Holding Your Own Basket
When your handbasket is delivering you to hell, it's time to let it burn.
A few weeks ago, I had a weekend to myself, and I felt utterly exhilarated. Every errand and household chore and meal prepared for myself felt like it was infused with joy. I was emerging from the crisis cocoon. A shift was pushing me away from survival mode towards thriving (I really want to say “thrival mode” here, you guys. Can we please make that a thing?))
I drove around, listening to my playlist, smiling for no damn reason. Relief was beginning to set in; I bought bulbs and vegetable seeds and the girls and I had picked out paint swatches that week. I was remembering how it felt to let my nervous system settle. It was fucking fantastic. And I felt compelled to pick up the phone and call someone to tell them. Reality set in—who should I call? I’ve always loved the idea of having “a person” that you tell your daily stories too. I have a handful of beautiful, amazing close friends I could have called. I could have called my mom.
But I didn’t call anyone. I sat with my compulsion to share my daily report and decided to keep my moment of joy and peace to myself.
Once upon a time, someone accused me of “needing to tell the same story ten different times to ten different people.” Ouch. But there was truth to it. I am a storyteller, after all. And I’m a person who prizes connection and emotional intimacy over almost anything else. I don’t feel ashamed of this tendency any longer, but I do try to be mindful and catch myself in the moment—with curiosity, not criticism—to examine what’s at the root of that urge to connect. If a 45-year-old woman is driving to Home Depot with an iced latte and a killer playlist and she doesn’t text someone about how free and happy she feels, did it really happen?
I discovered the term “meadow report” for the first time in October 2019 during a retreat devoted to exploring romantic relationships— specifically, understanding and appreciating differences in masculine and feminine energy.
When the facilitator delved into ancestral responsibilities of hunters vs gatherers, the science hooked me. Historically, while men were hunting, women gathered food from the meadow, then returned to share exact details so others could retrace the necessary steps to find berries—they literally “emptied their baskets.” Attempting to eschew cis-hetero gender roles, one could instead apply “masculine and feminine energy” to this concept. The anthropological upshot is that women are wired to observe small details and report back to their communities with the specifics. I had unknowingly been perfecting the art of the meadow report since childhood, retracing my steps and regurgitating them for my mother.
***
“How was your day?” my mom inquired brightly after my 8th grade neighborhood carpool dropped me off. I tossed my backpack in the corner, poured a bowl of cereal, and settled onto the kitchen counter to regale her with a play-by-play account. “I chose my French name (Chantal), we watched a slideshow of Renaissance art in Humanities, and 17 people smiled at me,” I began. This was not a joke. We had recently moved to a new town, and, ever the optimist, I’d created a daily practice of identifying amicable connections wherever I could find them.
My 5th grade brother joined us in the kitchen. “How was your day?” my mom repeated. “Good,” he replied, grabbed a snack, and promptly walked up to his bedroom. We enacted a variation on this theme every day of our school careers.
***
Modern women have no need to provide a verbal map to the berries, but when we empty our daily baskets to show our partner, the subtext is just as urgent: Look what I did. Please value what I am contributing to this family. Please see me. The partner’s task is to hold the basket and listen.
It’s no wonder the meadow report became imperative to me as a new parent; the jarring reduction of your world naturally evokes feelings of inadequacy. I desperately needed my efforts—and even the unimportant things that happened to me—to matter to somebody else, dispersing the burden of my anxiety and reinforcing the fact that I was contributing something worthwhile.
During the first weeks of quarantine after schools closed, I felt an eerie similarity to those endless days at home with a newborn and anxious nights spent wrestling with the uncertainty of what was to come—would we sleep? Would she be fussy? How many times would I nurse?
March 2020 brought a return to hours spent in pajamas, un-showered, with no clue what day it was, but this time with my 13- and 8-year-old daughters at home with me 24/7. When bedtime loomed, I had no idea what the next day would bring: How bad would the news be? Would remote learning be another emotional disaster? How much longer would this go on? I felt a feverish need to resume delivering a daily report to prove my importance, my existence.
When my partner listened to my meadow report, I felt the tranquilizing effect of popping a Benzo. I could relax—I was accomplishing things! I wasn’t just dead weight. But then. As the repetition of a soothing routine insidiously morphs into a compulsive ritual, my habit became a bad one. A weaponized one.
155 days into constant togetherness with my children and officially collecting unemployment, I had become a path of least resistance parent, ignoring discarded cheese wrappers, wet towels on the floor, and 14-hour Netflix marathons. The phrase “shadow of your former self” echoed in my brain as I hid in the bedroom with my 3 p.m. cup of coffee to meditate—an ill-advised and counterintuitive combination, for the record. My daily contributions had ceased to impress, but god help the fool who tried to diminish them!
I began to wield my meadow report like a crazed employee waving her HR file in the face of an impassive boss, evidence of her indispensable proficiency. During a heated argument about housework in which my husband and I mutated into my parents circa 1986, I may have screamed at the top of my lungs about the invisible work I contributed to the family every day.
The crux of it was intention—did my daily report create meaningful connection, or was it the verbal equivalent of frenetic diary entries? If I didn’t regurgitate my day, did it have any meaning? Was I inadvertently doing this to reassure myself I was a valuable, competent adult? I actually ended a friendship once partly because of my former friend’s tendency to provide the most tedious, navel-gazing meadow report I have ever endured—the recollection made me cringe.
Perhaps I could contain and savor my satisfaction whenever I delivered an effective diatribe on body positivity, flawlessly facilitated a genuine sibling apology, or competently moved the robot vacuum from floor to floor. Aren’t we also wired to relish secrets belonging just to us? Maybe mine would be that I spent the entire day in my underwear, drank too much coffee, accomplished jack squat, and hopped up hastily upon hearing the garage door open so I could quickly get vertical, run the faucet to feign activity, and toss cereal bowls in the dishwasher. Put that in your basket and burn it.
As I am ten months into single motherhood, the “meadow report” has primarily been deactivated, aside from the regular debriefing phone calls I have with my mother, a goddamn saint whom I believe to be genuinely invested in my productivity and sanity, a basket-holder who is generous and steadfast every time.
I am grateful every time I share a morning failure story with my podcast co-host, commiserate with my close friends who are also experiencing parenting challenges, celebrate an ADHD cleaning success with my best friend, or tell a story I haven’t told in a while.
But sometimes I will also just drive around alone, basking in the knowledge that my moment of joy is mine alone. I don’t need to report it—it existed, it happened. I am learning to hold my own basket, quietly celebrating my own successes and sitting alone with the fearful, lonely feelings that arise in the late hours, reminding myself that I am absolutely adequate to traverse these waters, to hold this overflowing basket. After all, I’m the fucking queen.
That moment of driving around while feeling flooded with peace and optimism and freedom was just for me—I didn’t call anyone to make it become more real. Oh shit, I guess I just told you guys all about it. Oh, well, baby steps to solo basket holding.
XOXO,
Steph
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