There are exactly seventeen minutes until I need to get on my bike and go pick up my toddler from daycare. This is the math of my life these days: several hours to draw a comic, several weeks spent wishing I had a comic to post so I could also write down whatever diaristic thoughts are floating through my head, seventeen minutes to actually figure out what I want to say and say it. Perhaps this is a useful constraint; often it feels otherwise.

The math of my life used to be fairly unrestricted. When I had a few thoughts, I’d write them down; every Sunday I drew a comic; none of this was any impediment to doing a full day’s work on my fiction. Now, it has been a full three years since I did a full day’s work of any kind, other than childcare.

I realize that sounds kind of bleak, but of course the reality is more complex. I have four+ daycare hours every morning, and I’ve mostly been working on fiction during that time. On the weekends, we’ve been having adventures, driving up to Sonoma and Marin and pressing on sea anemones in the tide pools. There is space for a certain amount of focus. What there’s less space for is variation. Odd, because for years it was the guiding principle of my artistic life that writing and drawing were necessary counterparts, each a psychic release valve for the other, both entirely critical to my practice.

Or not odd. Just uncomfortable, and hopefully temporary. This is me trying, you see, to balance the scales.

We’ve lived in Berkeley now for five and a half months, which seems both too long and too short to account for how I feel about the transition. Mostly good, but still—strange. Or perhaps estranged. I am learning in real time the degree to which my reality—not just my identity, but my internal sense of the earth and the seasons, the past and the future—was tied to the desert. I still find myself picturing hypothetical conversations with a teenage version of my toddler child, and realizing these hypotheticals are set in the living room of our old house. I go into the bathroom at night and still sometimes look up, as if to see the moon through our old skylight.

Last weekend, we went to Alameda to meet up with some friends and go to the beach, and driving home I saw a big set of thunderheads moving over the horizon—at which sight, I almost cried. Because thunderheads are a building block of the Tucson sky, whole white (and blue and purple) worlds erupting out of nothingness, spilling over the tops of the mountains. I had not seen one since arriving in California.

But we do go to the beach. We go quite often, and the baby sprawls out in the sand and runs around and screams with joy when we bury his feet. He still asks about our house in Tucson (recently: “Why didn’t we move into our old house?”) but it’s unclear to me what he pictures when he thinks about it. He does seem to have an uncommonly good memory for his age, so maybe he in fact recalls the stained-glass door dripping soft green into the living room, or splashing in the wading pool in the backyard. He still calls my office “the studio.”

He also loves his friends here, and biking to the park, and being able to walk to multiple bakeries selling donuts, cookies, bagels. He loves taking the bus to the bookstore and refusing to nap until he falls asleep on the five minute drive to the farmer’s market. I am listing the things that he loves instead of the things I love because it’s easier, even if it’s more imprecise (how, after all, can I know exactly what anyone else thinks or feels? I make good guesses). Because I spent ten years pressing the bruise in my soul that was my distance from the ocean, clouds, rain, trees. And now I spend a lot of time taking pleasure in those things, but also pressing a new bruise, the one that remembers the candy smell of spring in the desert.

I realized the other day that one reason this move was particularly hard is that Tucson was the place where I lived my second childhood. The childhood of my adult self, if you will: I grew up there. I built a chosen family, a chosen reality, and now I have to start again and I am not so young. (I’m also not so old, but you see what I mean.) This is, I think, why it feels like another side to the coin of missing the west for so much of my life: the west, Seattle, the Puget Sound: that was the site of my first childhood.

Anyway, I’m letting this all sound more melancholic than I feel because I have now spent sixteen of my seventeen minutes, and I have to go. These thoughts have been swimming around in my head for months, and it feels good to write them down. I hope to start drawing more often, even if what I draw is not exactly what this comic has been. (Or maybe it will be! Who knows.) There is no one way to write a poem, no one way to live a life, no one way to walk through a transition, except, I guess, one step at a time.