So, almost immediately, I proceeded aggressively to BUY. It wasn’t aggressive in the sense that I bought a ton of stuff, because in my opinion (I acknowledge this is relative) I don’t feel I bought all that much. By my count, since May, I’ve bought five items on Poshmark (one of which I’ve listed for resale because it doesn’t fit), one item new from Kotn, and five items while on vacation in July. (I have also sold a LOT of my clothing in that time!) The reason my failure felt aggressive is that shopping, in the age of the internet, often functions much more a state of mind than as an actual action, and despite my best efforts, I fell deep into the state of shopping. In the first place, my no-buy was more an attempt to exit this mindspace than it was an attempt to stop spending money or limit my possessions: I wanted to force myself into the state of enoughness. Nevertheless, once the warm weather hit in earnest, I became instantly convinced that not only did I not have ENOUGH, I in fact had NOTHING to wear. Thus I NEEDED not only to buy new things, but to R&D the revolutionary next iteration of My Style.

The intensest phase of that feeling soon passed, without doing too much damage. But it arose in the first place, I think, thanks to legitimate refinements in my understanding of what I do and do not like to wear. For example, I had a respectable collection of high-waisted denim shorts accumulated from previous summers. This summer, for some reason, I have just not felt like wearing those AT ALL. I do not want them on my person. I don’t think it’s a matter of size, they do still fit. They just don’t feel psychically comfortable.

I’ve had a similar realization as regards a lot of my tank tops. I’m coming out of this summer with a more refined vision of what kind of tanks look and feel good on me, which ones I can and can’t wear with the kinds of bras that feel comfortable. And many tanks of summers past do not fit the brief anymore.

So my question is not, What’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t I stick to my goal, especially given that I’ve been able to stick to similar goals in the past? My question is: Why couldn’t I remain in the state of enoughness for more than a few days? And how can I make sure that falling out of this state doesn’t automatically result in buying something?

Despite my unequivocal failure at not-buying, because I’ve applied my best thinking to the question, I still feel I’ve come out on top. Something in my attitude towards shopping generally has shifted, and in the kind of thing I genuinely find inspirational and aspirational. I’m coming to understand my style better. And although I quickly entered a shopping frenzy (again, I’m using this more as a descriptor of my mood than an actual activity), and I’m sure to do so again, I’ve spent most of the summer wanting to shop less, not more.

Here are some of the shifts I’ve noticed:

1. I’ve realized I have an ideal style archetype, and it can be best described as 80s boho. Wait a second, I hear you saying—the 70s were boho, not 80s! To which my answer is no—I’m not interested in 70s boho. To my mind, 70s boho reads as all one thing, which is less interesting to me. The 80s iteration, in my interpretation, has elements of tension within it that make it so much more delicious to me: a silk hair scarf with acid wash jeans; a linen midi skirt with a studded leather purse; a jumbo wood bead necklace with Ray Bans. Natural fibers with an element of toughness. Outfits with any of this kind of thing going on really scratch my brain in a very satisfying way, and identifying this about myself helps me determine whether an item that seems immediately tempting to buy would actually fit into my ideal wardrobe.

   

   2. I’m getting much more inspired by outfits I see in “real life”. This has been historically rare for me, since I live in an area I would describe as generally sartorially uninspiring (sorry friends and neighbors!). Still, I’ve realized how much lower the bar is for me to really like an outfit when I see it in real life (or even something a little closer to real life, like a person showing us around their eclectic English cottage in a House & Garden home tour1) than it is when it appears in my Instagram or Tiktok feed. Even when an outfit seems a little ordinary, or just not my style, I can love and appreciate it when it strikes me as a unique and true expression of the person who is wearing it. And there’s something really delightful about seeing someone dress in a really personal way, a way that feels like a perfect expression of their being, even if their outfit isn’t something I would wear myself, or contains no single item I would necessarily shop for. The ineffable quality of self-ness is what inspires me. (Of course there are also people sharing their outfits on social media who have this quality, though many do not!)

2. I just feel less interested in buying anything new or trendy, and less convinced that expensive things are better because they’re expensive. I’m increasingly convinced that what will define my style and stick in my wardrobe are the things I’ve been drawn to across the different eras of my life. I’m becoming re-interested in shapes or styles with a quality I won’t call timeless, but perhaps anachronistic: something I really liked wearing in college, a time I fondly recall as one when I felt very me. Or a look reminiscent of something Meryl Streep would have worn in an 80s romcom, even if it hasn’t quite come back around on the trend carousel. When I see something I pinned in 2014 and still feel delighted and inspired by it, I know it’s good.

   

   

   

3. All of which just makes me aware that I may have spent a lot of time j jujhklililboverthinking my wardrobe. Periodically I will arrive at place where I’m desperately scrolling Pinterest, or Poshmark or eBay, thinking I need SOMETHING new, I need to revolutionize, I need to figure out how to dress!!! And I don’t think I’ll ever shake that completely—novelty is an element of creativity. But this summer, despite having made purchases I didn’t intend, I’ve felt a conviction that my style is just part of me. It’s not something that can change me, or change the way I’m perceived. If I may now descend into cliche: a good outfit isn’t identifiable not by how current or cutting edge the pieces are, but by how much you love what you’re wearing, the life you’ve spent with your clothes. And I think that absolutely is something that comes through in an outfit!

Of course, “a good outfit” is subjective. But I believe there are examples where this truth—that a great outfit is one the wearer loves and has lived with—will shine through. A person who you look at and just know they bought their entire outfit in the last six to twelve months can certainly look good, and look stylish—I’m not saying they can’t! But that quality of an outfit is not what feels most aspirational to me.

Sadly, just being comfortable and confident in your own taste does not mean that you will never want to go shopping! One reason shopping wisely remains so hard for me is because it fills so many different functions in my life—as I’ve said, it is both mood and activity. Also, it is both creation and consumption, and the hierarchy people seem to like to establish between these two “opposites” strikes me as obviously false, in fashion and in most everything else. You consume an item of clothing, but you’re drawn to it because it allows you to create an outfit that is an expression of your taste.

When you throw DIY-ing or sewing into the mix, the boundary between these two becomes even blurrier: In order to knit or sew or dye or embroider, you have to consume materials, which, unless you’re spinning your own linen from flax, requires you to shop! Again, in the age of the internet, this can easily become a never-ending activity, a quest for the most perfect option among millions.

Likewise, for me, all of the following are true:

Shopping is a entertaining hobby and a genuine source of pleasure — It’s also a source of clutter, physical and mental.

Shopping costs money I know I ought not to spend — Reselling clothes and making fashion content has also been a source of income.

Thinking about clothes takes time from other more important goals I have in my life — It also feels like a core aspect of my self.

Two quotes I’ve encountered recently have informed my thinking on this subject: Emma Stephenson, writing about her failed no buy year, says, “How glorious it would be to be freed of the messiness of wanting.” This seems an especially apt description of what I wanted out of my no-buy phase. Knowing that I could not acquire more, I would have to finally believe with my heart the fact I know in my mind: that I do have enough. Imagine all I could accomplish, all the energy I could expend in worthier pursuits, if I could believe this!

Then there’s this author-less quote from a meme I pinned on Pinterest:

My next shopping goal, I think, will be looser, more mindful of how I want shopping to function in my life, and what I want it to feel like when I do engage. Can I make “shopping” (the mood), into one that feels more aligned with my preferred lifestyle, more conducive to my creative instincts?

Here’s how I don’t want it to feel: shameful, overwhelming, burdensome, obligatory, urgent, compulsory, addictive.

And I know the times when I feel this way: when I’m overtaken by the list of things I want to buy RIGHT NOW and start making a schedule of how soon I can buy them all given my limited budget. When I’ve bought a lot of stuff in a short time and realize I can’t properly enjoy it all. When I’m spending a lot of time on Instagram! When I’m scrolling secondhand apps while I’d rather be talking to my kids or my husband or reading a book or making something because I have that feeling that I just want SOMETHING new.

What I do want shopping to feel like: creative, additive, expressive, playful, karmic, providential, experimental, slow, a little special, a little constrained.

When I feel this way: When I order something pricy from a brand I’ve lusted over for years and return it because it’s not exactly the way I wanted it to be. When I add a bunch of stuff to an online cart and then, in a moment of clarity, abandon it, realizing I don’t actually need any of this. When I find something on eBay and know INSTANTLY it’s meant to be mine and my (lowball?) offer is accepted. When I clean out my closet and see before my eyes only the stuff that inspires me! When I go vintage shopping on a vacation and feel like I get to treat myself because I didn’t just buy a bunch of new clothes for the vacation. When I dig out something fantastic I’ve had for years and think why don’t I wear this more often?

So—even though I’ve bought more this summer than I meant to, I legitimately feel I’ve spent much more of my time in the second mood than the first.

I feel I’ve reached a pinnacle of awareness of my personal style, which lessens my desire to buy new stuff. (Also, perhaps problematically, I’ve only gotten here through buying a A LOT OF STUFF over the years—mostly thrifted at least—and letting what doesn’t stick cycle through. Maybe there is a shortcut to this state, but if there is I don’t know it.)

I could say I failed because I thought making a strict goal could turn off the feeling of wanting, and when it really didn’t I took that to mean I should cave. This is the ungenerous read of my actions. The complication is that I don’t regret it: I failed fast, failed hard, learned stuff, and bought stuff I’ve loved and lived in most of this summer.

I still want to impose meaningful constraints on my buying going forward, since I believe this will help me toward the style I find most inspiring. Because shopping is more than one thing: the enemy of enoughness, and the only way to actually achieve it.

This month I tried my first ever rented clothing bundle, kindly gifted to my by BNTO (@rentBNTO)! I’ve always been rental-curious, but never felt able to commit, so I was glad of an opportunity to test the whole thing out. Here’s what I ordered, how I styled it, and what I will consider entering a more committed relationship with.

My items, l-r: Viavia 100% silk sheer tee, Marle Yelena tee, Norr Camis skirt, Damson Madder Tatianna culotte, NIA Tropez skirt, epingler Wide Tuck Denim in black.

#BNTOPartner #BNTOSphere #BNTO

MONDAY / grocery shopping with kids, afternoon writing

wearing: Norr camis skirt, vintage denim jacket, thrifted Ducks Unlimited hat, Onitsuka tigers.

For an unseasonably gloomy day, I pulled out the Norr camis midi bubble skirt. Because I have difficulty feeling myself in items that are even as overtly feminine as a solid white midi skirt, my styling inevitably aimed to take the skirt in a much more casual/masculine direction—I paired it with my vintage asymmetrical denim jacket, most perfect baseball hat, Onitsuka tigers and fuzzy coral socks. This certainly felt like a very me outfit, and the skirt was easily as comfortable as wearing pajama pants to the store. However, I found the midi-length bubble hem unexpectedly unwieldy—it snagged on the bottom of the car door and the edges of my kitchen cabinets. Since this is the outfit that witnessed my struggle to steer a tantrum-ing four-year-old through the parking lot with one hand while maneuvering a cart full of groceries and a whole other child with the other hand (luckily a kind stranger was nearby to help when my 12 pack of Diet Coke rolled off the bottom of the cart), I was forced to acknowledge that my outfits need to offer me maximum agility. They just do. While I love the shape and uniqueness the bubble hem adds to the look, I would likely just buy a straight skirt if I were going to purchase something similar.

TUESDAY / preschool drop-off, playdate with friends, afternoon writing

wearing: Marle tee, thrifted & dyed vintage trousers, labradorite pendant, secondhand leather flats

Literally a dream outfit, so comfortable. This tee is surprisingly exciting; I’ve been looking to add to my closet a basic long sleeve white tee in the perfect relaxed shape that includes one or more slightly interesting element: an across-the-chest athletic-style seam, a v-neck, a textured slub linen fabric, etc. This tee fit the bill thanks to it’s double-layered sleeve: a subtle nod to skater style without making me feel like I’m in costume. I really loved this tee and wore it the most out of any item in my box.

WEDNESDAY / dropping off packages, craft store shopping with kids (cashier gave us free balloons!), afternoon home/life admin

wearing: Viavia silk tee, vintage denim jacket, polka dot skort, thrifted leather sandals

The idea of styling this sheer t-shirt with my polka dot mini skirt came to me in a vision Tuesday night, and I woke the next day determined to realize it. This top in reality turned out to be much more sheer than I had anticipated upon ordering, or else maybe I’m just more comfortable with seeing the flesh of a model in a photograph than I am with baring my own flesh in the line at FedEx. On one level, I loved it; on another level, I couldn’t quite hype myself up to wear it out for a very mundane day of errands. I tried to ease myself in by covering up a bit with my trusty denim jacket, and the result was a pileup of very satisfying textures that I really loved. The overall look reads like a subtle salute to the 80s, and we know I love to salute the 80s whenever I get the chance.

(Didn’t snap a fit pic with the uncovered sheer top, but I did post a reel of it here! Thanks to everyone who validated me.)

Casting aside the fact that a very transparent 100% silk top isn’t highly suited to my life—a life almost completely devoid of clubbing—I really loved this top. The tension between its revealing, elegant texture and its casual boxy t-shirt shape was really good. In theory, it’s all the way up my alley. While I can’t justify adding this one to my permanent closet, it did inspire me to try making another Philo top (a beloved pattern I’ve made twice now) in a sheer black linen or cotton (wouldn’t this be lovely) that’s just a little more opaque than this one.

THURSDAY / daughter’s preschool graduation!, celebratory McDonald’s lunch, afternoon YouTubing

wearing: Damson Madder Tatianna trousers, me-made top, labradorite pendant, secondhand patent leather boat shoes

Ah look at that, the very Philo top I just aforementioned! Isn’t it perfect. And it’s perfection in shape and color is really enhanced by these excellent trousers from Damson Madder, easily one of my favorite picks from this box.

This is where the beauty of renting really shines: I’ve had these pants in my DM cart online for several months, but I wasn’t sure if they’d read too corporate for me to wear regularly. After testing them out at home I can confirm that I love them and want them to belong to me.

The single flaw of these pants is that, given limited inventory, I had to settle for a pair that was at least one and possibly TWO sizes too small for me. Thus I resorted to wearing them like this. The fact that I did this and still loved them at the end of the day is a true testament to my passion for these pants!

I’m a big fan of Damson Madder’s work—their products, their styling, their photography. Their marketing emails are probably the only ones I regularly open with enthusiasm instead that dark feeling of “damn I really need to unsubscribe from all these marketing emails.” Despite this, I have only purchased one of their actual products. As fun as I think their pieces are, I’ve especially lately become aware of how time-stamped they feel. A piece from DM 2023 feels both extremely distinctive and completely different from a DM 2026 piece. And a DM 2020 piece, hundreds of examples of which flood the secondhand marketplace, feels like an artifact from an alternate universe (as so many 2020 things do). I even wrote an post in 2024 about the delightful 80s-inspired aura of their styling; not even two years later, a scroll through their offerings reveals a much harder slant toward 90s minimalism and Y2K sportiness.

These pants, however, do not strike me as a style that would feel quickly dated. Their removable tie-on pocket is their most funky and distinctive feature, and I love it, but if I were to own these pants and eventually decide the side-tie detail felt too 2026, I could easily remove it to create a more basic pant. Okay, I’ve convinced myself—I need to buy these pants. Just in a bigger size. (Love the idea of wearing them a little lower on the waist with a snug-fitting tank or something for warmer weather.)

FRIDAY / park playdate, Youtube editing, weekend BBQ prep!

wearing: Marle tee, NIA skirt, jelly Mary Janes, carnelian pendant necklace

Another bubble hem! This is obviously a trend I’ve been attracted to but haven’t felt assured enough of its staying power to invest in anything thus constructed. This makes it a perfect candidate for rental! The length of this skirt made the bubble hem element feel so much more wearable, and the built-in shorts (!) added a necessary element of physical and emotional security. Felt so easy & comfy wearing this to (attempt to) read at the park while my kids played independently.

SATURDAY / morning chores, afternoon mini writing retreat (4 hours alone at the coffeeshop!), hosting a backyard dinner BBQ!

wearing: epingler Wide Tuck Denim in black, dyed stripe t-shirt, carnelian pendant, secondhand leather bow flats.

I am a big fan of a pleated pant, and the shape of these looked perfect on the model. Normally I’m also in favor of anything that creates the illusion that I have hips when I most assuredly do not. Have them. But the shape of these just didn’t totally work for me, no matter what top I tried with them. They were a little too tight in the waist, too voluminous around the middle, and too long on the leg to create the effortless feeling summoned by the photograph. I did love the heavy drape of the fabric though.

I had such fun testing stuff out with BNTO and feel more assured of what trends belong in my life and which do not. Please lmk which look is your favorite and also how you would style a bubble hem mini skirt—I’m determined to get a few more good fits out of this one before I ship my BNTO back.

Even though I had chosen my title with tongue firmly placed in cheek, I guess the universe saw fit to knock me down a peg or six.

Travel back with me to October 2025. I was preparing for a long weekend trip with my husband when I started having chest and arm pains, lightheadedness, and weird hot flashes that maybe I should have seen a doctor about but really felt like it was probably just my body trying to tell me I was not doing great. All my stressors of course melted away during the five days I was on vacation with no responsibilities (our parents and my brother took turns watching our kids, a thousand thanks to them!), but the sensations returned with a vengeance when I was back in charge of what felt like everything. Several mornings, alone with my two youngest kids, I fell into total motionlessness. I wrote:

I was sad, demotivated, and completely overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility I was coming home to (the usual amount, btw). This feeling reached its peak on a Friday morning, when I had planned to take my 2 youngest children on a bike ride, but instead sat completely unable to move from a dining room chair, completely unable to stop crying. I don’t remember ever experiencing such acute inability to function. The usual things felt completely impossible. I’m just totally responsible for these children? I’m supposed to fight both of them into their shoes? I’m supposed to locate their hats and bikes and snacks while they hurt each other and destroy things? And when we come home, I’m supposed to look at this bed-sized pile of laundry and this sink full of dishes and say “Okay, now I’ll make you lunch!” and just do that forever?

On top of the intense overwhelm, I was confused by why it was happening now. Why was I feeling so debilitated? Why was I feeling so debilitated when I’d just come back from vacation? I ought to be recharged, and overjoyed to see my children!

I was feeling a bit naturally better my the time I encountered the aforementioned life-altering podcast and from there went on a binge of related podcasts and audiobooks, which together constituted my education in dopamine. I had long been interested in better understanding the concept of dopamine addiction, and vaguely aware that the way in which this idea was dealt with in popular culture was likely an oversimplification. But I wasn’t actively pursuing said better understanding when I pressed play on this podcast. Among many revelations it bestowed upon me, one of its most relevant was the concept of “cheap dopamine.” In it I understood that by constantly feeding myself on easy rewards, I was diminishing my enjoyment of everything else in life that isn’t effortlessly pleasurable.

I was highly motivated to reset everything. For two weeks, I was able to mostly abstain from scrolling and drastically reduce my sugar consumption—and it felt strangely effortless! Also, I was in a great mood. I had fixed myself. With enormous relief I recognized that I wouldn’t have to follow up with those two therapists I had emailed after coming home from my trip!

Alas, it could not last. I had already crashed back to earth, returned to scrolling compulsively first thing in the morning and resenting my lot in life (except it was ten times worse now, since at that point I knew I’d had the secret to happiness in my hot little hands, and I was just too foolish to hold on to it!!) by the time I began reading Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals in December, which begins: “This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you are never going to sort your life out.” Promising. But I really knew I was in trustworthy hands from these words in the introduction:

“Shifts in perspective fade depressingly quickly: for a few days, everything seems different, but then the overwhelming momentum of the usual way of doing things reasserts itself once more.”

I didn’t encounter that many ideas in this book that felt revolutionary on their own—I felt like I already believed all of it. However, just having Burkeman’s voice in my head (in audiobook form) over the course of the following weeks enabled me to see more clearly a lot of the thought trenches I’ve spent years digging for myself to live in. Though I certainly don’t identify as a perfectionist, I began to see the many ways in which I actually had oriented my life toward some future time when perfection would be attainable. Recognizing and releasing that has, as Burkeman promises, made a noticeable difference in my ability to experience pleasure.

Being a full-time caregiver to young kids is, I maintain, very hard. I will never, never try to tell a mother to just stop self-victimizing, or to cheer up and remember that she is responsible for manufacturing the magic of childhood. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling completely unable to do those things. I now find myself feeling generally much more capable, but I don’t think I could have rushed the process. It happened because I was ready. If it’s helpful to anyone, I want to share some of the realizations and reframes that have helped me stay reliably happier in the past several months.

MfM is largely about the freedom that comes from honestly accepting one’s limitations. My own limitations are, at this point, things I can conveniently blame on my children. This creates resentment, towards them and others. It enables me to tell myself my husband is not limited in the same way, and neither is anyone else in this world who has a mere job, and therefore doesn’t understand what a great excuse I have for operating so far below my true capacity.

Though I don’t think of myself as a person plagued by comparison to others, or pummeled by unreachable societal expectations for moms/women, I realize I do actually have a lot of loud voices in my head other than mine. These voices—an imaginary composite of cool internet moms, and more capable mothers of generations past—are always telling me what I should do, or should be able to do (keep my house clean, lose weight, get my kid to wear a coat in January, etc.) According to my conscious self-concept, I don’t live under a lot of cultural pressure—after all, I left the Mormon church of my childhood, and that required me to give up caring what anyone in my life would think of me. But maybe those expectations are still much more insidious and present than I realize.

Also, it exposed to my conscious mind how much I’m unconsciously oriented toward optimizing—or figuring out what the right and best thing to do would be. But optimization, as is now quite clear to me, is wholly optional. What if I relieved myself of the expectation of doing the right thing, and just did what felt right in any given moment? Not in a hedonistic way, rather in an “I can’t possibly invest the required amount of research into figuring out what the optimal thing to do would be, let alone muster the will/find the time to implement an optimal plan, so I just have to do something, whatever feels best right now, and that’s going to be fine” type of way.

It exposed how often I orient myself toward fixing a problem long-term, rather than just doing one small piece of work on it right now. I go to get a load of laundry out of my washing machine and think “I really need to start cleaning my washing machine every month.” But since implementing such a monthly schedule is #88 on my list of priorities, if I’m honest with myself, I know I’m not actually going to do that. Instead it would just be a thought that weighs on me occasionally, making me feel bad. Instead, I should decide to clean it one time, right now—or don’t.

On a small scale, anti-optimization thinking looks like: I’m probably actually not going to take the time to rethink the whole organization scheme of this hugely messy room later, but I can throw away the two pieces of trash that are next to my foot right now. (Embarrassingly, I think that my orientation toward implementing-optimal-systems-in-the-future actually has deterred me from taking even such minuscule actions as this. I’d rather try to schedule “clean bedroom” in my planner than just put away a handful of things in my bedroom now.)

But I’m realizing optimization thinking plagues me on a larger scale as well. This is related to the common problem of searching out a “story,” or an explanation, for why I feel the way I feel. I seem to assume that if I can come up with a persuasive articulation of the reason for my suffering, I will change the world, and also justify all the resentment I have felt in the years since I became a mother. I have generated and collected partial articulations aplenty. None seemed entirely satisfactory.

The search for this One True Story is, inevitably, informed by online discourse: virally controversial videos and comments that feed on division (between working moms/stay at home moms, between moms and dads, between parents and child-free people) but which I cannot help but consume in search of some explanation. The Internet says parenting is so hard because moms don’t have a village or help from family. (Except I do). It says parenting is hard because they don’t have a supportive/equal partner. (I do). It’s hard if your children have special needs, or if you have two under two. . . But I have none of these, and it’s still REALLY HARD for me. And it seems I have no excuses for this.

The story I realize I’ve settled on is this: parenting is hard because I am just not suited to it. I don’t have the temperament; I prefer the life of the mind; I lack empathy, et cetera. But if I’m not suited to it, I have to ask myself, why am I doing it? Why did I “sign up” for this in the first place, the imaginary arbiters in my head demand to know? Because I didn’t know what I was getting into?

Well, yes, I answer.

Does this make me irresponsible? Did I make reckless, ill-informed choices?

Well, I say, so what if I did?

What if I simply accepted every charge these imaginary people are leveling at me: Yes, I was unprepared. No, I didn’t do the thing that made the most sense, and I still am not doing the thing that makes the most sense! But I’m not capable of doing the thing that makes the most sense, because identifying what that thing is would require resources I didn’t then and still do not have. I’m just doing the thing that I’m doing. And actually—if I get outside of my own head and objectively look at how it’s going—it’s going great. My kids are loved, and loving. They are fed, healthy, clean (most of the time), and clothed. They don’t even use iPads! They are, I think, happy with their lives.

I’m conscious now of how much my inner dialogue has been devoted to explaining why my life is so hard, like way harder than I expected and way harder than anyone else can comprehend. Various sources will confirm that this struggle is justified: I listen to a podcast on parental burnout that tells me the stress of parenting young children is comparable to the trauma that causes PTSD, because you’re averting disaster that is not constant but intermittent and unpredictable, and I think: Yes! That’s what’s destroying my mind and body! It’s unbearable, because I (never my husband) will wake from a deep sleep when I hear my child roll over in the middle of the night. Because in the process of tying one child’s shoe, I can reach out the other hand in a split second to catch the toddler who is toppling on his tricycle. But my superpowers come at a cost: my brain is fragmented, I no longer function in any of the ways that used to make me feel capable.

Okay, that was me indulging in some explaining—but while the explanations feel good for a moment, I see now I’ve been overvaluing them. Henceforth I renounce them: I will feel my feelings without trying to justify them. Without trying to hone them into a perfectly convincing diatribe, rife with illustrative examples and powerful metaphors, for why I am so beaten down. I’ll never be able to use this explanation anyway. It doesn’t help me. And no one will ever ask me for it.

An interlude

While my intensive dopamine education led me to what I now think of as a false epiphany, I did learn several valuable reframes that continue to improve my experience of life. Here are some:

Phone-free workouts. Understanding the utility of avoiding scrolling first thing in the morning, especially while exercising, has helped me stop reaching for my phone during my morning workouts in a way that I have never previously been able to sustain for more than a week. Maybe working out is supposed to make you feel good because it’s hard. Don’t keep escaping the hard with a fun little scroll, or googling every single thing that crosses your mind in between sets. Let your mind truly rest (and your body work) during a workout. This has really helped me appreciate my workout time more and experience it as valuable me time, rather than feeling like it’s just one more thing I have to schedule/do before the 445,299,328 other things I have to schedule/do.

Not treating myself to constant treats. In the months before my dopamine epiphany, my consumption of fun little treats was at a lifetime high. I deserved these, I told myself, because my life is hard, it’s all I have to look forward to! But there is a pleasure-pain balance your brain works to maintain; when you over-consume pleasure, your brain tries to rebalance by doubling down on pain. This is why one Kit Kat from my daughter’s Halloween basket (please don’t tell) will never be enough. The pleasure it affords is immediately followed by pain—the pain of no longer having a Kit Kat in my mouth, which I reason will be alleviated if I have just one more KitKat! And so on. By contrast, a painful experience demands that your brain rebalance by generating its own pleasure. (The logic of the cold plunge).

Remembering everything is hard. This is as it should be. Doing hard things is good for your brain. While I always would have said I believed hard is good, I think understanding it in the context of brain chemistry makes the truism convincing—a concrete scientific reality rather than some abstract moral principle that I merely hope is true. Dopamine plays a role evolutionarily in getting humans to do the hard work that sustains their lives, and we try to sidestep this at our peril. Whatever allows you to escape pain for a while will itself end up causing additional pain. Better to practice welcoming pain into your life as well as you can—and let yourself be consoled that some amount of pain is healthy.

It’s been months now since I read Meditations for Mortals, and its lessons seem to have stuck. Now the key, I think, is leaving plenty of room for feeling everything, bad and good, without letting the bad feelings cause me additional distress because of what I allow them to mean. Without letting them signify something is wrong with me or that I should have done something different with my life. The problem with my dopamine epiphany was that I had valued it for its ability to transform my mood. Of course that was not going to last. Of course I was going to be in a bad mood again, and what then? That story could not be true anymore.

My new story, I think, goes something like this: it feels hard, as Dr. Becky says, because it is hard. There’s no mystery here, and no one even needs to believe me when I tell them. Feeling like I’ve chosen a lifestyle that’s very hard for me does not mean that should have chosen something else.

I still feel angry and annoyed many times each day (though less frequently overwhelmed, I think). I’m not letting the fact that I feel bad mean that something is wrong. It just means that there are multiple people screaming in my vicinity at all times. It means that I just spent twenty minutes bargaining with someone who refuses to put pants on and it’s not even 8 am. In other words: it’s the appropriate response to the stimulus. Feeling justified in feeling bad means my bad moods pass much more quickly: I apologize to my kids when I need to, which is often, and I move on. The moods don’t accumulate into stories of failure, victimization, and wasted potential.

I recently heard “Both Sides Now” again, as if for the first time, and have played it many times since. I’m not the first to find comfort in the wisdom of this verse:

Oh, but now old friends, they’re acting strange

And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed

Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained

In living every day

I like giving myself permission to say that I actually have lost something by choosing the life I’ve chosen—just as everyone cuts off other options by making any choice, simply by “living every day.” My kids have taken a lot from me (“autonomy and vitality,” in the words of Molly Millwood, which I think of perhaps too often). I can just say that without adding but they’ve given me the greatest joy I can imagine!—I don’t want to put that burden on them. I want to just let them be what they are. My reward is that three new people exist in this world. And I get to observe their lives at intensely close distance—which is both delightful and punishing.

So I like this ambiguous calculus of Mitchell’s: “Something’s lost but something’s gained.” Not something’s lost but so much more!! is gained—they’re both just something. You can’t quantify it, therefore you can’t optimize it: you can’t know in advance that you’ll come out better off.

Monday: After a park playdate with friends, we picked up our grocery order (I do like to shop in person with my kids when circumstances allow, but with a four-year-old and an 18-month-old in tow it’s just too tempting sometimes to order for pickup). We came home and I unloaded a good amount of said groceries onto a wooden board for lunch. Fancy! (They call this “snack lunch”.) My kids don’t know how good they have it.

I recently treated us all to a combination CD-bluetooth-radio (my first CD player since high school!) that lives on our kitchen countertop. I am loving life with this CD player. I love having a finite number of options of what to listen to, and yet knowing that whatever I choose to play is something I love that will reward repeated listens. Our current CD collection (which lives in a kitchen cabinet right above the player) is made of a few of our own CDs that have survived since middle/high school, but mostly is a collection in a giant zip-up binder gifted to us by a friend before moving across the country last fall. What a windfall! I’ve also begun adding a haul of CDs to my weekly library haul, which is so fun. Anyway: our lunch soundtrack, courtesy of the public library, was the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, which I haven’t listened to straight-through in years but it’s so good and fun: consistent but varied, weird but catchy. Perfect lunch music.

I partake in the snack tray while also enjoying a homemade chai latte with collagen powder (trying to re-prioritize my protein intake!). Refreshing.

I put away the rest of the groceries while the kids eat their snack lunch, while also dispensing a few groceries into the VIRAL SNACK TRAY I purchased last year and usually forget to use. But! I’m glad I have it! When I can be bothered to prep it (or better yet, get a child to prep it), it comes in very clutch. My goal this week is to have it out every afternoon when my first-grader comes home from school, so that she might be tempted to eat something other than her usual slice of unadorned bread. (Her current diet is primarily bread).

Dinner today is sheet pan veggies (beets, red potatoes, peppers) & sausage. I prep the veggies while the girls proudly half (halve?) the potatoes.

Our dinner soundtrack is one of my all-time favorites, a central pillar of my identity, New Order’s Power Corruption and Lies.

My dream was to serve this with crumbled goat cheese (yum), but to my dismay I discovered that I’d mistakenly ordered smoked goat cheese, which smelled so weird to me that I didn’t even try it. I sprinkled grated parmesan on mine instead, which was fine.

Tuesday: (Note: I am not including breakfasts here, because I don’t usually eat breakfast and my husband makes the kids’ breakfasts!) Today’s lunch menu is avocado, hummus, and sliced pepper rolled up in turkey slices. Actually delicious! I enjoy mine again with a chai latte. I stopped by the library this morning with my baby while the big girls were at school and stocked up on a fresh batch of CDs. One of these provides today’s lunch music: Getz Gilberto ‘76—as far as I understand, a live recording of the 1963 album Getz Gilberto. (“The Girl from Ipanema” is certainly the most famous track on this album, but I am partial to “Doralice.”)

After the little kids down for their naps, I toss some chicken breast, onion, garlic, jalapeno, spices & other stuff in the crockpot so that a delicious white chicken chili will be ready by 6 pm for dinner. A crockpot is another thing I always forget I have! Why?? It’s so nice to cook at 1 pm instead of 5 pm when, if you’ll pardon the phrase, I am usually feeling pretty cooked. Aside from some pesky chopping, this one was quite quick & easy to put together. Also lots of protein!

Wednesday: leftover sheet pan veggies & sausage for lunch. This time instead of topping it with parmesan I whipped up a quick dressing with the last of the tahini I had in my fridge, plus garlic and salt and ACV since I didn’t have a lemon. A marked improvement on the parmesan in my opinion. There is something that just feels so right about the combo of beets & tahini. More Velvet Underground for lunch today, this time Velvet Underground & Nico. It too is AKNF.

Our dinner was leftover chili, which we ate while listening to Blue Rev by Alvvays (a truly perfect album by a most beloved band—Alvvays shares the distinction with Fleet Foxes of being the only group I’ve seen live more than once!). I’m seeing a pattern in my listening habits: at lunchtime, in the middle of the day’s chaos, I’m usually in the mood to put on something with “chill vibes”; by dinnertime my energy is flagging and I usually want something to pump me up.

Thursday: Lunch today, served immediately after preschool pickup, was cottage cheese, avocado & tomato on top of sourdough crispbread. I am one of cottage cheese’s biggest fans and I’m so glad my children share my passion for this easy versatile protein source. Earlier I’d treated myself to a coffee on the way home to celebrate receiving my first paycheck from YouTube! Fun! Our soundtrack today was that of KPop Demon Hunters, at my daughter’s request. The lyrics of the song Takedown “how can you sleep / or live with yourself / a broken soul trapped in the nastiest shell” prompted the following illuminating dialogue with H, age 4:

H: “Mom, I know how you can live with yourself.”

Me: “Oh? How?”

H: “Well, you can play by yourself, read books to yourself, brush your teeth, and put yourself to bed.”

It’s really that simple.

For dinner I made this cabbage roll soup, with turkey instead of ground beef since that’s what I had on hand, and pearl barley instead of rice because I wanted to eat barley. It was easy and quite good, though very tomato-y (I think I’ll use less tomato sauce next time I make it). Still, my kids all seemed to like it, especially since they got to top it with sour cream. Anything to them is delicious with sour cream.

I’ve become such a cabbage person lately—I feel like having a nice cabbage on hand at all times comes in so handy, since you can roast it, put it in soup, eat it raw in a salad or slaw, it’s voluminous enough to make several meals, AND it lasts forever in the fridge! Basically, if we were playing underrated/overrated, and you asked me about cabbage, I think you know by now what I’d say.

The Supremes Gold put me in that good Motown mood for cooking.

Friday: Another “snack lunch” for the kids (I ate leftover cabbage soup with a splash of heavy cream mixed in—I think the day-two soup flavor was much improved and I enjoyed this a lot) with Leonard Cohen on the CD player, a souvenir from my recent trip to his hometown, Montreal. Chill vibes!

Ever since we moved to our new house in July, we’ve been wanting to try the Thai restaurant which is literally a five-minute walk from home—so rare in our suburban paradise! The idea of being able to do things like this was a major selling point on this house for us, and yet in four months we’ve never done it. Weird. Anyway, we finally visited our local Thai joint and it was so thrillingly delicious. Unfortunately, the experience of eating here was extremely unpleasant thanks to my 18-month-old, who did NOT want to sit in a high chair, did not want to sit anywhere, and also did not want to eat anything. Instead my husband and I took turns walking him around the restaurant to look at the fish tank and go outside. My big girls did great though, and the other adults having conversations around us seemed to be enjoying their experience a lot. (Next time we will walk here to pick up takeout and eat at home. I kind of don’t want to try going to a restaurant again for six months.)

What else I’ve been consuming:

a. a bunch of Halloween candy, in secret (shh)

b. During my daily laundry sorting-and-folding sessions, I’ve been taking in the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, available on YouTube, in twenty-minute doses. It is so fascinating/inspiring/tragic. In the past I’ve enjoyed some of Daniel Johnston’s songs from afar, without engaging very deeply or learning anything about him, but this documentary has pushed me down a Johnston rabbit hole. Watching the story of his life—his upbringing in a Christian home in West Virginia, his devotion to passing out his homemade tapes while employed at McDonalds, his sort of accidental debut on MTV in 1986, his struggle with mental illness—has me alternately wondering how I might encourage his intrinsic passion for art in my own children, and pondering how inextricable this passion was from his illness. His 1980s music seems like a template for what indie rock would become—its amateurishness is its charm—and while he always seemed to believe completely in his own genius, it’s hard to tell how aware he was of the specific aesthetic he was creating. The entanglement of his life and art with religious dogma is also a lot to think about. I’m sure before watching the documentary I would have read the lyrics to a song like “Don’t Play Cards with the Devil” as an ironic little joke, but in fact his belief in the devil’s wiles was as sincere as his belief in Casper the Friendly Ghost—both completely real characters to him.

c. Speaking of rabbit holes: my current audiobook is Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a book that compels me every night in bed to recite to my husband every detail of what I’ve read that day. I’m not typically a true-crime person, but the intersection of this particular crime with every facet of twentieth-century pop culture and political history is in my opinion too fascinating to not be consumed by. To this point my main education on the infamous 1969 murders came from the extremely comprehensive podcast You Must Remember This, which dedicated a whole season (in 2015) to the Manson family. However, CHAOS—a book published in 2019—interrogates the “official” narrative of the crimes and their motive by probing at gaping holes in the story used to convict Manson & colleagues. The author Tom O’Neill began this investigation as a magazine assignment in 1999, but after missing his deadline because he couldn’t get the answers he was looking for, the research trail consumed him for twenty years. This book is the result and it is completely insane. I will be watching the Netflix documentary version too when I finish the book!

Come find me on YouTube if you want! Talking lots more about my media diet & other life stuff in this recent video:

Perhaps you will also enjoy this?

Thanks as always for reading, xoxoxo

Without further ado, allow my to introduce the items currently crowding my eBay watchlist.

Fall linen. Two specific checked linen items have captured my heart recently: First, the double-layered jacket from Deiji Studios (I WILL buy this if I ever find one secondhand—the $394 price tag pushes it out of my reach). Second, the poet blouse from Daughters of India (seen below on an icon of mine, Daisy Murray). I think the DOI one actually is cotton, but I would be so sold on this exact top with the weight/texture of linen.

A subtle plaid/checked linen just feels very fall to me right now—I found so many exciting options on Poshmark (most from FLAX.)

(I’m afraid the real solution here may just be to learn to sew, purchase my perfect plaid linen, and make this pattern.)

I feel like I’m seeing slightly weird denim jackets everywhere and I love them. You may see a recurring theme in this wish list: take a classic style and make it just a *little* weird. Actually this might be the key to fashion generally! Anyway, I’m wishing hard for a denim jacket with an extra something—an asymmetrical front, a puff sleeve, a high collar, what have you. Images below are from Damson Madder and Seventy Mochi.

Who’d have thought I’d spend the year 2025 fully obsessed with pleated jeans?? My first encounter with this trend was, I think, the Ozma of California field pant (below right)—again, just not in the budget for me. I did purchase a pair from L.F. Markey in February that were fantastic, just slightly too voluminous a shape for me, and I ended up returning them. I tried on a vintage Bill Blass pair on a recent vintage shopping trip with my sister that were *so* close to perfect. In the end, I think the pair of my dreams may just be this barrel-legged pair from Everlane (below left)—but there are lots of true vintage ones to be had for cheap!

We are in the era of the statement flat (I still love it on an instinctive level every time I see it)—but were not the 80s another such era? I love the idea of taking a wacky 80s or 90s shoe and using it to jazz up an otherwise understated outfit like the ones above. I look for a fascinating little flat or loafer like this every time I go thrifting and it seems like I should be able to find something that fits the bill, but I never quite do. Guess I’ll just snag one of these .

My ultimate accessory aspiration right now is to own a Taxco sterling silver and onyx necklace—but all varieties of vintage sterling silver jewelry are getting my gears going this season.

Like linen, silk is a material whose texture just adds immediate interest to an outfit— the way that it falls and catches light elevates it even above a cotton blouse (and way above polyester). Always looking to add to my collection of silk striped button downs!

These studded jeans from Roucha have been in my cart for nearly a year at this point. Again, their price is a deterrent. . . but the pop of texture these metallic studs add to an otherwise ordinary pair of jeans is just so alluring. Maybe I’ll be able to scratch the itch with a much cheaper secondhand pair, featuring grommets, beads, or chains?

I spotted what looked like a vintage striped denim button-up on @danunule on Instagram (another mom fashion icon of mine!) and became instantly convinced this would be a fall wardrobe essential. I love a *normal* denim overshirt as much as literally everybody on earth, but why not add a stripe and style as usual? (I love all the vintage options below, but the equal-weight stripes on her top are what really excite me—those are a key ingredient in my dream denim shirt.)

A striped long-sleeve tee: an evergreen classic to be sure, but also, they seem to be enjoying a moment? I love the styling on this one from AYR that Instagram keeps pushing on me, I click “add to cart,” but then I tell myself. . . surely I can capture this vibe for less than $125? The shirt’s weight is key here, and I think the surest way to succeed here is to buy vintage.

Now that’s sorted, shall we imagine a few possibilities together?? How about some outfits featuring the above pieces as well as other finds from various of my other watch lists.

Outfit idea #1: striped tee, jeans, and mules from above, with asymmetrical leather coat (!!!), woven leather black bag (!!!!!!!) & sterling silver bead necklace

Outfit idea #2: loafers, blouse and jacket from above, with sterling silver earrings, Charlie Beads bloomers, and green leather bag

Outfit idea #3: pleated jeans, woven loafers and denim shirt from above, with 80s chiffon clip, sterling silver earrings, yellow ostrich bag & Le Bon Shoppe socks

That was so fun and it took SO long. I hope you enjoyed. Let me know what’s on your list for fall—vintage, new, or whatever. <3

One night, well past bedtime, I come upstairs to find H, age 3, on the landing outside our family’s bedroom. “Get in bed,” I say. She is in the fetal position; her body wants so badly to be asleep, though she is fighting it with all her will. “I want someone to sleep with me!” she wails. This is my fifth visit upstairs since I tucked her in. “I’ll sleep with you,” I say. I can tell she will be out within thirty seconds.

She crumples onto her inflatable air mattress and I lie with my face next to hers, my body curled on the ground in opposite direction. Her eyes are already closed; I am looking at her face upside-down. This is an artist’s trick, isn’t it, to see a face with the accuracy required draw it faithfully? Oriented thus, I can see very clearly that she is nothing more than a baby. She’s completely still, the bangs of the French bob I gave her last month have fallen away from her forehead. Her thumb is rising to her mouth as it does when she sleeps, and her face is presented to me so plainly: still so round, its proportions still those of a baby’s. My mind scans for images of her at six months old, twelve months, eighteen, to compare. But the only memory I can summon is the obvious one: the moment of her birth itself.

As predicted, she’s already breathing the heavy breaths of sleep. I, though, am weeping (I must be very tired): I can recall nothing. Aside from the moment the midwife laid her bloody on my chest, her whole babyhood is gone from me. Photos or journal entries, I know, would surely bring much of it back—but unaided, I could tell you so little of what she was just two years ago.

Because he is present, I could tell you anything you want to know about a different one-year-old: her baby brother, A. Whenever he is uncontained he is trying to fall into a body of water, toss Pyrex dishes on the floor, or headbutt the sharp corner of a piece of furniture. He wants to run, and to walk down the stairs on his feet like an adult. I wish he would just scoot so that I didn’t have to live in fear—but he’s judged his ability accurately, he almost never falls. I just gave him his first haircut with the electric clippers and accidentally transformed him from infant to child. His lurches toward language are so exciting; I remember how fun it will be, in the coming months, to observe yet again the miracle of a baby learning to say what’s in its head. At the same time, I love that he doesn’t yet talk, I love how he strains to communicate without talking, I love his custom vocabulary, his “o-e-o-e-o-e” and his “anhg” and his “wee-ah-wee-ah,” each of which does seem to mean something specific, though just when I think I’ve decoded it (‘he’s saying “fan!”’) he pulls out another novel usage. It feels like I always have to save him from himself. It feels like his babyhood is slipping away too. I’m always afraid it will be gone before I can record it or properly experience it. By “it” I mean “he”: my baby, who will in one sense outlive me, and who in another will soon live only in my memory. Like his older sister. And see how carelessly my memory has treated her.

I’m crying again, writing this, which feels good, actually, because it has made this moment into one I may actually remember. The intensity of whatever feeling this is compelled me to sit and actually write it down, unlike the more subtle feelings of longing and regret (which compel me only to think about sitting and writing things down). Of course, the longing and regret are actually just blips punctuating the more persistent yearning for the future, in which my children need me less.

I want to remember how, on our hike today, I said near the end, to hurry H along, “Are you ready to get back to the car and eat some lunch?” and she said, “I’m lit-er-y going the right way.” She meant “literally,” a construction borrowed from her older sister, who in turn borrowed it from her older cousins—a phrase that feels anachronistic in a six-year-old’s vocabulary and even more so in a three-year-old’s.

H hiked so well today: almost five miles, which I never would have guessed she could do. She did so much running, and jumping, and when her energy flagged I tried to distract her with letter and counting games, and she did not whine, only asked me to carry her a few times. When I put her on my shoulders and told her to whisper me a secret she said, “Mom, I love you.” Too sentimental a characterization for fiction—she could only be real. Everyone that passed her smiled at her and laughed to themselves and many of them told her what a great hiker she was. Wherever she goes, people love her; looking at her makes them smile. This I remember has been true all her life. My husband carried the baby, so I was on duty with H, while our oldest ran ahead with the cousins. It was the most focused time we’ve spent together in a while—time where we were dedicated to nothing but The Journey. Literally.

I want to remember how at the lodge, later, we passed two people parking their motorcycles. A woman rider, in all leather, dismounted, removed her helmet, and waved at H. H waved back, then, walking away, said, as if to reassure me, “See, motorcycles are nice. They love us.”

A few days later, we are home from our trip and school has already begun. On Friday, school is out early and my oldest, S, has prepared us tiny mugs of peppermint tea to go with the dark chocolate pistachio cookies I made earlier for a potluck. The little kids are napping. An hour ago, S pulled a bloody tooth out of her mouth and promptly lost it somewhere in the house. That’s okay, she says, she’ll just write a note for the tooth fairy. I watch her intently mix sugar into her tea. She looks impossibly old. I try to picture her as a baby, too, and can’t.

It strikes me that the reason I cannot remember them as babies is that I cannot remember myself as the mother of those babies. I seem to myself violently transfigured over the six years I’ve spent in this unsalaried position: from a calm, easygoing young adult who felt basically capable of handling anything in her life (a master’s degree, a Mormon mission) to a frazzled, short-fused mother incapacitated by acute executive dysfunction (a term I’ve only recently learned but now think about twelve times a day). But when exactly did this happen? What kind of mother was I at the first? As a baby, S was very simple; I think I still felt capable then of doing what needed to be done for her, and me. She pulled off full night sleeps embarrassingly early. Her twos were not very terrible. I try now to summon the feeling of consuming obsession with her every action that I know I felt when she was my only child. But it’s hazy now. Only when she turned three—after the arrival of her little sister—did our relationship grow complicated. Now we spend much of our time embattled, which I do not like, but feel usually powerless to stop. Exhausted at the end of every day, I feel sure I could never forget the anguish this causes us both. But, if all goes well, I guess I will. Forget.

In this moment, at least, with the tea and the cookies, we are at ease with each other. When her tooth came out we talked about how the three teeth she’s lost so far were the first ones she grew—the same three teeth her baby brother now has accumulated on his lower gumline. She looked at the tooth in her hand and lamented, in the theatrical transatlantic accent she picked up from who-knows-where, “You chewed my first food for me, and now I'm going to give you away for money!”

I’ve taken to singing the baby “Time in a Bottle” as a lullaby, because maybe I like to engineer on-the-nose sentimental moments for myself. Force myself to feel the way I think I should. (Sometimes I sing “Baby Mine” from Dumbo—what am I doing to myself?) Singing gets me choked up, even though I think some of the lyrics are a little dumb, at least without their melody.

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
'Til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you.

If I’m mourning the fact that my memory fails, what is it that I would prefer memory to do instead? Do I want to bottle up time? It seems there must be a right and a wrong way to experience these years, and if I can’t remember them later, it’s because I’m experiencing them wrong now. I’m afraid I experienced my first baby wrong, and the second, and even knowing this, I’m doing it wrong again the third time. If I had experienced them properly, wouldn’t my memory of them be pristinely preserved somewhere? Bottled, so I could pull it down from the shelf when I wanted to?

Duh: I know it wouldn’t. But I think I want myself to choose: between wanting to stop time and wanting to speed it up. What I definitely can’t do, if I want to keep my memories, is to try to escape my children’s lives, though except in rare moments this seems to be my default mode. How can I be sad that I don’t remember my three-year-old as a baby when even now I resent her asking me to lie down and fall asleep with her? I don’t deserve to keep my memories of her. (I write them down instead, in defiance of this law.)

Of course I know this isn’t the right way to think of it. I don’t know what is the right way.

If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never come true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how they were answered by you.

I can never remember this verse, because I don’t think it is coherent. I stare at it now and cannot get a grasp on its layers of metaphor and conditional tense. The box is for wishes and dreams that never came true, okay—but it’s empty? So the dreams did come true? What about the wishes? No, no wishes in the box—there’s only a memory of how they were answered—what’s they?? The wishes? But there are no wishes. It seems proper, actually, that the meaning of this cannot be apprehended.

In April I had the idea that I was relying too much on my phone’s camera to capture my children. The proliferation of their likenesses in my camera roll diluted the meaning of the images, and my photos didn’t quite capture them anyway, didn’t capture how I felt observing them. Also, it compelled me to carry my phone everywhere. I wanted to practice seeing differently. I made a goal to write a prose snapshot of one of them every day for thirty days. (I made it to day four.)

I always want to remember, I wrote on April 4th.

I always want to remember the way S imagines and narrates the baby’s thoughts to me. She’ll come up to him, grin crazily in greeting and then say something completely random like,

“He’s like, ‘Watch out, there’s a new baby on the streets!’”

“He’s like, ‘Your arms are the safest place in the world, but I want to explore!’”

“He’s like, ‘I want to marry you—baby and wife!”

Always in her most dramatic accent. Where did this character come from?

I liked her confidence. “I remember how it felt to be a baby,” she seemed to be saying—even if I can’t remember being that baby’s mother.

So far so good. We have instituted our first-ever pom-pom jar system (yes, a reward, though I consider myself a sometime-acolyte of Punished by Rewards), which dispenses to each of the big kids a fluffy pom-pom when they complete the morning trifecta: dress themselves, brush their teeth, put their breakfast dishes in the sink. (Trying to let this motivator work its magic and not remind them 1400 times; trying to let my words mean something instead of nothing.) We’re a week and it’s been miraculously effective—send prayers for its continued success! The prize designated for filling it is a trip to the Nickelcade.

Other ideas for smooth summer functioning and prioritizing my priorities (always a challenge in summer’s great vacuum of structure):

• Put an outside basket by the back door, containing things that make it easier to transition to outside: slip-on shoes for everyone, blanket to lay on, books for kids and adults to peruse atop said blanket. (I should note: we are in the middle of a move. One of our reasons for wanting to relocate is that the current layout of our house does not allow easy access from the main living areas to the backyard. Even just trying to get set up to spend time in our own back yard involves multiple trips up and down the stairs for everyone’s shoes, hats, etc., made more complicated by the fact that I don’t like to leave my newly-bipedal baby outside near a cement patio with several sharp trippable steps. Hoping the future house will make the outside basket less necessary, but honestly it’s a good idea either way!)

• Put our bluetooth speaker back in the kitchen so I can listen to my music first thing in the morning and always. We had packed it away to stage/show our house, and unlike almost everything else we’ve packed away, it’s absence has been keenly felt!

• Related: make my summer playlist. I do feel a little of myself is dead/dying when I’m not intentionally listening to music that I like.

  (Here’s my playlist from a summer or two ago—still highly effective for outdoor dining/camping/languishing).

• Morning to-do list: neutralize kitchen dishes + complete 1 laundry task (i.e. put a load in, switch to dryer). That’s it. After that, have fun until lunch.

• Get word puzzle books for S to entertain herself when the little kids are having their afternoon naps. In the past nine months, while she’s been in kindergarten until 3 pm, I’ve really gotten used to spending the glorious overlapping nap window truly alone. Now that she’s back home, I am dedicated to enforcing alone time for both of us—hers being screen-free. She will resist, I know. But I must stand my ground, even if it means a boundary-testing first week or two, in hopes that the routine will become unobjectionable eventually.

  (Note: The question of how to make your kids play independently has always seemed baffling to me. In the last several months, though, H, age 3, has discovered a truly wondrous world of independent imaginative play. Suddenly she can disappear into her room for 90 minutes without speaking to me. Unthinkable! Her preferred mode of play is to care for a baby doll (in a shockingly realistic way that makes it clear she has been watching me and her baby brother very closely), but literally anything has the potential to become her playmate. A banana broken unevenly in two becomes a dad and his baby engaging in a polite dialogue about bedtime. Her transition to this stage has made evident to me that S just never has been that interested in this kind of play—so it wasn’t that I had failed at teaching her, since I was presumably the same parent to both of them. I think this actually makes me more accepting of and relaxed about the *non-preferred* behaviors of S. We just need to find something else that she likes. I do know that if is that if anything is likely to consume her attention when I’m unavailable, it’s a crossword puzzle or a book. She would rather I give her a science quiz than tell her to play alone. Honestly, she loves a quiz.

• Cheap, “fancy” lunches that are basically instant to put together but feel a little luxurious to eat. Things the kids and I both like, so that I don’t spend 30 minutes and dirty 30 dishes trying to make it. Ideas: charcuterie lunch, tuna salad on crackers, chickpea/avocado/feta salad, cheese tortellini without sauce (served on a skewer for extra fun? With mozzarella balls? Hm.)

  

• Plan the lunches in advance so that I don’t have to think about it when noon arrives. Plus, kids can independently see what’s on the menu and start prepping it themselves if the fancy strikes them. (Occasionally it does.)

• The atrocious cost of buying a new house (and also selling one??) will require reining in our spending. But since we still must have some luxury in our lives, I intend to put on a Sunday home cafe instead of taking the family to brunch. Making a menu like this is just the sort of thing I can see my very eldest-daughterly eldest daughter taking very seriously. (You simply have to have a giant roll of butcher paper: it’s come in handy for gift wrap, an illustratable table covering for a party, and now, for our cafe menu! This one is cheap and huge and lasts forever, but it is from Amazon, sorry.)

• Lots of reading, lots of art-making. S told me she wants to host an “art club” with her friends—how I’d love to get a gang of six-year-olds over and do that at least a couple times this summer. I have this book I like about process art (meaning the kid leads the way, you don’t have to take over cutting or gluing to make sure the project turns out right) which I think we’ll use as our inspiration.

• Invite more kids over. More kids, all the time! Make sure everyone near me knows their kids are welcome at my house! Wherever that house ends up being. It is so fun when a kid knocks on the door and asks to play—it feels like a development milestone I didn’t know to expect or to love so much. I’m on the precipice of being able to let my older kids play truly unsupervised with other kids, and it’s so exciting. I’m also at the point where I occasionally intercept a handwritten note from my kids’ friends—it’s a whole new variation on the fun of reading writing generated in the mind of your own kid.

  

• Take weekly adventures to somewhere we’ve never been before. Nothing beats stumbling upon a beautiful/fun/interesting place that you’ve never been, never expected to be and heard exactly zero hype about.

• Okay, discovery, yes. But also, repetition! I think I want to make practicing repetition the real theme of the summer. This is a joke in our household: every time I make a meal that turned out well, I say “We should make this more often!” and my husband says, “I’ve heard that before,” (or, more recently, “I’m not going to say anything.") The joke is that I will not make it more often; I will forget about it and eternally opt to make something new instead. I guess this is because I like novelty, or because I don’t have good systems for meal planning, or because I am a young woman of the Pinterest age who is being offered new recipe ideas constantly.

  In this one very limited and practical application, frequently repeating meals I like seems like an obvious way to save money on food and free up a little mental space. I’d use up more of the condiments proliferating in my fridge; I’d have a better memory of the ingredients I bought last week that can be reinterpreted this week. In a broader way, though, it feels like a way of knowing myself: choosing the things that I know I like over the things I think I might like. Getting so good at the things I already love that they become a part of me.

  So this summer, every time we have dinner at the park, lets just agree that we're going to share a deli sandwich on a loaf of french bread from the grocery store. My only goal is to identify the softest loaf, the tangiest dressing, the most harmonious symphony of vegetable toppings. This will take trial and error, but by the end of the summer I will have created the Golden Sandwich. My hands will know how it is made. I will pass down its secrets to my children. And so long as the weather allows for a picnic, I will never again have to wonder what to serve on a Friday night. It’s the sandwich. And it cost 12 bucks.

I’d love to hear some of the things your summer self wants to get up to.

Since the dawn of this Substack I’ve dreamed of writing monthly reading roundups, but the prospect always daunts me. The idea of a reading snapshot appeals, though: writing about what I’m in the middle of feels like less pressure than than reviewing what I’ve finished. After a rough February in which my reading momentum really dried up, I have enjoyed a very fulfilling March; I find myself in the middle of several reading projects that are really snapping nicely into the gears of my mind. Also many of my current reads represent a foray into genres I really haven’t explored before. We’ve got some theater, we’ve got some nonfiction, we’ve got some home design stuff—hope you enjoy.

Plays. I did not intend to read six plays this month, but my first encounter with Angels in America set off a chain reaction that’s still going strong. Angels had languished on my TBR list for some time; I knew the play centered on a gay couple during the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City, but once I learned the astounding fact that it’s also about a Mormon couple, the deal was sealed. In case you didn’t know, the Mormons are my people; my own novel-in-progress is very Mormon and I will consume any mainstream media in which they are portrayed, whether accurately or not.1 Anyway, I loved listening to this play, I loved its crazy mashup of history and fantasy and religion (“Any religion that's not at least two thousand years old is a cult” the progressive gay Jewish man says to the closeted Mormon lawyer) and I also just really like the 80s. It planted in my mind the idea that I ought to listen to more plays, starting with some of the canonical ones I somehow never encountered in my English literature education.

Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof came next, which I admired without exactly enjoying—the characters were just so vividly unpleasant, and I couldn’t quite get past how shameless the wives of this play were, flinging themselves desperately upon husbands who obviously, actively hate them. I was more enamored of A Streetcar Named Desire, which imo fully deserves its reputation. Blanche DuBois shares much of the desperation of other Williams characters but with enough canniness to balance it that she comes off, to me, as a more fully realized pathetic character—her arc is convincingly tragic, the depth of her self-deception highly sympathetic. It seems Williams likes to craft situations in which each character is a victim of some antagonistic force while also antagonizing other characters, so that the viewer isn’t quite sure who to side with. But I wonder if changing norms over the years have, for a modern reader, more decisively ruled out certain characters as deserving of sympathy.

At this point in my reading I encountered The Play Podcast, an aptly titled show in which host Douglas Schatz analyzes a specific play with an expert guest in each episode. I’ve now listened to several episodes, and the discussion is always so entertaining and much smarter than many of the book review podcasts I have found. I also love that Douglas & friends incorporate discussion of different productions of the plays on stage and screen, calling out choices made by various directors and actors and what those choices change about our interpretation of the story. The Play Podcast led me to A Long Day’s Journey into Night, a dark, intense, autobiographical play by Eugene O’Neill which he apparently stipulated should never be performed (his widow overrode him after he died, and the theater world is grateful).

Next was my favorite of the bunch: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which I somehow avoided reading in high school.2 I can’t help but feel much of my passion for it had to do with the recording I listened to being a contemporary (contemporary meaning old, not new) production—there is just something so transporting about those jaunty transatlantic accents! I loved the way that potentially cliche themes were treated in this play: questions of conformity vs. follow-your-heart-ness, city vs. country living, fake work vs. real meaning all felt so urgent and real. It struck me that the tragic plot here is similar to that of another favorite of mine, the novel Revolutionary Road. Both stories open (spoilers ahead!) when the first hints of trouble appear and the plots take aim at solving those growing problems. The characters have a plan, it seems like they might succeed, everything’s really is to be okay and no one’s going to get hurt! But no—the true extent to which everyone has been deceiving themselves becomes clear, and things are broken irreparably. Somebody dies.

I’m currently nearing the conclusion of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, another play with aggressively unlikable characters, but here the incessant vicious/hilarious banter makes listening to them intensely enjoyable. The production I’m listening to is the original cast recording and it is fantastic. I can tell this is an extremely rich story that will reward repeated rereading—there are just so many great tangents to try and make sense of.

In fiction, I really like a scene where characters are just allowed to talk—they drop conversational threads and circle back; they have time to attack each other and dissolve into laughter and sulk and attack again. I like reading this kind of scene and I like writing it. This is (duh) what a play is; in fact, most of the ones I’ve mentioned here take place in approximately the same amount of time it takes to perform them: a single evening (or in the case of Virginia Woolf, the time between 2 and 4 am. You just know the story has to be intense when it starts at 2 am).

I’ve always thought of a play as either something like a book (if read) or something like a movie (if viewed). What makes theater its own thing, in my inexpert opinion, is that it’s “living”3. You may interpret a character one way after reading a play, another after seeing or hearing an actor embody them, and a fully other way after seeing a different actor in the same role. A big part of the fun of these plays is that they’ve endured in the culture so long that a whole string of great actors has by now stepped into their stories. This strikes me as very obvious to someone who has thought about theater for more than twenty seconds—but I guess until this month I really hadn’t! It makes me want to incorporate theatergoing much more regularly into my life.

To continue my play spree, I want to read The Glass Menagerie and The Iceman Cometh in April. Please tell me if you’ve got a recommendation, either classic or contemporary!

Far from the Tree. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon writes on page one of his nonfiction tome Far from the Tree. Then, “Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.”

He proceeds at this impressive rate: at least one real banger of a quote per page, over the course of a 962-page book that takes as its subject parents and children who differ from each other in at least one major, obvious way. We encounter typical parents with children who are Deaf, who have dwarfism, who are schizophrenic, etc. These children thus construct their identities in large part around an enormous difference between themselves and the majority, a difference that their parent cannot ever experience.

The fun of this book is that it’s so long—alongside a brief history of cultural responses to each of the conditions discussed, each chapter includes a dozen or more real-life stories of families impacted by them, stories gathered through interview and retold in extensive detail. It’s impossible not to be riveted by these stories, and no one narrative is allowed to be representative. A consistent theme that does emerge is the question of whether parents should force a unique child to adapt to and function in the “normal” world, or to give them access to a (sometimes exclusive) community of others like them, a smaller circle inside of which they get to feel “normal”. In some cases, available interventions (like cochlear implants, or limb-lengthening surgery) may make a child more acceptable to the mainstream, but by the time a child would be old enough to truly choose it for themselves it would be too late—the parent must make the call. Solomon, a gay man, sympathizes with the aversion to intervention, knowing that if his own mother had the option to make him straight, she would have taken it—there was even a time he would have done so himself.

I’m only about a third of the way through this, but I’ve learned an incredible amount and encountered stories I’ve thought about almost daily since reading. Heartily recommend!

Uncommon Kitchens. At the time of this writing my Pinterest board for kitchens contains—let me check—192 images. (I honestly thought it would be more.) All of the images I’ve pinned align perfectly with my taste; the very sight of them gets my blood pumping, my salivary glands working. Though most of the photos in Sophie Donelson’s new book Uncommon Kitchens are not ones that would make it to my Pinterest board (they are all stunning, just not all my specific style), reading it feels like a much truer education in kitchens, not a mere glut of inspiration.

The gist of it is this: The kitchen is a room to be treated like any other, not reduced to mere storage and workspace. Put an armchair in there! Hang some art! And while home makeover shows have seeped thoroughly into our imaginations, teaching us to love tearing out and starting fresh. But letting some things stay, working with what’s present, and foregoing certain conveniences often create better design (and something that won’t be ready for another redo in ten years).

Donelson profiles dozens of kitchens and their designers, featuring stunning photos wrapped up with a digestible list of design lessons from the experts. Some of my favorites:

From Eppie Thompson: “If you want more time together, make a welcoming kitchen. People will hang out there while you cook. Make it a place you all really want to be.”

From Robin Henry: “An ‘OK’ piece is never okay. If you have an ‘OK’ piece of furniture or element of a room, then it’s not beautiful. And if it’s not beautiful, it’s ugly—it’s that simple to me. Of course oyu can work around items in the house, but be prepared to work extra hard. Or you could take a hard line and say, ‘Is this beautiful or not?’ It simplifies things.”

From Agnes Rudzite: “Get something wrong. To achieve playfulness in a space, you need something that doesn’t fit in, something off. Think of a beautiful person with everything in place, a god or a goddess. They’re intimidating. A small imperfection makes someone even more attractive. It’s the same with interiors; you have to make the beauty personal.”

Christine Flynn: “First love, then logic. [My] vintage pie cabinet was a piece I’d had my eye on forever at a favorite shop. Once that found a home, the kitchen was configured around it. . . . It’s wonderful to live alongside the things you love.”

(Also, a lot of designers believe we’ve gone too far with kitchen islands. They are mostly anti-island!)

I just had a lot of fun living vicariously through this book. I’m now very interested in accumulating a collection of secondhand home design books, leaving them on various surfaces around my house, and perusing them in place of scrolling Pinterest. . . . I like the idea of forcing myself to engage with the point of view of a particular author/photographer, rather than just scrolling for the next sweet sweet hit of real wood cabinetry or vintage tile.

A Pattern Language. I should have said earlier: my husband and I are in the early stages of trying to move—out of our “starter home," purchased in 2019 when our oldest was just born, into a home that we hope will better us and our now three children. Sounds like the perfect time for me to read A Pattern Language, which despite being something of a cult classic seems to be out of print—there are no cheap secondhand copies to be got. Luckily I got it for my birthday! The jacket copy had me hooked from the first paragraph:

A Pattern Language lays out 64 “patterns” which are presented in the form of problem/solution; you’re supposed to read those that interest you and add them to your personal “language”. Each pattern is connected to other patterns, and closes by pointing you toward a handful of others—the experience of reading it is slightly reminiscent of a choose your own adventure book. Oh, did you like pattern 135, “tapestry of light and dark”? May I recommend pattern 180, “window place”.

While many of the patterns describe concrete architectural/design elements (“pedestrian streets,” “positive outdoor space,” “long thin house”) , they are interspersed with other things that are just part of life, or should be (“old people everywhere,” “dancing in the streets”). The table of contents in itself thus becomes a sort of poem; the list of pattern titles turns unexpectedly in whimsical directions. The authors feel comfortable holding forth not only on the best way to enter a house and the maximum number of cars that one parking lot should hold (it’s seven), but also on the ideal way to educate children and how to encourage communal living. As I so often do these days when reading a midcentury work (this was published in 1970), I am struck by the sense of conversational stagnation: we are not talking about anything now that was not being talked about fifty years ago. “No social group—whether a family, a work group, or a school group—can survive without constant informal contact among its members,” the authors prophesy in their pattern “common areas at the heart”—is it just me or is every other Substack essay about this exact thing? (And I love reading them all.)

It’s a little eerie, even, that so many of the things I’ve noted in APL so far are semi-trendy niche-cultural beliefs which I half believed were my own ideas, arrived at independently in reaction against current macrotrends: an “adventure playground,” for example (“A castle made of cartons, rocks, and old branches, by a group of children for themeselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, exactly finished castles made for them in a factory”), or “half-hidden garden” at the side of the house, with some privacy and some contact with the public world (rather than a large front lawn that goes unused). What the authors say about kitchen design is just a bare restatement of an epiphany Uncommon Kitchens led me to: “The isolated kitchen, separate from the family and considered as an efficient but unpleasant factory for food is a hangover from the days of servants; and from the more recent days when women willingly took over the servant’s roles.”

My husband and I have had innumerable conversations in recent months trying to isolate bullet-point list items that articulate the way we want to live, and what these indicate about where we should want to live. We want a more permeable boundary between indoors and outdoors; we want a kitchen/dining area that facilitates comfortable hosting. This book unfortunately has made our house hunt only more difficult than it already is by adding to my list of things I really want in a house (is an entry courtyard too much to ask?) I’ve barely scratched the surface of this tome (it’s 1100 pages) but its structure makes it feel casual and accessible; I’ve immensely enjoyed what scratching I’ve done so far.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for proving to me that I do not in fact need to stick to a niche. I appreciate you. More reading snapshots to come, I hope <3

The fact is, however, that putting together an outfit I like is a creative exercise that actually does boost my mood, and I’m in an outfits-I-like drought. As one does, I head to Pinterest for something to get my mind spinning. I browse the screenshots folder on my phone. I feel a new fashion philosophy percolating, a sort of theory-of-fashion-everything if you will: the pop of texture.

As much as a color-saturated look thrills me to look at, I’m just not sure that it’s my style. I’m also realizing that the silhouettes I reach for again and again are mostly baggy on bottom and baggy on top (barrel jeans, oversized cropped jackets & tops, big coats). That leaves me mostly working with neutrals and muted colors in semi-shapeless shapes. But sticking too closely to this formula sometimes seems to put me at risk of boring myself. Here to save me from such a fate is the pop of texture.

It’s more specific than just texture: it’s not just a worn leather jacket or a chunky knit sweater (though piling multiple textures on top of each other is a project with ever increasing returns!). It’s a metal mesh coin purse worn crossbody or a lace half-apron on top of your jeans. I personally love all the many iterations of this trend; picking a silly little textured thing to throw on top feels so low commitment, so easy to thrift, so easy to repurpose. Let’s look at some pins and some secondhand finds that fit the brief.

POP OF KNIT: trending in the form of sophie scarves, knit bonnets, and many more.

(May I suggest: crochet keyhole scarf ($18), cobalt crochet triangle scarf ($16.79), striped knit beret ($12), white crochet button-up poncho ($40), fringe crochet shawl ($24), handmade knit collar ($21)

POP OF METAL, in the form of studded bags/belts/shoes (even grommets on boat shoes?), gaudy jewelry, and chains.

Secondhand finds: silver metallic mesh purse ($25), sterling silver puffy moon brooch ($35), sterling silver star/moon/heart pin ($27) (I like moons), silver heart chain belt ($22), studded leather tote ($38), metal fish bag! ($65), metal mesh handbag ($24), studded canvas shirt ($39), studded black leather flats ($40)

POP OF LACE/MESH/SHEER. Endlessly versatile—a layer that doesn’t weigh you down.

secondhand finds: sheer organza half apron ($14.50), 80s sheer striped puff sleeve top ($11), broderie anglaise apron ($34), sheer floral button down ($32), crochet lace collar ($15)

POP OF BEADS: Beaded bag charms or phone straps are prominent members of this family, but I dig these less expected details too.

If I may: vintage faux pearl chain belt ($15), lot of vintage beaded barrettes ($17.99), beaded clamshell purse ($35), beaded pearl collar ($15). Super into the idea of a lil beaded keychain coin purse as a bag charm.

POP OF FLUFF. Fur, loopy yarn, etc.

See also: vintage fur collar ($19), loopy crochet cardigan ($8.99), faux fur pom pom hat ($29), beige chenille bomber ($39), butter yellow chenille short sleeve jacket ($19)

(It strikes me now that Kendall Flavin’s delightful post on styling a thrifted faux fur shirt (!) can in retrospect be thanked for some key insights that led me to this post.)

Fun! This seems like a breakthrough in better understanding my own style. I have 3 kids, I’m breastfeeding five times a day; though I’m enthusiastic about experimenting with style I am neither physically nor emotionally comfortable parading around in anything impractically fashion-forward. Incorporating the pop of texture, to the exact degree I am comfortable with, seems like an obvious way to add visual interest to an outfit without changing its shape/color/pattern in a way that doesn’t feel realistic.

Thinking about posting a week of pop-of-texture outfits here, using what I can find in my closet. . . . Does that interest us?

I’d like to keep a running log of my purchases this year, tacked intermittently on to my dispatches here, if only to keep myself accountable. So far in 2025 I have been gifted 2 new items (both from Linenfox in the form of Choose App credit) and I’ve purchased 1 new item, a pair of Levis that replaced a few other pairs that no longer fit well. I also used Poshmark credit to get a red leather crossbody bag (and I’ll be selling a red leather bag I have in a less practical shape). I’m very happy with all of these! According to my shopping rules, none of these counts as one of my six items.

My Linenfox green dress (and red leather bag), worn to a Wild Pink + MJ Lenderman show one night reworn the next day for general mom activities bc I love it.

However, I’m thinking my secondhand shopping rules may need a bit more specificity if they’re going to be helpful. Originally I stated I would allow myself to buy something secondhand online if I were replacing something else in my closet. However, I’m realizing that I already have so much clothing that it would really be quite easy to technically “replace” something without necessarily being that thoughtful about the purchase and what gap it’s actually filling. I’ve come extremely close to pulling the trigger on a few eBay buys this month, but I haven’t yet—I’m wary of breaking my rules once, lest I open the door to sin. Some rule updates I’ve considered (to be used in conjunction with my existing one-in-one-out principle):

• Allow a seasonal secondhand “haul” (4x/year), allotting myself a certain budget to buy a handful of things all at once. I like the idea of shopping in this way—it somewhat replicates the constraints of shopping in person, while also allowing me to select my favorite items from what the entire internet has to offer

• Anything I buy has to sit in the cart for at least 2 weeks (or some other predetermined length of time) before I can purchase

• My secondhand clothing budget for each month is 50% (or something) of what I earned reselling my clothing the previous month

• Maybe take accessories off the list of what counts as a new wardrobe purchase? Let me accessorize with abandon?

• Or just suck it up and don’t buy stuff!!

I don’t want to have to be quite so rule-bound; I like the idea of acting in good faith without having to police myself. But I don’t think I’m ready for that.

Items currently at the top of my wishlist:

• Pleated wide leg jeans, specifically the L.F. Markey Myles jeans, which I love in theory but worry will look bizarre on me. I’ve also considered the Lucy & Yak Cole jeans which are a bit more subtle (and less expensive), but I’m afraid if I’m going to do a big pleated jean I’ve got to do a big. Pleated. Jean. More drama in an outfit is usually better imo, and this exaggerated shape brings the drama.

• Currently need something with jumbo polka dots, either this navy J. Crew roll neck number or this vintage cropped jacket. (Both? No. . . but maybe?) Opinions welcome!

• So in love with these vintage Cole Haan loafers. Complete with a pop of metal! I have a pair of thrifted Bass tassel loafers I love, but the time has come to admit they’re just too big for me—may have to resell and get these ones instead.

• Seems dumb to put 2 pairs of loafers on my wish list but they’re different colors so it’s fine. I may request these Bass Mary Jane loafers in white for my birthday (coming up very conveniently soon!)

• Taxco onyx/sterling silver pendant necklace. As soon as I find the perfect one it shall be mine.

I feel crushingly aware that this may interest precisely no one! But it’s my Substack and I do what I want here. If you’ve read this far, thank you, I love you. <3

I’m happy to report my low-buy resolve has remained strong through the month of January—one month down, eleven to go! I’m also feeling this drive to pare down/minimize/make room to love what I really love spill over into other areas of my life. I feel I have a really strong sense right now of what I really like, what I can use, and what I just won’t. I just read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo for the first time, not because I needed motivation to “tidy up” but because I was already feeling it. I actually loved this book; even though parts of it are wacky and dubious, I actually enjoyed those parts as well. It’s a fun combination of extremely practical, prescriptive methods for living and sort of mystical, spiritual beliefs about objects (your purse is tired after a day’s work and needs to be emptied each night so it can rest). I realize I had always heard the term “life-changing magic” as a little tongue-in-cheek, a little knowingly hyperbolic. But no—Kondo believes completely in the power of tidying to change everything about your life. Even though in the back of my mind I have my reservations, I’m choosing to kind of just buy into it right now.

“The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life,” Kondo writes. This rings very true to me at this moment, especially after reading Emily Mester’s excellent essay collection American Bulk earlier this month, which I very much enjoyed. These two books actually provide interesting counterpoints: Mester writes about her grandmother, a hoarder of garbage and freebies (receipts, hotel shampoos), and her father, a hoarder of anything that can be bought from Costco or Amazon. The former seems motivated by a scarcity mindset born of financial insecurity, while the latter, having ascended to a higher tax bracket, seems thrilled by this unlikely power he’s gained to purchase whatever he wants. Mester finds the compulsion to surround herself with stuff is encoded in her DNA, too.

“Consumerism” is frequently discussed as an American cultural problem. But Kondo, a Japanese woman who writes about working with Japanese clients, obviously finds plenty of excess to deal with in Japanese homes as well. And though Kondo relishes telling the stories of extreme accrual she encounters (a client who has stockpiled 100,000 cotton swabs, for example), she doesn’t ever discuss this as a problem of excessive buying, or “consumption”; the focus is placed solely on parting with bought items once they no longer serve their purpose. The closest she gets to opining about over-buying is to say that once clients have been through her program they never relapse (i.e. they stop acquiring too many things); the pain of sorting through every thing that has accumulated around them is so acute that they avoid this accumulation for the rest of their lives. American Bulk is the story of the other extreme: people who fill their homes with objects and then, when the objects make the homes unlivable, flee. The mess is never tidied, but abandoned.

I’m not doing a good job of describing what makes American Bulk so compelling—I do highly recommend it. What really unites these two books in my mind is their implicit claims regarding the spiritual nature of the objects we own—their power to affect our spirits. And how an inability to judge whether an object belongs in your life—either before or after you’ve bought it—does, perhaps, reflect some inability to face yourself.1 The famous “Does it spark joy?” is actually a great criterion, capable of eliciting answers so much clearer than questions like “Do I need this?” or “Will I use it someday?” or “Will I feel bad if I get rid of it?” To ask whether an item sparks joy is to get briefly in touch with yourself, using a book or a skirt or an enormous pack of cotton swabs as a divining instrument.

And here I was, just trying to show you some of my favorite outfits I wore this month. Hopefully you skipped all that if you don’t care about it! On to the outfits.

What I wore to my nephew’s birthday party: Thrifted silk polka dot top, thrifted leather belt, thrifted (and dyed) corduroy jacket, thrifted loafers, Olend crossbody bag, Everlane way-high curve jeans. This jacket used to be a pastel minty green and it went through a couple of dye baths before I landed on this rich piney green, which I love.

What I wore to school drop off (and then for the rest of the day): North Face fleece via eBay, Brooklyn baseball hat, Olend bag, Old Navy leggings, New Balance 574 sneakers. I just sort of threw this together in the morning but ended up digging all the colors together and felt cool every time I caught a glimpse of myself. This is my goal for leisure/lazywear!

What I wore to run errands: Thrifted trench, thrifted v-neck, thrifted t-shirt, Zara trousers (once white, dyed by me), Olend bag, New Balance 574. I liked the tonal yellow/beige colors going on here.

What I wore to storytime at the library: Thrifted leather jacket (from a mid-road-trip stop at the coolest thrift store in Elko NV), blue light glasses from Target (I am one of those dumb people who wishes I actually needed glasses), thrifted blue turtleneck sweater, Baggu crescent bag, thrifted loafers, Sezane socks, jeans from Walmart (!). I don’t absolutely love these jeans and one to-do on my list this year is to replace them with a better fitting pair of light-wash denim, but they are fairly sturdy 100% cotton and they cost $12 at Walmart, so you can’t beat that. I bought them early in my last pregnancy and they have since basically satisfied my needs for loose comfy jeans.

What I wore to run errands (again): Thrifted bandana, COS striped shirt, thrifted belt, Walmart jeans, thrifted Bass loafers, thrifted leather fringe jacket which I was literally stunned to find at Goodwill during my last thrift trip of 2024, baby made by me. I had so many brown suede fringe jackets in my eBay cart but was too nervous to pull the trigger. Then spotted this one for $12! I gasped audibly! I had really good jacket-thrifting luck in December: I also got the fur-trimmed one below around the same time.

What I wore to my solo coffeeshop writing outing: Sezane cardigan, thrifted striped long-sleeve tee, thrifted baseball hat (one of my most worn items of all time—perfect with every outfit), Le Bon Shoppe arc pants, Olend bag, silver Onitsuka tigers. I ordered these sneakers as a late Christmas gift to myself—my final purchase of 2024—and they were so worth it. You will see below that I’ve worn them almost every day since they arrived.

What I wore to family dinner: Thrifted ribbed t-shirt, thrifted (handmade I think!) striped sweater vest, thrifted trench, Everlane curve jeans, Onitsuka tigers.

What I wore to run errands with kids (again): Thrifted (and dyed!) baseball hat, thrifted coat, thrifted black cardigan, thrifted bag, Everlane way-high curve jeans, Onitsuka tigers, rings from Sezane and By Orly. The combo of fur trimmed coat with gaudy jewelry and silver leather shoes made me feel like the coolest grandma on the block. Had to take it down a notch with the baseball hat though.

What I wore to the thrift store : Sezane cardigan, Brooklyn hat, Baggu crescent bag, camo pants via eBay, silver Onitsuka tigers, same rings as above. My eBay search term for these pants was “duck camo pants” and I don’t even know what that is but it got me to these pants, and I’m glad for that—I really like this specific camo pattern.

What I wore to take my daughter to track practice at the rec center: LL Bean chore coat via eBay, Everlane way-high curve jeans, thrifted dyed hat, thrifted leather crossbody, Sezane tote, thrifted ankle boots, Linenfox top. I acquired this top this month with credit gifted from Choose App (doesn’t count as one of my six new items of the year, as determined by the low-buy rules I set out here!) and I love it. So comfy, great for breastfeeding (it buttons up, which you can’t see), and I am simply delighted by a ruffle sleeve poking out of a jacket cuff.

Looking at these photos together makes me feel like I know what shapes/colors/elements I like, and I already have plenty of them in my closet. I have a couple of items on my wish list at the moment, and I will wait patiently for the perfect incarnations of these things to manifest themselves, but I feel strongly untempted by most things the internet wants me to buy right now. It feels good. On to February!

This idea of chaos, as applied to family life (and I don’t think I applied it myself—I think I inherited it?) makes it into a cute, harmless, neutered word. In reality, the brand of chaos I am daily enmeshed in feels mostly demoralizing, disorienting, exhausting. It feels constant: I am bullied, I am powerless. I cannot utilize my brain. I lack the imagination to think how I might change this. I don’t know if it’s supposed to feel this way.

Recently I found myself explaining to a friend: I would have thought I would be a pretty easygoing mom. I want to let my kids do whatever they want, as long as they’re not hurting people or destroying property. I just wouldn’t have thought that 90% of what they’d want to do was hurt people and destroy property!

When my New Year’s energy was at its zenith a few weeks ago, I wrote down the words that best describe my goals for family life: peaceful and capable. I want the house to feel peaceful; I want the kids to feel capable. I want everyone to have the space to do what they like. Most of all I want space for myself to plan for and ponder and do the things I like: make food, make art, read books, hear music, think. This feels infuriatingly elusive.

But that feeling is not exactly accurate. I do sometimes get what I want. The sense of defeat just crowds out, usually, the sense of contentment. Sometimes, it does all feel the way I want it to feel.

I had the idea that I needed to write down every moment in which my experience of parenthood aligned more or less perfectly with what I want my experience of parenthood to feel like. Moments in which that question—is it supposed to be this hard?—was far from my mind. Here are a few from the last month.

“Cozy night”—it is a treat because the three-year-old and the baby have to go to bed, but the oldest gets to stay up late with the parents and read. She makes us all hot chocolate and asks us both at least four times if it was the best hot chocolate we’ve ever had. A log is lit in the fireplace. She reads the American Girl book her grandparents got her for Christmas. I read Ninth Street Women—I’ve been reading it for months and still feel like I want to let it last a long time. My husband reads the copy of Swann’s Way I got him for Christmas. I am lucky to have a husband who wants to read the copy of Swann’s Way I got him for Christmas! (I have never read Swann’s Way.) The room is quiet; we are, indeed, cozy.

Singing lullabies to my sick baby, who has a tragic fever, but endures it stoically. He is ill enough to actually relax in my arms—a rarity, now. I choose “Silver Springs,” my own cold having brought my voice 1% closer to resembling Stevie Nicks’. It’s mostly not a good lullaby lyrics-wise (so I’ll begin not to love you), but it is perfect otherwise. (Some lyrics, though, seem right? You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.)

Poetry night with S—her request. I peruse some Emily Dickinson, my husband reads Yeats—we don’t have much poetry on hand beyond the basics. S reads the Random House Poetry Reader, speed-memorizing a four-line poem, then standing on the ottoman, interrupting our reading, to recite. She repeats this with a half-dozen other four-liners. She forgets the words, but (blessedly) doesn’t get frustrated with herself. I prompt her. We applaud.

At the bookstore, the girls find a rack of Little Golden Books and read to each other. I love how, when they’re in a rare cooperative mood, they speak so patronizingly to each other, admonishing and encouraging the way adults admonish and encourage them. We don’t rip the books, okay? Miraculous minutes go by without a fight. Trusting them, I have ventured to a different section when all the lights go off in the store. It’s weird that I sense immediately who is to blame. I investigate, I’m correct. Who put the light switch in the children’s section, within reach of a three-year-old? I flip the lights back on.

Eating my perfect lunch bowl: sweet potato, chicken, microwave wild rice, goat cheese, kewpie dressing, arugula, pickled red onion. Note: two sheet pans of roasted veggies on a Monday will last us all through the week. I am getting the hang of prepping the veggies ahead of time! I am dedicated to the veggies!

Watching Stop Making Sense together for the first time, in three installments, over the course of a week. My husband tells the girls they are not allowed to dance: it is our cold-weather way of trying to wear them out before bed. They dance like crazy, taunting him, flipping over couches, stripping their clothes off piece by piece. I can’t pay too much attention to “This Must Be The Place” or I will cry. “Slippery People” is a hit with the kids. Good thing: we have many watches of this film (my favorite) ahead of us.

Listening to the playlist I made. A 2025 resolution is to make a monthly playlist of newly discovered music, or just stuff I’m into at the moment—I’m on track for January!

S comes home from school while I am nursing the baby in the other room. I hear the microwave going and issue several shouted demands that she tell me what she’s doing. She ignores me. After fifteen minutes I emerge to find she’s dipped six strawberries in perfectly melted chocolate. She refrigerates them and serves them to all of us after dinner.

Reading Wanda Gág’s delightful Nothing at All—our copy is from the library, but I think I’ll have to buy it. As much as we love Millions of Cats, I think the heartwarming absurdity of Nothing At All takes the cake for me. We visited a Gág exhibit at the Whitney this fall (I promise Wanda’s estate does not sponsor this newsletter) and learned that her brother hand-lettered all of the books she wrote and illustrated—this makes me love them extra.

In the middle of a dinner of vinegar chicken, the girls have abandoned their seats and begun a game of hide-and-seek/tag. The little one comes and hides under the table and we pretend to cover for her. Then she is found and they both go sprinting down the hall, giggling. “This is all I’ve ever wanted them to do!” I say to my husband. Is there more of this in our future?? Please say yes.

Running errands with H, 3, who can be so infuriating, but so delightful. Alone, she is a great errand buddy. We pick up croissants at a bakery for the next day’s breakfast and treat ourselves to a chocolate chip cookie. I sometimes wonder when I’m out with her if people will assume I have only one child. If only they knew how many children I have! If only they could guess how experienced I really am!

Watching S at her first day of track practice at the rec center. Before the coach calls everyone to attention, an older boy comes up and challenges her to a race—she doesn’t even think, just accepts. He is a head taller, she is sure to lose, but she doesn’t know it. I wonder if I was still so unintimidated at her age or if I took longer to grow into it.

My in-laws got us a robot vacuum for Christmas. My children like to toss little pieces of garbage in front of it as if it were a pet who eats paper. But I like to watch it while I’m alone, languishing with my laptop during nap time; it putters diligently around the room and makes me feel like someone is on my side. Someone else is here, with me, combating the forces of entropy.

Note: These are mostly things that are somewhat shopping-adjacent, because sometimes doing yoga or volunteering at a food pantry just doesn’t scratch the itch, even if these are obviously better uses of your time.

1. Use Indyx (or another virtual closet app—Indyx is my favorite) to plan outfits using items you already have. Plan all your outfits for a whole month! Realize that you might be wearing your favorite things only a couple of times in an entire month because you already have so many favorite things!

   

   (This is my #1 tip for a reason: it is the best true replacement for shopping. I’m currently breastfeeding and spend a lot of time browsing/scrolling whilst trapped under a baby. In my case, outfit planning from the comfort of my rocking chair is easier to sub for shopping than any other alternate activity.)

2. Reorganize and declutter your closet. Get some clarity on what you actually love & wear by selling or donating stuff you’re not reaching for.

3. OR just reorganize according to some aesthetic principle (by color? material? pattern?) to see new items next to each other and inspire your outfit brain.

4. Declutter some other area of your living space, or a virtual space.

5. Conversely: if you need a shot of novelty, pull something out of your sell/donate pile and see if you can rediscover your attraction to it. Pull something from the closet of your partner/friend/family member.

6. Keep a running wish list of items you want—a spreadsheet, a Notion page, a Freeform page, etc. I like having actual background-removed images of the coveted item in Freeform or Indyx so I can play around with it, visualizing it in different outfits and seeing how well it integrates with my other stuff. Sometimes adding it to the list is enough to get it out of your system. Tell yourself when the time is right to buy something, if this thing is at the top of your list, you can get it. And if it’s not at the top, maybe you don’t need it.

7. Plan a formal shopping “trip” in your closet every month. Pull out things you’re excited to wear and spend an hour or two trying them on together. Make a huge mess. Maybe take mirror selfies for your own reference when you need an outfit idea. Or film something for Tiktok/Instagram if you do that kind of thing.

8. Try to recreate 5 or 10 Pinterest outfits with stuff from your own closet. (I also like to do this virtually in Indyx because it feels like less effort. If I like the Indyx recreation I’ll plug it into my calendar and wear it.)

9. OR, once you find a Pinterest photo that speaks to you, ask yourself if the outfit really is the part of the photo that you’re drawn to. Maybe the real allure of the image comes from the subject’s confidence, the photo’s backdrop, or the vibe generally? Make plans to do something that chases the vibe instead of the outfit. Meet a friend for coffee, go to a karaoke bar, throw a party, plan a trip, go on a hike, pursue a creative opportunity, etc.

10. Maybe what you really want is just better photos? Practice taking photos.

11. Create an outfit challenge for yourself. Get dressed according to a random color scheme generator! Wear a skirt every day for a week! Wear the same skirt every day for a week!

    

12. Challenge yourself to a week of wearing little-worn items from your closet.

13. If you’re craving inspiration, scroll the profile of one specific person whose style really resonates with you, rather than just scrolling your feed. This always helps me zero in on what elements I really like in an outfit and makes gets me excited to get dressed. It also proves to me that many of my favorite style personalities are wearing the same pieces over and over again—it’s fun to see these pop up in different outfits, and it reminds me that style is created through repetition, not novelty.

14. Seek inspiration from offline sources. Old magazines, movies, documentaries—media that isn’t (usually) trying to sell you something.

15. Revisit outfits you’ve worn & loved & documented in past years. Change up just one element, compare, and see which version you like better.

16. Explore your taste in something other than fashion. Find a new artist you love or spend some time with a favorite album you haven’t listened to in a while. Read something by a favorite writer. Make yourself something good to eat. This has the effect of making me feel more like myself.

17. Spend time on some other aspect of your appearance that isn’t clothing related. Do your nails, experiment with hair or makeup, etc.

18. DIY a clothing item that is boring you or isn’t working in some way. My DIY of choice is always dyeing with Rit. White garments obviously are the best candidates for dye, but you can strategically dye over other colors as well. This is so so fun to me.

19. If making alterations is beyond the scope of your talents, invest time/money in getting something you already own altered so that you’ll get more wear out of it. I have yet to do this but want to try it in 2025!

20. Redirect your energy to some other creative hobby. For me, usually, it’s writing. Consider also: home improvements or redesign; drawing or painting; sewing or knitting; a craft. Surely you’ve pinned something you always meant to try but haven’t yet.

21. If you create fashion content in any form, try making content out of the stuff didn’t buy. Do a roundup of what you recently thought about buying but didn’t, or didn’t yet. Give your reasons for holding off on it. (There is someone I follow who does this on TikTok but I don’t remember who? I personally love seeing this stuff.)

22. Make a plan to spend the money you will save from shopping less on something you really care about.

23. Go to the library. New stuff for free!!

24. See if you can help someone else shop who trusts your taste and may need new clothing more than you do. Make a virtual shopping list for them (use new and secondhand sources!) and see how you fare as a personal stylist.

25. Review previous wishlist items to show yourself that many of the things you once desperately wanted are things you never think of now. This will certainly happen to everything you desperately want now, if given time.

    Do you have a shopping replacement you recommend? Please add it in the comments <3

My biggest goal for 2025, it occurs to me now, is yet another way of embracing finitude, even if it isn’t an issue of digital vs. analog. It is, however, an attempt to close of 99% of the options available to me on the infinite internet and practice contentment with the physical objects that already exist in front of me. These physical objects being, primarily, my clothes.

Or maybe this is a digital vs. analog thing. I love shopping, and nearly all of the shopping I do is performed online, even if it is mostly secondhand. This means that a huge portion of my life is characterized by lusting after things I see on a screen, sometimes purchasing those things, then waiting for them to arrive in a package on my porch, at which point they become physical realities for me. This also happens to be the point at which they lose almost all of their allure. The cycle repeats. There is always something new to want. I’m at a point where that doesn’t feel good. I want to drastically limit the amount of new things I let into my life in 2025.

A quick autobiography of myself as a shopper: I’ve been a longtime thrift addict. For most of my life, my thrifted wardrobe has been augmented by the occasional piece bought new from somewhere like Old Navy, Gap, or Asos. A few years ago, I discovered eBay and Poshmark. Hallelujah! It was like I could be browsing the thrift store all the time! I think I made my first online secondhand purchase in 2022, and an unstoppable tide of vintage goodness began to flow into my life. I could control my finds much more precisely than I could when relying on the thrift had to offer. My tastes refined; I found some extremely great stuff.

In just the last year, I’ve begun to feel able to spend more money on clothing from small, sustainable, more expensive brands that I love. Pieces from Damson Madder, Dancing Kind, The Amente, and Linenfox entered my wardrobe. I love and cherish each of these pieces and feel they are perfect representations of my own style. I purchased all of them after long deliberations. They also cost more than I would have felt comfortable spending on myself at any point before this year. I am certainly privileged to be able to do this. And I keep discovering (or should I say, the algorithms keep serving me me) new brands whose lovely unique pieces I want to spend money on.

However, I’m realizing that as my capacity to afford more expensive (and just more) things may increase, my capacity to enjoy these things does not. I have a finite amount of love to lavish on clothes and a finite number of days to wear what I accumulate. I now have a closet full of things I love—both new/trendy pieces and secondhand/vintage ones. Much trial and error has taught me what I’m likely to wear and what I’m not likely to wear, and the latter category has by now mostly filtered itself out of my closet. The collection I have now was built with years of searching and thousands of dollars. It feels like continuing to acquire more would be a project with significantly diminishing returns.

I took to Instagram stories to ask my followers for advice. “If you have ever successfully stuck to a no-buy/low-buy goal for an extended period, or just drastically changed your shopping habits, what specific practices helped you stick to it??” I wrote. “I am pretty determined to stick to a specific low-buy goal in 2025, and while my motivation and excitement are high right now I know they won’t always be. Looking for strategies to help me when my willpower inevitably runs low.”

Many offered excellent budgeting and shopping tips. Common advice included:

• Deleting social media platforms or unfollowing influencers that encourage you to shop

• Unsubscribing from marketing emails

• Decluttering what you already have and reflecting on how short-lived the excitement of past purchases was

• Using buy-nothing groups when possible

• Learning to knit or sew for yourself (both as a hobby and as a way of learning what resources and labor actually go into clothing manufacture, thus heightening your suspicion of cheap clothing.)

• Keeping a specific list of wants (a spreadsheet or Notion list, for example) and revisiting it after a certain amount of time has passed to see if the desire is still there

• Writing down everything you purchased in the last month, reflecting on what was unnecessary, and being forced to look at how much you spent

• Challenging yourself to periodic no-buy months, then seeing how long you can keep the streak going

• Keeping yourself accountable to a partner

• Writing down the why behind your goal, reminding yourself there is something more important to you than the dopamine hit that comes from a fun purchase

• Finding something to replace the shopping habit with; filling time with activities that have nothing to do with buying stuff

I intend to implement several of these in the new year. (Currently writing this whole post mostly in the interest of accountability.) However, sourcing these ideas helped me realize that my “why” actually isn’t mostly budget related (though my family and I would certainly benefit from me spending less on clothes). It’s spiritual. What I want, mostly, is to practice contentment and creativity within constraints.

Shopping and outfit planning are a major source of enjoyment and a creative outlet for me. I don’t think that wanting to spend a lot of your discretionary income on clothing is stupid or vain! I think it’s really fun! Contrary to what minimalists or no-buy enthusiasts seem to want you to believe, I think an unnecessary, even expensive purchase can add real joy to your life if you really love it. I’m just at a point where the thrill of purchasing things is ever-weakening. The satisfaction I’m craving can no longer come from acquisition, but from being forced to actually just enjoy the items I already own and love. To create from the finite palate I’ve spent so much time and thought curating.

Some of the advice my followers offered was more along the lines of “things I tell myself when I feel compelled to shop”—mantras such as: You can always get it later if you really want it. (Even if the website tells you it’s low in stock?? Yes! It will come up secondhand somewhere!) I don’t know about you, but sometimes when something in my cart sells out, my reaction is relief, not disappointment. (Now I don’t have to wonder if I should buy it anymore! A revealing thought.)

But the self-talk I most needed to overhear came from the very stylish and creative Elise Apffel (@eliseapffel), who said she tries to remind herself of two things: First, “nothing I buy will make me cuter or cooler, period. There is no magic item out there that will suddenly make me feel like I’ve found my personal style.” And second, “personal style is not about being uniquely different, it’s about being yourself (which ultimately makes you unique). This helps [keep] me from searching endlessly for that new item/something original that no one else has. I can wear a ‘basic’ outfit and still have personal style if it reflects me.”

This thought relates closely to something else I’ve been thinking about a lot: the most stylish people I know of are not the ones who are styling a constant inflow of new items (and definitely not the ones who look like every part of their outfit was manufactured and purchased in the last twelve months). They are the ones who have signature pieces or looks associated with them. Something becomes your signature when you wear it over and over again.

Ok. My why is clear to me. Time to make a plan.

First, acknowledging where I get into trouble:

• Secondhand marketplaces. I love scrolling eBay. I love Etsy and Poshmark and Mercari. I buy from these marketplaces fairly often, but because I rarely spend more than $30 on a single item, it doesn’t really feel like a problematic expense, even though it adds up to an amount I am probably truly ignorant of and would not be proud to admit.

• Thrifting. I would say I used to have a thrifting problem, but—perhaps ironically—due to the obscene amount of thrifting I’ve participated in in my lifetime, I am extremely well acquainted at this point with things I will and will not wear. No matter how much I love an item under the romantic glow of Goodwill’s fluorescent bulbs, I know I simply will not wear it if it is: polyester. Pants without pockets. A dress without pockets. A polo shirt. An acrylic knit. Shoes that I have to sit down to put on. Pants with a tight waistband. Really anything very form fitting. A romantic white blouse (I have about 25 thrifted romantic white blouses.) So, an item has to pass a pretty high bar to make it home with me at this point—and if I get it home and decide I don’t love it after one wear, I resell it at a modest profit pretty quick. I’m not too worried about this. Also, thrifting to me feels like a concrete expression of my desire to open myself to what the universe has to offer; cutting thrifting from my life would certainly decrease the pleasure I take from existence. I’m not about to try that! I still would like to place some limits around it, however. Ideas: Focus on thrifting clothes for kids and husband rather than myself. Focus on thrifting home decor and furniture over clothes. Thrift from a specific wish list. Everything I thrift for myself must replace something already in my closet (one in, one out rule).

• New/advertised stuff. Buying newly manufactured clothing is pretty rare for me. If I do buy something new, it’s usually after sitting on it for months, so I can be reasonably sure it’s something I’ll really cherish and wear. In this category, more problematic than what I actually buy, is the amount of time I spend thinking about what I could buy. I’m currently breastfeeding six or seven times a day, which means I spend a lot of time on my phone. Almost all of that time I spend at least *kind of* shopping. It feels fun, it feels like turning my brain off. I feel like I deserve it. But it’s so much time wasted. I don’t like the amount of space in my brain that’s dedicated to acquisition of new clothes.

I want to cut my purchases in all of these categories, as well as the time I spend thinking about purchases.

Mantras to remind myself of in vulnerable moments:

• Nothing I want is cooler or better than anything I already have.

• You can love, admire, and appreciate something without needing to own it.

• Personal style means rewearing the clothes you love, not acquiring new things that you imagine will henceforth define your style.

• Clothes are for living in, living isn’t for clothes. (Even if you are a person who really, really likes clothes, like way more than most people, i.e., me!)

• You only wear one outfit per day (unless, say, an infant occasionally barfs all over you). Each week only has seven days. Each season only has ninety-ish. You can only wear so many clothes.

• You will feel the need to buy new a new wardrobe when a new season begins. Anticipate this, and remember it’s not true.

• Your style is only one aspect of who you are. You have tastes and skills and interests in other areas. You can assert your identity to yourself in other ways that don’t cost anything.

• Clothes cost you money but also cost you time and space (shopping, storing, cleaning, repairing, eventually reselling or donating). I would rather spend these in other ways.

• Shopping is alluring because it often feels like accomplishing something (I really need to find my perfect summer sandal this week!). But this accomplishment, like most of our to-do items, is kind of fake. I’m not actually attracted to the achievement of this goal, I’m attracted to the pursuit. Purchasing does not end the desire for pursuit. There will always be something else to pursue.

• In other words: I may always feel a bit unsatisfied. Accept this. Know the next purchase will not solve this any more than the last one did. It’s okay to want things; the wanting may in fact be the most pleasurable part.

Those got a progressively less mantra-like as they went. . . oh well.

My rules:

At first, my idea was to allow myself six new purchases for the year, with a responsible amount of secondhand shopping thrown in as desired. I initially got excited about the idea of limiting my purchases and putting more of my money toward a small number of extra-special items from super-cool brands that I usually consider out of my budget. I still plan to focus on this. However, as I’ve considered my goals and consumed content from other low-buyers (Michaela Dickson’s YouTube series on her 2024 attempt at “the rule of five” really talked some sense into me), I’ve decided my goals will be best served by being as draconian as possible. I’ve decided I will aim to make six new clothing purchases total.

What counts as a purchase: Clothing, jewelry, shoes, accessories, workout clothes.

What doesn’t count: Bras, underwear, socks. A purchase made to replace something that no longer fits or gets destroyed beyond repair. Gifted items from brands (I usually get just a handful of these in a year.)

I’m ready! I have high hopes for myself.

Coming next time: a list of replacement ideas—things to do instead of shopping. Of course there are a million things you could do instead of shopping; this is a list of things you can do instead of shopping that specifically scratch the I-want-new-clothes itch. I’ve got a good list going, but please comment if you’ve got one for me!

Until this year, our family Christmas gift strategy has centered around one large shared gift (past items include an Ikea play kitchen, a handmade Barbie doll house, a Pikler climbing gym thingy), accentuated with a few other small toys/clothes/books. This year, however, we really are out of space for anything big. (If we had a place for it, this year’s gift would probably be a kids table/desk and little chairs—their own dedicated project space.) So, for the first time I’m allowing myself to just buy toys, which is fun! I really have bought very few toys for my children in their lifetimes: they get fun things from their grandparents for every birthday and Christmas, and we just don’t have that much room to keep adding to the collection. I currently feel more empowered to accept new toys into our life because I’ve finally jumped onto the toy rotation train. I believe in toy rotation so passionately! Maybe I’ll write more about that later. Anyway: most of my toy ideas came from a visit to a very cute Brooklyn toy store back in October.

I’m still at a fun stage with my kids where they don’t know that they can want things—or if they do want something, they don’t remember that they wanted it the next day. So I get to choose! Recently my oldest said she was going to write one wishlist for Santa and a different wishlist for us, her parents. I told her she could just make one list, because Santa would watch over me and know what I was getting. “Or,” I said, “you could just ask for all surprises, and we could choose some things we know you’re going to like.” She was very open to receiving all surprises. She just wanted to make sure she got one thing: “those little chocolate balls you got in your stocking last Christmas.” (Lindt truffles.) Can do.

This was also the first year I explored getting secondhand gifts other than clothing, and it’s been a thrill as well as a bargain. Definitely will continue this in years to come.

Without further ado, the gifts:

S, age 5: books via Thriftbooks, kids chess set from MOMA design store, balaclava from DropStitchCo on Etsy, floral set from Sezane (gifted!), quilted pants from Little Lawless (makes kids pants from vintage fabrics and I love every single pair), tea for tea parties, Zara socks, Nido kids sweater via Choose app, purple cowboy boots from eBay, Yoto cards, accordion, Zara scrunchie (hidden, oops), oil pastels (still need to get a sketch book).

H, age 3: Noble utility suit, wooden animal puzzle via FB marketplace (was going to pay $38 for this from the MOMA design store but got it brand new for $16 shipped on marketplace!), books via Thriftbooks, the Puppet Company puppet via eBay, Rivers, Roads & Rails game via eBay (since this came used I played it in secret a few times already and I’m so into it), Yoto cards, Zara socks, Play Doh hair salon (still need to get the Doh), Djeco sticker face via Pi Baby Boutique, Clicks retractable markers (no lids to get lost!!), pants from Little Lawless.

A, 7 months: wooden rattle phone from Le Toy Van via Choose app, books via Thriftbooks, silicone suction dish set, Bibs pacifiers, Zara shirt, balaclava via DropStitchCo on Etsy. I have a corduroy puffer suit I was going to give him, but we walk to school every morning and he really needed it a couple of weeks ago so I broke it out early. He isn’t getting much! Because a) he won’t care and b) we already have all the baby stuff he could dream of, and I feel kind of bad about this but then I refer back to point (a) from earlier in this sentence and I remember it’s okay.

I’m very excited about all these cute things and especially proud of finding so many of them secondhand! Also, very lucky to have gifted credit from Sezane and the Choose app to get some of the pricier stuff at little or no cost to myself. I really have been impressed with the quality from both of these sources though. (Choose features a rotating list of small independent brands that you can get at a discount, and I’ve discovered a lot of fun things I love. You can use my code PIGSTYLISH for $20 off if you feel so inclined.)

Now to back off purchasing and enjoy the season. <3

Tip 1: Go for natural fibers! A one-of-a-kind vintage sweater on a child is unmatched. But I am pretty much done with acrylic sweaters, whether for myself or my kids, whether thrifted or new. Especially in the winter—they cling with static, snag on the microscopic cracks in my dry fingertips, and just don’t feel good! Personally, I always prefer a cotton sweater. I would certainly accept an argument in favor of wool sweaters, but I find their itchiness level to be unpredictable when buying online, and thus likely to go unworn by a child. Plus, if my kid is wearing it, it has to be something I can easily wash after every single wear.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of vintage clothing for sale is acrylic or polyester. This is tragic, but the plus side is it dramatically limits the quantity of stuff I can allow myself to buy on eBay. Sometime I will conduct a research project about why every single clothing item manufactured in the 60s, 70s, and 80s was synthetic, and how that squares with the accepted wisdom that old=quality, new=crap, and I will share my findings with you. Look forward to that! Until that day, I can only testify that “cotton” is almost always part of my eBay search terms.

Tip 2: Search by brand. Some of my favorite kids brands to shop for are: Osh Kosh, Vintage Hanna Andersson (I like new HA too, esp. for pjs, but their old stuff is SO cute), Claver, Polo Ralph Lauren (baby Harrington jackets!!), and Health Tex (their 80s striped t-shirts for little boys are so classic and can be got for very cheap). I also have found steals on newer brands that I love but are out of my price range to buy new, such as Fin & Vince, Misha & Puff, Oeuf, and Patagonia. I also love finding Adidas or New Balance sneakers that are lightly used and half the price. When searching by brand, my search term would be something like “vintage kids Hanna Andersson” or “vintage 3T Osh Kosh.”

Tip 3: Search by feature. Often I simply search by a feature I love, such as: patchwork, quilted, handmade, knit, crochet, striped, graphic tee, graphic sweatshirt, roll neck, toggle clasp, chenille, leopard print, etc. In these cases I like to cast as wide a net as possible by searching, for example, “vintage kids patchwork” and leaving clothing item or size out of the search. I’ll look at anything that catches my eye, even if it’s the wrong size or not quite my style, and then scroll down to see similar recommended items. Often this is where I’ll find the good stuff.

If you find something you love, go back to Tip 2—search for other items by that brand in your desired sizes and see what turns up!

Tip 4: Always scroll down to see similar recommended items! This feature is quite good on eBay. This way you catch things that are visually similar to the vibe you’re going for but may be titled/tagged in a way you wouldn’t think to search for. Plus it can keep you on the hunt for literally hours of your life! Fun!

Tip 5: Size up. I find that just like adult vintage, kids vintage often runs smaller than modern sizes. More than once I’ve ordered something in my kid’s current size that they could barely squeeze into. Heartbreaking! For this reason I always try to size up one or more sizes. An oversized fit is always cute on a kid, and you can roll up the sleeves or cuffs and be good to go. Plus you’ll get years of wear out of it.

Tip 6: Make an offer! Don’t lowball, but in my experience an offer of 15-30% off is almost always accepted.

Tip 7: Look elsewhere too. Of course eBay is not the only secondhand kids’ marketplace, it’s just my favorite. I also like Mercari, though usually for newer brands. Poshmark has some gems but the search function is much more imprecise (in my experience—tell me if you have tips!) Facebook marketplace is often very cheap if you can find something you like, but the finding part is also more complicated since sellers sometimes don’t label very precisely.

(I would love to know if any readers have a preferred marketplace for more upscale secondhand modern brands—I do find them on eBay, as I mentioned, but never in large quantities. I feel like there’s a better place to find these that I don’t know about?)

Did you all catch the prices on these?? Many of these uniquely beautiful vintage pieces can be got for little more than you’d spend at Target. Very worth it, imo.

I hope you had fun here today—I know I did. I’d love to do a roundup every few months, since heaven knows I’m adding enough to my watchlist to make it possible. Happy shopping!

I’m coming off of a mystery illness that left me humbled (my immune system, it seems, is not what I thought), in great debt to my husband (he was basically a single parent for 5 days), and finally—surprisingly—energized! My weeklong bout of nausea/vomiting/fatigue came in the middle of a week wherein—like all weeks—I had a long vague mental list of things that I’d like to accomplish, and everywhere I looked in my house added something to the list. Clean out that sticky stuff in the fridge. Fix the wall hooks that are sliding off the wall. Throw away my child’s destroyed rain boots when she’s not looking. The experience of walking through my home could be best described as “mounting overwhelm.”

Then the illness struck, and for nearly a whole week, I gave up on almost every to-do item, including eating, and standing up. The house became a true disaster, and we were all powerless to slow its entropic descent. When the incapacitation passed, clarity descended. I needed a better system. Also, I was so tired of not being able to do tasks that I was actually thrilled to do them. It felt like the first-to-second-trimester transition in microcosm.

The illness intersected productively with another major development: the beginning of sleep training the baby. Nearly six months old now, he has never slept as well as my older two, and has seemed to be getting worse with time. His ability to roll really has messed him up (the first major instance I can think of in a child’s life when their growing maturity actually really inconveniences you, and then you feel bad about feeling that way). The short version of the story is that he’s mostly been quite successful—we’re about two weeks in and he slept all night last night! And even when his nights are messy, it seems that having practice putting himself back to sleep during the day has really improved his naps.For the first time in his life, he naps on something like a schedule; when I lay him down for a nap I can reasonably expect he’ll be there for at least an hour, often more. He also wakes up for the day within a predictable window. BTW this changes everything.

(As I type, this very baby woke up, cried for 20 seconds, and went to sleep again—may I never take this thrill for granted!)

For the past six months, the idea of trying to schedule my life has felt more irksome than empowering. Mostly because of the naps. For six months, I haven’t known how much time I will have for anything. And it makes me anxious to be constantly, constantly embarking on a new task and constantly interrupted, constantly having to reshuffle my mental model of my day and slot things into new places.

But the consequence of living without a schedule has been that in any given moment, I’m flipping through my mind’s deck of a thousand possible jobs to be done and trying to decide which one to fit into the current window, which will last an unknown amount of time. With one kid in kindergarten now and two at home with me, our days are still almost completely unstructured by outside obligations. The number of decisions to be made by me in any given moment can feel paralyzing—especially because whatever I choose it will usually require a lot of preparation and be met with resistance from one or more irrational young beings. I exhaust myself just trying to imagine what I might do next, and when that doesn’t work, what to do next.

Of course, of course, the months immediately postpartum are months to focus on rest and recovery and sweet fleeting babyhood. Of course I would not recommend that a mother of three young children hold herself to an impressive standard of productivity, especially not for the sake of keeping up appearances. Also, of course, messes are evidence of children living life in all of its magical chaotic beauty and one day, I’m told, I’ll miss it. (Older parents, please confirm??) Some seasons are seasons for schedules, and some are not.

But I think in the trendy cultural turn against productivity, we neglect the fact that some types of work are also self care, even expressions of love. When I lower my expectations of myself, yes, I allow time for rest, which is wonderful and necessary. But I’m also very likely to be creating a life in which many things I actually love and value are neglected, as the habits I slip into by default take over. Soon I find that day after day I’ve accidentally given all my time to the things I don’t care about at the expense of the things I do.

Having a clean house is surely not the most important thing in this world. But I really, really like having a clean house. I like beauty in my life; any amount of time or money I spend in home decoration or renovation, which I am frequently inclined to spend, does not go far toward cultivating beauty if I don’t actually just keep the place kind of clean. If I’m cleaning, I’m not doing it to please anyone but myself. The same goes for cooking: planning and cooking and eating a tasty nutritious meal is fun, and I enjoy it, and I’ve done very little of it in the last six months.

I don’t typically feel I’m the type who needs to maintain maximal control over all circumstances of life. I’m comfortably Type B, if I have to label myself. But if the alternative to seizing control is to let my days seep away, me scrolling on my phone and my children streaming random content, eating food we don’t really want to be eating because it’s easier and buying stuff I don’t really need because it feels like getting something done, then I guess I need to seize control.

Methodology

I started by freewriting a list of everything that is important to me: value-based tasks I want to fit in somewhere between one and seven times a week.

Priorities outlined, I made a template for a basic day.

My morning now consists of interchangeable blocks for one activity and one chore—about 90 minutes each. Sometimes the activity will happen before the baby’s morning nap, and sometimes after. While he naps, we are at work on the job of the day. The three-year-old can choose to either help me with this job (usually that’s what she prefers) or go do her own thing while I work.

The activities I made space for in each week are as follows: 1-2 playdates, 1 library visit, 1 errand, 1 outdoor walk/hike, and 1 snack or lunch prep session. Each day is also dedicated to one of the following chore areas: bathrooms; kitchen; tidying/vacuuming the upstairs living area; tidying/vacuuming the downstairs living area; and one “project” (such as organizing the pantry or storage room). I also put in one load of laundry each morning. For chores, I use this template I made last year and just updated. Until last week, I still had June’s chart up on my fridge, with not a single box checked, if that tells you something.

Afternoons while both kids are napping are my personal time: I’m writing and doing life admin tasks. I also like to fold laundry in the afternoon while I watch YouTube; it’s also easy to do this if the baby is up. My husband picks the kindergartener up from school and then she sometimes hangs out and chats with me while I put away laundry.

When the three-year-old is up from her nap, they watch TV together until it’s time to start dinner. Then we eat, maybe go for a walk together or do baths before bedtime. One of us puts the baby down while the other puts the big girls to bed since they share a room (one of these jobs is approximately 27x harder than the other). Then we finish the dishes, tidy the kitchen and living room, and do some combination of reading/watching TV together/piano practice (my husband, not me) until our own bedtime.

There are other events to spice up the weeknights: Wednesday my husband and I have an extremely casual at-home date night (which usually consists of eating a snack and talking for an uninterrupted hour). Thursdays I meet with a writing group whose membership has now dwindled to exactly one other friend (but the only one I need!). But mostly, this is it.

Schedule in action!

On my first day of scheduled living, I was empowered to turn the kids’ show off after 30 minutes (I, like the children, usually try to justify allowing five more minutes and then five more and five more) and announce to the girls, “I’m making dinner now! You can help me cook, or you can draw at the kitchen table or ride your scooter in the driveway while I cook.” This led to a thrashing-on-the-floor meltdown from my kindergartener (it wasn’t exactly about the TV going off, but about a toy they started fighting about as soon as the TV was turned off. . . or who can say what it was about really?). Normally, I think this disruption would have thrown me for a loop—great, now this is happening, I was going to start dinner but she’s throwing a fit, my life is unmanageable! With the reassuring support of my daily schedule, though, I reminded myself 4:30 to 5:30 is my cooking window, I’m going to let her process this injustice for as long as she needs to, and I’ll go upstairs with the other kids and start chopping stuff. And I did! And it worked. And within five minutes she had come upstairs to draw, acting like nothing had happened.

(Note that I’m not strictly opposed to more than 30 minutes of TV time a day—many days we do more than this. I’m more concerned about the opportunity cost that comes when they do watch TV for longer stretches. Making a value-based schedule helped me see that in every 24 hour period I want them to have plenty of 1) unstructured play time and 2) time to help do the real work of the house. In this instance, turning the TV off gives them the opportunity to do either of those things. Leaving the TV allows them to do neither! Surely there will be other days when my principles will take a backseat and the TV will pull a longer shift as babysitter, but in this one moment at least I felt the glowing satisfaction of making a stand that aligned perfectly with my values.)

Some other realizations/notes:

ERRAND DAY: I like taking my kids to the grocery store—I think it’s good and fun for them to encounter letters and numbers here and to practice choosing foods and acting appropriately in public and not getting things they want and maybe being bored, so I will sometimes opt to do this instead of the free grocery pickup option, which is undoubtedly luxuriously wonderful too. Our standby grocery stop is Smith’s (Kroger), but I sometimes want to get food at different, more fun grocery stores. In this case, when it’s grocery day, I’ve decided I will prep a grocery order for the basics to pick up at Smith’s, but we may stop in person at Trader Joe’s beforehand to get a few fun drinks/cheeses/flowers (and to push the mini cart—unparalleled fun). It turns out that “constant grocery novelty” is a value of mine that I’ve been neglecting. I could also sub in a different store as needed, perhaps IKEA or a thrift store, and do the grocery pickup on the way home.

PLAYDATES: I want to socialize regularly with other moms, and for my kids to see other kids, but I realize I need not accept every opportunity to do so, since it may come at the cost of something else we want to do.

CHORES: Please, never never make your three-year-old a sensory bin! Just let them clean the toilet! They’ll be thrilled. (You can make a sensory bin if you really want to.)

FUN: I make cleaning feel like a treat for myself by telling myself I can light a good-smelling candle in whatever room I’m cleaning as soon as I finish cleaning it. I’m easily motivated by this! A good playlist helps too.

WEEKENDS: I failed to mention that one of my main motivations in cleaning throughout the week is to avoid feeling like I need to clean on the weekends. Saturdays with the kids become depressing and demoralizing so fast when everyone’s home and we’re trying to get through four hours worth of chores and the kids are constantly undoing whatever progress we make and we also want to fit in workouts and hobbies and home projects and fun family time and friends and relaxation—it’s just really the opposite of fun. I would rather focus on fitting in a run outside, a few hours of coffeeshop writing, and a good brunch. (And come home to a reasonably clean house.) I still would like to come up with a template for Saturday and Sunday too, so we can get a few jobs done and both parents can get their fair share of “time off”, but this part is still in the works.

CONTINGENCY PLAN: Certainly there will be days when I choose to skip the chore and do a longer outing, or days when I simply lose my drive to get that day’s chore done. I think of this plan merely as the template from which deviation is allowed. The schedule will be there when I’m ready to come back to it.

CHILD INVOLVEMENT: Here I come to my loyal readers in need of help, because though my three-year-old is an eager cleaner, my five-year-old is decidedly not anymore. Or at least not usually. Being at school also eats up most of the time she would otherwise have to participate in the work of the house. I’ve tried a few different approaches for getting her to contribute but haven’t landed on something that’s simple and realistic and doesn’t breed conflict. Let me know please if you have a system that works for older kids.

Reflections:

It’s now been a week since I wrote the above. I hesitate to draw conclusions already, because if there’s anything I know about living with young children it’s that everything is subject to change and things that work beautifully one day may completely fail the next. But so far, it’s honestly shocking how much better I have felt since implementing this schedule. My energy level has skyrocketed. Having patience with my three-year-old feels much easier, since we spend our morning working as a team instead of antagonizing each other. And cleanliness truly begets cleanliness. Picture this: It’s 9 am on Wednesday, my mind is at ease, I know it’s time to scrub down the kitchen counters. I’m interrupted in my task by a crying child in the other room: I don’t feel victimized, I’ve got things under control, I can come back to it. I come around a corner to face a spot in the house where I usually find a daunting mess: I see no mess! A self-satisfied smile spreads across my face. Things actually are visibly cleaner. I didn’t believe I could make a dent without dedicating my entire being to cleaning, and I wasn’t willing to do that. But I don’t feel it’s required the sacrifice of other things I really want to do (my personal writing time, evening reading, chatting with my husband.) It’s only required the sacrifice of things I didn’t really want to do.

I often allow myself indulgences (scrolling, crap eating, procrastinating) because it feels like my life is difficult; I deserve to slack off. But the indulgences don’t make anything easier, or even feel that good in the moment. At the same time, I know I couldn’t have written this post a month ago. Even two weeks ago. It wasn’t the time.

I don’t feel like someone for whom the lack of a schedule or detailed to-do list is naturally crazy-making. And yet living a life of total spontaneity becomes its own type of constraint. It’s wild that I’ve mostly lived this way for six months. I’m enjoying the space my mind has to stretch out in now that I’m able to make as many decisions as possible in advance and then just see them on a chart, instead of digging through the detritus of an overtaxed brain in search of a plan.

1. How we traveled: 4-hour direct flight to Newark Airport (the cheapest option), bus to train station (bus skipped our stop so we enjoyed a long stroll through Newark to get to the right station), subway to the city, then walk to our Airbnb. We did it all in reverse on the way home, which admittedly stressed me out, since there were just so many transitions at which we could have grossly miscalculated where to go and how long it would take. And missing a flight with three kids in tow would have been nightmarish. (We made it in the nick of time.)

2. I knew toting our stuff was going to be tricky, since we were a group of five travelers, only two of whom could carry any luggage and who would also have to carry some of the other travelers. We packed everything in three carry-ons and a personal item (I was proud of this). My husband wore an Osprey backpack and pushed the stroller with my duffel bag stuffed underneath, while I wore the baby in my Tula carrier and pushed a rolling suitcase with my Olend crossbody bag tied on the handle. This worked as well as it could have!

   

3. A note on our gear: We took our Mockingbird stroller (which we usually use as a double stroller, but configured with just one seat for this trip) and purchased the riding board attachment especially for this occasion. I was hoping my five-year-old would walk as much as she could and then we’d have the riding board option for when she got tired, but it turned out the board was just too fun to resist—she preferred to ride it pretty much the whole time. Which was fine—it was actually mostly convenient, and we got a lot further with it than we would have if we’d had to verbally motivate her to walk when she didn’t want to. We covered a good 25,000-ish steps each day. (There was a lot more conflict than I’d expected over which child got to use the riding board and which got to sit in the main stroller seat, though I really don’t know why I didn’t expect that.)

   

4. We did walk a LOT, and usually opted to walk rather than take a subway, because a) walking is the best way to experience a new place, and b) most subway stations are not very wheel-friendly! Almost every time we took the subway we ended up unloading the kids and letting them walk while my husband and I carried the stroller down the stairs. It was a hassle, but not enormously taxing (though I have to wonder how those who really *can’t* get up and walk down stairs navigate the city??). Running through subway stations was almost certainly my middle child’s favorite part of the trip.

5. Speaking of subway stations: New Yorkers seem to have a reputation for unfriendliness, but in our experience there was someone right there at every station offering to help us with the whole stroller production—we never had to ask, or even wait a single moment. On one memorable occasion, a commuter saw us approaching the subway turnstile and used her card to swipe me in so I could open the accessible door from the other side and let the rest of the family in—except that the door would not open. Probably six different people stopped and tried their best to ram it open with their bodies before giving up and walking away with apologies. One man was in the middle of helping my husband loft the stroller overhead to get through the turnstile when lucky New Yorker number seven came by and kicked the door handle with all his might, which finally did the trick.

6. It was both harder than and exactly as hard as I expected? I have been known to say that the kids are actually at their best when we’re on the go. It’s when we stay home that the worst usually comes out. And yet I knew the trip would ask a lot of them: to sleep in a new place, to adjust to a new time zone, to take in constant stimulation and a disruption to the routine and enter spaces where they needed to behave themselves. Most of these things they actually did remarkably well. Their interactions with each other were perhaps more strained than usual, mostly due to conflicts over who got to sit in which stroller seat. Traveling in such close proximity to each other—always just an arm’s length away—allowed for plenty of opportunities to physically bother each other. And those short moments at the beginning of each day when we were all trying to get ready for the day in a pair of tiny rooms were some of the roughest.

7. Since anticipation is half the fun of any trip, we did our best to really hype up the sights and experiences on offer in New York City, especially for our five-year-old. I rented library books about famous artworks we’d be seeing in person, we watched vlogs about restaurants and stores we could visit, we studied notable tall buildings. She seemed appropriately eager for all this. It was somewhat deflating, then, when we arrived and began pointing out the things we’d been mutually excited about— “Look, it’s Times Square! It’s the Empire State Building!”—only to get an irritated, nonverbal response equivalent to “I’m tired, I don’t care.” It just seems like for a five year old, who has no context of the scope of the planet and no sense of past, present, or future, it is difficult to appreciate the contrast between a bustling metropolis and our own textureless suburb 2000 miles away. Perhaps daily life is still sufficiently novel for her that a drastic change of setting barely registers.
   The one thing she had seemed more excited to see than anything, though, was the art. I admit I’ve encouraged her enthusiasm about this. But I encourage her to be enthusiastic about a lot of things she just doesn’t care about (thrifting, beets, speaking kindly to her sister)—she isn’t afraid to disappoint me. I began to worry that her interest in the paintings would wither when faced with the reality of an art museum: canvases on a wall in a quiet room. It was beautifully affirming, then, to experience the museums with her (first the Whitney, then the Met), and see the excitement come out in full force. At the Whitney she’d precede me into each room, then come back to beckon me on, eagerly pointing out works she recognized—Georgia O’Keefe’s Summer Days, Lee Krasner’s Spring. When we’d been there close to two hours and I was feeling the judgment of my fellow visitors (maybe imaginary?) for bringing a restless three-year-old through the museum, I said it was time to leave; she was confused, expecting we would explore every floor of the museum. At the Met she fangirled over Matisses and Frankenthalers. She saw a line of people waiting to take a selfie with a Van Gogh self-portrait; not eager to wait, she wanted to take a selfie instead with The Potato Peeler on the reverse of the canvas. She had been promised we’d see some Mary Cassatts in the Met, but the rooms were closed for renovation; we went on a wild hunt, carrying the stroller down multiple staircases, to an uncrowded labyrinthine room, finally locating a couple of Cassatts on tightly-packed shelves. Then we were allowed to leave for dinner. Its’s very fun to me that she’s a child who does not need to be convinced of the value of looking at art in person.

   

   

8. I’m proud of the five different outfits I put together with only six items, since I only had the space of half a carry-on for my own wardrobe. Sadly it was too warm to actually wear most of them as planned. (Weather was about 70 and sunny every day, which is literally perfect and hard to complain about, except for the fact that I wanted more of a true Fall in New York vibe.) This is a good capsule I’ll remember if I ever need to pack light for a colder weather trip.

9. It’s always wild to me how I can go on a city trip and eat like absolute crap for every meal with no regard to my vegetable or protein intake and yet feel unprecedentedly great, I presume because I’m walking constantly? It made me think, hey, I could walk all day at home, I could walk to the grocery store with the double stroller every other day instead of toting a multimillion-dollar Costco haul (slight exaggeration!) in my minivan. Except that the walk to my nearest grocery store isn’t cute. The vibes are unpleasant. Which is unfortunate. Walking is just so important to me.

10. Which leads us to the classic question every good traveler must always ask whenever they go on vacation anywhere—Should we live here?? Of course we discussed it. For several reasons I think our answer has to be no, I don’t really think New York City is the place for us, even if it was financially feasible. But more generally, we have been pondering the question of whether we ought to be living in a city. There is a part of me that believes I am meant for city life. It would of course come with many tradeoffs, especially for a family with multiple children. But it’s hard not to feel life my would be in some way improved if I lived in a cultural hub. I walk into a Brooklyn bookstore where I’m flipping through exciting used art books and listening to Pulp’s “Babies” which has just come on the speaker and it’s hard not to think I belong here, why is my only bookstore option a strip mall Barnes and Noble, there are so many books you can’t find at Barnes and Noble! I walk through the Met with my daughter, clearly a budding art critic or historian or something, and think, we could see a Matisse every day of our lives with free-for-New-York-residents admission! But it also seems a little silly to think my quality of life would be significantly improved by living near a used bookstore that plays my favorite songs. Or does it? Why do people like the places they live? What does it come down to? I’m worried I’m just drawn to vibes—but what is a vibe worth? What if I moved to New York City and never actually went to the Met, because the reality is I’m a mom of three children, and it really actually just makes a lot more sense for me to do weekly Costco hauls in a minivan, and that is quality of life? I don’t know.

    

11. I had kept my expectations for this trip low. Still, I watched a lot of Chantal Wirekoh’s lovely YouTube vlogs (which I think I will continue to watch even post-trip purely for the atmosphere), as well as other TikTok vlogs, which instilled in me a vision of certain activities I was casually devoted to squeezing in. One of these: having a glass of wine in a plastic cup while I watched my children play in Central Park. Another: trying an espresso martini while seated outdoors at a cafe. Instead, I had not one adult beverage on this trip. I just never found myself sitting around thinking, you know, being a little tipsy right now would enhance this experience. Or, hey, you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to stay in this restaurant slightly longer than is strictly necessary.

12. I find that opportunities to dine in general are significantly curtailed when traveling with children. Often, you have ideas of where you’d like to eat, but when dinnertime—or bedtime—approaches, you don’t have time to travel and potentially wait for a table. Sometimes the only thing to eat is the closest and fastest thing. We did have several good bagels, and several good pizza slices. Our best meal may just have been a jumble of meat and rice from a halal cart, scarfed from a styrofoam tray at the famous Bill Johnson playground (which really was lovely). I am legitimately proud of how well behaved my children usually are in restaurants, and I don’t even give them iPads! Still, they have their limits; dining as an experience is not especially likely to happen. In fact: my daughter chose as her first souvenir a handpainted notebook from McNally Jackson and took to writing a bulleted list of everything we’d done each day of the trip. On our second morning, as she went to update the list for the previous day, she asked me, “Where did we eat dinner yesterday?” “We didn’t really eat dinner yesterday,” I said. We’d eaten lunch at 4 pm (Prince Street Pizza in the Elizabeth Street garden in Soho—highly recommend!) and then shared a salted caramel milkshake between the four of us. She seemed scandalized, then added “No dinner” to the record.

    

13. Shopping also gets pushed to the wayside when traveling with children. I had highly anticipated checking out several shops in the city that my native suburbia just doesn’t offer, and I did steal a few moments to browse, though without spending enough time to buy anything. Traveling with such a group as I was, it just ended up feeling hard to justify an experience that no one else would enjoy. In Williamsburg we split up: my husband stayed at the playground (Domino Park—another 10/10) with the girls while I enjoyed a leisurely browse with the sleeping baby strapped to me. I visited a few vintage stores, as well as Ganni (my first time!) and likely would have bought something, except that it wasn’t worth waking the baby to try something on. In the end, the only souvenir I came home with was a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—New York just seemed like the place to buy it.

14. If your goal is to visit as many playgrounds as possible in a given city, and to view them with a critical eye, I do recommend traveling with young children.

15. My highlights: walking the High Line. The Met, though I wish we could have spent more time. Seeing dear old friends who live in the city. Strolling the Upper West Side and soaking in the ambience. Pizza in the Elizabeth Street Garden. The whole day spent in Brooklyn (DUMBO and Williamsburg). Turns out millions of people want to live in these places for a reason!

    

    

16. My children’s highlights: riding the glass-enclosed carousel in Brooklyn. Getting two ice cream cones in one day. Taking the subway. Jumping on a grid of light-up squares at the middle of the One World Observatory.

    

    

17. My baby’s highlights: spending five straight days strapped to someone else’s body. (He really was so, so happy the entire time.)

    

    

18. I’m currently halfway through What Are Children For? by Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg (which I’ve found very sharp and illuminating so far). On this particular journey I often found myself asking What Are Trips With Children For? I told my husband at the tail end of the trip that I needed to formulate a philosophy of travel. Why had we come on this trip with our kids? The answer is that I wanted to go, and I’m breastfeeding; we weren’t going to leave the baby behind, so we might as well bring everyone. And we were treating it like an experiment. For the next ten to twenty years of my life it will be in many ways simpler to travel with our children than to travel without them; we want to see if it’s going to be worth the trouble. I have heretofore considered it a value of mine to travel with my kids—both because I want to travel as much as possible, and because I have some vague dream to make them citizens of the world, conscientious and humble and flexible and adventurous and up-for-anything. I just don’t know whether this trip helped us accomplish any of that. I’m glad we went, but it’s hard to say whether the experience was overall more valuable for the kids than a week at home would have been, or more valuable for us to have as a family than it would have been as a couple. (I also find it interesting that one reason the authors of WACF repeatedly say people give for wanting to remain child-free is so that they can travel. . . Maybe I will further unpack the perceived child-travel binary in a future post?)

19. Every night of the trip I posted a modest photo dump in my Instagram stories and got more than a few responses from people who told me I was ambitious, adventurous, inspiring, for attempting such a thing. Because I’m part of several Facebook groups for people who make travel with their children a large part of their lives I know I’m not even close to truly adventurous—I recently saw a post from a couple who had hiked Macchu Picchu with 18-month-old twins. But I was flattered and validated by this feedback. I do like to think of my life as a demonstration of how one might be a parent (without child care) and still kind of do what you want. Even if you have to be a little delusional. It’s harder, but think of how good you’ll get to feel about yourself for surviving! When my husband and I returned from a trip to the Netherlands and Belgium last spring, he observed that it was kind of sad nothing had gone wrong—everything was beautiful and wonderful and we didn’t really have any stories to tell. That was not the case this time! (I will spare you the tale of my five-year-old’s legendary meltdown when we landed at the Salt Lake Airport.)

20. Yes, it was difficult to travel with an infant, a two-year-old, and a five-year-old. But probably easier than it will be with one- , three-, and six-year-olds, or two-, four-, and seven-year-olds, etc. Maybe by five, seven, and ten it will start getting easier again? I’ll keep you posted. (Also, pretty much everything we did was free for kids five and under—a bargain.)

    

21. Whenever someone asks my oldest daughter what her favorite part of the trip was, she says, “Everything.” So it’s possible that her remembered happiness will be greater than her experienced happiness. And that’s not nothing!

Moodboarding in the way I typically do it is fun. But perhaps it’s not that helpful unless you have a ultraspecific idea of what you’re asking from your images. Recently I’ve come across two seemingly competing models of moodboarding, which I will henceforth refer to as the hyperliteral and the nonliteral models.

The hyperliteral moodboard

This model is taken from Lili Leaser of Homebody, who recently published the excellent piece All it takes is one. Borrowing an idea from interior design Youtuber Caroline Winkler, she suggests compiling a board of ten images “that you wouldn’t change anything about. [Winkler] referred to this exercise as creating a ‘North Star’, or a reference you can always go back to when considering a purchase.”

Immediately upon reading I knew I would undertake this exercise. I began to comb through my phone screenshots and Pinterest pins. It surprised me that in this sea of images, it was actually difficult for me to find 10 outfits that I felt I would wear exactly as-is. But here’s what I came up with.

(Yes I cheated a little: those three images with their borders touching are, I decided, basically the same outfit, so I’m counting this as one outfit with three subtypes. And I love every single subtype, like, so much.)

Some elements I can see I’m drawn to after compiling this moodboard:

• interesting shapes: barrel pants, mini shorts, oversized tops

• classic neutral pieces

• pops of color, especially in shoes/jewelry/bags (red, chartreuse, cobalt)

• layers on layers, duh

• statement jewelry

• stripes!

Some things I learned about myself:

• I tend to think of myself as a maximalist, but these outfits are more understated than I would expect. I do think that reflects where I’m going with my style lately. I find it hard to combine a lot of colors in my outfits in ways that feel exactly ME; I think this moodboard is true to my style in that the bulk of the outfits are mainly neutral, but incorporate some slightly wacky elements. Walking the tightrope between classic/wacky is *key* for me.

• I really like loafers with socks! I already knew this, but now it’s really obvious. I just think I’ll always be wearing loafers with socks. Also, lots of ballet flats!

• Shapes. I don’t see a single fitted shape here, especially in the top. This also reflects accurately what I’m reaching for in my closet. It’s possible being 4 months postpartum has something to do with it. I am pretty comfortable baring almost my entire leg, but I want nothing to do with a form-fitting top right now, maybe not ever.

• Multiple images on this board (and even more from the longlist) came from the same few Instagram accounts. I already knew I loved these ladies, but having chosen these images helps me zero in on whose accounts I can revisit when I’m in the inspiration-gathering phases of life. (@thedillonstore, @natacatcat, @dancingkind, and @monpetitchuchu on Instagram are all-killer-no-filler accounts in my book.)

The nonliteral moodboard

The idea behind the nonliteral moodboard is that it’s all about vibes and ideas—it should have nothing, or at least very little, that you can actually add to cart. This idea comes from Glenn Mae at Trash Panic, who writes in Trying Not To Fall For It:

You will not find your way out of the personal-style-confusion-corn-maze until you throw the very-literal-niche-aesthetic mood board out the window and stop (I beg of you) asking, “where’s the skirt from?” in the comments.

I agree with this so hard! (One time I did annoyingly implore a TikTok follow to tell me the brand of her top—a light-wash denim baseball-jersey-shaped top with toggle closures!—but it was 90s Coldwater Creek, and finding the exact top on eBay was highly satisfying. I had no doubt this top was extremely ME so I sprang for it without hesitation.)

Anyway: these are mostly outfits you can’t wear; they’re not even outfits. This model ends up focusing me on textures, pattern combinations, color combinations, and accessorizing concepts.

In Glenn Mae’s words:

I find more often than not, gathering a collection of images that merely showcase literal tangible things simply feeds the insatiable gremlin that lurks within us, rather than sparking self discovery, growth and individuality with a tasteful side of conscious, pre-meditated consumerism.

I am on very intimate terms with the aforementioned insatiable gremlin! This exercise was surprisingly difficult too—it’s hard to get into the mode of appreciating a vibe rather than admiring an item/set of items. To be fair, I compiled this collection of images after selecting my ten perfect fits. It’s possible that I would have come up with something quite different had I started with this one: many of these images do reflect specific styles I’ve been consciously lusting after for this season. (It would be fun to try doing this exercise in a way that’s even more geared toward bringing things up from the subconscious, but that would be a longer project, since to find stuff on Pinterest you do generally have to type in a search term.)

Things I’m into based on this moodboard:

• victorian vibes (neck-high lace, Gibson girl hair, puff sleeves)

• a pileup of jewels

• primary colors + neutrals (hey, pretty much the same color scheme I noticed above)

• Argyle & stripes!

If I were to distill the essence of this moodboard into a single outfit, I think I’d end up with a voluminous white lacy top, a brown fringe suede jacket, a big striped textured red and white bag, some olive trousers, cobalt blue ballet flats, a chaotic bun and a stack of chunky silver necklaces. Would wear that 100%.

Compare and contrast

So which moodboard method will I ultimately employ going forward? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found both illuminating and useful in different ways.

Both models are centered around building a sense of personal style that is resistant to a barrage of advertisements and trends. In my experience, the literal board was most useful in identifying what outfit shapes I’m drawn to. Looking at this moodboard clarifies for me why I don’t often reach for many of the items I have in my closet, even if there is something (a color or pattern) I truly love about them: I probably don’t like their fit or shape. I also have several pieces of clothing that are technically comfortable, but I just don’t feel COOL in them because their shapes are kind of basic. When considering a purchase in the future, I’m realizing, shape should be probably the first element I look for, since it’s the most make-or-break element of a clothing item for me. And since an outfit’s shape is something that depends on the body wearing it, it makes sense that it needs a literal illustration—a full-body photo of a person—in order to be apprehended.

The nonliteral moodboard seems most useful in helping me figure out how to dress up the shape in a way I like. Looking at this board is where I see textures, accessories, and juxtapositions that speak to me. An interesting shape is an outfit’s foundation; without this element in place I don’t feel comfortable. But without a few wackier elements on top I don’t feel totally myself. The wacky elements are the things that can be more loosely inspired—a color combination from a table setting, or close-up of a texture does the trick. It also strikes me that these are the things that are most easily thrifted, while the structural components of an outfit must be more painstakingly hunted down, whether from new or secondhand sources.

If you try these, I’d love to know what you learn about your style. <3

I’m conscious that it is kind of silly to be proud of this: to celebrate her good taste feels akin to saying “How cool that my young child likes everything I like!” But it really feels like she’s been introduced to multitudes; she’s pursued her own avenues. To me, the soundtrack of the day is much more than background music: listening to my favorite music energizes me, reaffirming my own tastes and passions to myself, which feels sorely needed in this stage of life. And being frequently prevented from listening to my chosen soundtrack (which absolutely does happen, as any parent whose children have rendered useless their Spotify Wrapped can attest) can feel like an affront to my identity and autonomy. She doesn’t like everything I introduce her to, and she’s certainly not afraid to demand something I dislike. As much as I’d sometimes like to be, I’m really not the type to regulate my children’s consumption of culture overly much. I’m no Susan Sontag (for more reasons than one), who forbade her son David to read children’s books, pushing Voltaire and Homer instead. (“He had to improve his intellectual stature so he could be a companion to her” says biographer Benjamin Moser—I’m in the middle of his Sontag biography right now and enjoying it a lot.) My kid’s true musical obsession at the moment is Disney’s Descendants series—all four films—whose soundtracks are mostly laughable (though I admit they grow on you). She listens to her heart’s content, sometimes on multiple home speakers at once.

When our tastes do align, though, it’s beautiful. When she stays up late reading The Story of Paintings, which I snagged hopefully from the library, and yells at me from her bed, “Mom, look! It’s Van Gogh!” I want to tell her to go to bed, but I can’t. I come back in the room to see what she’s seeing. It’s fun to see art working on her, melding itself with her in this earliest iteration of what will forever be her taste.

Last Sunday we spent an afternoon consuming the following stuff together in a way that felt uniquely satisfying, and that I want to remember.

Over the course of three nights last week, we all watched Singin’ in the Rain together. It’s one of the longer live-action films the kids have watched, so I wasn’t sure it would hold their attention. In fact, both were rapt. (My two-year-old still can’t stand to watch anything that doesn’t involve Elmo, so this was a thrill.) Immediately afterward, the five-year-old wanted to reenact the film’s dramatic conclusion infinite times: I would stand in front of her, lip-synching “Singin’ in the Rain” while she stood behind me singing the real lyrics, then pretending to pull up the curtain and expose me. I had to then run off crying. (Only she was allowed to be Debbie Reynolds’ character; I had to be the villainous—or victimized?—Lina Lamont.) Though she refused to play the part of Lina, she’s been walking around rehearsing under her breath Lina’s signature line, “Do you think I’m dumb or something?”, attempting to replicate the uniquely grating voice that’s deemed unfit for talkies, thus setting the plot in motion. Even the two-year-old now asks to listen to the soundtrack in the car—fun, since her own tastes have been a little later in developing than her older sister’s.

I love this movie’s wacko digressions, its disregard for keeping the plot moving. I can’t look away from the pure physical charisma of every one of its lead actors. I think my kids love the movie for the same reasons without realizing it. And it just seems true to me that stories whose plots and characters are a little out of the grasp of their comprehension capture the imagination so much better than, for example, a typical modern cartoon, whose stupefyingly smooth aesthetic and oppressive didacticism are aimed so precisely at a toddler’s brain as to give them nothing to struggle against. I have a feeling SITR is only the first of many old movie musicals we’ll watch together once it gets colder. (Recommendations welcome!)

After the movie, the little girl went down for a nap, my husband went out for a stroller walk with the baby, and I (hoping against hope) took a book out to the back porch without a word, aiming to give the big girl some empty space to fill with self-entertainment. As I predicted, my never-eager-to-be-alone daughter followed me to the back porch right away. The book was Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art. (So glad I’ve discovered in recent years that I love a good group biography—they’ve truly enriched my life. Again, recs welcome!). With the words of Henrik Karlsson in my mind (“Reading challenging books with kids is fun and probably useful”), I offered to read aloud to her. She declined. Then I offered to show her the pictures in the color inserts, which she eagerly agreed to.

We flipped through the reproductions and photos of the artists with great interest. Thinking I’d take the opportunity to teach her about the concept of representational vs. abstract art, I showed her two Lee Krasner paintings on the same page.

“What is this a picture of?” I asked, pointing to the first.

“A girl painting,” she said.

“Yeah. And what is this a picture of?”

I thought she’d be stumped, at which point I would explain, it’s not really a picture of anything, it’s a picture of paint, it’s a picture of shapes. “Flowers,” she said without a second’s hesitation. Looking at it now I see she’s obviously right. (The title was a good clue too: Still Life.)

We proceeded, and at every spread I asked her “If you could be any painting on this page, which one would you be?” (a museum game idea I know I lifted from someone’s Substack and can’t remember whose—help me out if you know it?). Then I showed her how to read in a painting’s caption where the original artwork lives. She was thrilled to discover just about all of them could be found in New York City—we’re all taking a trip there in about a month. We looked at Krasner’s White Squares and found it lived at the Whitney, where a Wanda Gag show (author of one of our favorite picture books, Millions of Cats—talk about a story to grapple with!) is ongoing. “We could go see this one in the same building where the Millions of Cats show is going to be,” I told her. She began to literally jump up and down, clapping her hands. I felt I had succeeded marvelously as a parent.

After that, she agreed to let me read a little of the book while she paced the porch. She needed no prompting to stop me frequently and ask whatever questions arose. This gave us the opportunity to discuss such topics as Van Gogh’s unremunerative career as an artist and posthumous fame, the Federal Art Project (also the Great Depression in general; also the concept of money); the perplexing dismissal of women artists, etc. In case it’s in doubt: this didn’t thrill me because now, having learned these important concepts in her youth, she will be far ahead of her peers in terms of quantity of facts known. The title of Karlsson’s article mentioned above, I think, is apt: the practice is probably useful; it’s certainly fun. I hope she’ll someday read out loud to me from the books she’s interested in so I can ask my questions.

Life with children can feel like a constant mutual struggle for self-determination. They are forever keeping me from the things that I want to do, as I am forever keeping them from the things they want. This is mostly how it has to be: our goals are so different, and we cannot be apart. When we find slack in the struggle, when we can both stop pulling on each other, it feels magical. If I find the space to read 0.75 pages of my book in their presence, I am a major success. I imagine they feel the same when they begin a dish-soap-and-black-pepper potion in the bathroom sink and I decide to let them. Listening to Kate Bush, watching Singin’ in the Rain, discussing Lee Krasner, we are at peace together, we are both ourselves. When I try to pull them into my world, and they seem willing to follow, I am happy. I think they are too. They’d tell me if they weren’t.