Two things happened on January 6th. One you know about – that unhappy business down in Washington D.C. The other thing that happened was my youngest child turned eighteen.

I have three kids – Claire, Emma, and Christopher, 21, 19, and 18 respectively. If you’re good at math that means that you know I had a brief, productive burst of fertility. It also means that they’ve gone through most life stages together. They were all toddlers at the same time, preteens at the same time, hormonal teens at the same time, and now all young adults who can do things like drive cars, access their own medical records, and get drafted into wars. These are all things that the world has decided they can do WITHOUT CONSULTING THEIR MOTHER.

For instance, people call Christopher “Chris.” I gave him a full name for a reason (says the person who insisted that people call her Genny instead of Genevieve by the time she was three). But what people call him isn’t up to me. This is a decision that is left between Christopher and other people who are incapable of pronouncing three syllables. I know this because as I got older I started to like my name and I would introduce myself as Genevieve. Most people asked if they could shorten it. Not ask – beg. Pain spreads across their face and they say, “Do you go by anything shorter?” as if the pronunciation of all three syllables will be the final thing that causes their complete mental collapse.

Have you ever gone through a time where there’s so much happening that’s bringing up so many feelings that you find yourself at a loss of how to manage it all? It’s like the feeling most people get when they have to pronounce a three-syllable name, only they’re trying to pronounce it with a COVID mask on, six feet away from you, and the Capital is under attack, and they’ve just realized that all three of their babies are now adults, and they’re very proud of them, and they hope that these offspring survive the pandemic to enjoy a long, happy, healthy adulthood, and they’re under a writing deadline, and they have to write a lesson plan for next week, and there’s birthday cake in the house and they’re on a diet. It’s like that.

Christopher’s birthday was one of those days when everyone in my house felt a lot of things. On a personal level, it was a huge day. A landmark. He made it to eighteen. That’s the goal, to get them through childhood. As each of my kids have hit that milestone age I’ve wondered, but haven’t said to them, “You’re eighteen now. Your childhood is over. So, uh, how was it? How’d it go overall, do you think?” Which is another way of asking, “What will you be telling a therapist?” Their feelings about their childhood experience is something that I don’t get to decide. I don’t get to decide anything now, unless something goes terribly wrong. That’s a good thing. That’s natural. And it’s scary as fuck.

I don’t say all of this to them. The reason I’m telling you all this, dear reader who has also reached adulthood, is because you and I know that the key to surviving is adaptation. It’s knowing that things get bad, then maybe they get really bad, then they get better, then they’re intoxicatingly good, then they fall apart again. Most of the time, all of that happens in one day. Christopher became a man and there was terrible political unrest on the same day. That’s not actually unusual. That’s the way it is everywhere, what happens to all people and all governments all over the world. There’s no escaping the things we can’t control. So we keep our sense of humor while we go through all the feelings at once. We try the best we can to embrace full catastrophic living with the most grace we can muster, and we fail at it sometimes. Then we try again.

On Wednesday I showed my IB Film students the movie JoJo Rabbit, which ends with a quote by the poet Rainer Rilke from the poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing.” He said:

“Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror/Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

And I realized that’s the best life advice that I can give.