Zen And the Art Of Aquarium Maintenance

Who knew I'd become a fucking fish nerd?

Sometimes healing means throwing yourself headlong into new things.

For the better part of three years (more if you count the caretaking years), I have been dealing with sick and dying parents, a dead dog, romantic heartbreak, and a job that can only be described as galactic fucking levels of stressful. Needless to say, I lost a bit of myself in the process.

One promise I made to myself in the wake of the Year of Death and Destruction (nb: if I don’t rely on gallows humor I’m not gonna make it so…sorry not sorry) was that I was going to rediscover a bit of Amber and what even makes my head and heart happy.

It’s really fucking disorienting when you ask yourself what that is, and you don’t even know where to start.

I mean, I’m going to be 49 this year. 40 didn’t freak me out, but the lurking of 50 somehow makes me all kinds of twitchy. Maybe it’s facing down death and mortality so hard core the last couple of years. Maybe it’s the fact that 50 coincides with my daughter heading off to college as a Division I equestrian (holy fuck), which means I’ll be an empty nester (holy extra fuck). Maybe it’s just that half a century feels like a giant Red Rover step forward toward being dead myself.

But it bothered me enough that I grabbed my trusty journal, and sat down and tried to inventory what things actually made my heart full and my soul feel like it’s being cared for. When you spend a lot of time caring for other people and then you sit down to ask your own damn self what makes you happy, what you need, what fulfills you, it’s actually quite an emotional experience.

It’s almost as if my heart was like “oh hey, someone actually cares to know what we need and want?” Sometimes you have to be your own fucking white knight, I guess.

What I came up with was:

• Writing. I love writing, but man it’s been fucking hard to find voice again, to give myself the permission to write as an act of creativity instead of aversion or time-wasting, to believe that my writing is something that even matters. I’m working on it.

• Creating. I’m a creative nerd and used to let myself get fucking bullied about wanting to do crafts or make projects or pick up and put down any number of wild hobbies like paper quilling or making hair bows for horse show kids or learning to draw mandalas or doing collage and junk journals. But I’m really tired of apologizing for how much I love to make shit. So I’ve learned to crochet and I’m dusting off some of the craft supplies because fuck people who make fun of others who do artistic or crafty things.

• Music. I was a music major in college and I was never happier than when I was in rehearsal or performing on stage. I also loved theater and acting, but music had its hooks in me. So I picked up my flute, got brave enough to reach out to my high school band director about joining the wind ensemble he directs, and I performed my first concert in nearly 25 fucking years a couple weekends ago. Even sent my beloved flute out for a complete overhaul, because I’m fucking investing in me.

The one that I didn’t see coming was fish tanks.

My BFF started an aquarium several months ago, and once she started explaining all of the intricate biology of building a self-contained ecosystem in a glass box—cycling the tank, selecting and introducing live plants, evaluating compatible fish, understanding water parameters, encouraging biodiversity with snails and other critters—I immediately had to be a copycat and bought a tank.

Now I have fucking three. Because I have zero chill and hyperfixation is a thing. (And thank you, Steph, for enduring my incessant fucking questions and nerdery for a hobby I totally stole from you.)

My betta fish Dante lives in his own house, my African Dwarf Frog Virgil in his own pad too because he was a dick and kept trying to eat Dante’s fins when they were roommates, then my big tank (pictured here) has a community of nano fish (ember tetras and celestial pearl danios), panda cories, blue neocardinia shrimp and a handful of snails who were all “fuck you, you didn’t ask for me but here I am to clean up the shit in your tank, you’re welcome”.

Nature is my cathedral, really. I’m not a Jesus girlie and I don’t particularly subscribe to a sky daddy running the show out there but I have always been unable to look up at the stars or through the forest and not feel the awe that comes from being a speck on the pale blue dot hurtling through spacetime for a mere breath of a moment compared to the vastness of the universe. My cleansing tears come with my back against a tree, or my feet in a surf. So it would seem that having a slice of that in my house makes me REALLY FUCKING HAPPY.

And fish tanks are fucking fidgety. When you’re new to it, there is an overwhelming amount of information, some of it conflicting, and everyone of course has a fucking opinion about the best way to do this or that. Mark, my local fish store guy, has more years of fish keeping experience than I’ve had on the planet, so he’s been super helpful as I navigated feeling like a murderer when some of my first fish died and when I freaked out about the pH being too high and when I was trying to make sense of which things did what.

But there’s ritual in sitting with my little ecosystems, tending to their maintenance by changing out water or pruning plants, watching them grow and balance on their own, watching nature give me the “quit fucking fussing with things and just let me handle this, you rookie” that shows me she has always and will always know better than I do.

Just yesterday, I sat on my bed and watched my little fish and shrimp swimming around, my snails wandering across the glass, listening to the gentle bubble of the filters, and I realized something.

Part of the peace I’m finding in the aquaria is the peaceful but purposeful reminder that life, in its own way and always whether we want it to or not, keeps going.

The world sort of screeches to a halt when you’re in the midst of crisis and loss and it can feel afterward like your time is standing still while everyone else’s keeps hurtling forward. At first, it makes you angry, and you want to scream “How can you just keep fucking living when my mother and father are dead?!” Then it makes you sad, because you note the moments and milestones your loved ones are missing because they’re no longer here.

Yesterday, it brought me comfort.

Neither of my parents—my stubborn-as-an-ox German-Welsh mother or my stoic Swede of a father—would want me stuck. In fact, they’d be pissed. I can practically hear my mother in my ear “Oh for fuck’s sake Amber, don’t you dare sit there moping, I’m dead, go live your life and take care of Abi and wave to me when the stars are out because I’m zipping around out there with Grampa.”

So as my little fish tanks make new plants and grow more fucking snails and sustain the lives of my beautiful little fish and frogs, the prayer that I whisper to myself is that life keeps going.

And so, somehow, must I.

Dante and Virgil and The Gang are dragging me forward, inch by inch. I’m trudging along, less begrudgingly by the day. Happier to see sunrises, more contented to see sunsets, and comforted to see a sky blanketed with stars knowing my parents are out there somewhere, floating around as stardust.

So long, Mom and Dad. And thanks for all the fish. xo