On Survival

3800 words on the LA wildfires, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and what I lost in 2024

What the sky looked like from our backyard on January 8th at 4:38pm

I don’t know where to start. I’ve abandoned so many essays lately. But I’m making myself finish this one. I guess I’ll begin with winter break.

Los Angeles public schools always give three weeks off over the winter holidays. But since my partner, Matt, has never gotten three weeks off for anything, it never quite feels like a break for me, the stay-at-home mother/writer. At the beginning of those three weeks, I have a keen sense of needing to pace myself. Like I cannot overcommit to activities with the kids because I know I’ll hit a wall.

Which reminds me of one of the essays I abandoned this year. I’d read the book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, which is largely about how the thinking and research around physical endurance has changed.

See, we used to think a person could only run as far or as fast as their body physically allowed them. In layman's terms: that we stop going when our muscles are fatigued. But now, most scientists who study endurance seem to agree that how you feel, whether that’s tired or thirsty or hot or cold or just like you suck at running—affects your performance significantly.

But what I wanted my essay to do was take this concept into the political realm. I wanted to prop up all the science that’s laid out in that book to point out how we’re all biased. How our feelings affect even the most “rational” thinkers¹. Even say, the professionals who decide on the headlines at The New York Times! Alas, I got overwhelmed and abandoned it.

But back to winter break. Going into week one, I was feeling pretty good. I’d recently turned in another draft of the book I’m writing to my agent. Plus, my mom was coming to town and renting a house with a pool. And so, the week came and went. I had some time to write, and in it, I began another essay. This one was going to be about how this piece about class politics by Tangle made me want to cry. Why had it made me so emotional? That’s what I was hoping to write about.

But then, halfway through the week, my agent got back to me with her notes on my manuscript. And so, I quickly pivoted. I wanted to pivot.

During the second week of break, on Christmas Eve, we drove up to Big Sur. Our friends have a beautiful place there and had invited us to come. We got there around 3pm. We settled in and then our oldest kid started throwing up.

Which I bring up mostly because one of my favorite memories from that trip was lying in bed next to him on Christmas day while he worked up a sweat in his sleep and I worked on my manuscript. These are always my favorite parenting moments. Being able to do what I want while also being a present parent. Ha.

After a few days of that sweet ocean air and communion with old friends, we came back home. The kids had another week off, but at least Matt would be home for some of it. I worked on my book in the mornings. The kids watched a lot of TV and played a lot of Fortnite. We played sports, too. Sometimes at a skating rink, sometimes in the backyard, and maybe once or twice, at a tennis court.

At night, I read. When my mom was here, I’d taken her to Vroman’s, my favorite bookstore, and I’d bought Maus by Art Spiegelman. It’s a book I’d been meaning to read but somehow hadn’t realized was a graphic novel until I was holding it in my hands at the bookstore. I saw too that there was a Maus I and a Maus II. The store was so crowded that I just grabbed the first one and got in line with some of my other selections.

On the very last day of winter break, a Sunday, I baked my younger son’s requested birthday cake. Between this endeavor and a lemon tart I’d felt compelled to make a few days prior because of a surfeit of Meyer lemons on our tree, I felt a real chasm between my current self and the one who used to tackle new recipes all the time. It’s so much work! And then there’s all the cleanup. How had I ever summoned the energy?

Still got it?

The very next day, we sent the kids to school and I felt the relief. “Break” was over! This feeling was tempered by the fact that both the kids and Matt were sad. Break was over. Plus, we had a busy week ahead. There was Hebrew school in Pasadena on Tuesday night. Teddy was starting flag football on Thursday—also in the Pasadena area. And then Friday was hockey, in Pasadena.

But then: Tuesday, January 7^th. Our synagogue emailed early in the day saying that in-person Hebrew school was canceled due to the epic windstorm and that they’d send out a Zoom link instead. When I walked to school to pick the kids up around 3:30pm, I wore sunglasses mostly so that twigs and other things that were flying through the air wouldn’t hit me in the eye.

Shortly after coming home, we set the kids up in separate rooms with separate computers for Zoom school. The whole time, I was agitated in a way that felt out of sync with the moment, in a way that felt bigger than the moment. Yes, there was a windstorm. And yes, a fire had broken out on the west side of town. But we were relatively okay.

But then after dinner, we learned that a fire had broken out on the east side of Los Angeles, too. In Pasadena. A group text born during Covid and made up of all Angeleno women was erupting with alarm. The kids became hopped up on our anxious energy. They usually don’t want to sleep together in the same bed, but that night they did with a twitchy kind of glee.

Kind of similar to how I handled election night, I picked up the book I was reading. I was deep into Maus at that point and couldn’t really put it down.

I fell asleep.

In the early morning, when I grabbed my phone I saw I’d missed calls from both my mom and step-dad; they’d seen the fires on the news and were worried. A text from a friend said our synagogue was gone. When I said this aloud to Matt, whom I thought was still sleeping, he said he already knew. He’d been up for a while in the middle of the night. I started texting people we knew who lived near there. They’d all evacuated and didn’t know what the future held. A few hours later, our kids’ school was canceled. This is what the sky looked like from our deck at 7:17am:

I’m not here to list out the tragedies. There are so many. So many people remain displaced. So many kids I know are without schools because they were destroyed.

I think I’m here to tell you about my feelings while all of the worst was happening around us.