past issues
Constrained Choices - Issue No. 17
I Am a Mother and I Am Worth Your Time, Tradwives and Penis Spoons, Succumbing to a Cult, Sickness Spiral, The Magic of Touch
I AM MOTHER AND I AM WORTH YOUR TIME
To potential employers, I know 2.5 years is a long time, and when you put my application next to one without holes in the employment history, perhaps there isn’t really even a choice to be made. However, in my time “off”, along with writing a collection of essays of which I am quite proud, I’ve been working hard to keep two children, whose prefrontal cortexes have yet to fully develop, alive and well. They are irrational, risk-taking little humans who have caused me to never surpass a sleep score beyond 70, or “fair”, on my Fitbit, and who make it nearly impossible for me to finish my own sentences, remember the days of bodily autonomy, or ever have clothes that are unstained and unpulled. I would argue that they’re thriving, and while they now wipe their own butts more often than not, I assure you that in these 2.5 years “off,” I have had nearly no breaks. Though I could tout innumerable qualifications I have gained from motherhood that would make me an excellent employee, I will leave it at this, there isn’t a moment I’m not multitasking, under pressure, being creative, thinking outside the box, showing resilience and patience, answering hard questions, being strategic, connecting, stretching outside of my comfort zone, and leading with compassion and altruism. I have done this job with zero performance reviews, bonuses, upward mobility, or days off, and with full understanding that it would widen my wage gap and make you view me as a lesser candidate than I was just a few years ago.
For my first two and half years as a mother, I continued teaching, and my mom left her prestigious executive director role at a counseling organization to help take care of my daughter. The sacrifices women make in their careers for their children and their children’s children continue. I was making thirty-thousand dollars per year teaching sixty-percent time at a prestigious private school in Atlanta. I was driving across the city and spending approximately two hours in my car each day to take care of kids that were not my own. Returning to teaching after maternity leave made me feel like a lesser mom and being a mom with a baby at home often made me feel like a mediocre teacher. In the Fall of 2021, like so many, coming off of insurmountable challenges with childcare, fear of COVID, and the long-term impacts of spending so much time in isolation, I became a part of the “Great Resignation.” I was one of the 47 million people who quit their jobs in 2021. An additional 50 million quit their jobs in 2022. This also meant I did my part in exacerbating a long-standing national shortage of teachers.
I never intended to stay at home with my kids. I had grown up with a mother who often surmised that remaining in the workforce and maintaining her own ambitions were integral parts of her success as a parent, so I had every intention of doing the same. I had big goals and dreams of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to make my impact in the world. But, despite the unmarketable pretext of rearing children, I do not regret the time I’ve been at home. It also gave my husband the opportunity to continue to climb the corporate ladder, thanks in large part to his hard work, smarts, and dedication, but also in part because having children didn’t derail his career like it did mine. Now, I am looking for a job, because it turns out having kids, on top of being incredibly time consuming, is also very expensive. In many ways, I find the idea of returning to work appealing: feeding my ego, earning my own income, being recognized for my worth, occasionally changing out of my joggers, and partaking in “adult talk” outside of school drop off and pick up times. But looking for a job has made me feel like I’m totally floundering. My priorities have shifted and I’m left trying to peel my own ambition apart from the consuming reality of parenting my children, all while justifying why the sacrifices I’ve made shouldn’t disqualify me as an applicant.
This brings me back to the purpose of this letter, an attempt to offer a modified lens with which to view me. We live in a country that is restricting our bodily autonomy and yet offering so little support and understanding for the mothers that are desperately trying to do it all. I get that my time away might cause me to be overlooked, but I assure you it does not make me a lesser candidate. I challenge you to break the cycle of devaluing women with children and overlooking the paradox of being a working mother. I am worth your time.
TRADWIVES AND PENIS SPOONS
Recently, while attempting to shower while solo-parenting, I heard my son screaming and proceeded to run out dripping wet and naked to find my daughter physically restraining her brother on the landing of our staircase. Water droplets still trickling off of my nipples, my feet making small puddles on our wooden floors, I imagined myself as them looking at my mom in a state of such exposure and likely wondering if she had become completely unhinged. After towling myself off and feeling utter regret for my retrospectively masochistic demonstration of freedom by staying up till midnight the night before, I couldn’t get either child dressed for the day. Then, at breakfast, my daughter looked me in the eye and said, “get me milk, old lady.” She called her brother “bad baby” about a dozen times, which at this juncture is her most severe insult. He responded with a desperate plea of “just call me by my name.” My son would not let me tame his Flock-of-Seagulls hairstyle with a brush. My daughter stuck her finger through the hole in her shoes and reminded me once again that I had forgotten to buy her a new pair. Her disappointed look somehow doubled when I told her that I had no way to fix her thumbnail that I had cut too short. I made our dog yelp when I pushed his humping pelvis off of my arm. I rushed everyone more than I wanted to and didn’t find a moment to pause and enjoy our time together. I dropped them off at school feeling utterly relieved to have a break and so guilty for being a subpar mom during the short time that they were in my care that morning.
After settling in at my desk, I found an article by Kathryn Jezer-Morton called Is Tradwife Content Dangerous, or Just Stupid? Not knowing anything about Tradwives at all, this sent me down a disturbing rabbit hole. Like a lot of nonsense, this movement has been propelled by social media and seems to be an attempt to garner nostalgia for traditional gender roles and women finding their joy through returning back to homesteading, homeschooling, and baking. These accounts are getting millions of views on TikTok. While not overtly proselytizing, Ballerina Farm is an Instagram account I’ve followed for quite some time that arguably falls under this regressive umbrella. Hannah of Ballerina Farms has 8.4 million followers and is currently representing the United States in the Mrs. World pageant. Just to clarify, the difference between Mrs. America and Ms. America is simply if you’re married or not. Because, I suppose it is empowering to divide married women from unmarried women to sexualize and objectify them equally albeit separately.
I’ve followed Ballerina Farm on Instagram for quite some time, and not exactly with judgment. More so, because there is something that feels very captivating and foreign about their country-french aesthetic and homesteading lifestyle. Their house isn’t a minefield of sharp toys, Hannah’s hair is always perfectly highlighted and effortlessly styled, she is constantly kneading bread, whipping cream with milk from her cows, and putting sausage stews in pumpkins. In one recent Instagram story, Hannah claimed that because of inclement weather, she was letting her 7 children skate around her kitchen on a thin sprinkling of flour. She said this with no sense of humor, blemishes on her skin, or notable concern for the cleanup or concussions that would most certainly ensue if I gave my children the same opportunity. This content is a ruse. Despite their seemingly unostentatious lifestyle, Hannah’s father-in-law is also the former CEO of JetBlue Airlines, so their homesteading storyline comes from lucrative beginnings. None of this should matter to me. However, similar to the new viral Tradwife ideology, which is perpetuating sexism and glorifying incredibly repressive times in American history, I, like millions of others, am still watching this propaganda and using these platforms to feel connected to the outside world while I am cloistered in my insulary mostly-at-home mom life.
The night after reading about Tradwives, I made tacos for dinner, a meal that we eat too often in our household. There was rice all over the table and black bean juice making five o’clock shadows on both of my kids’ faces. My son, who was inexplicably pantless, put his penis on a spoon at the table and served it to me while my daughter experimented with how many chickpeas she could grasp between her chin and chest. She then proceeded to stand on her chair, giggling, as she mooned us for the first time. By the end of the meal, they had both deemed it a “naked-baby dinner” and had removed all of their clothes entirely. This has nothing and everything to do with Ballerina Farm and Tradwife content. If I were to really capture our lives on social media, this revealing dinner, or disaster of a morning that came before it, would be what I’d have to show, the hard and the hilarious. When I knead bread, my kids ruthlessly poke it with their fingers. I desperately seek the moments of being an ambitious individual just as I embrace the messiness of motherhood. There’s room for my escapism through Instagram but the inevitability of it coloring my reality through comparison is such a waste of a life I wouldn’t want to change.
SUCCUMBING TO A CULT
When we moved into our home, we didn’t know anything about the private school that was essentially our neighbor. After a tour, we applied to their early childhood program for our daughter and, when asked what drew us to their methodology of education, we did our best to not answer, “the proximity to our front door.” I wanted her to feel nurtured, safe, and encouraged to stretch and grow in all of the creative and unique ways for which I knew she was ready. The little school tucked into the woods behind our home had everything we wanted.
My daughter has loved the school from her first moments there. She is immersed in nature. All of the toys are wooden, which is so different from the plastic dinosaur at home that relentlessly demands we feed him the apples that we have lost somewhere in the crevices of our playroom. Kids carry their lunches and water bottles to school in a basket instead of a backpack, which is a bit puzzling and inefficient but very fun to watch. On Tuesdays, the students bring vegetables that they then prepare themselves (picture three year olds with knives and peelers), for their vegetable soup snack, a dish which would quickly be deemed “yucky” at home and is gobbled up perfectly with a spoon at school, thanks to what I can only assume is some hippy hypnosis. The kids do “handwork” weekly and come home with acorn-felt-bead garlands and “water bottle satchels.” The classrooms are filled with tree branches suspended from the ceiling, colorful silks, candles, and glass jars of grains and oats, and, mysteriously, nothing seems to ever break or catch fire. The kids design their own lanterns in November for a ceremony in which they proceed through the woods with their families to a bonfire at dusk, singing songs about the lights that shine brightly within them. The teachers have all been there forever. They wear aprons over their bucolic aesthetic and put on puppet shows with needle-felted dolls. They command the classroom with ethereal charisma. “It’s like being in a watercolor world,” claimed a Times reporter. They focus on the whole child, “the head, the heart, and the hands” with a curriculum that emphasizes “arts, nature, and imagination.” The school fills so many of my own shortcomings as a parent. And if I’m being honest, witnessing the rituals and the incantations feels a bit like we’re on the verge of sorcery or perhaps like we’ve accidentally registered our children for an adolescent cult, which I suppose might be how all cults feel at the beginning. But, that being said, I can’t think of a more nurturing or magical place for them. In the ancient words of 90’s nostalgia, I drank the Kool-Aid.
My daughter will be eligible for Kindergarten in the fall, and I am feeling utterly heartbroken at the thought of pulling her out of what seems like the perfect place for who she is today to attend her local public school. She will be leaving her wonderful teacher, who she’d otherwise be with for another year; her dear friends; and an ethos that encourages her in the creative, mindful, holistic ways that I truly believe she needs. However, during the pandemic we outgrew our house and found our dream home, which is at the very tip top of our budget and is located in one of the best school districts in the city. We agreed to have a tight few years financially with the anticipation of promotions and public school. My kids were six months and two and half years old when we moved, and in the haze of nursing my son and potty training my daughter, kindergarten still felt far away. Their future education was something of which I had only a faint outline. We were half-dressed, exhausted, and regularly playing a game called what is this stain on my shirt? Though I’m honestly unsure how anyone ever knows in advance how to best support their children. Even though a part of me knows my daughter will likely adjust, find her groove and be okay, even though a part of me knows that if she’s not thriving, there will always be another way, still, today I’m giving myself the space to just be sad. As I clumsily answer my daughter’s questions about switching schools and listen to her articulate anxiety at the prospect, I feel disappointed by constrained choices. For the past five years, the focal point of my life has been predicting the needs of my children and ensuring they thrive; it is only getting harder as they unfold into these whole beautiful individuals in a world that just keeps on spinning.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
While I maintain a healthy skepticism towards alternative medicine, I also believe that there is a lot about the human body that we don’t understand, and that at times it is important to think outside of our Westernized box. While I certainly don’t think health problems can all be solved with homeopathics and acupuncture, I do think that we are doing ourselves a disservice by overlooking these treatments entirely. There is value in considering the longevity of some of these forms of medicine. My 98 year old grandmother swore by apple cider vinegar in boosting her immune system and keeping her healthy. Does it work? Who’s to say? But, choking down a shot of it is the first thing I do when I begin to feel a scratchy throat.
Last spring, my then two-year-old son went through a very random bout of hitting his peers in class. He was never upset when he did it. Rather, it was as if he had energy in his hands and didn’t yet have a way of handling it. His teacher and I had a meeting to discuss this problematic new behavior, and during our meeting she suggested that I try “body mapping.” She explained that when her husband had become paralyzed after a stroke, she did this body-brain mapping, and truly believed it improved his quality of life for the time he had left. We had already tried all of the talk strategies we could come up with, so we decided to give it a shot. The handout she gave me, which I can’t find anywhere on the Internet, has a picture of a person, and instructions to basically move your hands from their navel to their feet, hands, and head while giving squeezes or pushes to those body parts. After three weeks, my son’s hitting disappeared entirely.
Then, a few months later, my daughter began having massive tantrums quite regularly. There was biting and throwing things, spitting, pinching and pulling hair. She seemed so dysregulated, and no matter what “gentle parenting” strategy I tried, it took time, resilience and patience for her to calm herself down, and it felt like the next tantrum wasn’t far behind. Eventually, I was referred to several forms of massage and passive rhythmic movement. I began rocking her back and forth, squeezing her arms and legs, rubbing her head, and pushing on her feet every night. I’ve watched the skepticism wash over people’s faces when I’ve told them this, which only grows when I tell them that the intensity of the tantrums faded substantially a couple of weeks later.
Here is what I know: Were there other factors at play? Absolutely. Time, illness, sleepiness, hangry-ness, and innate challenges of being growing little humans and learning to self-regulate could all be contributing factors. I am weary of endorsing something I don’t fully understand, but there is a lot to still be learned about the “magic of touch”, and, for us, magic is exactly what it felt like.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Over the last three months, my daughter, son and mom have all been diagnosed with pneumonia. It took us a shockingly long time to realize that this was likely bacterial pneumonia and that they had probably all passed it to one another. My mom was pretty much laid out for six weeks, and is still dealing with wheezing and a lessened lung capacity. Between my kids, there have been 8 visits to the doctor, one chest x-ray, daily Pulse Ox readings, an ear infection, a sinus infection, three rounds of antibiotics, heartbreaking nightly coughs, painfully little sleep, worrisomely low appetites, and irritability that makes it feel like every time they are in a room together, they think they’ve entered a “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robot” match.
Not coincidentally, I recently noticed increasingly deep wrinkles in my forehead. Studies show that aging comes with wrinkles but that doesn’t cushion the blow much. I have tried to cut and position my bangs to cover said wrinkles but it turns out, cutting your bangs on little sleep is not a good idea, and it seems that my brow might just be permanently positioned in a slight furrow or, as I like to think of it, a badge of honor for surviving the last couple of years.
At my kids’ first signs of illness, I feel a tightening in my chest at the thought of entering another sickness spiral: all that will not get done, the worry, the loneliness and boredom of being trapped inside for days, the capacity it takes to be a tireless caregiver without reprieve. At the risk of revealing what it feels like to exist in my head, here are the questions I confront approximately every two weeks as my kids succumb to yet another illness: Am I putting enough balanced foods in their meals? How many days of pasta in a row is too many days of pasta? Why isn’t my son eating? Do they need to be outside more, or is being outside perpetuating their symptoms? Should I be giving them vitamins? Should I be giving them elderberry syrup? A probiotic? A DHA supplement? Is any of this caused by allergies? Food intolerance? What am I missing? Should I be looking more at homeopathic treatment? Are they too cold while they’re sleeping? Are they getting enough sleep? Can I force them to sleep? Is our ventilation system insufficient? Did I waste $150 on air purifiers? Are their shoes too thin? Am I not washing their sheets and dusting enough? Is that why they’re snotty all of the time? How long should we keep them on their inhalers? What if it stunts their growth or is causing behavioral challenges? Is milk the problem? Is that why my son’s cough is so bad? Do we have black mold? Does their school have black mold? Am I not hugging them enough? Am I totally screwing this up?
In my more rational moments, I recognize that they are kids building their immune systems, but I had no idea how hard and worrisome that process would be. Though seldom, when they’re both well, I am shocked at how much easier it all can feel and then, one of them inevitably sneezes.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
A few years ago, my husband mentioned, rather nonchalantly, that he had made chocolate mousse for a woman the had gone on a date with years before. I immediately felt pangs of jealousy, not so much at the woman, but at the fact that she had gotten homemade mousse from a man who is definitely not known for having an affinity for baking. He judiciously made homemade chocolate mousse for me soon after. Since then, it has become his specialty and a celebration-meal staple in our family. My kids have become dedicated mousse sous-chefs and taste testers and I have become a delighted regular recipient. This is an airy, silky, rich and deeply satisfying dessert. Top it with a few raspberries and enjoy.
Surviving - Issue No. 16
Parenting in Partnership - Love and Limits, Our Bodies, Our Hypochondriac Spells, How to Live to 100 - The Importance of Drinking Wine and Socializing, The Unexceptional Machine, The Tiny Swindler of Sleep
PARENTING IN PARTNERSHIP - LOVE AND LIMITS
I’m officiating my dear friends’ wedding in November, and with it I’ve been thinking a lot about love. When I was younger, I thought of love in terms of passion. It was visceral and all consuming, staying up all night entangled in one another. It was electric witty banter, it was carnal and captivating. In my idea of love, there was no such thing as being touched out, depleted, short-fused, misunderstood, or unseen.
But the reality is, last week my husband and I got into an argument about bacon. What is the etiquette for the consumption of bacon with one’s hands, and does the protocol change based on its flimsiness? This wasn’t a silly debate, it was an actual argument, which had nothing and everything to do with bacon. Later that day, so as to not get our floors dirty, my husband took his shoes off and left them blocking our front door, and then, when my son tripped over my husband’s gigantic shoes which were very much in the way, I did not feel slightly irritated, I felt infuriated. Because being married is like being put into a petri dish with all of each other’s bad habits and pet peeves and not-best-selves and then left to see what grows or, I suppose, molds. This will not go in the speech I give while officiating the aforementioned wedding. But, maybe it should. Because being married with young kids, to me, might be as much about love as about resiliency. According to a study, more than half, or 60%, of divorces involve spouses who are between the ages of 25 and 39, not coincidentally this is the same window of time in which a couple is likely to have children.
Marriage involves combining two totally different people, with two completely different upbringings, different love languages, different personality types, and then expecting them to build one life together. And then you give this couple a kid or two or three, you suck all of the energy out of their bodies, you don’t give them adequate time to sleep or poop or administer self-care, let alone care for each other, and then you expect the seams of this stitched union to stay intact. Sometimes the most intimate moments now are locking eyes when our kid is having an epic tantrum and finding synchronicity in how we handle it, or feeling for each other’s hand over the kids and around the dog who are all piled in bed for morning snuggles. “I love you” sometimes comes in the form of tire rotations, making a meal plan for the week, buying tomato cages, giving the dog a walk, and installing a new filter on a robot vacuum who we’ve affectionately named Trudy. And yet, that I love you doesn’t fill your cup, and your partner doesn’t feel like they’ve got anything left with which to fill it. Our marriage goes weeks operating more like a well-oiled machine than what I imagined as a marriage. And though this is a conversation that has been reserved for my closest friends, I truly don’t think our challenges are extraordinary.
One of my biggest challenges with this newsletter is to be honest about what life with little ones is like without objectifying my family. This is a tricky line to hold, and I suppose one that’s not just tough as a writer. I’ve found that making friends in adulthood also involves walking a strange undefined line between connecting and oversharing and seeking understanding and honest dialogue while not wanting to seem burdensome or bleak. However, when I’ve gone out on a limb and shared, I’ve found rich opportunities to feel connected and seen. So, with that warning, I’d now like to say something that is slightly controversial, incredibly liberating to admit, and yet not news to anyone: even with abiding love, good intention and commitment to one another, marriage is really hard sometimes.
OUR BODIES, OUR HYPOCHONDRIAC SPELLS
According to recent statistics, 100% of people, despite their best efforts, are getting older. I too have fallen victim to this bizarre phenomenon. If we have a third kid, I would have a geriatric pregnancy. I’ve aged out of The Real World cast, a show I’m not sure still exists because somewhere, about five years ago, I lost track of pop culture trends. Sometimes, for pleasure, I look at birds. And, earlier this summer, I strained my back by contorting my body while watching Yellowjackets on my iPad under the covers while my husband slept next to me. This is 36, I suppose. As my parents get older, it is becoming increasingly clear that just like everything else, age can be viewed on a spectrum, and how you get older is contingent on lifestyle and luck. I have been fortunate enough to have not had many health scares in my life, though I have had a great deal of hypochondriacal episodes thanks to Google and my overactive imagination. Because of the nature of childbirth and the sizable gaps in postpartum care, having children has been the impetus for me feeling somewhat powerless against my own mortality.
In November 2020, I gave birth to my son via c-section. I remember laying on the table, arms out, insides exposed, just watching my heartbeat on the monitor and feeling utterly powerless in my own body. This was a feeling we had grown accustomed to during the pandemic. It was 2020 and we had been quarantined for months, full of uncertainty and anxiety. There still wasn’t enough longitudinal data on the impacts of COVID on pregnant women and newborns, the vaccine hadn’t come out yet, and we lived in fear of going to the hospital. My son was born healthy and beautiful and without complication. As we were rejoicing in his arrival, admiring his tiny feet and silky skin, my routine blood draw in the hospital revealed that my white blood cell count was high, a normal consequence of surgery. At my routine follow-up appointment two weeks later, my white blood cell count was still high, which is still relatively normal. However, in order to err on the side of caution, my OBGYN recommended I go see a Hematologist at Emory Winship Cancer Institute. So, at one month postpartum, packed full of changing hormones, breasts leaking with milk, sleep-deprived and feeling incredibly vulnerable with a toddler and a newborn, I had to go to the leukemia floor of the hospital by myself to see if, on top of everything else, I was facing a cancer diagnosis. Retrospectively, while I deeply appreciate my OBGYN making sure everything was okay, having them redraw my blood again in-house before making this foreboding referral would have been invaluable. But instead, I went to the hematologist and then for two weeks, while awaiting the results of my blood tests, I’d cry at night with trepidation in the dim light of my son’s room as he nursed himself to sleep. I received a call two days after Christmas to hear that I had a clear bill of health. While I was so relieved, the great task of holding it all together during my fourth trimester while fearing that I had cancer felt nearly impossible.
This past spring, my now very active two-year old son ran full speed into my stomach, a place that used to be occupied by what I fondly remember as abs. When he plowed into my abdomen, I felt an unfamiliar pain and noticed a lump above my belly button. My previously mentioned Googling concluded that it was a postpartum umbilical hernia. I went to my general practitioner, who referred me to my OBGYN, who after doing an ultrasound recommended I see a general surgeon. For the weeks between these appointments, thanks to my treasured imagination, my undiagnosed lump became a very scary thing. According to the National Institute of Health only .08% of women are diagnosed with umbilical hernias postpartum. However, I didn’t discover my hernia until two years after my son was born and only thanks to a great deal of persistence. Similar to my diastasis recti, I had no idea that these postpartum challenges existed until they became my challenges. So, I went to a general surgeon who was a mom herself and had experienced the same issue postpartum. She pressed my hernia like my kid’s Dimpl pop toy and then confirmed my initial Google diagnosis. To have hernia surgery, you have to be certain you are done having kids, because pregnancy reverses the procedure. You also have to be able to not lift anything heavy for 4-6 weeks - a notion that sounds preposterous to a mom of a 2 and 5 year old. It is not an emergency, and so I am just waiting. Waiting for it to get worse or more painful, or for me to get sick of not being able to do any work on my central core. It is a nuisance, not an emergency. However, it is another opportunity to feel totally unprepared for the reality of having children and for the lack of information and support in postpartum care. As with so much of motherhood, we are often left carrying the weight of our own limitations demurely and with resignation, while remaining an unwavering pillar for our families.
HOW TO LIVE TO 100 - THE IMPORTANCE OF
DRINKING WINE AND SOCIALIZING
My grandma passed away in June, just two years short of reaching her goal of becoming a centenarian. She would want you to know that she wore her age like a badge of honor, she loved watching surprise wash across someone’s face when she told them how old she was. Over the last few years, there was tension between succumbing to aging and remaining hopeful to soon become agile and able-bodied again. I’ve thought a lot recently about what I can learn from her well-lived life. With this in mind, I stumbled upon the research of Dan Buettner on “Blue Zones,” areas of the world which are home to the longest-living and happiest populations. He and his team have been working for over twenty years “to uncover the secrets of longevity.” After analyzing demographic data and interviewing numerous centenarians, they identified five regions: Loma Linda, California (Seventh Day Adventist Community); Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan; and Nicoya, Costa Rica. All of them “stood out for their extraordinary longevity and vitality.” In these areas, “people reached the age of 100 at 10 times greater rates than in the United States.”
According to CDC data, the U.S. life expectancy declined to 76.4 years in 2022l that is the shortest it's been in nearly two decades. According to another study, only 20% of how long the average person lives is dictated by our genes; that leaves a lot of room for this “Blue Zone” research to be applied to how we live our lives. In the United States, we often associate health with two factors: diet and exercise. But, as a culture, we connect “diet” with how we restrict ourselves in order to lose weight, and we connect exercise with gyms and challenging workouts. However, there must be more effective ways, considering that, according to the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, more than 90% of individuals in the United States give up on their diet after 7 months. Similarly, 70% of individuals with gym memberships will no longer continue with these workout regiments.
So, while their wisdom, knowledge, and lifestyle probably provide endless opportunity for us to learn from and emulate, here are the nine common factors among the world’s centenarians that seem to be most connected to longevity:
Move naturally. Instead of hitting the gym, running marathons, getting ripped at Crossfit or losing oneself in the cultish-enthusiasm of SoulCycle, the longest living people reside in areas that encourage “moving without thinking about it.” Whether this comes in the form of sitting and then getting up from the floor often, gardening, or walking to your village, this natural movement is tied to long-term vitality.
Purpose. Having a purpose is an integral component of a Blue Zone, perhaps even more so than happiness. The Okinawans call it Ikigai, and the Nicoyans call it plan de vida; for both, it translates to “why I wake up in the morning.” Research shows, though I’m not exactly sure how this research is possible, that feeling like you have a purpose can add 7 years to your life expectancy.
Downshift. No matter where you live, stress is likely inevitable at certain times in life, and stress is linked to health problems that have long-term implications on life expectancy. However, the world’s longest-living people have found ways to reduce their stress, whether it is napping, praying, or happy hour; a built-in perspective-reset is connected to increased longevity.
Stop while you’re ahead. One of the biggest surprises when dining in another country is how much smaller their portions are compared to ours. Most people in Blue Zones “eat their smallest meal in the late afternoon or early evening, and then, they do not eat any more the rest of the day.” The mantra repeated before meals in Okinawan culture is “Hara hachi bu” which is a reminder to stop eating when you are 80% full.
Minimize meat. In all of the Blue Zones, “Meat—mostly pork—is eaten on average only 5 times per month.” However, in the United States, “between 63 and 74% of individuals consume red or processed meat on any given day.” Beans, fruits, and veggies were the cornerstones of the diet in Blue Zones. Nuts were snacked on often, and processed food was essentially absent.
Wine O’Clock. Unlike what you might expect, people “in all Blue Zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly” and have for much of their lives. Most drink between one and two glasses of wine each day, either with friends or with a meal.
Belong. Most centenarians “belong to some faith-based community”, though which denomination doesn’t seem to matter at all.
Family first. Most centenarians in the Blue Zones live near or with family. They often have remained with a life partner and have invested a great deal of their energy in their children.
Tested true tribe. The people who have lived longest have an enduring social circle that also supports a healthy lifestyle. My favorite example of this was the “Moai” (/mo,eye/) in Okinawa. This is a small group, usually around five, that remain in committed friendships throughout life from a very young age. The Moai concept originated as an alternative to a bank: if you ran into financial troubles, these were the people you’d count on, but it has since evolved into a life-long group of people who support each other in all facets of life.
It feels worth noting that these Blue Zones are not war-torn areas, and none of them are facing ongoing racism, poverty, and oppression, or other factors that would make these nine principles of longevity far more complicated. However, it also feels important to acknowledge that these nine principles are totally sensible, and it seems like a missed opportunity to not consider how they can be applied in our own lives.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
My daughter turned five a couple of weeks ago. That means for longer than I was in high school or college, which at the time felt quite extended, I have been a mom. This is an identity I’m now and forever inextricably tied to. It has been a bewildering, humbling and utterly wonderful journey, that has gone both indescribably fast and achingly slow. This is the letter I wrote my daughter on her fifth birthday in reflection of the scintillating human she is becoming:
My tiny swindler of sleep,
Three times in the past week, you’ve busted into our room in the middle of the night, like a tyrannical, nocturnal caterer dispensing birthday demands: the cake frosting must be pink, the cake should be chocolate, and nothing but rose decorations will do. Until I had you, I had no idea what it was like to wake up to someone monologuing next to my bedside without warning or context. Now, it is common, though still quite startling, for me to go from dreaming to quelling the demands of my tiny swindler of sleep.
The other night as I was tucking you in, you looked into my eyes, a mirror of your eyes, and said, “I wish a part of you was inside me, so you could fix me any time something hurt. And a part of me was in you.” My love, you’ve been earthside for five years today, but being connected to you is embedded deeply within me. Being your mom means that even in my treasured moments of solitude, we are never without each other. I am permanently halved, even as you become more whole. And, being mortal and thus unable to always fix your hurt, keeps me up at night when you don’t.
Somehow, you are now five. Which means we’ve been tired and in awe of you for half a decade. Your birthday party is unicorn/fairy/mermaid/ballerina/princess themed despite us being so intentional of not pushing any gender norms in your direction. Because somewhere between five years ago and now, you’ve become this entire little human. You love painting flowers and being absorbed in books and prefer wearing your hair in these goofy antennae-like double buns. You’re happiest with a wand in hand and your haggard Pooh bear in the nook of your arm. You feel things so deeply and are already quite a storyteller. At night, when you should be in bed, I often come in to find you orchestrating elaborate fairy tales with a sloth in a headband and a cat in a tutu.
The other day, you told your brother that you loved him and his entire body lit up, “you love me?” He asked with such eager desperation. When you’re not kicking each other in the shins, these moments of sweetness are everything. Last week, you learned to cross an entire set of monkey bars and when you dropped down to your feet, you were beaming. You can do hard things like finding ways to recenter when you are frustrated or worried or exhausted and navigating your capacity for connection and quiet. Even in the moments filled with the biggest of feelings, we never stop seeing the shining light you cast on this world. Happy birthday, my girl. I love you entirely and forever, from the moment you began to grow within me to all that you are growing into without me. I am and will always be connected to you.
With love and wonder,
Your mom
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
We have an instruction manual for our espresso machine that is more comprehensive than the directions we received when departing the hospital with our newborn. I don’t think my son and daughter have ever even considered the fact that I wasn’t a mother before I was theirs. Faking it till you make it, I’ve found, seems to be the secret of adulthood, and so we proceed as if we know what we’re doing. But, at every step, we are left with the ever-humbling truth that we are just throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks with our test audience, who also just happens to be the people depending on us for success and survival.
With that, I’d like to pitch the idea of the “Unexceptional Machine.” Controversial? Yes. But stick with me. Parents are constantly navigating the issue of whether the challenges their children are experiencing are age appropriate, part of who they are, or something that needs further exploration and support. From sick days to erratic behavior, to developmental milestones, what if you could insert a slip of paper into a machine, and it would pop out an answer of whether you needed to take action on your concern or just take a deep breath and chalk it up to the unpredictability of tiny humans. It is probably a bad sign for the inventor to then admit to the immeasurable problematic nature of such a device. But, despite it being an indisputably bad idea, I think it would bring me a great deal of peace of mind. Here are a few examples:
My child has a dresser full of clothing and only four outfits that feel comfortable on their body currently. Unexceptional or Cause for Concern?
My child realized that we have a dog this summer. We’ve had said dog since before they were born, but seemingly unbeknownst to them. They went from not caring at all about his existence to “dressing” him daily in a bandana, sneaking treats to him in exchange for a shake or a kiss, and being endlessly amused at how the inflection of their voice impacts the perk of his ears and the wag of his tail. Unexceptional or Cause for Concern?
My child’s tantrum was so bad the other day that they tried to spit in my face and hurled a fire log at me because I didn’t say the words “unicorn, mermaid” while pushing them on the swing. Unexceptional or Cause for Concern?
In the days of yore, people did this child-rearing business in close-knit communities, and from my understanding the “Unexceptional Machine” was just innately built into the village that was helping to raise your children. However, since I don’t know how to mobilize this fabled “village” that we’ve heard so much about, how do we adequately distinguish which inevitable challenges deserve our time, money, and worry and which deserve a deep breath and some patience? A part of me knows we should just trust the process and do what we can to raise empowered, empathetic, strong, capable kids. But, also, would you just “trust the process” with your espresso machine?
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
This eggplant parmesan is what I ate the night I went into labor. I was nine-plus months pregnant and was so incredibly uncomfortable. While treasuring my final moments without a baby, I stumbled upon several news articles touting the success of this "labor inducing" miracle-worker of a dish from a place called Scalini's. I called my husband and asked him to go out of his way to pick it up for me before coming home from work. Did it sound a little crazy that eggplant parmesan could induce labor? Yes. But, worst case scenario, I would eat delicious Italian food and continue to be pregnant. There really didn't seem to be a downside. Two hours and one devoured eggplant parmesan later, I was in labor. According to this restaurant's website, my daughter is considered an "eggplant baby." The restaurant has since closed, but they did share their famous eggplant parmesan recipe before shuttering their doors. So, if you are pregnant and ready for that baby to arrive earth-side, this recipe is for you. If you just enjoy a delicious Italian meal as the evenings get cooler, this is a good one for you too.
The Lives of Others - Issue No. 15
The Backwards Walking Woman, Dumbledore and Gifted Cocktail Sauce, Mortality and Motherhood, The Power of Reading and Learning to Read
THE BACKWARDS WALKING WOMAN, DUMBLEDORE AND GIFTED COCKTAIL SAUCE
When I studied abroad in a small Etruscan town in Italy for a semester of college, there was a woman who lived on my street. She and I, though we always remained strangers, both lived at the bottom of too many steps and half way down a very steep hill. She didn’t seem well. Her unkempt hair was unnaturally black and scraggly long. Her makeup looked like a child who had gained unauthorized access to some lipstick and eye shadow before getting stuck in inclement weather. She was somewhere between 35 and 70, weathered by a story I would never know. Every day, despite the sloped cobblestone streets, she would wear outrageously high platform heels which rendered it impossible for her to walk downhill, so she was left with no other choice than to walk backwards. Most days, we’d pass each other, she walking like a VHS tape being rewound, and I trying desperately to maintain a straight face at the strangeness of it all. Sometimes, I’d say “Ciao” as we passed, and other times I’d feign distraction by my far-from-smart Vodafone. It was a really weird semester. Perugia, where we were, was beleaguered with the fallout of Amanda Knox being imprisoned for allegedly murdering her roommate just a few months before I arrived, and Americans were seen as having brought a lot of bad press to the region. The writing material I gained from that semester continues to be quite fruitful. And, while much of those months have blurred with time, the backwards-walking-woman-in-heels remains crisp in my memory; she was the embodiment of how frighteningly, and sometimes humorously, untethered the world felt during those months.
Two years later, while touring graduate schools, I met the director of my dream MFA (Creative Writing) program. Picture Dumbledore driving a pickup truck around a small college town; he was charmingly and endearingly eccentric. His gas tank was very near empty, and his truck was filthy, a brown coat of dust across the windshield, papers scattered about like makeshift floor mats. So, our first stop was the gas station, at which point, he grabbed two scratch-off lottery tickets from the dash and said “that should cover it.” I waited in the car as he paid inside with his winnings and filled up the truck with the couple gallons of gas that his cashed-in lottery tickets covered. He got back in his truck, rolled down his manual window and combed his working-man fingers through his long beard. I remember thinking, this is exactly where I should go to school. Years later, after having gone to a second choice school because of a better scholarship, I found out this man had died. I felt pangs of sadness, as if I knew him so well, but also for not getting to know him at all. He will always represent a path untaken for me.
One year later, my roommate from college and I moved into our first apartment in Philadelphia. It was the attic of a row home with a bathroom that had green floor-to-ceiling vinyl and a kitchen that made you lose all sense of time because of the stackable washer-dryer that blocked the only window. Our landlord’s name was Bill Clinton, and the middle-aged man living below us was a hoarder. Soon after moving in, we began receiving gifts from our neighbor. It started with cocktail sauce. He had allegedly had a party, though we never heard or saw anyone, and as his note explained, “he had far too much cocktail sauce left over,” so he bought extra frozen shrimp and left the hors d'oeuvres on our stairs. Next it was boxes of Girl Scout cookies because, “how can you say ‘no’ to those cute Girl Scouts?” Then it was a $100 gift card to the sushi restaurant that opened at the end of our block because “we have to support local business.” And finally, since he was an employee of Comcast he “saw that we used them as a provider and decided to take care of our bill for the rest of the year.” This was one of two times that I actually remember speaking to him, confused and questioning his decision to pay for our Basic Cable and Internet Bundle. The only other time we spoke was when my roommate and I needed to recover our air conditioning box unit that we had accidentally dropped out of our window and onto his patio (thankfully, no one was harmed by our stupidity). We had very little money that year, my roommate had experienced a catastrophic loss in her family, and despite the strangeness of it all, our neighbor’s random acts of generosity always brought smiles to our faces. A year later, we moved out, and that was it. His public Facebook profile picture is now of pole dancing Peeps-bunnies on stage while Peeps-chicks watch in the audience. That’s all I know about his current life. Pretty weird, as was he, as was a lot of that year when this person we never knew, but invented a whole life for, became strangely incorporated into my navigating my early 20s in a new city.
F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in one of my favorite quotes from “The Great Gatsby,” “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Paying attention to the people on my periphery has helped me connect to time or place or even myself. To me, strangers can be a playground, letting me explore without ever leaving my own head.
Just as when I was a kid, I am still kind of floored by the fact that life continues on for people even when I am not there. There is something akin to kismet that my life and the lives of others have moments of intersection, and that sometimes, and often unpredictably, those moments matter.
MORTALITY AND MOTHERHOOD
A woman who I worked with back in 2011 was shot and killed in a doctor’s office a few weeks ago by someone she had never met. She was two years older than me, and her kids are two years older than mine. When it happened, they locked down Midtown, and before anyone knew any details, I just felt sheer relief that my husband was working from home that day, that my kids go to a mainly outdoor school in the woods, and that if an incident transpired, there would be so many directions for them to run in. That we live in a time where this crazy thought has crossed my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about this woman who was killed: how in the very brief time I knew her, she always seemed so kind and gracious, how she always had a moment to strike up a conversation in the lunch room or make you feel noticed, what a wonderful mother I have no doubt she had become, how unfair it is that she will not get to see her children grow. This is innately a story about the lives of others, how someone else’s news impacts our own, how tragedy can remind us to treasure this precious life. Though I had not seen her in so long, as our city began to mourn the loss of her, concentric circles of our lives began to intersect. This world can feel so big and unwieldy and so strangely small at the same time.
The day after her death, as I chugged my lukewarm coffee, something I never could have imagined doing before becoming a mom, I thought of how just one morning before she could have been doing the exact same thing. I hadn’t washed the right tutu for dance camp, my daughter had lost a quarter in her underpants and my son asked me to watch him tie his penis into a knot. “How old are you?” my daughter asked me a million times as my son zipped around on his bike calling me “Bad Mama” every time he passed. I blended a smoothie, checked for dinosaurs in the bathroom, asked my humping dog to leave my arm alone, wrestled socks and shoes on wiggly feet and tried to hold onto that feeling that this life is just such a gift. Here is what I know: children shouldn’t have to know an unjust world without their parents, we cannot become apathetic to gun reform, the shortcomings in mental health resources in our country are a travesty, and this fragile life is just utterly beautiful and bewildering.
THE POWER OF READING AND LEARNING TO READ
One of my daughter’s Barbies just came down with Cholera last week. A couple of weeks before, Ken had a terrible case of Scarlet Fever. The other day, when someone said “wow, a war of big feelings,” my daughter interjected, “at least we’re not in a real war!” This is my fault. Recently, my four-year-old and I have been reading historical fiction together. It started with this abbreviated 65-page version of Little Women, which we read three times. Then, the librarian, who we see weekly during our Books and Bubbles outing (library + bubble tea), recommended we try the classic American Girl books, which I had not read since I was eight or nine years old. So, we have dived in, and with this undertaking, I have had to improvise insufficient explanations to my four year old on such topics as immigration, the Westward Expansion, Native American Reservations, World War Two, and the Suffragettes. And, I’ve had to offer context to parents and teachers as the references to the 1700s prairie or 19th century industrial revolution have begun to pop up during playdates and at school. Despite my flawed attempts at making sense of such a crazy world to my sweet kid, it has been such a pleasure to read together, and has conjured up quite a bit of nostalgia to revisit these stories as an adult. I love seeing her find the same joy as I have always found in historical fiction, watching her dive into these worlds as the words I’m reading swirl around her. I’ve wondered if it’s too much, if she’s not old enough yet to be exposed to such things. Then, I remember how grateful I was that my mom did this with me. Watching My So Called Life circa 1994 (a show that in its brief 19 episode scope was ahead of its time and exceptional) is still something I so fondly remember doing with my mom. This is just one among the many opportunities she gave me that led to such dynamic and fruitful conversations afterward. The trick was that she just kept showing up and leaving space for me to better understand the world with her help, and now I get the pleasure to do that through reading with my daughter. There is evidence that reading fiction can make you a better person. According to dozens of experiments, reading has been linked to increased empathy, better social skills, and increased tendencies towards kindness and compassion.
I was thinking about my daughter learning to read this morning while soaking up my final moments in bed. On the monitor, I saw her surrounded by American Girl books flipping through each of them and looking at the pictures. She loves doing this and I can tell that she’s reliving everything she’s heard as she does. This approach to learning to read is called “Balanced Reading” and it has been one of the main methodologies schools in the United States have used to teach reading in recent decades. According to The Daily’s episode on The Fight Over Phonics, “balanced reading” allows children to pick books that interest them, have quiet reading time, and infer the words on the page. So, this method of reading leans heavily on interests, pictures and context. The other main method has been deemed the “science of reading” which is grounded in phonics, the practice of learning sounds and letter combinations. My gut reaction is to gravitate towards balanced reading. Really anything with the word “balanced” is pretty appealing to me. If we teach our kids to love the act of reading, their investment in learning the words will come eventually and perhaps naturally from curiosity. No one cares that Mat sat on a cat. Except, maybe, the cat. To me, the phonics approach is tedious and certainly doesn’t seem like it would be the impetus for building a lifelong love of the written word. However, cognitive science and MRI research on reading have revealed that I am wrong and that phonics is the most important component of learning to read. So, those painful Bob Books that I remember from childhood unfortunately matter, and my gravitation towards balanced reading, it appears, is rather short sighted. And, pairing phonics with a well-rounded education in such areas as social studies and science seems to be the ticket to much higher rates of literacy.
So, despite over a half-century of research that shows the importance of teaching phonics, why is it that at least one-quarter of our country’s schools, including some of the biggest school systems, are teaching the “balanced reading” approach? The impact of how we’ve been teaching literacy in our country has led to a national crisis on dropping literacy rates. According to The New York Times, In New York City, only 49 percent of third grade students were proficient in reading in 2022. In Chicago, 80 percent of kids are not reading on grade level, and in Detroit that number jumps to 91 percent. This educational crisis in reading instruction is disproportionately impacting black and brown children: “On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4th-graders was 45 percent. For 8th graders, the percentages were 15 and 42.” New York City recently announced that they will trade in their “balanced reading” approach for a more phonics-based approach to teaching reading. This announcement is “the latest and biggest acknowledgment to date that a generation of American students has been given the wrong tools to achieve literacy.” But, there’s a long way to go. Many teachers still need to be trained in more phonics-based methodologies, and many schools are still using balanced reading curriculums. Maybe it shouldn’t be a shock that our education system is so flawed, that a popular methodology of reading that isn’t scientifically successful has caused an entire generation of kids to fall behind in their ability to read, that children with learning disabilities and people of color have been disproportionately impacted by this failed methodology, that perhaps it has taken so long to shift our approach because of who was being disproportionately impacted. So, all of this to say, reading matters. How we teach reading also matters. It feels exhausting and riddled with privilege that not having an excess of time or resources or education ourselves can cause our kids to fall through the cracks. As Frederick Douglass once said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Literacy is a fundamental right and our kids deserve the key to the worlds that books open.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
My favorite dinner table question currently is “what is a recent internet rabbit hole that you went down?” To me, understanding the topics that consume our energy when we could be spending those resources on so many other things is truly fascinating. Here is an example:
While perusing Instagram back in December, I stumbled upon a picture of Joe and Jill Biden dressed up for the State Dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte. My first observation was that Emmanuel Macron looked like he could be the son of the other three people in the picture. From there, the rabbit hole began: Joe Biden, whose age has been a point of contention for our country, is a well-documented 80 years old. His wife Jill is 71, similarly, Brigitte is 70. Macron is a sprite 45 years old. So, in fact, my Instagram observation was quite accurate. Naturally, I then wanted to know how Macron and Brigitte met? Macron met Brigitte when he was 15 years old and she was his drama teacher and a married mother of three. Their age difference, and that of Melania Trump and Donald Trump, is almost exactly the same, the only difference is our country’s sexist view of what is copasetic versus controversial. The Macrons married in 2007, one-year after Brigitte’s divorce, he was 29 and she was 54. I have nothing intelligent to say; this deep dive took an hour of my life that I will never get back and made me an expert on a topic that will very likely never be useful.
Here are some recent rabbit holes of my dear friends:
Who Taylor Swift is dating
Your eyes involvement in the immune system
TikTok chiropractic adjustments
All things eczema
Smith Island Cakes
Breast milk in mice
To me, the rabbit hole question is similar to the intrigue of seeing what’s inside your neighbors’ recycling bin on trash day or being able to hear what someone is listening to on the earbuds when they think no one hears. When I was in my early twenties and living in Boston, there was this dreary day when I had forgotten my coffee at home, and adulting just wasn’t coming easily. I got on the T (the subway) on my way to work, popped in my headphones and played a song on my iPod (to age this story) that I was into at the time. In order for you to get the whole experience, the song was a rendition of the 90s hit “Back for Good” covered by The Concretes. For the first twenty minutes of my ride, I had the song playing on repeat at full volume, as the T filled with people. Eventually, I pulled off my headphones, which it turns out were not fully plugged in, and thanks to the iPod’s internal speaker, I had blasted this angsty tune for everyone on the subway during the entirety of their commute. I was mortified by having exposed my inner world to strangers. To me, this is similar to revealing your deep dives, how are you filling your unoccupied time when you toss inhibition to the wind?
So, at the risk of being nosy or prying, if you need a conversation starter for your next dinner party, I would encourage you to ask what rabbit holes have you gone down recently?
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Every Sunday evening, I curse the task of making our weekly dinner menu. I Google healthy-enough, fast and easy recipes that will fit my family’s very limiting dietary preferences, and then put together our grocery order to be delivered the following day. Then, as we refer to the whiteboard menu that hangs in our kitchen, I feel very grateful to have at least one clear roadmap for the week. This morning my son ate three string cheeses for breakfast, and yesterday my daughter ate a baguette like an apple. Left to their own devices, this would be their preference. But, instead, we have the menu, and then once a week, despite all logic and experience, I throw in a wild card, a meal that looks good to me but is a risky move for everyone else. It’s a chance for me to stretch my culinary prowess and invite my neglected spice cabinet into the mix. Last week, I decided to try lamb meatballs with saffron rice and an herby yogurt. My kids love balls of meat, I hadn’t tried lamb with them for a while, and as long as they didn’t connect what was on their plates to the cute lamb puppet that they use to describe their big feelings, I thought we’d be in good shape. Often, my wildcard meal earns disgusted faces and is reduced to the adjective “yucky.” But, I got to use saffron, and my kids picked dill, cilantro, and mint from our garden. It looked like a success; They ate the meatballs, the hummus and the veggies, and they capped their meal with the classic digestif: the after dinner banana. The evening activity of calculating how many twirls will make you too dizzy to stand had commenced when we asked my daughter to bring her finished plate to the counter. This is one of her “chores,” something that we’ve read increases the potential success of children. She explained that the kitchen was too smelly to bring us her plate. We are no stranger to this excuse: I’m too tired to clean up my toys, my nose hurts too much for me to put my own shoes on, I simply can’t clean up my spilled milk because my hair is too tight. So, despite us being perfectly aware of sensory challenges, I explained that if the smell is too much for her to touch her plate, at the very least she would need to throw out her banana peel. The meal had been cooked over an hour before, she had sat in the room and eaten her food with no problem, surely the smell of spices wasn’t still so thick in the air now that she would actually feel sick. So, without protest, she went to the table, grabbed her banana peel, threw it in the trash, and then proceeded to vomit all over our kitchen. Then our two-year-old son, who is no stranger to his sister’s light gag reflex and propensity for puking, as if having seen it for the first time, ran a lap around our house to escape the puke, and then, in an act of total disorientation, slipped in it and began puking himself. And just like that, my attempt to make a nice pre-kid, sophisticated meal was once again proven to be far from worth the effort. I thought of the Instagram mom I had watched that morning, feeding her son a plate full of sauerkraut, spinach and tilapia, and the caption explaining that it was our job as moms to banish the idea of “kid’s food.” Or the occupational therapist who had said dysregulated emotions are most certainly tied to gluten. I do my best to offer a balanced diet for my children, but as puke-gate proved once again, the challenges to expanding our meal plan repertoire are real.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
ONE-PAN LAMB MEATBALLS AND SAFFRON RICE WITH HERBY-YOGURT SAUCE
I realize that the story told in connection with this meal might be enough to deter you from making it. But, it was a fantastic combination of flavors and everyone in our family ate the meatballs, so I'll call it a win. My sister-in-law introduced me to the Defined Dish cookbook as a holy grail of interesting, easy to make, healthy meals and it has not disappointed. Pull out some spices and may your meal be less eventful than ours ended up being.
Why Am I Doing This? - Issue No. 14
Nursing on a Boat, Pondering Employment While Cleaning up Poop, Phone Addiction
NURSING ON A BOAT
Around my daughter’s first birthday, we bought a boat. To some, this was as naive as when we adopted a puppy when I was five months pregnant. And sure, maybe I had been following a viral Instagram account (#theoandbeau) and had developed some preconceived unrealistic expectations about my puppy and baby having daily snuggle nap sessions together. I’m sure the older, more seasoned parents in our life might have thought, what the heck are they thinking? Nevertheless, all of our parents were kind enough to at least not express this sentiment to our faces. And truth be told, we are mostly just making it up as we go as is, I think, the case with becoming a parent for anyone. We figured, if we have a puppy and a baby together, they won’t know life without each other. And, similarly, if we get a boat when our daughter is so young, then being “boat people” is just a facet of our family’s identity. So, we bought a boat and all of the accompanying watersport toys from a couple who were selling the majority of their possessions to embark on motorhome-life as the first chapter of their third act, post-retirement.
And just like that, Big Barracuda, our 27-year-old Malibu boat, became an integral part of handling the Atlanta heat and spending wind-lashed time as a family. A few things about our boat: In archetypal form, the boat’s pronouns are (she/her). When we got her, she had a slightly beat-up, maroon-striped interior and an unseemly tramp-stamp, the removal of which was one of our few cosmetic upgrades. Her sound system doesn’t work, so our tiny bluetooth speaker is an integral part of our outings. And, similar to a torrid love affair, my feelings for her fluctuate between adoration and animosity. In the same vein as devouring a large cheese plate and then feeling overcome with lethargy and regret, there are moments when I think “why are we doing this?” Since we don’t live on a lake, the boat takes up what would be my car’s space in our garage, which sits beneath my daughter’s bedroom. A boat beneath a bedroom also seems like a hazard. In order to tow the boat, my husband drives a gas-guzzling truck instead of the environmentally-conscious, economically-sound vehicle we might otherwise own. In order to keep the boat running, my husband, who is peculiarly handy and knowledgeable about random repairs, has to spend time working on the boat while I continue doing what I’ve done all week by watching our children without him. The boat wears us out, even if we don’t do a single water sport. So, there are times when we return home having burnt zero calories, but still feel like sleeping all afternoon. We never get back as early as we think we will, which usually messes up what is otherwise sacred nap time for our son. And, I often have a little pervading voice in my head questioning whether our children are being exposed to flesh-eating bacteria as they frolic around in the warm lake water.
And then, there’s the watersports, otherwise known as one of the few opportunities to endure a concussion and a recreational enema simultaneously. I married into a family of water sports enthusiasts. When we’re visiting my in-laws’ lakehouse, watersports are the focal point of the day; the more times we can do them, the better. Every summer, my husband, sister-in-law and brother-in-law have new toys, new ambitions, and renewed enthusiasm for jumping, surfing, and falling on their faces behind a boat. Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite memories with my in-laws have been during these times. I don’t even mind all of the talk of ballasts, which part of your foot needs a bit more pressure, or where in the crest of the wave you’ll get most air if you jump. But I also am very happy keeping my skill at mediocre level. For me, the 7am wakeup to get on the lake while it’s still like glass is rarely a compelling proposition. And sometimes I feel more excited by the Goldfish snacks than by watching someone gyrate their hips on a foilboard. Not to mention, being asked to tow my husband while he does watersports, fills me with a sense of dread. He grew up driving boats, so my novice operating sense often leaves room for critique, which I rarely want to hear. But most importantly, it feels like I am fighting every mom/partner-instinct when he encourages me to hit the gas and thus expose him to danger while our children look on at their father gliding in and out of the wake. One of my favorite comedians, Nate Bergatze, has a funny bit about boating that totally resonates with me: “I could be getting older but I don’t like lakes. I want a pontoon or like a boat that doesn’t move. [In my sister’s] boat, [for] like five hours you just sit in the back of it…[obnoxious boat sounds] no one can talk, it’s just chaos. I mean stuff is flying everywhere. I’m sore for a month. Just like, is that from the boat? There’s no rules on the lake, it’s just the Wild West. Everybody drives as fast as they want. There’s only sudden turns made out there. Everybody driving the boat is either drunk or eleven. No one is a normal person.”
But, despite all of these things, I love our boat. We bought Big Barracuda six months before the Pandemic hit and I found out I was pregnant with my son. And, when so many were feeling cloistered and claustrophobic, our boat became our little lifeline of fresh air and wide-open space. It felt like we had discovered an oasis on the water at a time when life felt confined and enigmatic. When I was pregnant, my son would move his legs around my rib cage as soon as our boat’s engine revved, as if he was stretching into the open space around us. And once he was born, as I had with my daughter, I would nurse him as the boat cut through the water and the wind tousled his hair. Our boat is the only place now in which my kids will nap in my arms. And this feeling is the incarnation of bliss: my nose tangled in their hair, their flopping limbs draped over my tightly wrapped arms, their heads pressed against my chest. These moments are the ones where I look at my family and think “We’ve done it. Just look at us. Look at these little humans who we’ve brought into this vast world. Look how we are together.” And yes, without plentiful snacks, lots of sunscreen, a sandy beach to anchor near, and my husband agreeing to basically handle everything other than our children, these outings wouldn’t be possible. And there are days that I fantasize about a world in which our hair is less tangled and my husband isn’t pushing for another Saturday of trekking up to the lake to spend the morning on the water. I can somehow both wonder why am I doing this? and feel a sense of peaceful surrender that is alike to not wanting it any other way.
PONDERING EMPLOYMENT
WHILE CLEANING UP POOP
Last week I met with one of my former high school teachers, who I have always admired and with whom I have stayed in touch with over the years. He and I were going to get a beer to talk about his upcoming retirement. There has been a part of me that has fantasized about returning to my high school as one of the English teachers who were formative in becoming who I am today. Positions at my alma mater open up very infrequently, so I wanted to see if it was time for me to put my resume in the running.
We were scheduled to grab a beer at 5pm; even the term “grab a beer” sounds low-stakes, with little preparation and effort to make it a reality. However, prior to my leaving the house, my daughter got upset in a failed attempt to convince me that she should be able to eat a second donut since the day had felt so long. She was certain that the donut she had eaten for breakfast must have actually been consumed yesterday. Then she went to the potty in a donut-deprived huff, and proceeded to accidentally spread her poop all over her skin, clothes and the toilet seat. I cleaned her and everything else up, desperate to not get poop on the outfit I had picked out to look like a casually and effortlessly put-together human. Before I finished, she explained that I absolutely could not go to my meeting because we needed to make a bowl of popcorn, a pool and an elevator for the dolls in her dollhouse immediately. Meanwhile, my son, who remains in his hit and run phase, was repeatedly banging his toy car into us and then scampering off as quickly as he had arrived. As I drove away to grab a beer, my daughter and son stood tearfully at the window waving to me, as if I were going on a trip, because that is how rare it is for me to leave both of them, I suppose.
So, in an event that high-school-me could have only daydreamed of, I met my former teacher for and Guinness and a perfect hour of talking about poetry and writing and teaching, and it felt fantastic to be an adult, to reconnect, and to fantasize about reentering the classroom in the future. And then we said our goodbyes and I went home, palmed the contents of an entire box of tissues out of the potty, tried to convince my son and daughter for the one-millionth time not to drink the bathwater after they both peed in it, wrestled pajamas onto my son, ad-libbed another “tooth story” so as to distract my daughter long enough for me to brush her teeth, read all of the books, sang all of the lullabies, kissed all of the stuffies, and then layed on my bed with nothing left. Relieved that I had maintained patience during the predictably circuitous pathway to sleep. The next week, after answering my daughter’s recent questions about heaven (something she’s become very curious about after hearing the plot of Disney’s esteemed-classic Bambi) and helping my son learn to hold his penis down so that his pee doesn’t spray all over our bathroom, after picking up a never-ending-mess of toys and cutting slices of turkey into stars, so as to entice my kids into consuming some protein in their lunchboxes for the following day, I applied for a too-good-to-pass-up writing job at one of my favorite publications. Teaching at my alma mater felt intimidating but perhaps committing all of my time to writing for an esteemed publication wouldn’t? I stayed up till midnight rewriting my resume and cover letter and picking the perfect writing sample, only to be woken up by my daughter at 3am because she had had a nightmare about “mean robots taking all of her stuffies.”
Why am I doing this to myself? I thought. Why try to take on more, when I already feel like I’m at capacity? Why not just soak in this fleeting time and believe that, when I’m ready, I’ll be able to step back into my career? Why feel jealous of my girlfriends making money and moving into positions of power when I’m getting to be with my kids and to write, when that is a choice I made? Why consider becoming an English teacher again, a far from lucrative job that involves a never-ending pile of papers to grade, books to read, and lessons to plan outside of the classroom? Why consider writing for someone else instead of having the creative liberty to write for myself? How can I navigate the internal pull to be impressive, to flex my brain, to prove my potential while also feeling deeply committed to having my own schedule and raising my little ones? How can we be all of the things we want to be? How can we live in the moment and also remember that the moment isn’t all that we are? How can you feel ambitious and settled? How does one ever find the balance?
PHONE ADDICTION
I am addicted to my phone. For years now, when making New Year’s Resolutions, I predictably set an intention to be on my screen less often. And, the fact that I make the resolution annually, should indicate my failure at setting this aspiration into practice. I haven’t found anything that sticks. And yet, I also don’t actually enjoy being on my phone as often as I am. However, it is my clock, my camera, my newspaper, and my weather gauge. Most importantly, as I am now most often home with my children, my phone also often represents my connection to the outside world. However, I fear it also might just be leading to my demise. Recently, I’ve noticed that I get on it any time I have a moment of peace, but it doesn’t actually bring me peace. I regularly will get into a room and forget why I’m there because I was looking at my phone. I’ll be standing in line and realize that I have no idea who is behind me or in front of me because I’ve been so glued to my screen that I haven’t taken enough time to just observe the world around me. My kids will be playing independently, and I’ll be checking emails instead of listening to them. I’ll be mindlessly scrolling Instagram, and realize that I am devoid of thoughts, as if my brain has actually atrophied. Recently, I’ve been wondering if phones are the antithesis to the brain training that is recommended to increase brain health. In other words, since cell phones haven’t been around long enough to collect longitudinal data, what if our phones are destroying our brains?
In part, this question feels a bit like that of a conspiracy theorist, but unlike Flightless Birds and Pizzagate, I think there is a great deal of validity in believing that the overuse of our phones might be dismantling our ability to critically and creatively think. The more life I spend on my phone, the more I feel like it’s not the life I want. I want to be present for my kids and for myself and since a world without cell phones will be as foreign as cassette tapes for my son and daughter, I want to model healthy phone habits now, so that they will have role models in order to be able to do the same. But, when I put my phone down I feel physically anxious and often pulled towards it as if my body needs a fix.
Not surprisingly, I am not alone. Apple recently confirmed that its device users unlock their phones 80 times every day. That's about as much as six to seven times every hour. When you get updates on your phone, like social media updates or text messages, your brain gets a hit of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that makes you feel good. However, this good feeling is fleeting and leaves us craving more. And, when I try to get some space from my phone, I experience nomophobia, a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity. This causes my body to release the stress hormone cortisol, because I’ve become conditioned to crave these dopamine hits, and my body is going through a withdrawal of sorts. I experience this every time I try to leave my phone on the counter for an hour. And this is the goal of social media platforms. They are built to be addictive to users.
So, I’ve deleted my social media apps from my phone and forgotten my passwords, so I can only log into them on my computer. I’m trying to put my phone out of reach, despite not getting the pictures I might otherwise capture, so I’m not tempted to pick it up when I don’t need it. My husband and I are coming up with the parameters of when and how far away we should put the devices in the evening. I’ve downloaded the Kindle app, and am trying to default to that, or the New York Times, or even the weather more often. I’m continuously reminding myself that for a good portion of my life, I was not this connected and I was fine, even better perhaps. I do not have the answers and I am yet to be a success story. However, I do recognize that when I’m on my phone and then put it down, I’m often overcome by the feeling of why am I doing this? And that’s not a way to live.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
Recently, I was listening to a Podcast with Gloria Steinem, and in it she talked about the power of laughter, specifically unadulterated laughter. As she explains in her book My Life on The Road, “Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled....laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” There is nothing I love more than the cleansing, endorphin-filled feeling that follows uninhibited laughter. The other day, my two-year-old son and I were making a dance routine on the swings, something that I’m pretty sure we could take to America’s Got Talent. Every time, I laid on my stomach and did a bow pose while swinging back and forth, he would erupt into the most joyful, uncontrolled laughter. And, despite my fear that I might fall flat on my face, I would have done my swing moves a million more times to hear the golden sound of his giggles. The poet Ross Gay has a perfect poem in which he talks about this feeling called Throwing Children. here is an excerpt:
"you throw her so high she lives up there in the tree for a minute she notices the ants organizing on the bark and a bumblebee carousing the little unripe persimmon in its beret she laughs and laughs as she hovers up there like a bumblebee like a hummingbird up there giggling in the light like a giddy little girl up there the world knows how to love."
To me, Ross Gay defines the purity of laughter in his piece. I’ve been thinking a lot about laughter in my life recently. When my dad really laughs, his eyes fill with tears and four deep creases indent the corner of each side of his face. His laughter reaches a higher pitch in his register than he otherwise ever has and to me, more than anyone else, I find it completely and utterly contagious as if in some primal form it is a calling for me to join him. Laughter is our opportunity to momentarily cast our reticence to the wind. My best friend and I share this laughter often. I never feel closer to her than when we can’t lock it up long enough to even squeeze words in between our belly laughs. When we try to articulate what is funny, we can never capture what made us totally disregard our inhibitions and connect with each other through this pure output of joy. Recently during my travels to New Zealand, at a cookout for our friend’s wedding, I said something retrospectively stupid, and in an effort to explain myself, I began to giggle. My eyes filled with tears as I tried to swallow my laughter, but I just couldn’t seem to choke it down. Before long, all of my friends sitting near me were laughing with me, or at me, or some combination of the two. It was a very simple moment and yet one of my favorites from the trip, a moment of bliss. I can’t think of anything that could heal the world and ourselves more than finding our place and our people to cast decorum to the wind and to participate in liberated laughter.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
The other morning before the sun had risen and our porch light had clicked on, while everyone was still sleeping, I stepped onto my front porch to go work out. There were four shadows in front of me, which I hoped were fallen leaves. But, I clicked on my phone’s flashlight and instead spotlighted four baby birds scattered motionless in front of our doormat. These birds had been in a nest built in the eaves of our wrap-around porch, and I had grown increasingly connected to them since their mother built their nest and their eggs hatched . This was the fourth nest built in this spot and the first one to fail, with the inaugural nest constructed just weeks after we moved into our house. When I think of that time of moving into our home, when my son was breastfeeding so often that I just walked around with one boob out and we were potty training my daughter, so she was also habitually underdressed, I think of that bird nest. Every night before going up to bed, I would take a minute to look at the Mama who after a tireless day of feeding her fledglings, attempted to squeeze herself into the ever-shrinking space that was left for her in the nest.
Heartsick, unsure of what to do, and crunched for time, I left the baby birds, got into my car and drove to the gym. The scene I had left was all I could think about in between medicine ball slams and mountain climbers. Desperate to share my sadness, though not exactly sure why, I told my gym acquaintance about my birds. I explained, “It’s just such a good metaphor for parenthood, ya know? You just give it everything you’ve got and then there’s this whole crazy world out there that you can’t control.” And just like that, I sprinkled a little black cloud over her workout and she feigned sympathy before attempting some pull-ups on a bar.
I returned home and we disposed of the remaining dead baby bird on our porch. I don’t know what happened to the others. I watched from the window of our front door as the mama bird flew to her perch and just looked back and forth for what seemed like an eternity. When I went to the doctor that morning for my physical and was asked if I suffered from depression, I felt moved to tell the story of our birds again, though this time I bit my tongue. I just kept picturing the mother bird, worm gripped tightly in her beak, coming home to the nest she had built and then trying to grasp the disorienting reality that her home and everything that mattered within it was gone. The parallels between this event and something like the barrage of mass shootings feels tragically apt. This world is just wildly unwieldy. In my slightly delusional nightly routine, this mama bird and I would lock eyes as I passed the front door while attempting to corral my kids upstairs for bath time and bedtime, and she and I would agree, “Parenting is tireless work, am I right?” And now, she’s gone and I feel guilty for feeling anything but grateful.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
My paternal grandmother used to always have brownies at the ready when we visited her in South Bend. There are three foods I still associate with her: brownies, carrot mold (better than it sounds), and Jello mold (about as good as it sounds). She would sprinkle powdered sugar on top of her brownies and would serve them in a box lined with wax paper. I haven’t had them in over fifteen years now, but I still have vivid memories of them. Two years ago, when we moved into our house, our neighbor brought over brownies to welcome us to the neighborhood. I remember trying to imagine us through her eyes: just barely holding it together, milk-stained, tired, and struggling. At that moment, nothing sounded more appealing than a moment of quiet and the self-indulgence of a good brownie. While I don’t know that I’ll ever be the person to have a plentiful supply of “welcome-brownies,” I do like knowing that I have an excellent recipe in my back pocket if necessary. This surprisingly easy recipe from Cooking Classy fits the bill.
Wellness - Issue No. 13
Dying in New Zealand, Where Do the Sick People Go?, The Job of a Kid
DYING IN NEW ZEALAND
The day my husband and I left for our ambitious adults-only trip to New Zealand, I developed a stomach bug, which, everyone initially insisted was caused by anxiety over leaving my kids. We were going with two other couples for our dear friend’s wedding, and the debilitating nausea and undesired gut-cleanse was not how I had envisioned kicking off our journey. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I actually thought we’d go through with the trip at all, as the anticipation of being on the other side of the world had caused me an unfamiliar level of intense worry in the weeks prior. The morning of our trip, between visits to the bathroom, I called a friend and asked her to listen to me cry. I’m not sure why I needed an audience or why I restricted my crying allowance to five minutes (both of these things probably say a lot about me), but for that designated time, I curled up and sobbed into the phone. Soon after, I attempted to package myself up enough to give my kids a fraudulently composed goodbye, before heading to the airport to embark on a painfully long and disorienting voyage to Auckland. We left on Monday and arrived on Wednesday. And despite the unpleasant situation of being locked in an aerodynamic metal box over water while my insides were churning, the idea of having to only consider my own needs felt like such an unfamiliar privilege. Upon our arrival in Auckland, I flopped my weak body into the bed of our friend, whose wedding we were there to attend, and fell asleep, while my husband and the four friends we had traveled with commenced our kid-free vacation.
I had come up with countless reasons to worry about everyone at home: my son running into oncoming traffic, my daughter getting bitten by a Copperhead snake hiding in the leaves in our backyard, our dog running away, our house burning down, our kids’ big feelings or propensity for puking being too much for their grandparents to take for so many consecutive days, but, as I lay in my friend’s bed, feeling weak and chilled, I began a new anxiety spiral: what if I die, or at the very least am hospitalized, in New Zealand? How could I do this to my children? I am not new to a health-anxiety-rabbit-hole. Two weeks prior, I had convinced myself that my tension headache from straining a muscle in a strength class was actually a brain tumor. And a couple of weeks before that I had decided that my writer’s block might actually be caused by early onset dementia. This hum of anxiety isn’t new, it began when I found out that I was pregnant with my daughter. I remember thinking once she was born how terrifying it was that she was now on the outside of me instead of the inside, that I wanted to protect her with every fiber of my being and yet I was just going to have to let her exist in this crazy world on her own. And then, that anxiety morphs into anxiety about the world we live in, a world that hasn’t prioritized gun reform, climate change, women’s reproductive health, trans-youth, or even whales. Because, of course, in the middle of my panic attack about leaving my children for our trip, I also did a weird internet-deep-dive into the recent steep increase of dead humpback whales that have been washing ashore. And, while it seems like I have really lost the throughline here, this digression exemplifies how anxiety breeds further anxiety.
I woke up the next morning in New Zealand, in a house with my husband and dear friends, feeling well-rested and ready, as cliché as it might be, for a piña colada and some sunshine. Perhaps, on the other side of the world, the whales are doing fine. And, while the hum of anxiety is ever-present, and leaving my kids to travel in some ways feels absolutely gut-wrenching, it also was rejuvenating. Traveling is a privilege, traveling without our kids is even more of a privilege, that is not lost on me. But, for those who can do it, for those who have a part of them that want to, I would urge you to try. Traveling without our kids gives them the opportunity to demonstrate, once again, how incredibly capable and resilient they are. They get to build stories about staying with their grandparents, something I used to dream about doing. It allows my husband and I to prioritize our marriage. And, traveling makes me a better person. Better at having perspective, better at remembering who I am when I’m well-rested and focused on my needs, better at taking deep breaths, better at revisiting music that isn’t about farms or touching my shoulders, better at recognizing how powerfully dynamic and interesting this world is, better at harnessing some of my favorite parts of myself. Despite all of the nerves, some of which I never was able to fully shake, it felt good to travel, it felt important. It is strange to think that the act of briefly leaving my kids helps me be a better mom. But, I believe that if you’re not filling your own cup, in whatever way works for you, you can’t show up like you otherwise might be able to for the ones who need you the most. So, at the risk of using a tired and oversimplified metaphor of putting your own oxygen mask on prior to someone else’s, make sure you remember, as often as you can, that it is not only okay but also necessary to fill your cup.
WHERE DO THE SICK PEOPLE GO?
I had high hopes for how much writing I would get done in the four and a half hours of the day, three times each week, when both of my kids are in school. What I had not considered is that while they are learning and exploring, they are also collecting relentless colds, and are habitually and exhaustingly sick. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, they are cesspools of germs, and I feel like we haven’t been well since September. For those of you who are lucky enough to have not experienced the chain of events that a cold with two little ones entails, this is how it unfolds in our house:
Our daughter sneezes one more time than is normal and we brace ourselves
Twenty-four hours later, she wakes up screaming because her nose is filled with snot and because she still hasn’t figured out how to blow it, which I would imagine is infuriating, as is being woken up to screaming
She proceeds to spend the next day fighting rest, feeling increasingly irritable, and uncomfortable in her skin, while our son runs circles around her
Twenty-four hours later, our son’s nose begins to produce an inconceivable amount of snot
My kids become little zombies with busy bodies and decreased brain function
Both kids get coughs that cause them to gag and have synchronized puking episodes, which never become less disgusting
Consistent sleeping stops. Screaming, hitting and crying escalates
Everyone is exhausted. And thus, we get sick too.
There must be another way, I’ve thought to myself. So, I decided it would be in my best interest to look up some guidance on how to best prevent this pervading obstacle in our lives. Here are some of the CDC’s recommendations and my follow-up questions:
Wash your hands often - Follow up: Will washing my hands still suffice if my children wipe their drippy noses all over my clothes, hair, and pillows?
Don’t touch your face with unwashed hands. If you are sick, cough or sneeze into a tissue or your sleeve to avoid spreading your cold - Follow up: So I know I shouldn’t touch my kid’s snot and then touch my face, but what about if my child sneezes into my mouth after asking me to hold their feverish body closer?
Avoid close contact with sick people, especially those who are coughing or sneezing -Follow up: where shall I put said sick people? Since it seems that there are always sick people at school, and since I am guilty of having sent my children to said school when they in fact themselves were not as well as they probably should have been, how might they avoid contact? Does this mean we all should forgo our work yet again to ensure isolation? Since the work pays for the health insurance which is needed for the sick kids, what does one do to ensure they’re performing at work while also keeping their sick kids away from other kids? Are there any further public health suggestions for moms who are having to continually face the reality that they cannot perform to their potential in jobs, mothering, hobbies, marriages and friendships because, just when they start to get into a rhythm, sickness strikes again? What if close contact is constant even when parents are wiped out, or snotty, or exhausted themselves?
Practice good health habits - Follow up: Have we missed some good health habits we should be following? Are we not feeding them the right foods? Too much gluten? Not enough fish oil? Should they be eating more kale? Or any kale? More protein? Less pesticides? Should we be giving them supplements or forcing more water into their little bodies? Do we have black mold growing in our walls that we are unaware of? Should I be cleaning our counters more often? Is it because sometimes I forget to remind them to wash their hands? How can I continue to promote good healthy habits when we’re not well? Is it me who is the problem?
Oh the places we could go and the people we could be, if the wellness of our family was more of a constant.
THE JOB OF A KID
I’ve been thinking recently about what jobs children have. I often say to my kids, “two of Mommy’s important ‘jobs’ are keeping you safe and making sure you feel loved.” Knowing my daughter’s inquisitive nature, I’m anticipating that the question, “well, what are my jobs?” is impending. While reading Dr. Becky’s book, "Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be," she mentions that the most important job of a child is to explore. She explains that this is why the insurmountable feat of sitting in a chair through dinner is often too much for my son and daughter’s little bodies to take. Because in asking them to stay seated, we are asking them to not explore the hundreds of sensory stimuli occurring around them at all times: to not investigate whether all parts of the booth feel the same, to not be fascinated by the world of feet under the table, to not try to stack butters or half and half containers, to not touch the boogers in their noses or their hair once their fingers have marinara on them, to not try to make shapes out of spilled milk or investigate if Mommy’s food tastes the same as theirs, to not see which volume of voice gets the biggest reaction from those around them, to not visit the dog under the table for a mid-meal huddle, and to not just let out whatever sound comes into their little bodies without impetus.
Our job of keeping our children safe often butts heads with their job of exploring. For instance, yesterday when my son wanted to barrel roll himself down our staircase in a circus tent, it was my job to say “no.” I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to be told “no” so much at your job. No wonder our kids get so frustrated when we stop them from doing things that we see as their best attempts at testing natural selection. That being said, recently I was introduced to the concept of “Wait. Watch. Wonder”, and it has been quite eye-opening. This concept isn’t always possible. For instance, with the previous example of my son hurling his body down the stairs in a tent, the Wait, Watch and Wonder approach would have likely led us to the emergency room. However, so often, I interfere or interject and offer my insight or expertise before they’ve had adequate time to try it out themselves. So, here’s how this approach has worked for me:
Wait. Pausing, when possible, allows us to take a breath and allows our kids the opportunity to do their job – explore. Certainly, our job is also to set boundaries, but more often than I sometimes acknowledge, my kids exploring and me setting boundaries don’t need to work against each other.
Watch. Watch openly and curiously with the same level of exploration as children bring to their every day. So, often we are on a screen or focused on productivity and we don’t give enough credit to just being a curious, open observer of the world
Wonder. Think openly and without criticism: what are they trying to do and why? I have found this approach to be incredibly valuable in my interactions with both of my children. My son will grab his sister’s snack from the counter and instead of stopping him or asking him to leave it in the kitchen, I watch him gently deliver it into the hands of my daughter. My daughter will run upstairs when we see on the monitor that my son is up from his nap, and instead of asking her to wait for me, I watch on the monitor as she opens the door and he looks at her with sheer delight as they hug each other.
And sure, expectations must be set, societal norms need to be understood, and parameters put into place, but also creating space for kids to just do their jobs and explore, has been the catalyst for some real magical moments of kindness and autonomy to unfold in our family.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
Recently, I watched the Stutz documentary by Jonah Hill. The next day, during the time I usually reserve for writing, I found myself jotting down in my notebook all of the “tools” he mentioned and how I could apply them to my life. The premise of the documentary is that Jonah Hill believes that his therapist, a man named Phil Stutz, has an array of incredibly useful “tools” that Hill felt others who are grappling with their own challenges might find as useful as he did. It’s been several weeks since I watched the documentary, and I’ve found myself revisiting the concepts Stutz introduced time and time again. Here are the five things Stutz said in the movie that stuck with me the most:
Life Force - Whenever you are feeling down or lost, you should start by working on your "life force" which has three components - 1. Body (Exercise, diet, sleep) 2. People (Connect to get pulled back into life. It doesn’t have to be with your favorite person, and it is important that you initiate it.) 3. Self (Get in a relationship with your self consciousness. Write.)
Part X - This is our villain, the part of ourselves that makes it hard to change or grow. This part of us creates fear and doubt in ourselves and can be debilitating.
The Shadow - The part of yourself that you’re ashamed to carry with you. It’s the part of you that you wish you weren’t and you can’t get rid of it.
The Snapshot - This is the image we have in our minds of the perfect life or perfect experience. Part X made this picture or at least holds onto this picture. It is a frozen moment that has no movement, dynamism or depth. It’s unrealistic and doesn’t exist. This could be in the form of a perfect partner, amount of money, or success. Just like Part X, it’s quite toxic.
The Maze - This is the byproduct of Part X. It’s the visualization of a futile quest for fairness that keeps you stuck in the past and puts your life on hold as you cling to resentment or anger. Instead of moving past these emotions, you hold onto them. Stutz shares how such practices as “active love” and “the grateful flow” are the ways forward.
So, all of this to say, if you can and are willing, make time for this movie, it's worth it.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Before we left for our recent adults-only trip to New Zealand, my daughter began to call our son “Lewis.” This is in no way his name. His name doesn’t even share any common letters with the name “Lewis.” We’ve explained to our daughter why our son isn’t responding to this “nickname”, and we’ve asked her to stop calling him this, but she’s continued to do so. In a similar vein of things that feel random and out of our control, our son has begun hitting and pushing. Perhaps, in toddler protest of being called Lewis. This new behavior isn’t during fits of rage, but instead in what feels like completely random moments. I was delusionally hopeful that this behavior was limited to our home but a week before we left for our trip to New Zealand, his teacher told me that his hitting had in fact made it to the classroom. That day, we went home and got a book about hitting, we talked about alternatives when you have energy in your hands, we practiced other behavior, we praised him for how good he makes people feel when he’s not hitting. But the pushing and hitting has persisted. I know deep down that my son’s behavior isn’t abnormal. He is learning how to play, how to use his body, how his actions impact others. It is all data collection. But, it feels like we have done something wrong and that we can’t find the right formula to fix it.
The other night, on the monitor, I saw my son sitting like a little genie atop his changing table. When I came in and asked him what was wrong, he explained, “I sad… I hit Olive.” There are so many things to say, so many things I’ve already tried. You are kind, you are funny, you are creative, you can hold people up, you can make them feel good, you can treat them with kindness and gentleness, you have already done all of these things, you are a good kid, you can find another way to use the energy in your hands, we will keep practicing, I say to his body, which is growing ever more limp in my arms, his lamb lovey grasped in his hand in the dark. I am not sure that a word I have said has actually been absorbed into his tired little curly-haired head.
There is a powerlessness about this stage of data collection that is absolutely exhausting. I just want all of his goodness to shine in every room he’s in. How does one get an active, temperamental two-year old to move more intentionally and conscientiously? How do you turn cause and effect into empathy, how do you describe long-term consequences of behavior without instilling guilt and enforcing “bad-kid” energy? How do you respect the process and follow the logic of these little humans who are growing more complex each day? How can my children, the thing in my life that I am closest and most connected to, become in any way unfamiliar?
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Growing up, my next door neighbors used to make chicken and dumplings and I remember thinking that there was likely nothing better. When my daughter was born, this was among the first dishes I craved. To me, adulting means a lot of things: paying bills, thinking about hardwood floors, considering lawn care and cholesterol, but also, and arguably just as importantly, learning how to make chicken and dumplings. While the cold weather is nearly behind us and thus this dish will soon feel out of season, after trying out several recipes, this is the best I’ve found for making the chicken and dumplings of my childhood dreams.
Guilt - Issue No. 12
Mom Guilt and Lizzo, The Fateful Foreskin, Collecting Worms
MOM GUILT AND LIZZO
It’s the new year, a season full of opportunity, cold days, and long nights. It’s a time to bundle up, long for greenery, be grateful for the mosquito respite, and oscillate between fighting and succumbing to our body’s desire to hunker down in a resting state. It’s a time to reflect, start anew, and make changes. At least for me, change and guilt seem strangely connected. And, as I’ve found my guilt to be abounding, I’d prefer to start this year with less of it. So, for 2023, I am setting out to recognize the surprisingly radical idea, first brought to me by Dr. Becky, that two things can be true. Here are two examples of this idea in parenting and in my marriage. My daughter doesn’t like what I’ve made for dinner and wants pasta instead. Two things can be true: one of my jobs is to serve meals that nourish our bodies, and this is what I’ve prepared, and within it, I know she can find something she’ll eat. It is also true that my daughter feels frustrated because she lacks power in choosing what is on her plate. She is in charge of her feelings and is allowed to feel disappointed that we can’t eat pasta every night. Two things can be true: My husband can want me to be more direct in voicing my needs, and I can want him to know what I need without me voicing it. Neither is right. Rather, if both things can be true, instead of getting so wrapped up in defending our own case, we can listen to hear instead of listening to respond, which results in the most magical of feelings: feeling seen. Then, we can work towards resolution together.
But back to abounding mom-guilt in the new year. My two-year-old son started school this month, and from 8:30 to 1:00pm, three days per week, I am in my house by myself for the first time since my daughter was born four years ago. We are three weeks into this new routine, and here are some discoveries I’ve made at this point. Two things can be true: I can feel so excited to drop my kids off, and also find my house eerily quiet while I’m missing them. I can find this recharge time necessary for being the mom I want to be, and I can also question whether I should be un-pausing my career now that I have any time that is my own. I can be astounded by how consuming my two little humans are, and I can question whether I want one more. I can want to clean and exercise and sleep and veg and meal prep and get coffee with a friend and read and walk the dog. I can want to write as much as possible, and also want to sink into my couch, uninterrupted, and watch every steamy scene of Outlander on full volume. I can witness a messy home, a dishwasher ready to be unloaded, laundry ready to be folded, a dog desperate to be walked, a counter covered in the remains of breakfast, and decide that the best use of my time is blasting Lizzo and having a solitary dance party in my kitchen. And, sure, I can still feel guilt, it seems inextricably linked to motherhood, and I can also feel so incredibly good letting go of the “should haves’” and “need tos” and dancing. I can wish I had more time before picking up two cranky kids, who will resolutely refuse the naps they need in order to not have the biggest of feelings for the rest of the afternoon, and also know that there is nowhere else I’d rather be as they run into my arms in the school pick up line. Two things can be true: I can love being a mom and love the moments of not mom-ing. I can work to improve myself while accepting myself, I can want to get it all done and want to get nothing done at all, I can listen to my gut and hold value in each of my truths.
THE FATEFUL FORESKIN
In 2020, when my son was born, like the majority of other parents in the United States, we chose to have him circumcised. Here were my three main reasons:
This is what the majority of people do in our country, and that way he will feel “normal.”
Circumcision reduces his risk of contracting HIV and other STDs.
A circumcised penis is easier to keep clean.
We went back and forth on this decision several times. I felt certain from the beginning that we should circumcise, but my husband questioned whether or not we should leave our son “intact.” So, while we debated the name of our unborn child, we also, like many, debated the fate of his foreskin.
Two years and one circumcision later, while driving to Target and listening to what I’ve otherwise identified to be a fairly inconsequential Podcast called Flightless Bird, my perspective shifted.
In the United States, the default is circumcising penises. This is basically what my OBGYN said when I asked her for her insight on what we should do with my son. According to the Flightless Bird Podcast, “at least 70% of American penises are circumcised, that’s about 150 million men, and some studies have that number even higher at 92%.” However, a 2013 C.D.C. report that “analyzed decades of hospital data found that the national rate of newborn circumcision dropped from about 65 percent to about 58 percent between 1979 and 2010.” However, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the true percentage is higher because circumcision isn’t “routinely documented on the hospital discharge sheet used to collate the data, and, furthermore, post-neonatal circumcisions for religious or medical reasons are not captured. Community surveys have found higher neonatal male circumcision prevalence of 76–92%.” Whatever the actual percentage of male circumcision is in the United States, it is significantly higher than the 30% of males with circumcised penises worldwide.
Circumcision is one of the oldest and most common procedures done in certain religions, mainly among Muslims and Jews. And, likely, as a religious practice, this is something that will continue. However, circumcision as a cultural norm is much more recent and complicated, and it begs the question, who are we circumcising for? Throughout history, certain sects have promoted circumcision in effect to reduce sexual desire and enjoyment. In the Victorian era, circumcision was promoted in large part, because it was believed that sex for pleasure instead of reproduction was wrong. The removal of foreskin, some believed, would lead to less masturbation and more focus on studies. Many men for centuries since have worked hard to disprove this theory. Then in the 20th century, according to the Flightless Bird podcast, when medicine became more of a “procedure-enterprise – the more surgeries done, the more money made, circumcision became a big business.” So, in an effort to go beyond the “they’re all doing it, so we’re going to do it too” approach, here are some of the most convincing reasons I have found to circumcise or to leave a penis “intact.”
PRO-CIRCUMCISION:
Reduction of HIV and Other STDs - According to the CDC, “Male circumcision can reduce a male’s chances of acquiring HIV by 50% to 60% during heterosexual contact with female partners with HIV, according to data from three clinical trials. Circumcised men compared with uncircumcised men have also been shown in clinical trials to be less likely to acquire new infections with syphilis (by 42%), genital ulcer disease (by 48%), genital herpes (by 28% to 45%), and high-risk strains of human papillomavirus associated with cancer (by 24% to 47% percent)... In observational studies, circumcision has also been shown to lower the risk of penile cancer, [and] cervical cancer in female sexual partners.” Circumcision has also been shown to reduce the risk of infant urinary tract infections in boys under 2 from 1 percent to .1 percent.
PRO-INTACT:
Medical Promotion of Circumcision Could Use More Conclusive Research - According to this New York Times article, “the studies that showed how circumcision reduced the transmission of H.I.V., were done in Africa, where overall H.I.V. rates are much higher, and where, unlike in the United States, heterosexual sex is the main mode of transmission. (Studies investigating whether circumcision helps protect against H.I.V. in men who have sex with men have been inconclusive.)” And ultimately, “researchers don’t yet fully understand the mechanism by which circumcision reduces H.I.V.” While circumcision has been shown to reduce the risk of certain health conditions, UTIs, and sexually transmitted diseases, it has not been shown to reduce it enough for the American Association of Pediatrics to officially recommend circumcision, though they have said that "the medical benefits outweigh the risks."
Keeping it Clean - An argument that I had heard and then subsequently used in support of circumcision is that it helps to keep the penis clean. This seemed like a sound argument, as most do, until you hear a convincing counter. And here it is: Just like cleaning your feet, you are taught basic hygiene as a child and are assisted with doing it until you can be trusted to do it yourself. You don’t cut off a child’s toes to protect against fungus or pull their teeth, so they don’t get cavities. Rather, you simply teach them and work with them on effective and sustainable hygiene practices.
Matching the Crowd - While circumcision is the norm in the United States, it is not for so many other areas of the world. And, who is to say whether it will continue to be done with the same frequency here. Similar to any other kind of peer pressure, just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t seem like the most compelling argument to do it too. The United States’ propensity for polluting, producing highly-processed food, and not supporting a woman’s right to choose, clearly shows that we don’t have it all figured out yet.
Cost/Benefits Analysis - One of the main arguments I have heard in defense of circumcision is that the “health benefits outweigh the risks.” However, this is actually a pretty complicated comparison to consider. It’s like comparing apples to oranges, or in this case, eggplants to bananas. The foreskin is packed with nerve endings, it is an epicenter of pleasure and a natural lubricant. How can one conclusively know if an elective genital modification surgery to reduce potential risks is worth how it will forever impact the pleasure that a person feels from their penis? Especially, when the person whose penis will be forever altered has no say in it?
Ultimately, this is more than I ever anticipated writing about penises, especially the one that belongs to my son. Similar to so many areas in the field of maternal health, I’ve been surprised at how difficult it has been to find information on this subject, and what little accessible research is out there. This is certainly not a call to action and I definitely don’t have all of the data or the answer, I’m not sure we ever do. But, at the risk of proselytizing and with very little recourse, this is the information I wish I had had when we were deciding the fate of a foreskin.
COLLECTING WORMS
"Do you know how much I love you?" I often ask my daughter. She’ll peel her arms apart, lengthening her wing span, “this much?” She’ll ask. To which, I always respond “more.” And then we try to stretch our arms as far out and back as possible, which is more of a testament to flexibility than anything, our shoulder blades inching closer together, failing every time to have our wingspan encapsulate our love. But, perhaps, instead, the acts of service I’ve found innately tied to parenthood, might better demonstrate my devotion. For instance, rising every night from the deepest measure of my sleep to find “Sparkle,” the tiny-limbed unicorn, who habitually performs a vanishing act beneath my daughter’s covers around 2am. Or cleaning up my daughter’s things from the kitchen table before lunch time because “[she’s] very busy writing a song about milk and [she] needs to go practice outside.”
Or having spent the past four months jackhammering, pulling up roots and fencing, hauling away hunks of cement to the dump, leveling the dirt, installing a playground and adding woodchips to our backyard, and then, on the first weekend after the playground has been fortified, instead of standing back and watching our children enjoy it, we are on the ground digging for worms. This is a metaphor for the humbling nature of parenthood. You pour your time and resources into erecting the most perfect of playsets, only for your child to discover a newfound fascination for the worms that have always been there. The week prior I had taken my daughter to the zoo. She didn’t care at all about the elephant having breakfast twenty feet from where we were standing, the baby monkey riding on the mama monkey’s stomach, the lions’ synchronized roars. She wanted only to ride the train and the merry-go-round. But, these worms, she is captivated by their wriggly bodies as she squeezes them between her fingers. So, I participate in the worm massacre, introducing dying worms to dying worms in a mason jar which will become waterlogged when she leaves the container out that night next to our neglected play set. “Do you know how much I love you?”, I want to say, that no matter how hard I work, what I give, how I try, it never feels like it could possibly be enough.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
This past week, I swallowed my “I would nevers” and my “how am I damaging him later ons” and had my husband turn my son’s doorknob around so we could lock him in his room. Prior to solitary, there were eight long weeks in which my son had been free-range, not confined by a crib (which he started climbing out of at 20 months old) or a “parent-grip door knob” (which strangely seemed less cruel and worked until eight weeks ago).
In short, he let the power go to his head. Our little dictator of the night, with reign of the house, had been found nightly upstairs, downstairs, and on the stairs with a befuddled look of boundless freedom and exhaustion on his face. This occurred after having to put him to bed roughly 37 times in a given night. When he wasn’t wandering around the house, he was creeping into our room in the wee hours of the morning, without a plan upon arrival. The first time he scampered to my side of the bed (he has two paces: still and scamper) I pulled him into bed, and we fell sound asleep, with his head on my shoulder, within minutes. I hadn’t felt the stillness of his busy body on me in so long. Listening to what Sylvia Plath once deemed “moth-breath” and feeling his warmth against mine was a lovely mistake. Because then he expected the same experience night after night, but with less sleeping and more somersaults on my head. I shouldn’t have let him crawl into bed, I set a precedent and sacrificed our sleep. He left me no choice; it seems that I couldn’t have the snuggles and the sleep.
The first couple of days were a heartbreaking test of endurance, watching him scream “help me! I need you” on the monitor as his tired head held up his body by leaning it against the door. Then he’d try the doorknob again and scream “it’s broken”, without the understanding that those he was calling on for help were those who had locked him in to begin with. My rationalization has been: the world is a fascinating place with so much to explore, and we are giving him the gift of boundaries on when and how he explores it. We are eliminating distraction and giving his body permission to sleep. And, within a few days, we were all sleeping again, soundly and deeply and in the confines of our rooms.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
I set September 30th as our “due date” to decide whether or not we would have a third and final child, a “caboose” of sorts. I put it on our calendar in April, which probably says a lot about me, but I wanted to make sure we had many months to anticipate the decision day. Spoiler alert, it is roughly three months past September and we have yet to decide whether we should create and raise a whole third human. So, every few weeks, my husband and I have been checking in. We have both gone back and forth for a multitude of reasons. Generally, my heart says yes and my head says no during these check-ins. Without disclosing the deepest inner workings of our family, here are some of my thoughts.
Heart - Bring On That Baby: When I picture our family, I picture three; I’d like to do it all one more time; I’m not ready, in some ways, to be out of this chaotic stage of our life.
Head - Two is Plenty: Everything, including ourselves, would be spread thinner. Would I be the mother to three that I could be to two? Could we travel like we want to with three? Would our marriage be getting the time and energy it needs? Would three limit my ability to pursue my career? Three pregnancies, three c-sections, and nursing three babies is a lot for my body.
So, the other night, my husband, for the first time during our check-in, voiced that he was feeling more definitively “no” than he has before. That night, I dreamt that my son and I were in the backyard with a few other people, and I lost him. He went out of our back gate and then was gone. I began frantically searching for him, going door to door and to schools and hospitals, but nobody was taking me seriously. I felt like he was getting further away and I was losing my ability to breathe. I woke up, saw his little body in the monitor, knees tucked under him, his butt up in the air, and realized that the dream was perhaps not about him but about the idea of losing a child I’ve never had. Letting go of an idea of what could have been and what might never be. I suppose we all do this when we make decisions, not have crazy anxiety dreams like me, but, rather, envision our lives one way and then have to continue living and breathing and moving forward when we’ve lost part of what we thought that picture would look like. Making choices without resentment, trying to find resolution without regret, feeling loss for something you’ve never had, realizing that more of your life is out of your control than you’d like. Like so many things in life, I think I was unrealistically hoping that someone would plop an answer on my lap on September 30 that felt complete and right. And as it turns out, yet again, that’s not how life or decisions work.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
In the winter, while I still love eating salads, I like them to be a bit hardier and more filling. This is one of my favorite "fancy salad night" recipes for this time of year. While I have yet to accomplish the feat of having my children enjoy a salad, they do like the parts of this salad. I usually put the farro in a cast iron with a little olive oil and parmesan on medium-high heat before adding it to the salad to give it a little more flavor and texture. To add some protein, we sometimes eat this salad with grilled salmon on top. Here is the recipe from Delish.
How Did We Get Here? - Issue No. 11
Yoga, Scones, and the Days of Yore, Dinner Party Outcast, Not Swallowing Plastic Bananas
YOGA, SCONES, AND THE DAYS OF YORE
Before I owned a house, had kids and felt resistance to wearing pants that button, when I still had time to dry my hair and drink coffee that was fresh and hot, I had a Saturday morning tradition of walking to my favorite bakery, getting two scones (one savory, one sweet) and then going to yoga in the attic of my gym. My teacher was this ethereal creature who somehow would share such abstract concepts as the connectedness of my pelvic floor to mother earth in a way that, for whatever reason, worked while I was holding a downward dog. Then, I would go back to my row-home, which I shared with three boys as if we were auditioning for a sitcom, and ruin my workout by eating both scones. It was wonderful and simple. Somewhere in there, I decided that perhaps I too should learn how to be a yoga teacher who shares transcendental tidbits while cueing people to connect their bodies to their breath. I began a 200-hour yoga teacher training during my last spring in Philadelphia, and while much of it felt a little amorphous in terms of concept clarity, I loved how aware I became of my breath and my body. I thought of that this morning, when my daughter pointed out that unbeknownst to me our dog was humping my leg, which we’ve coded as “dancing.” If he does this for too long, we’ve found through some unfortunate previous encounters, his penis gets stuck out and then we have to assist him in retracting it. If that last sentence felt a bit jarring compared to my previous recounts of my peaceful yoga journey, then I have successfully captured the “how did we get here” feeling of parenthood.
I still practice yoga, though some postures that once came easily now are out of reach, and often a child is on top of me in my child’s pose. I try to continue to check in with my body and to model as much deep breathing and centeredness as I can muster. But, it turns out that even with a supportive spouse, a mother who consistently gives a generous amount of her time and energy to assisting me in taking care of our children, with school, sickness, big feelings, travel, fragmented sleep, and having only discovered the fountain of endless laundry and not energy, my yoga mat has been rolled up for three weeks, my daily desk calendar hasn’t been peeled since August 15th, and Charmingly Chaotic, which I had pledged to be a monthly publication, ultimately and discouragingly has been on a lengthy hiatus. “Flow gracefully and with intention as if you’re moving through water” my yoga teacher used to say. While there are certainly moments of this, more often I feel like my dog (the same aforementioned humping one) each time he stupidly jumps into a lake. Despite my rudimentary understanding of physics, in which he looks to me like he should be quite buoyant, he barely stays afloat, paddling frantically and with very little rhythm or direction, a toothy open smile on his face because perhaps he’s enjoying the chaos even though it’s causing him to have some trouble taking deep breaths.
The weekends in which I focused on pranayamic breathing, dharma talks, and sequencing yoga classes feels distant now. There are moments when it’s less flow and more fumble, when I’m utterly unaware that my dog is humping my leg. But, I hope the breathing, the bodily awareness, and love for scones continues onto my children, even in the craziest of times.
DINNER PARTY OUTCAST
In my early-twenties, dinner parties felt like a novelty, like a lavender latte or truffle cheese. They were a Pinterest bridge into adulting. By the time I got into the swing of them, had my arsenal of amusing stories, had fine-tuned how to be inquisitive without being intrusive, had navigated how to avoid being the oversharer without coming off as aloof, I had reached my thirties and decided to start having kids. As if that wasn’t enough, the world was confronted by a pandemic, and there we remained for long enough that anything other than sweatpants began to feel like an unnatural compromise we had succumbed to for far too long. Now I’m resurfacing, sifting through facets of my former-self, and realizing that, while still enjoyable, dinner parties now feel similar to trying to walk normally after sitting on a plane for too long.
Thanks to some Facebook algorithm, a Saturday Night Live skit from a year ago popped up in my feed this week. Here’s the highlight reel: the skit is about four moms who venture out to a club to relive their youth. Kim Kardashian attempts to rap and, ultimately, the women fall asleep, need ice buckets for their sore feet, find the music to be too loud and fast, and have diarrhea from eating and drinking whatever they want. At 9:01pm, they decide to go home after obsessing about the traffic. It’s not SNL’s best work. Might you crack a smile? Sure. But, most of the jokes feel like low-hanging fruit written by a group of men who were trying to incompetently put themselves in the high-heeled shoes of some moms. To me, what’s much funnier is the rapid code-shifting involved in going from applying vaseline to a butthole to discussing the tannins in a glass of wine at a dinner party.
“Code-switching” happens when a person adjusts their speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in order to “optimize the comfort of others.” This can be problematic in many cases, which you can read more about here. I have found recently that the code-shifting involved in attempting to pretend like you aren’t entrenched in motherhood is equal parts jarring and funny. Recently, I went to a restaurant that is fancy enough to give you a coat-check-tag for your leftovers, so as to ensure that your used food doesn’t sit on the table and interfere with your eating experience. Prior to arriving, my daughter had a mammoth of a tantrum, which culminated in her vomiting a Hulk-size amount of fluorescent green pesto all over her room. After I cleaned her and everything else up (no easy task), as I was attempting to pull pajamas onto her distracted, limp body, she looked at me and nonchalantly said, “I hope that when we die, we die together.” As I was processing the heaviness of her wish and formulating my response, my son did a running-jump-hug into my arms and rubbed his snot all over what was to be my outfit for the evening. Then, I kissed everyone goodnight, went to dinner, and did my best attempt at discussing anything but them. We all do this in some way or another, put adversity and our divided selves aside, run our thoughts through a filter, attempt to just show up and sit at a table. We never know what it takes for somebody to get there, all that they have handled and worked through to just be present, and for that we all deserve to go a bit easier on each other and ourselves.
According to the existing research out there now, though it’s ever changing and there isn’t nearly enough of it: the increased activity in the amygdala stays forever; no matter how old your child is, they have permanently made an imprint on your brain and it doesn’t go away.
When researchers looked at the dad’s brain, they found that men absolutely get an oxytocin rush from interacting with their babies too, but there was about a quarter of the activity in the amygdala that they saw in the mother’s brain. Which, I would say is about right, my husband is probably about a quarter as worried as I am on average. However, researchers also looked at 48 male-identifiying gay couples who were living in partnered relationships, had a child through surrogacy, and had the baby from the first day of life. When the father is the primary caregiver, they have amygdala activation just like the mothers. So, this amygdala activation seems to have far less to do with childbirth and far more to do with whether or not you are the primary committed caregiving parent.
So, all of this to say, your parental worrying and anxiety is justified and backed by science.
NOT SWALLOWING PLASTIC BANANAS
My son recently had his first visit to the emergency room. At the risk of spoiling the punchline, his discharge papers read “No banana found. However, please dispose of all plastic fruit in the house to reduce choking hazards.” So, here is the story of the plastic banana that my son, in fact, did not swallow: A few days before the plastic banana incident, my son had choked on a plastic strawberry that had gotten wedged in his throat during a pretend picnic with his sister. I had to pull it out as his eyes got big and his face reddened. It was terrifying. At this point you might be wondering why I hadn’t disposed of the plastic fruit after the first choking incident, to which I would respond, that is a great point. It turns out that when you reflect back on an emergency, there are a lot of retrospective good ideas on how you’d do things differently. So, fast forward to the banana which was handed to him in a teacup full of water by his sister for a tea party that they were attending together with an array of stuffys. As if by way of pure magic, the banana was in the tea cup, and then with a sip, the banana was gone. It was not on the floor, it was not on the table, and so we assumed that it had been swallowed. In hindsight, perhaps we should have searched a bit further or consulted the two tiny tea party attendees to see if they had any insights. But instead, in a moment of panicked proactivity, I swooped up my non-choking son and declared that we were all going to the emergency room. My thought process was, if he’s not choking now he might at any second, and we needed to be at the hospital in case he did.
The next four hours were a metallic-smelling blur of panic while we watched Hairspray on repeat in a waiting room full of very sick kids. The whole time, my sunshine boy was downright joyful while I sat there in dread playing out countless scenarios of plastic-banana-removals in my head. He was put in a little blue robe with his diapered butt hanging out the back, and the nurses pointed and smiled at his white-blonde curly hair bouncing down the hall on the way to the x-ray machines. The tech told me that, off-the-record, he thought he had located the banana, though I will never know what banana-shaped-object he identified on the insides of my son. Because, eventually, before a radiologist could analyze the x-rays, another doctor came in and told us how improbable it was that this banana could fit down my son’s trachea, seeing as she felt confident that it couldn’t fit down hers. However, she also explained that if he had in fact swallowed the banana, it was a very big deal. With that in mind, my dad and step-mom then returned to the scene of the non-crime to search for a wayward banana, which they thankfully found on the other side of the playroom far from the abandoned tea party. So, some unnecessary x-rays, an embarrassing set of instructions on our discharge paperwork, one found plastic banana, another affirmation that hindsight is 20/20, and an outrageously expensive hospital bill later, everyone is fine. And, even though it was nothing, it was the scariest of nothing days. Because feeling powerless to your kids potential pain isn’t nothing, it is visceral and very real.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
In September, we took our kids to Portugal. Traveling has always been an integral part of my husband and my identities, and when we decided to have kids, we agreed that if we just continued to travel, that doing so would be knit into the fiber of our being as a family. But before we had kids, we also didn’t understand the sacredness of schedules and routines, that despite our very best efforts and no matter the number of Instagram foodie-moms I follow, my kids are still relatively picky eaters. We didn’t consider how hard it is to soak in a vacation when you’re exhausted from your one-year-old demanding that 3am is close enough to morning, or how it doesn’t matter how much you want to go sightseeing if your daughter has a tantrum in the center-square. My husband and I spent one evening in Lisbon drinking wine at a bay window of our AirBnB, watching a street party across from us, like we were observing an exhibit of inebriated 30-somethings unencumbered by responsibility. However, despite all of these things, travel still feels so good and necessary (albeit, I know, also very privileged). Because, it turns out, kids, or at least our kids, are incredibly resilient and can adjust quickly to the adventures we throw at them. My son’s favorite activities were sprinting down the sidewalk of narrow streets and playing with a tiny red tractor, and my daughter’s favorites were riding the Metro and swimming in a pool, and looking back, I realize now that all of these experiences could have happened without ever having left Atlanta. But, even if we traded happy hours for playgrounds and had to read a “lift the flap” book about airports 127 times in order to eat at a restaurant, we did it and we’ll do it again. We continued to be the people who travel with our kids, and even if they won’t remember a moment of it, traveling as a family somehow bridges the gap between exhausting and rejuvenating.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Recently, my son, who I would describe overall as a very agreeable little fellow, has made the steadfast determination that he will not lay in his bed for anyone else but my husband. This is problematic behavior on a few levels, but mostly because my husband is rarely around for nap-time, and occasionally not around for bedtime. When I stand up to leave after tucking him in, he screams out for me with heartbreaking desperation, as if he is anticipating these being our very final moments together forever. No matter how many times I forfeit my hardline and let him lay on me on the rocking chair or hold him in my arms with his head on my chest like I did when he was a baby, even if I sit next to his bedside and comb my fingers through his hair until he drifts to sleep, as soon as I stand up, even when his eyelids are fluttering and I’m certain I haven’t made any of the floors creak, like a lingering moro reflex, he grabs for me and screams “Mommy.” Then he’ll shuffle behind me in his sleep sack, and when I, full of guilt, close the door in his face, he lays down on the floor and cries out for me with his little fingers reaching out from underneath. It is heartbreaking. And, if you’re wondering how long he can keep it up, the answer is forever. But then, as I’ve observed on the monitor too many times, my husband will enter my son’s room, and will say as if it’s a novel idea, “buddy, aren’t you tired? It’s time to go to bed.” And, as if this is the first time that this suggestion has been offered, my son with very little consideration, will agree and with a newfound hop to his step, will walk willingly to his bed and fall asleep almost immediately. I do not know what act of sorcery my husband is carrying out in my son’s room, and I know my husband has felt this way during about 1000 only-Mama-will-do-moments, but this daddy-dependency at bedtime is causing a whole lot of tears and exhaustion all around.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
PUMPKIN COOKIES WITH CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
While the pumpkin days are still among us, between your Halloween and Thanksgiving festivities, I cannot recommend this seasonal recipe highly enough. This treat, which has a consistency somewhere between a cookie and a muffin, is fluffy and moist. With such spices as cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, it tastes like autumn in a baked good. Here is the recipe from Gimme Some Oven.
Impressions - Issue No. 10
Parenting Through Our Ring Doorbell, My Husband Sleeps Through Everything - An Ode to My Amygdala, Bathroom Envy
PARENTING THROUGH OUR RING DOORBELL
You know how football teams, or perhaps all sports teams, review their game footage later in practice to assess their performance? This concludes my knowledge of football and is likely the only time that the sport will be referenced in this newsletter. Similar to Tom Brady (there’s a first time for everything), at the end of the day recently, I’ve been reviewing the videos on our Ring doorbell to see how I’ve done as a parent. I realize the previous sentence has all of the worst overtones of a first-world millennial. But what better way to spend my meager and sacred quiet time than by evaluating my performance with an overly critical lens? Not only is it a surprise to witness my backside in action, it also holds a mirror up to how I did at facilitating some of the most challenging moments of the day: the comings and goings. I would like to file this activity away as something that I do in private, something that I’d rather not tell anyone else about, like looking at Instagram while I walk down stairs (terrible idea), or hiding in the bathroom when I need a five minute break, or trying to squeeze back into this one pair of skinny jeans 372 times without any regard for the miracle machine my changed body is for making my babies to begin with. None of you have asked for an explanation as to why this newsletter is roughly six weeks late, but it feels strangely connected to watching my doorbell videos once my children have finally fallen asleep, despite their persistent and valiant efforts to try to stop sleeping all together. The days have not really felt like mine, they’ve been wrapped up in and focused on my son and daughter. This is not a bad thing, it’s the whirlwind of summer, and it has left little time for anything else. I can both want a break and desperately desire the cadence of this constant time together. And then, in the short portion of the evening that is finally mine, instead of rebooting, I’ve been watching doorbell videos of myself parent, with the same curious surprise as when I hear my voice on a recording and realize that it’s far higher in pitch than I knew it to be.This summer, I have just been in it, constantly and deeply.
When I was sixteen, my best friend and I were laying on a dock on the Boundary Waters in Ely, Minnesota, when it began to rain. “What if we just didn’t move?” I asked. And so, we decided to just lay there and let the rain fall on us, to feel it all, to watch the raindrops’ path from the sky, and remain as present and as still as possible. When we got up, there were these perfect dry silhouettes of our bodies on the dock, our fleeting impressions amidst it all. I love that memory. It was before social media and selfies and Instagram. We just did it because we found some joy in it. We did it because we were too busy discovering the world together to be bothered by rain or our wet clothes or what came next. And while this summer has not felt nearly that peaceful or still, at its best, it’s been an opportunity to just slow down and be in it, big feelings and all. With summer came two weeks of quarantine with COVID, some wonderful summer travels, a much needed girlfriends’ trip, and little time to come up for air (which is what writing is to me these days). With summer came fewer adult conversations and many more sentences like, “Take your butt out of the potty please,” “You have a bloody nose, that means all of your boogies need a break from your finger,” “Let’s tuck your penis down for night-night, so that you don’t pee pee on yourself,” “Please don’t throw your brother off the fireplace,” and “Only jeté around the table, and not with chips in your mouth.” This summer, I tried to just metaphorically lay out in the rain and take it all in, even if it meant, according to our doorbell, coming in as a wet-sopping mess (usually from the Georgia heat and not refreshing rainfall), even if it meant taking a break from some of the things that feed me, even if it meant managing my two constantly hungry humans, who seem determined to join a nudist colony, while they twirl each day away. And thus, this newsletter is late. And, the more I write, the more I realize that perhaps writing is a far healthier processing tactic. So, as the school year begins and our schedules become more regimented, for better or for worse, I will try to reflect more here and less on raw doorbell footage.
MY HUSBAND SLEEPS THROUGH EVERYTHING
- AN ODE TO MY AMYGDALA
I am the worrier in our family. My autocorrect wanted to change that word to “warrior” and while I like that more, what I meant to say is that between my husband and I, I am the one who worries. I am the one who watches for my kids’ chests to rise and fall on the monitor, I am the one who gets nervous when they aren’t holding my hand by the street, I am the one who thinks of them popping out of the swing and landing on their head when their dad is pushing them just a little too high, and I am the one who hears their noises and cries at night, since the moment they were born. I would like to think that this is a healthy amount of anxiety, a “let’s make sure these kids survive” level of anxiety. Recently, I was excited to find some justification for these charming personality traits that came to fruition when I became a mother. And that brings me to the Amygdala, which looks like almond-shaped gray matter inside each hemisphere of the brain and, thanks to our trusty neurons, is involved in how we experience emotions, like fear and anxiety. According to this New York Times article, “A woman’s brain, it seems, may change more quickly and more drastically during pregnancy and the postpartum period than at any other point in her life — including puberty.”According to the Netflix documentary “Babies,” “Much of what happens in a new mother’s amygdala has to do with the hormones flowing to it. The region has a high concentration of receptors for hormones like oxytocin, which surge during pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing.” Oxytocin is often described as the “love hormone”, but it is also integral to uterine contractions and milk let-down for nursing. So, in short, all-things-baby impact the amount of oxytocin flowing to a woman’s amygdala. As the activity in the amygdala grows, this impacts how a new mother behaves and how she takes care of her baby. According to “Babies,” the oxytocin surge at birth activates the amygdala to cause us to feel, among other things, a constant worry about the infant, which causes such superpowers as a mother waking up every time her baby makes a peep at night. Here are the two craziest and coolest parts to me though:
According to the existing research out there now, though it’s ever changing and there isn’t nearly enough of it: the increased activity in the amygdala stays forever; no matter how old your child is, they have permanently made an imprint on your brain and it doesn’t go away.
When researchers looked at the dad’s brain, they found that men absolutely get an oxytocin rush from interacting with their babies too, but there was about a quarter of the activity in the amygdala that they saw in the mother’s brain. Which, I would say is about right, my husband is probably about a quarter as worried as I am on average. However, researchers also looked at 48 male-identifiying gay couples who were living in partnered relationships, had a child through surrogacy, and had the baby from the first day of life. When the father is the primary caregiver, they have amygdala activation just like the mothers. So, this amygdala activation seems to have far less to do with childbirth and far more to do with whether or not you are the primary committed caregiving parent.
So, all of this to say, your parental worrying and anxiety is justified and backed by science.
BATHROOM ENVY
My best friend has a wicker basket full of toilet paper in her bathroom. If this sentence hasn't grabbed your attention, I understand. But, let me explain. It’s the really soft toilet paper, and every time I go into her house, the rolls are seemingly somehow both precariously piled and perfectly balanced, so as to say “we’re just naturally very prepared to address all of your needs” and “we can even make toilet paper look good.” In a glass jar, there are books of matches from trendy restaurants, and the bathroom is always refreshingly cold, as is the toilet paper…or maybe that is just my fantasy of the perfect bathroom. There’s this picture of her husband in front of a fountain, positioned just right so that the fountain looks like a pee stream. And somehow, despite all odds, this bathroom art is fitting and funny without being tacky.
Last week, there was a pervading poop smell wafting from what felt like all the crevices of our first floor bathroom. After washing the bathroom mats and spraying the floor with cleaning solution, I got on my hands and knees to try to find a wayward poop tucked away somewhere. This is a sentence I never anticipated writing. Here’s another one: the other night, my daughter made a human nest out of toilet paper. And then, upon seeing my shock, explained that it was “a mistake she made to cover up her toots.” Discussing illustrious bathroom envy feels like an insufficient ode to one of the most important people in my life, who just yesterday called me to ask for breast pump advice in anticipation of her first baby arriving in October.
She’s always been put together, charming, successful, with an admirable knack for making things fetching and functional. And, who knows, maybe she’ll be one of those people who somehow can keep a couch white and give their kid ketchup. If someone could, it would be her. I know she’s worried about losing this part of herself, the aesthetic-forward, in-control, enough-time-and-energy-and-power-to-always-have-a-basket-full-of-toilet-paper part. I think everyone, to some extent, fears losing their former selves, fears what it will mean for these tiny humans to take over their lives. There’s no reason to warn her of what’s to come, nothing I can say to prepare her. That beautiful afghan that they got married atop of, that is now in the nursery and being used as their “palette inspiration” will likely, and perhaps heartbreakingly, soon be covered in milk and poop and Play-Doh. Or, at the very least, it will be inexplicably and inextricably sticky, like every other soon-to-be surface of their house. I would like to tell her that she’ll find peace with the changes, though I’m not sure that’s true. I’d like to tell her that they’ll be so busy, that the chaos of losing their pre-kid-house won’t bother them, or, at the very least, it will feel temporary, though I’m not sure that’s true. What I know is that friendship, at its best, isn’t about the aesthetic that’s delivered, it’s about the feeling that’s achieved. It was never really about the toilet paper basket. Even if their house becomes a disaster, which will drive her crazy and will be inevitable, even when she’s exhausted and doesn’t recognize herself and knows she can’t do it all, with all of the impending chaos and stickiness, my best friend, with a baby on her hip, will continue to cast her radiance onto the world. In some way, I’d like to think we all do.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
This summer, my daughter dunked her head under water. To some, this might feel adjacent to getting a trophy for participation, sure she did it, but is it praiseworthy? Debatable. But, to those who feel that way, you didn’t get to see her face right after she did it. She, like me, is an approach with apprehension and then be pleasantly surprised kind of girl. This achievement was the first among many that she ticked off her list thanks to a “survival swim” class that she took. Survival swim doesn’t necessitate much explanation. The basic idea is that if your child were to fall into a body of water, they have the basic skill set to survive. Crazy enough, this is something a baby can learn to do before they have even mastered walking. One of my favorite dinner party questions is “what is a recent internet black hole you went down?” And, my most recent answer is “survival swim class videos.” Here’s an example. Watching these babies be dropped into the water and then know how to turn over, float, turn over, paddle, turn over, and rest is nothing short of shocking. The first two days, my daughter begged me to let her just stay in the car, but by the time she was in the water, eagerness would wash over her, and soon that eagerness turned into confidence, and that confidence allowed room for her to learn. Thanks to Manta Swim Academy, my daughter went from not being able to put her eyes underwater to being able to jump into a pool and get half way across it safely and confidently. And while she’s learning new skills all of the time, watching this one develop over the course of two weeks and watching her realize her own potential with pure joy was pretty remarkable.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
I have found, more now than ever, that watching my children on a monitor can quickly manifest into the makings of a horror film. Similar to the Blair Witch Project, all of the footage appears on the screen slightly contorted and in black and white. Eyes glow like they’re possessed. Sometimes my son is in a crib, and then, within seconds, the same bedeviled tiny creature inexplicably appears atop his changing table. Then he’s by the door with his fingers reaching underneath in heartbreaking desperation before the screen cuts out because the witch got to him, or because he figured out how to disconnect the camera. All of this to say, my son recently learned how to climb out of his crib. Soon after our escape artist got his wings, we traveled to visit some friends and family. During one of the first nights away, we put my son in a pack’n’play in our friend’s “she-shed,” a beautifully constructed detached office with a wall of windows that looks out at the woods. We were sitting out on the deck, between the she-shed and their home, enjoying wine and a reunion with old friends, when my son appeared pressed against the windowed-wall staring at us. It was starkly reminiscent of the classic Scream scene with Drew Barrymore, when open-mouthed “ghost-face” appears at her window while she’s trying to call 911, except instead of a masked-killer, it was an adorably bright-eyed 21-month-old toddler with strikingly white-blonde curly hair. And this is our life now: we spend our evenings watching potential horror movie footage of this exhausted, newly free-range human aimlessly roaming about, hoping that his plotline ends in sleep before we pass out ourselves.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
For those of you who don’t know what a dutch baby is, seeing those two words under “sustenance suggestions” might feel a bit mysterious, or perhaps even controversial. However, I assure you that this puffed pancake is an easy breakfast favorite, and when it comes out of the oven, it has a marshmallow-in-the-microwave type of wow-factor. It is light, airy, crunchy, and subtly sweet. Top it with fresh berries when it’s still steaming hot, and it becomes what I would argue is one of my very favorite breakfast dishes. Find the dutch baby recipe I use most often from Joy The Baker here.
Dreaming - Issue No. 9
Earthquakes and Equilibrium, Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches And Losing the Right to Vote, Goosebumps’ “Choose Your Own Adventure” Books Otherwise Known as Parenting
EARTHQUAKES AND EQUILIBRIUM
On August 23, 2011, during an orientation for my graduate school teaching fellowship (which we called “professor bootcamp”), I fell asleep. I feel it necessary to now explain that I’ve never before or since been one to doze during a meeting. The caterer for our wedding had narcolepsy, and watching her nod off as we discussed hors d'oeuvres during our final walk through was pretty shocking. This fellowship orientation was in the middle of me upending my life, moving from Georgia to Philadelphia, living out of boxes, and desperately trying to prepare for teaching my English 101 courses to students who were likely to be only a couple of years younger than me. And yes, this all reads like an excuse. The truth is, I was too tired to stay awake, and so I didn’t, until, as if being punished by the Gods of Inappropriate Slumber, I woke up to the room shaking. While I was initially convinced that this was my ego trying desperately to rouse me from looking foolish around my future colleagues, soon everyone stood up and started running towards the exit. I just sat there, deer in the headlights, watching chaos unfold for about thirty seconds until I realized that the vibrating room was real and joined the others funneling through the door. This was the first and only time I’ve experienced an earthquake, and by the time I recognized what was happening, we were outside, and it was over. However, this feeling of being prematurely roused from a deep slumber or being snapped into consequential moments of responsibility, this is a feeling that I have become acutely aware of as a mother. Last night, my daughter woke me up from a lovely dream because she was feeling guilty about coloring her sheets with a red pen hours before, the next morning my son threw a tantrum because he wanted his shoes neither on nor off. Whether it is the middle of the night wake ups or the “is this real life?” feeling that packs the same punch during the day, I am often not at my best, and there is no wading pool into parenting. I am constantly surrounded by these little earthquakes, shaking up my once calm world, while I try to conjure up some semblance of equilibrium amongst the chaos.
PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY SANDWICHES AND LOSING THE RIGHT TO VOTE
On July 4th, we, so as to adhere to tradition, watched fireworks from my brother-in-law’s boat while listening to Bruce Springsteen. Captivated by this display of explosions that we equate to patriotism, I was able to briefly let go of what has recently been quite a disappointing display of America falling short of its potential. Not coincidentally, that night I dreamt that women lost their right to vote. If you’re like me, this dystopian plot line doesn’t feel that far off from the reality of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. In my dream, all of the women who still felt strongly that they should have some say on the future of their country, well-being, and livelihoods were instructed to all go to airports to sign petitions to make their audacious stance known. If enough women signed these airport petitions, whether women should be able to vote would be held to a vote. I woke up before there was an outcome, because my daughter came into our room having had a nightmare of her own. In her nightmare, it was Christmas morning and while everyone else received presents, Santa had only brought her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We were both shaken. I peeled myself out of bed, walked her back to her room, tucked her in and said (as I do after she has a nightmare), “you are safe, you are loved, and Mommy and Daddy are here if you need anything at all.” As I watched her drift to sleep, her brow relaxed and her hair fell into her face. I kissed her forehead and hoped that, for at least a while longer, she could live in a world in which receiving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Christmas morning is as bad as it can get.
GOOSEBUMPS' “CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE” BOOKS OTHERWISE KNOWN AS PARENTING
Growing up, I used to love the Goosebumps' “choose your own adventure” books. The first one I remember reading was “Escape from The Carnival Of Horror.” I was totally consumed by the idea that I could make a decision that would impact the ending of the book not realizing that adulting is just a way less fun Goosebumps “choose your own adventure” novel, and parenting is a much scarier version. So, here is my recent trip to the zoo told through the lens of Goosebumps:
After being around a group of moms chatting so casually about taking their kids to splash pads to get a reprieve from the hot Georgia summer, do I:
Decide, fresh-off of my vacation and feeling particularly ambitious, that I too should be able to handle such an undertaking and determine the zoo is a good starting point, because then, if the splash pad fails, there are always orangutans.
Decide it’s not worth it because, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, getting out the door can feel like a slow painful death. For those of you who remember Super Mario, you might remember the little ghost that chases Mario through the castle until he turns around and acknowledges the ghost, at which point the ghost freezes and acts totally uninterested in Mario. Then, when Mario attempts to do literally anything other than stare at the little ghost, it begins chasing him around shouting “Mommmmmmmmm” again, or perhaps now I’m just projecting. This is my life now. While these little needy ghosts chase me around, I must make our diaper bag one-hundred pounds with all of the things, while the dog incessantly humps my leg, because he hasn’t gotten enough exercise or because he wants to remind me that moms can’t do it all. And thus, the splash pad isn’t worth it.
If you chose B, the rest of the day continues to look like little humans screaming “mom” and chasing me around. If you chose A, I eventually get out the door. I then have to wrestle my toddler into a carseat and question whether it’s child abuse to physically restrain him in order to get his arms through the straps while the air conditioning attempts and fails to keep up with the heat, all while my sweat discolors the entirety of my clothing. I then realize I’ve left my daughter’s lovey and my children’s water bottles inside. Do I:
Get my children out of their car seats so they can come in with me to get the missing items and repeat this entire miserable process again;
Hope that nobody takes the car as I sprint my sweat-soaked body inside to grab Pooh Bear and water bottles from the table.
If you chose A, chances are, I’m not going to the zoo. If you chose B, I return to the car, which is thankfully still there, only to be confronted by the Double Bob stroller which in a neuralyzer-moment (the Men in Black device they zap at someone to make them forget) I cannot for the life of me remember how to collapse. Do I:
Attempt to watch Youtube videos, all of which are too long and none of which seem to be for my stroller’s model, only to realize that either I still have no idea what I’m doing, and/or my wingspan isn’t wide enough to press the buttons simultaneously as instructed. After many failed attempts, of which I hope the neighbors aren’t watching, I decide to go to the zoo with two tiny-legged-children and no wheels;
Call it a day and proceed inside to watch a movie about zoos.
If you chose A, I got to the zoo and had a surprisingly successful experience, aside from seeing only the flamingos at the entrance before my son attempted to jump off of a moving train and my daughter used the splash pad as her personal toilet. Do I:
Decide to try it again next week;
Realize that it takes a village to raise these kids, and that I should just wait patiently in my house until said village arrives.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
A few months after graduating college, the song “shots” by LMFAO featuring Lil Jon was released. LMFAO has long since disbanded after a short but surprisingly successful string of hits. And, while the days of shots and binge drinking are very far in our past, this song has made a comeback in our house during the past two weeks. Last week, we finally got our kids the first COVID vaccine. The COVID vaccine became available to children ages 5-11 in October 2021. Since then, many mask mandates have been lifted and much of life (aside from a brief Omicron blip) has gone back to normal. But, we have continued to live in this isolated bubble of restrictions and fear. We have answered quite a few questions about our decisions to remain more locked-down than others. Many people with young kids couldn’t or didn’t want to remain as restricted as we did, and I hold no judgment in regards to that decision. You do what you’ve got to do. Our primary reason for remaining quite cautious was that we wanted to do everything in our power to keep our kids as safe as possible. Secondly, I was pregnant with our son during the pandemic, before there were vaccines or a firm understanding of how COVID spread, how dangerous it was, and how it would impact pregnant women. So, we retreated, and for months we locked down and lived like little fearful hermits. I think we’re still grappling with the trauma from that experience, the powerlessness that we confronted, and the loneliness and heaviness of that time. Now, it’s our kids’ turn to get the vaccine. And while they (rightly so) were far more excited about the lollipops that they received afterwards than the shot, to us this is the beginning of getting them the protection that we got over a year ago. Someday, when we describe these past two years, I’m sure it’ll feel like a dream. Here’s the most insightful and helpful information I’ve found on the COVID vaccine for littles. We don’t really know what “normal life” looks like anymore, but we couldn’t be more eager to figure it out together.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
When my paternal grandmother was 93 years old, she was involved in a hit-and-run incident. After causing a fender bender, instead of getting out of the car, assessing the damage, and exchanging insurance information, she fled the scene. Later, when the police showed up at an apartment to confront the perpetrator, to their surprise, the person who answered the door was an incredibly petite Jewish woman, in a perfectly coiffed, too-auburn-for-her-age wig. While they decided that the handcuffs were unnecessary, this did conclude my grandma’s time with a driver’s license. Similar to a hit and run, recently, “the pinch and run” has commenced in our household. Out of nowhere, my daughter’s thumb and pointer turn into little crab pinchers that go straight for my thigh or her brother’s arm or our dog’s side, and before we know it, we’re reeling from a surprisingly painful pinch. Then, she flees the scene with a strangely similar surprise to an elderly woman who’s just bumped her Cadillac into the car in front of her. I, then, quickly thumb-through my “parenting rolodex” trying to handle the situation better than I did the time beforel. I’ve tried, “I understand that sometimes it feels good to pinch something. I won’t let you pinch us, let’s find something else you can pinch when you have that feeling.” I’ve tried, “pinching really hurts. Do you want me to pinch you? We treat others like we want to be treated. I don’t want to pinch you and I don’t want you to pinch me either.” I’ve tried, “why did you pinch? Can you use your words instead of your fingers? Do we need to take a couple of quiet minutes alone with me until you’re ready to talk about it?” But each response is met with running away screaming. We haven’t figured this one out, instead, in the aftermath, I am dependably greeted by a little disheveled lady who is fluctuating somewhere between guilty and flighty, reluctant to face her actions head-on.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
How many peach recipes is too many peach recipes? It’s still summertime, so my peach-kick is still going strong. My mom made this one for Sunday Night Dinner last year and to be honest, I was skeptical. She’s a wonderful cook, but to me, cooked peaches are a condensed, stickier, lesser version of a fresh peach. This Ina Garten recipe proved my theory wrong. Now is the time, as we’re in a groove of buying pounds of peaches at the farmer’s market, to put this recipe at the top of the “to make” list.
Detachment - Issue No. 8
Island Time and Painkillers, Home Alone and When Kevin McCalister Became a Mom, Reflecting on the Regression of Women’s Rights
ISLAND TIME AND PAINKILLERS
For the first time, this newsletter is a week late. While this next grouping of sentences reads like a dog ate my homework excuse, it’s more of an unsolicited explanation. It’s summer time, if this is a surprise to you, step outside and feel the suffocating heat surrounding you. With summer, the number of children constantly in my house has doubled. I’m writing this as my sweet and occasionally clingy three-year-old is sitting on my lap asking me, “how are you writing?” I’m not sure what she means by her question, but I’m inclined to reply “not as well as before.” So, I’m attempting to type with my arms on either side of her chatty little body, said Hemingway never. Reason number two for the delay, (and the real crux of this section) is that my husband and I took our first vacation away from our kids (more to come on that). Subsequently, my mom (who graciously watches my children while I write and acted as primary guardian while we were gone) needed a complete break from my very busy little ones upon our return. So, here we are, a week late, desperately clinging onto the final strands of the carefree and well-rested feeling of vacation.
And, that brings me to part two of this piece, my first real kid-free vacation since becoming a parent. The trip is so hard to describe beyond enthusiastic adjectives. So, here are some facts:
We rented a large catamaran and sailed for a week with four other couples (half of which we didn’t know well) in the British Virgin Islands.
My husband and one other man captained our boat while I lacquered on sunscreen, completely lost track of time, and had the most enjoyable chats when not reading (with equal parts amusement and envy) I’ll Show Myself Out by Jessi Klein.
While at a time other than now I’d love to learn the mechanics of sailing, for this trip, all of the women (who are either moms of young children or pregnant) decided to take a step-back from their usual appointed role as “troop leader”, and instead sat on the upper deck with no agenda, watching the water that was somehow both cobalt and clear. At any given time, I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going or coming from, or how long we’d been sailing for, it all felt so meditatively fluid.
I felt a bit like I was walking into this trip blindfolded; here are some things I didn’t know going in:
The difference between starboard and port (and that the word is “starboard” and not “star-bird.”)
Thanks to my embarrassingly rudimentary understanding of geography, much like thinking Nova Scotia was near Sweden, I wasn’t sure exactly where the British Virgin Islands were, beyond South.
Until this trip, I’d been unfamiliar with sea sickness. Thankfully, I only experienced it once, and puking off the leeward side of a boat with wind in one’s hair feels, in some way, albeit small, like a vintage connection to Moby Dick (a book that to date, I’ve never found very relatable).
Finally, here is what it feels like to return after such a trip:
The juxtaposition between sipping Painkillers one day (a delightful drink made with rum, cream of coconut, pineapple and orange juice, and a shake of nutmeg on top) to changing your son’s poopy diaper as he tries to heedlessly hurl himself from the changing table while your daughter gags at the smell but refuses to leave the room, can feel a bit discordant.
Having an opportunity to come up for air, to remember who you are in your own body, to not be constantly watching your periphery to be sure one child isn’t pulling another child’s hair or exploring the mechanics of your dog’s tail, it felt really rejuvenating and like I could come back a better mom than when I left.
Once you have babies, even when you’re away from them, even when you’re sipping cocktails, paddle boarding over stingrays, feeling your feet sink into the sand, they’re still deeply a part of you. You’re never fully alone again. I could both feel in touch with myself and so far from the self that I was before I had children, because without them I’m not whole. Even though I wholly enjoyed having a break.
HOME ALONE AND
WHEN KEVIN MCCALISTER BECAME A MOM
Every once in a while, I find myself truly stunned still by the fact that I’m an adult. At 35, I thought I would have warmed up to this idea by now, but there are times that it truly still floors me. Perhaps, I imagined I would be given a key on the precipice of adulthood to a door with all of the answers inside. But instead, I still feel like I have so much to figure out, and I lose my keys all of the time. Last night, I was laying in bed and thinking about how, if my kids feel scared, they seek me out to make them feel better. Since it happens every day, I don’t think a lot about it, but the other night, it really struck me. My husband was out of town and I was laying in bed devising a plan of what to do if a burglar broke in: hide under my bed or escape from one of our way-too-tall windows trying to avoid the electric wires that are far too close to our house to be to code. Perhaps, I could act like I was already dead from a burglar who had broken in previously or I could hope that my sweet Black Lab in a moment of true valiance would become a ferocious beast. But, it’s not just about me, without any additional Ninja training, I was given these kids to protect.
When I was seven years old and the first Home Alone movie felt like an integral part of my life, my nextdoor neighbors got robbed. The next day, my neighbor and I went outside to dig a very big hole in my front yard. Our thought process was, if the robbers returned, they would break-in to my house, since my neighbor’s house had already been hit. Upon walking up our steeply sloped yard, because robbers don’t use driveways, they would trip and fall in the hole, and know, thanks to Macaulay Culkin's expertly played Kevin McCalister, that we were expecting them. Having already experienced a taste of our possible vengeance, the burglars would run away in fear. The plan backfired when my neighbor gave me a bloody nose by accidentally smacking me in the face with his shovel. And, really from that moment forward, I’ve been uncertain if I’d be very useful (other than my stellar soft-skills) in a zombie apocalypse. Which brings me to the other night, laying there, in sheer shock that I am a mom whose job it is to protect my children. And, while I would do absolutely anything to keep them safe, my knowledge of how to tie knots, skin a fish, and forage for anything outside of our refrigerator is still incredibly limited. So, laying in bed the other night feeling sheer disbelief at the responsibility I now shoulder, I connected more to Kevin McCalister than I have in years. Unable to sleep, I just laid there, hoping that at least for a while longer my kids continue to feel safe in my arms, unaware that I’m totally winging it.
REFLECTING ON THE REGRESSION
OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS
I’ve been searching for the words to contribute my voice to the reversal of Roe. V. Wade. And, while I’ve felt compelled to speak up, I’ve been struggling with how to express my disappointment and fear.
I’ve been thinking about the nine months leading up to my daughter and son being born, and how unbearable it would have felt to be growing a baby that wasn’t viable, or who was conceived by rape or incest or before it was the right time. I’ve been thinking of how scared and betrayed I would have felt if my healthcare providers couldn’t have done everything in their power to keep me unharmed and alive. I’ve been thinking about my c-sections, the recovery, the scars, how my body has been forever changed, how a man could never understand what it feels like to endure any kind of pregnancy.
I’ve thought about how life-changing and consuming and expensive motherhood is and how impossible it would feel if I hadn’t been ready.
I’ve thought about how broken the systems are that we have to support these women and these unwanted children.
And, I’ve thought about how to articulate how serious this is for our country, how to say something that my eloquent and powerful community hasn’t said, how to express the urgency of this call to action.
To my daughter, June 24 was marked by a carousel ride, her first time tasting Dippin’ Dots, and her brother’s first time pooping in a potty (though, it was definitely a fluke). That night, I watched her on the monitor. She was fighting sleep by dressing up like a doctor-ballerina-firefighter in her closet. I’ve told her she can be whatever she wants to be. Though, that feels less and less true.
Because to me, June 24 marked the loss of women’s fundamental right to control their own bodies. To me, the day felt like the beginning of a terrifying regression in policies that will make this country so vastly different than the home I want for my babies. I’ve not yet told her any of this, I’m not ready nor is she. But, when I do, I hope that I can give her hope—Hope for a world that believes in her, wants to keep her safe, and trusts her integrity as much as I do. When I tell her, I want to assure her that a world which resembles the one she deserves is possible.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
When my son was born, he quickly gained the nickname “Mr. Grumbles.” When he was sleeping or nursing or feeling particularly cozy, he would make a sound likened to a grown man eating a perfectly barbecued rib, fresh off the grill. That grumbley noise, as I nursed him to sleep or felt his face pressed against my chest brought me peace. If I could compose any noise to sleep to on a sound machine, it would be this one. Now, when he eats a particularly delicious piece of cheese or an occasional hot dog, the grumble returns, but now he looks back at us with a face that seems to be inquiring “good, right?” And so, our whole family grumbles in response. And, this is why we will not be dining as a family in a fancy restaurant any time soon. Witnessing a child that was within you finding comfort without you, discovering the pleasures of the world and having it result in such a wonderful sound, it brings me joy. I know my kids, who are growing at what I would argue is a bizarrely fast rate, will outgrow most things that they do today. My daughter will likely stop saying “Scun-screen” and “Daisies and Gentlemen” and my son will probably soon stop saying “woah” when he’s running particularly fast in circles or exclaiming “Mama, bir!” when he hears tweeting overhead. My parents love talking about how I used to sing the word “Ba-quila” instead of “Tequila” (when singing the song from the ‘50s, which was my only exposure to Tequila till college). Or, how I confused the words “sensible” and “sensitive” and used to notify my peers, when a loud truck passed or someone screamed that I had “very sensible ears.” I know that eventually their words will get corrected and that they’ll be introduced to inhibitions. I’ve made peace with some of that concept, but I hope, in the right company, on occasion, my son will continue to share his grumbles of delight with the world.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
For this piece, it is important to first introduce you to MacGyver, a television character from the ‘80s (with a recent remake). Google describes him as a young hero with an extraordinary knack for unconventional problem solving. Recently, my daughter has been exploring her potentially preordained future role as Ms. MacGyver. She’s been trying her hand at creative problem solving, and I have been doing everything in my power to encourage her thinking-outside-of-the-box but doomed-to-fail experiments. When her bubble wand rolled under the fridge, she suggested we try to get it with a piece of fruit, first she tried a banana and then a peach, while I sat next to her, trying to conjure every ounce of my patience as I watched her gears turn while she attempted to squeeze our fresh produce underneath the refrigerator. The next morning, I had trouble opening a jar and she suggested, perhaps Play-Doh could help. So, then I was attempting to open a jar covered in Play-Doh, and when that didn’t work, she resiliently added poof balls (a word that you only say or understand when you have kids). Later that afternoon, she put grass clippings in front of our truck, so as to stop the scooter from ramming into the bumper as it picked up speed going down our sloped driveway. She was shocked when her brother still plowed straight into it. I so deeply want her to feel uninhibited in her imaginings, to approach problem solving with an open mind, unencumbered by the limiting nature of self-doubt or debilitating pessimism. So, I’m left encouraging her as she puts toilet paper between her butt cheeks and comes out of the bathroom with her “tail” dragging along the floor so “she never has to wipe again.” And while her inventions have not yet resulted in a lot of success, I think her continuing to think this way has a great deal of potential.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Peach Daiquiri
It’s summertime, and in true Georgia-girl fashion, for me, the season is marked by trying to consume as many peaches as possible while they’re good. From salads to pizza, during this season, to me peaches make almost anything better. Shout-out to my god-moms who first introduced me to this tasty beverage! And with that, here is my favorite summer cocktail:
Ingredients
2 ripe peaches
1 can of frozen Minute Made Limeade
1 tsp. of powdered sugar
2-3 shots of dark rum (you can also make these without rum, if you’re looking for a virgin option. Or add more rum, if you’re looking for something slightly more boozy.
1 cup of ice
Directions
Blend it up and enjoy!
Explanation - Issue No. 7
Climbing Mountains in the Dark, Proving My Worth Over Highlights, Sending My Daughter to School After the Latest Shooting
CLIMBING MOUNTAINS IN THE DARK
In 2015, my now husband and I took a magical vacation to Tanzania. Every two years, we would do a big trip, and we would budget and plan around the shared belief that travel should be a focal point of our lives. When deciding where we should go, we would independently make lists, mine often written by hand and researched based on images and stories I had heard, his made on Excel and based on weather patterns and activities we could do. Then, we would pitch our lists to one another, hold a debate, and settle on where our next adventure would unfold. And, with that, in 2015, we decided to go to Tanzania, to go on safari and then do a 6 day hike to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I could write an entire book about our experience. But, what I’ve been thinking about most recently, seven years later, is the final ascent. After 5 days of strenuous hiking and camping, dealing with altitude acclimation and stomach issues that I’ll spare you the details of, after putting our bodies through what felt like ceaseless challenge, after having a few existential crises on why anyone hikes mountains to begin with, we were told that we would wake up at midnight, eat a light breakfast and then begin the final climb, so as to reach the top of the mountain by sunrise. I hadn’t slept, I was so anxious, and I couldn’t decide if the cold, the 30-40 mph winds or my pure nerves were making me shake. This hike was unlike anything we’ve done before or since. We couldn’t see past our headlamps. There was no reprieve from the incline or the wind or the cold and the terrain was sand, so with every step we took, we slid back down at least half a step. When I look back at the experience, I realize that my body switched into survival mode and took a hiatus from collecting memories. It’s all kind of a blur, just snippets of sensations and emotions cutting through the treacherous, windy dark. Thanks in large part to our guides, to our determination, to our bodies’ willingness, to our support of one another, we made it to the top in six hours, just as the sky was lighting up in pinks and oranges and uncovering a glacier on the “roof of Africa.” It was one of the most magical moments of my life.
What I keep coming back to, after all of these years, is why did we hike at night? And, what I’ve realized, maybe through motherhood more so than ever before, is that there was more to the rationale for hiking at night than the mesmerizing sunrise. It was because sometimes, I think, seeing the hill, knowing what you’re up against, is enough of a deterrent to not trust your body’s ability to push through and survive. I don’t know if we would have made it to the top of Kilimanjaro if we could have seen the mountain, or the sand, or how the wind was blowing our path away. But, instead, we faced the challenge fully in our bodies, deeply consumed by our breath, by our determination, by trusting that there was a top to the mountain but not knowing exactly where it was. I come back to that experience so often now. In many ways, Kilimanjaro feels so distant from my current world. It was so meditative, I was so focused on my own body and needs, it felt so insular and yet electrifyingly different and dangerous. But, in these last few years, these years of entering a new phase of our lives with our children, I still feel in some ways like we are climbing mountains in the dark. Perhaps, we are able to do hard things because we can’t always see the hard things we’re doing. We just climb, not always knowing what will stand in our way, trying our best to pace ourselves while putting one foot in front of the other (pole pole in Swahili), each day we’re defying the odds, continuing to climb without knowing what’s ahead, demonstrating the mountains we are capable of conquering in the dark.
PROVING MY WORTH OVER HIGHLIGHTS
Last week, while getting my hair done, my hairdresser introduced me to the woman sitting next to me. “You’re both writers!” she explained in order to introduce us. And so, we began to talk. She was a law professor whose upcoming book about pandemics was being published in just a couple of weeks. She gave me a brochure, talked about the release party, and asked me what I was working on. I paused, took a deep breath, felt my bottom lip between my teeth, and then explained, “Well, I’m staying at home with my kids right now, so I only have 4-5 hours each week to write. I do have my MFA from Rutgers and my background is in creative nonfiction and poetry. Right now, I’m writing a newsletter about life as a mom to little kids. It’s all I have time for, but it’s fun and I’m feeling excited about it.” I felt her interest waning. Though, in retrospect, I don’t actually know that her interest did wane. She didn’t even really need to be there. The whole interaction was basically just me imagining what I would be thinking of me if I were her. I was so self-conscious, that by the end of my monologue I had explained away my legitimacy and totally undersold myself. And, I had done it all with enough foils in my hair to conduct electricity.
Similarly, before quitting my job last year, I pictured being at a dinner party and just dreading being asked what I do, because I didn’t want to own the title of stay-at-home-mom based on my own preconceived and largely false notions of what claiming that identity would entail. Despite being truly happy with my decision, my ego has continued to rear its head (which is not an all bad thing by any means), but it has manifested into a totally unnecessary over-explanation that I now find myself giving constantly. If someone says “what do you do?” Instead of saying, “I’m staying at home with my kids right now while they’re so young.” I say something so exhaustive and unnecessary like, “I was a teacher, which I loved, and the place I worked at was great. I’ve also been a professor, and I have also spent a great deal of time in the nonprofit sector. But, right now, I’m staying with my kids because of the pandemic and vaccines. Did I mention how young they are? I know it’s privileged and I don’t take that for granted. This time is so fleeting. I do think I’ll work again, and it’s been a really great opportunity to pivot my career back to writing, which is what I had originally set out to do in some form. Did I mention I’m also writing?” And by the time I’ve said all of that, I’ve officially lost the interest of the person, who probably never cared at all about what I do and why. This is what I keep coming back to, they don’t actually care and if they are judging me, they’re not my people. I think my over-explanation, ultimately, has little to do with anyone else and much more to do with the fissure I’m trying to make sense of that has happened in my life since having kids – On one side there’s ego and ambition, and on the other, my capacity and priorities. So, if you ever encounter me or anyone else at a dinner party fumbling as they try to explain what they do and why, perhaps the incessant over-explanation (albeit unfortunate for anyone who has to listen) is a desperate attempt to build a bridge between the complicated forces driving one's life.
SENDING MY DAUGHTER TO SCHOOL
AFTER THE LATEST SHOOTING
On May 25, we sent my daughter to school, like it was any other day, and to her it was. But, to me, it was the first day after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that I decided to go against my gut and send my beloved baby into her classroom instead of just holding her close and shielding her from the world. At night, when she has trouble sleeping, I always say the same thing, “You are safe, you are loved, and Mommy and Daddy are here if you need anything at all.” But the shooting in Uvalde, yet again, proved that despite feeling in the deepest parts of me that I would do absolutely anything in my power to keep her safe, I am raising her in a country that is failing her just as we’re promising her the world. She isn’t old enough to understand what happened, but no one is old enough to make sense of it. Nineteen children and two adults were senselessly murdered by someone who should have never had the opportunity to decide their fates. They were failed by a system which touts preserving the right to bear arms as more essential than the right to life. They were failed by a country that has yet to prioritize ample access to mental health resources. They were failed because even our places of education aren’t safe. They aren’t safe because our politicians have been prioritizing limiting the ability to authentically and honestly tell the stories of black and brown and gay people, as if education could ever do more harm than good. Because our politicians are more threatened by honest history than firearms. They were failed by a system that is working diligently to restrict women’s rights to make decisions for their own health and bodies and families and lives while creating ample opportunity for disturbed (almost always white) men to determine the fates of elderly black people at a grocery store, of worshippers, of our children.
Knowing all of this, I dropped my daughter off at school, kissed her forehead, and told her I loved her. I had to chase after my son, before she had even walked out of my sight. Life feels like it’s always moving too fast for me to get my footing, for me to build the world she deserves. The next day, I voted. Today, I’ll hug her extra tight. I’ll listen to the stories of the families affected, I’ll viscerally feel their pain while understanding that I have no idea. I’ll feel guilty and grateful and certain that no more stories are needed for us to understand that change is necessary. I’ll continue hoping that tomorrow the world will feel brighter, that we won’t continue to repeat history, that we’ll give these massive problems more than moments of silence and our respects, that I’ll have more answers and clearer next steps. By the time she understands the world she’s living in, my hope is that it will be different, that I will have done more, that we will be getting closer to the world she deserves. But, a part of me just wants to hold her close, to keep her safe in my arms, to not trust the system, to mourn and move on, to pretend it’s not our problem until it’s our problem. At night, when she can’t sleep, I’m not ready to tell her the truth, “The world is a scary place. We’ve got so much work to do. Sometimes we take steps forward, but, we’re also taking big steps back. You are not safe, we are not safe. I want to hold you up, but there is a lot that pulls us down. You deserve more. All children deserve more, and that is a daunting concept. But I haven’t lost hope, and I hope you don’t either. Change is possible, we live in a place brimming with potential, and we can do hard things. You are so very loved, and nothing matters more to me than ensuring that within this world, you thrive.”
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
Three years ago, when my daughter was 8 months old, we took her to Greece and Italy. And, while I could focus this piece on how travel, by and large, is something that’s really worked for us, or the number of stories we came away with from that particular trip, instead I’ve chosen to reflect on a particularly messy blow-out diaper. Because having kids means that along with adding words like “Hooray” and “Uh Oh” to your regular vocabulary, you also spend a remarkable amount of time discussing and reflecting on poop. It happened in Venice, while we were having dinner in a dimly-lit, family-run restaurant. The bathroom was off of the back patio, with an exterior entrance, no air conditioning, and no space to maneuver. There was poop everywhere and we were expeditiously getting sweaty as our daughter’s wiggles began to resemble that of a firehose on full blast. This is not the moment you would expect to feel unconditional love for your partner, but poop-bonding, it turns out, is among the moments that I feel closest to my husband. I was reminded of this at an outdoor taco joint the other day. My daughter, who is no longer in diapers, was playing giant connect four by herself, as we laid my 18-month-old son out across my husband’s legs and changed his poopy diaper right beneath our table of tacos. We were like a well-oiled poop-changing machine. We’re not always in sync, because who is, and also parenting is hard, but the moments when we can do it together, when we can laugh and feel certain that we’ve got the right person on our team, even if it involves blowouts in cramped Venetian bathrooms, it turns out those moments really work for us.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
In Issue No. 2 of Charmingly Chaotic, I mentioned that at night I tell my daughter a story in order to prepare her for something that’s coming. While I mentioned that this was something that was working, I would like to amend this previous statement. Like most humbling parts of parenthood, just as I start to feel like I’ve really figured something out, it shifts, and once again I’m left realizing that parenting is so very humbling. This brings me to a parent-teacher conference that I attended last week. During the conference, my daughter’s teachers asked if we were going on a trip soon without her, to which I replied that we are. I explained that at night I’ve been telling her about this trip to prepare her and assure her that she’ll have a great time and be in the most capable hands while we’re gone. Perhaps, I’ve also been telling her because I’m nervous about leaving her and her brother, and in my attempt to project confidence and assurance, I am subconsciously projecting my nerves onto her. I’ve reached this conclusion because that’s what her teachers told me I was doing. Apparently, three to four times each day for the last several weeks, our daughter has been telling her teachers how we are leaving her for eight to nine months (which we are not, not even close) and that a slew of people will be coming in and out of her house while we’re gone to visit her and her brother (which is also far from the case, they will be in the loving care of grandparents). They asked that we not bring up our trip again until the day before we leave. So, it turns out, sometimes more information isn’t always best. Sometimes, I’m not projecting the emotion that I’m desperately attempting to. Sometimes, I still have no idea what I’m doing.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Some people are experts on beer, others on wine, while others specialize in pickles. For quite some time, I’ve considered myself a chocolate chip cookie enthusiast. Several years ago, my friend and I even made it our mission to find the best chocolate chip cookie in the city, based on several criteria and an elaborate ranking system. After lots of trial and error, this is my cookie recipe. It makes between 20-24 cookies.
Ingredients
1 + 1/8 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 heaping teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (2 stick) butter, softened (melting it too much changes the consistency of the cookies)
1/4 cup + 2 Tablespoons granulated sugar
1/4 cup + 2 Tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large eggs
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions
Preheat oven to 375° F
Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl.
Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract until whipped
Add egg and beat to mix in
Gradually beat in flour mixture, then chocolate chips
Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto ungreased baking sheets
Bake for 7 minutes (Underbaking is key. They should look pretty doughy and only have a little browning at the edges)
Remove from cookie sheet immediately and let cool on cooling rack
Contrast - Issue No. 6
And, I Thought I Knew What Tired Was, The Day I Was Called a Grandmother, When the Caterpillar Stings Your Butt
AND, I THOUGHT I KNEW WHAT TIRED WAS
My sophomore year of college, I pulled my first all-nighter to finish writing a short story for my Fiction Writing Workshop the following day. This class was one I dreaded for two reasons: one, writing fiction was outside of my comfort zone, and two, because my ex-boyfriend was also in the class, though from our lack of interaction, no one would have ever known we had a history. I brought a copy of my piece for each person - and the most zen-disposition that I could muster. Then the piece was torn apart by my classmates, including my ex-boyfriend, as I sat there taking copious notes on my copy in a last ditch effort to not cry in front of everyone. I lost it on my way home, there were free-flowing tears, an awareness that I’m an ugly crier, a fear of not being a good writer, and deep hope nobody was watching me lose it in public. I went home, slept it off, and woke up a much more rational human being who could take it all in stride. This piece is not about the many writing workshops I’ve sat through, taking some feedback better than others, this piece is not about how consequential an ex-boyfriend’s opinions feel when you’re nineteen, this piece is about how viscerally emotional exhaustion can be.
That was my first irrational altercation with sleep-deprivation in adulthood, a feeling that has since become an integral part of my existence. This emotional rollercoaster of trying to handle the world when you haven’t let your body recharge, that’s just another day for a lot of mamas. I’m now going on four years of interrupted, fragmented, light sleep, and here are some things I know to be true:
I’m actually better at handling being tired than I ever thought I would be. This is a superpower for moms that is rarely noted. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I remember after not thinking about it once, that I was up with my son at 3am for an hour.
After never having been a napper or one who falls asleep easily, I’m amazed at how quickly and in what contorted positions my body can now rest: sitting up, on the floor, or with one arm draped over a bassinet to hold a pacifier in my newborn son’s mouth, I’ve proven my versatility.
There is an irrational anger that I feel towards my husband in the night when I wake up and he doesn’t. This, I realize, is not his fault. But, when I’ve gotten up to change my daughter’s sheets at midnight because of an accident, and then again with my son, because he has a cold and has coughed himself awake, I feel an all-consuming resentment. I could ask him to get up, but by the time I explain what’s going on and he has oriented himself enough to be helpful, I’m already handling it myself.
Breastfeeding Mamas have been damned by evolution to never feel well-rested because in their sweetest snooze, their engorged breasts demand action.
I have full-on fantasies about sleeping till 7:45am, and what it must have felt like, once upon time, so many years ago, when I would see the sun gleaming through the crack in the curtains and think, based only on my body and my needs, I’m going to snooze a bit longer, as I’d roll over, sink deeper into my pillow and drift off.
Even if a Mama is holding it together and taking things in stride, even if she maintains her sense of humor and her pleasant disposition, even if she’s found time to brush her hair and her clothes are not yet covered in drool or snot, I can assure you that she is exhausted. Like 19-year-old me after an all-nighter exhausted, except nothing is about her, and she might never sleep deeply again.
What I know to be true is that the tiredness of Mamas sinks deep within them. It’s an indescribable exhaustion that can make them feel like a lesser version of themselves, one that is incapable of idle chit-chat or wit or perhaps even comprehensible sentences. Sometimes it’s so extreme, they might not even recognize themselves. So, at the very least, we should recognize for them the resilience that mothers display every day by just doing all they do amidst the exhaustion.
THE DAY I WAS CALLED A GRANDMOTHER
Last week, my husband had to go to work (something that we’re still actively adjusting to after two years of him working from home, thanks to the pandemic). We watched him drive away from our window and then I chased each kid around the house attempting to get their shoes on, which bridges the gap between a game and a nuisance. The morning was filled with giggling, the sun was shining, my coffee was still mildly warm as I was drinking it. I asked my 18-month-old son if he wanted to walk or stroller and he proclaimed “walk,” so, I decided we’d give it a try. He stood between my daughter and me, his arms extended upwards, each hand in one of ours. And, three across we walked to school, past people smiling at our sheer existence, like a perfect picture. We dropped my daughter off, they embraced, my son squeeked, “Buh-Byeeee” and I thought, “we could definitely have a third, look at me, perfectly in control.” And then, before I could even breathe in the moment of the stars aligning and everything going right, my son attempted to book it into oncoming traffic, his little round tummy leading his feet. I carried him like a barrel under my arm squirming and screaming away every ounce of my newfound confidence I had, until we reached the sidewalk. After I put him down, he ran whilst flailing and face-planted into a pile of woodchips. Then, a mother of one of my daughter’s classmates, stopped her stoller on her way home, and with a generous lack of judgment, threw us a lifeline and convinced my son to hitch a ride back to our driveway. We acknowledged the finite nature of magical moments, that the good doesn’t feel as good without the bad, that parenthood is at its core a humbling act.
I get shaken out of the magical moments, just as quickly as I fall into them. Last week, I took my son to the park and was pushing him on a swing and chatting with the woman next to me. It was a light conversation about the boy whom she nannied, how she was teaching him Spanish, what a lovely morning it was. My son was giggling, his limbs limp as he swung back and forth, the sun glistening against his bright blonde hair. Then, she looked at me and with complete sincerity asked, “Is this your grandson?” At 35-years-old, this one really stung. What I hope is that the mistake was because of a language barrier. What I know is that I will never wear the outfit I was wearing again. For the rest of the day, every time I went to the bathroom, I would lean into the mirror and analyze the tiny creases that have rooted into my eye-corners and the sides of my mouth over the past few years. When I was little, I used to catch twinkling fireflies in a jar, I’d watch them blink into the dusk, and then would feel sheer disappointment when they were all dead in the morning. I’ve always wanted to bottle up the magic, the perfect moments, and keep them glowing indefinitely. But, while the contrast of the perfect moment with the utter chaos and confidence-crushing comments never stops being jarring, it makes the moments when the world seems to twinkle feel that much sweeter.
WHEN THE CATERPILLAR STINGS YOUR BUTT
When I was in graduate school, I decided to go down to Florida to interview my great-uncle Clayton for my thesis, which was a collection of essays exploring the complicated nature of memory. My mom had told me this story about my grandfather and his two brothers who were all in World War Two at the same time. They left their home and family in Mudd, West Virginia and their mother had to grapple with all three of her sons being in the war simultaneously. The story goes that she wrote letters to them asking them to try to get together, despite all being stationed in different countries. She wanted them to remember where they came from and what they were fighting for, in hopes that connecting would help them survive. And so, somehow, they all met in Italy, shared a pivotal weekend together and then, subsequently, and perhaps in part due to their meeting, all returned from the war relatively unscathed. So, I met with Clayton (the only brother who was still living), ready to hear his version of this epic tale. I have roughly 15 hours of recorded tape, with fascinating stories on so many facets of his life. But, the story that I came down to Florida to hear, the one that I anticipated being among the most integral, was one we hardly talked about at all.
So, the essay in my thesis ended up being less about what to make of his memories and more about recognizing which memories made him. Now, similarly, I’m experiencing my daughter, falsely categorizing my memories in terms of level of importance. She’s been requesting certain inconsequential stories on repeat. At Easter brunch she asked, “what was the one about the caterpillar and your butt again?” And so I shared, at our holiday meal, for the one millionth time, the story of being six or seven and mounting my bike, who I affectionately named “California Girl,” in order to impress a boy at my next door neighbor’s house. I sat on a caterpillar with spikes and then proceeded to pull down my pants and scream for my mom, in front of the boy. My mom called an entomologist, who said I’d be okay, and then treated the sting with ointment and a bandaid. This story, another about me attempting to run into gigantic waves in Hawaii, and a third about me not getting into the high school musical Freshmen year despite having tap shoes, and best friends who did, are among the most treasured stories currently in my daughter’s rotation. I don’t know why these particular stories have resonated so much. I wish she’d care to hear stories that mattered to me more, but I guess that’s not how it works. Perhaps someday, she’ll want hours of tape (or maybe by then it’ll be computer-brain-reading) about my life too. But in the meantime, I have no say in what stories become treasured.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
Once a week, and usually on a day where the hours between 1pm and 6pm feel like an eternity, my daughter and I venture out to the library while my mom watches my son. This has become one of our most loved parts of the week. This Mommy-daughter outing, with a bubble tea which we split on the backend, brings both of us so much joy. We do our temperature checks at the entrance of the library, Pooh Bear’s temperature hovers around 72, and then my daughter places her books one at a time and so gently in the book return slide before prancing to the children’s section to grab 11 more, which is a totally arbitrary number I have set for no reason other than to ensure we don’t take the whole library home with us each week. This was the first place we ventured with my daughter during the pandemic after months of being quarantined and her forgetting what it meant or how it felt to be in public. I remember her walking in, masked and wide-eyed with more stimulation than she’d felt in months. She began to know the sections that carried her favorite series and she’d always have a list of her most pressing interests to give to the librarians, so they could pick out books accordingly: Dinosaurs, trucks, dinosaurs in trucks, princesses, hardware stores, princesses using hardware, first days of school, first days your pets go to school, pigs who own bakeries - the options feel endless. I could go on all day about the importance of the library in our family’s rhythm, but instead, I’ll put the top eleven books which have really rocked our world in the past month:
1. Peterrific - Kann
2. Fergal & The Bad Temper -Starling
3. I Got Rhythm - Schofield-Morrison
4. Can I be your dog? - Cummings
5. The Electric Slide and Kai - Baptist
6. Will You Help Me Fall Asleep-Kang
7. Birdie's First Day of School - Rim
8. Love, Violet - Wild
9. Buddy Bench - Brozo
10. First Day of School- Van Den Berg
11. Ella The Elegant Elephant Takes The Cake - D’Amico
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Recently, my daughter has begun trying to understand the idea of exchange. She gives you a plastic ice cream cone, and then you give her money. She only accepts her money in pounds, thanks to Peppa Pig, but the concept is there. When we go to the library, she gives her library card to the person checking us out, and they give her a stack of books. She taps Mama’s card on a plastic square, and then she receives her popsicle. It all feels pretty magical and simple, two adjectives that couldn’t be further from describing money. Explaining payment, giving to get, it’s a complicated concept. And, this brings us to the Tooth Fairy. Similar to quicksand, the number of books on the Tooth Fairy would lead you to believe she will play a far more important role in your life than she actually ends up playing. To her dismay, my daughter is not of the age yet to lose her teeth, but she is desperate to be given the opportunity to find treasures under her pillow, because, who wouldn’t. So, she’s decided, and reasonably so, that perhaps other outputs will give her the same result. Recently she told me that by putting boogers under her pillow, the “Boogie Fairy” would take them in exchange for chocolate. And, soon after that, she explained that the “Nail Fairy” would take the nail clippings from beneath her pillow and in return leave her gold coins. So, now we’re dealing with a disappointed three-year-old, desperate to wrap her mind around economics while flexing her entrepreneurial ambitions.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Tropical California Avocado Salad
Summer is upon us and with it, I am always looking for lighter meals that incorporate all of the fresh produce of the season. This Tropical California Avocado Salad is the first recipe I ever discovered from What’s Gaby Cooking, and now I have her cookbooks and reference her all of the time. Her recipes are honest (in required effort and energy), easy to follow, versatile, and delicious. If you’re looking for a refreshing salad that embodies the brightness of summer,
look no further.
Collecting - Issue No. 5
The Helicopter Parent of Halted Friendships, Coconuts in Barbados - When Memory Fails Us, Burying the King Cake Baby in the Backyard
THE HELICOPTER PARENT
OF HALTED FRIENDSHIPS
One of the most interesting parts of watching my kids grow is seeing the ways in which they are exactly like me, and also the ways they are so starkly different. My daughter has begun going up to any girl on the playground and saying, “Hi, what is your name?” She has these exaggerated hand gestures with open outstretched palms that look like she is trying to imitate a whole adult in her tiny kid body. Then, once the other child introduces themselves, she says, “do you want to play?” With what seems like full confidence and certainty. I don’t know when the blanket of insecurity and self-doubt sets in, but I would do anything to keep her unencumbered by those unnecessary obstacles. Her success rate with kids her age is nearly 100%. There are a couple of things with this that are notable to me. Firstly, how is she already so aware of gender? We’ve done everything to not impose the restrictive nature of binary gender on her, and yet, she still only wants to go meet “girls.” When she asks, is that a girl or a boy, I say, “I think that’s a girl, but only they can tell you how they identify.” I’ve felt like this response, among others, has been my attempt to help her begin to understand the complicated nature of gender. And yet still, she’s already splitting people into categories.
My second thought with her approaching strangers is, how did she get such bravery and such an outgoing disposition? When I’m at a happy hour with strangers, a big part of me fantasizes about sprouting a full-on turtle shell to hide in. One time I was so uncomfortable, I took a glass of wine to the bathroom, poured it in the sink, and then came out, only to proceed to the bar for another glass of wine, just so I could look like I had a purpose. So, needless to say, I am so impressed and proud of this little socialite who couldn’t possibly have come from me. But, I also feel like I would be remiss to not acknowledge my biggest fear with her approaching strangers: her lack of awareness of how mean people can be. This part transforms me from a proud observer to a hovering, obnoxious helicopter parent. The first time I butted into her business was about a month ago. She went up to two 10-year-olds, (seven years her senior) and did her normal introduction. Unbeknownst to my daughter, these two older girls laughed at her when they told her their names and then said, “let’s try to find another place to play,” doing their best to subtly avoid her. Most heartbreakingly, when she tailed them, they laughed, said “she’s following us” and proceeded to run away from her. I can’t blame them. They didn’t want to babysit, they were there to play together, and the emotional maturity of many 10-year-olds is limited. Maybe I should have left it. Maybe it would work itself out. But instead, I approached my resolutely-eager daughter and said, “Sweetie, they’re quite a bit older than you, and I think they’re just wanting to play together. Let’s give them a little space and try to find a friend that’s your age to play with.” In my world of unrealistic fantasies, she would reply, “thanks, Mama, you always have my back,” give me a big kiss, and then proceed unphased with her friend-collecting-escapades. However, the ideal is rarely the reality. So, instead she cried and screamed “why are you keeping me away from my friends” in the middle of the busy playground. You know, earlier, when I spoke of the “growing a turtle shell to escape discomfort” scenario, this would be one of those moments. Eventually, she calmed down, thankfully those girls had left, and she rebounded quickly by playing “family” with another like-minded 3-year-old. That night, I obsessed on whether or not I had done the right thing, a game I like to play when I’m flirting with insomnia. Should I have just let her figure it out or not? Was it my job to impose? Did I do more damage than good? How can I ever step back enough for my kid to get hurt? She started from within me, folded into me safely, and now she’s a part of this dubiously cruel world. How can I accept that wrapped up in her growing interest in independence and finding her path in the world, is the inevitability of feeling pain?
COCONUTS IN BARBADOS - WHEN MEMORY FAILS US
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how powerless we are at choosing which memories stick for our children. We create and they collect so many moments in a day and yet we have no say on which ones they’ll recall later. My first memory was when I was an 18-month-old, the same age as my son is right now. My family was in Barbados, and my father climbed a ladder and picked a coconut from a tree. In my memory of the event, the coconut slipped out of his hands, fell on his head, split in half, and then the two halves swirled in circles on the sand and we all laughed for a long time. There are so many things that don’t add up. For starters, coconuts are too hard to break on one’s head, and if one did, it would likely be no laughing matter and would certainly not swirl on the sand. But this is the first imperfect imprint I have in my catalog of memories. I remember my mom smelling like chamomile face cream, her hair soft and curly, the feeling of her lips kissing my palms, so that I could press my hands to my face whenever I needed her closer. And, my dad smelling like the oranges we’d eat while sitting on the kitchen floor, me curled into his lap, time melting away. I don’t have any memories from when I was little of them getting mad at me, or being too tired to parent to their potential, or fumbling for the answers to my impossible questions. To me, their footing was steady, their intention clear, their knowledge endless. This is the best comedic interpretation I’ve found of what I’m trying to say. And now I’m left with such big shoes to fill and no control over what moments my children file away. Sometimes, I step out of the present and think, I hope this one sticks, riding bikes together along the beach, having a dance party in the kitchen, our family sweetly synced. But, like most other things, I’m left to just do my best and hope that the faulty and fickle nature of memory works in my favor for preserving this fleeting time.
BURYING THE KING CAKE BABY IN THE BACKYARD
Every December, growing up, I used to cut a branch off of our Christmas tree and stash it under the carpet. To me, I suppose, it was like storing dried flowers in a book, except a more festive nuisance. People would tromp across my hidden treasure all year, probably questioning the uneven floor. Sometimes, and always in private, I would lift the carpet and admire my collection, the different colors the trimmings turned over time, and their varying textures. Eventually, while visiting us, my step-grandfather vacuumed the living room and in the process mistakenly, but understandably, sucked up at least ten years of my christmas tree clippings. It was time, but I was also still very disappointed. In retrospect, the fact that my mom supported this strange tradition at all is admirable, I struggle to offer the same grace as my daughter brings in a new rock, stick, acorn, or perfect tulip blossom pulled too soon from our garden, to add to her various stashes. We have indoor rocks now, that’s where we’re at.
I don’t know if it is commonplace or just the case with my children, but they have a similar propensity for hiding little treasures. When we moved into our new house last March, it took us months to convince my daughter to stop packing all of our belongings back into the boxes and bags from which they had been removed. At one point, we lost a beloved Moana figurine, and after months of searching and my daughter asking where it was nearly every day, she pulled it out from a shelf (that I didn’t know existed) inside the back of our couch. Before my daughter could string sentences together, she would ask “where’s heart?” Referring to this pink plastic treat from her tea set that she magically made disappear at Nana’s house, never to be found again. After we got a king cake, she buried the baby in the backyard and then was devastated when I couldn’t find it with the shovel she handed me. Often, when we can’t find something in our pantry, we’ll look in my daughter’s extra lunchbox. It’s usually packed with the essentials: chocolate chips, a packet of crystal light, a keurig cup, and some dates. My son has started doing the same thing. Before I run the washing machine, I have to pull out MagnaTiles, some acorns, and a lego or two. Who am I to say what is to be treasured? What I do know is that if they team up, all will be lost for sure. I suppose, we covet things at different times. Finding money in a pocket never gets old, and I suppose digging up a King-Cake-baby in a backyard doesn’t either. If we don’t lose it, then we never get the joy of discovering it again.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
The other day, this woman, who does not have kids and who I had seen a couple of times around my neighborhood stopped in front of my house as I was chasing my kids around my yard and said, “It looks like you have a whole team there.” A doubles tennis team, I thought, as I politely answered “Just two, but they’re busy.” “Oh really? I could have sworn over the last few days that I had seen at least four” she said. “Yeah, I totally feel the same way,” I replied and then she walked away and I was left unsure of if I should be offended or laugh it off. One kid was picking all of the flowers from our garden prematurely, and the other was trying his luck once again with not falling face-first down the stairs and getting another set of symmetrical giraffe-bumps on the crest of his forehead. This is my life now. And I try as often as I can to keep my sense of humor about me. My 17-month-old son has begun to discover his sense of humor as well. While his comedic timing and repertoire could use little polishing, it is definitely working for him. Right now, he has three jokes. The first involves him putting various things on his head, then looking at us and saying “hat?” with arms outstretched and uncanny resemblance to a blonder and arguably much cuter Danny DeVito. The second joke involves him fake sneezing “ah-choo” and then us replying, “bless you.” That’s it. The joke isn’t great but his anticipatory expression makes up for what the joke lacks. His third joke is to hide things (pacifier in a school bus, bottle under the couch, apple in a drawer) and then slyly smile as he exclaims “uh-oh” and runs, his feet leading his gigantic head, all over our house, fake-searching for the lost object. There are many moments worthy of tears, but then our daughter tells a fart joke, and somehow it lands just right for every one of us, and laughing feels more important than ever.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Recently I heard a podcast about the founder of Girls Who Code Reshma Saujani’s new book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). She highlights the catastrophic impact of the Pandemic on working moms and how far women in the labor market have been set back because of it. Saujani explains how the pay gap isn’t as much between women and men as it is between mothers and fathers, with the biggest gap actually being between mothers and women without children. Many of us are personally familiar with the millions of women — particularly mothers with school-age children — who pared back their hours, took paid or unpaid leave, and left or lost their jobs during the pandemic. (AJC) According to Saujani, 11 million women in the United States left the workforce for some period of time during the pandemic, and 1.1 million women are still missing. This doesn’t account for those who have downshifted or changed their careers during this time. According to the 2020 Women in the Workplace study, co-authored by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, 1 in 4 women considered leaving the workplace or downshifting their careers. According to the survey, 40% of mothers (compared to 27% of fathers) also added 3 or more additional hours of caregiving a day to their schedule over the past 2 years. The pandemic was the largest exodus of women leaving the labor market in the history of our nation. According to Saujani, it erased 30 years of progress nearly overnight. And women of color were leaving the workforce at two times the rate of white women. The impacts of a “mom penalty,” an issue that far predates the pandemic, can be severe. Stepping down the career ladder puts promotions, future earning power, and leadership opportunities at risk (NPR). Saujani has created The Marshall Plan for Moms to address a lot of these issues. She highlights many areas of the workforce that need significant changes to better support women, such as: more autonomy with schedules, more paid maternity leave and incentivizing men to take paid leave, provided back-up care, subsidized child-care, more on-ramps back to work after maternity leave, and more training in workplaces to ensure that the motherhood penalty vs. fatherhood premium isn’t unintentionally imposed. There’s a lot to reflect on, and this little piece just scratches the surface, but clearly how we support mothers returning to work and being successful at work deserves serious consideration and change.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Green Smoothie
Green continues to be a tough color to get my kids to eat. They love cucumbers and they’ve warmed up to broccoli, but that’s pretty much where it stops. This is one of my favorite ways to get some nutrient-rich spinach into their diet. Add a colorful silicone straw for fun, and you have a drink that surprisingly pleases all parties.
Ingredients
1 Tbsp Peanut Butter
1 Tbsp Chia Seeds
1 Cup Milk (Your choice on kind)
⅓ Cup of Greek Yogurt
1 Tsp of Honey
1 Frozen Banana
1 Heaping Handful of Spinach (approx. 1.5 cups)
Directions
Blend it all up and enjoy!
Changes - Issue No. 4
Giving My Son to a Stranger and the Truth About Mom Guilt, “Ride Wit Me” at the Gynecologist, Working Out With Barbie and the Importance of Showing Up
GIVING MY SON TO A STRANGER
AND THE TRUTH ABOUT MOM GUILT
A few months ago, I was leaving the house to pick my daughter up from school with my son strapped to me when our beloved dog, Bennett, slipped through my legs and took off, full speed ahead with no intention to turn around or adhere to any commands. Thankfully, my mom, who was at our house, was able to pick my daughter up from school while I took off running down the street with my twenty-pound son attached to my chest. I knew if our dog got all of the way down our street and onto the next one, the chances of him getting hit by a car would increase exponentially. With tears in my eyes, I begged construction workers who were building a house close by to help me, but to no avail. A runner offered his assistance as Bennett crossed onto the busy street and dodged the first of three cars that nearly hit him. It was at this moment, when I did a thing that afterward I decided I wouldn’t tell a soul about. And now I’m publicly proclaiming it in this newsletter. An older woman approached me on the sidewalk and asked if she could help me by holding my son. After staring this ethical dilemma in the face for a good thirty seconds as I watched my dog cheat death zig-zagging across the busy street, I introduced this women to my son, handed him to her, threw the baby carrier to the ground, and took off running away from them, faster and farther than I’d like to admit. Long story short, I caught my dog thanks to a squabble with a surly cat he had found. And then, I dragged Bennett back up the street to my son who was thankfully not kidnapped but instead patiently waiting for me in a stranger’s arms.
While this story is extreme, it is at the root of mom-guilt. Feeling divided and knowing no matter which option you choose, there will be an undercurrent of failing, this feeling has been constant since my kids were born. When my maternity leave ended and I went back to work after having my daughter, I felt so guilty for leaving her, for not making her the priority, for giving my students more energy than I was giving her, for feeling distracted and not giving my job my all either. When I quit my job this past August to spend a few years with my kids and to really try writing, I felt guilty for no longer bringing in money (even though my salary as a teacher compared to my husband’s was miniscule, which is a piece for another time). I also felt guilty for not modeling to my kids what a working woman looks like. I felt guilty for feeling like I couldn’t do it all and for not wanting to. I felt guilty for the privilege of being able to make the choice to step back. I felt guilty if I ever relaxed and guilty for the resentment I’d feel for feeling like a housewife. When I am playing with my kids, I feel guilty for giving my son more attention when we’re outside because he is a walking hazard. I also feel guilty that my son doesn’t get the same focus as my daughter when we’re inside playing make-believe or reading 172 books in one sitting. I feel guilty that I have to divide my time at all. I feel guilty that at the end of the day, I sometimes want to sit on my phone, untouched and disconnected when it’s my only time to reconnect with my husband. I feel guilty for being tired, guilty for never being able to catch up with the laundry, guilty that our house is a mess, guilty for sitting my kids in front of Paw Patrol to finish dinner or just take a breath, guilty for making pasta again, guilty for writing, guilty for not writing, guilty for not being able to lose the last bit of baby weight for the second time, guilty for working out, guilty for not working out, guilty for not always modeling the confidence that I want my kids to have, guilty for being ready for my kids to go to bed at the end of the day, guilty for not thanking my parents and husband more for all of their hard work, guilty for expecting so much, guilty for telling my husband how to parent, guilty for how I’m parenting. I feel guilty for not having done more to help advocate against the newest regressive abortion legistlation or the “don’t say gay” legislation. I feel guilty for not having supported the people of Ukraine more or the people who have been crossing our borders for years because risking everything is better than trying to survive in their current situations. And then I feel guilty that I feel like I have any problems at all. But the truth of the matter is, there are days when you have no other choice than to hand your son off to a stranger so that your dog doesn’t get hit by a car despite the pervading, inescapable and unequivocally unfair mom guilt.
They are watching us constantly, like little creepy ghosts in a haunted house, there is no room for privacy, they are somehow always with us. A few months ago, after officially weaning my son, I stepped out of the shower and my daughter unexpectedly came out of my closet with my bra on her head like a headband. She looked at my naked body and said, “mommy, your boobs are smaller than mine this morning.” Then she pointed to my c-section scar and said “there’s the pocket that we came from.” My body is reviewed like a roadmap charting the landmarks of other people’s needs. While, I desperately attempt to ensure that my kids see their own bodies as miraculous and beautiful and with a far less critical lens than I use to view my own. Sometimes, I watch my daughter on the monitor after she’s gone to bed, which I realize is invasive in its own right, and she’s nursing and rocking her dolls just as I’ve done to her and her brother: same songs, same motions, our little shadows. In the morning, my son will run around the house with Mardi Gras bead necklaces draped around his neck, a dog-less leash clasped in his hand, he’ll put on my shoes and attempt to slip a hat over his head (a skill he has yet to master), ready to conquer the day. He is doing his very best to put together the puzzle pieces of how to function in this world, they both are, with us as their roadmap, everyday, no matter our mood, no matter what we’re feeling or going through, no matter if we need to poop, no matter if we are clothed or naked, no matter the pressure.
“RIDE WIT ME” AT THE GYNECOLOGIST
The other day, I was at my gynecologist’s office for my annual exam (if this hasn’t stopped you from reading, I want to assure you that this section is not about pap smears). I was sitting on the exam table in a gown with an open back, braless with my butt exposed despite my best efforts, the stirrups ready for the ultimate exposure. I was answering an array of questions about my medical history and sexual proclivities when I noticed that the song “Ride Wit Me” by Nelly was playing on the room’s speakers (if this is not a song that you are familiar with, it was released in 2000 and the sound effects in the song include him taking a hit after the line “Smok[ing] a L in the back of the Benz-E.”) I heard it and then thought to myself, what a different life I’m living now than when this song came out 22-years-ago and I was at a middle school dance surrounded by “booty-dancing” while I navigated my ever-changing body and the array of confidence-issues that accompanied it. So many things have changed: I am so much more aware and endlessly grateful and stunned by the miraculous things my body has been able to do with growing and nourishing my children. I also feel so much more grounded, comfortable and settled in my skin. But, some things remain the same. The sexualization of my body as a woman is still a very complicated and confusing thing. And, when I look in the mirror, I’m still plagued by judgment.
In the past four years, I have gained and lost nearly 50 pounds twice, I nursed my kids for a total of 34 months, I had six layers of my abdominal wall and my uterus cut open for each cesarean. My body is not the one I had before my daughter was conceived. It is curvier with additional scars and cellulite, my breasts are languid and my hair weirder. In some ways, I feel sexier because I’ve proven how powerful my body can be. But, on the other hand, I feel like the opportunity for sexiness is lost in motherhood. When you hear the word “maternal” it feels like the antonym for “seductress.” There’s a lot to unpack here. Women are sexualized from the moment they hit puberty, while men maybe never really have to consider their own sexiness, or certainly not to the same extent. In our society, beauty and worth are inextricably connected for a woman even after they’ve brought life into the world. But as mothers, this part of our identities also seems to disappear in the public-eye once we have children. I remember walking past a group of men, when I was far along in my first pregnancy and thinking, I’m not sexy to them anymore and then more powerfully, I wonder if I’ll ever have public-sexuality again. This is not about sex but instead how appealing we feel to others. Part of me now wants to say, why should I care? I’m happily married to a man who finds me beautiful and I’m looking for nothing else. And, that is true. But, as a member of a society that places a ceaseless emphasis on beauty, my appearance is something that matters to me. On my way home from the gynecologist, I passed an Amazon van cruising down the street with the sliding door wide open, just ready for all of the boxes to tumble out. From one side, it looked fine, but it was actually one turn away from being a hot mess. I feel like that all of the time, I thought, never having quite enough uninterrupted opportunity and focus to pull myself together. I’ve found a certain resolve in how my life, and with it, my body has changed with my kids, but figuring out how to view my physical-self in this world is still so confusing. I’m so busy, so consumed with caring for the little people in my life, so focused on holding everything together, but also I’m a woman who wants to be seen as something separate from them, something singularly beautiful. The inevitable selflessness that comes with motherhood has not caused me to let go of the selfish interest in being desired. For the sake of a tidy, cyclical ending, I’ve been trying to think of how my life now connects back to Nelly’s Ride Wit Me or who I was at 13-years-old, when the song first played. Back then, I was pretty confident that I’d have everything figured out by the time I was 35. And now I see how absurd that idea was. Understanding ourselves, our bodies, the changes we go through, and how we fit into this complicated world, it’s an ongoing ride.
WORKING OUT WITH BARBIE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SHOWING UP
When I first moved to Atlanta, before having kids, I went to the YMCA to work out. Every day, I noticed this group of women lingering outside of a workout room waiting. They ranged in age and body type, but seemed united in their enthusiasm to break a sweat. The timing, I thought, was odd. They were just arriving as I was wrapping up and I wasn’t planning on getting to my job till 10am. But, they all seemed to be on similar schedules and had this shared activity. It got me thinking about the idea of adult lunch tables. When you’re a kid, at least in the movies, there are cafeteria tables based on your interests. There are the slackers, the popular kids, the nerds (I realize that this is grounded in an ‘80s teen-movie-mindset) but you get the idea. I started thinking about how you pick your cafeteria table in adulthood. It could be through your local cornhole league, your affinity for meetups at local breweries, or working out with a contagiously energetic and strong woman named “Barbie” in a group workout class. I was desperate to make new friends and had decided that I would write a series of essays on “adult lunch tables” and so, I decided for the sake of research and curiosity to give Barbie’s class a try. When I arrived, I wasn’t aware of a few of the unwritten rules (as is true with most cafeteria tables). Firstly, you have to show up 15 minutes early to secure a spot. Secondly, upon arriving you have to claim three sets of weights, so as to not prematurely show your limitations in terms of physical agility and strength, and third, faking it until you make it is harder if you have not followed rule one and two and are placed in the very front of the class, next to the instructor, with dumbbells that are far too heavy. Long story short, after a rocky start, I became hooked on Barbie’s classes and with them this camaraderie with women who, it turned out, were mostly Mamas who weren’t in the office for a traditional 9-to-5 and just liked a good workout.
One of the friends I made in this class was a woman who was due with twins around the same time that I was due with my daughter. We used to team up during certain exercises, especially once our bellies grazed the floor during pushups and burpees became a preposterous proposition. We found camaraderie in our big-bellied squats, and then, when we had our babies and were on maternity leave, we began walking together. One day during our walk we were talking about all that changes when you have kids, and she said something that I think about almost everyday and reference all of the time. She explained, “I was one of the last of my friends to have kids and once I did, I felt like I had so many people to call and apologize to. I just had no idea. I had no idea how I should have shown up.” The idea of “showing up,” how it fits into friendships and changes over time has been such an important point of reflection as I think about who makes up my “lunch table” of sorts today. My husband and I were among the first of our friends to have kids, and with that a fissure grew in understanding and perhaps empathy with the people that until that point had kind of always gotten us. It seems like a rite of passage for adulthood, not just the kids, but the big life events that others just don’t and won’t understand. I have friends who have lost parents and dear friends, who have grappled with infertility, who have chronic illnesses, who have made the decision to not have children, and I feel pretty confident that there are so many ways that I could have shown up better for these people and didn’t. Because, I suppose, in part the essence of empathy is understanding what another person is feeling, to connect because of a shared experience. We can feel close because of memories, but to connect, in some ways, now comes with a different kind of understanding. That’s not to say that you can’t be close to someone whose experience is different, in fact, I think those friendships are very important. Rather, I suppose, what I’m saying is that there are a lot of types of friendship and they definitely don’t belong at the same lunch table or at the same time frames in our lives. Forgiving each other for our shortcomings and continuing to do our very best at just showing-up however and whenever we can, that’s what matters.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
The other day, this woman, who does not have kids and who I had seen a couple of times around my neighborhood stopped in front of my house as I was chasing two kids around my yard and said, “It looks like you have a whole team there.” A doubles tennis team, I thought, as I politely answered “Just two, but they’re busy.” “Oh really? I could have sworn over the last few days that I had seen at least four” she said. “Yeah, I totally feel the same way,” I replied and then she walked away and I was left unsure of if I should be offended or laugh it off. One kid was picking all of the flowers from our garden prematurely, and the other was trying his luck once again with not falling face-first down the stairs and getting another set of symmetrical giraffe-bumps on the crest of his forehead. This is my life now. And I try as often as I can to keep my sense of humor about me. My 17-month-old son has begun to discover his sense of humor as well. While his comedic timing and repertoire could use little polishing, it is definitely working for him. Right now, he has three jokes. The first involves him putting various things on his head, then looking at us and saying “hat?” with arms outstretched and uncanny resemblance to a blonder and arguably much cuter Danny DeVito. The second joke involves him fake sneezing “ah-choo” and then us replying, “bless you.” That’s it. The joke isn’t great but his anticipatory expression makes up for what the joke lacks. His third joke is to hide things (pacifier in a school bus, bottle under the couch, apple in a drawer) and then slyly smile as he exclaims “uh-oh” and runs, his feet leading his gigantic head, all over our house, fake-searching for the lost object. There are many moments worthy of tears, but then our daughter tells a fart joke, and somehow it lands just right for every one of us, and laughing feels more important than ever.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Recently I heard a podcast about the founder of Girls Who Code Reshma Saujani’s new book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). She highlights the catastrophic impact of the Pandemic on working moms and how far women in the labor market have been set back because of it. Saujani explains how the pay gap isn’t as much between women and men as it is between mothers and fathers, with the biggest gap actually being between mothers and women without children. Many of us are personally familiar with the millions of women — particularly mothers with school-age children — who pared back their hours, took paid or unpaid leave, and left or lost their jobs during the pandemic. (AJC) According to Saujani, 11 million women in the United States left the workforce for some period of time during the pandemic, and 1.1 million women are still missing. This doesn’t account for those who have downshifted or changed their careers during this time. According to the 2020 Women in the Workplace study, co-authored by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, 1 in 4 women considered leaving the workplace or downshifting their careers. According to the survey, 40% of mothers (compared to 27% of fathers) also added 3 or more additional hours of caregiving a day to their schedule over the past 2 years. The pandemic was the largest exodus of women leaving the labor market in the history of our nation. According to Saujani, it erased 30 years of progress nearly overnight. And women of color were leaving the workforce at two times the rate of white women. The impacts of a “mom penalty,” an issue that far predates the pandemic, can be severe. Stepping down the career ladder puts promotions, future earning power, and leadership opportunities at risk (NPR). Saujani has created The Marshall Plan for Moms to address a lot of these issues. She highlights many areas of the workforce that need significant changes to better support women, such as: more autonomy with schedules, more paid maternity leave and incentivizing men to take paid leave, provided back-up care, subsidized child-care, more on-ramps back to work after maternity leave, and more training in workplaces to ensure that the motherhood penalty vs. fatherhood premium isn’t unintentionally imposed. There’s a lot to reflect on, and this little piece just scratches the surface, but clearly how we support mothers returning to work and being successful at work deserves serious consideration and change.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
It’s strawberry picking season, and, if you’re like us, this is an outing that seems to satisfy all parties. Then we return home with buckets of strawberries and an overzealous belief that we have extra time and hands and can somehow pull off making this pie. But, if you want to succumb to your false belief that you can do it all, I would recommend starting with this delicious dessert.
Obstacles - Issue No. 3
Do Unto Others - A Poop Story, Getting Booted, Beach Envy, and Overnight French Toast Bake recipe
DO UNTO OTHERS - A POOP STORY
With the onset of parenting, I said goodbye to a few attributes of my non-parenting self: the fear of missing out, needing a lot of sleep to function, and the topic of this section: modesty. Yesterday, while I was attempting to take a moment of privacy in the bathroom, my 16-month-old son slammed the door open, pulled far too much toilet paper from the roll and attempted to wipe my butt while I sat there laughing. There were two things at play here: 1. The toilet is a vessel of wonder with its spiraling water of sorcery miraculously making objects disappear. 2. He is mirroring our behavior and how do you conceptually explain to someone who doesn’t yet even know how to say their own name, that’s something I do to you, but you don’t do it to me. My mom and my daughter looked in to see what was going on, we all got a good giggle, and I was reminded once and for all that my privacy is a pastime. The night before, my son was palming fistfuls of rice and stuffing them into his mouth. His nose was running and there was dirt caked under his fingernails. He looked at me fondly and put his hand to my face in his most generous attempt at sharing. I pretended to eat. I even made some silly, exaggerated chomping sounds. He examined me with these, “Look Lady, I wasn’t born yesterday” skeptical eyes and like a little Italian grandmother who wouldn’t be appeased until my mouth was full of what she was serving, he guilted me into eating smashed-snot rice from his hand. This is love.
They are watching us constantly, like little creepy ghosts in a haunted house, there is no room for privacy, they are somehow always with us. A few months ago, after officially weaning my son, I stepped out of the shower and my daughter unexpectedly came out of my closet with my bra on her head like a headband. She looked at my naked body and said, “mommy, your boobs are smaller than mine this morning.” Then she pointed to my c-section scar and said “there’s the pocket that we came from.” My body is reviewed like a roadmap charting the landmarks of other people’s needs. While, I desperately attempt to ensure that my kids see their own bodies as miraculous and beautiful and with a far less critical lens than I use to view my own. Sometimes, I watch my daughter on the monitor after she’s gone to bed, which I realize is invasive in its own right, and she’s nursing and rocking her dolls just as I’ve done to her and her brother: same songs, same motions, our little shadows. In the morning, my son will run around the house with Mardi Gras bead necklaces draped around his neck, a dog-less leash clasped in his hand, he’ll put on my shoes and attempt to slip a hat over his head (a skill he has yet to master), ready to conquer the day. He is doing his very best to put together the puzzle pieces of how to function in this world, they both are, with us as their roadmap, everyday, no matter our mood, no matter what we’re feeling or going through, no matter if we need to poop, no matter if we are clothed or naked, no matter the pressure.
GETTING BOOTED
When I was 17-years-old, my car got booted. This was my first car, Goldie, an ‘89 Acura Legend that first belonged to my dad, then my mom and then my step-dad before becoming mine. Like a first car should be, it had a lot of miles and character and held a great deal of my affection as my literal vehicle for independence. While any car with 180,000 miles and three previous owners would have some notable deficiencies, Goldie’s faulty sunroof was arguably her least illustrious attribute. Any time I made a left turn after a storm, what felt like, buckets of water would be dumped on my head. I remember my angsty-teenage-self running late to school and thinking, I’m either going to show up damp and embarrassed from my leaky left turns because of yesterday’s rainstorm or I’m going to be late because of another attempt at the impossible: trying to get to school while only turning right. Anyway, during lunch one day, Goldie got booted when I parked in a lot and then did the unlawful act of crossing the street for a sandwich. The person who booted me had watched me walk across the street and then put the boot on my car. When I returned, he asked me if I had $75 cash as his chihuahua barked from the passenger’s seat. I’ve never felt so helpless. I explained that I wasn’t sure I had ever even seen $75 cash and then went to an ATM, withdrew my dignity and what felt like my life savings to have the boot removed and be in the exact same situation I had been in when I had arrived, except with $75 less and a subpar sandwich in hand.
I was thinking of that moment a few weeks ago when I took my daughter to the pediatric orthopedist for a limp we had noticed. At first, we weren’t sure if she was just trying out a new walk or actually limping. She’s 3-years-old, seems to fall 338 times each day, and there was no event to note. But, on day three, we decided that it deserved a second opinion. They did x-rays, saw no breaks or fractures, gave us 3.2 seconds of their time, listened to no context or questions, and slapped a boot on it, for which we will pay far too much money. They told us to take the boot off in a week or two and as long as she was limp free, we could assume everything was copacetic. Then, our sweet, hobbling kid had two weeks of hopelessly trying to keep up with her frenetic 3-year-old antics while booted. On day one, when we picked my daughter up from school, she was running around with her normal agile gusto and her boot on her good foot. We were honestly relieved that it was her teacher’s mistake and not ours and then we questioned whether we had just imagined the whole limp to begin with. Now, a few weeks later, she’s not limping and we have no more information or answers. Being forced to slow down, feeling totally helpless and having that, what just happened? feeling, it sticks with you. I’ve found myself encountering those same emotions nearly everyday of motherhood. But, watching my kid confront her own limitations makes me wish that struggle and resilience weren’t so inextricably connected, a part of me just wants her to be able to float.
BEACH ENVY
Last week, while vacationing in Hilton Head, South Carolina, we saw a remarkably put-together family with four kids at the horse stables. They were all blonde, smiling, jarringly congenial, and fully clothed. That’s the whole story. There really isn’t much more to mention but my husband and I were both shook by the encounter. They weren’t arguing with each other, they looked well-rested, no one seemed hungry, no one was palming horse poop or getting their fingers nipped by crotchety ponies. No one was sunburned, their hair was brushed, their clothes unstained, their shoes the same color and on the correct feet. No one was screaming (with endearing enthusiasm) for Woody the Clydesdale to come over and eat carrots. Maybe any family can pull off the Norman Rockwell freeze-frame for a minute. Perhaps before we saw them, their son, like ours, had eaten a fistfull of sand at the beach…again…with the same shock and disgust as the time before. Maybe, otherwise they had only been able to get him to eat hotdogs and cheese all week. Maybe he also would run full speed into the cold ocean every chance he got, falling face-first into a wave, and then shivering profusely while he attempted to do it again. Maybe their daughter would only ride bikes if while riding the bikes they continually pretended to be train engineers fixing broken train cars. Maybe they too hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep all week because their children had coughs that wouldn’t go away and even when the coughing stopped, they would just be up staring at the monitor to make sure their non-coughing-children were still breathing. Maybe they also fantasized about sleeping till 7:30am, opening the book they brought, finishing a coffee before it got cold, or watching something that wasn’t animated. Maybe their dog also tried to attack every majestic, gigantic bird during their walks. Maybe they had to play dinosaurs 7,235 times each day. Maybe their kid threw a tantrum too when they were told they couldn’t drink their mom’s piña colada. Maybe they also tried to go out to breakfast, almost broke every plate on the table, spent more time walking the premises with their toddler than enjoying their meal, and left with children who were somehow hungrier than when they arrived. Maybe they too were realizing that even with generously involved grandparents accompanying them, vacations with little ones are less about relaxation and more about entertaining these overly-tired-out-of-routine tiny humans in a less-baby-proofed house. Relaxing? No, but still somehow fulfilling. Watching my kids traipse through the sand, hold their arms out like they're flying when the wind picks up, and then giggle at the sheer sight of waves reaching their feet, desiring nothing more than to hold their grandparents’ hands and walk the beach, it doesn’t get much better. With kids, the term “vacation” has been reenvisioned, but somehow, it was still exactly what we needed.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
As a writer, I like to think that there is quite a bit of power in language, that the sheer act of naming something equips us with knowledge and potentially opportunity. Over the past few weeks, our son has begun to say “no,” “oh no,” “uh oh,” and “more” and these words have seemed to just burst open his little world. He can tell us when water spills, when he doesn’t want to eat more waffle, when he’s decided to pick up a handful of dog poop in the backyard. A few weeks after having my son, I remember touching the skin above my naval and feeling this cavernous hole, as if all of the organs and muscles there had just disappeared and beneath the skin there was an abyss of nothingness. I went to the doctor for a postpartum check-up with the usual hypochondriacal fear that I was dying, only to be told that I had Diastasis Recti, a separation of one’s abdominal muscles. This is an incredibly common condition that plagues so many women postpartum, especially after multiple pregnancies, and the lack of general understanding and research on it speaks to the shortcomings of maternal health in general. More to come on that in future newsletters, I’m sure. My point is, knowing that I had Diastasis Recti, allowed me to be proactive with my rehabilitation.
Recently, we learned the term “crossing the midline” from my daughter’s teachers. Prior to our parent-teacher conference, this term meant absolutely nothing to us. In short, “crossing the midline” allows you to move an arm or a leg across the middle of the body to perform a task and ultimately allows for both sides of your body to work together (bilateral integration). If I’ve lost you with this one, I understand, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t sort of zoned out myself when I first heard about it. But, as it is with many things, until it impacts you personally, it’s easier to tune it out. So, our daughter’s teachers spoke to us about her troubles crossing the midline and all of a sudden we noticed how often she sits “W” instead of “criss-cross applesauce,” how she just can’t seem to catch a ball, and how propelling herself forward on a tricycle seems nearly impossible. My initial reaction was that I’m not sure I’m great at catching a ball either and is riding a tricycle truly the achievement she’ll hang her hat on? But as I began equipping myself with knowledge, it turns out that those are actually pretty important building blocks in coordination and in some ways, I suppose, success. So, we’re learning and trying to help and while our daughter might think we’ve just become ball-throwing-and-catching-enthusiasts, language has once again empowered us.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Do you remember that game Never Have I Ever? You’d hold ten fingers up and then someone would say something like, “never have I ever been skinny dipping,” and if you had been skinny dipping, you would lower a finger. The first one who put all their fingers down, lost…or maybe they won…I actually am not sure anyone knew the goal. I do know, few walked away from that game feeling good except perhaps if they had consumed quite a bit of alcohol while playing. Those who were among the first to put all of their fingers down felt singled-out for their spotlighted escapades that now seemed to beg for further explanation and those who were left with fingers up felt like sheltered prudes who had hardly dipped their toe into the potential scandals that they could now showcase to a group of strangers. Needless to say, this sedentary-icebreaker-drinking-game is one filled with unspoken judgment and pressure. That game popped into my head recently when I was thinking of a superfluous solitary game I’ve played with myself for my entire adulthood called, “Never Would I Ever.”
-Never would I ever pull my boob out to nurse in public
-Never would I ever give my kids highly-processed food
-Never would I ever catch my child’s throw-up in my hand so that I wouldn’t have to change their clothes again
-Never would I ever forget to buckle my kid in their carseat before starting a drive
-Never would I ever spend my Saturday night folding an interminable pile of laundry
-Never would I ever forget to drink my morning coffee because I’m too tired and too busy
-Never would I ever think of the bathroom as my ultimate place of solace and retreat
-Never would I ever use my spit to clean my kid’s face, never would I ever find rice on my windowsills and bananas in my shoes
-Never would I ever quit my job to stay at home with my kids.
I’ve charted out my life in never would I evers, set expectations that I thought I would hold, and painted pictures of who I would be and what I would do that just don’t hold up with the test of time and the reality of change. I would be remiss to say that parenthood has allowed me to look at others with no judgment. But, I’m realizing the game never would I ever is steeped in ignorance and misinformation.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Our neighbor made this for us when I had just had our son, and it totally hit the postpartum “give me all of the carbs” spot. Originally found here, it has been a make-ahead-hosting-brunch favorite for us ever since.
Growing - Issue No. 2
Why Couldn’t I Stay In Your Belly for 100 Years?, The Value of Banana Pudding, My Garden of Cucumber Beetles
Why Couldn’t I Stay In
Your Belly for 100 Years?
Today my three-year-old daughter said without any context, “I’m so sad that things have to die.” At least it was a statement instead of a question. This was because of a Daniel Tiger episode she had watched one day prior about Daniel’s blue fish passing away. “Passing away” is my preferred euphemism to not confront the concept of death head on, which my daughter now wants me to do. In this episode, Daniel’s dad, in his calm sing-songy voice, explains to Daniel that the fish can’t play because it isn’t moving or breathing anymore; it is dead. I watched this from the kitchen while massaging kale for our dinner salad instead of sitting by her side, like I should have been. It was a totally insufficient introduction to death, though I suppose death often has no introduction at all. They sang “ask questions about what happened, it might help.” And then Daniel faces his sadness, his parents validate his feelings, they sing the song one more time, he draws a picture and that’s a wrap. There are a couple of understandably false certainties in this simplistic handling of what many of us spend a lifetime trying to understand. Most importantly, despite Daniel’s parents' suggestion, I don’t really have an answer to why things have to die and I have even less of an answer as to why things die prematurely and/or tragically. So, I doubt my daughter asking me a question about it would prove to be very helpful at all. Earlier in the morning, I had read an article about a theater in the port city of Mariupol, Ukraine being bombed while civilians sheltered inside. And when I came up for air, a privilege that I know no alternative for as I’ve never been pummeled by any form of violence, I kept coming back to the questions, how could this happen? And, why? The inadequacy I feel with giving helpful answers expands beyond just the concept of death. As my daughter is growing, in her language and her understanding of the world, I find myself often dumbfounded with how to properly parent in many situations. I am constantly reminded of flipping through a translation dictionary while studying abroad, trying desperately to find the right Italian words to order the perfect prosciutto panino while a line of impatient customers formed behind me. This helpless feeling of knowing that there must be words but you don’t yet have them is aligned with the desperation I’ve felt in trying to give my daughter the explanations she deserves. I don’t want to parent without context. I don’t want to give a “no,” without some rationale. And, while her questions might be unanswerable, I still want her to know that they warrant a response. But also, they are constant and my patience and focus is not.
“Mommy, what happened to Humpty Dumpty?”
“Why couldn’t I stay in your belly for 100 years?”
“Who buried Great-Grandpa with the shovels? Why don’t you know their names?”
“Why can’t I get the sun to rise in my window this morning?”
“Why does daddy have to work so much?”
“Why can’t I scream when I’m feeling sad?”
“Why are potatoes so funny?”
The curiosity of little ones starts early and then they gain language and through their desperate attempts to understand this big world, our own insufficiencies sink in. Or maybe my job is to just encourage the wonder and questions, to understand sometimes that’s all there is. A part of me, albeit a small part, but a part nonetheless, wonders why I couldn’t have kept my daughter close in my belly for 100 years. I am trying to take on the moments when my kid is widening my eyes to the world and to accept the humbling reality, and perhaps the secret to adulthood: we have very few answers.
THE VALUE OF BANANA PUDDING
When I was pregnant, I craved banana pudding and deviled eggs, separately, and constantly. And, when I passed on my DNA to my children, along with my eyes and tendency to cross my toes when I’m nervous, I gave them an abiding love for oranges and cheese and peaches and of course banana pudding, because, science. The other night, when my husband was away on his first work trip since the pandemic, my kids and I closed out our evening with three colorful spoons and a cup of the very best banana pudding from our favorite BBQ joint. As if their bodies knew the taste from when they were still in-utero, with pure delight, my kids both attempted to squeeze onto my lap on the floor while smashing wafers down into the pudding and fishing out the perfect bites with real banana slices. We resynced and all of the chaos of the day seemed to peel away. It was one of those perfect, simple moments that you hope you can harken back to when the proverbial shit is hitting the fan. Or, more accurately in our world, when the poopy diaper is thrown from the changing table or there’s pee pee all over the couch because someone couldn’t possibly be peeled away from Peppa Pig.
When I got married, someone at my wedding gave me the advice to steal a moment away from the crowd and dancing, to step back and just look at everyone we loved celebrating together in one room. Rarely do we give ourselves those moments to just pause, get a little perspective, and take it in. Later that banana-pudding-evening, I accidentally burnt my daughter with bathwater from the faucet that I hadn’t tested before pouring on her shoulders. I tucked her in feeling like I had totally failed as a mother and those feelings continued to stew until I was woken up, too early, to try again in the morning. But before the mishap there was that banana pudding moment when I could just hold my babies close and soak in how they’ve grown. Not long ago, I was sitting with a cup of banana pudding resting on my rotund belly, refusing to share a bite with my husband, as each of my unborn babies kicked, with what I assumed was delight, inside me. And now, I share my entire world with these tiny erratic humans who take up so much space and surprise me everyday with how they’re growing. My son hummed and grumbled as he worked on getting bites into his mouth instead of on the mouth-adjacent parts of his face, sounds I hope he never outgrows. “More,” he signed once we had scraped the container dry, “ichhhhh,” he said while rubbing his chest with his open palm, sign language for please. “Baby, it’s all done,” my daughter explained in a lilting British accent, which she has recently been trying out, thanks to the aforementioned Peppa Pig. I suppose growing has been done since the beginning of time but in the moments when I look up from my phone, from my baby wrangling, from the dishes and mess, it’s nothing short of stunning to step back from the consuming busyness and watch these babies grow.
MY GARDEN OF CUCUMBER BEETLES
When we moved into our house last March, our kids were 2-years-old and 6-month-old and thus many things were put into the “will happen at a time after now” bucket. Boxes remained packed, rooms remained empty. In some ways we settled in quickly, toys were scattered into messes everywhere, most surfaces became mysteriously sticky, and to my husband’s dismay our wood floors, which were transplanted from the previous owner’s childhood church, became expeditiously scratched and ruined through the sheer act of our toddlers existing. Among the craziness of potty training and nursing and moving, I decided to disregard clear time constraints and succumb to my own ego by starting a garden. I am no gardener. I don’t know at what point you earn that title, but I’m confident that this will not be one I’ll claim at any point in the near future. In February of this year, I went to buy tomato plants only to be told by the nursery employee, to whom I was about to give my money, that he couldn’t ethically sell me tomato plants because they would die, as their season had not yet begun. So, instead, I swallowed my pride, bought lettuce and worm casings, though I don’t understand what that means or what to do with them and promised to return to him in early April to receive further instruction.
The previous owner of my house had a garden and a lot of opinions. When we moved in, she texted me a chart of what vegetables go where for optimal growth. She gave me three varieties of dried beans, netting for our blueberry bushes, and a false sense of security that I would find success. Most days, my daughter would come out with me and attempt to water the plants either by drowning them with a hose or by peeing. Inevitably she’d end up soaked and we would both reenter the house wet, muddy, and welted with mosquito bites. But, she could name every plant we had and where it was and we both shared the sheer amazement of watching them grow. This affirms two things, Google and Youtube are powerful tools that allow you to feign knowledge, despite green-thumb deficiencies. And, also we are so far removed from our food sources that picking food from the ground feels just as miraculous to me as it does to my toddler. Before I go any further with this story, I feel it only right to tell you that this garden failed and perhaps I abandoned it when it needed me most. But for a few months there, when someone asked me how I was, I would talk about crop covers, Diatomaceous earth, and the tenacious beetles to whom I eventually surrendered my cucumber plants. But first, tomatoes and peppers sprouted and turned red, spindly bean vines began to wrap around the fencing and grow pods, and the oddest shapes and colors of cucumbers began to tangle up the gate of the back fence. So, despite the blunders of last year’s garden, we’ve turned the earth, added some worm casings, planted some lettuces and we’re going to try again. To which I turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was apparently quite fond of gardens and also said, “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Before I tuck my daughter in at night, I tell her a story. More recently, she hijacks these stories in order to give them her own slant. Generally, her version of whichever story I choose to tell has a castle, a dance party with party blowers (despite her distaste for them), a sleepover, and pancakes. The idea behind these stories is to prepare her for something ahead: a dentist appointment, Christmas, feeding goats at a wildlife sanctuary, riding in the stroller to take our poor dog for a walk that he desperately needs even if big girls think they shouldn’t use strollers. You get the idea. She likes knowing what to expect, who doesn’t, and so telling her a story the night before and letting her sleep on it, has seemed to help her keep her center when we go Into The Unknown (sing to the tune of this Frozen 2 hit). Setting expectations through storytelling has served us well. However, being able to identify the blindspots in these stories before my daughter has given herself a haircut is, unfortunately, a shortcoming I can’t predict until it is in retrospect. My story went something like this, “once upon a time, there was a little girl who was going to get the most magical haircut. It would be her very first one by a kind woman named Jessica who worked right next to the train tracks. The girl’s hair would be washed, then brushed, then cut. Then it would shine and be full of bounce and she would celebrate with whatever tasty donut she desired.” This was not one of my best stories, not only did it lack a compelling narrative arc, it was also missing some clarifying points with said haircut, mainly that only the hairdresser should cut hair, scissors should only be used within the presence of an adult, not every haircut is followed by a donut, and that between haircuts, your hair must have the opportunity to grow back. The professional haircut went great. There were french braids and donuts and we called it a win. Then, the following morning, she went to the bathroom. It was too quiet and we were distracted by the dog humping my leg and our son doing his run-and-jump-move into the dog bed. My daughter wanted privacy and we tried our best to walk the careful line between granting our children autonomy and making sure that they don’t cut off their own hair. And then, I opened the door to find her holding a fistful of freshly cut bangs. Admittedly, this might not be the last time my children cut their own hair. But, it seems like the perfect metaphor for the humbling experience that is parenthood. Just as you hit a groove, you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s and gotten it under control, your kid finds scissors and an impulse.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
My husband and I are taking a virtual parenting workshop on managing meltdowns. In the first section of the class, Dr. Becky, who I would highly recommend, shares the idea of the Most Generous Interpretation (MGI). The idea behind this is to approach your child’s meltdown with the most generous interpretation of what is going on. For instance, when my son hurls his little body on the floor and screams after we tell him that he can’t put his hand in the dog’s water bowl, the most generous interpretation would be, playing with water is so fun but the water bowl and the toilet and the mud puddle are all apparently off-limits and the world is this big, interesting place full of restrictions that he has to confront constantly. Applying the most generous interpretation to most anyone is likely a practice that would make the world a less combative and more empathetic place:
Example 1: My husband blocks the front door with his giant shoes causing our kids to habitually trip and causing me to have to move them while wrangling said kids before using the door.
Most Generous Interpretation: He wants to keep our floors clean, his shoes are muddy and he was wrangling the same kids when he removed them to begin with.
Example 2: My mom backs over a large cluster of our daffodils when she leaves.
Most Generous Interpretation: She helped us all day, she was tired, and her reverse camera didn’t detect the beautiful blooming flowers that are now no longer.
Example 3: Woman cuts me off while driving.
Most Generous Interpretation: labor?
I’ve been trying to put this idea into practice to offer the Most Generous Interpretation to the big feelings that present themselves with what often seems like no reason or warning. I can both read Little Blue Truck for the 7,365th time while simultaneously having unabridged and unrelated thoughts in my head. According to Glennon Doyle, I can do hard things. The most generous interpretation is not easy. At times, I’m pretty sure it’s impossible, but also, so very important.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
OVERNIGHT OATS
(On the mornings when your kids are asking to play monsters before you’ve had your coffee and you somehow already have stickers in your bra and rocks in your back pocket, this is a good one that involves just a couple of minutes of prep)
Ingredients
½ cup of milk (oat, almond, regular, you choose)
½ cup greek yogurt
1 teaspoon of honey
3 teaspoons of chia seeds
3 teaspoons of coconut
½ cup of oats
Pinch of salt
Berries
Directions
Add milk and yogurt to mason jar and stir
Add in honey and stir
Add chia seeds, coconut, oats, salt and stir
Add berries to the top
Put the lid on, give it a few shakes
Ready to enjoy in the chaos of your morning
Beginning The Day - Issue no. 1
Tigger on the Precipice of War, Attempting to Forgo Responsibility for Fantasy, Sketching out the Grumpies, and more.
TIGGER ON THE PRECIPICE OF WAR
After sleeping in the other morning, our daughter woke up devastated to find Tigger had an open-wound on his ankle. Paul had sewn the laceration on his “bouncy tail” the night before. There wasn’t enough time for the necessary operation before school and so there were screams and tears. This is how we began the day. The Wordle word was “mourn,” I got it in four tries, since that word is in the forefront of my mind right now. Not so much about Tigger, I feel confident he’ll make a full recovery and to be honest he was fairly inconsequential to our household until just the other day. It was more about feeling like we’re on the precipice of World War Three. I checked the New York Times, Ukraine is on fire, there was shelling at the Holocaust memorial, a maternity and children's hospital was bombed, a nuclear plant caught fire before being taken over, an unprecedented number of refugees have fled in such a short amount of time. So many homes are being destroyed, men and women who are not soldiers have become soldiers, there is indescribable loss and unintelligible anguish, there is heroism that feels timeless, valor that is unimaginably consequential. There are too many families tucked away underground hoping through the stillness for survival. This is a fight for a home, a way of life, for livelihood.
But, as soon as I rise from bed, my morning is spent checking Tigger into the infirmary for his upcoming operation and trying to dress our devastated daughter who is refusing to go to school while Tigger is in such a state. We compartmentalize and balance all of the weight of the world with the daily rollercoaster of little ones. Empathy starts young and honoring it is important, as is compartmentalizing. Balancing the needs of others, whether children or Tigger Tigers, with our own busy day’s agenda and all that is happening in the world is the very reason coffee exists. Somehow we can both acknowledge the devastation in Ukraine while convincing our son to stop chucking blueberries and oatmeal at the dog.
ATTEMPTING TO FORGO RESPONSIBILITY FOR FANTASY
I didn’t dream of war last night, nor did I dream of my loving husband or my children. Well, not exactly. My dream couldn’t have been less worldly. It was about Bradley Rose, a hot Peloton instructor whose British accent and goofy quips contribute to me getting really good workouts on my bike. He and I were on a date, I was dressed up and walking towards him as he charmingly smiled my way, when I realized that he hadn’t been watching my son like I had asked. After a great deal of panicked-searching, I finally found my son, he had drawn with Sharpie all over his face and in his mouth and I was so angry with Bradley for not watching him more closely. That’s how the dream ended. That was my current attempt at fantasy, I suppose. I think I need to keep working at it.
SKETCHING OUT THE GRUMPIES
Yesterday my daughter had what we’ve lovingly deemed “a bad case of the grumpies.” We’ve held out hope that these grumpies, which often transform into little unpredictable tantrums, would only happen within the comfort of our own home. Yesterday, I realized that perhaps they were only sequestered because of the frequency at which the Pandemic has caused us to be home and not because they will otherwise only remain at home. We went to the park with daughter’s friend, her little brother and her mom. It feels appropriate to mention, despite forgoing subtlety, that I am desperately trying to become friends with this mother. And, it feels necessary to then also mention how hard making friends in adulthood is and how helpful it is to have parent-friends for one’s own morale and sanity. We also happened to run into someone with whom I went to high school, which is only noteworthy because what happened next was her first impression of me in over 15-years. The hysterics began without much warning or context. First, it was about not wanting to share a hoola-hoop, then about dandelions, then about opening and closing gates, and then there was tumble from a bench. All of it involved tears. My daughter was hungry and hot and tired and who doesn’t feel a little irrational when the comfort-deck is stacked against them. I did the best parenting I could muster and tried to ignore the part of me that felt like this was all a reflection on my parenting-fails up until this point. I was encouraging deep breaths and holding her tight while also keeping an eye on my son who has a recent propensity to test gravity and eat sand and dirt. This didn’t happen first thing in the morning, but first thing this morning, she grabbed a paper and drew out her grumpies, something we had done together last week. There were spirals and scribbles and one full face, (eyes, nose, and mouth). For those of you who do not have three-year-olds, this probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but most kids have the same progression in drawing people. First there are blobs, then the blobs sprout arms and legs, and then eventually they get faces. A child hitting a milestone, whether it’s sitting up or a first word or a first drawn face, feels unnervingly touching and exciting. My daughter’s first face was the face of one of her grumpies. That’s how real and consequential these big feelings feel to her at the moment. And, while she couldn’t articulate it yesterday, this morning, before the sun had a chance to rise, she was ready to show it to us.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
I’ve been listening to a parenting podcast recently that I’ve found invaluable and applicable to my current challenges as a parent. I will probably mention the strategies I’ve found to be helpful several more times here. However, this week I tried a recommended technique that was an epic fail. When your child is frustrated, try to tell the story of the frustration, so your child can feel like you’re on their team. Get back on the same team by telling the story instead of adding to or discrediting the frustration. Easy enough. So, back to Tigger. At some point between the 6am alarmist who announced Tigger’s injury and the 8:30am drop-off at school, I tried this strategy of articulating the frustration back to my daughter. And, for a moment, perhaps, it caused her to pause, perhaps even sit in a moment of reflection, but then, as if fueling a fire, the result was more explosive than the original. Maybe it was how I described it, not adequately acknowledging the dire straits of the condition, but whatever no matter what, it was one of many parenting fails this week.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
Ignoring “media-lite living” in exchange for Trash Truck. This week I promised to make Thai Chicken Soup for a family whose daughter is in my daughter’s class. In retrospect, this seems like a ridiculous offering as I have a hard enough time getting my own family fed in the evening. My daughter’s school pontificates screen-free life through a movement which they’ve deemed “media-lite living.” I’ve tried to get onboard, restricting television to weekends-only despite desperately missing the weekday quiet, stillness and snuggles that TV provides us. Enter a parenting challenge: enforcing a rule you don’t actually believe in because it’s extreme and unrealistic to comply with your daughter’s school’s unrealistic (to me) request. This brings me to Trash Truck, a charming story about a little boy named Hank, his forest companions, and his trash-truck-best-friend. This sorcery is the only way I can get my son to sit still for more than one minute. So, this week, I defied the arbitrary rules, went easy on myself, made some killer soup for a family that needed some extra help, and let my kid’s become zombie-fied in the whimsy of Trash Truck’s world.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Thai Chicken Soup
(Not popular with the kiddos, but man does it the spot for the grown-ups)
Ingredients
2 tablespoons coconut oil
8 ounces of sliced baby Bella mushrooms
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 onion, sliced in half moons
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
2 inches of ginger root peeled and chopped
3 heaping tablespoons of lemongrass paste
1 red pepper cored and seeded, julienned
2 teaspoons of Thai red curry paste
1/2 jalapeño or 1 Anaheim pepper cored and thinly sliced (additional jalapeño sliced in rounds for garnish)
(Optional: 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar or coconut sugar)
2 cups of low sodium chicken broth
2 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce
1-1 1/2 lbs boneless skinless chicken
30 ounces full fat unsweetened coconut milk, in a large bowl, whisk till smooth
2 tablespoons fish sauce
One lime, juiced
Cilantro for garnish
Sliced green onions for garnish
Directions
Warm coconut oil in a pot till it melts
Add sliced mushrooms and salt, stirring until the mushrooms start to give up their juice
Add onions, garlic, ginger, and lemongrass paste, stir until the aromatics release their lovely fragrance
Add in red bell pepper, stirring until they soften.
Add red curry paste, soy sauce, sliced jalapeño (or anaheim), (Optional sugar), chicken and broth. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and let simmer till chicken is cooked through.
While this is cooking, shake well and open your containers of coconut milk, pour them into a good sized bowl and whisk them until creamy.
Remove the chicken to a separate bowl and slice thinly, or shred if you prefer
To temper the coconut milk, ladle several scoops of hot broth into the bowl of coconut milk. Then pour it all back into the pot
Add the chicken back in the pot.
Add fish sauce & lime juice
Stir and serve