Summers as an adult are strange.

The way the weeks blend into weekends. The way the light falls differently in August than it does in June—golden and heavy, like it knows something we don’t yet. The way the August heat lingers into September in a way that makes you wonder why you ever wished the brisk air of Spring away.

I quit my job on July 1st. The weeks and weekends blend together now more than ever. Time moves differently when you stop measuring it in meetings and deadlines. It stretches in ways that feel both like a gift and like something you haven’t quite learned to hold properly yet. And, in a way, it’s like being a child who was told that summer break will never end.

Except I am forty now. And I know better. I know that everything ends, even the things you desperately want to keep.

On a scorching Sunday night, as the last of the fireflies bid farewell to this lifetime and the katydids chirped their familiar songs—the kind of sound that exists nowhere else in the world except the middle of a Midwestern summer at the exact moment you realize it is almost over—a soft melancholy lingered on our porch. I was familiar with the Sunday Scaries, sure.

But this. This was different.

This had a weight to it that I recognized but couldn’t yet place. The specific heaviness of a door about to close on something you were not finished with yet.

It was 5:00 a.m.

I awoke to the sound of gentle crying—mostly a murmur from Ryder, my youngest, tossing and turning in his crib. The kind of cry that is not quite distress and not quite sleep. Just a small person navigating the dark in the only way he knows how.

I walked into his room and rubbed his back gently, offering his stuffed Lion for comfort—it had managed to escape to the other end of the mattress, as it always does.

He grabbed it from me instinctually, without looking, and pulled it into his chest as he lay on his stomach and fell back to sleep. Just like that. The way two year olds do—like sleep is the easiest thing in the world and not the thing I had been chasing for the last four years.

I quietly walked back to our room, leaving the door open a crack. Just in case.

I got back into bed, expertly maneuvering around the snoring cat we affectionately named Ghost so as not to disturb him from his slumber. Ghost didn’t move. He never does. I have never once in my life slept like that cat and I think about it more than is probably normal.

I finally positioned myself between Ben and Ghost—both as still as stones—and laid back on my back, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned.

Ti-tap. Ti-tap. Ti-tap.

The lump in my throat was more apparent than when I had gone to bed—as it often is with dread or anticipation.

I turned over to my right side and pulled Ghost’s warm body toward mine. I still miss Halsted—my late cat who we lost suddenly this past March. He would’ve been up with me. He would have been putting his paw on my hand in the dark, as if to say: It’s going to be okay. I promise. Ghost is many things. He is not Halsted. Nobody is.

My alarm was set for 7:00 a.m.—an hour earlier than I usually rose. I worked through the mental gymnastics of how quickly I needed to fall asleep, now that it was almost 5:30 a.m., in order to get the REM and deep sleep I needed to function like a person the next day.

But it was no use.

The house was quiet in the way it only gets at 5:30 a.m. when everyone is asleep but you. That specific quiet that feels less like peace and more like waiting.

I couldn’t sleep. Not when there was only one thing on my mind.

At 7:00 a.m. sharp my alarm blared on my nightstand.

I was equal parts thrilled I had gone back to sleep and equal parts ready to throw my phone across the room. I’ve had this same alarm for four years and every single morning it sounds like someone was actively dying in my bedroom.

I would change it but that requires going into settings or some shit and I simply do not have the bandwidth. So instead I curse Steve Jobs under my breath.

It felt like a normal morning in most senses, except the air was different. Tense, for me anyway. I walked to my bathroom to brush my teeth and assess what I could only describe as the “hair situation.” It was giving wet dog—which was exactly what I deserved for showering at 10:00 p.m. and being unconscious by 10:07 p.m.

The rooms were darker than usual—a grim reminder that the days were getting shorter and that I was up at an hour I found personally offensive.

As I slipped on a pale orange sundress I heard the pitter patter of his footsteps and looked to my left.

Clark was standing in my closet clutching his Ducky and beaming up at me with a smile that will one day melt another woman’s heart.

“Good Morning, Mama!”

The person who hated mornings the most had somehow given birth to a child who woke up like he just won the lottery. The universe thought that was funny. I was still processing it, if I was being honest.

But that day he was even happier than his usual default mode—which was genuinely disturbingly giddy.

The morning went as it always did—just an hour earlier.

Ben and I tag teamed the slow cooked eggs and oven cooked bacon. I chopped strawberries for the four hundredth time that month because my children consume fruit at a rate that should concern a doctor.

Breakfast was calmer than I expected it would be. Partially because nothing in the routine had changed and perhaps also because Ryder was still sleeping in his crib and not yell-singing at us for the first time in weeks.

After cleaning up and a quick bathroom stop, we packed our bags and loaded Clark into the car.

My stomach ached while my mind raced.

I was about to do the one thing I said I would never do.

Ben drove, as he always does.

Once I drove Clark to an appointment and I had to tell him to pick his jaw up off the floor. When I asked him why he was making that face he said: “I didn’t know girls could drive.”

So yay feminism or whatever.

We drove the quick five minutes and pulled into the parking lot.

I told him to leave Ducky in the car.

“I promise I’ll take good care of him,” I said with a smile that was just believable enough to hide my broken heart.

We walked through the parking lot. He and I hand in hand.

His backpack was bigger than him—comical really.

In it: his green folder, pencils, crayons, glue sticks, and a picture of our family—just as the teachers asked.

We walked up to the side of the old brick building and gathered with the sea of other parents as the waves of emotions rolled over me in a way that induced a sea sickness I will never quite be able to describe to another.

We got in line behind twenty or so families. Each minute getting closer to the side door.

The scene was chaotic—toddlers crying, babies in strollers whining for milk as their moms hugged their older children with a tightness that could rival that which I felt in my chest.

And then it was our turn.

“Okay Clark. The nice lady is going to walk you to your classroom now. We will come and get you in a few hours. You’re going to have so much fun!” I said

His smile slowly faded as he walked towards the steel double doors, watching his peers crying in their parents arms—not wanting to let go.

“You got this,” I said holding back the dam behind my eyes. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mom,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

As he let go of my hand and took the hand of the teacher’s aide, I held the steel door to keep steady. His little body slowly walking down the long hall, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared into a room.

I was doing fine. I really was.

Until I locked eyes with the principal—who mouthed “It’s going to be okay.”

And the floodgates opened.

And quickly a friend and neighbor hugged me tight—a mom who had been in my shoes three times before.

I had been saying it since before he was born. We are going to homeschool. It wasn’t a passing thought or a loose preference. It was a plan—a real one. I had curriculum researched and philosophy decided. I had my reasons and I still have them.

But somewhere between that plan and the person Clark turned out to be, something shifted.

Clark is social in a way that genuinely surprises me. He walks into a room of strangers and introduces himself with a handshake like a forty year old man at a networking event. He begs for playdates. He remembers every neighbor’s name. He asks about them by name when we haven’t seen them in weeks. He berates me when I don’t know someone’s name—usually a stranger walking past our house.

Putting my plan on a child like that—a child who was clearly built for other people— would have been about me. Not him.

And motherhood, I am learning, is the longest practice of getting out of your own way that will ever exist.

So I did the thing I said I would never do.

And then we went to pick him up.

When we went back a few hours later, we brought Ryder. We watched Clark walk back down that same long hallway toward us—getting bigger and bigger until he was right there, whole and fine and exactly himself.

He and Ryder hugged the way only brothers who have missed each other for three hours can. Like it had been years and the reunion was long overdue.

We loaded them both into the car and started to drive away.

And from the backseat, completely serious, Clark said:

“Wait. Why are we leaving? I want to go back.”

I looked at Ben. Ben looked at me.

He had made a friend. A little boy who made him a necklace on his very first day and played tag with him until their cheeks were red. He wore that necklace home like it was the most important thing he had ever been given. Maybe it was.

I had spent the whole morning holding back a dam. I had stood in a parking lot falling apart while a principal mouthed reassurances at me through a glass door. I had driven home with a lump in my throat and an empty backseat and the specific ache of a door closing on something I wasn’t finished with yet.

And he wanted to go back.

That night I tucked him in and touched his cheek the way I always do as I leaned down to say goodnight.

He looked up at me and said:

“I like you, Mom. Thanks for taking me to school.”

I wasn’t prepared for that.

And then he hugged me. The kind of hug that means something without knowing it means something. The kind only a four year old can give—completely, without calculation, without any idea that it just fixed everything broken inside of you.

He was asleep before I made it to the door.

I stood in the hallway for a moment with my hand still on the frame. The house was quiet again-that same quiet as 5:30 in the morning except this time it didn’t feel like waiting.

It felt like something had settled. Like the door that had been closing all day had finally closed—and what was on the other side was better than what I had been holding onto.

I don’t know why I ever doubted him. Clark has always known exactly who he is. I was the one with the plan. He was the one with the life.

I think the bravest thing I have done as his mother—maybe the only truly brave thing—was stepping aside and letting him show me who he already was. And he did.

I went back downstairs and sat on the porch for a while. The air was still hot—still heavy—yet everything somehow felt lighter.

The fireflies were still gone, the katydids were still singing and the summer was still ending.

But, there, sitting on my oversized couch, I thought: Maybe not everything that ends is a loss. I keep thinking about that.

Maybe some doors close so that the right ones can open. A portal, if you will.

Clark walked through his today without looking back. I'm still learning how to do that. But he'll teach me.

He always does.

Find me on Instagram at @amuseofgemini for the Clark quotes in real time—including whatever he says tomorrow that will inevitably humble me further.

And if this essay made you feel something and you want more of the honest stuff—the essays I wasn’t sure I was ready to write—that’s what the paid tier is for. $8 a month. The door is open.

Being a girl is weird. Being a woman is weirder.

Why is referring to myself as a woman strange? I’m forty years old and doing this somehow makes me feel completely geriatric, like I’m months overdue scheduling a deep plane facelift. Which, for your information, I’m not above doing in the next five years.

Listen, I heard that the earlier you do it, the better. Don’t shoot the messenger—I’m just out here doing the Lord’s work asking my aesthetician friends the hard hitting questions you won’t. But sure, I’m the asshole for MAYBE implying you should consider a facelift. (I wasn’t.) Christ.

If I had a dollar for every time I put my foot in my mouth like this, I’d have exactly $800 Million Dollars. I’d be on a yacht in Ibiza (I-bee-tha?) Whatever—you get my point.

Why? Because I never say the right thing—especially to women.

The truth is, I’m a guy’s girl. There. I said it.

And I’m done apologizing for it because being a guy’s girl doesn’t automatically induce the transitive property to make you a “pick me” girl either.

And like, please don’t pick me? I’m married. And also I’m, like, really tired?

And yes—I know you’re rolling your eyes. I know how this sounds. I know the reputation you assume I have. But why don’t we address exactly what this means.

What it means: As a general rule, I prefer men’s company. Or better yet—I thrive in masculine energy.

And no, I don’t hate women nor do I think I’m special or different. I’m also not performing for male attention. I genuinely, wholeheartedly find the dynamics in male friendships easier, less complicated and way more straightforward.

A big part of this is my love language—which is relentlessly making fun of you. Biting my tongue when I have the perfectly timed jab ready to roll borders on a phobia for me.

I wish that was hyperbole. It’s a sickness, I know that, but I have yet to find the cure.

I am also the oldest daughter.

Well, I’m the only daughter, actually.

I have one younger brother, four years younger. He’s a guy’s guy, yet the running joke in my family is that I was the son my dad never had.

Not because there’s anything wrong with my brother, more so because there’s definitely something wrong with me.

I’m not particularly warm.
I say exactly what I’m thinking.

My favorite holiday of the year is the air & water show—something my dad loves as well. Planes are cool AF (am I too old to say that?)

I also spent the majority of my childhood—granted we lived in Indiana for my formative years—being a race car fan.

Scott Goodyear, the race car driver, and his family lived in the house directly behind us. I may or may not have seen his infant child pee into a sandbox like a cat.

One of my core memories is his 1995 race where confusion led to him passing the Pace Car and losing the race on a technicality.

I cried. Which is probably the most feminine thing I did at that age.

All this to say, I’ve spent the majority of my life living in a boy’s world. Voluntarily.

I rode bikes, I played Nintendo 64 in the basement with the boys, I rolled my eyes at Barbies.

But at the same time, I also craved belonging with the girls. And I struggled to find my place.

When I started second grade, I remember feeling overwhelmed and intimidated by the glitter nail polish, the Polly Pockets and the “makeup.”

I’ll never forget being made fun of—at the age of nine, mind you—for not shaving my legs.

I didn’t even have a training bra yet and girls were out here talking about what brand of shaving cream smelled the best. Naturally, they rolled their eyes at me when I asked what Nair was, so fuck if I was making that mistake again.

And this was long before the internet, or at least before the internet was good. The only person on my street with AOL was my next door neighbor and I was not about to walk over there, sit through that dial up screech—which sounded exactly like a robot getting an unmedicated colonoscopy—wait four minutes for the connection to establish, find a chat room, and ask a group of strangers how to fit in with girls my age.

A/S/L? Oh also, how do you make friends?

I had some dignity. Not much. But some.

So I learned to cope—I pivoted.

I spent my time with the girl next door who, like me, preferred romping around in oversized t-shirts and Umbro shorts while riding bikes rather than painting nails. I made friends with the neighborhood boys, championed Hot Wheels race tracks and learned how to play 007 and Star Fox with the best of ‘em.

People said what they meant, meant what they said, and everything was uncomplicated. When someone asks about childhood, it’s those Indiana summer nights that stick out.

I don’t know exactly when it switched. The tomboy phase. I’m still in it in many ways, especially now that the gods have blessed me with only boys—which has been an easy life to fall back into, if I’m being honest.

Sometime after high school, however, my interests shifted a bit. Perhaps because my circle expanded or I started working and had disposable income. Maybe because the boys I used to pal around with became complicated. Feelings changed and not always for everyone.

I grew into my body and into my confidence. I started to learn the power of eyeliner and a good blow out. I wasn’t an ugly duckling story per se, but I’d be lying if I said that in my twenties and thirties I didn’t get creepy messages from boys—now men—from high school or grade school saying… “When did you get hot?”

Some women might have been proud of getting those DMs—albeit creepy. For me, it’s when I realized things started to shift.

The close friendships with males that I had fostered for years, decades even, started to change drastically. Some developed feelings for me that went beyond friendship. Some couldn’t handle it when the feelings weren’t reciprocated.

But the majority of them got serious girlfriends. Or wives. All of whom I can genuinely say I loved. That adoration, however, wasn’t always mutual. Social outings with them became more of an exercise in managing other women’s feelings than it was about enjoyment. Constantly having to censor myself and worry about every tension shift in the room became more of a load than I was willing to bear.

And for many, ties were cut altogether. No conversation, no “we can’t hang out anymore.” Just the slow fade of a friendship that once was.

And it was then, in my 20s, that I realized I was going to need to find new friends—women.

I spent the next two decades fostering my connections with other women. At the time, I worked in finance—a notoriously male dominated industry—which suited my personality just fine. While it made this somewhat tricky since there weren’t as many women to befriend, I often found that the women I did meet through work had the same guy’s girl energy I did.

Many of them spoke their minds freely—could command a room full of men with a level of respect and adoration that would genuinely shock you. And I soon found that many of the qualities that I possessed to allow me to be successful in that industry also existed within my female peers.

Alas, the era of finding female friends was born.

I’ll never forget the Happy Hours at Ceres Cafe—a notorious financial district staple positioned at the bottom level of the historic Chicago Board of Trade. There was a thrilling juxtaposition watching some of the most well-dressed, stunning women thrive in a sea of finance bros. The personalities were strong and the drinks were stronger.

We sat at the outdoor patio, myself and the other “skirts,” and bonds were formed. I learned that strong female personalities didn’t have to mean ruthless. I remember being uplifted by these women in the midst of heartbreak.

These weren’t just women who got drinks with you after work. They were women who also made sure you got home, and covered for you the next day when you were too hungover for a client call.

There were no filters—no holding my tongue. Saying something controversial or spitting an off-color joke was met with smirks and belly laughs, not judgement.

It’s fascinating to look back on the women I got along with the most. Many of them were athletes, like myself, and many grew up as the only girl amongst brothers. There was a shared language of recognition in that—even if nothing was said out loud.

Now I certainly don’t want to generalize. I had friends that were girl’s girls, too. They were just more like the unicorns amongst us. The ones that could pivot from the drama of the latest Bravo show while stopping on a dime to answer a client call and discuss equity attribution with the precision of a financial surgeon.

And then, without realizing it, life changed again.

I moved.

I moved two states away to a completely different life. I got a new job, bought a house in a completely different political and social atmosphere, and I got unexpectedly pregnant.

I was able to keep up with my Chicago friends for some time. And many of them made the five hour trek in rental cars to come visit me after I had my first son. But slowly, the distance, both physical and experiential, became larger than anyone could have anticipated.

Because what I didn’t see coming was that many of the friends I established—the guy’s girls—they kept going. Going with their careers, their social lives, their impressive goals and aspirations in full force. And me? I had babies. Two in three years. And it started to feel like we lived on completely different timelines.

And what I realized is that many of the qualities that made these women exceptional friends—that masculine energy, that “do no harm, take no shit” vibe that made me feel right at home—that was exactly why they could no longer relate to me.

I was living a life they couldn’t quite understand. No longer was I closing deals and meeting for dirty martinis to celebrate the close of the quarter. I was now baking cookies and cleaning vomit and breastfeeding.

I remember a specific phone call—a FaceTime actually—telling one of my friends that I was pregnant with my first son. She said all the right things. She did. But the “yay” lingered a bit too long and the disappointment in her eyes was hard to ignore.

When we hung up the phone—my husband and I looked at each other. He didn’t have to say anything and neither did I. We were both thinking the same thing—that I was soon not going to be able to relate to these friends in the same way. That, despite her best efforts to stay in touch, I would soon become a friend she no longer understood. Inconvenient.

And so I did what I always do. I pivoted.

Strangely, I’ve found that the unicorns I used to work with—the girly-pops—had more in common with me than ever before. And now, almost five years later, I text them more than some of my closest friends.

Not because I have anything to offer in the latest Real Housewives’ drama but because we are facing the same challenges all of a sudden: the identity shifts, the lack of sleep, the postpartum depression—or better yet—the postpartum constipation!

And so, here I am. Forty years old, two boys, a Substack I quit my job for and a cleaning company I help run. And I’m struggling to figure out how to make new friends. Not friends on the periphery of life, but real ones. Ones I won’t be ashamed to cry to on the couch in the dark. Ones that will come over just to sit with me on the porch and sometimes say nothing at all—just enjoy the silence together without it being weird.

Instead, I’m just out here still putting my foot in my mouth. Still saying the shit I shouldn’t—gravitating toward the wrong conversation at the wrong moment. I suggested a facelift to someone at an event recently. She did not laugh. I laughed. (That was worse, if you were wondering.)

I’m not particularly interested in curating the perfect lunchbox or comparing preschool curriculums or whatever the current parenting discourse is on Instagram this week either.

I care deeply about my kids. I am just also deeply interested in building something—a business, a newsletter, a version of myself that exists outside of them.

I wasn’t even sure I wanted kids. I’ve said that out loud before and watched a room go quiet in a specific way that tells me I have said the wrong thing yet again.

Maybe I should be ashamed of that. But I’m not.

Clark asks me if I’m okay every night and Ryder says “happy” when we put him to bed every night and I would burn the whole world down for both of them.

But I am also still me. That girl who preferred Umbro shorts to nail polish and refused to brush her hair. The guy’s girl who would rather talk about building something than talk about anything on Bravo.

I’m still looking for my people in this season. The ones who get both versions. The mom and the person she was before—and still is—underneath all of it.

I think they’re out there.

I think some of them are reading this right now.

Find me on Instagram at @amuseofgemini for the chaos between the essays. Clark quotes. Porch mornings. The facelift suggestions that didn’t land. You get it.

And if you want the essays I wasn’t sure I was ready to publish—the ones that cost me something—that’s what the paid tier is for. $8 a month. No pressure. But the door is open and the lights are on. Mostly.

Two has always been my lucky number. It’s always felt more complete.

Two cats, two kids, two eyes, two hands, two feet.

A couple. A pair.

Just two.

My youngest turned two this weekend. And no, I’m not okay.

My husband and I have this unspoken ritual on the eve of our kid’s birthdays. We read a story all together, and before we set them down in their crib or bed, we hug them until they tell us to stop.

With our oldest, Clark, it’s actually an absurdly long time. With our youngest, Ryder, it’s very brief. Approximately five seconds.

“All done. Nigh-nigh,” he says with an aggressive eye roll and we set him down in his crib.

For Ryder, we then have a check list:

• Exactly four pacifiers (or “bya-byas” as he calls them)

• His lion stuffed animal aptly named, Lion

• A bottle of milk he refuses to sleep without

• Sleep sack

• Air at a brisk 68 degrees

• Absolutely no fan on

• Sound machine—waves, not white noise (you peasants!)

• Collection of his second class stuffed animals shoved aggressively in one corner of the crib

Once the checklist is completed, we close the curtains—blackout curtains, naturally—and say goodnight.

And as he turns over onto his stomach and clutches his Lion, we feel the familiar birthday lump in our throat.

This is the last night he will be one years old.

We will never get this age back.

I should tell you who Ryder is before I tell you how guilty I feel about his first two years.

He is the loudest person in a house that is not quiet. He has opinions about everything and communicates them at full volume even when—especially when— we have no idea what he’s actually saying. He is mischievous in the best possible way. Ornery, if there were a more lighthearted and cheeky version of the word. He knows what he wants. He knows what he doesn’t. And he has never once apologized for being exactly who he is.

He is also (somehow?) the most easygoing person in the room. He’s the youngest. He likes what his brother likes. He plays with hand-me-downs, wears old stained t-shirts, and happily eats the leftovers Clark refuses to touch. At the end of the day he just loves being with us. That’s our Ryder Baby.

There’s another unspoken ritual on the eve of birthdays in our house, which is Ben and I meeting in the kitchen after bedtime, hugging each other and crying like complete bumbling idiots.

It’s only a cry of partial sadness—perhaps 50%. The other half is genuine gratitude. How did we get so lucky? We have two healthy, happy, smart boys that love us and love each other. They make our family feel complete.

There’s always a tinge of sting for me—the one who is not a “kids person.”

The older my boys get, the more I enjoy them. But I, for one, struggle with these younger years. I struggle to connect in a meaningful way when they are newborns—when they’re basically just a potato you have to feed, change, and keep alive for 12 months.

And then they turn one. I call this the year of “a danger to themselves.” Every normal household item becomes an existential threat to their wellbeing. As someone with a constant low level hum of anxiety on a good day, this is not my ideal state—worrying that the things I love most could get hurt at any given moment.

As I melt into Ben’s arms in the kitchen, I feel the ache of the guilt, knowing all too well that these first two years I spent mostly in a heightened state of panic, rather than enjoyment.

Instead of bonding with him at age one, I spent most of the year fearful of every corner, every sharp object. The staircase, the outlets he was obsessed with putting his fingers near just to spite me.

I remember one afternoon last fall. Ryder was in the backyard, sitting down in the grass, completely transfixed by something. An ant, maybe. A leaf? Unclear. But it was something small and inconsequential yet something magnificent to him. He looked up at me with those eyes—the ones that we’re still unsure if they are green or brown—and with that enormous, unself-conscious delight he said something I couldn’t understand. A babble. And instead of crouching down next to him—instead of trying to figure it out—I scanned the yard for hazards. That’s where my head was at. That’s what I was doing with that moment. That beautiful, precious moment.

And there’s more of those. Those moments. I think about them more than I let on.

And then I hug Ben tighter and cry harder, knowing all too well I need to learn to live in the moment and be more present.

I’m working on it. I have been working on it. I’m not sure if I’m getting any better.

Friday, August 14th 2026

Ben and I woke up with more enthusiasm than usual. Partially because both kids slept until 8 a.m. and partially because we had a birthday to celebrate.

We woke up Clark first, who was arguably more excited about his brother’s birthday than his brother himself. I suspect because he knew what toys were about to be added to the arsenal, but I choose to just pretend it’s because he loves his brother immensely.

We gathered up balloons from Clark’s room—naturally recycling the same ones we blew up for Clark’s 4th birthday last month—because we are lazy as shit into saving the environment?

Clark wanted to be the one to open the door, so we let him.

“Good Morning, Ryder-Baby!” Clark whispers genuinely. (I am now a puddle on the floor.)

Ryder squealed with delight from his crib, as he played “keepy-uppy” with Clark and the balloons from his bed.

We brought him downstairs and the boys played while I made a special Ryder-inspired breakfast, which is kind of a lie, because Ryder, unlike Clark, will eat anything you put in front of him.

On Today’s Menu:

Slow-cooked scrambled eggs,
prepared with the patience and precision of a Michelin starred
kitchen and absolutely no shortcuts.

Oven-roasted bacon,
because we do not microwave in this house and we never will.

Chocolate chip pancakes,
made entirely from scratch by yours truly, which I would like
everyone to acknowledge yet nobody seems to?

A seasonal fruit arrangement
Strawberries, hand selected and precisely cut into quarters because we plate things properly in this house and also because Ryder will only eat them if they are cut lengthwise. Don't ask.

And for beverages:

A chilled glass of choccy-milk for the birthday boy, which Clark has rebranded as cocoa-coffee because he is two years older and has decided this makes him sophisticated, I guess? It is the same drink. He knows it is the same drink. But don’t you dare bring it up.

The chef requests no substitutions.

After our feast, we put Ryder on Ben’s lap to open gifts. Clark was drooling, chomping at the bit. He was like a rabid wolf. Clark helped me wrap his gift for his brother—a giant excavator (or digger), which was equal parts for his brother and equal parts for himself to complete his collection of massive construction vehicles that this house has absolutely no room for.

“Remember Clark, this is Ryder’s gift,” I said gently.

He looked at me with a glance that can only be described as “pipe down, Karen,” yet he smiled and said “yes, of course.” Verbatim. What four year old says that?

First we read the card from Clark. It’s an 8.5 by 11 sheet of printer paper decorated with crayons and folded in half. On the inside, I had transcribed the following heartfelt note from Clark to Ryder:

Happy Birthday, Ryder!
You’re fun to play with, Ryder. You’re the sweetest kid in the world. You’re so smart. We love you so much. You have a great life!
Love, Clark

Ryder opened his massive digger while his mouth made the biggest oval shape—pure excitement and delight. He also opened a box filled with light up bath toys—which was perfect for the kid that sprints up the stairs if someone accidentally says “bath” out loud.

It’s funny how when you become a family, little traditions start to make their way into your lives. The traditions don't usually announce themselves. They just appear one year and stay. They’re quiet and unplanned, like a houseguest who arrives without warning and somehow fits perfectly into the space they weren't supposed to occupy.

Looking back on Clark’s 2nd birthday, we made it “A Day of Clark,” doing all the things Clark loved—yard work, Jeeps, water toys, playgrounds, etc. We had a whole itinerary of things to do that day. We made his favorite breakfast, gifted him a little toy lawnmower. We took him to a Jeep dealership and then a fun sprawling playground in Indian Hill. The day ended with a whole water park situation in our back yard that, frankly, the grass, is still mad at us for.

With Ryder, we were at more of a loss. He has arguably the biggest personality in the house, which made it strange to admit we didn't know exactly what to put on the itinerary. Planning his day was just as much throwing shit at a wall as it was trying to cater to what he loves. Because at the end of the day, he just loves being with us.

At 11 a.m. we took Ryder to our favorite toy store to pick out a new toy, a tradition Clark established on a birthday a few years back. But Ryder didn’t choose. He observed the other kids, played with the display trains and seemed content just to be out of the house running around.

We decided to pivot and headed to Target—because who doesn’t buy something at Target?

After going through a few aisles, in one of those huge kid-friendly shopping carts that both boys could sit in, Ryder fixated on a shelf.

A Mario doll.

We had recently watched the Mario Galaxy movie, which if I’m being honest, the whole family enjoyed. It even spawned a new game called “Mario tickles” where we aggressively tickle the boys while screaming the Mario theme song—its an acquired taste, you wouldn’t understand.

I gave him the Mario doll and he hugged it tighter than I had seen him hug a new toy. He motioned towards the shelf again—a Luigi doll.

I picked it up and gave it to him.

He immediately handed it to Clark.

The Super Mario Brothers.

The rest of the day was peaceful in the best possible way.

The kids napped. At the same time.

I don’t need to tell any mom of two what a God send this is. I’m actually pretty sure the clouds parted. Yes. And a single ray of golden sunshine fell directly onto my face. And somewhere, a chorus of angels sang “Hallelujah” in the background, with the echoes reverberating far into the distance.

The clouds also parted quite literally, as if right on cue, perfectly timed to the boys waking up from their nap.

We ushered them to the backyard where we had a makeshift water park: a water table, a water slide down to a splash pad, and—Ryder’s favorite—a very prolific bubble machine.

“Bubba bubba!” he exclaimed over and over as he ran all over the yard chasing them—his big brother in the background sliding down the waterslide with a complete disregard for his own wellbeing.

If time is a thief, memory is a net.

There are holes in it. You catch what you catch and the rest just falls through.

Clark recently went to bed crying because he couldn’t remember his 2nd birthday. I tried to comfort him by letting him know that I also didn’t remember my 2nd birthday.

Hell, I can barely remember birthdays 31-39. Memories can be fleeting. As we age, I’ve found that I have to focus to lock them in, like I’m cataloging my brain, except my brain is full of San Francisco fog (and honestly the Full House theme song, too?)

And as I watched my two sons—2 and 4 years old—playing in the wet grass, splashing and laughing and truly free, I told myself to remember.

Remember this time. Remember this feeling. Be present.

I put my phone down. The same phone that captures the birthdays so Clark and Ryder can remember them years later—likely through my Instagram reels, which will probably feel like watching home videos on VHS tapes when they’re my age.

And I smiled. I know I’ll remember.

We dragged the two boys in, like wet dogs, and got them immediately into the bath. Ryder’s new bath toys kept them occupied while I shampooed their hair in record time. (Less than 5 minutes, if you were curious—and yes, mostly rinsed?)

Dinner was one of Ryder’s favorites—home grilled hamburgers and oven-cooked french fries. (He’s mostly in it for the ketchup).

Afterwards, I panicked. How could I have done this?

I had no cake. No cupcake. Nothing to sing happy birthday over. To be fair, he doesn’t love sweets, but how could I have forgotten this step?

I panic baked brownies from scratch—obviously, because I am an insane person. They took an hour. He didn’t eat them. But hey—the thought was there? I feel better about myself?

I admitted defeat and scooped Straus brand vanilla ice cream into a small blue bowl.

Two little scoops—2—each of them with a candle.

He sat on his dad’s lap and Clark and I gathered at his right side. I turned off the lights and we sang—Clark kicked us off.

Happy Birthday to you…
Happy Birthday to you…
Happy Birthday Sweet Ryder.
Happy Birthday to you.

He held his new Mario toy in his left hand and beamed at the candles while we beamed at him. As he blew them out, I hoped he made a wish. I hoped he’d remember this. I know he won’t. But I hoped that, in this fleeting moment, he felt loved. Because I know that feeling—not the memory—is what will live on. What will remain.

Bedtime went as it usually did.

Both kids on our lap for story time. Ryder’s pick: Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site.

Afterwards, we picked up our sleepy two year old and placed him gently down in his crib—all his accessories accounted for—and we gathered around the gates.

Clark peeked through the wooden bars and told him he loved him. “All the way to the moon and back. No matter what.”

Ben and I leaned down to give him one last touch.

I thought about the kitchen. The crying. The guilt. The two years of panic I can’t get back.

“Did you have a good birthday, Ryder Baby?” I ask.

He looked up at me and took out his pacifier for a moment.

He smiled and said a new word.

“Happy.”

If you want more between essays—the Clark quotes in real time, the porch mornings, the behind the scenes of whatever is currently falling apart—find me on Instagram at @amuseofgemini.

And if this essay made you feel something and you want to go deeper—the paid tier is where I put the stories I wasn’t sure I was ready to tell. The ones that cost something to write. $8 a month. No pressure. But the door is always open.

May 2018

It was a dark time, if I’m being honest. Which I am, by the way. I always am.

My sprawling Lakeview condo had barely anything in it anymore. Furniture gone, pictures that once hung proudly now empty little rectangles on the wall leaving that faint shade of ivory where the sun hadn’t touched in years.

My home felt barren—something my ex fiancé’s mistress certainly wasn’t, considering she was due to give birth to a baby boy in November. (Boom. Sick burn.)

As the days went by, I still struggled with my time at the condo. I spent more nights out with friends during the week than I care to admit.

I didn’t miss him. Really, I didn’t.

Which sometimes made me feel like I, myself, was the sociopath. Shouldn’t I miss someone that I spent years loving? Shouldn’t I miss someone that—until two weeks prior—I had planned to marry and spend the rest of my life with?

I still grapple with that. Eight years later. Like maybe there is something wrong with me, too.

The one thing that kept me coming back to the condo after work each day was the cats. Paisley and Halsted were my lifeline. Cats are not usually known for their loyalty and yet there they were.

I was convinced they took my side. They pressed against me every night when I came home, as if they understood something before even I could admit it out loud. That this was bad. That I needed support. They somehow understood that sometimes the only honest comfort available comes on four legs and asks nothing of you in return…even if they stare at you crying with just a tinge of judgement.

And yet, I still found it excruciating to stay there at night. When the sun dipped behind the neighboring buildings and the living room went dark, it felt like an ominous cloud had been patiently waiting for me all day. Settling in. Getting comfortable. As if to say—Oh good, you’re home! Just us now. You, me, and the fun little fact that your fiancé got someone else pregnant while telling you he wasn’t sure he was ready for kids. With you. Specifically.

The open space of my home became suffocating after dark. I felt like I was drowning—being waterboarded by every stupid memory that every little trinket on the shelf or creak in the floorboard brought on with each passing moment.

I started rotating where I slept at night to avoid it altogether. It was like some kind of grief tour but instead of cool stages across the country, the venues were friend’s couches. The tour was aptly named “Anywhere But Home.” I really feel this was a missed opportunity. Sigh. Oh, well.

So I rotated. My own little road show.

Never my parent’s home, though. God, no.

Looking at my parents’ faces was unbearable. There is a specific kind of grief that lives in the eyes of people who love you but who cannot fix what happened to you. It doesn’t look like pity exactly. Or maybe it does? It looks like helplessness wearing the face of someone who would burn the whole world down if it would make this better. That look was somehow harder to sit with than the empty condo.

Instead I spent time with extended family, friends, or the occasional staying out drinking at bars that didn’t close so I didn’t have to sleep at all. (Genius, I know.)

I slept on girlfriends’ couches and I even had Ben’s basement couch in the rotation. There was something about sleeping in a house of three dudes—even if they were basically children—that seemed a hell of a lot safer than sleeping in my house alone. But truthfully, I think what I was really looking for was someone who wouldn't look at me like I was broken. I just needed someone who would let me be broken quietly, nearby.

Ben lived on Clifton Avenue, right next to Wrigley Field. He and his two roommates lived in what a Chicagoan would call a “duplex-down,” which is really just a fun way of saying they lived in a condo that included the first floor and the basement in a three-story building.

Ben’s bedroom was the back room on the basement level, next to a full bathroom and laundry room. The front of the basement was a lounging area—which smelled faintly of beer and stale weed. I didn’t mind.

On the rare occasion I was able to sleep, it was often on the plaid couch or loveseat in that basement. I always found it odd that the one place I was able to fall asleep or relax was the home that was a revolving door of retired college lax-bros, music blaring on the floor above me, and a gentle (occasional?) smell of piss that wafted in when a window was open from the bars nearby.

Often, I would nod off in the hours after work and find a bottle of wine or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s on the coffee table in front of me. A dude’s way of saying, “I’m sorry you’re hurting.” It was equal parts endearing and equal parts insulting—Am I really this basic?—I asked myself with a mouthful of Americone Dream that got immediately washed down by cheap cabernet.

I stayed on the couch a couple nights per week at the beginning. It became a regular appointment, which nobody seemed to mind. My anxiety was at an all-time high, and that little plaid couch in the basement was my favorite escape. Partly because it was dark and moody—I could relate?—and partially because the Nintendo-64 next to me was a great distraction from the legal mess I was avoiding with my ex.

This is where I will tell you—do not buy property with anyone that is not legally your spouse—ever. Please, for the love of God, do not.

I continued my residency in Ben’s basement whenever I felt the anxiety coming on. I laid on the couch like one would in a shrinks office, except I didn’t have anyone constantly asking, “and how do you feel about that,” which was a breath of fresh air.

One night at his house, before going to turn in for the night, I heard what I assumed was a vacuum coming from his room at the back of the basement.

I didn’t know twenty-something sales bros knew how to use vacuums?

I sat back up and turned around and saw Ben in his room inflating a blow up mattress.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re gonna sleep in here from now on.”

I would like to tell you I was skeptical at first—like he was making a play. But I wasn’t. And he wasn’t.

At the time, he was the closest person I had, both physically and emotionally. Physically because we were functionally tied together at the hip daily as work partners, traveling together multiple times per month. And emotionally because on said work trips I would just burst out into tears at the smallest reminder of how pathetic my life was. Usually if someone looked at me wrong or said something slightly triggering, like “How are you?”

He dragged the mattress over to the center of his room between his bed and his dresser. I watched him from the other side of the basement as he fitted it with a proper sheet and pillows.

“This way if you need to talk, I’ll be right here,” he said.

That night I struggled to sleep. I quietly tossed and turned on the blow up mattress, trying desperately not to wake Ben up from the squeaks of my body against the plastic bed.

“Can’t sleep?” He whispered.

“No,” I said softly, painfully choking back tears. (As one does when their whole life is falling apart and they are sleeping on a blow up mattress in the bedroom of a 24 year old’s frat house, because…and I’m being sincere…it was more pleasant than being in the fucking condo I bought with my asshole ex.)

“Do you want to sleep here instead?” Ben asked, sitting upright in his full-sized bed.

I rolled over and looked at him. I didn’t want to say yes. But truthfully, the mere thought of just laying next to someone warm and kind seemed like the answer to a prayer I didn’t even know I’d asked for. Also, blow up beds are, like, extremely uncomfortable?

“You don’t mind?” I said sheepishly.

“‘Course not.” he said and he scooted over and pulled the blanket down for me to hop in.

I slowly climbed up to his bed with my blanket in tow, just to make sure there was more cloth between us as to not confuse the situation more than it already probably was. And then I laid on my back next to him.

He asked me what was on my mind and I slowly began to unveil all the words that had been hiding in my head for weeks. I explained the feelings of shame, fear and anger—verbally walking through the quiet suffering I had been experiencing alone on my island of terrible thoughts. Tears dripped down my face and into my hair. I tried to muffle the sound of crying but I knew he could distinguish the faint quiver in my voice as I spoke in the dark.

What was only five or ten minutes of talking felt like an eternity, and the release of my emotions felt like a heavy burden had been lifted off my chest and into the air.

After a few minutes of silence, Ben spoke softly.

“Everything is going to be okay. I promise.” He touched my hand as he lay on his back next to me. And I was able to exhale.

We said our good nights as he rolled over—turning his back to me as I turned mine to his—and for the first time in weeks, I was able to sleep through the night.

I didn’t know that night that the man lying next to me with his back turned, pretending to be asleep so I could cry in peace, would become my husband. I didn’t know that the blow up mattress on the floor of a duplex-down that smelled faintly of beer and stale weed was where my actual life was beginning. No sane person would think that. I didn’t know any of it. I just knew I could finally breathe.

And that was enough.

The bulk of this story lives in a blog I once had that detailed every painful moment of my life from 2018 to 2020. Every word of it was true. Raw and real in the way that only writing at 2am in a basement can be.

That blog cost me things too, you know. Friends and relationships. It also cost me the comfortable assumption that people who are supposed to love you will show up for a version of you that is hard to look at.

I didn’t learn from that (clearly) because here I am again. Right back at it.

But in that era—that brutally beautiful and fucked up era—I learned something that took me almost a decade to fully understand.

I learned that there are rules. Unspoken ones, mostly. The kind nobody writes down but everyone enforces, perhaps unknowingly. The rules are designed to ensure you earn love and respect and fulfillment in the right way, the correct way. You must earn them in the proper way that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable at a dinner party or question whether they really know you at all.

Those rules, the unspoken ones? I broke all of them.

Every single one.

And you know the obvious ones: Don’t get into a relationship right after another. Don’t complicate a male friendship you actually value. Don’t date a coworker. Don’t date someone too old or too young or too whatever the algorithm has decided is problematic this particular week, with this particular audience. Yada yada yada…

Oh, but then there are the rules nobody says out loud yet they live and exist solely in the subtext of every piece of “well-meaning” advice you’ve ever received:

Don’t let someone see you at your absolute worst before they’ve seen you at your best.
Don’t cry in someone’s bed before you’ve ever kissed them.
Don’t fall in love on a blow up mattress in a duplex-down that smells faintly of beer while technically still heartbroken over someone else.
Don’t mix friendship and romance—you’ll ruin both!
And for the love of God, don’t fall for the guy who watched you fall completely apart and chose you anyway—that’s too much pressure.

Except!

Except that last one is exactly the right person as it turns out.

So yeah, I fucking cheated.

I cheated the system and I cheated the rules and I cheated the carefully curated timeline that normal, well-adjusted people follow when rebuilding their lives after a disaster.

The one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that I did not cheat on anyone. Not my ex, not Ben, not a single person who trusted me. That was the rumor then and I suspect it still lives somewhere in the mouths of people who preferred a simpler story or preferred me as the villain. But it was never true. It was never even close to true. As it turns out, the truth really is stranger than fiction.

I did pay for it though—cheating the system. I shamed my parents. I disappointed people who got caught in the crossfire. I lost friends—good ones, by the way—who decided that the speed of my recovery must be evidence of its insincerity, I suppose. Certainly there was no way I could actually be that broken because look how fast she found her next victim!

History, it seems, has a way of repeating itself. Because this Substack—these essays I write from my porch in the sweltering heat—they are doing the same thing the old blog did. They are costing me things—hydration, sure—but many, hidden things, too.

I have friends who have gone quiet. I have people who knew me before who would really prefer I kept more of this to myself—friends and family who think that writing one’s truth out loud is a character flaw, no matter how much I try to dress it up as “bravery.”

And who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe I just never learn. Maybe I suck at this.

Or maybe, just maybe, the things worth having have always cost you something And maybe they always will.

My first blog cost me comfort but gave me clarity. Breaking the rules cost me safety but gave me Ben. And these weekly essays are costing me the approval of people who were never really mine to keep anyway.

Maybe growth is learning to be okay with that. And if I’ve learned anything: Life is full of maybes.

For what it’s worth—they were wrong then.

And sure, it was messy. All of it. Spectacularly, embarrassingly, gloriously (if not entertainingly) messy.

But here is what the mess gave me:

A husband who is genuinely my best friend. Two boys who humble me daily and remind me that it’s safe to love myself again. And a lifetime of content that I am still, unapologetically, writing about.

So would I do it all over again?

Yes. I’d happily relive every humiliating, rule-breaking, eyebrow-raising moment of it all. I’d disappoint the same people! I’d lose the same fifty thousand dollars in wedding deposits. I’d sleep on the same blow up mattress in the same basement next to the same lax-bro who asked me what was on my mind and actually waited for the honest answer I didn’t know I had in me.

And, perhaps most importantly, I’d write every word of it. Again and again and again. Until the end of time. Until death do us part.

Because the life I wasn’t supposed to have is the only one I’ve ever actually wanted.

So would I cheat the system again? Yes. Without hesitation.

What do you think I’m doing right now?

It is Sunday morning. I’m sitting on the porch of the family lake house in Michigan with a hot cup of coffee and the most luxuriously buttery chocolate croissant from the shop down the road.

August arrived quietly, which felt right. July was full and in the best possible way. Ben and I snuck away to a farm retreat in Nashville called Southall for our five year anniversary, which was equal parts romantic and deeply relaxing and also the weekend we attempted mushrooms that turned out to be completely inert. I could have used an ego death, to be honest. The universe apparently had other plans.

Then Clark turned four—which deserves its own essay and will probably get one—and then we loaded the car and drove eight hours to Michigan for two weeks at the lake with the boys. No agenda. No schedule. Just the water and the kids and the croissants and that specific kind of tired that only can come from actually resting instead of just stopping.

It’s been exactly one month since I quit my job to write full time. Is it freeing? Yes. Is it daunting? Also yes. I still consistently worry that one day I will run out of things to say. So far, so good, I suppose?

A few things are changing around here and I want to tell you about them directly because you’ve been here since the beginning and you deserve to know.

I’m scaling back to one essay per week instead of two. Not because I have less to say— clearly that is not the problem as I don’t shut up—but because I want to give each piece the time it actually deserves. I’d rather give you one thing worth reading than two things rushed. Occasionally there will be two. But one is the new rhythm.

Starting this month the newsletter will also feature a brand new essay written specifically for From the Porch rather than pulling from the month’s most popular post. You get something made just for this. I think that’s how it should have been from the beginning—my bad!

I’m also spending more time on the business side of this—the marketing, the growth, the figuring out how to make something I love into something sustainable. I’ll be documenting that in the Entrepreneur Edit because I think the behind the scenes of building a writing business is just as interesting as the writing itself. Maybe more?

And finally—I’m thinking about fiction. I have stories in my head that have been living there for years, fully formed, waiting for somewhere to go. Fiction might be the thing that lets me say what I want to say without saying too much. A loophole, if you will. More on that soon.

This month’s issue is heavier than usual in the best way. I wrote about parenthood in a way I wasn’t sure I was ready to. I wrote about aging and boundaries and the people we love who make both complicated. And somewhere in between I also gave you a family cookie recipe because balance is important (and so is butter!)

Pull up a chair. The croissant is gone but the coffee is still hot.

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There is a specific and largely unspoken challenge that comes with watching your parents age—and it is not the one anyone prepares you for. It is not the grief of watching them slow down or the weight of becoming the caretaker. It’s something quieter than that. It is the moment you realize that the difficult parts of their personality have not softened with age. They have calcified.

The crotchety parent. The one who is more set in their ways than ever. The one whose opinions have become louder and whose flexibility has become nonexistent. The one who can still make you feel twelve years old in thirty seconds flat without even trying.

Here is what I, and many others in my life, have had to learn the hard way: you are not twelve anymore. You are a grown adult with your own home, your own children, your own hard-won sense of self. And while you love them and will show up for them, you do not have to shrink back into the version of yourself that existed before you knew better.

Boundaries with aging parents are not cruel and they are not disrespectful. They are what make it possible to keep showing up for them without losing yourself in the process. Without resenting them. Without ruining what time you have left together

You can hold someone’s hand and hold your ground at the same time. You can be patient with their limitations without excusing their behavior. You can love someone deeply and still refuse to be spoken to a certain way.

The goal is not to win. It is not to change them—you cannot change them or anyone, you should know this by now. The goal is to stay in relationship with them while remaining fully yourself. That balance is harder than it sounds and nobody gives you a roadmap for it.

But you are allowed to be an adult in the room. Even when they make you feel like you aren’t.

A note: This newsletter will always have a free version. But later this year I’m adding a paid tier for subscribers who want to go deeper: the full advice column, extended beauty and wellness deep dives, real business numbers, and more. If you are subscribed now, you are grandfathered in and you will always get the full newsletter for free. I’ll give you plenty of notice before anything changes for anyone else.

That said, if you’ve been enjoying the writing and want to support it anyway, you can pledge a future subscription below. Your card won’t be charged until I turn on paid subscriptions, and even then you are not obligated. It’s just a tip jar for people who enjoy what I’m writing. Or are concerned I quit my very stable job to do this. Both?

Stay amused.

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"Ok so my husband and I have been together 10 years, two kids under six and I genuinely love him and I know he loves me but like…somewhere in the chaos we turned into really efficient roommates? we're good parents, we tag team everything, we're a great TEAM but I miss us. and I don't even know how to bring it up because he's literally doing everything right and I don't want it to sound like a complaint or me being a jerk. like last night he loaded the dishwasher wrong AGAIN and instead of saying something cute or funny like I would have three years ago I just quietly fixed it after he went to bed and said nothing. or how he'll ask me what I want for dinner every single night like I have any more time than he does to plan a meal. or how he falls asleep on the couch at 8:45 every night and I sit there alone watching something I don't even want to watch just because I don't want to go to bed by myself. none of these things are his fault. that's the problem. i dunno, how do you even bring up that you miss someone who is right there?"

— Anonymously submitted via Instagram DM

Meet Castor and Pollux: the twin stars of Gemini, and the two voices that live rent free in my head. They both have opinions. They don't always agree. They're both usually right.

Castor:

Before we dive into anything, please know that what you just described is one of the most common and least talked about things that happens in a marriage after kids. The quiet drift; the “efficient roommate” era. So yes, you fix the dishwasher in silence at 10pm because it’s easier than having the conversation. I get it. And for what it’s worth: I want you to know that noticing it and naming it—even just to a stranger on the internet—is actually the first step. So kudos to you!

Now, here’s what I want you to do: Stop waiting for some big moment to bring it up. Often times, by doing that, you end up waiting and instead you explode. Trust me when I say it’s better to start talking about this when you are calm and not deep in your feelings or emotions. And definitely not during luteal—my God, no.

And look, there is no perfect opening and there is never a right time. But there will be a random Thursday night, when your kids are finally asleep and you can sit next to him on the couch or in the bed and realize once and for all that missing him out loud is better than missing him quietly.

You don’t have to frame it as a complaint. You shouldn’t. But you can frame it as an invitation. Just tell him you miss him. Don’t frame it as something is wrong. Don’t make him feel like he’s failing. Just that you miss him and you want to find your way back to each other. Most good partners—and it genuinely sounds like you have one—will meet you there if you just open the door.

Let the dishwasher stay wrong for now. Get your husband back first.

Pollux:

Okay yeaaaaa. Soooo….the dishwasher thing. I need to talk about the dishwasher thing.

You are fixing it in silence at 10pm after he goes to bed. Seething (fuming?) quietly in the dark over the angle of the plates, saying nothing, and then wondering why you feel disconnected. I say this with love: the dishwasher is not about the dishwasher. You know this. I know you know this. You must.

I also need to tell you something important: I am probably the one loading the dishwasher wrong in my house, too. And if my husband is silently fixing it after I go to bed instead of just telling me—Bro. Just. Tell. Me.—I can handle it. I cannot handle being quietly resented over the silverware basket. Like c’mon.

And here’s the thing about the couch. He falls asleep at 8:45 every night and you sit there alone watching something you don’t even want to watch because you don’t want to go to bed by yourself. That is the saddest and most relatable sentence I have read in a long time and I need you to say it to him exactly like that. Not a softened diplomatic version but that exact sentence. At 8:44. Before he goes under and disappears forever.

You miss someone who is right there. That is a specific kind of lonely that will not fix itself. I have felt it and I get it.

Now, the “what do you want for dinner question?” That is just a permanent problem all couples have and I refuse to waste any of my time pretending like there is a solution for this. I am convinced that somewhere, deeply embedded in the fine print of every marriage contract there is a clause: Must debate what to have for dinner in perpetuity, until the end of time, ‘til death do y’all part or whatever. We’re not solving this tonight. Or ever.

Bottom line? He’s not doing anything wrong and you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re both just tired and you’ve stopped reaching for each other in the small moments because the small moments got eaten by bedtime routines and dishwasher logistics, oh and probably tiny tyrants.

Try reaching anyway and do it tonight. It doesn’t have to be some big conversation. Just—Hey. I miss you. Can we sit here for a minute and talk like we used to?

Start there. The rest will follow. And tell him about the dishwasher. He can take it. Probably?

Entrepreneur Edit is a dedicated section to each monthly issue where I discuss the good, the bad & the ugly of owning your own business.

Every month in this space I’m going to tell you exactly what it looks like to build something from nothing. The numbers, the decisions, the mistakes, and the moments we almost quit. Not theory. Not a course. Not someone who read about entrepreneurship in a book and decided to teach it. This is real time, from someone actually in it, with receipts.

My goal is that by the end of the year you have everything you need to start something of your own. Or at the very least you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into before you do it. Consider this your unflinching, unsponsored, occasionally unhinged blueprint. We’re building it together.

I am really excited about what this is becoming, genuinely. And no, not in a performative way where people post a sunrise pic with a vague caption about new beginnings and then you never hear from them again—in the way where I wake up in the morning and actually cannot wait to sit down and write. Which is something I did not have for a long time and do not take lightly now that I actually have it.

If something in this issue made you think or laugh or cry (in the car, perhaps?)— share it. Forward it to the person it made you think of. Post it. Send it with no explanation. That is how this grows and it means more than I know how to say without getting all awkward and weird about it.

Follow me on Instagram at @amuseofgemini for the behind the scenes—the Clark quotes in real time, the porch mornings and, you know, the moments that eventually become the essays. The ideas always start somewhere and that’s usually where.

Thank you for being here. I mean it every single time.

Stay amused,
Lindsay

Ok, so listen—I am not going to tell you how many white dresses I own.

Asking me to count them is like asking someone to admit they committed a crime and I am formally pleading the fifth. I have plenty, okay? That is all you are getting from me on that front and I will not be incriminating myself further.

What I will tell you, however, is why I own them.

White dresses are not a bridal thing for me. I am not walking around my house pretending to be a bride—that ship has sailed and I don’t need to relive it. I am, however, walking around my house pretending to be a woman who has her life together, which is a very different fantasy entirely and one I find much more useful on a daily basis.

Here is what I actually believe about white dresses: Everyone, and I do mean everyone, looks good in them. I don’t care what the color theory people on your Instagram For You page say about undertones and seasonal palettes or about being a true autumn or whatever. Like, I hear you and I respect the science. I’m literally sitting here writing this in an olive green sheath dress for Christ’s sake—but damnit, I’m still going to wear the white dress to dinner tonight, okay?

And before you even start to try and disagree with me—put on your best white dress with a good tan and freckled shoulders and then come back and tell me I was wrong. You won’t. Because you truly cannot. Not in good faith. Because it is genuinely hard to feel ugly in that combination and I stand behind that with everything I have in my deeply superficial soul.

I should note that I am technically a true autumn. Yea yea yea… Warm undertones, the works. The algorithm keeps telling me I should be in rust and olive and deep burgundy and honestly it’s totally correct—but I also suspect it is making that determination based on my spray tanned skin rather than the very German-Irish-see-through-paleness underneath, that I refuse to let the public discover. So…grain of salt?

But white—white is different. White feels clean and ethereal, whimsical if not a little angelic in a way that I find genuinely useful when I have two toddlers and have not slept properly since 2022.

Speaking of toddlers….

Yes I wear white dresses around my children.

Is it stupid? Also, yes!

I also have white couches and white chairs in my house which I’m pretty sure tells you everything you need to know about my relationship with practicality as a parent. I was simply not cut out for beiges—sorry not sorry? I do, however, keep OxiClean on hand and I pray—which is hilarious because we all know church isn’t exactly my “thing.” But, hey, I am choosing to believe that whatever higher power exists is reasonable enough to extend grace to a woman trying to keep her whites white while raising two boys who treat every surface like a canvas and refuse to wash their hands after playing in dirt.

The casualties have been real. I will not be discussing them specifically. Because I will cry. So just let me protect my peace, please.

I think the obsession started during what I can only describe as my 2018 wedding season—the showers, the events, the general pre-wedding festivities where wearing white suddenly was not only acceptable but expected. And I realized somewhere in the middle of all of it that I loved it. Not in a bridal way. In a this-is-genuinely-just-a-great-color-on-me way and I refuse to give it up just because I’m already married. (And don’t get me started on the asinine Labor Day rule—ridiculous.)

I spent years avoiding white dresses at other people’s weddings—as one does, because the social contract is clear and I respect it even if I personally would not have cared one bit if someone wore white to mine—but once I had permission to wear them freely, when most of our friends were already married, I never stopped.

There is something to be said about feeling pretty in this season of life. I think it matters and nobody talks about it honestly enough, if at all.

Postpartum is hard on your relationship with your body. The hair loss, the skin changes, the way your body looks and feels different in ways that nobody fully prepares you for and that don’t just resolve themselves in six weeks the way everyone implies they will. Liars.

I have written about this at length in the Wellness Edit and I will not rehash all of it here except to say: The dislike of your own body after babies is real, it is common, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than rushed past.

What I have found—and this sounds small but it really isn’t—is that a white dress fixes something in me that nothing else quite does. It doesn’t matter what size I am or where I am in my cycle or how little I slept or what expletives I yelled at the scale that morning. Something about putting on a white dress and stepping into the sun with bare shoulders makes me feel like myself again. Not the pre-baby version of myself. Just myself.

Present. In my body. And okay with it.

Feeling pretty in this stage of life is rare and fleeting. We should learn to chase it and hold it tightly wherever we can find it.

Some of my white dresses are sitting in the closet right now waiting for a version of me that may or may not show up again. I am fine with that—a diet problem for another day. They hang very prettily in the meantime. And when I am ready, they will be there.

So for now, I collect them. In every length, every silhouette, and every version of white that exists—hello cream and ivories! Not because I have somewhere to be or something to prove but because on the days when nothing fits right and the mirror is unkind and the postpartum version of myself feels louder than any other version, I can put on a white dress and something in my confidence shifts. And to me, that's worth more than a lot of things I've spent money on. (Don’t let Ben check the credit card statement, please.)

Right now my current obsession is the corset top dress. The structure, the waist definition—truly needed after the rib flare my kids gave me that is now apparently permanent—the way it somehow manages to look both dressed up and summery at the same time. I also love a flowy long white maxi for pure effortless summer energy, and I have a few structured midi lengths that work for everything.

Now my pale sunscreen girlies are going to struggle in white and I understand that. That is a conversation for another day. For now: white dress, good tan, bare shoulders. Just trust me. Please?

And no, I’m still not going to tell you how many white dresses I own. But I will tell you that every single one of them has earned its place hung proudly in my closet.

So my honest advice that you didn’t ask for? Find the thing that makes you feel like yourself and buy it in every length.

My current favorites — linked below.

Lino Mid Dress — Camila Coelho: This comes in a buttery yellow as well, which I own. Love the structured top and flowy skirt.

Honey Moon Dress — Understated Leather: Cannot stop wearing this. Will be wearing it to dinner tonight. Corset top that hugs in the right places, and soft fabric skirt. 10/10 and comes in chocolate brown, too.

Mabel Dress — Amanda Uprichard: I have loved Amanda Uprichard ever since I got pregnant with Clark. She has amazing dresses that can easily be used during the early stages of pregnancy or postpartum, while also having more structured options as well. This one is a shorter dress, with the cutest subtle pattern of daisies. I wore it to our anniversary dinner last year and it’s on repeat still.

House of Harlow 1960 — x Revolve Simone Maxi Dress: This is currently out of stock but often comes back. You can usually get on the waiting list. It’s a perfect summer dress that can be dressed up or dressed down. Beautiful soft fabric and a style that perfectly blends sexy with a high middle slit and practical with it’s lacy capped sleeves.

Anna October — Dores Dress: This is the dress I’m wearing in the picture above. It was what I wore for my maternity shoot when I was pregnant with Clark. Pricey but gorgeous and perfect for a professional shoot.

Last month I asked you to do some homework. Specifically: Figure out whether you’re building a profit business or a passion business, know your actual safety net, and write down your real number.

If you did it, welcome back! If you didn’t, go do it. This series builds and the homework is not decorative.

This is the third issue so if you’re new here, welcome! Please read the last two issues before continuing on:

1.) Entrepreneur Edit: The Idea
2.) Entrepreneur Edit: Passion vs. Profit

This month we’re talking about research. Specifically: how much you actually need to do, how to do it without losing your God damned mind, and the one move that cost us almost nothing and told us almost everything.

The Call

Before we launched Champagne Clean, Ben called a competitor pretending to be a customer.

My husband’s background is in sales. He knows what a good sales call sounds like. (To be honest, if I could clone Ben about ten times, we’d be filthy rich.) Anyway, what he heard on that call was not it.

The person who answered—and to be clear, the bar here was simply answering the phone—asked questions about our house, gave Ben a quote, and that was…it. No follow up. No reason to choose them over anyone else. No assumptive close…no closing at all? Just a number hanging in the air and a “call us back if you want to book, I guess.”

Oh and they were also booked several weeks out.

That one phone call told Ben two things:

1.) The competition was not trying very hard
2.) The demand was real.

And that was enough.

The Research You Actually Need

Here is the thing about research that nobody tells you before you start: Most people do way too much of it.

There is a specific and very comfortable trap that we like to call in our house analysis paralysis—where you spend so much time researching, planning, building spreadsheets, designing logos, and perfecting your website that you never actually start. It feels like productivity. It is not. It is procrastination wearing a business casual outfit.

In entrepreneurship, action is what is actually rewarded. Research is a tool, not a destination—and understanding the difference is of the utmost importance.

How much research you actually need depends heavily on what kind of business you’re building. Ben has a framework for this that I find both useful and deeply funny.

The Sexy Scale

On a scale from 1 to 10 how sexy is your business idea?

A 1 is a blue collar service business. Cleaning. Window washing. Landscaping. Not glamorous. Not the thing you announce at a dinner party and watch people lean in, chomping at the bit to learn more. A 10 is AI software or a sports business—the kind of idea that sounds thrilling and innovative and makes everyone at the dinner party ask follow up questions, while setting their chin in their hands smiling at you like you’re about to buy a yacht and maybe you’ll invite them one day.

But here is the counterintuitive truth: The sexier the business, the more research you need and the harder the road to success. A 1 on the sexy scale means the model is proven, the demand exists in every city, and your competition is probably not running a very tight ship. A 10 means you are competing against people who are incredibly smart, very well-funded, and have already thought of most of what you’re thinking of.

Think about it this way: If you are are playing basketball, would you rather compete against a 5th grader, or Lebron James? In entrepreneurship, you have the same choice of who to compete against.

Champagne Clean is a 1. Deliberately and totally on purpose. As I’ve said before, we didn’t start a cleaning company because we love cleaning. We started it because we found a proven model in an “unsexy” industry where the competition was answering the phone with bad sales skills and booking weeks, if not months, out. The bar was low enough to step over and we stepped over it—jumped really.

And to be clear, we are not passionate about cleaning and dealing with a lot of the day to day problems—cleaner call offs, client complaints)—is not “fun.” It’s not even close to fun. It’s bash-your-head-against-a-wall-repeatedly not fun. But succeeding in this industry is significantly easier than others. We’ve all heard that you choose your hard. Dealing with some of the BS at a cleaning company is hard, but the margins are insane, the competition is non-existent and we’d rather take this type of hard that competing with Ivy League brainiacs with the next cutting-edge AI app. Know your lane, ya know?

That said, if you are building something closer to a 10—a new product, a new concept, something that doesn’t exist yet—don’t be discouraged. Just know you’ll need to do significantly more research before you spend anything. The newer and sexier the idea, the more you’ll need to validate that real people will actually pay real money for it. All that before you order inventory, build a website, or tell anyone about it.

The 5 Questions to Answer Before You Spend a Dollar

Ben would tell you to answer these before you do anything else:

1.) Where does your business land on the sexy scale?
Know what you’re getting into. The more proven the model the less research you need and the more action you need to take quickly. The newer the idea the more you need to validate before you make real moves.

2.) What will your actual schedule look like?
Not the inspirational version. The real one. What are your working hours. Can you take a vacation? What does Tuesday look like in this business? If you can’t answer this you don’t know what you’re building yet.

3.) Where do you want this to be in one, five, and ten years?
Will it be a cash flow business? A business you eventually sell? A lifestyle business that gives you flexibility? These are different businesses and they require different decisions from day one. Know which one you’re building and it will help you form the proper blueprint.

4.) What is your competition actually like?
Call ten of them. See how many answer the phone. Find out how far booked out they are. Look at their reviews—what are people complaining about? That complaint is your opening. Look at whether the owners are private equity, educated operators, or people running things loosely. The quality of your competition tells you everything about how hard this will be.

5.) Are you dependent on someone else for your success?
Selling on Etsy or Amazon means a platform controls your business. Alternatively, one large contract with one client means losing that client could end you and your business. One supplier who could disappear means your product disappears with them. Know your dependencies before you build around them. And if you have them, create a backup plan.

The Copy Principle

Our first Champagne Clean customer came from Thumbtack. Ben found a pricing matrix from another cleaning company online and copied it.

I want to say that again clearly: He found something that was already working and used it as his starting point. He did not spend weeks building a custom pricing model from scratch. He did not hire a consultant. He found evidence that something worked and used it.

This is not cheating. This is how smart people start businesses. The goal is not to reinvent every wheel. God, no. The goal is to get to your first $500 or $1,000 in revenue as quickly as possible so you know the demand is real. You don’t need a website. You don’t need a phone number or booking software or a logo. You need insurance, a way to take payment—cash, check, Venmo, whatever—and a first customer.

Everything else can come after you know it works. Work smarter not harder, I always say.

What Happens When You Skip This?

The most common research failure mode is not doing too little research. It is overestimating demand for something that has no proven history.

Someone has a new product idea and sure, it sounds good. Their friends think it’s genius. They order a significant amount of inventory before a single person outside their immediate circle has agreed to pay money for it. They are now the owner of a garage full of product and a much smaller bank account. Oops.

The sexier and newer the idea the more this happens. The solution is to validate demand before you invest in supply. Find ten people who are not your friends or family and ask them if they would pay for this specific thing at this specific price. Not whether they think it sounds interesting. Whether they would pay for it. Those are very different questions and the answers are usually very different, too.

And while this may sound insane or counterintuitive (probably both)—if you go this route, you should be getting sales BEFORE ordering any product. A lot of business is simply about getting sales first and then figuring it out later. Trust me.

Your Homework This Month

Pick your business idea—the one you’ve been thinking about, the one from last month’s homework, whatever it is—and do this:

• Find 10 competitors. Call 5 of them. See how many answer. Ask for a quote and note what happens next.

• Read their reviews. Find the complaints. Write down the gap you see and how you could fill it.

• Figure out where your idea lands on the sexy scale. Be honest about what that means for how much research you need versus how much action you need.

• Then answer the five questions above. Write them out on paper. Not in your head.

• Bring your answers next month. We’re going to talk about money!

Next month: The Money—what it actually costs to start, how long until you break even, and the number most people are too afraid to look at directly.

I want to start by saying I did not spiral.

I know how this sounds: woman discovers her bathroom cabinet, cleaning products, and favorite candles are quietly disrupting her hormones and proceeds to throw everything into a dumpster fire while ordering seventeen replacement products at midnight. That is not what happened. Mostly.

When I started learning about xenoestrogens—the synthetic chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body and accumulate in ways your system was never designed to process—my reaction was less panic and more: umm, okay, I already care this much about what I put in my body so I should probably care about what I put on it too? Maybe?

But the truth is, I eased into it. I finished older products before replacing them and I made one swap at a time. I was not a total psycho about it. I say this knowing full well that some of you are already googling your deodorant.

For those new to the term: xenoestrogens are synthetic compounds found in everything from conventional beauty products to plastic food containers to the candles you burn while trying to relax after a hard day. They mimic estrogen in the body, bind to estrogen receptors, and add to your total estrogen load over time in ways that compound quietly for years. For anyone already dealing with estrogen dominance—which I was, extensively, as documented in previous issues—reducing xenoestrogen exposure is one of the most significant things you can do alongside the dietary and supplement changes.

I knew this in theory. And then I did the estrogen purge and the histamine reactions and the acne and the general biological chaos of actually releasing excess estrogen from my system and I understood it in my body in a way that theory never quite gets to. The carrot salad is not just a bit I do. It is load-bearing.

Here is what I actually changed:

The Bathroom

This was the most overwhelming category and also the most impactful. Conventional beauty and skincare products are loaded with parabens, phthalates, and synthetic fragrance—all of which are documented xenoestrogens. The word “fragrance” on a label can legally hide dozens of undisclosed synthetic compounds. I know. I know. SOS.

I started reading labels the way I read food labels. If I couldn’t identify what something was or why it was there I started looking for an alternative.

Deodorant: Swapped to Primally Pure. This was the swap I was most nervous about and it ended up being one of the easier ones once I got through the adjustment period. And there is an adjustment period—I want to be honest about that because nobody warns you…like at all. When you stop using conventional antiperspirant your sweat glands essentially wake back up and your underarm microbiome has to rebalance. This can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and it is not always comfortable. I had a period where my underarms were not thrilled about the transition…

If you get a rash—which is common—it’s usually either your skin reacting to a specific ingredient in the formula like baking soda, or just the adjustment period doing its thing. Try a gentler formula before you give up entirely. Primally Pure has a baking soda free option. Stick with it.

I am not going to make clinical claims about what happened in the general lymph node vicinity but I will say I noticed something during my estrogen purge and I found it personally very interesting. Make of that what you will. I am not a doctor. Do your own research. You know how I feel about that by now.

Toothpaste: Swapped out fluoride toothpaste after going down a rabbit hole I will not fully recount here. There was trial and error. There were products that did not work. Land on Boka and don’t look back. You’re welcome.

Everything else: I look for paraben free, phthalate free, and fragrance free where I can. I’m not perfect. I’m consistent.

The Candles

This one hurt.

I love a candle and I have always loved a candle. The ambiance, the scent, the ritual of it. And conventional candles—particularly paraffin based ones with synthetic fragrance—are one of the more significant indoor xenoestrogen sources because you are literally burning them and breathing the output for hours at a time. Cool cool cool.

I gave up my old candles and mourned that loss quietly for a few months. Okay, it wasn’t quietly, but I mourned it and moved on. Now look for soy wax or beeswax with cotton or wood wicks and essential oil based fragrance rather than synthetic. Good options that actually smell like something worth burning: Fontana Candle Co., P.F. Candle Co., and Primally Pure also makes candles worth trying.

I rarely use my Pura anymore. I gave up synthetic scents almost entirely for a while.

And then recently I bought my Burberry Brit perfume because I genuinely missed it and I am a person who has to live my life…and smell amazing while doing it? I don’t put it on my skin. I spray it on the outside of my clothes on special occasions. Is this ideal? Probably not. Does it make me feel like myself? Yes. Balance is a real thing and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The Cleaning Products

Both my boys have eczema which meant we were already motivated to clean up our cleaning products before I went full xenoestrogen awareness mode. Branch Basics is our go-to for everything—laundry, dishes, surfaces, all of it. One concentrate, multiple uses, no synthetic fragrance, no hormone disrupting chemicals. If you have kids with sensitive skin or are just trying to reduce your overall toxic load at home this is the most practical swap on this entire list.

I will say this with full transparency: If norovirus enters this house I will bleach every surface within a five mile radius and I will feel zero guilt about it. I would bleach myself if I could. There is a time and a place for chemical warfare and it is called stomach flu season. This is not a moral failing. This is survival. The xenoestrogen reduction is for everyday life. The bleach is for emergencies. Balance, as always, is the goal.

The Plastics (and no—not the Mean Girls kind)

Here is the thing about plastics that I want you to know because it is both alarming and actionable: heating food in plastic dramatically increases microplastic release. Not slightly—dramatically. Studies have found that microwaving plastic containers can release hundreds of thousands to millions of microplastic particles into your food in a single session. And yes, even the containers labeled microwave safe. The label means it won’t melt. It does not mean it won’t leach.

We use glass food storage exclusively. When something ends up in plastic we are very careful not to heat it or put anything hot into it directly. This is one of the easier swaps—glass containers are not expensive and they last forever. These are the ones we use—love them.

The Food

I read labels. I try to buy organic where it matters most. I avoid soy and seed oils as covered extensively in previous issues. Beyond that I do what I can and I don’t catastrophize what I can’t control. You cannot eliminate every exposure. You can reduce your overall load and let your body do the rest.

The Things I Kept Anyway

Honestly there are probably things I haven’t found yet. That is just the reality of living in the modern world. The Burberry Brit situation I already told you about. I still occasionally use products that are not perfect because I am human and perfection is not sustainable and the stress of trying to achieve it is probably more estrogenic than the product itself.

The goal is not a perfect environment. The goal is a meaningfully reduced load so your body can actually process and eliminate what it’s dealing with. Small consistent swaps over time. Not an overnight overhaul. Not a spiral.

I was not a total psycho about it. Most days.

Branch Basics · Primally Pure deodorant · Boka Toothpaste · Fontana Candle Co. · P.F. Candle Co.

Nothing here is sponsored. I bought all of it myself and the only thing I’m selling is the idea that your bathroom cabinet deserves the same attention as your grocery cart.

Next month in the Wellness Edit: I’m coming for your skincare routine specifically—what I actually use, what I stopped, and why less is almost always more.

Someone once asked me if I thought they should have kids.

I looked at them like they had twelve eyes, cocked my head to the side and said, “I’m sorry, what?”

What a ridiculous question to ask someone. Especially someone who hadn’t yet had kids and who certainly didn’t have it in their five-year plan either.

Now that I have kids, however, I have an answer for them.

No. You should not have kids.

Is that meant to be cold or unfeeling?
No—it’s meant to be honest.

Isn’t that what friendship is after all—honesty?

To some people, maybe. To others, definitely not. For many, they ask this question with the sole intention of having someone tell them what they want to hear—that they’d be a great parent, that they’d totally not bring their own bullshit and baggage into their child’s life, or that they certainly could be selfless enough if they wanted to.

The truth, however, is that many people aren’t cut out to be parents and should leave the heavy lifting to the others.

Have you ever experienced an addict?

It could be someone addicted to anything: Alcohol, drugs, anger, being a generally miserable human being.

If you haven’t—count yourself as lucky. If you have, then you will understand the context of what I’m about to say.

I have spent the better part of 40 years trying to fix and change certain people in my life. It has destroyed me from the inside out in ways that may never be completely visible to the outside world unless I choose to come out and say exactly the pain I carry in each private moment. But I assure you—the silent vibration of chaos lives and echoes within me, even in life’s quiet and precious moments.

One of life’s hardest lessons for me is this:

You cannot change people.

You can try—you can explain the logic of why they should, you can accumulate mounds of scientific data regarding what it’s doing to their health and your own, you can cry, you can get angry, you can stomp your feet and slam the door and wallow in self pity or never ending frustration. But in the end—change will only happen if they choose it.

And often, sadly, they don’t.

The reason I bring this up is that people often talk about parenthood as though having a child will finally make someone change. But children are not powerful enough to transform adults who have already decided not to transform themselves.

Children will never magically turn selfish, avoidant, or even emotionally immature people into good parents—or good people. That’s not how this works. Parenthood only exposes who you already are—and demands that you choose to change.

This does not mean good parents enter parenthood perfectly healed. They don’t. The difference is whether they are willing to confront what parenthood reveals—or make their children carry it for them.

Yet even if that demand is made, often parents are unwilling or simply ignorant to their own shortcomings to own that change.

Many of you reading this may be parents or may be contemplating if you want children.

And many of you shouldn’t be parents.

I say this without an ounce of sarcasm or irony or ill-will. I say it because it’s true.

And if that offends you, ask yourself—why?

I’m not talking to anyone in particular here. I’m talking to the masses. The masses in my generation (and others) that have spent their entire lives being spoon fed propaganda about self care and putting yourself first and enjoying your life and rejecting anything that appears in opposition of that mantra.

But I’m talking to the masses of existing parents also—the ones who are gentle-parenting their kids to a level of assholery that is going to make their lives incredibly difficult down the road because the parents are too afraid to be looked at as an authority figure instead of a friend. Parents giving their kids a cookie as an attempt to get them out of a temper tantrum instead of doing the hard thing of sitting and holding them in silence as they work through difficult emotions.

The truth of the matter is they are not protecting their children from distress, they are simply protecting themselves from having to witness it.

I’m sad to say but a huge contingency of today’s parents are raising children with a level of cowardice and avoidance that is masked as “gentleness.”

If parenthood was meant to be gentle and calm, everyone would do it. It would be simple. Every kid would turn into confident, well-adjusted adults. But they don’t.

And then there’s the contingency on the opposite end of the spectrum, parenting with apathy—another way parents avoid the real work.

Instead of relying on over-accommodations, they retreat to something more along the lines of emotional absence. Sure—they provide food, housing, screens, activities, nannies, but they neglect or flat-out refuse to truly notice their child—to know them, guide them or otherwise emotionally engage.

Both parenting styles, the over-accommodater and the emotionally absent spend their years thinking they’re a good parent simply because they are prioritizing their own comfort and not the child’s. One may disguise itself as kindness while the other barely cares to disguise at all.

I say all of this because I have been on the other side of my own advice. I know what it feels like to sit with a positive pregnancy test and feel the wrong thing. I also know what it looks like when someone who isn’t ready decides to show up anyway. Because that someone was me.

It was September 2022. I was blasting music in the kitchen of our new home—mid-remodel, with the floors down to what I can only describe as the ugliest color of underlayment you can imagine. I was walking with my shoes on as to not get accidentally impaled by a misplaced nail from the floor boards we had just ripped out. I didn’t mind. Soon all that was sitting untouched would be the perfect shade of white oak picked out by yours truly.

We had just moved from Chicago a few weeks prior—quite the shock going from our 700 square foot luxury apartment, where we were the first tenants in the unit to a 3,000 square foot home built in 1900 in the middle of Cincinnati, Ohio.

The water was at a roaring boil, rumbling and bubbling over in the new all-clad pot we had been gifted by one of our many aunts for our wedding only four months prior. I had just discovered Isola pasta and was making a luxurious dish with sea scallops, fresh shrimp and a creamy lemon butter sauce that I’m pretty convinced could bring world peace. I swayed my hips from side to side as I poured glass after glass of my favorite rosé, paying a gentle homage to the summer that had slowly but surely slipped through my fingers on that warm October night.

We were celebrating everything and nothing at the same time. In four months we had gotten married, honeymooned for two weeks in Hawaii, bought a new house hundreds of miles away from my friends and family and—because life wasn’t chaotic enough—I entertained a recruiter from LinkedIn for the first time in my professional career, and was two weeks away from starting a new job.

I had bags of groceries sitting on the island that I put away as the pasta cooked. Coffee beans, eggs, lotion, and a package of pregnancy tests—just in case.

Before I had left Chicago, my OB had suggested I stop birth control if we wanted to have kids in the next “year or so.” I waited for a few months after she told us that, and decided once we moved to stop taking the little pink pill I had grown accustomed to taking every night for the last twenty years.

I had spent the better part of my life up until that point sure that I didn’t want children. Ben changed that for me however. He opened the door to a new way of thinking—to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I could be a good mom.

But it was still just a concept. In the back of my mind, getting pregnant was hard. After all, I had watched many of my friends struggle with infertility for years before having their first child, so I didn’t think twice about it. A concern for a different day.

We sat on the two white stools at our small island in the kitchen—the only furniture that existed on the first floor—and finished the pasta and the bottle of wine to boot. We weren’t drunk but we were warm and fuzzy and laughing. I had joked that I got the pregnancy tests because for the first time in my life, my jeans wouldn’t zip—surely it was from all the good food and drink we had been making in the new house.

I slipped away to the bathroom to take a digital test. It came back with an error code—inconclusive. We both laughed. I had never taken a pregnancy test before but it seemed like a flawed system.

We took out the other test that came in the box, the one with the famous pink lines. One line if not pregnant, and two if pregnant. I took the test and set it on the counter face down. It was a fun little ritual we saw people do, but there wasn’t any way it would be positive. I had only stopped the pill 10 days prior.

I sipped my glass of wine and turned it over.

Two pink lines.

Not faint. Not barely there.

Two distinct pink lines staring at us both in the face.

Ben was ecstatic, shocked, but thrilled.

I on the other hand felt the color drain from my wine-flushed face with a speed I can only liken to an Indycar racing by you when you have front row seats.

This can’t be right, I thought.

It was well after dark and Ben and I drove to the Walgreens together. I stayed in the car, unsure if I would even be able to talk I was so beside myself with disbelief.

I took five more pregnancy tests that night. Each one very clearly positive.

I remember not being elated. I remember hoping that one of those follow up tests would yield a negative result. And then I felt like a terrible person for hoping for that. I wanted more time. I wasn’t ready.

I thought I’d have at least another year of therapy and general personal growth before even considering a positive pregnancy test was on the table.

I said none of that out loud. All I felt was fear and shame.

He wasn’t a mistake. He was a shock.

And then—nine months later, on a scorching Saturday in July—Clark William was born.

He arrived perfectly and right on time, just like the doctor said he would. And in that moment, in the recovery room, with pitocin pumping through my system and a wound on my abdomen the size of a Walgreens receipt from a five pregnancy test run, I made a choice. The same one I make every day since.

Clark is four now. He is one of the kindest people I have ever met in my life and I mean that without the bias of motherhood clouding my judgment—or at least mostly without it. He has an unusual and almost eerie ability to understand emotions. His own. Mine. His little brother’s. He will stop mid-chaos, mid-tantrum, mid-whatever is happening in this house and look at me and say “Mom, are you okay?”

Four years old. Are you okay.

Part of that is just who he is—something he arrived with that I cannot take credit for. But part of it is this: I have spent the last four years doing the work I told myself I wasn’t ready to do in that Walgreens parking lot. The therapy. The self examination. The uncomfortable conversations with myself about what I was carrying and what I didn’t want to pass on. And Clark watches all of it. Children always do.

He learned to ask “are you okay” because someone in his house modeled what it looks like to check in with yourself. That someone had to become that person first.

Clark arrived and I had a choice. I could show up, heal myself in the process of learning to become a parent or I could take the easy way out and do the bare minimum to get us by.

Clark didn’t heal me. He didn’t complete me. He wasn’t the magical antidote that fixed things and made everything magically better.

Having kids won’t fix a marriage, won’t heal an emotional wound. They aren’t the antidote to adult problems. And frankly, we need to stop treating them like the cure to our disease. In doing so, we just pass on what we are trying to heal to them. They will not be what fixes you. But they can be a catalyst to make you decide to do the hard work you should have been doing all along.

So no, Clark didn’t change me. I changed myself because he is here.

And to the childless man or woman reading this and asking the question:

No, you should not have kids.

Not unless you are willing to be completely inconvenienced, humbled, frightened beyond recognition, confronted with your own demons, permanently exhausted and completely changed.

You should not have kids because you are bored, lonely, aging, pressured, curious, afraid of regret, or hoping the child will give your life meaning.

You should have them only when you understand that they are not coming to heal you, complete you, obey you, validate you, or make you better.

You must decide to become better because they are here.

I almost hoped those pink lines would disappear. I drove to Walgreens after dark hoping one of five tests would tell me I was wrong. I was not wrong. And Clark William arrived that summer and looked at me like I was his whole world. I had done nothing to deserve that yet. But I have spent every day since trying to.

Aunt Thelma’s Crescent Cookies

There are certain things you don’t fully appreciate until you’re an adult. And then, out of seemingly nowhere, you find yourself craving them at random times—usually after the kids go to bed—for no explainable reason. These cookies are exactly that for me. My Aunt Thelma, my mom’s sister and the best baker in our family, passed along this recipe to my mom and I years ago. They have proven themselves as a family staple that shows up each year. Again and again….and again. While many tout these as more of a “holiday” cookie, I say to hell with you! These are perfect year-round, bit-sized (okay, I have a big mouth) treats that can make a great summer staple as well. They are buttery and delicate and melt in your mouth in a way that feels almost sinister for how simple they are to make. The texture is truly everything and the flavor is perfection. Oh and a little family secret: If you add a splash of almond or lemon extract you get an entirely different cookie, which feels like a bonus cheat code nobody told you about. But I did. So you’re welcome. Make these once and you’ll understand why I think about them completely unprompted on a random Tuesday night.

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks butter, softened

• ⅓ cup granulated sugar

• ⅔ cup pecans or almonds, ground to a fine consistency

• 1⅔ cups flour

• ¼ teaspoon salt

• Powdered sugar for dusting

• Optional: splash of almond or lemon extract for a different vibe entirely

Instructions:

• Preheat your oven to 325°F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

• Cream the butter, sugar, and ground nuts together until mixed and creamy.

• Gradually add in the flour and salt until everything is fully combined into a dough.

• If the dough feels too soft to work with, chill it briefly in the refrigerator. Don’t over-chill or it will crack when you try to shape it. Pro tip: Coat your hands lightly with flour to keep the dough from sticking.

• Roll the dough into small balls and shape each one into a crescent. (Or don’t—they are just as good as cute and little round bites.)

• Place on your prepared cookie sheet.

• Bake for 14-16 minutes until the edges are just slightly browned. For the love of God, do not overbake—the delicate texture is the whole point!

• Leave the cookies on the sheet to cool completely so they hold their shape.

• Once cooled, dust generously with powdered sugar. Store in a container with powdered sugar on the bottom so the undersides get coated too.

Notes:

The recipe technically says to sift the flour and salt. Aunt Thelma notes this is not necessary. And since she’s been making these longer than most of us have been alive, I’m going with that.

Add a splash of almond or lemon extract to the dough if you want to change the flavor profile entirely. Both are excellent. The cookie is forgiving that way. Enjoy!

Based on a True Story.

The truth of the matter is most of the details are pretty hazy. Nevertheless the drive was still freeing.

It was a frigid winter evening in Chicago. I’d be lying if I told you I remember what month it was. January, perhaps? Who’s to say. All I remember is the way the air felt on my cheeks with the car window cracked ever so slightly.

It is a quirk of mine—to blast the hot air on my feet in the car, while the brisk winter air gently caresses that delicate area of skin beneath my chin and neck. Every so often the crispness of the air would penetrate my lungs so aggressively, I would cough and have to regain composure. I remember thinking it was like taking a hit of a joint in college—too aggressive, like you were trying to prove a point, but ultimately relaxing in the end.

I remember thinking: I need this.

There’s just something about the way Chicago looks in winter at dusk. There’s nothing else like it. A particular way the sunset reflects off the mirrored buildings, creating an orange glow that fractures off the snowfall. The prestige of the Sears Tower—and no, I will never call it by any other name—hovering over the other buildings like a tall soldier keeping watch over its domain of Midwestern city-dwellers.

I exited on Fullerton, the street Ben and I used to live off of. The skyline from here at night bleeds into the low clouds as the smell of chocolate and something metallic fills my nostrils in the way only Chicago ever does.

The silence in the car was deafening—no children yelling, no Google Maps berating me because I missed my turn like it often does in Cincinnati.

Turn here. Wait. No, here! Oh my God, woman. Now turn here!! JEEEZUS. Okay—you know what?—just turn around and go home you worthless piece of shit.

Not today, Siri. Or Alexa. Or whoever the fuck is up my ass on a daily basis.

Here, I knew exactly where I was. Because Chicago will always be home.

There must have been a blizzard of sorts. The ice on the streets hadn’t been plowed or salted in what must have been days. And driving the minivan over the glaciers was near comical if not completely terrifying in its own right. It shocked me just as much as the negative temperatures did on my face that I insisted on experiencing even as I exited the highway at full speed.

The roads were shockingly empty—in a way that felt almost apocalyptic?—but less doom and gloom and more a peaceful quiet that never truly lives long in a city.

As a matter of fact. I was completely alone on the street. I wasn’t lonely, I was just…alone. There’s a difference and for some reason, it felt like it mattered.

The car’s suspension was certainly being tested.

How are the chunks of ice so big? I thought to myself as the car seemingly toppled over to one side and then the other.

I wish I could tell you the name of the restaurant I was driving to. It had a quirky but trendy sounding name. Blazé? I don’t know.

I didn’t remember there being a skyscraper off of Fullerton, but there it was right off of Lake Shore Drive. I guess I have been gone for way too long.

I pulled up to the half circle entrance in my black mini van, we have lovingly—okay fine, not lovingly—nicknamed Black Beauty. I felt ridiculous, but the valet boys didn’t seem to mind. I’m sure they would have preferred a Maserati or Lambo, but listen, that’s not my aesthetic. I’m more of a 90s Jeep Cherokee girl who’s just going through a mom phase.

The boys seemed unusually young—almost elvish. Wearing aggressive kelly green sports coats that are equal parts endearing and equal parts making me ask: am I in a bootleg sequel of the Wicked franchise?

I walked through the ornate rose gold revolving door and caught a glimpse of myself in a full length mirror.

Oh, wow.

For the first time since having my boys, I stopped and thought: I look good.

I was in a velvet forest green wrap dress. One of my pre-kid favorites. It has a whimsical dark pattern that looks as if Monet painted a moody evening stroll through a dark forest.

I did that thing where you run both hands from the rib cage and down to your hips—gently hugging your curves.

I guess I had been so preoccupied with the boys, quitting my job, and the general chaos of life at 40 that I didn’t notice the last ten pounds had just, melted off.

As I walked through the lobby of the hotel, an eccentric woman in a fur coat walked past me and I saw a couple of young patrons snap pictures of her.

Lady Gaga.

I did a double take and she did to me as well.

She pushed her large, dark rectangular sunglasses down her prominent nose and motioned with her right hand, and, if I’m being honest, terrifyingly long nails and waved them down at my outfit.

She said something to me that I obviously blacked out.

Something to the effect of amazing or fabulous or some other adjective that only Lady Gaga could pull off saying unironically.

But again, I blacked out.

When I finally composed myself, I walked to the elevator, my heels clicking almost too aggressively on the golden marble floor.

There was a small older man sitting in the old, open elevator with a little cap on his head—somewhat reminiscent of Abu from Aladdin. I briefly considered calling him Abu to make a joke, but he seemed to take his job of selecting my destination floor very seriously.

I looked at the buttons and the numbers were in a different script.

What the fuck—are those wingdings?

They weren’t—they were Sanskrit or Japanese, a combo, perhaps?—certainly something attuned to the theme of whatever experience I was about to have on the top floor.

The speed of the elevator, given its age in particular, was somewhat alarming. Getting to the hundredth floor shouldn’t have been so quick, but there I was—in the lobby of a secret Michelin rated restaurant—before I could even think to day dream about Lady Gaga giving me a compliment.

“Mrs. Grombala,” a soothing, dare I say sexy, woman’s voice says in a low lusty register. “We’ve been expecting you.”

I decided immediately that I would probably switch teams for this woman. She was perfection in every facet a woman wants to be. The hair—the perfect Slavic auburn that has likely never been touched by tinfoil and bleach. And skin that was as smooth as my sons’ bare asses.

What a weird thing to think, I immediately thought.

She ushered me to a seat in a dark table in a room alone. When I say she glided along the floor, I do mean that quite literally. The way she moved was surreal in a way that seemed almost ridiculous. I attempted to move my hips and feet in a way that would allow me to also glide so effortlessly, but I am quite positive I instead looked like a toddler with hip dysplasia and lipstick.

She seated me at the long side of a rectangular table and told me that the girls and chef would be with me shortly.

The view from up there was unlike anything I had ever seen. My hometown city below looked like someone had taken a snow globe and just shaken it. The twinkling lights in the wind diffused through the blizzard into something softer and more beautiful than any city has a right to be. The lake looked like the great beyond—frozen and completely still. I wondered momentarily if I was looking at a painting or the true landscape below. And for a brief moment in time, I loved winter again.

I sat and took a deep breath, basking in the silence that seems to only ever exist in my dreams.

Not having two boys body slamming me, asking me for applesauce, or showing me what treasure they found after having their finger up their noses to their knuckles for 45 minutes straight. It was needed.

The silence.

And as if they knew exactly when I was ready for the silence to end—soft instrumental music started to play and the girls came out to greet me. Three petite and stunning Asian women came to ask me about a wide variety of beauty preferences. How I liked my hair, how I preferred my makeup to be done. For this wasn’t just a restaurant, this was an experience.

On one side of the table, they put up a vanity mirror and started brushing my already curled hair. I had forgotten that this was rumored to be a part of the experience.

Had I known I wouldn’t have made such an effort to get dolled up with hair and makeup. But I suppose then maybe I wouldn’t have stopped Lady Gaga in her tracks, so life just seems to work out the way it’s meant to, I guess.

The hair brushing was blissful, and I was borderline inappropriately about to fall asleep at the table. Relaxation wouldn’t even begin to describe it.

As two of them took turns brushing and braiding my hair, the third girl presented an array of makeup palettes—a gift they would be sending me home with after they applied it professionally.

As the third girl walked away to wrap what I could only assume was my gift bag to take home, the chef came out. He was Japanese. He bowed.

I would have bowed back. Really, I would have. But my hair was being braided. So I did what I assumed was the second best thing and just smiled with my eyes in a kind of half alertness that only really ever exists when I take a 10mg edible and fall asleep with nowhere else to be.

He presented me with the first of many amuse-bouches. Three perfect cuts of sashimi over the best rice I have ever tasted.

My hair was still being brushed, I was half asleep, enjoying what I could only describe as the best sushi of my life and I looked up at the ceiling and noticed a bright light.

It got brighter and brighter—almost as if the sun itself had been planning to make an appearance in the experience all along.

My head turned all the way up facing the bright light. And as it moved so did my body. I was no longer looking up, I was looking straight, but I was no longer sitting, I was laying and looking at this bright light.

No longer were the girls braiding my hair, and my mouth began to feel dry. I closed my eyes tight to try and see if it helped me get my bearings…

“Mom?” Clark says softly, standing next to my bed and nightstand, his chin resting gently on the mattress.

“I have to poop.”

In 2021, my therapist broke up with me.

Which, to this day, is the funniest joke I will never stop telling to strangers on the internet.

Goes to therapy for abandonment issues. After finally unpacking years of trauma, therapist says they can’t see you anymore.

Hilarious. 10/10. Pure comedic gold. Could not make this shit up.

Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Bill helped me quite a bit in our two years together. And he wasn’t my first. I had seen many therapists on and off for years when I was no longer coping with anxiety and stress well on my own. Now, before Dr. Bill, I tended to graduate myself out of therapy and not the other way around, but it’s fine. I’m totally over it. I swear.

I have found with each new therapist it’s been easy to unpack the laundry list of items they need to know about me beforehand—childhood trauma, that time I got my hair stuck in a pool drain, my general distaste for windmills, my inability to keep my mouth shut in family arguments, the overall misadventures of 2018.

Because of this, it had become easy to make new admissions or confessions to Dr. Bill when we worked through things.

There are many things I am not good at (things I am actively working on) but one admission has always stuck with me.

It was a few months before our wedding and Bill was asking me whether I was carrying baggage or unresolved tension from my previous failed engagement into my current relationship. Hard but fair, given the circumstances. Questions like this never bothered me. This is quite literally the hard hitting question I was paying someone to ask me point blank. Roast me, big guy.

Yet somehow, my answer made me sadder than the question itself.

No. But I feel like Ben is never going to get the best version of me.

It all started at a birthday party in 2018.

It was for my ex. Yes the one who kickstarted the worst 2 years of my life, which ultimately spiraled into the best years of my life somehow. Yea, it’s still a weird mindfuck I’m sorting through. The one who allowed 2018 to become a year I refer to in therapy by its year rather than its contents.

He was smug in the way only narcissistic sociopaths can be, but I was naive to that at the time. He had always told his friends and I that nobody could ever throw him a surprise party because he was too smart. He held onto this delusion for years. I set out to prove him wrong. I planned it the way I used to plan everything—completely and obsessively, with the kind of energy that only exists in a person who hasn’t yet learned that going all out doesn’t protect you from the harsh realities of the universe.

I got his out of town friends to Chicago. Coordinated travel and hotel rooms and arrival times without anyone tipping him off. I stashed away party decorations in secret cabinets in our condo. I handled the drinks and the music and the lights and the games. I thought about every detail the way you do when you love someone and haven’t yet been given a reason not to.

Ben was at that party.

He was a work friend at the time. He stood in the room I had built for someone else, holding a drink, playing beer pong with his brother, completely unaware that I was currently being accused of cheating on the person whose surprise party we were both attending.

Oh and that he was the one my ex accused me of cheating with.

That is either the most ironic detail of my life or a sign from the universe that has a very specific and slightly fucked up sense of humor. Probably both.

The accusation had been building for weeks. My ex had become convinced I was hiding something. And I was—a surprise party. That dumb bitch. That was the entirety of the secret. A party I had spent months planning for him.

One night out with work friends I had been texting one of his friends and one of mine about the final details and had deleted both threads so he couldn’t accidentally see it. When he grabbed my phone out of my hand—which in hindsight was a crimson red flag I wasn’t ready to admit out loud yet—the last message he saw was a text to Ben. A work thing. A client issue. I had texted Ben because he was still at the office and I told him he should go home and we could handle it tomorrow. I said goodnight. That was the whole text.

He didn’t see it that way.

He spiraled at the goodnight.

What was I supposed to say? Good evening? Fuck right off? Have a great night and, hey man, just to make sure we’re on the same page, we are definitely not having sex?

I mean, I said goodnight so the text conversation could be ended politely and I could get on with my evening with my friends and boyfriend.

It’s a level of stupidity I cannot even remotely begin to entertain. But here we are, all getting annoyed by it eight years later.

What I didn’t know then, what I wouldn’t find out until much later, was what he had already done about it.

Before the party. Before the accusation became a confrontation. Out of what he would later describe as spite—because he was convinced I was cheating, because of a text that said goodnight, because of a surprise party I had spent months building for him—he drove two hours to sleep with his ex girlfriend.

She got pregnant.

I was planning a birthday party. He was doing that. Cool.

The cruelest part of that math is that he told me the reason he cheated was because he thought I was cheating. As if that was an explanation. As if the logic held together in any universe that makes sense.

It didn’t. It doesn’t. I have spent years trying to find the place where it does and I have come up empty every time.

When we got home that night he exploded. The kind of explosion that doesn’t leave room for explanation or defense. And at some point during it he threw my phone at me and it hurt me. Physically. The kind of hurt that leaves a mark in ways you don’t always understand until later.

I remember standing there thinking this is not what love is supposed to feel like.

And something in me—some open window I had been living with my whole life—just closed.

And maybe not all the way. Not yet. But that was the night it started closing and I fear it has never fully opened again.

There was a version of me that existed before that night.

She was carefree in a way I no longer have memories for. She trusted first and adjusted later. She planned elaborate surprises for people without doing the math on whether they deserved it. She went all out without question because going all out was just who she was. She didn’t protect herself because it hadn’t yet occurred to her that she needed to.

She was also, in retrospect, incredibly brave in a way she would never have called bravery because it felt like just being herself.

Here is what I know about the version of me that Ben married.

She loves him completely. She shows up every day. She has built a whole life beside him and means every part of it.

She is also harder than she used to be. More guarded. Quicker to defend herself and her opinions. Quicker to react when she feels backed into a corner. She moves through the world with a kind of low-grade alertness that wasn’t there before—it’s like a constant scanning or readiness. A part of her that is always slightly prepared for the thing she doesn’t see coming.

There was a gift idea I had for Ben once. A good one. The kind that would have been perfect for him specifically—thoughtful, personal, exactly right. I had done a version of it for someone else years before and it had worked beautifully.

I didn’t use it.

Not because it wasn’t right for him. It was. Probably more right for him than it had ever been for anyone else. But I couldn’t bring myself to recycle it. It felt like giving him something that had already been touched by someone who didn’t deserve it. Like handing him a gift with someone else’s fingerprints still on it.

So I did something else instead. Something fine. Something that probably looked perfectly thoughtful from the outside and felt, to me, like a fraction of what I actually wanted to give him.

He deserved the original idea. He deserved the version of me that had it first, before I learned what it felt like to have love thrown back at her.

He got who I became instead. And most days I think that woman is still pretty good. But some days I grieve what she used to be capable of.

I don’t say this to be dramatic. I say it because it is one of the most honest things I know about myself and I am tired of carrying it quietly.

The men who came before Ben got something from me that I didn’t know was finite. My openness. My willingness to go all out without armor. My carefree certainty that love was safe and that going all out was just what you did when you loved someone.

I spent that on people who didn’t deserve it. And some of them hurt me badly enough that my nervous system took notes.

Ben has never given me a single reason to be guarded. Not one. In eight years he has been the most consistent, the most safe, the most present person I have ever been loved by. He planned my entire 40th birthday in secret for months and made me feel, for the first time in a long time, like someone was going all out for me.

And I still flinch sometimes. I still close windows he hasn’t even tried to open. I still catch myself defending positions I don’t even need to defend, bracing for impact that isn’t coming, scanning for the exit even in rooms where I am completely safe.

It is not his fault. It has never been his fault.

At this point, it’s probably mine.

I told Dr. Bill that Ben would never get the best version of me. And I believed it when I said it. I still believe it some days.

But here is what I have come to understand in the years since that session.

The best version of me didn’t disappear. Not entirely. She learned something. Something hard and necessary and painful. She learned that the open window could become the way something terrible gets in. So she protected herself the only way she knew how. By keeping it mostly shut.

What I am still working on—what I will probably always be working on—is learning the difference between a window and a wound. Between protecting myself and punishing someone who has never hurt me for the sins of someone who did.

I asked Ben recently what the worst year of his life was.

I told him mine. 2009. 2018. The years that split my life into befores and afters.

He thought about it for a minute.

I really hated working for that asshole at Salesforce.

I laughed. Genuinely.

We are not the same. And I don’t say that as a criticism. I say it as one of the most beautiful things I know about us. He came into this relationship whole. Unmarked. With a nervous system that had never been trained to brace for impact.

Someone once asked me why we work. Given everything. The age gap. The way we started. The wreckage I arrived with.

I think it’s because only one of us is carrying the baggage. And the other one just helps carry it because he came in with nothing in his hands.

She’s still in here. Somewhere. The version of me he deserved from the beginning.

I am trying to let her back out. Some days I do. Some days I catch myself mid-flinch and I stop and I breathe and I remember where I am and who I’m with and that the exit I’m scanning for doesn’t exist in this house.

Some days I just recycle the gift idea. Some days I plan the party.

But I am not fixed. I am not healed. I am not the carefree version of myself who trusted without doing the math. I don’t know if I ever will be again and I have made a fragile peace with that.

But I am trying. Quietly, imperfectly, in that particular way that only the people who have been broken in a specific place know how to try. One window at a time.

Ben is still waiting. Patiently. With nothing in his hands.

And that, more than anything, is why I keep trying.

Summer 1994 | Carmel, Indiana

There’s a particular feeling that is hard to describe. A mixture of fear and excitement that bubbles up at the surface like a volcano about to erupt—but into laughter.

My mom and I were putting together a puzzle at the dining room table. My older cousins, Nikki and Kristy, were on the other side of the old oval dark wood table. I wore an oversized E.F. Hutton shirt, one of those soft fabrics that only age can produce. My messy hair swept to one side, hanging over my right eye of my freckle-kissed summer face.

My cousins and I glanced at the clock in the kitchen, waiting patiently for my three year old brother to finally be put to sleep.

The anticipation was palpable. My cousins, from the suburbs of Chicago, had been dropped off at the beginning of the summer to spend many weeks with us. I’m still not entirely sure why they came to stay—with me as the undoubtedly annoying eight year old younger cousin and them at approximately twelve and thirteen respectively—though I try not to argue with it too much. As the oldest child, I was enjoying my time with older, cooler girls who at least pretended to like me.

My dad came down the stairs. We couldn’t see him from the dining room but we could hear him.

Which meant it was time.

My cousins and I snuck around the living room and popped our heads around the doorway—just three heads stacked on top of each other, seemingly floating at the edge of the wall. Absolutely zero chill. My dad reached for the front door knob and spotted us out of his peripheral vision, I’m sure of it.

He let out a dry laugh as he walked out the front door to begin his nightly ritual of watering the plants in the yard.

“Goodnight, girls!” he said antagonistically as he closed the door behind him.

We had been begging him all day to play with the four of us, my mom included. It was eight o’clock. The sun was slowly setting. My little brother was asleep in his room. We wanted to play our favorite game. The one that was the reason my Chicago cousins had extended their stay from one week to many weeks.

Hide and Go Seek.
In the Dark.

We had spent the last weekend playing it with both my parents. There were rules. They were as follows:

1. My little brother’s bedroom was off limits.

2. No screaming.

3. The basement was off limits. It was literally too scary—I think even the adults would have lost their minds down there.

4. The person who was “it” had to count to one hundred in the pantry.

5. Dad couldn’t say no to playing until Mom said she was ready to be done.

There were many memorable moments playing that game. Mostly traumatic ones I am still unpacking with a therapist—like my dad hiding behind my standing mirror in my bedroom, which really wasn’t the move for a kid who was deathly afraid of Bloody Mary lore being circulated at school that year in the second grade.

Or catching a glimpse of my dad’s white shiny teeth in the dark like a fucking Cheshire cat as he crouched on top of our refrigerator.

I’m still emotionally processing the time I hid my slight frame tactfully behind the laundry room door, only to hear my cousin slamming every door open as a search strategy. I was certain my nose would get broken. I briefly considered the dryer as an alternative. My claustrophobia got the best of me.

But my dad? He said no.

What a weenie.

We had been looking forward to this all week. We hadn’t even asked him on a work night. A Friday? How could he possibly say no?

I should note that as a kid I was very reserved. Quiet. Polite. Shy, even. But when I was in my element, when I had an idea, someone else took over. Perhaps, in retrospect, this was the birth of the second Gemini twin. Who’s to say. But standing at that door, I made a decision.

I locked it.

Both my cousins looked at me. First confused, then smug in their understanding. We did that thing that only happens between family or close friends—complete with crazy eyes and the complete disregard for rules and punishment.

The three of us immediately split up and sprinted across the first floor, locking every door we could think of. The back porch off the kitchen. My parents’ first floor master bedroom with the walkout to the back patio. And finally the door to the attached garage.

I peeked out and saw all three garage doors wide open, my dad holding the hose, completely unbothered. He was still watering. Still unhurried. The look of a man who had not yet received the information that was about to ruin his evening.

We hit the first button. His head turned.

The second. His eyes narrowed.

By the time we hit the third, the hose had stopped watering the plants entirely. He was watering pavement. He stood there watching all three doors descend simultaneously, the slow mechanical certainty of it, and you could see the exact moment his brain caught up to what was happening. Not panic. Not anger. Something worse—the quiet, dawning realization of a man watching a situation slip completely out of his control in real time, one garage door at a time. He looked at us. We grinned. The last door hit the cement floor with a thunderous boom.

We closed the house door and locked it too. Just for good measure.

Outside, the Indiana summer sky had gone the color of a lit match. That specific red that only exists for about twelve minutes at the end of a Midwest July day before it bleeds into purple and then into the dark. Fireflies were coming up from the grass in slow, lazy pulses. The air was that particular kind of warm that doesn’t feel like heat so much as weight—like the whole world exhaled and forgot to breathe back in. It smelled like cut grass and the impatiens my mom planted every spring along the front walkway and something faintly agricultural from the horse farm down the road. The good kind. The kind that means you are somewhere specific, somewhere real, somewhere you will remember.

My dad sat on the front steps, defeated in every possible way, that flame red sky burning behind him. He tried to reason with us. Bribery was his primary strategy.

“I’ll make waffles in the morning.”

Please. You’re making waffles regardless. Also they’re Eggos. You’re not exactly putting in a heroic effort throwing those into a toaster, pal.

By this point my mom was fully in on it. We were holding him hostage until he agreed to our demands, which were simple: hide and go seek in the dark, until midnight.

Then my mom had a genius idea. A new game entirely.

We never gave it a proper name. But it will go down in Damrow family history as Lock Dad Out Of The House.

The rules were as follows:

• Two teams. The girls—my two cousins, my mom, and me—versus my dad, who was currently sitting locked outside the house he paid for. Classic.

• Our goal: two people had to sneak out of the house, touch the mailbox, and get back inside. The caveat was that whichever door we came out of had to stay open.

• My dad’s goal: find the open door, get inside, and touch the phone in the basement before we could stop him.

• Whoever did it first won.

It’s showtime.

My dad begrudgingly agreed, but we knew he’d eventually have fun. His crotchetiness often disappears once he’s in the throes of competition. We let him back in the house. He was going to need sustenance to keep up with us, likely in the form of the fresh, from scratch chocolate chip cookies my mom had baked for us earlier that night.

We played a couple rounds to warm up. A time to rethink game rules and strategy on both sides. I’ll never forget my dad ducking behind the pine tree in our front yard as a patrolling police car drove past around ten o’clock.

I laughed at the mere thought:

Officer, I can explain. No I do not live here—Well I mean I DO live here, that’s actually the problem. We’re playing a game. It’s called Lock Dad Out Of The House. Yes that’s the real name. Well it’s not a REAL name, my eight year old invented it approximately two hours ago and I was strong-armed into participating by four females, three of whom are children, and one of whom is my wife who I would like to speak to a lawyer about. Are you married? Oh wow 40 years. Good for you, officer. No I haven’t been drinking. Ok, look, I was drinking ONE beer while I was watering the plants but they locked me out BEFORE I could finish it so technically I’m a victim here. Do I have ID? My ID is INSIDE THE HOUSE THAT I OWN AND CANNOT ENTER. Sir, please do not touch the handcuffs. I have a mortgage. I have a very reasonable credit score. I am a father.

After a few rounds we realized we needed a better strategy to beat my dad. It was too easy for him to pinpoint which door we were exiting from. So the girls asked for five minutes to formulate a plan.

It was genius. My mom’s plans usually are.

“Ok girls, we are going to go out a window,” my mom said in a hushed tone looking back to make sure her husband, that scoundrel, wasn’t in earshot.

No way that clown would ever think to check an open window. We’d keep it unlocked but closed and when the two runners came back from touching the mailbox, the two inside would crank it back open and victory would be ours. Bragging rights for years to come.

(Seriously, you don’t know this family. We don’t forget a win. And we’ll make sure you don’t either.)

We put the plan in motion. Before we could even say start, we saw my dad race out of the back door in a wild hurry. He had obviously been planning something too and wanted to make sure we didn’t know where he was in the yard.

We quickly locked the door behind him, sitting there looking at the darkness in a house with all the lights out. He was nowhere in sight.

Panicked, we rushed into my mom’s first floor master bedroom on the east side of the house. The room had three doors: one to the back patio, one to their bathroom, and one to their closet. The window we were going to use was next to the closet, nicely hidden behind a birch tree.

We stood there in the dark, not speaking, barely breathing. The kind of silence that has a sort of texture to it—where you can hear your own heartbeat and the crickets outside and nothing else. It was that specific feeling again. The one from the beginning of the night that I still don’t have the right words for. Fear and excitement wound so tightly together you couldn’t pull them apart if you tried. Like Ghost in the Graveyard, which we also played on those Indiana summer nights—that electric, full-body aliveness that only exists when you are a child and the stakes feel enormous and the worst thing that can actually happen is that someone’s dad jumps out from behind a tree. We were terrified. We were thrilled. We were eight and twelve and thirteen and however old my mother was, and none of that mattered. We were just four people in the dark holding our breath and trying not to giggle.

We waited, watching for any movement. My mom and Kristy were chosen to make the run to the mailbox while Nikki and I manned the window.

The coast was clear. My mom got one leg out the window, then the other, and shimmied down to the ground not three feet below. Then Kristy did the same. Nikki and I stood there, scared but exhilarated. We whispered “go go go” and cranked the window shut as quietly and quickly as we could.

The room went completely still.

Just the two of us now. No voices. No footsteps. Just the sound of the crickets bleeding through the glass and the specific quality of darkness that only exists in a house with every light off and something unknown somewhere inside it.

We stood frozen at the window, eyes adjusting, scanning the yard for my dad. Nothing. No movement. No shape behind the birch tree. No shadow crossing the grass.

I felt it before I heard it—that prickling, animal awareness that something behind you has changed. The air pressure shifted. A creak. Slow. Deliberate. The kind of sound that a person makes when they are trying very hard not to make a sound and failing just enough.

The closet door swung open.

What emerged was not my father. It was a shape. A large, formless thing with arms raised high overhead, filling the entire doorframe, backlit by nothing, making a sound that started somewhere deep in the chest and built and built until it detonated into the darkness of that bedroom like a cannon.

Nikki and I did not scream.

We produced something that has no name in the English language. Something primal. Something that came from a place well beneath rational thought, beneath childhood, beneath anything that could be described as a normal human response to a normal Friday evening.

My mother, three feet from the house and sprinting toward the mailbox, stopped running.

She turned around.

She came back.

Nobody touched the mailbox that night.

To this day we have no idea how he got in there. Whether he had quietly pocketed a spare key at some point during the evening, whether one of the doors had been left unlocked on accident, whether the man simply willed himself through a wall out of sheer competitive spite—we never figured it out. He has never told us. He never will. He just laughed, straightened up, dusted himself off, and went to find more cookies like a man who had absolutely no remorse on his gameplay ethics.

We declared the round null and void on account of—and I quote—egregious cheating. My dad accepted this verdict with the dignity of a man who had no leverage and knew it. We played again.

He lasted approximately five minutes before we found him on the back screened porch, fully asleep in the chair, a single chocolate chip cookie balanced on his chest, rising and falling with each breath like a very content man who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen to him.

We looked at each other.
We looked at the hose.

What followed was not premeditated. It was instinct. Pure, joyful, completely inevitable instinct.

The water hit him before he knew where he was. He came up sputtering and confused and then furious and then laughing—that specific laugh that only happens when someone has completely given up being an adult and just decided to be a person instead. My mom was screaming. My cousins were screaming. I was screaming. It was midnight in Indiana and we were having a water fight in the backyard in our pajamas and every single person in that yard was exactly where they were supposed to be.

I don’t know what time we finally went to sleep that night. I know the sky was fully dark by then, the fireflies gone, the air finally cool enough that it felt like a relief. I know I fell asleep with wet hair and a face that hurt from laughing.

I know I have never forgotten it.

Not once in thirty years.

Summer 2026 | Cincinnati

Clark has been asking me for a movie night.

He appears in the doorway of his room the way three year olds often do—suddenly, completely, as if he has always been standing there and I was only just now noticing. He has his Ducky. He has the look on his face that means he has been thinking about something for a while and has finally decided to say it out loud.

“Mama can we do a movie night in my room? With the projector? And snacks? And can you sleep in here with me after?”

He has asked me this four times this week. Each time with the same energy as the first time. Each time ending with the same thing, delivered with the gravity of a man closing a business deal:

“Does that sound like a good plan?”

It does, Clark. It sounds like a very good plan.

I used to have a reason to say not tonight. I don’t anymore.

This week I am saying yes. Without guilt, without the undercurrent of everything else I should be doing instead, without the version of myself that was always half somewhere else even when I was physically present. Just yes.

We will set up the projector the way we always do, the image blooming across his wall in the dark, soft and slightly imperfect the way projectors always are. And I know, the way you know things you cannot fully explain, that one day he will be somewhere. A house he lives in, a life he has built, maybe a porch he considers his church. And he will remember this. Not necessarily this specific night. But the feeling of it. The particular safety of being small and loved in the dark with someone who showed up without hesitation. With someone who wanted to be there.

I think about my parents. My cousins. That red Indiana sky. I think about a guy asleep in a chair with cookies on his chest who woke up to a face full of water and laughed anyway. I think about what it costs a parent to fully show up for a night like that—to set aside the dishes and the emails and the exhaustion and the hundred things that need doing and just be there, completely there, in the dark, hiding behind refrigerators and climbing out of windows and losing on purpose so everyone else can win.

It doesn’t cost nothing. But it costs less than you think.

It’s not Lock Dad Out Of The House. Not yet. He’s three. Give it a few years and I make no promises about what game gets invented in this house or who ends up locked outside of it. Ben should probably start sleeping with one eye open.

But if I am building something for him right now—if these ordinary Tuesday nights and these small yeses are becoming the thing he carries with him for thirty years—then that is enough. That is everything, actually.

That is the whole point.

It is Sunday morning. Fourth of July weekend. Let freedom ring.

Which is right on schedule, because I have just broken free from the golden shackles of corporate America. I quit. I have retired? No—I have become self employed, which I assure you is much less glamorous than it sounds and involves significantly more staring at a blank document than the LinkedIn posts would have you believe. But it is still, undoubtedly, the right move.

The past few days have been, how shall I put it? Bizarre. Out of body. A specific kind of surreal that happens when something you have been building toward for years finally arrives and your body has absolutely no idea what to do with the silence.

I remember when I put in my notice a few months ago. The relief was immediate—like the charade was finally over. I have no problem keeping other people’s secrets but my own? Different story. Psh, obviously. I have a live action tell-all diary I put out into the world every week. Subtlety has never been my brand.

Then July 1st came. And it was just done. Computer wiped. Slack messages gone. Custom emojis—specifically the one with me in a hazmat suit drinking a margarita—just gone. The Google docs and presentations I built entirely with my trackpad, because I genuinely never once invested in a mouse in five years of remote work, all of it gone. I would say I have no regrets but I do think about the mouse often.

I thought I would feel relief. I thought I would finally breathe. I couldn’t wait to open my laptop and write—write for the first time without the low hum of guilt that I should be doing my actual job instead. But what I was met with was every writer’s worst nightmare.

A blank page.

Change is hard for me. And yet I am completely addicted to it. Reinvention is something I may actually excel at but it almost always comes at the expense of my own wellbeing first. When I was a kid, my child therapist diagnosed me with something he called delayed emotional processing—a smart sounding way of saying I push through hard things and deal with the feelings later. Usually much later. Usually at an inconvenient time. Usually in the car.

I have spent the last few days since I left wanting to do nothing but sleep. It is as if I have been running on cortisol fumes for five years—wearing every hat, holding every thread, smiling through every Zoom call I did not fully understand—and now that one hat is finally gone, my body has decided this is an appropriate moment to stage a quiet protest.

The tank, it turns out, was more empty than I knew.

But this morning I came outside. Made my coffee. Sat in the chair I have decided is my church. Opened this newsletter. And felt proud.

If I could put this together while working full time, raising two boys, helping Ben run a cleaning company, and filming myself lip syncing in my kitchen for reasons I have already explained at length—what else can I do?

Welcome to July. Volume two. I genuinely cannot wait to find out.

Pull up a chair.

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Here is something I have learned the hard way and will now share with you completely unsolicited.

If something someone does sends you into a spiral—if you find yourself stewing about it, venting about it to three separate people, and then venting about it again to your husband who clearly stopped listening approximately 45 minutes ago—I would gently suggest that the problem might not be them.

I say this as someone who has done all of the above.

The things that trigger us most are almost never really about the other person. They are about the thing inside us that recognized something—an insecurity, an unmet want, a wound we haven’t looked at directly yet. The person who got the opportunity you wanted. The woman whose life looks like the version of yours you haven’t built yet. The friend who said the thing that shouldn’t have landed but absolutely did.

Your reaction is information. Uncomfortable, inconvenient, occasionally embarrassing information. But information. Use it.

I am not saying people can’t be wrong or that bad behavior doesn’t exist. Shit, 90% of my exes have proven that. I am saying that if something is living rent free in your head for more than forty eight hours, the most useful question is not what is wrong with them. It is what is this telling me about me.

Go inward. It sure is annoying in there but, hey, it is worth the visit.

A note: This newsletter will always have a free version. But later this year I’m adding a paid tier for subscribers who want to go deeper: the full advice column, extended beauty and wellness deep dives, real business numbers, and more. If you are subscribed now, you are grandfathered in and you will always get the full newsletter for free. I’ll give you plenty of notice before anything changes for anyone else.

That said, if you’ve been enjoying the writing and want to support it anyway, you can pledge a future subscription below. Your card won’t be charged until I turn on paid subscriptions, and even then you are not obligated. It’s just a tip jar for people who enjoy what I’m writing. Or are concerned I quit my very stable job to do this. Both?

Stay amused.

If you’re already subscribed and want to pledge your support, please click here.

“My best friend and I have been close since college. She doesn’t have kids and I do, and lately it feels like we’re just... drifting. She doesn’t really get why I can’t just pick up and go like I used to, and I don’t know how to explain that my life looks completely different now without it sounding like I think mine is harder than hers. I miss her but I also don’t know how to bridge the gap. Is this just what happens or is there something I can actually do about it?”

— Anonymously submitted via Instagram DM

Meet Castor and Pollux: the twin stars of Gemini, and the two voices that live rent free in my head. They both have opinions. They don't always agree. They're both usually right.

Castor:

Ok first—take a deep breathe. This is one of the hardest stages of life and nobody tells you that part of it is grieving friendships that used to feel effortless. It gets better. I promise. It gets easier with each kid and as each kid gets older and slightly less feral.

Here is what I actually do: I have a dedicated time each week where I check in with the people I love. I know that sounds incredibly organized for someone who cannot remember where she put her phone, but it works. It does not have to be a long call. It does not have to be a thoughtful paragraph. It can be a voice memo in the car line. The point is you showed up.

Try not to leave people on read for days. You don’t have to respond in thirty seconds—nobody should expect that—but a quick “I’m alive, I miss you, I’ll call you Thursday” goes a long way. The friendship will not survive on good intentions alone. You have to actually show up even when showing up looks different than it used to.

And give yourself permission to be bad at it sometimes. You’re not abandoning anyone. You’re just in the thick of it right now.

Pollux:

Hoo boy! Okay. Honest answer. Your friend cannot fully understand what you are going through and she never will until she has her own children and her entire identity gets quietly dismantled overnight while everyone around her acts like she should be completely normal and fine.

She thinks she gets it. She does not get it. She thinks you’re busy the way she is busy. She is not busy the way you are busy. She is busy in the way where she can cancel plans and sleep in and finish a hot meal sitting down. You are busy in the way where you cannot remember if you showered today or if that was a different day entirely and honestly it doesn’t matter because someone is crying again. Plot twist—it’s you!

You cannot explain this to her. I know you’ve tried. It does not land. File it under things that cannot be taught, only experienced and hopefully survived.

Here is the part nobody says out loud: if she drifts because your life looks different now, the universe will eventually return the favor. Life humbles everyone. Maybe it’s kids. Maybe it’s something else entirely. But one day she will be in the thick of something hard and inconvenient and slightly embarrassing and she will think of you. She will get it. She will feel bad.

The real question is whether she’ll have enough self awareness to actually say so. Because being quietly dropped by someone you love when you are already running on no sleep and zero identity is a specific kind of awful that deserves to be acknowledged. It feels absolutely terrible. Shame on them. I said what I said.

The friendships that survive this season will survive it because someone kept showing up even when it was inconvenient. Find those people. Be those people. Everyone else is on a learning curve and karma is a very patient teacher.

Entrepreneur Edit will be a dedicated section to each monthly issue where I discuss the good, the bad & the ugly of owning your own business.

Every month in this space I’m going to tell you exactly what it looks like to build something from nothing. The numbers, the decisions, the mistakes, and the moments we almost quit. Not theory. Not a course. Not someone who read about entrepreneurship in a book and decided to teach it. This is real time, from someone actually in it, with receipts.

My goal is that by the end of the year you have everything you need to start something of your own. Or at the very least you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into before you do it. Consider this your unflinching, unsponsored, occasionally unhinged blueprint. We’re building it together.

A lot has happened since I sat down to write Volume One in June.

I turned 40. I quit my job. I stood in my kitchen on July 1st with a wiped computer and a blank page and approximately zero idea of what came next. I told you about it at the top of this issue because I tell you everything, apparently, which is either a gift or a problem. Who’s to say?

What I know is this: I built something in the margins of a life that was already very full. Two kids, a cleaning company, a W2 job I was quietly losing my mind in, a newsletter I was writing at 1am because I ran out of hours before I ran out of things to say. And now one of those things is gone and I have more hours and somehow more to say and I think that’s what freedom actually feels like when it first shows up. Not relief exactly. Just more room.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: Thank you for being in the room.

I’ll see you in August. Same porch. Just 40 more hours each week to bother you. I mean shit, I just quit my job to start writing an online newsletter so clearly my decision making is pristine. August should be very interesting.

Stay amused,
Lindsay

I am a skincare orphan.

I was REN Skincare’s biggest fan. Not in a casual way. In a—I used the entire line, evangelized it to anyone who would listen, and cried actual real tears when I saw the announcement that they were going out of business—way. Their AHA tonic was the one that started it all. This subtle, almost imperceptible exfoliation that somehow made me wake up looking like I had professionally contoured my face overnight. Except it wasn’t contour. It was just my actual face, looking like a better version of itself. Even skin tone. Natural glow. The kind of skin that makes people ask if you’ve done something different without being able to identify what.

I found out they were closing and I bought every bottle I could locate. I have a stockpile in storage that, according to my calculations—calculations that were done by the same woman who asked Alexa what 20% of 200 was last night—will last me approximately two to three years. At which point I will have to confront this grief properly. I’m also not entirely confident I won’t immediately morph into a witch once I stop using it. How upsetting.

So, for now I am rationing and doing what I always do with difficult feelings, which is ignore them until I am forced to deal with them alone in a parking lot.

If you know of a replacement I am accepting recommendations. Please send them to my Instagram. I am not above begging. Like, at all.

Is more better? Lessons learned the expensive way.

Before REN there was SkinCeuticals. I owned the entire line. Every serum, every moisturizer, every product with a clinical sounding name that cost the same as a car payment. My skin was good. It was also costing me a small fortune every month and when I eventually switched to REN at a fraction of the price I did not notice a meaningful difference.

Which brings me to my late twenties and early thirties—a period I can only describe as having a hilarious amount of disposable income and absolutely no sense. I went to my aesthetician every six weeks for something. Lasers. Facials. Dermaplaning. Lymphatic drainage. Chemical peels. I tried every treatment, owned every product, stacked every routine. And somewhere in all of that chaos I lost the plot entirely.

I also had, running parallel to all of this, a dress buying addiction that I refuse to seek help for because I genuinely enjoy it too much to be cured. I do not buy dresses because they look good on me. I buy dresses because they hang beautifully in my closet and bring me a joy that is completely disconnected from whether I will ever actually wear them. And then there are the dresses I buy in sizes I—how do I put this —optimistically anticipate fitting into at some future point when I am apparently going to weigh what I weighed before two pregnancies and forty years of living. That size. I am buying for that size. She is not coming back. I know this. I buy the dress anyway. It hangs very prettily.

The skincare was not unlike the dresses. More did not mean better. It meant more products, more money, more confusion, and eventually standing in front of my bathroom mirror at forty genuinely unsure which of the seventeen things I was using was actually doing something.

What finally humbled me

Microneedling. For those unfamiliar, microneedling is the process of paying a professional a significant amount of money to roll tiny needles across your face in the name of collagen production. I looked like Freddy Krueger for a full week afterward. And because I was apparently a person with no impulse control and a very loose definition of self care, I scheduled a chemical peel at my very next appointment.

So I went from Freddy Krueger to my face just…peeling….off.

I want to be clear that the stated goal of all of this was to look better. Not to look like I was gently decomposing. And yet…

I genuinely cannot tell you if any of it worked. My skin looks great now. It looked great before. Collagen may have been produced? I have no way to verify this and I have made my peace with that.

What I actually think is happening

Here is the honest answer to the question I get asked most often: Why don’t you look your age?

Ma’am, I don’t know.

And I’m starting to think that’s not a failure—it’s actually the point.

What I do consistently now is embarrassingly simple compared to what I used to do. Copper peptide serum daily (which has hyaluronic acid). Red light therapy daily. Dysport once a year because I am not going to pretend that doesn’t work because it absolutely does. I mix in different moisturizers but am not married to one at the moment. Never done filler. It scares me and I like being able to move my face.

I adjust based on the season. I adjust based on where I am in my cycle—and if that sounds overly complicated it’s actually the opposite, it just means I pay attention to what my skin is telling me instead of following a fixed routine regardless of how my body feels. Some weeks I need more moisture. Some weeks I need less. My skin communicates and I have finally started listening.

I also stopped eating seed oils about a year ago and my skin has gotten better in that same year. Ray Peat believed polyunsaturated fats accelerate aging among other things. I cannot tell you definitively that this is why. I can tell you I find it interesting.

And my genuinely unpopular opinion that I will say out loud anyway: I do not wear sunscreen every day. Only if I’m outside all day or in a stronger climate than I’m used to. I think we have been significantly misled about sunscreen and I think seed oils in the diet may be what actually makes people burn. I’ll write a full piece about this another time. For now I’ll just say: I no longer burn the way I used to and my diet changed before my sunscreen habits did. Make of that what you will.

The rest of it is probably genes. Possibly the fact that I am small enough that from behind I look approximately twelve years old, which is its own complicated thing, but from the front seems to be working in my favor.

The thing I bought that I absolutely did not need

A rice exfoliator. In two colors. Because it claimed to clear everything out of my pores and I bought two colors because this is a disease I have and I know it and I refuse to seek help because it genuinely cures whatever personality disorder I obviously have.

My skin was smoother. My pores were not clear. I have no idea what the second color does differently. I bought it anyway. Hey, they look good on my bathroom counter?

This is the beauty industry in a nutshell. And honestly? Maybe that’s the universe telling me something. Maybe the overwhelm is the message. Maybe the answer was never more products, more treatments, more routines—maybe it was always just finding the three or four things that make you wake up feeling like you don’t need makeup, adjusting them when your skin tells you to, and putting the rest of the money toward dresses that will hang very beautifully in your closet and never be worn.

I’ve gotten there. It took me until forty and several thousand dollars in SkinCeuticals but I got there.

The actual takeaway

Find what works. Not what works for the influencer with the ring light and the affiliate code. What works for your actual face, in your actual life, during your actual cycle. Drink your orange juice. Put down the seed oils. Use your red light. And when the one product that truly understood you goes out of business, buy every bottle you can find and store them in a climate controlled environment while you grieve.

And maybe don’t let anyone near your face with needles unless you have a full week with nowhere to be.

That’s the protocol. You’re welcome.

It is July in Cincinnati which means it is approximately the temperature of the sun’s surface and I have exactly zero interest in turning on my oven. What I do have interest in is a lemon drop martini.

I am not a big drinker anymore. But I have a short list of cocktails I will commit to fully and my mother’s lemon drop martinis are on it. They are deceptively cheerful looking—bright yellow, sugar rimmed, very summery—and they will absolutely take you out. I have personally witnessed one of these drinks bring down a 6’7”, 280 pound grown man. He did not see it coming. None of us ever do.

You’ve been reading my essays long enough to know that alcoholism runs in my family. Consider this the perk. You sit through the trauma, you get the recipe. Seems fair.

We have two versions today. My mother’s classic, which she has been making for decades and which is the reason several family gatherings have gone sideways in the best possible way. And then Sergio’s—a recipe my mother charmed out of a very well known Chicago restaurant that shall not be named, because she is exactly the kind of woman who asks and somehow always gets what she asks for. Classic Leo.

Both are excellent. Both will sneak up on you. You’ve been warned.

My Mom’s Classic Lemon Drop Martini

The one that took down a 6’7” grown man. Proceed with caution. Or don’t. Whatever, I’m not your mom.

Ingredients — per drink:

• 1 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

• 1 oz Cointreau

• 1 oz simple syrup

• 2 oz vodka

Instructions:

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well. Strain into a plain or sugar rimmed martini glass. Garnish with a lemon.

Optional but recommended: add a splash of Squirt, Sprite, or any carbonated beverage when serving. It lightens it slightly. It does not make it safer.

Large batches can be made ahead and frozen for parties. This is how things get out of hand. You’ve been warned.

Sergio’s Lemon Drop
The one my mother sweet talked out of a very well known Chicago restaurant that shall not be named. She asked. They said yes. This is who she is. Help.

Ingredients — per drink:

• 1 oz fresh lemon juice

• 2 oz citron vodka — or regular unflavored vodka if that’s what you have

• ¾ oz Acqua di Cedro

• Splash of Grand Marnier

• Splash of agave syrup

Instructions:

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well. Strain into a sugar rimmed glass.

Note: Sergio’s version has no carbonation and no Cointreau. It is smoother, slightly more sophisticated, and somehow even more dangerous than the classic. My mother is very proud of this acquisition and she should be.

Make one of each. Sit outside. It is July and you have earned it.

Just maybe don’t make them both at the same time on an empty stomach. Ask the 6’7” man how that goes.

The Wellness Edit: The Protocol
Last month I told you what was wrong. This month I’m telling you exactly what I did about it.

If you missed last month’s Wellness Edit, the short version is this: after two pregnancies, almost twenty years of hormonal birth control, and a lifetime of cutting carbs every time I wanted to lose weight, my body was a hormonal mess. Estrogen dominance. Sluggish thyroid. Nutritionally stressed. My hair was falling out in clumps and I felt exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix.

I found a book by a dead biologist named Ray Peat. I read it twice. And then I built myself a protocol based on everything I learned — from him, from my bloodwork, from my holistic practice, and from a year of paying very close attention to my own body.

This is that protocol.

I want to be honest with you before I share it: I don’t know with certainty which piece did the most work. Some of what I did has solid clinical evidence behind it — adequate nutrition, resistance training, sleep, thorough thyroid evaluation. Some of it is Ray Peat-inspired and has more limited or mixed scientific support — the carrot salad, the PUFA reduction, the red light therapy. I did all of it consistently for a year and things changed dramatically. I am not able to tell you it was the carrot salad. I am also not able to tell you it wasn’t.

What I can tell you is that my hair is growing back thicker than it has ever been. My skin is clear. My resting heart rate dropped from 70 BPM to 59 BPM. My waking temperature went from around 97.9°F to the mid 98s. I ate more food than I ever had in my adult life and I did not gain weight. And when I finally quit my job and added Pilates — when the stress came down — I shed three to five pounds almost immediately without trying.

Which tells you everything you need to know about what stress does to your body and why willpower alone was never going to fix it.

What I Was Doing Before

I want you to understand where I started because the contrast matters.

Before this protocol I stressed about every calorie even when I wasn’t counting them. I worked out hard — really hard — all the time. I kept carbohydrates low whenever I wanted to lean out, which was most of the time. I was tired constantly in a way that felt bigger than normal tiredness. My hair was still falling out. The last ten pounds I wanted to lose refused to move regardless of what I did.

I thought I needed more discipline. More restriction. A harder workout. A stricter approach.

What I actually needed was to stop fighting my body and start feeding it.

What I Ate — And What I Stopped

This is the section people ask about most so I want to be specific and honest.

What I added or dramatically increased:

Orange juice — ideally fresh squeezed or the best quality I could find. Ray Peat practically considered this a medicine. It provides easily digestible fructose and glucose, potassium, and vitamin C, all of which support thyroid function and lower stress hormones. I drink a glass most mornings.

Fruit — ripe, sweet fruit at nearly every meal. Tropical fruits especially. Mangoes, oranges, cherries, grapes, melons. Ray Peat believed ripe fruit sugars were the most easily digested carbohydrates and the least stressful to the body.

Honey — in my coffee, in warm milk before bed, drizzled on things. Easy to digest, anti-inflammatory, and genuinely one of the easier switches I made.

Potatoes — white potatoes specifically, well cooked. Easy to digest, good source of carbohydrates and potassium. I stopped being afraid of them.

Sourdough bread — the long fermentation process breaks down much of the phytic acid and makes it significantly easier to digest than regular bread.

Skim milk — daily, sometimes multiple times a day. High protein, high calcium, low fat. Ray Peat was a huge proponent of milk as a complete food, particularly for its calcium to phosphorus ratio and its easily absorbed protein.

Eggs, lean beef, shrimp — my main protein sources alongside dairy.

Gelatin and collagen — daily. Ray Peat was specific about this: muscle meat is high in certain amino acids like tryptophan and methionine that can be pro-inflammatory in excess. Gelatin and collagen are rich in glycine which balances this out. I add collagen to my coffee and take gelatin before bed in warm milk.

Greek yogurt — in moderation. Ray Peat cautioned about high lactic acid fermented foods adding burden to a sluggish metabolism but I found it worked well for me personally.

Eating my vitamins

This is the part that sounds the most intimidating and is actually the easiest once you build the habit.

Ray Peat was not a big supplement person — his preference was always to get nutrients from food where possible. Two foods he specifically recommended weekly for their extraordinary nutrient density were beef liver and oysters. So I started eating both. And one he recommended daily.

Beef liver — once a week, hidden in my homemade meatballs. If you are not a liver person, this is your move. You genuinely cannot taste it when it’s mixed into ground beef with garlic and breadcrumbs and baked in the oven. Beef liver is one of the single most nutrient dense foods on the planet. It is loaded with vitamin A in its most bioavailable retinol form, copper, B vitamins including B12 and folate, and zinc. Ray Peat specifically recommended about four to six ounces once a week — enough to get the nutrients without overdoing the iron content of muscle meat. I use the Force of Nature ancestral blend ground beef in my meatballs which already has liver and heart blended in, which makes this even easier. You are welcome.

Raw oysters — once a week, and here is my specific tip: Whole Foods runs a deal on oysters every Friday. I go, I get my oysters, I eat them that day. Oysters are one of the best natural sources of zinc and copper in existence — two minerals that are critical for thyroid function, hormone production, and skin health. Ray Peat himself said a deficiency of copper causes tissues to retain excess iron, and that shellfish like oysters should be eaten regularly to address this. He recommended two or three oysters as a serving, once a week, noting that more than that might provide too much iron. I usually have six because I enjoy them and I am not Ray Peat. But the point stands — this is not a health food that tastes like medicine. It is a genuinely delicious Friday ritual that also happens to be one of the most nutrient dense things you can put in your body.

Raw carrot salad — daily, or close to it. One grated carrot, coconut oil, apple cider vinegar, salt. Ray Peat believed the unique fiber in raw carrot acts as an intestinal antiseptic — binding excess estrogen and endotoxins in the gut and helping the body excrete them. This was one of his most consistently recommended foods specifically for estrogen dominance. I buy a bag of carrots, peel them, and keep them in a jar of water in the fridge so they’re ready to grab. It takes about two minutes to make and it is the lowest lift thing on this entire list.

The principle behind all three of these is simple and very Ray Peat: instead of taking a dozen supplements to fill nutrient gaps, eat the foods that actually contain those nutrients in their most bioavailable form. Your body knows what to do with food in a way it doesn’t always know what to do with a capsule.

What I stopped or dramatically reduced:

Seed oils — completely eliminated where possible. Soybean oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, corn oil — all gone from my cooking. Ray Peat believed polyunsaturated fats accumulate in tissue, suppress thyroid function, and promote oxidative stress. The clinical evidence on seed oils is genuinely mixed and I want to be transparent about that. But eliminating them costs nothing and I had no reason not to try it.

Chicken breast and protein bars — reduced significantly. Poultry fat is high in polyunsaturated fats. I still eat chicken occasionally but it is no longer my default protein.

Nuts and seeds — eliminated almost entirely. Same reason as seed oils. Very high in PUFAs.

Raw cruciferous vegetables — eliminated. Broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage — Ray Peat cautioned these contain goitrogens that can suppress thyroid function, particularly when eaten raw. This one surprised me because I had considered these extremely healthy. I do not eat them raw. If I eat them at all they are very well cooked.

Most above ground vegetables and large amounts of fiber — reduced significantly. This is the most counterintuitive part of the Ray Peat approach and the one most at odds with conventional nutrition advice. His position was that indigestible fiber promotes bacterial fermentation in the gut which produces endotoxins that increase stress hormones. I didn’t eliminate vegetables entirely but I dramatically reduced leafy greens and high fiber vegetables and focused on the carrot salad as my main vegetable intake.

Soy — eliminated completely. Soy contains phytoestrogens — compounds that mimic estrogen in the body — which was the exact last thing I needed given my estrogen dominance situation.

Fasting and skipping meals — stopped entirely. Ray Peat was firmly against fasting. Going without food elevates cortisol which suppresses progesterone which worsens estrogen dominance. I eat consistently throughout the day.

Black coffee on an empty stomach — stopped. Coffee on an empty stomach spikes cortisol. I now always have coffee with skim milk, honey, and collagen.

Salmon and fatty fish — reduced significantly. High in omega-3 PUFAs which Ray Peat believed were particularly suppressive of thyroid function. The clinical evidence on omega-3s is genuinely complicated — most mainstream nutrition considers them beneficial — but I reduced them anyway as part of the overall PUFA reduction.

A typical day now looks like this:

Breakfast: eggs, sourdough toast, fresh orange juice, coffee with skim milk and honey

Lunch: fruit, Greek yogurt, honey

Afternoon: raw carrot salad

Dinner: lean beef or shrimp with potatoes, fruit

Before bed: warm skim milk with collagen, gelatin, and honey

The Protocol

1. I stopped dieting.

This was the hardest mental shift of the entire year. Not the carrot salad, not reducing seed oils, not any of the specific food changes. The hardest thing was letting go of the belief that I needed to eat less to weigh less — and specifically letting go of the last ten pounds I had been trying to take off for years.

What I eventually understood was that I needed to heal my metabolism first before I could think about cutting anything. You cannot cut from a depleted system and expect good results. You get more depletion.

So I stopped. I started eating enough — consistently, every day, without guilt and without earning it. My approximate starting intake before this protocol was around 1,500 to 1,600 calories. I increased significantly from there, focusing on hitting adequate protein and carbohydrates rather than a rigid calorie target. The specific numbers evolved based on hunger, body temperature, pulse, and energy rather than a fixed plan. Most days I aimed for roughly 100 to 110 grams of protein, 180 to 200 grams of carbohydrates, and 35 to 40 grams of fat — but these were guidelines, not rules.

2. I tracked metabolism instead of weight.

Instead of obsessing over the scale I started tracking waking body temperature and resting pulse every morning. These are Ray Peat’s primary indicators of metabolic health — a warm body with a reasonably elevated resting pulse means your thyroid is functioning and your body is burning glucose efficiently rather than running on stress hormones.

My waking temperature started around 97.9°F. Over the course of the year it climbed to the mid 98s. My resting heart rate started around 70 BPM and dropped to 59 BPM. Both of those shifts indicated my metabolism was actually changing even in the months when the scale was not moving. Having those data points kept me from quitting when the weight wasn’t shifting yet.

3. I simplified supplements dramatically.

Magnesium before bed. Vitamin E — specifically TocoVit. Collagen and gelatin daily. Creatine, three to five grams daily. Progest-E — a topical progesterone — during my luteal phase. And for a period of time, low dose aspirin with breakfast. That’s it. The emphasis stayed on food.

4. I added daily red light therapy.

Every day I used my EMR-TEK red light on my thyroid, face, neck, shoulders, abdomen, and lower back. I track my sleep on a Whoop and I can tell you clearly that my sleep quality improved with consistent red light use. I sleep well now and I did not before, and the red light is part of what changed. Whether that is placebo or the specific mechanism Ray Peat described I genuinely cannot tell you.

5. I stopped punishing myself with exercise.

Walking. Pilates. Gentle strength work. No more grinding through workouts while exhausted trying to earn food I was already restricting. When I eventually quit my job and the stress came down and added consistent Pilates I lost three to five pounds almost immediately without trying. Not from the exercise burning calories. From the stress reduction. I think about this constantly.

6. I got a complete thyroid panel.

Not just TSH. A full panel: TSH, Free T4, Free T3, Reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies including TPO and TgAb. If your doctor tells you your TSH is normal and sends you home, ask for the full picture. Normal and optimal are not the same thing. This single step gave me more useful information than years of generic wellness advice ever did.

What I Want To Be Honest About

It took a full year to feel clearly better. Six months in I was still in what I can only describe as an estrogen purge. Acne. A rosacea-like response. Histamine and allergy-like symptoms. Itchiness. Things I had not experienced before that I initially found alarming.

But here is what I held onto: those symptoms were new. And new symptoms after significant hormonal changes are often a sign that something is shifting. My body was processing and eliminating excess estrogen that had been stored and accumulating for years — from birth control, from pregnancies, from xenoestrogen exposure. That process is not comfortable. It takes time. And most people quit before it resolves because nobody warns them it is going to get uncomfortable first.

Six months in I was annoyed. But I also knew the purge symptoms meant something was actually happening. So I stayed.

A year later: hair growing back thicker than it has ever been. Skin clear. Energy different. Resting heart rate 59 BPM. Waking temperature mid 98s. Sleeping well. More emotionally regulated than I have been in years.

I don’t know which piece of this protocol was responsible for which result. I am not going to pretend I do. What I know is that I did all of it consistently and my body responded.

If You Want To Start Somewhere

Don’t try to do all of this at once. Pick one thing.

If you are constantly tired and restricting carbohydrates, start eating them. If you have never had a complete thyroid panel, get one. If you are drinking black coffee on an empty stomach every morning, add some milk and honey and see what happens. If you want to eat like you actually care about your body — start with a carrot and a Friday oyster and go from there.

The goal is not a perfect protocol. The goal is to stop treating your body like the enemy and start giving it what it needs to function.

Next month I am going to talk about xenoestrogen exposure specifically — what it is, where it actually hides, and the specific swaps I made in my beauty and home routine that I think made a real difference. It is less overwhelming than it sounds. I promise.

And honestly, if a chick who genuinely believed kale was the answer to everything can pivot to eating potatoes and honey before bed, anyone can.

Products mentioned: EMR-TEK red light · TocoVit Vitamin E · Progest-E · Whoop · Force of Nature ancestral blend beef

Nothing here is sponsored or gifted. I bought all of it myself.

The day we fired our marketing company I felt nothing.

No guilt. No second guessing. No middle of the night wondering if we made the right call. Just math. Six thousand dollars a month, no measurable return, contract terminated. I went to bed that night and slept like a person who made a completely obvious decision and was at peace with it.

The same quarter, I published an essay I had cried over for an entire day. Ugly cried. The kind where you have to take breaks because you can’t see the screen anymore. I went back to edit it and had to stop. I thought it was one of the most moving things I had ever written. A complete window into something true and private and hard.

The views were good. But the DMs were quieter than usual. No one wrote to say “I needed this.” No forwards. No “this is exactly it.” Just silence from the people I thought would feel it most.

That is the difference between a profit business and a passion business in three paragraphs. And if you are building something right now, or thinking about it, understanding that difference before you start might be the thing that saves you.

Last month I gave you four questions to answer before you start anything. If you haven’t done that yet, go back and do it first. This series builds. The homework matters.

First, let’s define the terms

A profit business is one you build because you identified a gap in the market and knew you could fill it better than the people currently filling it. You don’t have to love it. You don’t have to feel called to it. You just have to be smarter, more strategic, and more willing to do the unglamorous work than your competition.

We started Champagne Clean because we did the research and found that most residential cleaning companies churned through clients and cleaners, paid poorly, had almost no marketing strategy, and in some cases were still using fax machines. Service based businesses are not sexy. They are not the kind of thing you announce at a dinner party and watch people lean in with excitement. But they have great margins when you run them correctly and the bar to clear is often embarrassingly low. We did not start Champagne Clean because we love cleaning. If you saw my house, you would unfortunately know this. We started it because we saw a gap and knew we could fill it.

A passion business is different. It is trying to build income doing something you love so much you would do it anyway. A chef who wants to become a private chef. An artist who paints because they cannot not paint. A writer who, ahem, has things she needs to say and genuinely cannot help but say them. What keeps a passion business going is not the anticipated margins. It is the pull of the work itself. The fact that a bad day at it still feels better than a good day at something that doesn’t matter to you.

The distinction matters because these two types of businesses require completely different things from you—emotionally, operationally, and in terms of what you need to sustain you through the hard parts.

What a profit business actually feels like from the inside

Everything at Champagne Clean is a number.

Revenue. Margins. Client retention. Cleaner retention. Recurring revenue versus one time cleans. Hiring rate. Firing rate. We are a seasonal business so a bad month is not a bad month—it is a data point compared against the same period last year. What matters is whether March 2026 performed better than March 2025, by how much, and why.

When something isn't working we diagnose it and fix it. When we were paying six thousand dollars a month to a marketing company that wasn't generating ROI we stopped paying them and started running our own Facebook ads. This meant I got filmed in Champagne Clean branded gear in our own house, which has since made me the kind of locally recognizable that I did not sign up for and cannot undo. People have stopped me at the farmers market. Someone recognized me at my doctor’s office. Fame is not for the weak. The decision to cut the marketing company took about twenty minutes and I felt nothing making it except mildly relieved. The Facebook ads have paid for themselves many times over. Now, my dignity has not fully recovered but we're working on it.

This is what people don’t tell you about profit businesses: the emotional detachment is a feature, not a flaw. It is what allows you to make clear decisions quickly without the kind of second guessing that costs you money and sleep. The business is not you. It is a thing you built that either works or needs to be fixed. You look at the numbers. You fix what needs fixing. You move on.

That said, nobody tells you about the garage.

Because we don’t have an office, we used to run test cleans and store all our supplies out of our house. Our one-car garage was packed to the ceiling with cleaning equipment for twenty employees. Ben spent nights packing cleaner bags, fixing vacuums, managing inventory while our kids were asleep. We had strangers in our home constantly for test cleans—background checked, but still strangers, in our space, with our children. It is not glamorous. It is not the version of entrepreneurship anyone puts on their vision board.

Now we have a storage unit, an operations manager, and a cleaner who handles inventory. We got there. But we got there through a lot of nights in a very crowded garage first.

What a passion business actually feels like from the inside

Last week I spent an entire day crying while writing an essay called Three Thousand Miles Away.

Ugly crying. Taking breaks. Coming back to edit and having to stop because I couldn’t get through a paragraph. I thought it was one of the most powerful things I had ever written. The views were solid. But the DMs were quieter. No one wrote to say this changed something for them. It just sat there, doing its thing, without the response I had expected from something that cost me that much emotional currency to write.

Meanwhile, I wrote I Quit in under an hour. Just me, describing a normal overwhelming Tuesday—on a Zoom call I barely understood while my toddler was having a full psychological event in the background, realizing something had to change. I thought it was okay. Decent, if not a little bit rushed.

It became my most read essay by four hundred percent.

What this taught me: in a passion business, what moves you and what moves your audience are not always the same thing. You cannot always predict what lands. You publish it anyway. You stay consistent anyway. You sit with the quiet after the essay you cried over and then you write another one. That is the job.

And then there are the other days. The days the words don’t come and the deadline is tomorrow and you have two kids and a full time job and it is 11pm and you are staring at a blank document and, oh my God, why did I commit to two essays a week like a complete sociopath? I am a perfectionist. I kick myself over a typo I catch after publishing. I would rather pull an all nighter than put out something I’m not proud of. There were weeks I stole hours during the work day to write because there was simply no other time.

I forced myself every single time. Because I know my writing has value. And I know the only way it reaches anyone is if I keep doing it and keep putting it in front of people.

But here is the part that actually stung.

The hardest moments building aMuseofGemini were not the writer’s block or the exhaustion or the essay that didn’t land the way I hoped. The hardest moments were the silence from people I expected to show up.

Friends who didn’t subscribe. Family who didn’t share it. People I had championed loudly and without hesitation who scrolled past like it wasn’t there. That stings in a way that a stranger’s indifference simply doesn’t. You put something real and vulnerable into the world and the people closest to you respond with quiet.

I will tell you what I have come to believe about that silence.

When people whisper about what you’re doing, or go quiet when you put yourself out there, it usually means you are onto something. The things that make people uncomfortable are almost always the things worth saying. And the audience that finds you, the strangers who DM you at midnight to say this was exactly what I needed, will matter more to you than any like from someone who knew you before.

Ben has always encouraged me to speak my uncomfortable truth, even when it means people we know might find it uncomfortable. He saw early on—back in 2018 when I was writing about very difficult and personal things—how many women were reaching out privately to say it changed something for them. Hundreds of DMs. That kind of impact is not something you walk away from. That kind of support from a partner is not small either, and it is something I will come back to later in this series because it deserves its own full conversation.

The safety net nobody talks about

Just because you love something does not mean anyone will pay for it.

I say that not to discourage you but because I think it is the most honest and useful thing I can tell you. Loving what you do is a starting point. What you build on top of it — the consistency, the willingness to keep going through the quiet — that is the actual business.

I have the fortune of Champagne Clean as a safety net. We do not need aMuseofGemini to generate income right now. The passion business gets to breathe because the profit business is holding its weight. Not everyone has that and I want to be honest about the fact that it matters.

If you are building a passion business without a safety net, here is what I would tell you:

You need a supportive partner. Not someone who is nice about it on good days. Someone who is genuinely on board with the risk, who understands what you are building and believes in it, who will be in your corner when it feels stupid to keep going. The entrepreneurial life is hard. Doing it without someone in your corner is a different and harder version of it.

You need a real runway. Not a vague sense of one. An actual number. How long can you sustain this before it needs to generate income? Write it down. Know it exactly.

And you need to take calculated risks. When Ben quit his job, Champagne Clean was bringing in nine thousand dollars in revenue. After margins, after taxes, after five employees who could quit or not show up on any given day, we were taking home fifteen hundred dollars that month. We had a newborn. No childcare. No local family. My salary floated us while we figured out what needed to be better and fixed it.

If we could do it under those conditions anyone can. But only if they are willing to do the one thing most people aren’t: stay in it long enough for it to work.

How to figure out which one you’re building

Can you make decisions about this without taking them personally?
If yes, you might be building a profit business. If changing direction feels like betraying something, you are probably building a passion business. Neither is wrong. But they require different things from you.

What is your actual safety net?
Not the aspirational version. The real one. If this doesn’t work in twelve months, what happens? If the answer is catastrophic, you need a longer runway, a more conservative risk, or a profit business running alongside the passion one. There is no shame in building the safety net first. That is actually the smart order of operations.

Are you willing to stay when nobody is watching yet?
Passion businesses are built in obscurity first. The audience comes later, and later is longer than anyone tells you it will be. Can you keep going when the people closest to you are quiet? Can you write the next essay after the one that didn’t land? Can you pack the cleaner bags in the garage at eleven pm and believe it is going somewhere?

If yes — you are built for this.

If you’re not sure — stay anyway and find out. Most people discover they are more capable than they thought once they stop waiting for permission to begin.

The thing I want you to take away

I would not trade either business for the other.

Champagne Clean taught me how to think without feeling. How to look at a problem and solve it without making it about me. How to terminate a contract and sleep well that night because the math was clear and the decision was obvious.

aMuseofGemini taught me that the essay I cried over for eight hours and the one I dashed off in an hour can both matter deeply to someone — just to different people at different moments. That consistency is the whole strategy. That an audience is built one honest sentence at a time and there are no shortcuts and I do not actually want shortcuts because the slow build is where you figure out what you are actually made of.

They are not competing. They are in conversation. The profit business gives me the freedom to build the passion business without desperation. The passion business gives me a reason to keep going that has nothing to do with margins.

Figure out which one you are building. Then build it like you mean it.

Your homework this month

Write down which type of business you are building and why. One paragraph. Be honest — not aspirational, honest. If you cannot answer it cleanly, that is useful information. Sit with it until you can.

If you are building a passion business: what is your safety net? Write that down too. A real number, a real timeline. Not a vague sense of one. The actual thing you would fall back on if this took longer than you planned. Know it exactly before you need it.

Bring both answers with you next month.

Next month: The Research — how to validate your idea before you spend a dollar, and what we learned about our competition that anyone can apply to any industry.

I asked Ben tonight if he thought I would one day run out of things to write about.

“Does Taylor Swift run out of things to write songs about?” he replied.

To be honest, I’m not sure if that was a compliment or a diagnosis, but I suppose that’s a problem for a different day.

Anyway.

I have a confession: I'm a keeper of many secrets, most of which will come out eventually. One of them isn't much of a secret if you know me personally—I'm what some people would call "woo-woo."

I believe in the supernatural.

I believe that cats are interdimensional.
I believe human creativity is channeled from our higher selves, who I picture as mildly judgmental but ultimately on our side.
I believe we are given signs on a daily basis if we actually stop and pay attention.

And I believe this week, I’m going to enter a portal.

Oh, you’re still here?

Wow, ok—so portal, let me explain.

In my 40 years of life, I feel as though I have lived a thousand lifetimes. I look back to who I was at seven and at fourteen. At twenty two and thirty. I don’t recognize any of those versions of myself.

I barely recognize the lives I lived. Sometimes, I think back to a place I once was—a newborn in Alaska, flying a kite in kindergarten in Carmel Valley, boarding school in Rhode Island, college in California, the weird, bizarre misadventures that occurred in between—and it’s like I’m reading a fiction novel instead of moving through my own book of memories.

The memories seem so far away, so distant. Pieces will be there but it’s like the belief that it happened is foggy.

What I do remember—and if I’m being honest—what played into much of my anxiety as a young person, was what the change felt like. The growth, the becoming.

The portals.

I remember how it felt before I was about to walk through one.

It’s like being on the edge of a cliff. And looking down.

Will you fall to your death?
Will you survive?
Will someone or something catch you?
Will you fly?

You anticipate every emotion. Some that never come. Change can do that, especially when that change feels risky or unsafe.

As a child, I walked through many portals. Many were not of my own choosing. I was not awarded a choice on whether or not we would move as a kid.

Except for just once.

Indiana—Summer 1997

We pulled up into the Meijer parking lot. I sat next to my six-year-old brother in his car seat, riddled with Cheerios and stale McDonalds french fries, while my mom spoke to my dad tensely on her hilariously large cell phone. Back then we called it a “car phone.”

We were one of the first families that I remember having a car phone. I had spent the entirety of that last year in Indiana waiting for the phone to ring—the landline, the car phones—all in anticipation of one thing: hearing my dad on the other end.

He had spent the year working all over the country. Most weekends he would fly home. Sometimes he didn’t. At one point, he even started renting an apartment in Manhattan and Chicago because he was spending so much time in those respective cities.

It was a strange time. It was tense. My mom was often stressed. Often short with us.

I remember worrying, perhaps unreasonably, that one day my dad just wasn’t going to come back. Fortunately, he always did.

We had spent the last year anticipating a move. To New York. The East coast was foreign to my family. We didn’t have people there. I remember visiting the schools and being called on by the teacher. It made me anxious even though I knew the answer. Like they were trying to point out that I didn’t belong.

It didn’t matter that I was sad. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to. We were going and that was that.

My parents had even started building a house in Pound Ridge, something my mom pointed out to my dad with a look of defeat in her eyes as she twisted at the waist in the driver’s seat as she turned to face her kids—six and ten years old.

She said work had given my dad a choice. We could either move to New York.

Or we could move to Chicago.

And then she did something she had never done before. She asked us what we wanted.

My brother was six. He was in a car seat. Did I mention he was covered in cereal? He wanted whatever came with a juice box and a nap. So they were really asking me.

I’ll never forget my mom’s eyes looking at me and nodding. As if to say, it’s up to you, babe.

And for the first time in my young life—a life that had largely happened to me, a life of new schools and packed boxes and waiting by the phone—I had a say.

I chose Chicago.

We had family there. Cousins. It was closer to Indiana, which meant the life we were leaving—the life I still mourn to this day—wasn’t entirely out of reach. It felt like the better cliff. If there is such a thing.

But if I'm honest, those were just the reasons a ten-year-old gives when someone asks her to explain a feeling. Reasons are usually just the story we tell afterward to make a feeling sound responsible.

They listened.

We chose Chicago.

Four years later, on a Tuesday morning in September, I sat in my boarding school common room and watched the world change on a television screen.

My dad’s apartment building in Manhattan, damaged in the collapse.

He had worked in the Twin Towers.

Nobody in that Meijer parking lot knew. Nobody knew that a tense conversation on a car phone—in a parking lot in Indiana, between two parents just trying to figure out their chaotic lives—had already decided something much larger than any of us understood.

A ten year old had made the call.

And she hadn’t even known what she was doing.

I didn’t know it then, sitting in that parking lot with my hand barely raised, that I had just made the most consequential decision of my young life. I just knew it felt right. It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t strategic. Just right, in the way your body knows something before your brain can put together a sound argument.

I wouldn’t have called it intuition back then. I didn’t have the words for any of it. But that was the first time I learned to trust a feeling I couldn’t explain—and somehow, it rerouted the entire trajectory of my family without anyone realizing what was happening in real time.

And it would not be the last time.

October 2021

I wasn’t looking for a job.

I loved working at Morningstar. I knew what I was doing there. I felt challenged every day. I had met my husband there. Twenty Morningstar friends came to our wedding. Morningstar wasn’t just a company. It was family. It still is.

So when a recruiter named Kaitlin messaged me on LinkedIn, I almost didn’t respond. I’d gotten messages like hers a hundred times before. I never answered them.

Why would I?

We had just gotten married. We had just moved. I had just gotten approved to work remote, something Morningstar rarely did. So, really, why would I rock the metaphorical boat? A new job was the last thing I (and frankly my accountant) needed.

I’m still not sure what was different about this one—her wording, the timing, some frequency I wasn’t tuned into yet. But for the first time in my career, I wrote back.

We had a call. She told me about being a single mom, about how the company had worked around her life instead of asking her to work around it. There was something in the way she talked about it. It didn’t feel like a sales pitch. It was just her truth.

Then came the first interview, with a hiring manager named Ryan. He tried to keep it professional, by the book, and so did I, for about four minutes. We found out we had the same sense of humor almost immediately, and the interview turned into something closer to a conversation I didn’t want to end.

Then the panel—Betsy, Aaron, Jason. And the whole time, some part of me kept thinking, this seems too good to be true. But everything in me kept saying keep going.

I was not pulling toward this job with logic. Logic would have told me to stay exactly where I was, in the place that already loved me back. But something else entirely—something quieter, perhaps even stubborn—kept pulling me toward Camunda anyway.

The final interview was a presentation to a leadership panel. I was so nervous that morning that I genuinely did not know if I was going to throw up or pass out first. I did neither, somehow. Thank God.

And then the offer came.

The pay was a hundred and fifty percent of what I was making. I cried when I read the email.

Why am I so emotional? I thought.

I didn’t cry because of the number. Not really. I cried because some part of me already knew I was going to say yes, and saying yes meant walking away from a place that had given me my husband, my friends, my whole adult identity up to that point.

It didn’t make sense. Portals rarely do.

I didn’t understand, but I walked through anyway.

A week after I accepted the job, I started feeling sick.

Not nervous-sick. And not sick-sick. This was different. The kind of 24/7 hangover sick that makes you run to CVS and buy every test on the shelf.

Eventually I took a pregnancy test, and got the shock of my life.

Clark.

So that’s why I had been so emotional reading that offer letter. My body knew before I did. Classic. It usually does.

He wasn’t planned. I was terrified. I hadn’t even started the job yet—I didn’t know I had been pregnant during the interviews, and the thought of it kept me up at night. Surely they’d think I’d hidden it. Surely they’d feel tricked. They’d probably call me an asshole.

They didn’t. Not even a little. When I told my manager and my team, they were thrilled for me—genuinely, immediately, without a flicker of the hesitation I’d braced myself for.

I didn’t know it yet, but I had just walked through a portal inside a portal.

Because if it hadn’t been Camunda—if I had stayed somewhere safe and familiar and known—I wouldn’t have had five months of maternity leave, twice. I wouldn’t have had time to heal from two C-sections. Time to come up for air through postpartum depression that I wasn’t prepared for either time and that I didn’t even know happened until looking back on it years later. I wouldn’t have had time I didn’t know to ask for because I didn’t know it was something I was allowed to need.

And there’s more, of course.

That salary, the one that felt almost embarrassing to accept, the one I cried over for reasons I couldn’t fully explain—I mean mostly hormones but whatever—it gave us room to take a risk we never could have afforded otherwise.

In 2022, after Clark was born, my husband left his corporate job to take a chance on our small family business.

That business is now seven figures in annual revenue.

None of it would exist—not the maternity leave, not the healing, not Ben’s leap, not the business, not the version of our life we’re living right now with our two beautiful boys— if I hadn’t answered a LinkedIn message I almost ignored.

A single yes, in October of 2021, to a job I wasn’t looking for, quietly rerouted everything that came after it.

I didn’t know that “yes” was a portal either.

I just knew I had to walk through it.

What’s the saying? If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan.

So here I am.

Wednesday is my last day.

I know what comes next. Not because I planned it—I never plan anything—but because I feel it coming, the way my joints ache right before it rains. Some people read the sky. I read whatever that is.

But this time? This time the forecast is clear:

I’ll write here, on this strange little corner of the internet I’ve come to believe in more than I believe in most things. I’ll work alongside my family, in the business that built me before I knew I was being built. I’ll parent my two boys, and maybe—because who knows, we’re insane people—there will be more of them someday, more small chaos to love.

But knowing what I’ll be doing isn’t the same as knowing what it’s for or why.

And I’m done needing to know that part.

Because here’s what twenty-some portals have taught me: seeing 4:44 on the kitchen clock, the cats, the song that comes on at exactly the right moment, the cousin who randomly says the one thing I needed to hear—it’s all the same language, if you’re willing to listen to it. My higher self has never once led me somewhere just to abandon me there. Neither have the friends I can’t see. Call it intuition, call it signs, call it whatever makes you comfortable. I call it mine.

A tense phone call in a parking lot, between two parents just trying to survive a year apart, became the reason my father is still alive to read this. A ten-year-old girl who didn’t yet have a word for intuition still knew exactly which way to point.

I trusted it then without knowing I was doing it.

I’m choosing to trust it now, eyes wide open.

So who’s to say what Wednesday is actually setting in motion. Who’s to say what’s quietly being rerouted—four years from now, or forty—in a way I won’t fully understand until I’m an old woman somewhere, looking back at this exact moment the way I now look back at a Meijer parking lot in 1997.

Everything—and I mean everything—happens for a reason. Is that cliché? Maybe. Who cares? Cliché just means it’s a truth that’s been said so many times we stopped feeling it.

I’ve stopped fighting my intuition. I’ve stopped swimming against the current.

I’ve stopped swimming at all.

And the moment I let myself float, I realized the current already knew exactly where it was taking me.

The portal doesn’t ask me to understand it. It only asks me to trust it.

So this week, with eyes open, hands steady, heart loud,

I walk through.

There was a time, not too long ago, that I thrived in these environments.

There’s a whole side of me who loves a party, meeting new people, the thrill of whether I can quickly pinpoint a new person’s sense of humor and land a joke like a toddler who somehow gets every single drop in the toilet on the first try.

Then there’s the other side of me—the one who wouldn’t want to say she hates people per se, but who also wouldn’t want to say she doesn’t want to move out into the middle of nowhere with a few select people and never see the rest of humanity ever again?

It’s fine.

Saturday, June 20th 2026

Maybe it’s not that bad, I thought to myself.

I’m just out of practice—practice socializing.

I don’t socialize. At all.

Well not with anyone other than my husband, two toddlers and the plethora of college-aged babysitters who still haven’t quite been able to explain to me what the fuck “6-7” means.

But don’t worry—when I make a good dinner, my three year old tells me his mac n’ cheese is “so fire, bro” so at least someone’s learning something from the Gen-Z constituents in our house?

I look in the mirror and then at the clock on my phone.

Christ.

I have exactly one hour to figure out how to look like I’m not homeless. Or at least not the shitty version of Cinderella?

You know the vibe: Dressed in rags, getting yelled at to clean something or fix something or “Hey Mom, hold still while I throw this ball at your face real quick.”

“Did I shower yesterday?” I ask audibly to myself in the bathroom.

“No.” Ben chimes from the other room.

Rude.

I walk out from the bathroom and into our bedroom, my button up smock dress unbuttoned from the top to my waist, so it just hangs there like the remains of a dead conjoined twin on my hips.

“On a scale of 1-10 how fun do we think this will be?” I said while hunched over dramatically, sulking exaggeratedly.

Ben just gives me a blank stare.

“Well, there will be donuts,” he said in a way that was both encouraging and also questioning if that would suffice to get me to stop complaining.

I fucking love a donut.

We used to be fun.

Naturally we’re running late because I stared into the abyss while showering and somehow 45 minutes passed me by and I’m still unclear as to what I was doing or if I even washed anything on my body.

It wasn’t a hair wash day, thank GOD.

I rush to do a quick curl of my hair and perform my daily speed makeup routine that makes me feel equal parts like a piece of shit and equal parts like I should do a YouTube tutorial that approximately 1 person would watch—on accident.

It’s hot out. A short summer dress sounds perfect.

As I peruse through my closet looking for something cute yet comfortable, I look down at my legs. I have somehow shaved just one of them.

How.

One could literally be a perfectly tanned leg in a Gillette commercial and the other is giving Sasquatch.

Maybe she’s born with it.
Maybe it’s mental illness!

Then I lift up my arm to put on deodorant.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Who shaves only one half of their body?

Again, HOW.

Short dress is out. I don’t need the neighborhood talking about a BigFoot sighting. So I throw a green dress on that goes down to my ankles.

Will I be sweating? Yes.
But will I complain about it the whole time? Also yes.

Nothing will make you stress about showing up on time like a party you don’t want to go to.

And while most block parties are more “come and go as you please,” our street does not mess around. This, my friends, is a traveling block party.

The theme of the party is Golf. There will be 9 holes and 9 houses. Each with food and a signature adult beverage. Some with activities for the kids.

We rush out the door with Clark to try and get to the first house by 1pm. Naturally we roll up at 1:20.

The house is literally two doors down. 100 feet away. 20 minutes late. I can’t…

Hole/House 1:

The first hole went exactly as we expected. We gravitated towards the neighbors we knew and made exactly zero new friends.

Killing it.

But we did manage to eat some donuts and judge people from afar. In a nice way?

Over 90 people RSVPd “yes” to the traveling block party. We both cannot believe how many young families like ours live on our street. We also cannot believe we are outside of our house. Talking to people over the age of three.

Many we recognize and many have nicknames we’ve given them that they don’t know. Mostly from five years of sitting on our porch observing.

“That one guy and pregnant girl with the Golden Doodle.”
”People on the corner lot that we haven’t introduced ourselves to yet because we suck.”
“Tom & Jerry.”—We have met them exactly once. Their names are Tom and Sherry. They introduced themselves, made direct eye contact, and told us very specifically and with a completely straight face to please not call them Tom and Jerry. We have never called them anything else.

“FORE!” The party hosts yell. This is our cue that 30 minutes have passed and it’s time to go to the next hole.

Hole/House 2:

“Ok, we can meet some new people here,” I say to Ben confidently and we walk to the house directly across the street from us. The next two houses are our friends’ houses, so we need to let them host and start to mingle.

I make an attempt.

And by make an attempt, I mean that I stand as far away from the crowd as possible, put on my sunglasses so nobody knows where I’m looking and let my resting bitch face do the work. Cause, listen, if anyone is brave enough to approach, then they are probably insane enough to be my friend.

Naturally, I am quickly joined by our sweet, older neighbor we know well. She’s in her mid-70s and loves our boys dearly. She’s like having a grandmother on the block who dotes on all the kids—gives them Easter Baskets, Christmas presents, etc.

Eventually another couple comes up to us and starts chatting. We exchange pleasantries.

The weather, mostly. Always the fucking weather.

Then someone asks us where we live, and I motion to our house which is sitting directly across the street.

“Oh sure, we love that house!” the wife says genuinely.

“Well too bad our basement is filled with shit from a sewage backup right now and it’s baking in the heat,” I say.

I see her face and try to recover.

“Heh. Old houses, amiright?”

Why am I like this?

FORE!!!

Hole/House 3:

Ok—this is the house, I tell myself. We are going to have a few sips of a drink and introduce ourselves to the people we always see walking but never speak to.

I walk up to the drink dispenser, and pour it into my cup. I sip it casually. Just when there’s an opening into a conversation with the couple that walks their dog by our house every day, I turn around and walk up and into the backyard to “check on Clark” who is playing with two new friends he just made in the sandbox. Because of course he made friends already.

I stay in the backyard with them the whole 30 minutes. I’m sitting in the sandbox. To be fair, I did make two new friends. They were 7 and 9 years old.

Whatever.

FORE!

Holes/Houses 4 & 5

We had spent the first three holes close to our house where Ryder, our almost 2 year old, was blissfully sleeping in his crib. The next stretch of houses was a 10 minute walk away, so we waited for him to wake up before we caught up with the group.

Once Ryder entered the picture, however, meeting people became even harder. Maybe this was by design subconsciously.

Because Clark? He’s our rule follower. He would color inside the lines without having to be asked.

Ryder? He says fuck your rules and colors on your walls while giving you the middle finger and smiling maniacally.

Ben and I spend the next two holes taking turns managing the Ryder tornado—mostly just making sure he didn’t dart into the street or walk straight into a stranger’s house—while the other binge ate cucumber sandwiches and lurked behind trees as to not have to talk to anyone.

FORE!

Hole/House 6

It was getting kind of late. It was already 3:45pm and we had been playing social dodgeball since 1pm.

I should have stocked up on donuts from Hole 1.

And then, the unthinkable happened.

As I walked towards the tent where food and drinks were being served, I tripped. And as I tripped the largest, most booze-filled margarita fell into my mouth.

And would you believe it? It happened again! Twice?

When did I become so clumsy?

FORE!

Hole/House 7

I am a new woman.

Correction. I am a woman buzzed for the first time in months.

“We are so back, baby!”

Ben is equal parts delighted for me and equal parts concerned. He is now responsible for both children.

As the group walks up to the 7th house and stops, I happen to stop next to a woman, around my age, wearing a super cute chartreuse dress. It suits her and her hair perfectly. She clearly knows color theory.

“This is super cute. I wish I could pull off this color,” I say.

“Aw, thank you! I got my color analysis done earlier this year!”

Nailed it.

“True Spring!” she says.

“Ah, yes. True Autumn,” I say motioning to my olive-green dress.

Hannah, my new friend, and I talk for the entire 7th hole. I learn about her four kids, her husband. I learn she’s also turning 40 this month. Not a Gemini but a Gemini-Cancer cusp, which is still totally acceptable in my book and something we even discuss.

We talk a bit about work. I tell her that I’m about to quit. She claps enthusiastically. We share some of the hard things we’ve been carrying in parenthood. Not in a sad way, more in a “you get it” type of way.

She’s open about loss in a way that is disarming. In exactly the way I’ve been craving people to be. We are soon joined by one of my neighborhood besties, Katie, and a few other women, many who all know each other because their kids are in school together. The school Clark may attend in the fall.

And for the first time in what feels like forever, I have a sense of community.

Fore.

Hole/House 8

I walk over with Ben and some of the new friends we’ve made.

“This is the last hole!” someone says.

Last hole? This was supposed to be a round of 9?

“8 holes of golf? What clown organized this?” I say poking fun.

One of our new friends shoots me a serious look.

“I did,” they say, straight-faced.

“We’ll workshop this next time,” I say holding my breath.

Everyone lets out a big laugh. And I exhale out of relief.

As the crowd dwindles down on the last hole, I gather our kids and motion to Ben that it’s time to start the 15-minute walk back to our house.

Before we go, I motion to Hannah and we come in for a quick hug.

“Have a great 40th birthday,” I say warmly.

“Thank you! I hope we see you in the fall!” she says smiling.

We walked home that night, kids in tow, slightly sunburned and smelling like margaritas.

“We did it,” I say to Ben.

We showed up. We made friends. We are so back.

I still cannot tell if the lesson is to drink more or something more profound. Honestly? Might be the same thing.

I then immediately informed him that my social battery was fully depleted, I would be unavailable for human interaction until further notice, and that further notice would likely be September.

He nodded. He already knew.