

“What do you mean?! I’m resting dude. Not avoiding.” Meegan and I FaceTimed most days, sometimes more than once. She had become my de facto mother whether she liked it or not and gamely addressed any need—existential, cooking, legal. She offered medical advice although not a doctor and parenting advice although not a parent. She was available only because after twenty-five grueling years as a lawyer she quit her job with no new job waiting. On the first day of her not working, I started getting photos of sourdough bread and brioche buns and cakes with pink ombre frosting. My family began asking, a little worried, are you starting a bakery? Selling at the farmers market? Our niece suggested a TikTok micro store, whatever that is. But she rejected it, long tired of toiling, she had decided to give herself some time. When I ask her what she plans to do, she told me, “This,” and waved her hand like Vanna White, moving the camera across the lumpy surface of her well-worn couch and crocheted blanket. She said her issue was, she suspected she might live an annoyingly long life and run out of money. “Maybe I’ll die young and then I won’t have to worry about it.”

“I really hope not,” I said. “Then I would have to die too and it might become like a domino-type situation.”

“Ok fine. I’ll live. But I still have no idea how I’ll pay for it.”

Earlier that day I ran into my friend Alice. We were standing out front of Whole Foods, as one does in LA, talking about how skinny the city had become, how the place seemed to have lost a dress size since the last time I was here, when she paused and put her hand on my forearm. She then told me, with a big smile—the kind you make instead of crying—that her husband of thirty years left her. She was out of town working, and when she came back, he had packed his stuff and was gone. She said she was trying to figure it out—life. She was sunny and looking good, but expressed how difficult it was at nearly 60 to reinvent herself. We worked the whole run of West Wing together, she doing my make-up, touching my face every day for seven years. Like all of my West Wing colleagues do, Alice feels like a member of my family.

“This reinventing thing seems bogus,” I told her. “Kind of self-hating if you really think about it. I mean, were generations before us saying at fricken fifty they had to reinvent themselves? What about the self we are now?!”

“I know…” She sighed and kicked a little stone on the hot pavement. “Transitions are just hard.”

As I drove away, I thought about that and realized that transition was all life was—moving from one story line to the next. I thought about Take This Sabbath Day—how effortless Aaron was at shifting these threads, from the funny to the difficult and back again. It would be nice if reality could be so elegant. But the story in this show was not without uncertainty. I loved watching Martin walk the halls, asking everyone for their advice, anything to shed light on which direction to take. In the end he had to go with his gut, as imperfect as the decision was. Even fictional presidents sometimes muddle through, looking for the light switch in the dark.

And I guess that’s what we all have to do—me and my girls. Figure it out. Hang on. As my mom always said, when you are confused and not sure what’s next, just wait, because things will always change.

Later that morning, I was sitting at my computer at the kitchen table thinking about how stupid Brad was in this episode, and how much I loved him when my son appeared. He had just woken up, the heat of sleep still radiating from his rumpled hair and sports shorts. I wanted to jump up and grab him, pull him onto my lap like a baby and smother him with kisses. I did not though. He is getting older—transforming, a little more distant, more full of mystery every day.

“Watcha doin’?” he asked, finding his cell on the counter.

“I’m trying to write.”

“Good job Ma,” he said, mildly, looking down at his phone, not really paying much attention. “That’s all you can do, right? Try?

”