45. A Clearheaded Tenderness.

We are trying to live

in a clearheaded tenderness—

I speak not merely of us, our lives

are “moral and ordinary”

as the lives of numberless women—

I pretend the Hudson is a right-hand margin

drawn against fear and woman-loathing

(water as purification, river as boundary)

but I know my imagination lies:

in the name of freedom of speech

they are lynching us no law is on our side

there are no boundaries

no-man’s-land does not exist.

-Adrienne Rich

from the poem “The Images” in the collection “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.”

Summer 2020 view from the living room, Westwood Place, Asheville NC

In March of 2020, three things happened: my job ended, my beloved friend Glo died suddenly, and COVID stay-at-home orders began. This is an essay I wrote (but never published) at the end of 2020, about that spring, and about encountering my younger self via found journals. Some parts of this essay have since been re-mixed into other pieces, but here it is in full.

As a diligent list-keeper, I often transfer neglected tasks to the next week’s notebook or the next year’s calendar. “Clean out bins” has basically been on my to-do list since I remember keeping lists, maybe since the invention of lists, and the creation of bins.

The bins in question: two plastic under-the-bed sized storage tubs filled with notes, letters, pictures, and journals spanning the decades of my life since middle school. An entire shoebox of undeveloped negatives and grainy proofs of my wedding photographs resides in one of those bins, with “develop wedding pics” another item on the ever-revolving to-do list. Like “clean out bins,” “develop wedding pics” is perpetually bumped to the bottom of the list in favor of more pressing items like “back up computer” and “plan camping trip.” Currently, my goal is to make a wedding album in time for our 20th anniversary in 2022 [narrator: she did not, in fact, make a wedding album in time for their 20th anniversary in 2022]. The bins are full; there is no more room. If I want to keep collecting meaningful scraps of ephemera, I will have to get another bin, which I refuse to do.

Enter: quarantine.

I had just quit my job in February, and my graduate school classes were slated to begin in May. I planned to take a little time off, shake off the dust from the last chaotic year, do some freelance work before grad school. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay for it—the living-without-a-job or the school—but, we are resourceful, I reasoned. We always find a way.

My last day at that job was February 28th. The first US death from Coronavirus was reported the next day, on February 29th. Two weeks later my son’s middle school was cancelled for the rest of the year, then my husband, Duncan, was furloughed to ten hours per week. It took another 4 weeks before unemployment benefits or stimulus checks buoyed our bank account for another mortgage payment, another massive grocery bill. Almost all my consulting work dried up, and there were no prospects for freelance gigs, and honestly, even if there were, would I have been able to execute them? My friend had just died, and I was grieving, and glued to the news. Sleep was elusive. Planning and cooking elaborate meals with my son was the only thing tethering us to any version of a routine.

Slowly, as the weeks rolled on, and our mountain town remained seemingly untouched by the virus, a new kind of routine emerged. I stopped setting an alarm to try to keep an at-home learning schedule for my son. I still had my lists, but the tasks were no longer attached to a particular day. Walks through the abandoned, unmowed parks, riotous with bees, became longer, more meandering. Something began to unspool inside of me. Suddenly, there was time.

I found myself starting to tackle projects: I rearranged the junky furniture on the front porch and got rid of a refrigerator box full of old magazines that I had collected for collage. I divided and repotted strangled aloes and scrubbed 7 years’ worth of grease off the top of the hood vent in the kitchen. And then, one Sunday morning, with grad school looming around the corner and the window of endless springtime rapidly closing, I pulled the bins out from under a table in my study, opened them up, and began sorting and stacking, strewing the contents across the floor.

Fully a third of the first bin consisted of stacks of Christmas cards from far-flung relatives and former friends and colleagues, and birthday, Easter, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day cards, mostly from my parents or my in-laws, to one of the three of us (the gendered emotional labor of being the silently designated steward and archivist of our family’s written correspondence being another topic, perhaps for another essay, another day). These were easy to sort through. I kept maybe one out of ten, noting the shaky handwriting of my late grandmother, or Duncan’s great-aunt, but for the most part, I looked at them fondly, then threw them in the recycle bin. 

Thank you notes comprised another large chunk, mostly from my sisters-in-law, themselves the keepers of my brothers’ families’ emotional inventory, themselves raised in the same Southern white-lady caste as I was, where every gift, every appearance at a shower or brunch, every visit or cocktail hour triggered a heartfelt, handwritten response, preferably on custom monogrammed stationery—the words thank you printed on a thank you note being, of course, gauche. Southern women are machines for making thank you notes.

There were letters from friends—so many letters! Reading them recalled a rhythm of life before the internet, when a morning on a porch with coffee and a cigarette would be an uninterrupted time to sit down and let your mind wander on the page, then wrap it up and send it off to a friend, never to be seen or thought of again. Seems so luxurious now.

I’ve been aboard the train for two days now, another to go before I step off in Northern California. I’m enjoying the trip more than the idea of reaching Marin County and M’s doorstep, reads an excerpt from one long missive by my most prolific letter-writing friend.

Another writes: How are you guys? I haven’t spoken to either of you in forever, and I was going to call tonight, but realized I didn’t have a number. How is everything going? Can you imagine, now, only having a street address to get in touch with someone? Do people even check their mailboxes anymore?

Another friend, in 2003, wrote on a letter-sized piece of birch tree bark: I am still in Minnesota on the North Shore enjoying the only taste of fall I will probably get this year. So far we’ve canoed, hiked, climbed, walked, and gazed at the stars, and Mars (which casts an orange light across the lake it is so bright in the sky). Now, of course, Facebook alerts me immediately when this friend and his partner paint over the beige in their new living room in Colorado, and I get daily Instagram updates on how their ducks are faring, but in 2003 I got a street number of where in Los Angeles he would be moving in an undetermined number of weeks, written in ink on a piece of bark, sent through the US Postal Service.

So much of what I found in the bins was sweet: welcome opportunities to reflect on tender times and places past. But so much of it—handfuls and piles and stacks of it—was gut-wrenching. I was devastated by the losses encased in these two small bins: deaths, divorces, estrangements. The sheer volume of relationships one can gain and lose in 25 years is astonishing. Naturally, as I age, I know more and more people who have died, and of course, over time, people grow apart and friendships break. But I can’t say I have gotten at all used to these facts, and recounting these losses evoked more than a small amount of remorse: the bins unfurled buried griefs and forgotten wounds, documenting the relational failures of their one common denominator: me. I remembered and felt the words of Toni Morrison: now that I'm 84, I remember everything as a mistake, and I regret everything.

One of the more surreal rediscoveries was two manila envelopes mailed to me in recent years by my mother, stuffed full of a lifetime of letters I wrote to her, and memorabilia and clippings of mine that she had kept. Ostensibly, I think these packages were supposed to serve as reminders of the many happinesses we had shared in years past, a protest of our current estrangement (You are a great mom and I can only hope that when I have kids I can do as good a job as you have done!). They were that, but just as frequently, they were a chronicle of our dysfunction, a record of so many repeated injuries over time.

There was a Marietta Daily Journal article circa 1993 profiling me as a “teen environmentalist:”

“Jodi Rhoden, founder and president of Students Against Violating Earth (SAVE) at Wheeler High School, says her brothers and father tease her for her activism. ‘Sometimes they feel that I can be a little fanatic about it,’ she says.”

Cute, but then I remembered that by teasing I meant that my brother, who had a Confederate flag with a skeleton brandishing a sword and the words “The South will Rise Again” hanging on his bedroom wall, thought it was funny to hide dismembered deer parts in my bed when I became a vegetarian. Stop being so damn SENSITIVE, my mother would admonish, when I complained. In the article, my mom says about my campaign to get the school to stop serving lunch on styrofoam and to get the city to recycle: “I do feel it’s a brainwash situation at times.”

To me, the newspaper clipping is evidence of the gaslighting and undermining I’ve experienced my whole life. To her, I imagine it showcases a tight-knit family standing by my side and supporting me despite my obvious ideological extremism.

There was the frantic letter on notebook paper written in the small library of a ranch in New Mexico, pleading for my parents to support my choice to work on a farm in California for a semester instead of going back to college: it’s a business NOT a commune!

There were letters from my pregnancy and early years of parenting, including a year-long separation from Duncan, politely and calmly asking my family to respect my boundaries: “I ask that you respect our privacy by not using my story as your own.” “If you don’t stop criticizing my choices around my birth I will need to limit my time with you.” Reams of reasoned and rational requests for respect and autonomy, panicked but measured bids to keep my place in my family, to avoid punishment and cold shoulders because they didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand my choices, my values, my life. Years of attempts to negotiate what turned out to be an impossible deal: that I could be myself AND be one of them.

The bins documented my slow and painful breakup with my family, relationships that ended not with a bang but a whimper. After a lifetime of boundary violations, drunken arguments, days and days spent writing desperate, impassioned emails thinking if I could JUST get them to understand, if I could JUST be more rational, more articulate, more CLEAR—I gave up. After 2016, among other painful rifts, our political differences began to feel truly dangerous. The rifts became chasms. Over the next few years, I slowly backed away until, one day, I just didn’t respond to one text, or the next, or the next.

Eventually, as I continued to excavate my past in the form of these two plastic bins, I came upon a steno notepad filled with tightly scripted journal entries, labeled 7/23/99 to 9/19/99 on the cover, the summer I turned 23, the summer Duncan and I left Georgia. I am an avid daily journaler now, but I don’t remember journaling then. When I read my old journals, I’m often struck, as I think many are, by my youthful melodrama, the sturm und drang of early adulthood. But reading this journal, I didn’t cringe. Instead, I felt so much care and fondness towards this young person that I was.

From an 8-page entry on August 8th, 1999, while on a family vacation to Hawai’i where we met my brother who was then stationed in Okinawa, I recounted a devastating fight with my father on the first night of the trip:

When I dare to be hurt that he doesn’t remember whole pieces of my life, I am “selfish, playing games, blowing it all out of proportion.” I try to understand - he is old, he is set in his ways, but his ways are so self-indulgent, so power-hungry and wasteful, I cannot forgive him. I tell him that I am not asking him to change, this is not an indictment, please dad, just be honest. I won’t absolve him of his neglect…. And expecting my mother to agree with me, knowing that the same things that chisel away at my self worth hurt her too (“you’re gaining weight, honey!”) I’m bewildered when she tells me that I'm out of line. My dreams are fitful, I rise early. Yes, I am trying to live in a clear-headed tenderness, I am trying to sweep back the tide of confusion that has so often threatened to consume me. He tells me my actions make the bile rise up in his throat.

I framed this trip with my family to myself as an opportunity to get to know them on a different level, more as equals. I was hoping to integrate the knowledge I had gained over the past year - insight (gifts) about letting go, about self-respect, about non-cooperation, non-participation, non-violence.

I decided I would simply not make myself a target, I would be detached, I would transcend their knives by loving them, my thoughts would be fluid, not rigid, I would try to be compassionate. But it seems as though they need my fear, they need my hurt, they go to great lengths to find it. How can I be here and not destroy myself? How can I heal and still have a relationship with these people?

This is a farewell trip, I know this now. Without expecting any understanding I will make my peace in my heart with them. Perhaps their hatred is in a way a liberation, a remembrance that I have no obligation to them, no promises to fulfill. I am afraid. But let this be known: I have a right to live and love in freedom. I have a right to expression, and I will exercise that right. I will not squelch myself to make my presence more comfortable and comforting to those who wish to control me. And I will not be ashamed.

The next day in the journal, I describe a screaming match in a restaurant between my two brothers. “I spoke to Duncan today and was hesitant to explain my day to him—I didn’t want to hear his shock and confusion at the way my family operates.” The following day I write of “painful, disastrous conversations” and feeling “misunderstood and misrepresented.” I spent two pages fantasizing about breaking my brother’s nose, “each blow would be revenge for his meanness and his spite, every torturous scenario, remembered and forgotten, from my childhood.”

The next pages describe going back to Georgia, getting drunk every night, and trying to “disarm myself of the weapons I took up to be around my family.”

Holy shit, I said to myself, sitting on the floor of my study, springtime sunlight streaming through the open window onto the scattered papers and photographs. Holy shit. I knew all along.

But I would forget what I knew. I would bargain, I would negotiate. It would take twenty more years for me to fully and finally walk away.

For a while before I got sober, before I blocked my mother’s phone calls and my brother’s emails, I had a recurring dream. I walked between two ancient columns to a wide bank of marble steps going down into the ocean. The steps got gradually steeper and more narrow as I descended. I walked down the stairs, checking it out, thinking I could turn around at any time and go back up, but eventually, I run out of foothold, I can’t get back, I can’t turn around, and I slip, pitching forward into the inky cold sea, waking up in the panic of free-fall, past the point of no return.

I’m comforted by the remembering found in these bins: that this life IS actually a vale of tears and I should stop expecting it to be calm, or nice, or polite. That I’m here to live life on my own terms, to bring something to the world that only I possess, and so are you. That all bets are off. That there are no guarantees. I haven’t spoken to my mother since last April and I quit a “good” job after barely a year, changing the course of my career yet again. But 23-year-old me knew it was bullshit all along. Fuck it. 23-year old me told me that my aim was true; that everything was going to be OK, for the most part. “Live in a clearheaded tenderness,” she says, and I thank her for reminding me of that. And, like her, I will let this be known: I am not ashamed.

---

Free Palestine, now and forever.

8,000 Philadelphians marched from City Hall to Rittenhouse Square on Tuesday, February 13th in protest of the genocide against Palestinians, with no mention from the paper of record, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

For 134 days, the occupation, apartheid, and genocide of Palestine by Israel has continued, unabated and celebrated: American-made and American-paid bombs continue to blow up children by the thousands in their hospital beds and tents.

• More than 12,000 children have been killed by Israel just since October 7th (Common Dreams, 2/12/24). TWELVE THOUSAND! God help us.

• More than 17,000 children in Gaza have become orphans since October 7th due to Israel killing their parents (Al Jazeera, 2/2/24)

• More than 18,000 Palestinian children have been critically injured by Israeli attacks on Gaza (Al Jazeera, 12/15/23)

• The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of Israel’s attack on Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, and half of those emissions were from US cargo planes carrying weapons to Israel (The Guardian, 1/9/24).

Witnessing this genocide unfold on my phone while the world actively ignores, obfuscates, and excuses it has changed me irrevocably. I hope it changes you too. Because what we are doing, every aspect of this culture that upholds genocide, that arms genocide, that explains genocide, must be dismantled, or humanity will perish. It is literally now or never, and I believe this in my bones. I also know that it is never too late to speak up, and that the truth will set you free.

Here are some actions you can take today:

• Direct mutual aid: Operation Olive Branch and Project Watermelon are grassroots collective efforts to amplify Palestinian voices and connect them to people who can help them. Both projects maintain constantly updated google docs with archives of stories and links to GoFundMes for individuals and families in need on the ground in Palestine.

• Pressure elected officials:

  • 5 Calls is an app that connects you instantly with the comment lines of your elected officials and scripts to follow.

  • Jewish Voice for Peace also has an easy call tool and scripts.

• Join a protest in your area, or start one! Disrupt business as usual. Throw a wrench in the works of genocide. Connect across difference in community.

• Join PACBI, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. PACBI was initiated in 2004 to contribute to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality. It advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights that are stipulated in international law.

• Join the BDS Movement: The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law. BDS was a primary factor in the fall of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, and is gaining traction in regards to Israel. Just this week, UC Davis’ Associated Students voted to divest all of their $20M budget from Israel.

• Donate an eSim. Purchasing and donating cellphone eSims allows people within Gaza to connect to the outside world to communicate with their families and also to document and disseminate vital information about what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, even more crucial as Israel continues to target and kill journalists.

• Resist the dehumanization and cultural erasure of Palestine by seeking out and engaging with Palestinian art, music, poetry, books, film, food, and people.

• Don’t give up hope. The least we can do is to cultivate what Palestinians call sumud- steadfastness. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! 🍉🤲🏻

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Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. If you wish to support my writing with a one-time donation, you may do so on Venmo @Jodi-Rhoden. Sharing

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⚔️❤️ Jodi