Searching for Softness

I walked the dog through the falling snow last night. The neighborhood was quiet. Cars slowly shuffled over the thick, choppy slush that lined the streets. The sidewalks, yet to be shoveled, were coated in fresh snow and I laughed like a delighted child as my boots left prints in my wake. It was that kind of soft, lovely snow that somehow feels like a blanket despite the cold.

Later in the night, I awoke again and again to the cries of a baby who is likely teething, or possibly going through separation anxiety, or is simply doing that thing that babies do sometimes where their needs are mysterious and unknowable, and so deeply frustrating. I want to tell you I handled it beautifully. Sighed lightly as I slipped out of the covers and into the cold air of my bedroom. Gently padded up the stairs and lifted him from his crib and into my arms with a soft shushing, my body warm and waiting to give him my love. But instead, I threw back the covers and screamed fuck as loud as I could into the mattress and beat my fists like a child in the throes of a tantrum. I clomped upstairs, threw open his bedroom door, and said “Oh will you please shut up,” as I pulled him from his crib. But the weight of his body against mine calmed me, the soft collapse of his head against my shoulder, the small, sad shudder of his breath against my chest.

Outside the snow kept falling, steady and quiet, covering footprints and erasing the evidence of the evening. In the dark bedroom, I sang softly, one song after another until his eyes closed and his breathing steadied, and when he awoke and cried out when I set him back in his crib, I lifted him and sang again, barely a whisper. We fell asleep together on the futon in his room, my body curled around his so that he couldn’t flip over into the soft cushion of the mattress, couldn’t roll away. He was tucked against me and I kissed the fine hairs on his head, the soft skin of his cheeks. Is this what feels like to be bears, I wondered. Bodies pressed together, sharing their warmth, resting. In his sleep, his hand found mine and wrapped itself around my finger as if to say closer, closer. I need more of you. I had to remind myself that I could give it. I can give away all of myself and then take it back in the morning, return to my own body the way one returns home—coming in from the cold, shaking the snow from their boots and their hair, letting the warmth slowly return to their cheeks and limbs.

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January is an odd month. I find it both invigorating and deeply exhausting. The end of the holiday season and the start of a new year tend to revive me. I get a creative surge in cold weather as if my whole system has been shocked and reset. I imagine it is not unlike what some people feel when they plunge themselves into freezing cold water. I’ll stick with just stepping out onto my porch and breathing in the cold air, but I think I understand the impulse at least. But while the colder temperature refreshes me, the accumulation of gray days drags me down. Without enough sunlight, I become melancholy and morose. So I am full of creative energy, but everything I create has an edge of darkness, a disturbing despairing quality that I too easily spiral down into. This is all crap, I tell myself, and then I force myself to keep working on it as if to punish myself instead of simply moving on to the next thing. I have to remind myself to be soft, gentle with my own emotions. To hold myself the way I hold the baby, whisper reassurances, let the night fold over me, and trust that morning will come.

There are many things that I would like to do this year. I have projects that I’m feeling energized to complete and others that I’m excited to start. I began this month by doing two poetry readings and launching my first writing workshop and it was all great fun. I can’t wait to do more. I want to get back to running regularly. I want to stretch more often because my body is so angry at me for neglecting this necessary bit of care. I want to read more and try out some new writing practices. I want to more fully and intentionally bask in the joy and beauty of my two little boys. I want to more easily give in to my desire to only choose the work and activities that fill me up. I want to be better about staying in touch with my friends. But for now, I am letting January be January. I am letting this week where the ground is covered in snow and the baby needs more comfort than usual slow me down and soften me. I am giving myself over to it like a bear who knows when it is time to pull back, to settle, to embrace a period of rest.

With A Little Luck

I have been thinking about luck lately.

The baby has learned how to roll and now insists on sleeping on his belly. Every night I am torn between rolling him back over to ease my anxiety that he’ll suffocate himself against the barely-there bassinet mattress, or leaving him be so that we all can enjoy a bit of sleep.

In some ways, those first few weeks where babies are wrinkly blobs who can’t do anything feel easier than the period when they start to become more active and slowly turn into their own worst enemies. I now remember this stage with my firstborn, where you have to take it on faith that they’ll make it through. My mother reminds me that these fears are normal and the important thing is not to dwell on them, and she’s right, of course. But I find myself repeatedly reminded that loving someone means accepting the risk that one day they may suddenly be gone from your life. It’s the sudden part that scares me, how things can go wrong without any warning. How it’s a million small miracles that keep us here year after year.

So much in life comes down to luck.

When my son first heard the word gravity, he asked me to explain what it meant and I told him gravity is what keeps us on the ground, but he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know where it was. He wanted me to show it to him. You can’t see it, I told him. You know it’s there because you’re not floating away.

I know I’m lucky because I haven’t had bad luck.

When you usher a new person into the world, you have to hope it works out, that they rise to meet the challenges the world throws at them. That the world rises to meet the challenge of keeping them safe. I want someone to tell me that my children will be safe forever. I want to know for certain that we’ll all make it through the day—none of the behemoth pickup trucks driving too aggressively on the highway will smash into our car; no one will slip on the stairs and hit their head in the wrong spot; everyone will fall asleep and wake up again in the morning just like they’re supposed to. I took my son to see Willy Wonka last weekend and as we slid into our seats for what was only his second time in a movie theater ever and my first since the summer of 2019, I thought to myself, I hope nobody comes in and shoots up this place. I hope we make it out of here alive. You never know for sure in this country.

My mother has a story about how she was gifted a set of crystal glassware for her bridal shower. This was before registries. She is not a crystal person. She was tormented by this gift and refused to use it for fear of breaking it. During one of my parents’ many moves, the box of crystal was dropped, everything shattered and my mother felt an instant sense of relief. The thing she feared would happen had happened and she could stop worrying about it. The tyranny of the crystal had ended. I felt a similar way when my son fell off the monkey bars and broke his arm. I could stop worrying about when this day would come because now it was here and we could just deal with the crisis. I am good in a crisis, calm and collected, quick to respond. But I will drive myself to the point of insanity in anticipation of a crisis. Anyone who has ever been on a flight with me owes me their gratitude because I’m quite certain it’s my unrelenting white-knuckle worry that keeps the planes in the sky.

Shortly after my friend died from cancer at a pretty young age, especially for the type of cancer she had, I was driving to work when NPR was interviewing a physician from Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was describing the findings of their latest cancer research. The gist was, it’s all random. There are risk factors for sure, but within those groups, who gets cancer and who doesn’t appears to be entirely up to chance. I found this oddly comforting. She died because she had shitty luck. Not because of anything she did or didn’t do. Not because of some unknowable series of factors that she never figured out how to control. It was freeing, in a way, like permission to take the endless hours I spent fixating on how to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, and use that time for something else, something better. Nothing I do will ever guarantee that everything will be okay.

The baby spent a day in the NICU when he was born because he came out too quickly and wasn’t breathing properly. My son has a scar on his elbow from the surgery he needed after his bones separated when he hit the ground. There is a space inside me where I house all my grief, a little cottage I visit when I am feeling low and want to sit with that emotion for a while. Like Hansel and Gretel, I leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back out: my friend’s hair, swept back from her face and held in place by a butterfly clip that reminds me of childhood; my husband rattling off a dozen facts about some baseball player most people have never even heard of; my niece smiling in a way that looks so much like my sister when she was that age that I feel like I’ve been transported back in time; my son kissing his baby brother every night before bed. There are so many moments of beauty in my life. So many little bits of good luck that keep me anchored to the ground.

When the baby sleeps on his belly he looks cozy and comfortable. So I leave him be and hope for the best.

Slow Summers

My dad was a college professor and I recently learned that he taught classes every summer when I was growing up. I’m sure I was aware of this at the time and it is just one of many things that has faded from my memory, but it helps explain why the summers of my youth had an especially languid, unstructured quality. We would take one family vacation—a few hours in the car and a couple of days at the beach in Corpus Christi or Port Aransas. The hotels were set back from the water behind big dunes and each one had a little station where you stopped to clean off any tar that had collected on your feet and body as you walked along the beach or swam in the Gulf. The waves felt strong and massive against my small frame, the water opaque and murky. The first time I went into the ocean, I got stung by a jellyfish that was so large its tentacles wrapped around my entire body. I had stingy welts all up and down my front and back and I remember my mother making a paste with meat tenderizer and rubbing it all over me. It took me a while before I was willing to go back into the water again.

These trips are my main memories of summer, the rest is a soupy, humid mix of time spent outdoors. We rode bikes, we played soccer. We didn’t climb trees because all the trees were mesquite and covered in thorns. I befriended anyone who had a backyard pool, or a giant trampoline. When we moved from San Antonio to the small town of Seguin where our house backed up to a lazy stretch of the Guadalupe River, we barely went anywhere and my siblings and I spent our days swimming and splashing and hucking black walnut shells at each other as we took turns jumping off the dock, trying to peg the other person in the back before they disappeared under water.

I’m sure my mother was keeping an eye on us, but I’m also not entirely sure because in my memories it’s just the three of us—my brother, my sister, and me—keeping each other entertained. Or it’s me off with my friends, going from one house to the next in the neighborhood, knowing I just needed to be home in time for dinner.

I don’t really like summer. It’s too hot and there are too many mosquitoes and not enough mosquito repellant in the world to keep them off of me. If you want to ensure that you’re never bitten by mosquitoes, come sit next to me because they all swarm toward my apparently delicious blood and leave everyone else in my vicinity alone. I don’t like to be sticky. I don’t like to be sunburned. I don’t like the way everyone wants to socialize by hanging together outside somewhere—street festivals, barbecues, long hours at the pool, or the beach. Outside is where it’s hot and sticky. Outside is where the mosquitoes plot my demise. I get depressed in the summer the way other people get depressed in the winter. I hate the forced excitement of it all (Wooo! Summer!) the way other people hate the forced merriment of the holiday season. Every day we must be doing something. Every day we must be making the most of this time when there’s no school and fewer obligations. This is the season for creating lasting memories for our children and ourselves. I would prefer to sit on my couch in my air-conditioned living room reading a book and feeling smug about how I’m avoiding skin cancer. I just want to eat tomatoes, write my little stories and not talk to anyone until October when the air starts to cool and I’m not feeling as grumpy anymore.

But this is the first true summer break of my son’s life. He is finished with kindergarten, looking forward to first grade, and is genuinely, heartwarmingly pumped about summer. Ask him his favorite thing about this season and he’ll say that you get to eat ice cream, even though there’s an ice cream shop one block from his school and we stopped there nearly every Friday on our walk home, even in January when our lips turned blue and our bodies shivered while we ate our cones. Ice cream is a year-round confection, I don’t care what anybody says. He wants to fill his days with nonstop play. He wants to make memories. He wants me to be a part of it.

I want to be like I remember my mother being: a background presence, a supporting character. I can picture her bright red lipstick, her tan skin, a coral-colored bathing suit. I can hear the sound of her laughing out on the back deck. I can see my dad’s sweat-soaked t-shirt after a run, his straw hat, his hands gesticulating wildly as he tells a story while driving us all to the beach. I should ask them if they remember what a summer with small kids feels like. Did my mom experience a hot irritation every time she had to pack a pool bag for three kids? Did my dad feel overwhelmed when he arrived home at the end of a day of teaching and we swarmed him like hungry mosquitoes, wired from the heat and the excitement of summertime? Were they more a part of my summer experience than I recall them being? Memory has a way of enlarging the aperture of our lives, blurring everything that was not our immediate focus, and when you’re a kid, your immediate focus is always yourself.

I am trying to embrace this summer, my son’s first with the awareness of all that summer entails, and my last with a baby in the house. This time next year, the baby will be a red-cheeked, sweaty-haired toddler and the infant stage of my life will officially be over.

When my son watches tv, he has a habit of stripping all the cushions off the couch and leaving them littered across the living room floor. I joked with him last week that someday when he is grown up and has moved away for college, I will walk into the living room and realize that the couch cushions are always exactly where they should be and I will burst into tears because I miss him so much. It was a snide, silly way of reminding him to put the cushions back when he’s done, but there’s some truth to it too. My heart always aches a bit as one stage of my life closes. When my summers are entirely my own again, to sit inside and read, and joyfully turn down every social invitation should I so choose to, I know that part of me will miss these days of being asked to run through sprinklers and hold dripping popsicles for just a second while my son busies himself with something else.

In the first few days after school let out, we drove up to my parents’ house which sits at the top of a mountain in Western Maryland. Despite one day of rain, the weather was perfect. Cool mornings and evenings, a nice breeze during the days. We played baseball and board games. The baby rested on a blanket in the shade or was lulled to sleep in the swing that hangs from one of the giant maple trees in their yard. It was slow and easy, the way summer should be. My son’s knees were constantly caked with dirt, and his hair was glued to his forehead with sweat. This is how I want to remember him always, his face flushed pink, smiling. I’m curious how he will remember me someday, looking back on these years. I was there, I will tell him. I was always right there—blurred in the background, just out of focus, swatting away mosquitoes as I laughed at his boundless energy, his unbridled joy.

The Only Parenting Advice You'll Ever Need

I have a few friends and family members who are preparing to have their first babies, and since I just had my second baby and thus now obviously know everything there is to know about parenting, I thought I would offer up a few tips.

It is worth noting since we are in The Digital Era of Everyone Being Angry All the Time, I do not actually think I am a parenting expert. I am not a doctor, or a child therapist, or a Mormon with six kids and a million Instagram followers homesteading from my immaculate kitchen in a giant house purchased with my husband’s tech salary (this is the majority of Parenting Influencers, fyi). Apart from the very real and good advice that you shouldn’t pay attention to anything you see on Instagram about parenting, I am not actually attempting to offer advice, though I do think some of what I’ve written here is actionably helpful. I am mostly just joking, though. I will add, however, that you may find parenting to be more enjoyable if you can be lighthearted about it and not take yourself too seriously. That may be just general life advice actually.

And so with that, I give you The Only Parenting Advice You’ll Ever Need. Go forth and have zero problems parenting. You’re welcome.

Memorize the names of every Republican member of Congress.

Stick with me here. One day you will be out somewhere and your baby will start screaming. (Godspeed if this happens to you on an airplane. Try not to wish for the entire plane to drop out of the sky and plummet to the ground in a fiery crash just so you can escape your misery.) It will feel awful—overwhelming and embarrassing. Your pulse will race and you’ll start to sweat and everyone will look at you like at some point a little over nine months ago you decided to have a baby specifically so that you could bring it out in public and make it scream so that everyone around you would be disrupted and annoyed. You will try many things, everything you can think of, to get your baby to stop screaming and none of it will work. At this moment, take a deep breath, and start reciting the names of every Republican member of Congress. I know you feel like an asshole right now. Everybody around you is looking at you like you are an asshole. They’re looking at your baby like your baby is an asshole. But trust me, every single Republican member of Congress is a way bigger asshole than you are. So calmly tick off the names from this long list of gigantic assholes in your head while you gather up your stuff, pay your bill, and make your escape. If you want to save yourself some time, just memorize the members from Texas. There are a bunch of them and they’re all doing way more to ruin people’s lives than you and your screaming baby are.

Embrace the 90s dance party in your head.

Is it appropriate to sing “Too Close” by Next to soothe your crying baby in the middle of the night? No, it is not. Have I done it? Also no— seriously, it is not a good choice for a lullaby—but I’ve come close. It grows tiresome to sing the same songs over and over again, and you’ll be surprised to find what lyrics your mind draws a blank on and which ones come roaring back to you at three in the morning when you feel almost drunk from sleeplessness. Singing a baby to sleep is so romantic in theory and so painfully tedious and frustrating in reality. When you look down after one song and your baby’s eyes are closed, their lips gently parted and they are sleeping peacefully, it is lovely and becomes a cherished memory. When you look down after a dozen songs and their eyes are still wide open and your body is weak from swaying and bouncing, it is enraging and you wonder if a person has ever willed herself into spontaneous combustion. It helps to incorporate a little variety into your nightly karaoke. My new thing with Baby Number 2 is that I put my earphones in and sing along to a playlist I’ve created and dance around the room until he starts to nod off. This offers the bonus of muffling his cries which helps keep my nerves from getting too jangled as I belt out “I’ll Make Love To You” by Boys II Men. (Just kidding. This is also a very bad choice for a lullaby.)

Repeat after me: it’s only 10 minutes. 

Imagine this: you are driving in your car and are only ten minutes from home when the baby starts crying in the backseat, so you pull over to the side of the road, get out of the car, pull the baby out of their car seat and proceed to rock and sway the baby until they settle. Then you put them back in their car seat, buckle them in tight, get back behind the wheel, and get going again only for them to start crying again two minutes later. Now you are eight minutes from home and pulled over on the side of the road shushing and rocking and settling a baby. Back into your seats, back out again three minutes later. And so on and so on until you might as well just call it a night and sleep in your car because you’re never making it home at this rate.

No one would ever do that. You would simply say, we are only ten minutes from home, this baby is safe, they can cry for ten minutes until we pull up to our house and it will be fine.

A little-known fact about parenting is that sometimes you have to poop even if your baby is crying. Sometimes you have to shower. Sometimes you need to eat for the first time that day. Sometimes you just need to get the fuck away from this needy little monster for a few minutes so that you can return a little calmer and more capable of handling whatever they’ve decided to throw your way. It’s okay for babies to cry. You can know this, you can fully believe this, and yet it can still be so hard to allow yourself a moment to do something else while your baby is crying. So imagine that instead of sitting on your couch texting, you’re driving in your car and only ten minutes from home. Put the baby down somewhere safe and take those ten minutes for yourself. It’s only ten minutes. They’ll be okay.

If you’re going to make other people uncomfortable, make them really uncomfortable.

My son’s kindergarten class lets out on the side of the school building and when the teacher opens the door at the end of the day and the students come streaming out to meet their parents, I like to point out which kids were breastfed and which ones took formula. It’s really obvious. You can definitely tell.

What I have learned about parenting is that no matter what you do, someone will inevitably think you’re doing it wrong. This is not advice about whether you should breastfeed, formula feed, or some combination of the two. I don’t care. No one should care (but boy do a lot of people really care!). Instead, this is just a heads up that when you are out in public feeding your baby, you will almost certainly at some point get nasty looks from strangers. For me, this has happened when breastfeeding—though I imagine if you were bottle feeding your kid in public you might get looks from people who think you should be breastfeeding instead—and the first couple of times, it was so humiliating that it brought me to tears. My first son ran hot and he would kick and fidget and struggle to latch on if I had any kind of cover over him, so if I wanted to be out in the world and needed to feed my baby, I had no choice but to be out in the world, breasts exposed for all to see. It’s a pretty vulnerable position to be in when you’re not used to it. But once I got used to it, I decided to turn my discomfort back onto the people who were making me uncomfortable and it was glorious.

I was once out to lunch with a friend and the baby started crying so I nursed him right there at the table while I continued to eat french fries. A guy a couple of tables away from us was looking at me with disgust, so I stared back at him, not with anger, but with a grinch-like grin spread across my face, my eyes unblinking. He squirmed and looked away, but when he looked back, there I was, still staring at him, my face unchanged. After a couple of minutes, he ended up asking for a check and packed what was left of his food into a carryout container, and left. I consider this my life’s greatest achievement.

It’s worth noting: the only thing people are more judgmental about than how you feed your baby is whether or not you’ve put them in a coat for the three-second walk from your car to the entrance of the grocery store. It’s wild. Do old ladies at grocery stores have some kind of bloodhound-like ability to catch the scent of a child without a coat? And they always speak directly to the baby—"You must be freezing. You need a coat.”—as if the baby will confirm that you are indeed a negligent mother. I don’t have a good retort for this, so I usually just roll my eyes, but something along the lines of “Actually I procreated with a penguin, so this baby doesn’t really get cold,” is probably off-color enough to make most people uncomfortable.

When you flip a coin and it lands on tails, heads hasn’t disappeared. 

There will likely come a moment when you feel like you hate your baby. I’m not talking about just general frustration and exasperation at how your baby is acting, but a deep sense of resentment and anger for how you’ve turned your life upside and still the baby refuses to be satisfied. It’s not rational, but I think it’s okay. You’re sleep deprived. Your hormones are all over the place. Imagine if you welcomed a stranger into your home and they kept you up all night, demanded that you feed them every two hours, and yelled at you repeatedly while doing little else besides pooping. You’d be like, man, fuck this person, why did I invite them here. Sanctimonious moms on the Internet will tell you that you should never say you hate your baby (you hate what your baby is doing, not who they are, I recall reading once), but I tend to find that trying to stifle or amend your feelings for some invisible audience is not particularly helpful to your postpartum mental health. So go ahead and let yourself acknowledge those feelings of hatred. It doesn’t mean that you don’t also love your baby, or that you won’t take care of them—flip the coin again a few minutes later and it will just as likely land heads up—all it means is that this moment is hard, and that you should ask for some extra help and a little relief if you can get it.

Another it’s worth noting for you: you may not feel like you hate your baby, but you may not feel like you love them right away either. That’s okay too. When you’re hugely pregnant and your body aches and you can’t sleep and you’re anxious about what labor and birth will be like, everyone will tell you how the moment you hold your baby in your arms, it will all feel worth it. But that is not always true. How you feel after your baby is born comes down more to how much of which chemicals your brain releases and in what order than anything else. Again, this person is a stranger to you. It may take a little time to feel a sense of love. Your role to start is all about survival. Your survival and the baby’s survival. If you’re focused on that, you’re doing fine.

Do your best to keep things in perspective. 

I don’t mean the days are long but the years are short perspective. Or this too shall pass. Though, irritating as they are, both those sentiments are true.

Have you ever had that dream where you’re in college and it’s finals period when you suddenly discover that this whole time you’ve been enrolled in a class without knowing it and now you have to cram an entire semester’s worth of knowledge in order to ace the final and avoid failing the class? (Why do I still have this dream so often?)

I think that must be what it’s like to be a baby. They have to learn so much in that first year. Every couple of weeks they’re learning how to do a totally new thing. It’s like a nonstop finals period for a bunch of classes they didn’t even know they signed up for. What a nightmare!

When my son was a toddler, whenever he would get upset about something small I would say to him, “Oh no, does this feel like a tragedy?” as a way to remind myself that what to me was a small little nothing thing was a really big deal to him. Once he learned to talk, he would hiccup through his tears, “I’m having a tragedy.” It was very cute.

Now, when the baby is especially cranky while going through a developmental leap, I’ll say to him “Oh no! Did you forget to withdraw from Art History?”

When all else fails, turn your frustration into a silly song. 

no one poops as much as you

you poop more than you sleep

I’m tired of cleaning up your poo

you stinky little creep

I sang this to my baby yesterday and he smiled. My album of children’s songs drops later this year.

Love and Marriage

Please note that the following contains what is probably way too much information about postpartum vaginas.

After you have a baby, you get one follow-up appointment with your doctor, usually around six weeks postpartum. This appointment masquerades as a general checkup of your postpartum health—is everything healing, how is your mood, do you have any questions or concerns about breastfeeding—but really the purpose is for the doctor to let you know if you’re ready to have sex again. 

When my first son was born, I had my postpartum appointment at four weeks because I was considered high risk for postpartum depression and they wanted me to come in earlier than usual for screening (the appointment was supposed to be only two weeks postpartum, but the practice didn’t have any appointments available until four weeks after I gave birth. This is the nature of American healthcare). I was still having a lot of physical discomfort at the time of the appointment. I had torn during delivery and kept getting a searing pain in my vagina whenever I walked. It turned out that whoever had stitched me up did a bum job of it and a bit of the internal tissue from the wall of my vagina was poking out through the stitches. The midwife at my follow-up explained that the internal layers of tissue have more nerve endings than the more external ones, so every time I moved this bit of nerve-heavy tissue was getting rubbed and that’s what was causing the pain. “No biggie,” she said (I remember her exact intonation even six years later—no biggie!), it could easily be fixed by putting a bit of silver nitrate on the spot to cauterize the tissue and deaden the nerves. She warned me that it would feel uncomfortable when she applied the silver nitrate—hurt like hell would have been a more accurate description—but that after that, I’d be good as new. When she was all done burning off a portion of my vaginal wall, she let me know that as long as there wasn’t anything else that was bothering me, I was all set to start having sex again.

This time around, I had my postpartum visit at six weeks. I was supposed to go in during my first week postpartum to get my blood pressure checked because I’d had high blood pressure readings toward the end of my pregnancy. And I was supposed to go in again at two weeks postpartum because I was still high risk for postpartum depression. The hospital staff told me that someone from scheduling would contact me to set up these appointments, but that never happened, so I didn’t go. Again, this is the nature of American healthcare. Since it was my responsibility to schedule the six-week follow-up, that was the only appointment I attended. After a cursory round of how are you, how’s the baby, any concerns, and a few uncomfortable minutes of rooting around inside my vagina to make sure everything looked okay, the doctor asked me if I had started having sex again yet. I laughed and said no, and she cheerily informed me that I was good to start doing so at any time. “What is your plan for birth control?” she asked and I replied, “breastfeeding.” She reminded me that you can get pregnant while breastfeeding, and I clarified, “Oh sorry, no, I mean abstinence because I’m breastfeeding.” Abstinence because I have a baby pressed against my body nearly every hour of the day. Abstinence because when I’m not holding the baby, I’m doing my best to spend that time with my six-year-old, hearing about his school day, playing games, reading books, letting his warm, sweaty, dirty-from-recess body press against mine. Abstinence because I’m often covered in someone else’s snot or spit-up. Abstinence because I have one breast that keeps getting engorged in a way that feels like a cartoon balloon slowly filling beyond capacity and I’m sure that at any moment it will burst and spray milk everywhere. Abstinence because I still pee myself a little bit if I move too quickly or sneeze too hard. Abstinence because at this moment, only two months after birthing a human that grew inside of me for nine months, I have zero sexual needs of my own and I couldn’t possibly give less of a fuck about the sexual needs of my husband. 

She wrote “condoms” in my chart and suggested we could follow up in a few weeks to discuss other methods. 

I do not expect to hear from her. You know, because of the nature of American healthcare. 

* * *

My husband and I are celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary this week. That’s one year less than my age when we started dating. I’ll admit it’s a bit crazy to fall in love with someone at 16 and then remain in love with them for over two decades. We should be one of those couples that are disproportionately represented in divorce statistics, a precautionary tale about getting married too young. There’s a writer whose work I enjoy and respect very much who is adamant that no one should get married before the age of 30. She argues that your twenties are for finding yourself, and no one should get married before they have discovered who they are. It’s a sentiment I’ve seen repeated elsewhere, and I guess it makes sense, but only if you marry someone who isn’t interested in seeing the ways you change and grow as you age, or if you believe the Self is a fixed point that can be reached rather than a complex organism that is constantly changing and adapting throughout your life. 

I have a very good marriage. I don’t say that to brag (okay, maybe I’m bragging a little), but rather to note that much of my ability to manage my depression over the years, to engage in creative pursuits, and deal with the ups and downs of attempting to build a writing career, to live a life that leaves me feeling happy and fulfilled can be attributed to this successful and supportive partnership. My husband is the first reader of all my work. He is gentle but honest in his critiques. He helpfully pushes back against my negativity and woe-is-me vibes when things aren’t going well. He genuinely wants to see me succeed and fully believes that I can. He wants me to be happy. It’s nice. 

I recently read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, (poet, not actress) Maggie Smith’s memoir about the dissolution of her marriage and the aftermath of her divorce. It was really good. I highly recommend it. Though her marriage ended ostensibly because of her husband’s affair, she reflects on other moments that in hindsight feel like warning signs. She acknowledges that though the affair was the final nail, she could point to a variety of reasons for why her marriage failed, most notably, her husband’s response to her work. You can read excerpts from the book about this topic in an essay she wrote for The Cut. I found these sections of the book to be truly infuriating. 

“Did my children see their father’s job as more “real” than mine because it happened outside the home, and because despite my work, I was the primary caregiver? I felt that he treated my (writing) work like an interruption of my (domestic) work, and did they see that, too?

When my husband traveled for work, I looked forward to his return — especially if the kids were sick or I had multiple deadlines of my own — but the daily fires were ones I was used to putting out myself. On the other hand, when I would call home from a trip, I remember feeling like I was in trouble. I’d made his life more difficult, and I might pay for that with the silent treatment or a cold reception when I returned home. I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.”

Fuck that guy. 

People say marriage is hard, but I have not personally found this to be true. Life can be hard. Finding time to get everything that needs doing done can be hard. Meeting people and losing people, knowing which choices are the right ones to make, making the right choices even if it will upset other people, those things can be hard. And yes, it takes effort to find balance in a relationship. It takes an honest evaluation of each person’s roles and contributions, and open communication about what feels unfair in those imbalances, and what is a source of animosity toward your partner. One advantage of having been in a relationship with the same person from an early age is that there was no fixed Self for life’s changing demands to butt up against. Because we have grown directly alongside each other through very formative periods of our lives rather than coming together after we each had already separately determined who we were and what we wanted from life, we have been able to make those evaluations and adjustments without either of us feeling like we’re being asked to change too much or to fundamentally disrupt the identities we had formed on our own. My marriage feels easy and it is often what helps make the other harder stuff feel a little easier too. I recognize how fortunate I am to be able to say this. 

The other night, after a very long day where the baby was needier and fussier than he has been thus far, I sat on the couch in the dark and sobbed. I couldn’t do days like this, I told my husband, where from the moment the baby woke in the morning to when he finally went down for the night around 10, I was carrying him, or walking him, feeding him, again and again, all day long. Never mind that my husband had been the one to carry him during his evening witching hour several nights in a row, walking through the neighborhood without embarrassment while the baby screamed against his chest (something I can’t bring myself to do; I always have to get him settled at home before we set out, lest my neighbors think I’m a terrible nuisance or a mediocre mother. My husband doesn’t feel this pressure. The world sees him as a Good Dad just because he’s out there walking around with the baby at all. Talk about an imbalance!). We came up with a plan for my husband to take over a feeding in the evening, and for me to get an hour to myself to relax at the end of the day. I worried that I didn’t have enough milk stored up to cover a bottle a day, or that I won’t be able to pump enough to rebuild our supply and my husband gently pushed back, reminded me we could supplement with formula, that I didn’t have to feel guilty about doing that, didn’t have to push myself to be everything for the baby, for everyone, all the time. We had agreed from the start that with this baby, we would more equitably share the load because we knew what to expect, we are both more confident parents than we were the first time around, and because fuck the patriarchy, that’s why. But I was starting to let the weight of expectation and societal pressure creep in and take over my thinking. I could feel myself sinking beneath it. My husband pulled me back up. 

Like Maggie Smith, I am self-employed while my husband’s job has a steady, reliable income and provides our health insurance. It would be easy to see his work as work, and my work as a hobby, but he has never treated it that way. We have childcare even though I’m still on leave from my job specifically so that I can keep up with my writing. Over a decade ago, when I told him I wanted to become a Licensed Massage Therapist and start my own practice so that I could work part-time and devote the rest of my hours to writing, he told me I should do it, even though it probably wasn’t the best financial decision for us at the time. When I said I wanted to take over the basement room of our small row house to turn it into my massage studio for a few years, he told me to go for it and helped me pick out a soothing green color for the walls. Years later, after I wrote a picture book in my head while I was giving a massage one evening and missing out on whatever he and our toddler were up to that night, he told me yes, I should definitely look into getting a literary agent. “I don’t know what that entails,” he said, but he assured me that the book was good and it was the right move. Whenever I’ve wanted to devote more time to writing, we’ve worked together to find a way for me to do that. Whenever I’ve doubted that I could do something, or questioned my abilities and the usefulness of pushing forward with an idea, especially after seeing it fail again and again, he’s been the voice that is missing from my own mind that tells me to keep going. Never once has even suggested that maybe this whole writing thing isn’t worth the effort. Perhaps I would have developed this voice on my own and wouldn’t need him to play that role if I had waited to find myself before we got married. But just like if you have a partner who belittles you and downplays your accomplishments until that dialogue eventually becomes your inner monologue, if you have one who repeatedly raises you up, points out your strengths, and encourages you to keep going, eventually you start to do that for yourself as well. My husband sees my wholeness because he’s witnessed every new piece that has been added to the circle. Sometimes he sees me more clearly than I see myself, as if I were an impressionist painting, a bit of distance bringing the image into focus. 

We went out the other night to celebrate our anniversary. My parents stayed with the kids while we enjoyed an early dinner at a restaurant that we figured would be pretty empty at 5 pm on a Saturday. It was, but only briefly, as we learned when we asked for a table for two and were told that they were all booked up for the evening. We were welcome to find a seat at the bar. That worked fine for us and is actually what we usually prefer, a habit we’ve borrowed from my parents who pretty much always choose seats at a bar over a table and like to chat up bartenders. We ate lots of delicious food, had some wine and cocktails, reminisced about earlier moments in our marriage, and discussed which of our friends could be entrusted to perform a Weekend At Bernie’s-style farewell for my husband if he died unexpectedly. It goes without saying who we picked; they know who they are. 

My parents have been married for almost fifty years and they too got married young—my mother was still an undergrad. The way I remember them telling it, they were only planning to live together, but they couldn’t find anyone who would rent an apartment to an unmarried couple so they said, fuck it, let’s just do this. I wonder if at the time they could have predicted that “fuck it, let’s just do this” would become a sort of ethos for their lives. I admire the way you can see their friendship at the foundation of their relationship even all these years later. They still make each other laugh. They genuinely enjoy each other’s company. This is how I feel about my husband. At every point where our relationship reasonably would have ended, we chose to stay together for no reason other than we just like being together. We’ve never been ready for that enjoyment to end. Who knows what the future will bring, but I expect that fifteen years from now, I’ll still find him delightful at least most of the time. And I hope the same is true fifteen years after that, and so on and so on until we are two old, wrinkled people still making each other laugh. 

I have many, many pieces of writing about my husband that I could share and though I am tempted to say, here are fifteen of my favorites in honor of our anniversary, I will keep it to just a few, including this one, which is unpublished but part of a larger collection of poems that all share the title One Good Thing:

One Good Thing 

is my frozen toes sandwiched between your bare thighs. Though I suppose this is a matter of perspective. You snore from your right nostril only. A whistle like a train in the night. Or maybe that is actually a train I’m hearing? Either way, I wake you. Irritated. The first time you broke up with me your hair was dyed green. The first time I broke up with you I took it back ten seconds later. I needed to see what you looked like, crushed beneath the weight of my many failures. In the back of my mind there plays a song you used to sing that wasn’t written for me. I forget its name. I forget the many times I went out of my way to make you cry. If I die before you, tell our son every day how much I loved him. If you die before me, I’ll be up all night listening for a train that never comes.

* * *

And a few links to other pieces:

including my husband’s favorite, “Cardinals Mate for Life”

All The Places I’ve Called Home

If I Die

Slow and Steady

There’s a section of the Honolulu Marathon where you run along a highway. It is long and monotonous. You take the road out, away from the city, and into a little neighborhood where one kind soul has a big bowl of gummy bears and another has a carton of pretzels. You think to yourself, who would eat pretzels during a race, and the answer is you. The crunch revives you as you prepare to leave the neighborhood and head down the highway again, back toward the finish. If you are slow, like I am, the sun has risen by now, and it beats down as you trudge along miles 18 to 21, the part of any race where you start to feel delirious. You sing one foot, two foot, one foot, two foot, over and over again in your head just to keep yourself moving forward. 

My husband, who ran this race with me, and who had run it already four times before, warned me not to stop and walk during this stretch. If you stop running here, he told me, it will feel impossible to start again. So I keep running, slower than I can walk, but still technically running. My husband also warned me about the hill at mile 24. The race goes back up the side of Diamond Head Crater, and you have to do a full mile straight uphill on legs that have lost all structure. The crowd cheers you on. Drums play. But still, it’s brutal. I take it faster than any mile since the first half of the race just to have it over with. By the time I reach the finish line, I’m genuinely worried I’ve somehow shredded all the muscle fibers in my quadriceps. My thighs are chaffed and bleeding. Later, back at the hotel, I devour a giant bag of peanut M&Ms and sleep like I’ve slipped into a coma. 

* * *

Yesterday, I went for my first run since the baby was born. I remember this same run after the birth of my first child—the dissonance of a mind that feels ready and a body that is far from it. My legs were like bricks on that run. I had a sharp pain way up inside me like a hot cattle prod zapping somewhere behind my cervix with every step. It was unpleasant. This time went a little better. No sharp pain, just dull, heavy legs. It was nice to be moving my body in that way again, though. 

You hear a lot about getting your body back after pregnancy, which is an obnoxious idea that willfully ignores the many ways in which pregnancy and childbirth irreparably change your body. There is no returning to your pre-pregnancy state. That person doesn’t exist anymore. But I find the often-encountered vocal and vehement rejection of this idea to be equally tedious. What if the body you want back is one that can freely and easily run? That doesn’t feel like too much to ask, or like a shameful acquiescence to the patriarchy. I can’t speak to other types of fitness, but I find it deeply unfair that it takes so long to build up running fitness, and yet you lose it so quickly when you stop running. When you are not doing it well, running is such a vulnerable experience. You jiggle and you pour sweat and you slog along huffing and puffing and looking like you might collapse at any moment. I used to coach a Cancer to 5k program and I would remind the runners in the group that only they knew how far they had run when they were struggling. The person passing on the sidewalk, or speeding by in their car doesn’t know if you are on your first quarter mile, or if you’re suffering through mile 10. Nobody knows that I gave birth only seven weeks ago as I shuffle along, breaking every couple of minutes to walk and catch my breath. Nobody knows that my pre-pregnancy body was one of nearly constant pain and discomfort, plagued with endometriosis and adenomyosis. It is not a body I want back. 

My writing lately is a bit like my running—I am out of practice and taking it slow. It feels vulnerable and a little embarrassing. I have started a thing where I write down something I see in my immediate vicinity and go from there, writing whatever comes next without any editing. I do this for a full minute and see what comes from it. For the most part, it’s nonsensical garbage, but perhaps from the clutter, I’ll be able to extract something good, something useful. 

Here is a recent example of this practice:

the dog rests 

by the back door sun

soaked on a spring morning 

wet grass against

my soles my soul

is tired years marked with

streaks of silver

I tell my son

hair turns gray

when it dies and he wonders

does the head die

first before the rest of the body

like a flower whose petals

have shriveled on the green stalk

in the garden

I pinch the wilted blossom

between my fingers and

leave it to rot

* * *

I remember when I crossed the finish line of the Honolulu Marathon, I felt as though I had given everything I had to that race. I could not have run any faster. I could not have pushed myself any harder. But in the days that followed, I began to wonder: what if I had timed my water breaks differently? What if I had taken my shot block earlier or later than I did? What if I hadn’t eaten those pretzels? Did those pretzels dry me out and slow me down? If I ran it again, could I do better? It’s the what-ifs that keep runners running. 

My incredible friend, Judy has taken my chapbook Mother Nature and set it in motion. In a few weeks, she and a group of fellow dancers will perform movement pieces inspired by the poems and short prose in this collection. I was so proud of Mother Nature when I published it. Spanning three years of work, it captures my experience of pregnancy, early motherhood, and raising a toddler during the pandemic. I love all the pieces I included in it and I am especially proud of how I structured the collection. It is raw and honest and a great example of the kind of writing I want to do. And yet, when I went in to record myself reading the pieces that will be used in the performance, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would change now. Lines that I would go back and fix. Things I would add or remove. Emotions and experiences that in retrospect I might not share as openly. I can always make these changes if I use any of these pieces in future collections, but for this performance, what’s done is done. And really what good would it do to fiddle with those pieces now, three years removed from when the last one was written? I can’t go back and retroactively inhabit that experience in the same way I lived it at the time. I can’t be a first-time mother to a newborn again. I can’t access the specific desperation and worry I felt in the spring of 2020. I wrote what I wrote knowing in part that I needed to preserve how I felt at the time because I would never be able to precisely capture it again. I will never be able to get that body back. That race is over. I gave it everything I had.

The Most Beautiful Thing

I wear a straw hat whenever I’m out walking with the baby. It blocks the sun from my face and, if the angle is right, from his as well. I strap him to my chest with one of those big fabric wraps and shuffle slowly through the neighborhood, enjoying the blossoming trees. The hat was a gift from my father, who has worn straw hats for as long as I can remember. With his round, affable face, he is a man who wears a hat well. I like to think the same can be said about me. I know it is true of my older son, as evidenced by a framed photograph in our living room where he is wearing my straw hat and smiling brightly, looking like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes when I am out walking, I see a woman in my neighborhood whose dog looks exactly like my old dog, a dog whose photos still pepper the rooms of my house. We have not put up any pictures of the new dog. We have not put up any pictures of the new baby yet either.

I like to pretend that this woman’s dog is my dog, that he died and was reincarnated as a slightly different version of himself—a little bit redder, a little less fluffy, with a head that is not quite as comically large. I like to think he came back to be near us, to keep an eye on us. To give us the gift of checking in on him.

“I like your hat,” the woman says to me as we pass each other on the sidewalk.

“I like your dog,” I reply. I want to ask her how he is doing. Does he still have that heart problem? Is she monitoring it closely? Is he stiff in the mornings? Does she rub his legs to help him get moving, to ease his discomfort? Take him in for extra vet checkups, I want to warn her. Something is growing in his gall bladder. Something you can’t know is there until it’s too late. Take him in now while he’s perfectly healthy. Make them do imagining. Make them find it early. Keep him alive, I want to say. Keep him alive so I can keep seeing him.

I’m pretty sure this woman’s dog is female.

The baby looks so much like his older brother when he was a baby. It’s a bit odd, really, the feeling of deja vu I get whenever I look down at his sweet little baby face. It’s like a time travel trick where I’m parenting my older son in both his infant and six-year-old forms at the same time. I want to call my son’s attention to it—look, this is how I rocked you when you were crying, this is how I sang over the sound of your screams, this is how I kissed your belly at the end of every diaper change, this is how I cared for you, this is how I loved you—but I don’t, because no two children are ever parented in the exact same way, and I feel a bit guilty that the new baby is getting the better version of me. Sure, he will have to share more of my time and attention where his big brother didn’t, and we’ll forget to note milestones and fail to celebrate every small leap in his early development the way you do with your first child when everything feels new and special. But he is getting a calmer, more knowledgeable set of parents. Six years of parenting have taught me what to focus on and what to let go of, how to move on from a tough day, how to bail out early when my approach is clearly not working, how to celebrate the simple pleasure of a long walk on a nice day when the baby otherwise refuses to nap, instead of seeing it as a mark of failure, an inability to get the baby to sleep where and how he’s supposed to. I’ve learned how not to be so shackled by “supposed to.” How to not care so much about whether other people think I’m a good mother. How to barely care what other people think at all.

This baby fusses less than his brother did (or perhaps I’m not as bothered by fussing as I used to be) and he settles more easily (or perhaps I am more adept at calming babies now and can more easily recognize his cues). He has slotted into our lives with the ease of a corner puzzle piece—it is very clear how he fits in with the rest of us and provides a sense of closure. I’m looking forward to seeing his personality develop and how it diverges from his brother as he grows and changes. And I’m looking forward to seeing how they grow together, how the identity of “brother” takes shape for each of them. This is the truly fantastic part of parenting: watching someone become themself and getting to be alongside for that discovery.

The top of my six-year-old’s head is now level with my armpit. He measures this frequently. It won’t be long before he is as tall as my mother. And not too long after that until he is taller than me. It takes forever and it goes so quickly. Both things are true. I see him in the present as the kind, tender little boy he is, and I see him in the past as the baby reflected in his little brother, and I can picture him in the future, towering over me, leaning down to hug me, wrapping me up in his long, wiry limbs.

It is strange how all the different versions of ourselves both disappear and exist forever. My mother looks at pictures of the new baby and she sees my face, my baby face, and I can imagine that, for a moment, she can feel the weight of me in her arms again.

Apparently, I looked like my father when I was a baby. I look like my father when I’m wearing my straw hat.

I tell the woman “I like your dog,” and then I reach down to pet his head, three hearty taps and then a quick scratch behind his ear. “Good boy,” I say, and then I smile and let them walk away, let the dog that is not my dog disappear around the corner, out of sight.

When the baby starts to stir against my chest I get moving again, letting my steps gently lull him back to sleep. As we turn onto a new block, the sun’s angle to us shifts and light floods his face. I take off my hat and hold it over his head as if he were wearing it. The brim creates a wide circle of shade. His eyes are closed and his lips are slightly parted. He looks like his brother. He looks good in this hat. He looks like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

My poem, “September Again,” about the death of my dog is now available in the aptly titled The Dead Pets Poetry Anthology. Net proceeds from each purchase of this anthology will be donated to ASPCA.

If you’d like to read more about all the dogs I’ve known and loved in my life, check out A History of Dogs, originally published in Bandit.

Happy (?) Birthday to Me

This post contains writing about several topics that could be difficult for people to read about including depression, suicidal ideation, loss, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Please take caution as necessary when reading this piece. 

***

I am turning thirty-eight in a few days. It’s a difficult age for me. Not because it’s only two years from forty, nor because it places me squarely in my late thirties and the idea of late-any age rankles me, heavy as it is with a sense of ending, of something slipping away. I am not thrilled about thirty-eight because a friend of mine died when she was thirty-eight, leaving behind her two young kids. Having just had my second baby, I will be thirty-eight with two young kids and I can’t help thinking, what right do I have to this life? And then I think, what if I die too? 

There have been times in my life when I wished myself dead. Never quite enough to do anything about it, but certainly enough to have it become a fixation, a darkness that hovered over me as I moved through my days pretending to be fine. What if I stepped out into traffic right now, I would wonder as I waited at the crosswalk. What if I turned the steering wheel suddenly and crashed my car into the median on the highway? What if I swallowed one pill after another until the entire bottle of antidepressants was gone?  

A strong support system and an intense aversion to having anyone be even remotely upset about something I’ve done have kept me alive through many difficult periods. Sure, I could die, I would think, but then my mom would cry and I feel horrible when I make my mom cry. I’m writing this now with a sense of levity but please know that I recognize the seriousness of what I’m revealing here. I knew how serious these feelings were when I was living with them. 

I was considered at high risk for postpartum depression after the birth of my first son thanks to an existing history of depression and a difficult labor that obliterated my perfectly crafted birth plan. People were worried about me. I must have filled out that postpartum depression screening at least half a dozen times in the first month of my son’s life. Even his pediatrician asked me to complete it, though she was very obviously not my doctor. “Have you been so unhappy that you’ve had difficulty sleeping?” I jokingly asked my one-week-old baby. 

The odd thing was that I did not feel unhappy. Not even a little bit. Instead, I felt almost alarmingly ecstatic. The world felt bright and vibrant and practically pulsing with joy as if I were on an intense postnatal acid trip. To be honest, I was frightened by the feeling. Sorrow was what I was used to. Sorrow I knew how to manage. What was I meant to do with this strange elation, this overwhelming love that felt like at any moment it might morph into a physical form and consume me, a bright, colorful beast that would swallow me whole? It’s no surprise, I suppose, that my joy was eventually replaced with anxiety, a sense of panic that literally stopped me in my tracks at times. I once fell to my hands and knees in the middle of the street while I was out for a short walk in my neighborhood because I was suddenly so overwhelmed with fear that either I or the baby would randomly die that I collapsed under my own weight. It was terrifying. It wasn’t until around six months postpartum that the depression finally set in and my mind began working overtime to convince me that I was not suited to be a mother and that my son would be better off without me. That we would all be better off if I was dead. It was comforting in a way, to find myself back in a precarious emotional state that I understood so well, rather than one that felt new and confusing. My psyche may have been a desolate, dilapidated structure, but it was my desolate, dilapidated structure, with a worn and rotted Home Sweet Home sign hanging on the wall of my mind. 

I came out of it. I lived through it. Somehow, in the years that have followed, I let that structure crumble to dust and have left it behind. I have been happy. Not the weird, unsettling happiness of my initial postpartum period, but a soft, genuine happiness. My life is so lovely. It has its hardships—pain and grief, and plenty of stress—but I find myself now beginning and ending each day with a feeling of satisfaction and hopefulness, and whenever things feel overwhelming, I am better able to see the difficulty for what is: temporary and simply a part of life, not a commentary on my abilities or personality. Not a reason to throw my hands up and declare myself done with this world. 

I waited quite a long while to have another baby because I was worried about messing up this happy life I have stumbled into. Things are good, why mess with them? My husband has a different way of thinking: things are good and will continue to be good, why assume otherwise? We are not built from the same mold. Ultimately, I let his thinking win out and am happy to report that so far, he was right. Things continue to be good. I’m a little more tired, and would very much like to have at least a bit of my core strength return as soon as possible, but I feel content so far in this second postpartum experience. The world is not a vibrating mass of overwhelming joy, nor do I feel anxious or inadequate. I feel at ease, able to recognize and accept the ebbs and flows of life with a new baby. I am able to watch my older son gently kiss the baby’s head while he sweetly says, “Look at this cute little guy” and feel at peace rather than flooded with emotion. I can let the baby shout at the delayed let down of my milk—his frustrated “eh!” sounding so much like a 1940s gangster it makes me laugh—and just shake my head and tell him to chill out. It’s coming. It will be fine. It will all be fine. 

Perhaps my depression will return and I will find myself once again debating the question of whether to live or die. Luckily, I have a well-worn path to follow through and out of that feeling. I know better now how to care for myself through that experience, having done it before. I know how to pick myself up, hold myself gently, how to stay calm. 

When the baby wakes in the night, hungry and angry, I scoop him into my arms and bring him to my breast. His sweet, small body relaxes as he latches on, and I run my hand over his soft head and say, there you go, all better. You’re happy now. 

Why Write

There is a poem by Sean Thomas Doughtery that I’ve seen repeatedly shared on Instagram and other online writing circles. It is called “Why Bother” and it simply reads:

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words.

This is not a post discussing the intent or meaning of this poem. Its application on social media is meant to be motivational, a way to encourage fellow writers or yourself to keep at it. Keep writing. Writing is a time-consuming practice and apart from a small minority of professional writers, most people who do it have other jobs that take up the majority of their days. They fit writing into their free time, their family time, their TV time. They turn down social invitations and rearrange their schedules, waking early or staying up late to fit in writing wherever they can. And they do all of this for very little gain. The odds of success by any generally accepted measure of success are very small. The act of writing is often hard and frustrating, and the effort to get published is mostly demoralizing. I once described the submission and querying process to my husband as being like if every time you tried to make a new friend, you instead got punched in the face. You tamp down your vulnerability, gather up your courage and introduce yourself, but instead of the start of a beautiful friendship, you get a face full of fist. And when you recover from that hit, you have to get up and do it again with someone new and repeat the whole horrible process. After enough times of being punched in the face, it would be reasonable to wonder if you’re simply not meant to have friends and you should maybe go ahead and just give up that dream.

So why bother writing? Why take the repeated hits? Because the world needs your words, we are told. Because somewhere out there is a person “with a wound in the exact shape” of those words and they need you to keep going. Someone needs the story that only you can tell.

No they don’t. Or maybe they do, but who cares? What are the odds that your specific words are ever going to reach this hypothetical person in need? There is an endless supply of things to read and most of it will go largely unseen. The author Linda Holmes wrote an essay called “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything,” way back in 2011 and it has stuck with me since I first read it over a decade ago. In it she writes:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore.

As writers, we’re not screaming into a void. We’re screaming into a wall of sound and praying that by some miracle, ours are the words that break through. Meanwhile, that person who is desperately waiting for your words? Either their wound has continued growing such that your words will no longer be enough to fill it, or they’ve found another way to help it scab over. I think you can let yourself off the hook.

I’m not trying to suggest that writing doesn’t matter, I just think the only reason to do it is because it matters to you, and not because it matters in some larger global sense. Do it because you like it and because you want to. Because it challenges you or it fills you up, or it lets you escape yourself for a while. The most common writing advice you see is to write every day. Even if it’s just a little bit, every day should include some amount of writing. Why? Is there anything else you do every single day apart from eat, sleep, and use the bathroom?

I tend to set a writing schedule for myself because I want to dedicate the time and it can be too easy to let other concerns and responsibilities creep in and get in the way of writing. But during that writing time, whether or not I actually write depends entirely on my mood. Sometimes I work on something new, sometimes I fiddle with an old draft, sometimes I am firmly in revision mode, but there are other times when I don’t feel like doing any of that and I sit and read instead. I think about writing. Jot down a couple loose story ideas or a random line that sounds good in my head but is only just fine on paper. I’ve stopped telling myself, you should be writing. I write when I want to. Luckily, I find that most of the time I do still want to write. But over the past year I’ve more frequently hit stretches where I’m just not that into it, and I’ve given myself permission to let it go and wait for when the urge returns at some point in the future, which it always does eventually.

My husband plays the guitar and the piano. He’s played both for most of his life and is particularly skilled at playing by ear. Let him hear a song once and he’ll start picking it up within a couple of minutes of sitting down at the keys. But he also likes to compose little pieces of his own. When he started working from home during the pandemic, he would often grab his guitar throughout the day and fiddle around between meetings, writing short little songs. “What is that?” I would ask him every time I heard him playing, wondering if it was something I should recognize and he would shrug and say it was just something he was making up in the moment. I am not musical so I find this skill baffling. I’m sorry, the music comes to you as you go along, the ways words come when I’m writing a story? I simply cannot comprehend thinking in music.

Many nights, when it is my turn to put our son to bed, I will come downstairs to find my husband seated at the piano with the headphones plugged in so that only he can hear what he is playing (it’s an electric piano if that wasn’t obvious). He looks so at peace in these moments, lost in his own world, playing only for himself. It’s a creative outlet that exists solely for his own pleasure. He’s not planning to record any of these pieces. He doesn’t need to share them with anyone else. Any dreams he may have once held of being a professional musician have long since been abandoned, and not because he tried and failed and had to slink away friendless and bloodied, but because that’s not the purpose music holds in his life. He plays because he likes playing. He does it just for himself. How lovely!

During the first year of the pandemic, I wrote obsessively, in a frenzy. In a way, I had more time than usual because my job couldn’t be done remotely so I had to shut down my business, but in reality I had way less time because my son, who had just turned three when the pandemic started, was home with me all day, every day and only took one short nap in the morning. But I filled every available second with writing. I sat him in front of the TV longer than I otherwise might have just to create a little more time to write. I needed the outlet, a way to release my pent-up anxiety and frustration, and to break free of the monotony of days where we couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. But more than that, I think I was afraid of dying. What if I got covid and died and all that I left behind was a life that didn’t feel like it had amounted to very much? I needed to write and I needed to be published so that some piece of me could exist beyond the walls of my own home. So someone could point to my work and say, ah yes, Claire lived and this is what she had to say.

You need a healthy dose of ego to believe your words are worth reading. And an even healthier dose to keep on believing it after your inbox has filled with agents and editors telling you sorry, but they have to disagree. But more than that, I think you have to learn to see the value and significance of your life that exist independently from what you create for other people’s consumption. Write because writing helps you live, not because someone out there needs your words and will remember them long after you’ve died.

My father has been a writer for most of his life. His writing is primarily academic, but he’s spent some time writing fiction and poetry. He always has a project going. Always something he is working on. We’ve had a lot of conversations over the years about writing and ambition, about thwarted dreams. He tells me about how he’d like to have some collection of writing to leave behind. Something he can pass along to his kids and grandkids. We all want to go on living in some way, even after we’re gone. I’m sure I would find a collection of his writing to be a comfort, something I could return to again and again, and hear his voice in my head as I read it. Losing my dad would leave me with a wound that is shaped in a way that truly only his words could fill. And yet they wouldn’t be enough, not even close, to replace the experience of actually knowing him and they’d be a poor substitute for my own memories. A stranger could come along and read everything my dad has ever written and they still wouldn’t know what he looks like on the occasions when he laughs so hard he can’t breathe, or how free and easily he moves when he dances with my mother, or the way his face scrunches up when he falls asleep while reading, his pencil still suspended in the air, waiting to make a note in the margin of a book.

Whenever I find myself tempted by the idea that if I can amass enough publications, leave enough of myself in print, I’ll be able to live on in some small way after I’m gone, I try to remind myself of how peaceful my husband looks when he strums the guitar, how at ease my son is when he sets marker to paper and the image in his mind spills out onto a page. It is so beautiful to watch someone doing something they love. And it is so wonderful to give yourself over to something you love to do regardless of whether anyone else will ever see it, regardless of whether anyone else needs it, or will be made better by it, made whole. Do it simply because you want to, because it makes your life better. Do it entirely for yourself.

Come Light the Menorah

For Hanukkah, we light two menorahs. One is a minimalist silver piece that looks like a metal picket fence. My husband’s mother gifted it to him when he was in college, I’m pretty sure. I was around and I remember him receiving it, but after a while, the years all begin to jumble together in your mind like a clump of poorly stored necklaces, all the chains twisted together, painstaking to separate. The point is, this menorah is pretty old and covered in now two decades' worth of candle wax because we are terrible about cleaning our menorahs at the end of the holiday and the next year we dig out just enough dried wax to be able to insert new candles. But its age is nothing compared to our other menorah, gifted by my mother-in-law to my son on his first Hanukkah. Or passed down, I should say, as it is nearly forty years old and was used by my husband and his siblings when they were children. It is a Sesame Street menorah, made of nine individual candle holders that you can line up in any order you choose: four Oscar The Grouch; two Big Bird; two Grover; and one Cookie Monster. These Muppets have seen better days. They are chipped and peeling in spots, each one covered in a film of wax that has distorted their smiles into grimaces. Cookie Monster’s head appears sunken in, as though he has been beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. There is something desperate and pleading about Big Bird’s eyes. It is truly one of the ugliest menorahs you’ll encounter and my son loves it.

Last night, for the first night of Hanukkah, he took charge of setting up the Sesame Street menorah. He helped prepare the latkes. He helped set the table. He lit the candles himself for the first time ever. He is getting so big, which is delightful and heartbreaking in equal measure. I am overwhelmed by that bizarre parental feeling of wanting to literally squeeze your child to death because you love them so much. But I get by just kissing the top of his head and breathing him in for as long as he’ll still let me.

He decided that Grover should hold the shamash candle, the helper candle, the candle you use to light all the others. “He seems like he would be the most helpful,” he explained, an opinion based on an extremely limited knowledge of Sesame Street and yet somehow surprisingly accurate for this group—Oscar too grouchy, Cookie too chaotic, Big Bird too childlike despite his towering height.

I do not operate from any specific framework or philosophy when parenting. I learned quickly to let go of any expectations about myself as a parent or my son as a person and to instead leave plenty of space for us each to grow and change, to learn from each other, and get better over time. But if I do have one hope for my son, one goal that guides the way I interact with him, it’s that he will maintain as much of his current sweetness as possible as he grows. Though he is naturally very loving and tender, there was a brief period when he was four years old when he started saying “I will hurt you if you say that to me,” anytime I said something he didn’t like. It was an empty threat—he never actually tried to hurt me, never hit anyone, always burst into tears himself if he even accidentally caused someone else pain—but still, it really bothered me because I couldn’t help but picture him as a grown man, rising to anger whenever someone pointed out his failings, questioned his behavior, or even slightly bruised his ego. The kind of man that unfortunately never seems to be in short supply.

I sat him down, this sweet-faced four-year-old caught halfway between a pudgy toddler and a lanky little boy, and told him that he needed to stop threatening to hurt me when he felt mad. “Right now you are a little boy,” I said, “but someday you’ll be a big boy and after that a grown-up man, and when big boys and grown-up men threaten to hurt people, even if they don’t actually mean it, it can be really scary.” He asked me why and I told him because a lot of men do hurt people, they hurt women and children and even animals. They get angry and instead of finding better ways to deal with their anger, they hurt someone else. “So it can be scary,” I told him, “especially if you’re a woman and a man threatens you because you worry that maybe he really will hurt you.” He then asked me if men had ever made me scared and I told him honestly, yes. Many times. He took it all in. Said he would stop. And he did. We brainstormed some other ways for him to respond when he felt mad at me, and he changed his behavior, not gradually like I expected would happen, but immediately. The threats stopped right away.

I don’t know if this conversation would be considered good or bad parenting, and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m raising one boy and I have another on the way and I believe that young boys have an outsized responsibility to learn how to manage their anger and frustration in ways that don’t place anyone else in even perceived harm, much less real harm. Sorry boys of today, you must carry the burden of making up for the men of the past.

At nearly 7 months along, I am visibly pregnant and frequently get asked if I know if I’m having a boy or a girl. We didn’t find out with our first. After 49 hours of labor, when the baby finally emerged, my husband and I were both so exhausted and dazed that I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we were still waiting on that piece of information. The midwife had to remind my husband that he had requested to be the one to announce and, momentarily stunned, he looked down, said, “oh, a boy,” and then they quickly whisked the baby away because he was blue and not really breathing at the moment. I found out early this time because I was horrifically anxious during my first trimester, as a result of a thyroid imbalance it turned out (I’m fine), and I needed something concrete to hold on to, any little piece of information about this soon-to-be-person that could anchor me to reality. That and we wanted to be able to tell our son if he was curious, which it turned out he was not really, though now he talks frequently about his little brother coming, and damn if it isn’t heartwarmingly adorable. But now when people ask and I tell them I’m having another boy I can see something cross their faces, a moment where they need to recalibrate their immediate reaction, a brief feeling of sadness for me. “Oh well that will be fun,” they’ll say. Or some will actually ask me how I feel about that, wanting to gauge my response to this news before offering their own. I find this the most irritating, to be honest. How should I feel? And what’s it to you? I get the sense that mothers are supposed to want girls and fathers are supposed to want boys and that getting one of each is like winning the two-child household jackpot. In truth, I don’t really care. If I were having a girl that would be fine. But I’m having a boy and that’s fine too. Either way, I am raising someone who has to learn how to be a person in all the beautiful, ugly, painful, joyous, and complex ways in which we exist in the world. Either way, I will come to the end of another year and I will think, I did some things well and I did some things poorly, and a new year will begin with its own successes and failures awaiting me.

When I came downstairs after putting my son to bed last night, the Hanukkah candles had already burned out, which was too bad because I like to witness the moment when the flame fades to a thin wisp of smoke. Tonight we will only light the silver menorah because we don’t have enough candles to light both on all eight nights, so we are saving up what we do have to use both menorahs on the last night when all candles are lit and the light is the brightest. The last night of Hanukkah is on Christmas this year. We will spend the morning celebrating Christmas with my family and then we will return home to watch movies and order Chinese food. When it gets dark, we will FaceTime my in-laws and light the menorah and my son will open one last gift from his grandparents, and then all that is left of the holidays will be the candles burning brightly on our windowsill. As the flames slowly fade, the wax will drip down over the faces of Oscar and Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Grover leaving them worse for wear but still going strong after another year of use. In the morning, I will think maybe I should try to clean them off before I box them up and put the menorahs back on the shelf, but I know that in the end, I won’t bother. We’ll pull them down next year, the four of us this time, and they’ll still be covered in this year’s wax, this year’s mess and we’ll once again dig out just enough to get the new candles to fit. Just enough to start again.

---

To accompany this post, here is an itty bitty unpublished poem I wrote a couple years ago.

Dear Santa

Over the weekend, my son and I spent some time reading his favorite book: the toy catalog that recently came in the mail. ’Tis the season of want.

The first day it arrived he went through and circled in blue all the items that interest him. He drew a big red X through anything he thought looked boring or was meant for younger kids. He has since gone back and circled some of those items in red and informed me that I should buy those too so that he can share them with his younger cousins. A small measure of generosity among the excess.

“Will you get me these things?” he asks and when I tell him to make a list, he holds up the catalog and looks at me like I’m being intentionally dense. This is his list, plus everything he’s mentioned over the past year which ranges from “a real-life boomerang,” “one of those, like, remote control truck things that shoot actual lasers” (is this a thing? how did he come up with this?), to “little animals made out of glass.”

This is mostly my fault. In the dilemma of raising a half-Jewish child who still gets to celebrate Christmas, we decided early on that Christmas morning would always take place at either my parents’ or my sibling’s house instead of celebrating it directly at home, and that we wouldn’t bother with the whole notion of Santa. Not wanting to make our son responsible for ruining Christmas magic for any other kids, though, we explained that his dad and I (and other family members) handle all the gift giving so Santa has more time to make it to all the other houses he needs to visit on Christmas Eve. Because we get the benefit of two holidays, I explained, we are trying lessen the jolly man’s load at this busy time of year. Aren’t we so thoughtful?

But now, instead of being able to pass off any gifting disappointments onto some mythical bearded man from the North Pole, we have to shoulder the full blame if we fail to recognize that “a real-life boomerang” was an actual request and not simply a fleeting desire after reading a book about Australia.

The main thing my son wants right now, though, is as much of my attention as I can give. I am due to have our second baby in the spring, and my son is old enough and wise enough to know that this new family member will steal a lot of my time. My son is in school all day for the first time in his life and laments that he has fewer opportunities for play than he used to. So when he asks me sit down and read the toy catalog with him, to slowly go through and name each item and read its description, I do, even though what I want most right now is as much time to myself as possible. Like him, I too am acutely aware of how much attention a new baby will require of me. My husband and I spend most of our time talking about how we can best manage it all—newborn exhaustion, quality time with our oldest, maintaining regular, dedicated opportunities for me to slip away and write.

I know how to write in the smallest pockets of free time. Everything I have created and published since I started writing in a more determined, dedicated way in 2019, has been accomplished while raising a young child. And while I have the benefit of working part-time, I do have a separate job that has nothing to do with writing that takes up time and energy. In the past three years, I have published nearly 100 pieces of writing in print and online journals, created and published multiple short collections, and edited and designed four issues of a literary magazine. This is no small feat and I’m really fucking proud of myself. As a lifelong depressive, I have a tendency to compare myself unfavorably to everyone else, to not give myself credit when credit is due. But I’m trying to be better about that, and credit is due here. I decided I wanted to write and damnit, I made it happen. Good for me!

When I start to worry that I will lose all ability to write when the new baby comes, I try to remind myself that there is more time available than is often immediately obvious, and that writing rarely happens in one big go, but instead is built up in bits and pieces, a story growing over days, weeks, months, years. A line of poetry written one moment and then set aside will still be there when I’m ready to come back to it.

As a sort of advent calendar for the season, on my social media sites I am sharing a few lines each day from pieces that are in my notes app or drafts folder. Putting this together has made me realize I did way more writing this year than I thought, and that I have a lot of pieces, at various stages of development, to draw from next year when time is tighter and my energy is diminshed. Right now I’m looking at the year ahead like it is one giant catalog of time and desperately circling every moment in blue. I want this one and this one and this one and this one. Can’t I have them all? But I know that I will be happy with even a small smattering of writing time and that I will make the most of it.

In his effort to soak up as much of my attention as possible, my son has started asking me to linger at bedtime on the nights when it is my turn to tuck him in. “Chat with me,” he says, and I sit on the floor beside his bed and rub his back while we talk about the day, or what the week ahead will bring, and I try to answer whatever odd questions or concerns pop into his mind. Last night he asked me “will you die soon?” and I reassured him that I still have a long time to live.

I hope it is true. I hope I have more time ahead of me than I could possibly know what to do with. A long life full of stories to share.

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To accompany this post, here is a flash essay that was originally published in the holiday edition of Near Window in December, 2020.

Wishlist

He wants a blue anti-slip mat like the one in his grandma’s bathtub. He wants a drill truck with a drill that really spins. Or a forklift truck where the fork actually lifts. Or a jackhammer truck that goes zzt zzt zzt zzt zzt zzt. He makes the sound for another fifteen minutes. He wants everything in the little Save The Animals catalog the World Wildlife Fund sent in the mail. A pangolin. A harpy eagle. A blue-footed booby. A green sea turtle. Something that looks like a buffalo, but isn’t. A set of three monarch butterflies. A pair of scarlet macaws. A three-toed sloth. He wants to know why all the animals are dying. He wants a drum set. No, a trumpet. No, he wants one of those things you can shout into and everyone will hear you. A bullhorn? Yeah, he wants a bullhorn. He wants to scream at the top of his lungs and he wants to say shut up and he wants to know why I won’t let him feel his feelings. You’re right, I tell him, go nuts, and I pour another cup of coffee. He wants a new set of markers and a big pad of paper. He wants those paints that are like crayons. You know the ones he used to have, but he used them all up? He wants more of those because he wants to paint me a picture. Would you like that, he asks me. I would like that very much. He wants to know what else I want. 

I want to live in a hotel for a week and pick my pores in the harsh light of the bathroom. I want to scoop all the fat from my belly, dump it in a trash bag and set it out on the curb for Tuesday pickup. I want to get so drunk I fall down and crack a tooth. I want to hold my breath beneath the surface of the bathwater and just when I think I can’t possibly hold it any longer, I want to hold it for one minute more. I want to scream at the top of my lungs, and say shut up, and feel my own feelings. I want to set this house on fire. Stand out bare-legged on a freezing cold night, cackling as I watch it all burn. 

Maybe I too would like a drill truck, he suggests, and I kiss the top of his head. That sounds great, I tell him, but I have everything I need.

Muddling Through

This is a love letter to people who leave their blinds open at night.

I like to take walks through my neighborhood and peek inside your homes. Especially this time of year, as Christmas trees begin to pop up in windows and stair banisters are strung with twinkle lights. I am not trying to spy on you—mostly I am interested in what color your walls are painted, what kind of kitchen cabinets you have, I am always on the lookout for a better living room lamp, do you have a nice one that might serve as inspiration?—but every now and then I catch a glimpse. You on the couch, watching television. You at the counter, chopping onions. Your family sitting down to dinner, so much later than mine does. Was it a busy day at work? I tell myself stories about your lives, imagine you as characters in a piece of writing I’ve been slowly crafting in my mind. The woman seated in the round back chair by the window, book in one hand, a glass of wine on the end table beside her: she is a mother, small children finally in bed. Her shoulders ache, her neck is stiff, but this is bliss, seated here alone in the dim light of a reading lamp. I’ve got a glass of wine and a book and nobody needs me! she will text a friend and they will go back and forth for forty minutes, sharing stories of their days as she scrolls through Twitter and Instagram until she starts to grow tired and decides, wine finished, book unread, to head up to bed.

It is a strange time of year, this space between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Equal parts festive and melancholy. The daylight diminished but everything aglow in holiday lights. I like the pinpricks of color reflected in windowpanes and wet sidewalks. I like a cold night where I need a scarf and a hat. Where I pass other people on the sidewalk and we smile, tight-lipped and rosy-cheeked, and I can feel the weight of the past year in the hunch of their shoulders.

My family finally caught Covid, after all this time, and I can still feel it in the way my breath catches if I inhale too deeply, which is something I do often this time of year. Step outside in the morning and take in a full breath of the frosted air. Walk in the evening and let the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves fill my nose. I am still fatigued, more easily worn down by small tasks. I cannot walk as far as I would like to, and thus have fewer windows to peer into. I am hopeful that this will improve in the coming weeks—as more decorations appear, so will my stamina.

I used to live in a neighborhood that was next to a neighborhood full of beautiful old homes. What is nice about Baltimore and its abundance of rowhouses is that with a single quick glance you can see the majority of someone’s home; the downstairs floor is usually one continuous long space. But there was one rowhouse in the fancy rowhouse neighborhood that had a grand staircase in the front room and it blocked the view of the rest of the house. The owners would drape white lights and garland along the banisters and red bows hung in even increments down the full length of the stairs. In this high-ceilinged foyer, they would place a towering Christmas tree. I would pass by this house every night when out walking the dog, stand for a long moment and look through the window at this gorgeous setup and imagine the lives of the people inside. People I never saw.

I think about that house often—the scene inside like something from an old movie, classic and beautiful, the kind of Christmas Bing Crosby would sing about. I prefer our current neighborhood, though, with its kitschy displays—inflatable Santas and reindeer, oversized plastic nativity scenes that cover an entire porch, so many colorful lights strung from a single home that it’s almost an assault on your eyes. Best of all, I like the handmade children’s decorations that get taped to windows and doors. Wonky, asymmetrical snowflakes and construction paper Christmas trees.

My son has a set of markers that are made for drawing on windows. At Halloween he drew a spooky scene of ghosts and monsters. For Thanksgiving, he did a series of turkeys of increasing size—Tiny Baby Turkey all the way up to Jumbo Magnus. Yesterday he erased the turkeys to make room for his holiday display, though he is still waiting to decide what exactly he wants to draw. Soon we will hang up the advent calendar my sister and her husband made for us—a tradition that is big in Germany where my brother-in-law is from. Soon we will pull out the menorah. We will get a Christmas tree and my parents will come to town to help my son decorate it. We will celebrate many little bits of the holiday season. We will try to lean into cheer and warmth and the cozy joy of traditions, while also trying not to overdo it as we teach our son about gratitude and restraint.

The weeks will march on and the year will come to an end and my husband and I will try and fail to make it to midnight. It was a pretty good year, we will say. Good enough. Better than the last. Maybe next year will be even better. Easier. It is the lie we all tell ourselves to keep going, to push through the long, gray winter. To hold out for spring. Though I admit, I have grown to like winter. To anticipate it and welcome it with something akin to pleasure. It asks so little of us really: Slow down. Seek warmth. Simply survive.

I walk and I take in whatever the evening has to offer, whatever the season has to give. I like coming back inside with my nose and cheeks stinging, the smell of cold clinging to my hair. My home is warm and dimly lit. Upstairs my son is sleeping. I sit on the couch with a book and a drink. Nobody needs me, which feels wonderful, but lonely—a perfect encapsulation of this time of year—so I pick up my phone and text a friend.

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As an accompaniment to this post, I offer up this seasonally-appropriate poem, previously published in Second Chance Lit.

My Father and I Take the Same Antidepressant

Christmas is canceled.

He’s finally making good on that threat—

lifting the tree by the trunk with one hand and

splashing water out of the stand 

onto the floor. Later my mother will mop it up 

with towels and a knowing shake of her head. 

The limbs are still strung with rainbow lights and covered in 

ornaments: reflective red orbs, popsicle stick reindeer, handmade

paper cutouts framing our smiling school portraits, a bizarre wooden clown that

years from now we’ll finally throw out 

having collectively decided it looks vaguely racist. 

He flings open the door and heaves the tree into the backyard. 

Ornaments smash and scatter across the grass. 

Christmas is canceled, he tells us,

quietly closing the door. 

Years from then I tell him

“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is unequivocally

the best Christmas song ever. 

Oh definitely, he agrees. But only 

the old version. The one about muddling through somehow. 

Yes, obviously. Of course

the muddling through. 

Yes, obviously

we’ve always had that in common.

Fear Itself

One of my childhood homes had a spiral staircase that led from the central part of the house up to a loft that served as my parent's bedroom. When we first moved in, the stairs were lined with beige carpet and the railing was painted an ugly, poop brown. My mother stripped the fabric from the steps and painted the metal staircase a melange of bright colors. It felt fun and welcoming during the day, but at night the spiral pattern loomed out of the shadows, twisted and unnatural in a way my young mind found unsettling. I was afraid of this staircase. I often imagined one of us slipping on the top step and falling head over feet down to the bottom, our bodies breaking and rearranging like a character in Death Becomes Her. Or I imagined our house on fire and my parents trapped in the loft, my siblings and I escaping into the yard and huddling together as the house burned and our parents’ screams echoed through the night. 

I didn’t sleep well as a child, too often plagued by vivid, terrifying dreams. I remember one night, sick with a fever, I awoke to the sound of a train. But it wasn’t a far-off signal, traveling through the dark from across town. No, this train was close, too close, and moving closer by the second. I stepped out of my bedroom as the train came barreling through the loft and down the spiral staircase, metal clanging against metal at a deafening pitch. I remember screaming, and I remember my mother racing down the stairs, the touch of her cool hand pressed against my fiery forehead. I remember her tucking me back into bed. The train was not the most frightening thing I saw come down those spiral stairs, though. That honor belongs to poltergeists. 

My parents love movies. They never shied away from showing us their favorites at an early age that would likely horrify most parents these days. The only movie I recall them ever really hesitating to show us was Night of the Living Dead. It was Halloween season and we wanted to watch something spooky. They went back and forth with each other, debating whether it was too scary for three young kids. Ultimately they decided to go ahead, with the caveat that this was one of the scariest movies they had ever seen, and we were free to stop watching at any time if it felt like too much for us to handle. 

We didn’t make it even halfway through the movie before we asked to turn it off because all three of us found it comically bad. 

Night of the Living Dead was one of the least scary things I have ever seen. I almost felt bad for my parents. This is what passed for horror when they were growing up? We switched and watched Poltergeist instead, an early 80s movie where a ghostly presence terrorizes a family after they move into a new house, and a little girl gets sucked into a tv. There’s even a bit in the movie where a creepy clown doll comes to life and attacks a little boy, but that’s not especially scary because if you own a clown doll you kind of just have to expect that eventually it’s going to come to life and try to kill you. Sorry to blame the victim.

What I found especially chilling about Poltergeist is a scene where a wispy, ghostly form slowly descends a staircase. It has been decades since I have seen this movie and yet that image remains so clear in my mind, along with the one that tormented me for months after: that same ghostly form slowly descending our spiral staircase. I couldn’t look at our stairs without seeing a hazy white apparition drifting down from step to step, coming for me. 

The other day I was trying to find a Halloween movie that would be appropriate for my five-year-old (but that wouldn’t make me want to drive a nail through my eye to escape from boredom) when I got to thinking about what it will be like to someday show him the movies that his dad and I found genuinely frightening when we were growing up. Will Poltergeist be his Night of the Living Dead—all camp and terrible special effects? Or better yet, will The Ring? The Ring scared my husband so badly that he has refused to watch horror movies since. Though to be fair, he wasn’t a big fan of horror movies to begin with and he especially dislikes ones where creepy, demonic children terrorize people. 

We saw The Ring together on Homecoming night instead of going to the school dance. I can’t remember if we both went home and changed first, or if we went straight to the theater from dinner, him still in his suit and me in my sparkly silver dress. It was a late showing and by the time he dropped me back at my house after the movie, all of the lights were out and everyone else was asleep. I made him walk me to my door, through our dark garage where the light had burned out a long time ago and no one had ever bothered to replace it. Then he drove home alone to his own quiet, darkened house where his mind stirred and stirred with frightening images as he made his way to his attic bedroom and tried to get some sleep. 

I try to imagine my son watching this movie someday and what his reaction might be. It’s a movie about watching a videotape (a thing that doesn’t exist anymore) and then answering a phone call (a thing that never happens anymore) to receive a cryptic warning about your impending death. Just writing that out sounds so stupid I can already picture my kid rolling his eyes and asking incredulously, “you thought this was scary?” 

Like Poltergeist, I haven’t seen The Ring in decades. I have no idea if it holds up even a little bit. In all likelihood, if I watched it today I would laugh at how silly it is and tease my husband mercilessly for being as frightened as he was all those years ago. After all, my parents were forced to admit that by the standards of early-90s film and television, a black-and-white movie about literally the slowest zombies you’ve ever seen who look like Wall Street guys stumbling back to the office after a three-martini lunch was not especially scary. Time comes for all of us and makes us look like fools. 

The house with the spiral staircase is gone now. One year the Guadalupe river flooded its banks and surged through my old neighborhood. The house next door to ours was knocked off its foundation by the rushing water and smashed into ours, destroying it. My family had already moved away by that point, but I went back a couple of years later to visit a friend and we drove down to the spot where my house had once been. No one had rebuilt on the land yet, so there was nothing there except an empty yard reaching all the way down to the water. I stood in the overgrown grass and let the house rise up around me, conjuring each room in my mind. I pictured myself as a little girl, drifting through the house like a ghost, haunting the now empty space I had once called home. 

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My poem “Flood,” originally published in Canary, a literary journal of the environmental crisis, is about this same home and even makes mention of the spiral staircase. If you’d like, you can read it here.

Sparks

After nearly a week of nonstop rain, we’ve been gifted the most perfect fall weather—sunny and cool, with a brilliant blue sky every single day. It’s been wonderful for the long walks I like to take. The other day I took the dog and walked along the wooded trail near our house. The main trail runs the length of a stream that connects into the Jones Falls and eventually ends up in the Baltimore harbor. Smaller, more rustic paths wind their way from the main trail down to the water and a thick curtain of tall trees and vines surround the stream on both sides. It’s very peaceful. I find it to be a little too buggy for my liking during the heat and humidity of summer, but this time of year, as the leaves begin to change and the breeze rustles through the trees amplifying the sensation of being near running water, it is one of my favorite places to be.

On this recent walk, I happened to look up at the moment a strong breeze blew loose a cluster of small yellow leaves from high atop an especially tall tree. The wind caught the leaves and sent them shooting upward like sparks flashing against the sky. They fell slowly then, swirling down and landing lightly along the path in front of me. I stood still and watched them fall, trying to take in everything about this moment that felt refreshing and uplifting.

I am not a person who can really meditate (I have tried and failed many times), but I am someone who can stop and notice a moment of beauty, catalog it in my mind and return to it briefly in times of stress as a way to calm myself, which is what I do with the image of these leaves when all the lights in our house won’t stop flickering.

I have an extreme fear of fire born from an early childhood experience that left my mother’s hand badly burned. (If you’d like, you can read more about that here.) Flickering lights for me signal fire—a fire that is soon to happen, or perhaps one that is already underway, lurking unseen behind the walls, sparked by a problem in the wiring. The lights flicker and in my mind the fire is already moving from room to room, taking over the whole house. I imagine that by the time we actually see smoke, it will be too late. The house will be overrun with flames and all we’ll be able to do is escape onto the street where we’ll stand barefoot in our pajamas and watch our home burn to the ground.

Our house was built in the 1840s from stone that is two feet thick. Sure the insides could be reduced to cinders, but this is not a house that can easily be turned into a pile of ash. When we first bought the place, all the utilities were kept in a small rundown shed attached to the side of the house. The hot water heater, the boiler, and the circuit breaker could only be accessed by going outside. At the time of our purchase the home inspector informed us that he couldn’t tell exactly how old the boiler was, but he did know that the company who made it had gone out of business in 1961. It needed a maintenance check every year. It wasn’t long for this world and during one routine maintenance visit when I asked what could happen to it apart from it simply breaking down and no longer being capable of heating our home, the plumber shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It could maybe explode.” This was my literal nightmare. I didn’t have a decent winter’s night sleep for years after I heard that.

We finally reached a point where we were able to afford a renovation on the house, the primary purpose of which was to upgrade these old systems and incorporate the utility space into the interior of the house. That we managed to get two additional rooms added to the footprint of our small home was just a bonus (and an absolute life saver when the work was completed in March of 2020, just as we found ourselves stuck in our house for months on end). The electrical work that was done with the renovation is only two and a half years old. It shouldn’t be flickering. The connections shouldn’t be loose. The wires shouldn’t be faulty. I shouldn’t be spending my evenings trying to convince my anxious mind that our house isn’t about to suddenly light up like a struck match and make us victims of a gruesome, fiery death. But alas, this is where my mind goes, so I close my eyes and picture the leaves.

We are trying to get to the bottom of the problem. The electric company has been out several times now, but nothing they’ve done has fixed the issue. My husband and I joke that perhaps it’s a ghost. It is almost Halloween after all. I would honestly prefer a ghost. Ghosts are not nearly as terrifying to me as fire.

I have done my best not to pass my anxious tendencies on to my child, which has not been an especially easy task given that his entire existence has taken place during either a Trump presidency, a global pandemic, or both at the same horrible time. I do not have a particular parenting philosophy. Most of the time, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to raising a kid. I just try to follow my instincts and wing it, and frequently remind myself that despite what our culture likes to tell us, as his mother, I am not solely responsible for determining how he turns out. But one thing I do believe when it comes to interacting with children, especially in this current moment when so much about our lives and our futures feels uncertain and scary, is that you have a responsibility to balance teaching kids how to confront and manage the hard stuff with sharing what is good and beautiful about the world. There is a lot of hard stuff, but there is also so much that is soft and comforting. There is a lot of sorrow, but there is also so much joy. Among the seemingly endless list of things to fear, there are reasons for hope and optimism.

My son likes to let us know when he catches the lights flickering. We have made it a group project. “There go the lights!” we shout to each other across the house. We have turned it into a kind of game, one that I am desperate to see come to an end, but that my son may be disappointed to have to stop. The flickering grows worse in the evenings, as the sunlight fades and the air cools down even further. Or perhaps it is simply more noticeable because we have more lights on and we are all home at once, keeping an eye out, catching every small flicker as we sit together eating dinner or go about our nightly routine.

Some evenings, we’ll all head out together to take the dog for a walk. We create little treasure hunts where we have to look for different types of Halloween decorations, or I challenge my son to see which one of us can find the most colorful leaves. Each week, more and more trees are changing colors. Red, orange, and yellow are popping up everywhere we walk. One evening we pass a tree where only the tips of the leaves have begun to turn. Small, pointed green leaves like spears tipped in bright red. I stop and draw my son’s attention to them. I show him how the color is starting to creep its way down the length of the leaf. It is beautiful, the way we lean our heads close together to get a better look. The way the fading sunlight slants through the tree branches and dots the road beneath our feet. The way something so small can settle your racing heart and erase the worries and tensions of the day.

In moments like this, the love I have for my life is so strong it feels like it might consume me, like a fire building up beneath my ribs, unseen and unstoppable.

I surrender myself to its warmth.   

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I always try to write a little something after my walks as sort of ritual or practice. After the walk mentioned at the beginning of this post, I quickly jotted down this poem that I will likely never revisit.

A Slow Return

I am going slow. Intentionally for the most part, but a bit out of necessity. These days I measure success by how much of my time qualifies as rest or leisure. I am doing my best to ignore the voice in my head that tells me to get back to work, to stop being so lazy. I no longer believe in laziness. At least not as a cause for admonishment.

It is rainy and cool and I am sitting in my writing shed for the first time in months. Once a cinder block room with a concrete floor and a single fluorescent light dangling from the ceiling, we converted the space into an office earlier this year. Drywall and a wood floor, recessed lighting, and a small window that looks out onto the yard so I can watch the birds come and go from the feeder as I work, have transformed the space. There is no heating, but the room is small enough that running a space heater for just a few minutes leaves me feeling cozy and comforted. Which is how I feel right now, drinking my coffee and enjoying a little piece of the last of the cider donuts.

At some point this year, I got away from the quiet task of closely observing my surroundings, and in doing so, my writing fell away too. So I am slowing down and getting back to watching the world around me, taking it all in without the expectation or obligation to regurgitate it in some fashion, to reflect on it and turn it into writing. I am trying to observe just for the sake of observation, for the interest and pleasure it brings. And if doing so inspires me to write, all the better, but if not, that is fine as well. I have decided not to push it, but to allow the words to come in their own way and time.

There is so much emphasis on producing in writing. Tracking submission stats and word counts. Racking up consecutive days of sitting down to work. I mention this without judgment—I do it too; it is part of the publication process. But when it starts to feel like too much, there is something quite wonderful in taking a step back from objective measurements of your writing efforts and letting it all go for a while. Who cares if I don’t publish anything more this year? Who cares if all I have to show for the time I spend in this converted shed is a list of disjointed thoughts and lines, stray observations that are eventually lost to time, never coalescing into a complete and finalized version of an initial idea? That’s okay because my focus for now is to return to a place of enjoyment in writing, free from expectation, untethered to any particular sense of achievement. Like I said, I am measuring success in different ways right now.

Four times in the brief period of writing these paragraphs, I’ve gotten up from my seat to go outside and shoo a squirrel away from the bird feeder. It keeps returning. The birds flit and flutter around the squirrel, trying to run it off but to no avail. The squirrel is unperturbed. This is a daily practice in the fall, opening the door and shouting, “Hey, get out of here!” at the squirrels who perch their fat bottoms in the center of the feeder bowl, or who dangle upside down from the suet holder, paying no mind to the rising chorus of chirping and chittering from the birds around them.

I return to my desk not sure what I was planning to say next, the thought having raced from my mind like the squirrel racing away from the sound of my voice. Perhaps it will return again in a few minutes, just as the squirrel does, or maybe it is gone for good this time and will be replaced with other ideas and observations, like so many birds swamping the feeder in the squirrel’s absence. They are hungry and hurried. They jockey for room around the bowl. Sometimes they push each other away, pecking at each other’s sides until one falls back away from the feeder. Other times they make space, swap turns so everyone gets a chance to eat some seeds. I love to watch them and realize now that I missed them over the summer—their noisy chatter, their busy wings.

In the weeks and months ahead, more and different varieties of birds will return to the feeder. Nuthatches and tufted titmice, house finches, and the occasional gold finch. Every time there is a bird I don’t recognize, I look it up in our bird book. Yesterday we spotted our first cardinal at the feeder. “Well, hello, old friend,” I said as it hopped along the ground picking up fallen seeds. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

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If you’d like to read another piece about birds that isn’t actually about birds at all, check out “Call Notes,” originally published in (mac)ro(mic). (CW: cancer)

How Am I Not Myself?*

I used to be a runner.

Before I was a runner I was definitely not a runner. I hated running. I made myself do it out of an effort to be healthy (by which I actually meant to be thin) but it was always an obligation instead of a desire. Then in my twenties something changed and running turned into an activity I loved. I felt strong and accomplished. Running cleared my head, my footfalls drowning out the perpetual whirring of anxiety and self doubt churning through my mind. Over several years I kept adding on mileage: 10k, 10 miler, half marathons and then finally a full marathon. Eventually when I got pregnant my mileage dropped dramatically. Then I had the baby and it dropped even more. I developed a chronic pain condition a couple years after my son was born and I stopped running entirely. If I were to set out for a run today, I doubt I could make it even a couple of miles before having to call it quits.

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I’ve read a lot about how women lose themselves in motherhood. This is partly inevitable. Parenting an infant in particular is all-consuming. You can’t help but work your way through the dark tunnel of that first year and come out the other side irrevocably changed. It is true that in time, pieces of who you were return, but you can never go fully back to being the same person you were before you became a parent. I once described it like this:

my mind a blank slate
as though I’ve birthed a new me
along with the baby

That sense of loss is obviously not helped by how little maternal support there is in this country. Yes, parenting requires so much time and effort, but the lack of affordable childcare and paid parental leave, plus an imbalance in parenting expectations and commitment in many partnerships exponentially expand the difficulty of raising kids.

But I wonder if some of that feeling doesn’t stem from a problem with the basic way we define who we are. From an early age, we are encouraged to conceptualize ourselves by the things we do. What are your hobbies and interests? What are you good at? What do you want to be when you grow up? When our interests shift away from the activities that had previously defined us, or we have to take a break from them to make room for other changes in our lives, it often feels like we have given up a part of ourselves instead of, more accurately, simply changed the way in which we spend our time.

Even within the writing world we are asked to define ourselves in narrow terms. Are you a poet or a fiction writer? Genre or literary? Though you may cross over into a variety of mediums, there’s still the question of what best defines your style. In a world that increasingly demands we develop our own personal brands, what type of writing would you build your brand around? What kind of writer are you?

I didn’t really start writing until after I became a mother. In some ways, I suppose I was always a writer. From a young age, writing was a hobby of mine. An interest. It was a thing I was good at. But it didn’t become a pursuit until I became a parent. The limitations that parenthood put on my time and energy brought with them a clarity: If I had such little time for myself, I wanted to spend it in the most fulfilling ways possible. For me, that meant writing. At first I fit it in wherever I could manage, like during my son’s nap time or later at night, after he had gone to sleep. But as my sense of myself as a writer became more defined, the space I created in my life for writing expanded. I am lucky to have family and a partner who support this effort, but the most important part of forming a writing habit was choosing to write instead of doing something else, and then allowing other parts of myself to fall away. I suppose you could say I lost those parts, but I prefer to think I let them go so a different version of me could grow and flourish.

I don’t know if I will ever start running again. Sometimes when I am out walking the dog, someone will run past me and I’ll feel a pang of jealousy. We are less than a month away from the Baltimore Running Festival, and though I know this will sound ridiculous to anyone who is not a runner, a part of me is sad that I won’t wake up this Saturday morning and set out on an 18-mile training run. I was a runner and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore. I used to be one person and then I became someone else. I am nearing forty and I don’t expect the next decade to look exactly like this one. In all likelihood, my life as a runner will be confined to my twenties. When I was twenty-eight, at the height of my running fitness, I went to bed early and gave up my Saturdays to long runs instead of bottomless blood mary brunches. I made a choice and in time I turned into someone who would have been unrecognizable to my younger run-despising self. But I didn’t look back at the ways I had changed over the course of that decade and felt as if I had lost something. At twenty, we don’t lament that we’re no longer the people we were when we were ten. So why now, at the tail end of my thirties, does it feel like everyone wants to classify change as loss? It is true that I am not the same person I was before I became a mother. Hell, I am not the same person I was before the pandemic started. We can’t help but be changed by major life events. We can’t help but lose ourselves a little over time, shedding parts of ourselves as if we are snakes who have outgrown our skins.

---

My son’s favorite toys are what he calls cars with eyes and mouths. They are basically hot wheels from the Pixar Cars universe and they make them for even the most minor side characters. Having inherited his father’s collector gene, my son wants them all. We buy them in lots off of eBay and dole them out at holidays and his birthday. We gave him half a dozen this spring when he broke his arm and had to have surgery. He loves these toys and can tell you the names of every single character he has, even though some have less than a minute of screen time in only one of the three Cars movies. For a long time, he would “play” with them by carefully lining them all up on a shelf. Then the next day, he would slowly and gently line them up again in another part of the room.

“Don’t you want to drive them?” I asked. “Maybe make them race?” But he was too afraid he would break them. If they moved too fast their wheels might fall off. If he played too hard they could get scratched or dented. I sat down next to him on the floor and explained that though it sounded impossible, one day cars with eyes and mouths wouldn’t be his favorite toys anymore. He would grow up and something new would become his favorite. I told him he should play with them as fully as he could now while he still loved them more than anything in the world, and though he didn’t believe me that a day would ever come where he didn’t love these cars, I think it gave him permission to let go of his worries and really enjoy his toys. He started driving them all over the house. He now sends them smashing into each other and soaring off ledges. He is no longer afraid to let them get a little banged up, but he’s also not at all convinced that his love will fade. And why should he be. It is impossible to look ahead and see how many versions of the self can exist inside a single person.

“I am always going to love cars with eyes and mouths,” he told me one day.

“Oh yeah?” I replied.

“Yeah,” he said and shrugged, his palms turned up toward the ceiling. “That’s just who I am.”

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You can read more about my shift away from running and the development of my chronic pain condition in “The Road to Here,” originally published in Red Fez.

* “How am I not myself?”

With Love

My son is on day five of a bad cold and we are sitting on the couch watching a nature documentary he has seen a dozen times. I am behind on so many things: I need to finish sending decision emails for submissions to the latest issue of the children’s literature magazine I operate; my massage therapy license is due for renewal in a month and I still have not taken any of the required continuing education courses; next spring’s tax season is going to be horrible because I am horrifically behind in bookkeeping for my business; I owe everyone in existence an email, or a follow-up text, or a check-in because it has been so long and I am terrible at staying connected to the people I love. Oh and also, I’ve pretty much completely stopped writing. The well is dry. I should probably get on that.

But when your sick child asks you to keep him company while he rests on the couch and watches a nature documentary, you drop what you are doing and join him, which is why I am yet again watching a pair of bald eagles fight over a scrap of carrion instead of making any headway on my ever-growing to-do list. I have not seen this particular documentary as many times as my son, but I have watched it with him often enough to know all the animals it features. There are Siberian tigers and African elephants. There’s some strange cat-like thing called a fossa that my son calls a fusser. There’s a great section with hornbills that always reminds me how much I like hornbills. They are so funky looking. It’s wonderful. There is a part of the documentary that is about forest fires, and another about how wildlife is slowly returning to Chernobyl. It really is a fascinating hour of television, especially the first time you see it before forced repeated viewings have turned its more educational elements into tedious lessons.

I can feel my son watching me watch it. “Here comes the tiger,” he says, glancing over to be sure I am paying attention. He signals when it is time for the elephants. “Remember this about the forest fire?” On and on, his eyes darting back to me throughout the show, hoping to confirm that I am not missing a single second of its many delights. It’s endearing really: no matter how young we are, we all relish sharing the things we love and desperately want other people to love them too.

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I find it hard to talk to non-writers about writing because the conversation inevitably turns to whether or not I’m working on something new. If I haven’t been writing, it is hard to explain that no, I haven’t been working on anything, but I’ve been thinking a lot about things I could or should be working on. There are always ideas floating around in my mind, but they are not anything I can describe in a coherent or interesting way. They are not fully formed or cohesive enough that I could offer them up as some form of action, some evidence that though I am not actually writing, I remain writing-adjacent. If I have been writing, it isn’t any easier to describe my work-in-progress without feeling like it comes off as silly and slight, as if I have no better handle on its plot and themes than I do when trying to describe a book I read years ago and only vaguely remember. This is of course, entirely a me problem. Friends who ask me about my writing because they know that’s how I spend much of my time and they want to demonstrate an interest in my life and passions are lovely people and I appreciate them tremendously.

Perhaps surprisingly, I do not find it any easier to talk to other writers about writing. I always end up comparing myself to them in ways where I fall short. Take for instance this recent interaction with the dad of one of my son’s Kindergarten classmates when we found out we both write:

Him: What do you write?

Me: Oh, you know. Stuff hardly anybody reads and that doesn’t make any money. How about you?

Him *proceeds to tell me about the book he has coming out soon and how he needs to get working on his next proposal for his publisher.*

His publisher. Oh, right. He’s a real writer.

I know, I know. We are all real writers. But let’s be honest, some of us feel a lot more real than others.

I like to talk to my son about writing, though. He is in full-time school for the first time and though it is glorious in so many ways, it is a big adjustment for both of us. Suddenly we are not together most (if not all) of the day like we have been for the last five years. It feels odd to spend so much time outside each other’s orbits, unaware of what the other is doing all day. We’ll catch up on the time we spent apart and I’ll tell him I worked on a new story (without needing to elaborate on what exactly that means on any particular day) and he’ll say, “Cool!” with the same genuine enthusiasm he has for sharing a new fun fact he learned about caterpillars. We are both sharing a little bit about something we love and hoping the other will recognize its inherent greatness.

I am trying to find my way back to writing simply for the pleasure of it, divorced from any specific metric of success or realness. To seek publication as way of sharing what I love with others, rather than a form of validation, a reward for my efforts. That is in part why I am going to try to get back to blogging regularly—a thing I used to do simply for the enjoyment of it, back in the early days of LiveJournal and Blogger. Writing that is just about sharing ideas, memories, the thoughts kicking around in my mind.

And I’m going to try to share more of my work that I love, things I have published in the past and maybe even bits and pieces of stuff I am currently working on, or work that has been languising half-finished for months or even years. You can feel free to read it or ignore it—I won’t be sitting there watching you take it in, quietly whispering, “here comes the tiger.”

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Speaking of nature documentaries, this piece, “In Spring When We Couldn’t Leave the House,” published in my chapbook Mother Nature, begins with another much-beloved nature documentary in our house, and shares some of my favorite interactions with my son from the long, tiring days at the start of the pandemic.

In Spring When We Couldn’t Leave the House

I cried in the bathroom. Sat down on the Sesame Street step stool, dropped my head onto my knees and sobbed for a full five minutes. It felt amazing. My son was watching a nature documentary at the time. The same episode he’d watched every day for two weeks, because he was in that stage where he wanted to consume everything over and over again until it imprinted on his being like a sense memory. Years from now he won’t remember anything he learned about orangutans, but perhaps he’ll feel a momentary calm whenever he sees an image of one swinging through the trees. I like thinking about that. About how this moment will fade into the past and jumble together with the rest of a life he was too young to remember. It’s a small comfort, but I accept comforts of all sizes these days.

Like these, for example:

The gummy bears my mother purchases from the mill shop at the bottom of her mountain road come in twelve different flavors. A nonsense rainbow of sugary excess. Teals, and pinks, yellows both wheat and buttery, three different shades of blue. He likes to cup his chin between his thumb and forefinger, give careful thought to his dessert time decisions. “So many good options,” he says to me. Yes, I agree. Life is full of difficult choices.

He has named his crane truck Mary. She works so hard. All day lifting brightly colored wooden blocks and beams. Mary has built three dozen cities, watched them razed to the ground, and calmly started over again. I have so much sympathy for her, constantly observing her world’s heartbreaking cycle of progress and destruction. Mid-build I tell him I’m going to make some tea. Would he like some too? “Tea sounds delicious!” he replies, and it is—his cup of warm water with a heaping spoonful of honey. We sip our tea quietly, and then I set down my mug and help Mary pick up another beam. “What are you doing?” he asks. I am helping Mary work. Is that not okay? “No,” he tells me. “The construction workers are taking a break for tea.”

“When I was a little kid,” he says, and what follows is a rundown of the aching, tender moments of his sweet, short life.

Why couldn’t I sleep when we were in Maine?

Why was I sad at Aunt Leah’s wedding?

How did I hurt myself that one time when I got that scrape?

(and the time after that, and the one after those, and so on)

Why did I yell when you told me I couldn’t have those things?

Why did you tell me I couldn’t have them?

Why was I sad when I yelled when you told me that?

Why was I nervous at school?

Why didn’t I like being in a strange place?

Why was I scared of Curious George?

Why was I scared when that fan made that zzzt zzzt zzzt noise?

Why don’t I like scary noises?

Why did I cry that time when you cried?

Because you feel sad when other people are hurting?

“Yeah, that’s why.”

We hold dance parties almost daily. He runs upstairs to put on his tutu and then tells me to play “love keeps lifting me.” We spin. A swirl of blue tulle and pink-cheeked joy. “Have you ever seen anyone dance like this?” he asks, as he twirls on one foot, throws himself to the floor and kicks both legs up behind him. I have to admit I have not. The Degas poster from my childhood bedroom hangs on his wall. I watch it as I spin in a circle, the colors blending together even more than the artist intended. Around and around, feeling higher and higher.

On a Monday he pours a bucket of water over a pile of dirt and digs half a dozen holes in the mud. What are you doing? “Burying my animals,” he says, and I decide not to read anything into it about his understanding of death. On Friday I suggest we pretend to be paleontologists. We carry a handful of paint brushes out to the dirt pit and gently free the animals from the earth. I find a gorilla. He finds a rhinoceros. Halfway through uncovering an elephant he pauses and laughs. What’s so funny?

“I almost forgot to remember all the things I’ve been hiding.”

The walls are covered with drawings of cars and trucks. An ATV with purple and green tires, a blue stripe, and a bunch of red lines that are meant to be flames. There’s a truck with fourteen wheels. I heard him counting them out. He says thirteen in a way that sounds like fourteen. Ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen, fourteen. He is learning to write his name. The B, two circles stacked one on top of the other. He creates a mixed media piece of a building on fire. Stamped fire engines and emergency vehicles. Thick lines of black crayon for the fire ladder. Wild strokes of orange marker for the flames. “Here is the smoke,” he says, furiously scribbling a gray colored pencil across the top of the page. It looks just like a fire, wild and chaotic, background images slowly emerging through the blaze. He is learning so much, I tell him. “I wake up every day and I learn something new,” he says. “I can hardly believe it.” I know. It’s amazing.

How It Started: "Happy Now"

How It Started is a blog series exploring the development of a piece of writing from its initial idea, image or line, to its final version. You can read my previous post about my story “Still, Life (With Avocados),” published in Capsule Stories here. If you would be interested in sharing the story behind one of your pieces, please feel free to reach out to me to coordinate.

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Read “Happy Now,” published in Flash Frog Lit.

Maybe they need therapy.

Maybe they need a time machine.

I once told a therapist that what I believed I needed most to be healthy was a time machine so I could go back to a certain point in my life and change the way I responded to a particular set of events. Instead of reframing my current thinking, practicing radical empathy for my younger self, and learning how to let go and move on, it would all be so much easier if I could just go back in time and respond differently.

“What I need is a time machine,” I told her, to which she responded yes, that would be nice, but for now all we had was that day’s fifty-minute session.

“Happy Now,” is a story about a marriage on the brink, but it began as a woman in conversation with her younger self.

I set out to write a story about a character confronting her past, both admonishing and forgiving herself, then and now, for her actions. It was structured as a disjointed, jumbled back-and-forth between her two selves, never entirely clear what was a spoken thought and what was internal dialogue, or even which version of the woman, present or past, was speaking at any given moment. It worked if I was to be the only reader of the story, but it was a confusing, nonsensical mess for anyone who wasn’t inside my head. But within that confusion was a truth about the ways people struggle to communicate with each other.

I shifted the story’s characters to a married couple in part because the idea of therapy versus a time machine felt like two opposing approaches to addressing the cause of a failing relationship. Was the problem a single act of infidelity, the marriage saved by simply going back in time and not committing adultery? Or was the problem larger than that, as most problems are? An inability to communicate the emotions and frustrations at the root of the action? Needs left unspoken as the couple grows farther apart over time?

The way in which I structured the story originally—a combination of internal thought, disjointed dialogue, a confusion about what has been communicated directly, versus what has been left unsaid—felt to me like how couples communicate when they are struggling to communicate, all of their exchanges underpinned with resentment and frustration. I stripped out all quotation marks and focused on quick, statacco sentences, lots of short back-and-forths.

What if we forget the whole thing, he suggests.

What if we become fabulously wealthy?

Why not both?

I tried to infuse many of these exchanges with a wry, pointed humor, because that is the way my husband and I argue: aiming for laughter even when we are angry. I wanted to hint at a foundation that was not completely cracked and crumbling. There was still a soft landing place for this couple on the other side of their turmoil, a connection that allowed them to joke, to banter, a time of happiness that they couldn’t travel back to, but perhaps could recreate in the future.

How It Started: "Still, Life (With Avocados)"

Capsule Stories Spring Edition: In Bloom

Cover Art by Darius Serebrova

When I read a piece of writing, whether prose or poem, I often find myself wondering how the writer developed the piece. Did they start with an initial image, or a single line and build the rest of the piece around it? Was there a particular emotion they set out to convey, or a bit of action, or story twist that drove the narrative from the beginning? Some writers need to find an opening line before the rest of the piece is able to unfold. Others can start somewhere in the middle and skip forward and back as they construct their stories. Some writers are especially adept at endings; they know from the start where the story is going and just need to figure out how to get there.

I am surprised by how often a piece of writing develops in a way I wasn’t expecting. It is one of my favorite things about writing—the way the piece itself can take over and follow paths you didn’t plan on taking. While it’s nice to not necessarily know how the sausage was made and leave all interpretation up to the reader, I think insights into how a piece was created can be really interesting and even helpful to developing one’s own work. So I’ve decided to share how some of my pieces were crafted. I’m hoping to share one a month, or so, with a nice variety of fiction and nonfiction prose, and poetry.

For the first post in this series, I’m starting with my short story, “Still, Life (With Avocados) in the Spring Edition of Capsule Stories, which is available for purchase in paperback and ebook. The theme for this edition was In Bloom, and I wrote this story specifically for this theme.

You can read “Still, Life (With Avocados)” in full here if you’d like (I recommend reading it first!) and then continue below to learn more about how this story came together.

Content Warning: Death & Grieving

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The jar would sit on the windowsill in the dining room alongside all the others, avocado pits lined like votive candles at a prayer altar

I started this story with a specific image in my head: A row of avocado pits placed in small mason jars lined up on a windowsill. For a period of time, in design blogs, Instagram posts, even in my friend’s kitchens, I felt like everywhere I looked people were trying to grow avocado plants from pits. I remember looking up how to do it once and reading that an avocado plant grown from a pit would likely never bear fruit, and even if it eventually did, it could take over a decade to make it happen. I imagined a person excited to grow their own avocados, not knowing that the most they could reasonably hope for would be a pleasant houseplant. There was a bit of sadness in this image for me, the hopeful effort of attempting to grow something that would never actually bloom. From that idea, the story of Elizabeth and her avocado pits was born.

It seemed an apt metaphor for grief, the work of moving toward a point you would never reach, healing that would never fully blossom. So I knew I wanted Elizabeth to be grieving something, and to be in the process of trying to emerge from the darkest point of her pain at the same time as the world around her was beginning to emerge from winter.

Half the battle was pretending you were okay. Waking each morning to say, “Today will be fine.” Trying to speak the words into existence, slowly letting the lie turn into truth.

It would be easier now that the weather was shifting, hard ground softening into damp earth. The promise of spring. Mornings that smelled of dirt, rebirth, possibility.

Initially, I had thought her grief would center around a lost pregnancy or some form of maternal grieving, but that ultimately felt a bit like trying to incorporate too many levels of “blooming.” I was playing around with the story in my head one evening while washing dishes and the window above our kitchen sink looks out across an alley and into our neighbors’ backyards. One neighbor’s fence is lined with trees that bloom early in spring, blossoming with lovely little white flowers that smell horrible. My husband and I often lament how unfortunate it is that the first scent of spring is the stench of hot feet wafting from these trees. I liked the way that image slightly undercuts the beauty of spring, and introduces an imperfection to this season of hope and rejuvenation. Once I had that in my mind, I decided Elizabeth would be grieving the death of her spouse.

The tree across the alley had begun to sprout. She could see it from her kitchen window, the tiny white buds like blemishes popping through the skin of the tree bark. It was one of those stinky trees—she could never remember what they were called—the little white flowers filling the air with a scent that made her nose scrunch up the moment she stepped outside to pull the garbage cans to the curb.

“Ah, the sweet smell of spring,” he would joke each year, hands on his hips, sucking a deep breath in through his nose. This year it would have to be her, taking the deep breath, making the joke. It was so painful, all the ways the world kept reminding her of what she had lost.

I have always found spring to be a hopeful season, and yet at the same time, I feel a sort of melancholy awareness of how fleeting that sense of renewal and rebirth can be, how it is just one small part of a cycle that will continue to repeat itself. The heat and humidity of summer are close at hand, the desolate darkness of winter will come back again. Grief too can be cyclical, the pain of a loss returning, again and again, a season of darkness from which one must repeatedly emerge. Though in time it becomes less effortful, it never goes away completely. There is no endpoint for healing, only a slow continual process. There is a real sadness in the avocados as a stand-in for Elizabeth’s healing, in knowing that they may never grow, she may never heal. I wanted the emphasis to be on the work of healing, though, on the effort required to move forward and grow.

She inspected each of the avocado pits for signs of growth. No roots snaking down into the water. No cracks in the smooth brown shells of the seeds. No tiny sprouts pushing skyward.

“You can do this,” she said, gently touching the top of each pit with the tip of her finger. “Take your time. There’s no rush.” She would wait patiently. It was amazing, she thought, how sometimes the world changed in an instant, flipped upside down so that one second it looked one way and the next it was completely unrecognizable. And how other times it changed only by force, through steady deliberate effort, the quiet will to push forward again and again, up and out of the dark, to make a series of tiny cracks through the hard surface of the world, everything slowly bringing itself back to life.

And in the end, I wanted to leave Elizabeth with a sense of hopefulness, for it is spring after all.

The avocado pits would grow. She could feel it. She believed it.

“You’re doing fine,” she said aloud. “Keep going. You’re doing fine.”

Losing Touch

Back in early March, shortly after Maryland announced it’s Covid-19 social distancing and stay home orders, I wrote this essay about how closing down my massage therapy practice and not being able to connect with people through touch left me feeling lost and disoriented. The shift from regularly touching people for hours at a time to not even being able to come within six feet of anyone outside of my household was a particularly difficult adjustment for me. This essay was published as part of Art in the Time Covid-19, released as an ebook back in July by San Fedele Press and American Writers Review. A portion of the proceeds for this anthology are donated to Doctors Without Borders. I highly recommend grabbing a copy if you’re interested. You can read my full essay, Losing Touch, below.