Coffee Break
First, a note about split infinitives, and remember this is a writing podcast so it was bound to come up, but stick with me because if you have written with me you know that I think split infinitives are phooey. Hear me out. Indeed, infinitives in Old English were single works with a -n or -an suffix. In Middle English, the “to” popped up ahead of the bare verb that still had the -n suffix. While Modern English developed the suffix-less two-word infinitive in roughly the 16th century, it was 18th and mostly 19th-century grammarians who issued the prohibition on split infinitives based, as I understand it, on the notion that the grammatical rules of Latin can, and must, be proscribed onto English.
As with Greek and all romance languages, Latin infinitives are marked by a suffix at the end of a verb. Since it’s all one word the is no such thing as a split infinitive. In an attempt to regulate English with the rules of Latin–an interlingual equivalence no linguist today would apply–these 19th-century grammarians passed down the edict to protect the English infinitive in its two-word state.
Of course, this rule has been broken for centuries, and current English style guides do not class split infinitives as objectionable. Indeed Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage states: “the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis.” While plenty of style guides note the widespread objection to split infinitives and suggest avoiding them in case of offending a reader with conservative grammatical predilections, I chose not to cater to adherents of this irrational rule.
All of which is to say, the notion of split infinitives is phooey and you’ll observe throughout this piece I use a line with a split infinitive and that’s all I have to say about that.
I just love the smell of coffee in the morning.
Even when I was too young to discern any flavor amidst the bitterness, the smell of the pot percolating in the kitchen was as regular and welcome as the rising sun.
As much as I may have protested when my dad kissed me good morning, his perpetual coffee breath signified to me dependability, a reassuring routine. Coffee breath was evidence of my Dad’s early rise and preparedness to guide my day. Coffee breath, I knew, meant work started and finished as I slept, allowing him to be present all my waking hours.
Coffee didn’t signify my father alone. The family story goes that my mother craved coffee ice cream milkshakes when she was pregnant with me, and to this day my mother’s vast collection of coffee cups gives me as much joy as any family photo album.
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As an adult, coffee is one of the three things I look forward to every morning. I like best the days that start with coffee, but in reality, coffee is often the second thing I enjoy most mornings. The first thing, chronologically at least, is the smoosh of one of my kids’ bodies against mine. I know they seek me instinctively for groggy comfort, but the comfort, along with the grogg, is mutual. I love pulling the covers over a small, warm, bedraggled body for a few moments before stepping out together onto the cold floor.
The third thing I look forward to every morning began, like coffee, in my own childhood, namely taking time to listen to the radio and read the day’s newspaper. The radio in my house–which was only ever tuned into National Public Radio–played more hours a day than not, and no matter what other expenses had to be shaved, we had the New York Times delivered seven days a week.
These days I don’t have a radio or a newspaper, but I read through the entire New York Times app every morning over coffee while two podcasts play back to back: NPR’s morning news round up “Up First” (punny) followed by the New York Times’ topical deep dive, “The Daily.” Of course I’m also getting kids dressed and putting on make up and finding shoes and losing socks but the coffee and the news help me get through all that.
Then, with the kids off to school and a second cup of full caf in hand, I commence with morning errands. As I drive, or shop, or put clothes away, my podcast app plays nonstop through programs about global affairs, domestic law and justice, and U.S. politics. Finally, many hours into the day, I’ll resign myself to non-topical podcasts on history, design, and of course Terry Gross’ incomparable interviews on Fresh Air.
By this time I’ve had at least two more cups of coffee, hot or iced, and am thoroughly amped up and weighed down.
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I went to a therapist a few years ago. I had gone to the ER a few days before that thinking I was having a heart attack. Fortunately, I am very Type A, even when having a breakdown, so when the ER doctor explained that I had suffered not from a cardiac event but rather from a panic attack I immediately made an appointment with a therapist.
The therapist asked why I was there. I explained that I’d had a panic attack. He asked what was going on in my life that was stressing me out.
Well I have a big new, fixer upper house and two kids under three, but that’s not particularly new.
OK so when did this start? he asked.
This past month or so.
What happened in the past month?
Well, I’ve been stressed about the news.
What about the news? he asked.
This was June 2016. I enumerated to the therapist all the latest statistics of the migrant crisis in Europe, ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the brutal final weeks of the U.S. presidential election primaries, the deaths of Muhammad Ali, wildfires in California, Zika Virus, Brexit, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and so on.
So you’ve been following the news a lot recently, he observed.
Well, I mean, no, not a lot. I mean I’ve listened to NPR since I was a little girl, and have been reading the New York Times daily for decades. This isn’t new.
OK, so what changed this past month that you had a panic attack this week?
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What had changed?
Was the world of June 2016 truly any more dangerous or stressful than any other month of my lifetime, or, as it felt, more stressful than any other month in human history?
I’m not sure I ascribe sufficiently to the notions of either an idealized past nor a glorious present to believe the past was always better or worse, respectively, than the present. Rather, I’ve always tended towards the belief that the beauty and horror of humanity, and the events of our making, have persisted across time and space more or less in balance.
I will readily concede, however, that there is a major difference between the amount of news consumption possible in the 21st century compared to any other epoch before it. Same for the coffee consumption.
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Just to pause for a moment to share a thought about coffee in epochs past that has always brought me joy.
I absolutely DELIGHT in the notion that the so-called Age of Enlightenment in Europe, which bridged the 17th and 18th centuries, coincided with the popularization of caffeinated drinks such as coffee and tea. This correlation occurred to me during my senior spring semester of college. I was on a health kick at the time and had abstained from caffeine, as well as meat, dairy, and refined foods of every kind, all semester…until Finals, at which point I drank a large full-caf iced coffee with a shot of Irish Cream flavor syrup and felt a surge of intellectual enthusiasm and scholarly endurance akin, I was certain, to the Enlightenment philosophers I was studying at the time.
Since those wired weeks of Finals in 2008, I’ve enjoyed this pet theory that this era of great thinkers–Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Hume, and Kant–was really just the effect of caffeine hitting European biology for the first time in history. In 2019 Michael Pollan, the writer specializing in the science of food and drink, published a book on caffeine that validated my untested undergraduate theory. According to Pollan, Voltaire drank up to 72 cups of coffee a day. Caffeine, he goes as far to say, not only stimulated these thinkers but also underpinned the whole process of industrialization and capitalism.
My coffee consumption even in my post-college years as a working mother to young children never quite met the same level as Voltaire, but I was pretty sure with my six hours of podcasts a day I had Voltaire beat in terms of news consumption.
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What had changed? Not my news consumption, not my coffee consumption, not my job, not my kids. My husband was suffering from depression, but that was pretty same old, getting better even.
Maybe it wasn’t a change, or a something? I’m Type A, remember? And an English major to boot. I was going to figure this out. Why did it feel all of a sudden like the news was too much? What had changed?
Change generally didn’t scare me, doesn’t scare me. But staying the same scared me, scares me. And doing something generally didn’t scare me, doesn’t scare me. But doing nothing scared me, scares me.
It is hard to not do something.
Why say no to another cup of coffee when you can get more with a mere press of a button? Why accept a blank screen when another screenful of content is on offer with just the flex of a thumb? Why not expend minimal effort and money to go through the drive-through and get a bag of hot, salty fries and cool, sweet ice cream? Why tell your phone not to continue listening to the news or watching Netflix?
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At the time of that conversation with the therapist, I had worked for many years in the study abroad office of a wonderful liberal arts college. It was the kind of job that made for terrific small talk because people could understand it easily enough but still have lots of questions.
Most people wanted to know if I got to travel internationally a lot. My answer was that the job provided a satisfying mixture of groundedness in the tight-knit residential community of the college, which was perfect while my children were very young, as well as regular opportunities every year or so to travel abroad, typically for a week or two, an amount of time, I learned, that is just long enough to make you miss even the fussiest toddler.
Indeed working at this college with hundreds of fantastic and curious young people, my own travel horizons broadened tremendously. In college, I had studied abroad repeatedly, but never strayed from English-speaking countries. When I embarked upon a career in international education, I found myself continually inspired by the adventurousness of some of my students. One spent a semester in Rwanda studying post-conflict resolution, another studied ice cores on Svalbard spending the latter two months of her semester in the total darkness of the Arctic winter. Another student split his year between Chile and Morocco, while another split a year between China and Japan.
In the fall of 2014, my boss offered me an opportunity to visit two study abroad programs in the Middle East–Tel Aviv and Amman. I had never been anywhere near the region, and was, for the first time, confident enough in myself to embark upon such a trip. The whole cost would be covered by my employer, and I would be able to enjoy a week off away from the stress of parenting. It was a great opportunity.
It is hard to not do something.
I can still see in my mind’s eye the trip itinerary from the college travel agent on my computer screen. The left of the broad monitor was given over to details of the carriers and the layovers while on the right were images of the hills of Amman and the beaches near Tel Aviv. I can still feel my hand on my computer’s mouse, hovering over the “confirm” button. Hovering.
I wanted to go on a free trip to a fascinating destination that would earn me professional and social capital while escaping my two children under the age of two. How many people, let alone mothers with young children, get to travel, for a week, for free, to someplace that isn’t, like, a convention center in Minneapolis? How could I say no?
It is hard to not do something.
But that spring I’d had a baby. It was a hard pregnancy and she was a hard baby. Just a few months before we’d brought her to daycare and, though she’d been fed by both breast and bottle prior to this, she refused to accept a bottle at daycare. When I say refused I mean the daycare told me that she couldn’t stay in their care unless I made myself available to feed her at any moment that she needed feeding. And so, with no other choice, I left work whenever she needed to nurse. This went on for more than two weeks, but of course, amid those two weeks, I didn’t know it would ultimately only be two weeks since her stubbornness was such that it looked like she could easily stretch keep this up for months. Eventually, one of the teachers took it upon herself to buy four new bottles, in addition to the seven I’d already provided until she found one my baby would accept.
In those two weeks in August of 2014, I wanted nothing more than for my baby to accept feeding from anyone other than me. And though she finally relented, when the opportunity presented itself to take this trip–this weeklong trip to two new, warm, ancient counties–my hand couldn’t stop hovering over the “confirm” button.
I didn’t recognize the hesitation keeping my hand hovering. Since when did I hesitate to see tombs and temples carved into the pink sandstone cliffs of Petra? Since when would my cold New England heart turn down the opportunity for a midwinter trip to a Mediterranean beach?! Since when would I choose the unrelenting demands of a hard baby over the freedom of pump and dumping abroad?
I didn’t know I *could* (as in was capable of) saying “No.” I didn’t have a framework to understand why my hand would hesitate. But it felt impossible to ignore. I pulled my hand off the mouse and walked over to my boss’s office.
“I think I have to say no to the Middle East trip,” I would have said. “Things have finally gotten easier with the baby, and I don’t want to risk disrupting that.”
“That makes complete sense,” she would have said. “I thought I’d offer it in case you did want to go, but there will be other opportunities.”
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I’ve still never been to the Middle East. But I have felt proud of myself since then for not going.
I felt that I shouldn’t do it. I listened to myself and honored my instincts, dismissing the compelling potential for a few fabulous social media posts.
I let myself change, from wanting to be the working mother who wouldn’t be slowed down or pinned down, to wanting to stay home with my baby.
If I’d gone on that trip I would have disallowed an opportunity to learn the power of saying “No,” or if not “No,” “Not right now.”
It’s so much easier to have another coffee, play another episode, answer another email, scroll for another headline. It’s hard–for me at least–to say no, to turn off, to listen to myself.
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With that panic attack that brought me first to the ER and then to the therapist, my body made it impossible for me to not hear what it was saying. “No more,” it said. So I hauled my Type A ass to therapy and tried to put the pieces together.
There was a lot going on in June 2016, and I wasn’t wrong to want to respond to the import of the moment. But my response until that moment wasn’t contribution because I was in a state of constant consumption, without time for digestion or reflection to settle my nerves. And in trying so hard to not turn away from the moment, I was turning away from my body’s need for hope that the world I was raising my children in had good left in it, amid the demonstrable bad.
The therapist, to his credit, didn’t accept any answer I gave from the headlines. He simply asked again, So what has changed? What new thing has happened?
And then something inside me shifted, and I could see the picture of the last few weeks more clearly.
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A few weeks earlier I’d fought with a family member.
It hadn’t started as a fight. It had started with me trying to let her in about my husband’s depression. I’d tried telling her that his depression was better than it had been. That he’d probably not mentioned to her that he wasn’t doing well because he was embarrassed but now he’s a lot better. I’ve been helping him. He’s getting better.
To which this family member said to me, What are you talking about, helping him? He wouldn’t be depressed if it weren’t for you. You’ve made his life too complicated. You’re the reason he’s stressed. You’re the reason he’s tired.
But, I responded, we took on all the complications together–the kids, the house. We’re equally responsible. If anything, I’ve been picking up his slack.
Well you should pick up the slack. You can’t expect him to manage all this, it’s far too much for him.
Yes, well, I do do so much. And I’m tired too. I’m so tired. And he yells at me and I’m tired of being yelled at, but I’m still trying my best to help.
Well clearly it’s not enough. You’re not doing enough.
And then I cried. I didn’t believe her. I knew I was doing the best I can. I was doing more than enough. I was.
Or was I?
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I realized finally in that therapist’s office why the news had been weighing on me differently since that fight. Nightclub shootings, and wildfires, and the increase of right-wing extremism, and all the rest–it was all weighing so heavily because I had, it seemed, started to believe I wasn’t doing enough. Not doing enough at home to help my husband with his depression, to take the stress of the kids and the house off him. And not doing enough in the world, to advocate for racial justice, to counter the rising far-right extremism, to reduce carbon emissions. My family was a wreck, and the world was a wreck, and I should have been doing more.
It’s hard to not do something.
It’s hard not to believe that you’re responsible for everything when someone says you’re responsible for everything, even though you know you shouldn’t believe that. You know you shouldn’t look at the world for constant confirmation of your own inadequacy. You know you shouldn’t give credence to those who don’t know what they are talking about, especially when what they are saying confirms your greatest fears.
But ascribing to those concepts and relenting to those fears is easy, as easy as scrolling down through more and more articles, thoughtlessly assenting to the pain, without remembering you can choose not to do or believe the thing causing you pain.
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Someone I’m working with sent me a line the other day from the writer and blogger Ann Voskamp: “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places,” she writes. (NOTE: I was sent an image of the quote, but it seems like this is the original source.)
I love that line. Let me read it again because it’s so great: “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places.”
I hadn’t let myself tell hardly anyone the story of that fight. Instead I kept it inside where it thrived. Even my Shame is Type A, and in it spread with the efficiency of an Enlightenment philosopher penning pamphlets on his 72nd cup of coffee of the day.
And when something goes that deep inside you that you can’t see it or name it or argue with it–like this ridiculous notion that I was responsible for everything in my family and the world–it takes over. Even now, writing about this, I feel so stupid. But, “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places.”
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Sometimes, it’s hard not to do something.
I still struggle not to pour a third cup of coffee, or listen to another episode of infuriating news.
But the gentler part of me recognizes why it’s hard for me to let go of that routine completely. The gentler part of me recognizes that in these rituals I’m seeking the comfort I knew as a child from my Dad’s all-day coffee breath and All Things Considered playing while my mother cooked dinner.
It’s hard to recognize comfort in choosing to not do something. But there is something special and affirming about the times when I have chosen not to do something, like not going on a free trip to the Middle East and choosing to stay home with my fussy, difficult, wonderful baby.
And sometimes you have to do something. You have to go to a therapist and trust his line of questioning in order to realize you’ve been believing something crazy, in order to decide not to believe that thing that has driven you crazy.
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It’s hard to not do something.
I am writing this the week after the shootings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which follows the brutally racist attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
As I’ve shared before in this podcast, I believe passionately in the need for urgent gun control reforms in the U.S. These past three weeks I’ve felt enormous pain on behalf of the communities and families everywhere living a new life without their loved children, mothers, and grandparents.
This past Wednesday, I was halfway through my first cup of coffee when “Up First” finished and “The Daily” began automatically. I glanced at the screen to read the episode title. “Portraits of Grief from Uvalde.” I picked up my phone and read the blurb: “These are some of the stories of those who lived through the devastation of the shooting at Robb Elementary School.”
My thumb hovered just a moment. I pressed pause. (Do you notice how there’s not even a stop button? There’s play and pause, previous and next.)
I pressed pause.
I can’t listen to that episode. It’s too painful. And that’s alright.
I put on this week’s episode of 99% Invisible and went about my day.
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I loved the smell of coffee on my dad’s breath, wondering each morning which mug my mother would have chosen for herself, and starting every morning with Bob Edwards orienting us in the world. It was a reassuring routine that I wanted to replicate for my kids.
I want kids who are curious about world affairs, active politically, appreciate historic and cultural nuances, who are scientifically grounded, and feel capable of contributing to the world.
But not doing something is as important as doing something. For my children of the 21st century, I realize I need to model a life that doesn’t reflexively consume–content, caffeine, criticism, and carbon while I’m at it. I need to model for my kids taking a break, putting the phone aside and the cup down, and not doing anything for a while. I think that’s the harder lesson to learn, and to teach.
I still drink coffee and read the news–as I said those are two of the three things I look forward to every morning. But I try to focus more on those little bodies smooshing up against me, enjoying those warm moments together before we pad downstairs to the cold terra cotta tile of the kitchen to make coffee.
I have the rest of my life to spend my mornings reading the news over coffee, but next week my youngest turns five and these precious years of sticky fingers lifting my eyelids out of sleep are coming to a close. And the owners of those sticky fingers, and tangled curls, and blueberry blue eyes, they are what’s worth getting up for, whose futures are worth getting worried for and fighting for. And I can’t do that too well if I’m hopped up higher than Voltaire.
