2023 was a year of seismic change for me. I had surgery at the end of 2022, and had one ovary and both fallopian tubes removed, putting a full stop at the end of my childbearing years. I changed jobs, leaving my beloved Farm Alliance of Baltimore in August and heading just around the corner to become a co-director of Impact Hub Baltimore, where we are building a base of support, refuge, and care for Baltimore’s small business owners. I got separated, and am getting divorced (amicably, in a peaceful manner) from my partner of 22 years. I turned fifty. All of these are facts. They happened, and I cannot alter them. I can only move forward in the new realities they’ve created in my life.
Since turning 50, I’ve been thinking about the ways my role in family and in the movements for peace and justice are changing along with my age. No longer am I the one to brainstorm how we build power, move in formation, change systems and worlds. No longer am I the sole executor of all the tasks needed to run a family home, or a nonprofit business, or an office. No longer do I set the meeting agenda and run the meeting. No longer do I help to organize a demonstration or write a petition or hand out leaflets in parking lots. I show up to the demonstrations others have organized. I set a course for strategic planning, and expect that others will fill in the specifics. I teach my children to cook using their own knives and ingredients that they’ve chosen for the family meal. I edit and review others’ agendas and whitepapers and newsletter writing. So many of the actions I once felt impelled to take in order to hold the center of the house, to hold the center of the job, to maintain order and keep things pushing forward — those actions are in large part now completed by others. Where do I fit?
Having accepted a position of leadership in my new job, and having little understanding or knowledge of the people there so far, I am back at the beginning. But the beginning now is still not “Mariya does all the things”. I’m incredibly thankful for the team of capable operations specialists, events planners, communications professionals, and business support techs who execute all the tasks that are needed to keep the place running. Where we are going, the roadmap to our movement-building, that part’s on me.
In my family, in its reshuffled new formation-that-is-still-forming, I play much the same role. I’m not shopping weekly or cooking every meal. I’m gently reminding the shoppers and cooks that meals must happen, and that they must be healthy and that I need to inherit a clean kitchen when it is my turn to cook or make the morning coffee. I don’t help kids with homework, I remind them that their grades are a priority as we steward their dreams toward adulthood. It’s a right-sizing of my role that has been a long time coming.
And it isn’t a moment too soon for me. My body has been sending signals that it needs more attention for some time. I will have to decide about selling this house and finding a place to live in the near-ish future. The family research and book project are not going to complete themselves. There are birds to watch, and friends to connect with, and joy to find.
Instead of New Years Resolutions, these are the guiding principles that I’m organizing my intentions around in 2024.
CARE
I’m excited to read Premilla Nadasen’s new book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, later this month. Caring for each other within our communities and within relationships does indeed feel like a radical act. And it’s one that all of us are called upon to perform, at various points throughout our lives. I’ve cared for my babies, my children, my spouse, my members, and I am learning to care for myself. Receiving care from others has felt like a last frontier, one that I was forced to cross when I had COVID in 2022, and again when I had my surgery. My sisters showed up and cleaned my house, a few people sent cards, people from my synagogue brought lovely food. I must remember that my role as caregiver can also contain care-receiver, and the reciprocal nature of it makes it more powerful.
GUARDIANSHIP
I’m still thinking actively about this, but I am feeling called to serve as a guardian of the dreams of others these days, rather than merely being a dreamer myself. Reader Betsy sent me this beautiful profile and interview with a Baltimore based Quaker who speaks eloquently of the importance of stewarding the heart-visions of children; I think of this with my kids, but also hold this question: How do I apply it broadly to the dreams of small business owners, and those building a world of justice and peace? What can I do to protect the work that is already happening? Not in a paternalistic or extractive way, but in a way that supports their work and allows it to continue unharmed and unimpeded by racist, patriarchal and oppressive structures?
NOTICING
I recently completed a writing exercise invented by the exceedingly generous and talented writer Alexander Chee, called Bibliomancy for the Living Autobiography in the Third Person, in which I mined the books on my shelves for quotes selected at random, and then made a list of the common themes in the quotes. One of the major themes I found was: There Is Power In Observation and Noticing. This is something I have been trying to focus on in my writing, as well as in my professional nonprofit work. Noticing things in and of itself can be a difficult thing to pin down, it is ephemeral and we always want some sort of trace or mark left by it. But in the best, flow-state kind of noticing practice, such as birding or music listening or geocaching, there is no trace except the improved and sharpened senses of the noticer. What is to be said about it, except that noticing is a form of learning, and one that feels accessible to me even as my ability to acquire new knowledge feels more tattered and faded with each passing year? Seeing things as they are, not as I wish them to be, is a discipline that I haven’t practiced nearly enough; and yet it feels to me to be the most critical one of my life.
QUERYING
Asking guiding questions that draw on my body of experience and whatever knowledge I’ve managed to gain over my five decades of life, THAT is a powerful tool. It feels like riding a tiger, sometimes, to present such questions in a group setting. I try to be judicious with the questions — i don’t need or want to shape every conversation! Maybe it will come in more handy at work than anywhere else. Deploying it with the kids is generally less successful.
DELIGHT/GRATITUDE
We who age have a choice: let the pleasures and delights of life pass unremarked and be swallowed by the impassive waters of time, or say THANK YOU, UNIVERSE for the friend or seeing a bunch of hopping frogs in a rainstorm or the orgasm or the perfect tomato or the ride home from work where you had no red lights. I am trying to choose the latter. One small thing from today that I am grateful for is the pleasure of getting to work from home and going to a pilates class at the gym, feeling the muscles in my abdomen and hamstrings shake and sweat from prolonged effort, and then hearing the instructor’s voice after class ring out in my direction: “I’m glad you came back!” 🥰 Indeed. Me too.
Love, Mariya
Happy New Year and thank you for sharing these insights on the changing year and about what you notice in the changes in your life. It is a strange thing, turning 50 and I could relate to what you wrote about changing roles in movement and home work. I am turning 60 in two years and I'm sure that it will be a time of reflection and thought as well. Take care - jenya