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Even though you are still with me, sometimes I catch myself missing you. I miss how small your body still is, how your skin sometimes still feels like baby skin, how your frame still holds some of your baby fat. The way you full-body hug me, your arms wrapped around my neck, nearly knocking me backward. Your dramatic pout, the way you haltingly piece your sentences together. Sometimes I miss our moments together even as we are in them. I hope that we are doing the right things for you. I hope we are giving you enough love and modeling enough empathy.

You’re my little boy, but the thing is that you never were. You have always been your own person. My body grew yours, but I don’t see any of myself in you. I don’t need to. I know how different you are, how much of a wholly separate, headstrong person you have always been, and I consider the many different ways your life can go.

Sometimes I look at you, and through the lens of our national moment, I see every man who joined a militia. I see every white nationalist or just plain misogynist jerk. I see anger, derision, and fear. All of these men were once sweet little boys still holding onto their baby fat. I don’t know how they ended up so far down their paths.

I want you to always be guided by a strong system of ethics and values. I will show you mine, and I will tell you what I believe, but I can’t tell you what yours are. I want you to share my worldview, but it’s more important that you earn your own. The only way you can do that is to push hard against what you believe in and see if it stands.

And yet independent thought opens up the possibility that you could arrive at very different conclusions than your parents did. Or that you could, as a young man, get sucked into misinformation that changes your life path profoundly. I have to entertain the possibility that we will lose you. If not physically, then spiritually; emotionally; mentally. Parenthood is constantly being open to the possibility of wrenching loss of one kind or another. I hope, of course, that it never happens, but I cannot guarantee it. No one can.

I hope in your life you choose kindness most of the time. I hope you are lucky. Really lucky. I hope you push boundaries. I hope you stay out of serious trouble. I hope your mistakes aren’t video-recorded. I hope you use your power to help others. I hope you know when to leave the hard drugs alone. I hope you are resilient. I hope you work hard for things that matter. I hope you come to understand that feeling bad isn’t forever. I hope you learn not to fear change. I hope you learn not to fear at all.

I hope you are happy.

To say a lot has happened recently would be an understatement. In addition to, like, all the other stuff going on, in the space since last summer I’ve acquired a dead dad, an awareness of my tendency toward passive aggression due to deep-seated conflict avoidance (thank u therapy), and an enormous chip on my shoulder about turning 40. I remember turning 30 and being like, this is great! I can leave the technicolor drama of my 20s behind and finally embrace being confidently, unapologetically me! 

But turning 30 isn’t that daring. 30 is still insulated by a thick veneer of cultural relevance and facial collagen. By 40 that’s all been stripped away. 40 involves being marketed a wholly different multivitamin, one with silver on the label to match the drapes, I guess. 40 has a mouth that is tugging down at the sides, like a perpetually sad clown. At 40 you’re like: actually I don’t want to do this. I can’t go forward with this. How do I Benjamin Button myself back, but with a hard stop; let’s say 27? I could be 27. I could even be 32 again. 32 was the last age before we bought a house and my life began shapeshifting into something I didn’t recognize.

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I haven’t been here (gestures vaguely around at your inbox) in a long time. I am extremely aware of that. I haven’t written a newsletter since just before my son was born, and he’s three now. I understand it isn’t this way for every woman! Some women see a kid and raise one thousand creativities. I saw a kid and folded.

My mental abilities certainly waned after the girl child came. But after the boy child arrived, I found I couldn’t knock two paragraphs together to save my life. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Over the last few years I must have started and stopped about two dozen drafts, often right in the middle of a sentence. I know because I still have most of them:

It became mortifying to even /

I don’t want to be a bitter person, /

They creaked and popped, the fluid shifting uneasily as I  /

Preoccupied with questions that don’t /

Surely raising them isn’t meaningless but I also couldn’t see that the alternative was /

What about the fact that /

And my personal favorite:

We /

Oh, that would have been a good one, I can tell. The latent power, the feeling! WE.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make it work. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t summon the words, it was also that the words weren’t there. They’d been Eternal Sunshined from my mind, only without a forwarding message to meet them in Montauk.

There was something wrong beyond just baby-induced word misplacement, though. The last few years, maybe about since 2015, were hard. Probably some of the darkest of my life, and that was well before (gestures vaguely around at the world) all of this happened. Yet I still, to this day, can’t quite get my arms around what exactly my problem was. I was a woman with a couple of kids, a paying job, a stable home. In retrospect it was like wading into a pleasant, calm lake on a pleasant, calm day, and everything was so benign that it didn’t totally register when my nose and mouth slipped underwater. No danger here, I told myself, keeping my eyes locked on the cool blue horizon. But the panic kept rising anyway. 

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I come from a stock of people with an almost pathological fear of asking for help. Why impose on a lifeguard when you could flail your own self to safety, or better yet, stay put and simply learn to breathe underwater?

Needless to say, my attempt to Darwin myself into a fish didn’t work. I believed I didn’t have any real problems, or at least none worth pulling the alarm on, but I was betraying that belief with increasingly cornered wild-animal-type behavior. It was perpetual fight or flight. Lots of intrusive thoughts, throwing of children’s toys, baring of teeth. Death would be easier than this, I would think, and thankfully I didn’t pursue that line of thought any further. Next, I’d check back in again with my old friend Terrible News Cycle, only to have them stick a wet finger in my ear and give me a toilet swirlie. Nuts!

Of course I’d prefer he not be dead, but 1 Weird Trick about my dad’s death last summer was that it gave me permission to finally flag down the lifeguard (in this case, therapy). At last I had a real, definable issue that wasn’t just, “I feel feelings and this is incompatible with my feelings-free lifestyle.” I admit I went in there at the end of 2019 ready for someone to teach me how to KonMari my headspace. I was looking to throw out everything that didn’t spark joy, and then tidy the A-team emotions away in a drawer for later. Imagine my horror when my therapist was like: LOL NO. So, I have been working on sitting with conflict and anxiety instead of trying to delete it or bend it to my will. Real basic bitch, Starbucks-and-Target-run, Mental Health 101-type concepts that I’ve nonetheless been unable to apply on my own. My therapist suggested that when I’m spiraling, I set a timer, say five minutes, and let myself go absolutely nuts entertaining my worst-case scenario inside of those limits. This is supposed to give it less power without letting it overtake my life. 

“What’s your worst-case scenario?” my therapist asked gently. I thought for a few moments. “We all die,” I said, meaning me and my family. 

“My worst-case scenario is that I make a terrible mistake that causes everyone in my family to die and I’m left alone with the guilt and grief,” she replied. 

Oh, she’s good. 

The real treat, of course, is that we get to entertain more than just one worst-case. Our brains, always looking out for us! That’s another 100-level concept my therapist introduced to me: the notion that we are not only hardwired to look for the bad, but to obsess over it, too. This is meant to increase our chances of survival. Unfortunately, natural design dgaf if it also decreases your chances of life enjoyment in the process.

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On my dad’s death certificate they listed smoking as the second cause of death. He stopped smoking at age 27, and died two weeks before his 59th birthday. I still wonder about that. Did his cells really sit on that info for 25+ years, waiting for the perfect time to go all messy bitch and mutate? I heard his cousin is also battling pancreatic cancer, so was there a genetic link instead? How do genes decide whose numbers hit and whose don’t? Could my dad have delayed death if only he’d eaten less salt; if only he’d taken a train to Montauk?

The part of me that wants to endlessly turn things over and over in my head, I think, is looking for the breakpoints. That part believes if I can crack the codes, I can avoid the bad outcomes, for myself and everyone else. The codes are constantly rewriting themselves, though. The outcomes are constantly changing. The circumstances are largely beyond my control. For someone who finds deep and abiding comfort in control, this is beyond maddening.

2020, frankly, is beyond maddening.

I don’t want to turn 40 this fall. It’s an unpredictable, unknowable chapter of life, and that’s unsettling. I want the certainty and the smugness of youth; I want to wear them like a cloak around my body. I want culture to perpetually bend toward me, like light through a prism. I want to never be marketed a vitamin with silver on the label.

I don’t have a choice, really. 

But. There is a certain perverse freedom in things that are outside of your control. Whatever happens will happen, unless it doesn’t, then it won’t. This is still math lady dot jpg levels of mental gymnastics for me. I cannot quite parse a world in which I don’t worry a topic to death from every angle; in which I don’t let it keep me up at night. I am trying! I am, frankly, not often succeeding. But I am trying, and this alone is new growth for me. 

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Where will we be when the hummus expires? Any outcome, at this point, appears plausible, up to and including 2Pac returning from the grave to endorse Scientology and declare his run for presidency. So, you know, I don’t exactly care to speculate. I’m just going to focus on what matters today, like whether the hummus itself is garlic or sun-dried tomato. I’m sorry but I don’t fuck with a sun-dried tomato, and I’ll understand if you need to unsubscribe now.

I’m reading this over and it’s not really the first letter I wanted to write after my unplanned hiatus. I didn’t want to write a letter about feeling sad, and I certainly didn’t want to namecheck 2020. We’re all pretty full up on these topics. Go figure, this is what came out. You can lead a middle-aged woman to a keyboard, but you can’t make her write fresh content. 

It is supremely dumb to try to figure out how to be happy now, of all available times. But I’ve seen the alternative and it’s a hard pass from me, dawg.

Perhaps you, like me, tend to acquiesce to your toddler’s demands because going outside is ultimately less nerve-fraying than staying inside and attempting to calmly ignore your toddler’s theatrics, such as collapsing to the ground fully prone and wailing with his face pressed into the rug. Can he breathe? How is he collecting enough oxygen to supply all those screams?

IF SO, then you, like me, tend to find yourself outside in all kinds of weather and circumstances, with a lot of time to consider your life choices. Why did you choose to have a toddler? And what if… your toddler chose you?

Heavy shit!

I recently rediscovered these two paragraphs in a post draft I started and then abandoned in the spring of ’16, maybe because I was too busy going outside all the time?? Anyway, I was struck by how strongly it read like a missive from my past self about my past toddler to my current self about my current toddler:  

Every day I’m home with Vera, I take her down to the playground at the end of the street to give her an opportunity to put broken glass and cigarette butts in her mouth. I hate to brag but it is kind of a special thing we have; our mother-daughter bonding sesh. She invariably digs a vodka bottle shard or cancer stick out of the sand and I curse and lunge to fish the spit-covered item from her face hole. Tomorrow we’ll wake up and perform this same bit over again. We’re the stars of a highly predictable situational comedy airing in syndication every weekday from 9:00-10:00 am and again at 2:00 pm.

Sometimes I try to direct her to places that are not the playground for a little sanity-preserving change of scenery, but she is not having it. Once we leave the house we must immediately turn right and go up the street to a small driveway, at which point we must cross the street and make an immediate beeline for the park. It must be this way for it as always been this way. Occasionally, after she has finished tasting all of the available undesirables at the park, she’ll continue further down the street, but only westbound. Back in January she turned east once and I felt the fabric of the universe begin to rend. She hasn’t attempted it since; I frankly don’t think she can handle the truth.

Much like babies, at this point I’ve experienced a sample size of two whole toddlers, which clearly makes me an expert in toddler behavior. To that end I wish to present you my four truths regarding toddlers and the outdoors:

1. Your toddler knows only one direction in the world and roundly rejects the existence of all others.

Provided that the home you live in exists along the standard space-time continuum, once you step outside the door you have the option of turning left, right, or even — not that I am necessarily recommending this — striding confidently straight ahead, right into the street. Well, your toddler is not having any of this “choice” bullshit. Your toddler turned right once and as far as he is concerned, right is the only way he will ever go for the rest of his life. Sometimes, out of desperate boredom, you will try to coax your toddler to go left, and your toddler will react like you are trying to persuade him to leap off the edge of the world. LEFT is uncharted territory. LEFT is a tortured hellscape of demonry in which you can’t even get the rainbow type of Goldfish crackers! Probably!

2. The most direct route is the dumbest one.

Maybe it makes sense, to you, to turn around at some point on your walk so you can head back home. Well, your toddler is not in the business of making sense. Why go home when you can continue more or less in a straight line until you collapse? It’s not a true walk unless you’ve gone ten straight blocks before sitting down in the middle of the sidewalk and refusing to go again. How will you get home now?  That is of no concern to your toddler. As far as your toddler is concerned, the walk is done and the window of discussion has closed. Incidentally, your upper body strength has dramatically improved since you got a toddler, isn’t that weird?

3. Every home is theirs for the sampling.

Toddlers! So young, so brazenly entitled to everything that doesn’t belong to them. “This looks like a nice place,” they seemingly say, bounding down a stranger’s front walk and right up to the door, jiggling the handle. How quickly the pleasantries turn sour when no one actually lets them in! Your toddler had expected to compare bedroom sizes; check out the kitchen layout; lick some random crumbs off the floor; manhandle a pet or two. Now everything has been ruined. And no sooner has your toddler lain in anguish on a stranger’s front porch then here you are, dragging them down the sidewalk again, away from their very favorite home in the entire world. The horror! The humanity! The — oh, say, this looks like a nice place, let’s see what their doorknob tastes like!

4. They stare at only the weirdest neighbors.

You know those friendly, kind neighbors? The ones who always wave and will gladly rescue your boxes and mail from your front porch when you’re out of town? Your toddler wants nothing to do with them. Your toddler won’t even swivel their heads to acknowledge their presence.

The only neighbors your toddler wants to socialize with are the creepy, antisocial ones. The guy who always pokes around his yard wearing a robe and scowling? Or the one who spends all his free time angrily working on cars in his front yard? Or the one who’s got seven “KEEP OUT” signs posted on her fence and is always peering suspiciously out her front window? These people are your toddler’s best friends. There’s nothing they want more than to just stride up to these folks and embrace them as long-lost friends. You can’t judge a book by its cover, after all — and maybe they’ll even invite you inside to sample their doorknobs!

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go pick my toddler up off the rug so he can breathe.

Whether you’ve read every baby how-to book you can get your hands on or deliberately avoided them in the effort to cultivate the kind of chillaxed, hands-off breeder persona who is too cool for Baby School, being a parent can leave you uncertain and fearful. And exhausted and irritable. And with a sagging face! What to do about that face? Which chemicals do you dab on it now?

I don’t know about all of that. I’m not a chemical professional. I’m not a professor of the Face Sciences.

What I am is a mere parent.

I have had *tries to count on fingers* some amount of babies for *tries to count on fingers* some amount of time now. This qualifies me as an baby expert.

Today, I will answer your imaginary questions about babies.

Q: Ever since the baby came my friends have been calling me “mama.” Do they really think I’m their mom now?

Of course not. That would be ridiculous! What your friends are actually doing, when they address you by your new job title, is acknowledging that this role is so powerfully all-consuming that it completely usurps your personhood.

If you’re in a heterosexual relationship, do you ever wonder why your spouse and his friends don’t call each other “daddy?” Of course you don’t. That would be so bizarre! And that’s because dads are people first. Dadding is a thing they might do on the weekends as a favor to someone else, or to earn accolades from strangers at the grocery store. Dadship lands somewhere down their personhood list between “hobby cyclist” and “home brewer.”

Not so for moms. Did you happen to go by Darla in your old, pre-parent life? Did Darla happen to enjoy game night at the pub, or hitting the trails for a hike? Well, Darla’s dead, and so are her dumb games and hikes. You are mama, now, full stop. It’s what you are and what you do. Mama is where all of you begins and where all of you ends.

So no, don’t question your new name, mama. Lean into it. Wrap your arms around it in a warm, motherly embrace. It’s the only identity you have anymore!

Q: My friend’s baby is only a couple weeks younger than mine, yet she’s already crawling and my baby isn’t. I’m weirdly jealous?

Babies are so different, and the range of normal is so broad, that you don’t need to be jealous. That being said, fuck your friend. She’s letting her baby crawl right on your feelings. Not only is that cruel, it’s rude, and it’s up to you to subtly teach her a lesson by turning the lens of scrutiny back on her baby.

The next time you get together, casually mention that you’re now up to “onomatopoeia” in your flashcard work with your baby. He’s really catching on! Does it matter whether “flashcard work” is actually you scrolling your phone while your baby chews a lamp cord? No. What matters is planting that seed of doubt, fam. Let her go home to mull and stew in how she’s failing to provide the very best start for her offspring. Let her lie awake at night worrying that her baby’s turning out to be a real abecedarian. In your face, friend!

Q: Now that my baby is mobile, everything is so much harder. I can barely change him, let alone get him fed and dressed. What went wrong?

A brand new baby is like a meatloaf that screams every hour on the hour. It’s very needy, but it’s also very boring and very stationary. And that’s the trade-off: you’re on-call 24/7, but otherwise you can do whatever, whenever. Wanna go out? You can tuck your meatloaf up under your arm like a football and take it around town with you. Very portable stuff! Wanna dress up? You can put your meatloaf in the frilliest pinafore you can find, like you’re doing Laura Ingalls cosplay, and the meatloaf just complies. You can grab your meatloaf’s hand and bop it up and down in the air to the tune of Freak Nasty’s Da’ Dip, sheerly for the benefit of your own amusement, and the meatloaf appears to be completely unaware of what’s even happening. A meatloaf don’t care!! And not caring is a beautiful thing.

Beauty doesn’t last, though. One day you realize your meatloaf has sprouted a personality, many dozens of opinions, a will mightier than gravity, and at least six to ten legs and arms. All of a sudden your average diaper change feels like wrestling a angry marmot on the ledge of a skyscraper, but with higher stakes, because the marmot is also covered in poop and you are trying not to get poop anywhere other than where it already is.

Look. I don’t have anything to tell you other than this phase sucks. It’s not you. You’re not the problem here. The problem is that your baby has broken the agreement, which was that you would provide snacks every night at 1:00 am, 3:00 am, and 5:00 am in exchange for the baby staying in one place on the floor at all times. Instead, you’ve now got a marmot that refuses to wear any pants speed-crawling into the bathroom to unroll the toilet paper again. You started keeping the toilet paper up on the lid of the tank to discourage your marmot, but sometimes you forget. Sometimes you want to just have nice toilet paper again, the kind you don’t have to twist your body around to reach, so you put the roll back in the holder only to find it, five seconds later, unspooled on the bathroom floor again. And you’re like: I seriously never imagined that a good portion of my adult life would be spent scooping up loose toilet paper and draping it across the toilet tank lid to use later, because like fuck I’m going to just THROW OUT every single piece of toilet paper that comes into contact with the floor, MOM. You think I’m not thrifty because I don’t spend my Tuesday evenings clipping coupons out of the Valpak mailer but I’m not the one advocating for throwing perfectly good toilet paper in the trash just because it maybe has a little bit of dust on it now. Like dust could possibly be the worst thing my nether regions have ever come in contact with! Mom.

I’m telling you, dude. This phase enough to drive you insane. My best advice is to let someone else raise your marmot during this very special time. He can come back home when he’s old enough to clip coupons. And dust that fucking floor.

Q: My new baby is here, and now I don’t like my older kid so much?

That’s because your older kid sucks. Her opinions are shit! Your older kid does things like:

1. Eats cheese quesadillas dipped in peach yogurt. Sorry but that’s not gastronomy, that’s absurdity;
2. Runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door because you merely suggested choosing shorts over fleece-lined leggings on a 98°F day, but sure, whatever, pants are your prerogative Miss Sweaty Kneecaps;
3. Throws a tantrum coming out of the restaurant because she wants to take a different car home than the one you actually own, sorry but this isn’t a rental lot, THIS ISN’T ANARCHY, we can’t take someone else’s car just because it’s a more appealing shade of silver than our own;
4. Scream-whines at you that she can’t see when her eyes are closed, why doesn’t she just FUCKING OPEN HER EYES THEN, why does she have to involve you in the process??

Child experts will say, oh, this is a prime example of kids exploring their independence, and that’s fine. But as a child expert myself, I additionally want to point out that kids are also just shitty. It’s what they do. They start off as shitty people and it’s our jobs, as parents, to make them un-shitty.

Which is something I really wish I’d have known before I made the investment! I mean I only had babies in the first place because I wanted photos of them wearing knit caps in a basket of burlap and feathers, with their heads propped extremely unnaturally atop their hands. That was my whole reason for having them. I didn’t realize I had to do things with them AFTER the photo session was over.

So yeah, you’re totally justified in not liking your older kid so much. Let’s hope she figures her shit out (and agrees to eat things that are not a microwaved tortilla with cheese) before Awkward Thanksgivings Home From College become a thing.

Q: My baby prefers my spouse over me! I feel hurt and offended.

AS WELL YOU SHOULD BE. Especially if you were the spouse who did the birthin’. You grew AN ENTIRE PERSON and that person isn’t remotely adoring or appreciative enough of his former home. What is blood? What are bonds? Why is human connection? The baby will have plenty of time to choose his own family later! He doesn’t need to be making those choices NOW.

Rejection hurts, but then again you don’t want to get too invested in the drama. Babies are like cats in that they can smell desperation. So the next time you’re in the same room as the baby, pretend you don’t even see him sitting there. Act casual. Yawn a lot. Shrug! Why are you shrugging? No one knows! It’s just what casual people do. If the baby comes near you, scoot away. And never, under any circumstances, make eye contact.

Remember, the more disinterested you act, the more the baby will be drawn to you. Bonus, you are setting baby up for a lifetime of normal, healthy relationship behaviors. Go win that baby’s affection back, tiger!

Q: My baby prefers me over my spouse! I feel exhausted and resentful.

AS WELL YOU SHOULD BE. You never get a break! You TRY to get a break but it’s hard to relax when a baby’s in the next room, screaming like the world is ending. It might be nice to feel so loved if you didn’t feel so needed.

In times like this, it might be helpful to remember that parents are like seasons. Summer parents, for example, should only wear soft neutrals with rose and blue undertones. A summer parent would look amazing in a powder blue suit. Choose power colors that exude confidence! You want a look that says, “Mother does not wish to be touched right now and also for the next 5,683 hours.”

And if that doesn’t work, wait. Take solace in the fact that a baby who really, really, extremely needs you now might first turn to your spouse in a different season of life. Especially if, say, you are spending that season of life in a remote cabin in Montana while your spouse raises the children solo. A summer parent can dream!

Q: My baby makes noises that sound like demons having a knife fight over a trembling fissure in the earth’s crust inside of which molten lava is reaching a roiling boil. Is this normal?

Oh my word, yes. If it stops, call your doctor immediately.

Q: Sometimes I feel like my baby just… doesn’t like me?

That’s because your baby doesn’t like you. Here are the things your baby likes:

• Making improbable claims
• Mashing food in hair
• Trying to catch sunlight in hands
• Wanton destruction
• Certain death
• Gumming shoes
• Licking the polish off of your furniture
• Sticking fingers in strangers’ mouths

You’re not on there. Sorry!

Q: My baby is not sleeping. How do I make my baby sleep?

There are very few truths to baby sleep, because there are very few facts. Even after decades — centuries! — of study, the only rule scientists have ever been able to observe about baby sleep is known as Weekender’s Law:

Weekender’s Law states that a baby at rest can remain at rest until 7:30 or 8:00 am UNLESS it is a Saturday or Sunday, in which case the baby will remain at rest until no later 5:30 or 6:00 am.

To borrow from a mid-aughts meme about humanoid beard Chuck Norris, babies don’t sleep, they wait. They wait for the next time they are hungry, and then they start screaming. What happens in the space between doesn’t really matter, does it? It doesn’t actually matter if they ever go to sleep, because they’ll just wake up again! Screaming! From this view, it is meaningless to even try.

(Fun fact you won’t find on Wikipedia: the very first subscribers to nihilism were a group of exhausted parents!)

So yes, how do you make a baby sleep? You don’t. You simply realize one day that they are sleeping, regularly, and at last you are over the hump. Your process to get there could have included anything from swings, to swaddles, to sleep training, to strict drug regimens (for you, not the baby). And none of these will even matter because you ultimately won’t remember them. It’s nature’s blackout method of survival, but for babies.

Let’s give it up for nature! And drugs!

Q: I feel guilty—

Yes.

Q. You didn’t let me finish—

There’s nothing to finish here. You are guilty. You just are. All the time! Even when you already know the game, and you know the game is rigged, and you set out to actively ignore all the triggers. It just happens! It creeps up on your like floodwaters. You can sandbag all you want but some of it always seeps in. Don’t worry, you eventually learn to live with it, sort of like how you’ve learned to live with toilet paper on the floor.

HEY OKAY that’s all we have time for today. Thanks for reading, mama!

Turns out I’m not much of a gambler. The familiarity, predictability, and moderate risk of a repeat surgery won out by the slightest of margins. I ended up choosing to schedule a c-section for June 21, which is like TOMORROW. Today, even, in some time zones, by the time I hit “send” on this. 

Yet even the night before I go in and do this big thing, I still worry it’s not the “right” choice. Should I have gone with the VBAC instead? Am I denying myself the opportunity to… something???? Have a good birth experience, I guess? What is a “good” experience, anyway? I mean if we define it as not getting cigarette ash in my incision, then I am virtually guaranteed to be in for a real treat.

I saw that quote from Peter Pan on Instagram the other day, and it made me want to hurl my phone out the window. It was the one that goes: “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” A different way of putting that is, if you failed, it’s because you didn’t believe hard enough. And I guess I’ve been worried that my lack of belief in my ability to VBAC is some kind of moral failing, despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of that statement even as I type it out.  

Belief is mercurial. It loves some and wounds others. Belief alone cannot guarantee good, nor protect you from bad. Is how I tend to see things, but there’s still some subcurrent of thought in me that whispers, what if? What if I’d just tried to believe? Believe in myself; in my body; in Beyoncé; in the Dream of the 90s! Maybe I could have opened myself up to something really good!

Yesterday I texted the beau asking if we’d made the right choice to do this c-section, and he wrote back something like, there is no right answer, what we’re doing is the right answer that works best for us. And I was like, that’s cool. Because there’s been all this pressure on me to fly, and I understand why, because flying is the fucking shit. But maybe it’s okay to just walk, sometimes. Sometimes a good answer can be walking.

These last few days, I have to admit, have been a whirlwind of weird emotions. I was trying so hard to get myself to a place where I was feeling zen and relaxed before embarking on this new gig, but I had to give up on that, too. Zen and relaxed is maybe not in my genes, I think to myself nearing midnight, when I have to be up in four hours to go have my abs sliced open. I’d tried hard not to make this late night happen again, like it did before my first kid, and before my wedding, but it did, and I have to forgive myself for that, too. 

Maybe walking was too high of a bar after all. Crawling? Lying on the floor, sighing heavily? 

So here we are. I’ve ticked off almost all my “lasts.” I’ve had my last prenatal appointment ever, which I felt weirdly sad about. We’ve had our last night together as a family of three, which went fine but wasn’t anything special. I did my last morning of daycare drop off with just one kid. I did one last workout before being rendered incapacitated. I had, last weekend, my last night of halfway decent sleep. I gladly took my last hug from my first and favorite kid before she went off to her grandparents’ house, wearing a too-big backpack. 

I’m not ready for this, necessarily, and I’m not particularly joyful. Maybe scheduling a c-section wasn’t the right answer, and maybe it’s not the good answer.

But I’m here. Let’s do this. 

I understand that for some people a second (or fourth, or ninth, or what have you) pregnancy just flies by like signposts along the highway. This has not been my personal experience. My personal experience has been one neatly dipped and preserved in amber. Time, for me, has crawled. Time has meandered. Time has — dare I say — moseyed along with its thumbs hooked in its belt loops, pausing occasionally to remark, “Welllllp.”

I’ve known exactly, down to the week and day, how far along I am at all times. I can think of only once I didn’t, and that was on account of waking to pee from such a deeply velvet, wildly fantastical dream that I briefly forgot everything I knew about who I was. As I sat on the toilet with the facts of my life streaming back to me like the old Windows starfield screensaver, it dawned on me that I was pregnant, and thought: well, surely I must almost be done being pregnant by now. Then I remembered: nope! Been pregnant for 17 months, still got another 17 to go!

In a way this should be good, and it is. I mean, I’ve complained about the rapid forward march of time for a good solid decade now, and it’s nice to complain about the reverse for once. Plus, this is most assuredly my last time playing Host Body and I don’t wish to rush through it and then later regret that I didn’t fully take advantage of or fully appreciate, I don’t know, rolling around on the bed like the Pillsbury Doughboy trying to get my socks on.

Yet the slow pace has definitely tested me. I can’t fully relax or lean into whatever’s happening in my day-to-day; I can’t be zen; I feel too itchy in my own skin. I’ve mentioned this before but at the winter holidays I noticed I kept looking forward to the next thing coming, and then when the thing arrived feeling mildly irritated and wishing for it to end. This has more or less continued to be my general state of existence: mostly okay, but kind of annoyed. Why? Not sure. Probably has nothing to do with the fact that my internal organs have been slowly compressing themselves up inside my ribcage!

Since finding out I was pregnant I’ve conducted a regular weekly exercise wherein I’d flip my calendar forward all the way to my due date in order to gauge what vast expanse of time still stands between me and having this baby. Along the way I’d pause to acknowledge social and personal milestones: Thanksgiving; the start of the second trimester; New Year’s; the 20-week mark (halfway!); the start of the third trimester; Easter. And when I’d get to May, I’d fully stop and examine it closely like an alien artifact. May! The month before June! It sounded like fiction. May was an impossible fantasy. Like, I’d heard of May but I believed that May only happened to other people.

Now May is actually here — incredibly, it’s practically gone! — and I’m looking around, stunned. Time had moved S O  S L O W L Y until now that I didn’t even realize it was actually going anywhere. I assumed I’d remain suspended in this twilight state of stasis forever. 

Surprise?

No, I don’t necessarily want time to go fast again, but I’m also so glad this part is almost over. I don’t do well with temporariness. I crave arrival. I want to reach my destination before I even begin my journey. This sentiment is neither aspirational nor inspirational, but it’s also kind of true. The journey part usually sucks! You have to wait on enormous lines; you have to either pound the rest of your precious liquids in front of security like a Greek initiation or dump them out; you have to choose from an underwhelming array of terrible food options; you have to carefully fold yourself like origami into a tiny seat for unending hours as all around you children scream. Sometimes they are your children and you have to deal with them and then it sucks even more. Fuck yeah, get me to the place, already!

Even after all this time, I haven’t learned any precious lessons on patience. Even in the end, I’m still counting.

Three more weeks until I can say: Glad that’s over! Where to next?

2. A thing about being a good patient 

Things may have felt slow over the last few months but I am definitely slow, now. Slow and achy. Stairs are a struggle. Walking is a literal, sciatic pain in my ass. Anything dropped on the floor by me is just assumed to be gone forever. “Drat, I lost another $100 bill!” Just kidding, the other day I stopped in the street to pick up a dime, so it’s not like crouching down is exactly beyond me. I just save the effort for only the really important stuff, like spare change, stray gummy bears, and banana bread crumbs.

I’m definitely feeling all 36 of my years this time around. I’ve also been feeling this persistent, sharp pain at the bottom right side of my ribcage since around, oh, week 20 or so. It hurts when I stand. It hurts when I sit. The only time it doesn’t hurt is when I’m lying completely horizontal, which as you can imagine I have plenty of time to do during the day between work, toddler wrangling, and burying my feelings in the backyard with a shovel.

I actually had this exact same pain during my last pregnancy, and after finding out Vera was stuck in a frank breech position I chalked it up to that — hell yeah, it’ll hurt when someone’s head is jammed up inside your torso! But this time is different; this baby’s position is different, and at some point I started wondering: what if I didn’t have to just grit my teeth and bide my time? What if… there was something… that could be done… to improve this situation sooner rather than later? 

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? A pregnant woman, unwilling to continue bravely and cheerfully putting up with pregnancy-induced pains? What do I think I am, a fucking princess? I mean, probably!

Listen, I like to think I’m a good patient. I try not to take up too much time or space. I do my own research first, and I don’t ask a lot of unnecessary questions. But at my 32-week prenatal appointment I really wanted two things to happen: 1) to discuss my birth plan options, and 2) to ask my OB what I could do about this rib pain. So of course when I got there I found out she had just left to deliver a baby. The staff wanted me to see a different OB in the practice instead. I was disappointed to have to wait on the birth plan stuff, but the pain had been driving me nuts and I was determined to talk to somebody about it, so I forged ahead. 

“My ribs have been hurting since around week 20,” I told this other OB. “Oh, that happens during pregnancy,” she replied. Cool, awesome, didn’t realize that could be a contributing factor!

“I was wondering if it might help to see a chiropractor for a body adjustment,” I said. “Sure, you could see a chiropractor,” she said flatly. I almost expected her to snap some gum, but she wasn’t chewing any. 

“Uh, do you have an opinion on the difference between chiropractors and osteopathic doctors?” I asked, because both types of treatment had come up while I was researching, and I wanted to get the input of a professional. The professional in front of me shrugged: “They’re basically the same thing.” (Incidentally, this is not what six minutes of browsing on the internet tells me, but what do I or the internet know.)

I tried one last tack: “Okay, so do you have any recommendations about which chiropractor to start with?” She gazed at me for a beat with dead fish eyes. “Why don’t you just Yelp it?”

Listen, I know my rib pain is incredibly trivial, in the scope of things. And for all I know this lady was having a really bad day. It was a late Friday afternoon and maybe she just wanted to pick up a six of Michelob Ultra and unwind with her vibrator like the rest of us. But it also didn’t exactly make me feel great that she couldn’t be arsed to drum up one iota of sympathy or even a single generic suggestion for the duration of our brief conversation. It didn’t make me feel great that I had waited with the pain for this appointment and that I now had to wait with it even longer until I could either talk to my real doctor or figure out how to take treatment matters into my own hands. I just didn’t… feel great at all, after that encounter, and for more reasons than just feeling uncomfortable most of the time. 

I’m not important. I know this. That’s one thing having a baby taught me the first go-round, from the minute we walked through those hospital doors. The beau and I may have been reeling, dangling by a thin mental rope from a high emotional cliff, but together we formed our own tiny island of shock in a vast sea of everyday ordinariness. Everyone around us was just doing their jobs, man. I was literally the bazillionth woman they had seen gripping a newborn with a look of terror on her face. Which is as it should be, in a way — if we stopped to help shoulder the burdens of everyone we meet, we’d never be able to carry our own. 

And still. You may know that having a baby is a big deal to no one else but you, but the closer you get to the end, the harder it is to escape the bigness of your deal. Maybe it’s your second time, or your fourth, or your ninth, but it still feels huge and scary. Being in someone else’s hands, on someone else’s terms, is nerve-wracking. A lot of it could super go wrong (editor’s note: don’t read these links), and you try not to think about that, but there it is anyway. You feel strangely, suddenly vulnerable, like you just noticed you’re walking around wearing your insides on the out.

After that failed prenatal appointment I wasn’t upset so much about the rib pain as I was about someone who ostensibly gets paid to care just genuinely not giving a shit, directly in my face. None of us may ultimately be important, but all we want when feeling vulnerable is for the people around us to pretend we are, like just for a few minutes. Half an hour tops. 

I’d love to say that after getting doctor-dissed I flounced right out of the office and found myself an amazing medical provider who listened sympathetically to my complaints before completely eliminating my rib pain forever while also somehow whitening my teeth and hydrating my skin! What actually happened is that I went to an osteopathic doctor I found through my insurance, and when nothing improved after one (expensive) session, I never went back. I may have utterly failed at proving the point that pregnancy pain can actually be helped, but at least I managed to avoid using Yelp.

Oh, and at my next appointment I did tattle on Bad OB Lady to my doctor, and she said she was passing on my comments to the head of the practice. I may be a good patient but I’m not that good.

3. A thing about my kid

I understand that older kids sometimes show an interest in the process of getting a younger sibling. They hug and kiss the belly; they ask pointed questions; they name it; they talk about what they want to do when baby brother or sister get here. Vera, on the other hand, could not care less. We tell her over and over again that she’ll be having a brother soon and that her brother is in my uterus. “Yeah,” she says obligingly, then goes back to putting crayons in her mouth. The subtext is: I know. And?

I’m guessing this kid is in for quite a reality check when the beau and I come home from the hospital with a tiny, squalling bundle of needs. But for these last few weeks, at least, she continues to retain her status as our number one favorite kookball. 

The other night she started digging through her toy basket in the living room. “Where it go?” she asked, scattering stuff on the floor. “Where it go?”

“Where did what go, buddy?” I asked. She paused and looked up at me, then went back to fruitlessly sifting through her stuff. I could tell she was having a hard time finding words for it, so I tried prompting some.

“What color is it? Is it red?” I offered. She looked at me again mutely. “Is it blue? Green? Yellow?”

“Black one!” she finally exclaimed. “Where the black one go?” 

By now the beau had come into the room, and he and I exchanged glances. Black? We couldn’t think of anything of hers that was black. I mean, childrens’ toys tend to stay more in the primary color spectrum and less in the funereal.

I tried another route. “Well, do you remember where you last saw it?” I asked. “Was it in the front room? Was it in the basement? Was it upstairs?” Something fired in her little neurons and she started scrambling for the staircase. But when she reached the top of the steps, instead of turning right and running into her room, she unexpectedly veered left and into ours. She beelined straight for my dresser and pointed at the bottom drawer. “In there! Black one is in there!” she told us excitedly. 

That’s when it hit me: she wanted my black thong underwear.

The previous night I’d been folding laundry and she’d snatched them from the basket and clumsily pulled them on, threading both legs through the waistband while the leg holes flapped merrily at her side. Maybe I should have stopped her then, but I was too busy trying to take photographic evidence. Now she thought my thong was a fun toy I was keeping from her. 

“I’m sorry, bud,” I said, rubbing her back as she wailed on the floor. “I know I let you play with them last night, but I can’t let you play with them again. They’re my underwear. I need to wear them.”

89% of my current real-time parenthood experience is me wondering how I’m going to get out of this one. What magical combination or words and actions will release the screaming demons from my child’s body? Turns out this time it was the realization that she could instead use a swim diaper in place of the thong. The really key part of the experience, in her mind, was being able to run around the house wearing something on the outside of her pants, and I can’t say I blame her.

I just hope the next kid is half as weird as she is.

The post has since languished in my drafts folder, all but forgotten, until yesterday morning, when I was in the shower and my mind wandered back to it. I dug it up, propped it up, brushed it off, slapped it across the face a few times. Here it is.

////////

If you don’t post real-time comments about an experience on social media, did it ever really happen? No, I don’t think so. Or it’s possible it happened in another dimension and not this one, which is sort of like what going to see the lady from Long Island Medium speak in a Denver suburb felt like.

The show was actually called ✨Theresa✨Caputo✨The✨Experience✨ and in order to explain how I came to be there I need to take you allllll the way back to March, when a friend and I were draining this bottle of wine. Somehow we came around to talking about Long Island Medium, which is a TV series about a woman from Long Island who love sparkles and purports to receive messages from the dead via signs. My friend said, wait, did you hear she was supposed to be coming to Denver? And I was like:

We turned to the internet, which confirmed the rumor to be true. “I feel like we have to buy tickets,” I said. “I feel like we have to buy them, too,” she said. We consulted the wine, and the wine emphatically agreed. I put the tickets on a credit card.

Have you ever noticed that events enthusiastically agreed upon on a Friday night while spirited aloft on the warm, gentle winds of booze do not always sound quite as great when you are staring the actual event in the face straight after a sobering workday? Nevertheless, I rallied by putting on some eye shadow and waited by the door for my friend to pick me up and drive us first to Wendy’s like the hottest high school date of all time.

! TOPIC DIVERSION ALERT !

Fast food was #goals for me for roughly the first quarter century of my life. Once while in college I drove through the snow to pick up a Whopper Junior from Burger King, fries from McDonald’s, and a frosty from Wendy’s, because I believed this was the ideal meal combo. Did I already mention this here before? Welp, I just mentioned it again. I was very into fast food until I just… gradually stopped being as into it. After college I got my first steady office job and was no longer budget-limited to $0.99 bean burritos when making a run for the border. I started going to fancier fast food places instead, and my convenience paradigm continued to shift. Nowadays my idea of fast food involves putting on a cardigan, cuffing my pants, and standing on line for 20-30 minutes for a $10 bespoke artisan handcrafted sandwich.

My main point, besides that I’m a prick, is that it’s been some years since I’ve had traditional fast food. So when I looked up quick dinner options near the event center where ✨The✨Experience✨ was going to happen and found only McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s, my mind lit up like a neon sign. What if we went a little crazy tonight? What if we got a little wild? WHAT IF WE… had ourselves a Frosty and fries for dinner?

I remember a Frosty and fries (UK translation: chocolate milkshake and chips??) being the height of treatdom. You could have your hot salty potato and you could have your frozen sweet dessert, and you could dip the one in the other for more carnal thrills than spring break in Fort Lauderdale. But as soon as we walked through the door of Wendy’s something felt off. The menu board was all bright, well-lit photographs of food. There was light bamboo wood paneling throughout, and a lounge area with a couch, and signs for free wi-fi, and a glass mosaic electric fireplace above which a flat-panel television played CNN. I felt like I’d walked into the business center at a chain hotel. All it was missing was a fax machine and a printer, but for all I know those were tucked away under the condiment counter. Print out your PowerPoint notes and pump yourself a cup of ketchup all at once!

What exactly had I been expecting of this Wendy’s? Oh, I don’t know, to relive my youth? I thought it would be all brown brick, and dark wood paneling, and those parlor-style stained glass shades hanging over tabletops printed with a collage of vintage newspaper ads. I thought the menu board would be black strips of plastic with white and green text reversed out. I thought maybe there would be an old lady sporting a ruffled lace collar in the corner, hollering “Where’s the beef?” into a telephone receiver. I don’t know?

You know what else didn’t feel right? The food. The fries were weird, hard, pointy tasteless things, and the Frosty was more icy than creamy. This did not at all compare to what I’d logged away in my memory banks. Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I finished everything on my tray. But I was unsettled by the experience. I guess it didn’t help that the whole time I kept swiveling my head around, unconsciously looking for the guy in a bluetooth headset who was going to pull me aside and give me a lecture on effectively scaling deliverables. Like maybe a TED talk was about to be delivered in the dining room of this Wendy’s. THIS WAS A NEW AND UNUSUAL ERA OF FAST FOOD FOR ME, ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE.

But we were talking about a TV medium though, yes? Were we? Were we? I genuinely don’t know anymore.

! RETURN TO ORIGINAL TOPIC ALERT !

So we eat the Wendy’s, my friend and I, and we drive to the place. By the time we get there I am cranky because 1) they charge us $10 for the privilege of parking in a dirt lot way the hell away from the actual event center, 2) they make us WALK OUTSIDE for at LEAST FIVE MINUTES while the blustery April wind slices through our clothes like shivs, and 3) the Wendy’s is already making my stomach rumble ominously.

The event center itself was pleasantly generic; vast expanses of alternating light and dark brick patterns punctured by the occasional square or circle window, like a suburban high school built circa 2000 would look. Inside, the crowd was a solid mix of True Believers and Mom’s Night Outers. You could tell the moms because they are uniformly dressed in dark jeans and drapey tops and are in particularly high spirits; buoyed by the dual thrills of being out on a Tuesday night plus $12 margaritas straight from a mix. I started to think that I would happily pay $12 for a premixed margarita but alas I cannot, for I had taken a positive pregnancy test 1.5 weeks prior to this evening and for the time being was limited to consuming only my own smug righteousness. Who am I kidding, I went and threw down $5 for a Fresca and they wouldn’t even let me have the bottle cap.

There was to be no video and no pictures of✨The✨Experience✨, they said. They said it over and over again, via signs on the wall and recorded announcements looped through the sound system. Joke’s on them because I waited until the usher’s back was turned and took a picture of the empty stage out of sheer bitter spite. They’d better be glad they didn’t give me the cap on my $5 Fresca or I would have really broken some house rules.

The lights went down and Theresa came tottering out on the tallest, sparkliest heels I have ever seen. They glittered all the way across the auditorium like sunlight cheerfully rebounding off the water. I don’t care much about shoes as a fashion accessory and yet I was entranced. I didn’t hear anything she said for maybe five minutes because I was too busy watching those shoes wink and glimmer up at me, and honestly, maybe that was the point.

I came back to earth in time to hear her break down how it was going to work: she would wander the audience and wait for spirit to guide her. Spirit talked to her through mental images of objects and numbers, and she didn’t get to choose what they would show her. So if they showed her something, she warned, it was for a damn good reason and only you alone could truly know what the message meant. As if in preemptive response to critics, she hollered, “THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF STUFF I CAN JUST GOOGLE, PEOPLE!”

With that she teetered down the center stage stairs and swanned out into the audience, a camera man following closely behind. She wended halfway down the aisle, then back up again, before finally asking who had the person who died young? Everyone looked around expectantly. After further negotiation, a mother and daughter picked their way over people’s laps and stood shyly at the aisle’s edge as Theresa launched into her spiel.

She kept bringing up something about the sky, what did they do with the sky? Did they name a star for the deceased person? They went back and forth for a few minutes, Theresa throwing out ideas as mother and daughter searched one another’s faces for the memory, trying very hard to connect the dots. Finally the daughter mentioned that once they had released a balloon in their loved one’s name. Theresa’s mouth fell open in feigned shock. “DIDN’T I SAY IT WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY?” she joke-yelled at them. Her voice dropped to a gentler tone. “So know that their spirit was with you when you did that.” Mom and daughter wiped tears as the audience applauded.

And so it went, spirit guiding her to the next person, then the next. Sometimes she would get a tiny, obscure detail right, something that defied any kind of logic or reason as to how she knew, and sometimes when this happened she would sarcastically yell,”I GOOGLED THAT!” Other times her signs fell completely flat, as they initially had with the mom and daughter, and she had to either quickly move on or press the issue, needling them to remember, making for some super awkward moments in the meantime. If only I’d had a bottle cap I could throw to distract us all from the scene!

So was this medium lady actually for real or not? I don’t know. All I know is that by the time, about half an hour in, that she started channeling a woman’s beloved dead horse I was actively looking at my phone and calculating how long it would take us to drive back home to the city. Even hot mamas on their mama’s night out needed to eventually go to bed.

That night I tossed and turned, my abdomen hot with stabby knives courtesy of Wendy’s. The following morning, just before my alarm went off, I had a dream Kanye West couldn’t find his passport and I suggested he look in all the drawers in his house and he smiled and gave me a hug because he really appreciated that suggestion. He was approximately five feet tall. Did he ever find the passport? I wish I knew. Maybe Theresa could tell me?

Image credit: detail from 12 Burgers, illustration by Craig Robinson // www.flipflopflyin.com/12burgers/index.html

It’s hard to live a normal life when you’re trying to save your country from wholesale descent into fascism even as normal life keeps happening. Work tasks continue to be assigned to me, dishes continue to get dirty, and children continue to express their needs at a much louder volume than is necessary. OK, child. Honestly, she’s loud enough to be at least three separate people at this point.

So far I have dealt with the jarring disparity between what’s in the news and what’s on my daily to-do list mainly via:

1. Starting my work timer. Stopping it because I’m not actually working.
2. Opening fridge, staring mournfully inside, closing it again.
3. Gchats of despair.
4. Pouring sugar into my mouth as if to fill the void in my soul.
5. Repeating this series of stuttering actions all day until I feel myself unraveling like a frayed rope.

W E I R D I know, but it turns out this lifestyle is not sustainable?

I am really struggling with the fact that it’s virtually impossible to be an employee, a parent, a partner, a friend, a student, a responsible adult, an informed and involved citizen, and a person with hobbies and interests. I can only really manage two things on that list at any given time. This means most days I default to employee and parent, because one pays me money and the other, as mentioned above, is very loud. You know the old saying, “the loud things and the greenbacks get the grease.” Well! Do they ever, lately.

I started the year off so well. I was marching, I was writing postcards, I was calling my senators every week, which is huge for me considering my fear of talking on the phone. The first time I called, I sounded like I was about to burst into tears the entire time, because I was! But I kept doing it because it was important, and it gave me a thread of hope to cling to.

And then I found, quite unintentionally, that there’s a very fine line between “doing stuff” and “worrying about doing stuff,” because I was finding myself mucking around in the latter end more and more frequently. I’d open up Twitter and scroll through endless links to horrified thinkpieces, and then I’d open up my political groups and scroll through endless calls to action, and then I’d end up just, like, cycling through various grief stages all afternoon, completely unable to focus. And the only way I could get myself to manage the Life Basics of employee and parent anymore was to close and cap the information hydrant. 

It’s been more than two weeks since I looked at news, checked my political action groups, or called a senator. I don’t feel good about this at all. People say, well, you have to put your own oxygen mask on first, sweetie. But it’s a privilege to have access to a damn mask in the first place.

Most of us are struggling with this post-election, I think: ye olde balance question. Your own mental health matters, but you also can’t keep peacing out on stuff just because it bums you out. I think the only answer here is to do stuff until it drives you nuts, rest, rinse, and repeat.

Imma be Sisyphusing my way through this process for however long it takes, won’t you join me?

two

This month my kid started daycare, which we are referring to as school for her because we’re insufferable twats.

Up until recently Vera’s main care setup had been a nanny share, which was great. It was in the neighborhood; she got to hang out with 1 or 2 other kids at their houses; they shared a fair bit of germs but it wasn’t the town-burying avalanche of constant illness that you get from a larger classroom situation. Then last October one of the other families got a spot in a “school” they’d been waitlisted at forever and the nanny share band broke up, leaving the beau and I going shit, did we need to be on waitlists for stuff too? We started calling around and wow, turns out we did! Two years into parenting and we still could super use someone to regularly walk us through an instructional checklist!

So we were dumb but we were also kind of lucky, because it only took about four months to get in somewhere. “Only!” We’re still hoping our first choice will eventually call us up later this summer, fall, or decade, but for now this other place WILL DO. Especially since it doesn’t involve me constantly scrambling to find babysitters and then re-scrambling to find backup babysitters when the first ones flake out, which is basically what I have been doing since the end of Ye Olde Nanny Share Times. You probably can’t see the the intense look on my face through that sentence, so just pretend I’m standing a little too closely and gripping your arm a little too tightly as you read it. *makes sign of the cross, spits over shoulder*

As soon as we had a start date on the books, we began talking school up to prepare Vera in advance. We told her there would be a lot of new kids there, and toys too. “Yeah!” she’d agree, as if she already knew all about it. The more we talked about it the more excited she got, and I was hopeful this meant that she would take the new environs more or less in stride.

The morning of the first day arrived, and when I told her it was time to get ready for school it was like telling a golden retriever we were going on a walk, only with slightly less drool. She bounded around the house talking about how she was going to bring her toy bus and car with her. When I told her the other kids might want to play with them too, she set them right back down again. Smart move, kid. I used my toe to scoot them over near the door. “We’ll leave them right here, so you can play with them as soon as you get home again,” I said. She kept up her stream of agreeable chatter while I put her shoes and coat on, got her buckled into the car, and drove over to the daycare center. As I parked on the street I was swelling with pride. She was already doing so well with this!

So of course everything shifted abruptly as soon as we got to the door. I watched as the first and then the second wave of anxiety passed over her face, and by the time we actually got inside she was crying, arms stretched above her head, wordlessly begging to be picked up. I carried her over to the toys and put on an abnormally excited show about them. “Look, bud!” I gasped. “They have a bus you can play with!” She wasn’t having it. “No mama leave!” she sobbed, face pressed into my jacket. A crowd of curious toddlers began to gather in a semi-circle around us. A teacher came up and tried to show her a doll, which only served to ramp her hysteria up another few notches. “I wan’ go home! I wan’ go home!” she screamed. “No mama leave!”

80s freeze frame, narrator voiceover: well, what would you do in this situation? Me, I handled it by bursting into tears, too! As silently as possible, so she wouldn’t know! “It’s okay, bud, I know you’re sad right now but you’ll have fun today,” I murmured weakly, trying I guess to convince both of us even as hot tears kept dripping off my chin onto the top of my daughter’s head. It seemed insane to leave her here, where she didn’t know anyone and the toddler room teacher appeared to have all the personality of a cafeteria lunch lady. How did I miss cafeteria lunch lady before?? She was kind of terrifying! I briefly, fleetingly, considered taking her home, even though I knew that would be a big setback for her, and perhaps an even bigger setback for me. I mean I love my kid but I don’t want to have to watch her all day? Also, like, work. 

Flashback for a second to the day I dropped Vera off at the nanny share for the first time. I remember walking away as she was crying and reaching for me, and I remember getting into my car and sitting there for a moment and feeling… exactly nothing. I felt separated from my kid’s emotions; floating above them; protected from them by ten layers of bubble wrap. Instead of being upset about leaving my baby alone with a virtual stranger, as was the normal, standard Mom Reaction^TM, I drove home and I just really fucking enjoyed being alone. And that had fed my preferred narrative about myself: I was a robot mom. You know. Not like those other moms. 

Now it was the first day of daycare, and I had been expecting more of the same nonreaction from myself. But one thing that I should know by 2+ years into this gig, outside of put your child on waitlists way earlier, is that parenthood is always out to get you. Parenthood is three raccoons wearing a trench coat, stealing your wallet. Parenthood is a looped audio track of pre-parent you assuredly saying “I’d never do that” over an extended cut montage of you doing exactly that. Parenthood holds a skeleton key which keeps unlocking new levels of basic-ness inside you. Once you think you’ve reached your most basic, the floor opens up and suddenly you’re plummeting downward again. 

The humbling just never stops.

Another teacher came over and wrapped an arm around my side. “She’s going to be fine,” she said. “I know,” I said. “They always have a hard time at first but before you know it, she won’t want to go home,” she said. “I know,” I said. And I knew. Like, truly I did. But in the moment I just couldn’t stop the waterworks.

Vera noticed a table full of crayons, and for a few moments her refrain of sorrow switched from “No mama leave!” to “Mama draw, mama draw, mama draw!” I knelt beside her and took a crayon and mindlessly drew a fat yellow sun with rays emanating crookedly from it. Then I drew a bus and wrote I love you! next to it and I folded it up and stuffed it in her jacket pocket, which was ridiculous because she can’t even read yet. And then I stood up and said, “I’ll pick you up later, I have to go to work now,” and walked away as she scream-cried for me from someone else’s arms, just like the first day of the nanny share. Except this time when I got in the car I started crying again and then I cried even harder when I got home and saw that dumb toy bus and car sitting by the door. She was too little to be in such a big world! 

I’m not a robot mom. I’m your average, standard, everyday mom.

Since that first day, things have gotten better while also sometimes getting worse. She still hates the process of going to daycare, but the amount of crying on any given morning now ranges anywhere from funereal weeping to light whining. She’s already been sick a bunch, including one feverish multi-day episode that totally zombied her out and caused code-red levels of clinginess and hysterics. Additionally, we have this tiresome routine going every weekday morning where I brightly suggest fun things she can do at school that day and she shoots them all down, even things I know she likes. “No want it! No outside! No go down slide! No toys! No storytime! No go night-night! No diaper change!” Okay, I can feel you on the last two, but DUDE, YOU AREN’T FOOLING ME. Also, what can you possibly have against storytime?

On the other hand, it turns out that cafeteria lunch lady of a teacher from the first day was just filling in for Vera’s real teacher, who was on vacation at the time, and Vera loves this other woman dearly. She is the only thing we can agree on every morning when we’re talking about school. The teacher told us Vera’s also juuust begun opening up and socializing a bit more, and I’ve been trying to use this info as positive ammunition during our daily battles. Last night I tried to get her to tell me about the other kids in her class, and she got as far as naming her teacher, a kid named Thomas, and Snack. Snack? I asked. Snack, she confirmed. Well, he sounds delicious.

The daycare staff periodically texts me photos which for all intents and purposes appear to be grainy surveillance camera shots of a criminal suspect, and I cannot get enough of these. I am so thirsty for information on her day that I sometimes make the beau repeat everything that the teacher said at pickup. Yesterday he told me that when he got there she was eating a S’mores Pop Tart, and I spent the entire night turning that factoid over in my head and internally lolling. Of course it was S’mores! What other flavor could it have been??

So are we fine yet? Well, I am. After I spent that first day bawling, I quickly switched over to looking forward to getting her screaming face out of mine every morning. I still feel guilty at times, and at the lowest points I still wonder whether we’ve broken her forever by sending her to daycare. But it also leaves me bursting to witness how strong she is, how stubborn she is, how resourceful she is even when she absolutely doesn’t want to be. I didn’t expect that.

Progress isn’t linear. Nothing is linear. It’s all scribbles, but you know what, I’m starting to get behind those.

three

No one asked for a music recommendation but here is a major player in the soundtrack to my February:

Billy Changer | She’s Good to Go

I hope you’re all well.

Hang on, my doctor has recently corrected me away from calling it a “genetic” test; apparently I was merely taking a basic DNA screening. I’d previously believed that all of the various levels of noninvasive prenatal blood testing were technically genetic testing, but she said no. Later I tried Googling “dna genetics” to learn about these crucial differences in terminology and the whole first page was links to cannabis seeds and swine, and I closed the tab and gave up then. You know what, I thought, I will entrust this matter into the hands of the Science Masters. As for my part in the Prescriptivist Battles, I will continue to respond with some heavy-handed remark on the baby’s sex every time the doc mentions its gender. 

But let me flash back for a paragraph to my first appointment, when the doctor asked me how I wanted the gender, er, sex results delivered. We could schedule a phone call, she said. I briefly mathed out all of the scenarios in which the beau and I could both be in the same place to take a phone call between the hours of 9:00 am and 5:00 pm on a weekday, and none of them made any sense. I asked: can you just send them in the mail instead? Well, I guess mail will take longer, but sure, she said.

Was mail really that odd of a request? I feel like my admittedly narrow window onto “gender” “reveals” always seemed to include the opening of an envelope at some point, unless they included a pink or blue confetti cannon or a very large tiered cake out of which Rob Thomas and Santana leapt to sultrily croon the big news (“Well it’s a vul-va…”). I also really liked that with mail, you didn’t have to talk to anyone. How do you even respond when someone calls to tell you what “type” of kid you’re having? Thank you? I love you? Will you be my new mother? Can I borrow your car? I can feel my social panic rising just thinking about it.

So at that first appointment they took my blood away from me and shipped it to San Diego, California, and some time passed. And some more time passed, and still I didn’t hear anything. And finally an envelope showed up in the mail, and I thought: The test results are here! Now I get to see if my genomes are, like, DNAing correctly, or whatever sciencey divination they performed down near the Baja border, probably whilst wearing hemp poncho hoodies and calling each other brah.

Straight away I tore open the envelope and unfolded the first third of the paper, and was surprised to see the letterhead of my doctor’s office with a bunch of empty space under it. Where was, uh, where was the text? Did they accidentally send me a blank sheet? Feeling suspicious, I began unfolding the second third of the paper more slowly, for which I am glad, because I juuuuust managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the handwritten word “It’s” before folding the paper back up in a panic and stuffing it into the kitchen junk drawer.

I stood there, mind racing. Why would they send me the fucking SEX RESULTS before I even knew if I cleared the DNA screening or not??? This was my first time taking this test so I was clueless as to how the process really worked but I’d pictured, I don’t know, getting a letter with some lab results first, or maybe even just a Post-It note scrawled with “U FORMED BABBY OK.” Instead they came at me with the big spoiler and not even a single alert.

The beau was traveling for work and wouldn’t be home until the following night. In the meantime I was sitting on some white-hot information. I could find out if it was a boy or girl now, like right this second, and the allure of that knowledge was dizzying. I let myself imagine sneaking a look and then feigning surprise when the beau came home. Oh! A ___! Wow! Never woulda guessed! What would really happen in that scenario is that I’d mutely gaze at him with a scrunchy guilt face until I confessed. So for the next 24 hours, the secret stayed safe in the drawer.

The thing is, though, I am good about delaying gratification. Either that or I am obnoxiously bad about delaying gratification. It took me until two days after Christmas to finish opening some of my gifts, so I’m voting obnoxiously bad. I guess I like waiting until the moment feels right to enjoy something. So the next night, when the beau was home and the kid was in bed and he suggested we open the letter and find out, I looked at him like he’d lost his goddamn mind. Right now? Are you kidding? But we’re just standing here in the kitchen in our pajamas! So? was his rejoinder. So?? There’s nothing special about (gestures wildly at entire life) this!

What exactly constitutes a special way of finding out which sex organs your kid has? I didn’t know. I didn’t need or want a confetti cannon or a horny Santana guitar solo. But this was the last time I was ever doing this, at least I hoped so anyway. I hadn’t done any of the standard memory markers during my pregnancy with Vera — no fun announcement, no themed party, no maternity photos. I didn’t even use a damn pregnancy tracker app. And there’s a point to which not engaging in stuff is fine, and a point to which you start to wonder if being too cool for baby school is making you miss out. This was our last chance to find out our baby’s sex, and it seemed disingenuous to not even try to elevate the event beyond the level of, say, casual weeknight opening of bills. 

So the envelope sat in the drawer for another 24 hours while I thought about how to do this thing. I had a friend who’d gone out to lunch with her spouse, handed the results to their server, and asked to have one dessert brought out if it was a boy and another if it was a girl. I thought this was sweet and simple and genuine, but we obviously couldn’t copy it because it was theirs. So I thought some more. We could… go out to eat and… open… the envelope… in the restaurant? Uh. Why don’t we just have dinner at home and open some wine or something? the beau asked. Buh-buh-but that’s what we do to celebrate EVERYTHING, I said. Shouldn’t this be DIFFERENT? 

Okay, I’m all for making something special, but I was starting to make perfect the enemy of good. So the following night — yes, three whole days after I’d first received the letter, making me the Guinness World Records holder for obnoxiousness — I agreed to cook some kind of “treat” dinner neither of us can even remember now (it was probably boxed macaroni and cheese) and open a mini bottle of champagne which had enjoyed a previous life as a stocking stuffer. After we were done eating I said, OK, let’s close our eyes and I’ll open the letter, and then I’ll count to three and we’ll open our eyes and look. OK, the beau agreed.

One, two, three. BOY, I said. Ahh, the beau said. I set the letter down on the coffee table and we both stared at it. The “y” in boy was shaky, like someone had started writing a “g” and then thought better of it and carefully drew over it with a loopy tail. It’s a bog?

It was utterly imperfect and unremarkable.

Of course I’m saving it forever.

What even happened since my last post? Two, three, seven things, even. Possibly 19. Let me recap in the form of numerous bullet points:

• After the miscarriage in early May, I decided to “try” again right away, mainly because I was fresh off the Pregnant Boat and it didn’t seem like too much of an imposition to have to turn around and get right back on.
• When this single attempt didn’t pan out, I instead spun on my heels and sprinted full speed away from the boat. Fuck that boat, I thought. My universe of potential had suddenly, violently expanded. June was upon us, the artisan mixologists were putting all kinds of fruit in all kinds of cocktails, and I decided that now was time to seize the season by the sweaty old uniboob. I was going to fill in summer’s brows and give it a nice smokey eye. I was going to holler at summer out of the window of a moving car. I was going to throw summer, laughing, into a clear mountain lake. Summer was going the jewel in my crown, the stars in my hair, the rose petals on my circle bed beneath a ceiling mirror. Summer was going to be mine.
• RECORD SCRATCH SOUND EFFECT, a new job falls into my lap. Like literally, I glance down and screech because HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT. Lest you be led to think I somehow earned this employment opportunity on skill and merit, let me explain that I had been catching up with an old friend when I offhandedly mentioned my dissatisfaction with my work and she offhandedly mentioned she was looking to fill a design contractor position. Suddenly, I was working for her instead. What I gained in pay I also gained in more hours, and on top of these new hours I was also working a side hustle plus a massive, unpaid volunteer project. Days, nights, and weekends were lived out inside the blue-white glow of my computer screen. What was that bit about making summer mine again?
• Succulent summer roses faded into desiccated despair. All was ashes, all was dust. Black clouds billowed ceaselessly overhead and the wind howled a funeral dirge. HGTV played only the dumbest home renovation shows with the most annoying hosts. All of the sparkling water was flat.
• Then the election happened!
• Lol wait I am getting way ahead of myself but that joke setup was just, like, too powerful for me to resist!!
• In July I hit pause on the work-a-thon and jetted to Portland, Oregon, for six days, during which time Loretta Lynn and Jack White failed YET AGAIN to greet us at the airport with pitchers of sloe gin fizz. I mean. It was cooler than I’d packed for because even though I know Portland’s ways I am a weather optimist, plus the whole trip was spent in a rental house with my in-laws, which probably says enough about how that trip went without going into any further detail.

Is this a Van Lear Rose?

• In mid-August I did a quick Friday morning – Sunday night trip to Lawrence, Kansas to visit a dear old friend. I spent much of the trip working on various projects on my laptop, but this annoyance almost didn’t matter because it was my first trip alone without my kid. For three days I got to experience a decadent abundance of time the likes of which I had not seen since late 2014. No one wanted anyone from me except to know what time I desired to head to brunch. It was so beautiful that the memory sometimes brings a tear to my eye.
• In mid-September the beau and I took a weekend jaunt to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is a quaint name for a town that smells like farts. Still, a fine time was had by all, even by our toddler who didn’t quite grasp the eating-out-at-restaurants concept and got splutteringly mad every time a server brought a plate or took one away.
• At the very end of September, still generally drowning in work, I turned in my very last assignment for my side job just in time to go to…
• CALIFORNIA, an old home and native-ish land, a beautiful place where they just let fruit grow on trees, and there are flowers, and there is an ocean? Like right there. The beau was back in Santa Barbara for his annual management conference and I tagged along for the excuse to see old friends. And at first it was fantastic! For a whole weekend I was filled with a renewed sense of wonder and love, and then we moved into the hotel where the conference was held and I realized just how misguided it was to try to stay for five days in the same room as your toddler while your partner is away for extended periods of the day and night. There I was in a gorgeous, warm, familiar city, playing full-time nanny to someone who had recently decided she didn’t want to walk anywhere (hi, I figured out like two weeks later that she didn’t want to walk because her shoes were too small, go me). Uh. I mean, it was challenging and whatnot and I definitely sort of unfairly yell-cried at the beau at least one of the nights, but I’d definitely do it again under circumstances which included at least two separate rooms and, I don’t know, a kitchen where I could actually prepare food and wash things in a non-bathroom sink. Also, someone else to be the nanny.
• Shortly after our trip ended my side project also ended, and with this plus my old side job gone I finally, finally, had enough time to sit down, catch my breath, and consider how I wanted to go about enjoying the rest of my life.
• Then I took a positive pregnancy test, which makes me two for four on getting back from a trip to California and finding out I was pregnant!
• Why am I telling you this now, right here, in a rando bullet point in this unasked-for life update? Because, friends, I have been writing this post off and on since, like, August, and it kept evolving as time went on, and after I found out I was faced with trying to decide between scrapping this whole post and writing a new one, or somehow finishing this one without mentioning pregnancy and then writing a whole other post about it, and neither of those options seemed appealing, so right here it remains. Not trying to be all surprise-I-buried-the-lede-y, I am merely lazy.
• What else happened? Three weeks after I peed on a stick the Very Bad Day occurred, and everything went black for me. One positive effect, I suppose, is that I was moved to political action for one of the first times of my life, but then I got too involved and upset and had to pull back, and then I felt guilty for pulling back, and I got too involved and upset again, and the moral of the story here is that I have been wholly unable to find some sort of middle ground between remaining an informed, active, and responsible citizen and not losing my goddamned mind over the terribleness of the world. It’s either all or nothing, so far! If anyone has any tips on how to hit the drama and skip the trauma, holler at me.
• Then for kicks I turned 36, which officially makes me closer to 40 than 30 and I remain more creeped out by the passage of time than I’d care to admit. For my birthday I ate some pierogies and the beau took me to see a hockey game, which was fun but my team ended up losing 6-3 in the final period, which was a real bummer because I felt like, after a long series of little to big losses, I could have really used my guy to win for once. Sadly, even at 36 you don’t get to influence outcomes outside your own sphere! Maybe 37 is the year of omnipotence; I’ll report back.
• Right around the beginning of December I finally went to my first doctor’s appointment, which occurred approximately seven months after I took the pee stick test. I’m joking but like, IT FEELS LIKE IT. You wait so long, suspended in this amber of not being sure, and to a degree you take that with you the whole journey, but most of the uncertainty is weighted in those first several weeks. I did elect to wait a bit longer for my first appointment so I could bundle it with my DNA testing, which was recommended since I am over 35 and thus qualify as a “geriatric” pregnancy. I’m pushing 80, fertility-wise. These eggs are eating dinner at 4pm and arguing over the daily crossword before falling asleep in their armchairs to reruns of M*A*S*H. Anyway, everything checked out. Now I just have to wait another five months until my second appointment. I’m due in June of 2020!
• Two weeks after my birthday my kid turned two, which was really low-key in the sense that I did nothing because the beau was out of town for work. We “celebrated” instead on the weekend after he got back by taking her to bike around a frigid lake until she cried, and then attempting to serve her a piece of carrot cake, which she was Not Into. And I was like: my good woman, you will have to get used to people serving you seasonal desserts for your big day, this is just the light burden we late fall people bear. I mean, my own mother made me a pumpkin spice cake for my birthday! YOU DON’T GET A SAY IN THIS, EVERYTHING MUST BE HARVEST-RELATED.
• And finally, next came the holidays, which outside of the fact that I kept looking forward to to the next event (decorating cookies, eating, opening gifts, eating again) and then getting mildly irritated about the event and wishing for it to be over, was generally pleasant enough and unremarkable enough to get the distinction of being called “totally fine.” So, a tally in the win column, finally? This Christmas also marked the time my kid finally got into the concept of opening presents, and now every time we get a delivery she demands that I go get a knife and we find out what’s inside the box immediately. She also really got into our holiday lights and since we still have them up, each morning the first demand on her lengthy Scroll of Demands is that we turn them on. Then the beau took off the week between Christmas and New Year’s and while I put in a few hours of work each day I also got a lot of menial household to-do list shit done, which felt pretty good. So I guess what I’m trying to say here in way too many words is that we got to cap a mostly crap year in completely passable manner and yeah, in comparison to everything that’s been going on, that feels like a towering Rocky-style triumph over here.

Okay that finally brings me up to speed but speaking of triumphs, I have one last thing. Since lately I can’t get my shit together on this blog to crank out more than one post every half year, I’m going to try doing a TinyLetter, which is a “post” that gets sent directly to your email inbox of choice. I’m hoping this will free me up to write more breezy, current, journal-style entries more often, instead of pouring my occasional late-night energies into meticulously crafting essays about things that happened months ago. I’d still like to publish bigger, thinkier stuff here but I’m hoping this will just get me back into writing, with which I’ve completely lost touch due to life obligations. I can’t and shan’t promise good writing, but at this point I just need something, man.

I don’t have a clear idea of what shape this TinyLetter endeavor will ultimately take, but I do know that initially probably 90% will be about pregnancy and baby stuff, which not everyone is into but is super on my mind right now, not sure why. In other words: I get it if you don’t want to follow along.

I aim to send the first letter out this week or next. Here’s the link if you want to sign up.

Thanks for hanging in with me on this non-post, guys, and I hope your 2016 wasn’t a total garbage fire. See you around internet town?