Third things have their own languages, though. My favorite part of being with book people is not direct literary discussion (often disenchanting) so much as the intimacy of allusion. When Joe and I are on one of our sporadic dates, usually in daytime Amherst, one of us will suggest going to “pay our respects,” which means taking a walk through the cemetery where Emily Dickinson is buried.

The first time we walked there, we didn’t realize it was the Dickinson cemetery, although their family home is a short walk away. We randomly came upon the Dickinson plot, which is accessible through its own small gate in the larger cemetery and has become a sort of shrine, where people leave notes and offerings on Emily and Lavinia’s gravestones. The first time we happened upon it, there was a group of (quiet, respectful) young people gathered inside doing drugs, I assume, since that’s what I used to do in graveyards when I was young and even now prefer to be subtly stoned for the experience.

The second time we came, there was no one else at the Dickinson plot, but there was a small group in historic costume at another nearby grave. On seeing us at Emily’s grave, one of this group complained: “She gets all the likes and subscribes.” This is so funny it feels scripted--maybe they were on a graveyard tour? It reminds me of the funniest Dickinson poem: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Lines for our times:

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Indeed there are much bigger Nobodies in the cemetery than Emily now. I’m most interested in the really old graves belonging to children, some of which have dolls beside them--who put them there? Some gravestones are so old they’re hard to read, and I was thinking of doing a rubbing to decipher one, but a search on how to do this led me to the Association of Gravestone Studies, also located in Amherst, which warns that this can damage old graves and advises using mirrors or inverted photography instead. Maybe they were the ones on the graveyard tour.

Another thing we do on dates is browse used bookstores. Good ones nearby are the basement of Amherst Books, Montague Bookmill, and Grey Matter Books, where I found a cool book on Nabokov’s synesthetic alphabet. (I think Eva has synesthesia.) But my favorite used bookstore is my friend Alex’s Lost Time Books in beautiful Brattleboro, Vermont, less than an hour’s drive from here. I met Alex 20+ years ago through working in DC indie bookstores, and while he has been selling books online since then, he now has his own shop in downtown Brattleboro, and it’s a delight.

Because Joe and I are VIPs, Alex opened the store for us on a day it was closed, and we tried to spend enough money to make that worth it. It wasn’t hard because the store is expertly curated and a pleasure to browse thanks to details like handmade pine shelves and original Proust art. It’s always a trip for me to get Alex and Joe together since they’re each reigning figures from different eras of my life, and we all share books as a third thing (fourth thing? they also both like soccer, sports being a common third thing among men).

Alex was reading David Szalay’s Flesh, and described it as being Eichmann in Jerusalem about sex, so Joe and I ended up reading it, too, and thought it was excellent. (Still need to get Alex’s final take--Flesh dinner party?) The Eichmann thing had me laughing; they share a similar abdication of responsibility, you could say.

Other books I’ve made Joe read so we can vaguely refer to them later are Lincoln in the Bardo but not Vigil, although I also read Vigil, but Lincoln in the Bardo is much better, and I’m sure why neither of us read it before now except maybe due to pettiness over George Saunders pivoting from short stories to novels and becoming too popular. I was reading Vigil in a library play area shortly after it came out then looked up to see another mom also reading Vigil. We laughed; she said it was her first Saunders; I told her to read Lincoln in the Bardo. I feel like he might need to leave society to write another book that good, but instead he’s on Substack and adapting Lincoln in the Bardo into a movie starring Tom Hanks.

Joe’s now reading book one of On the Calculation of Volume, a Danish series about a woman reliving the same day, which I thought I was going to like more. It’s not about parenting but felt suffocating to me in the same way parenting sometimes does. We even regularly clear out our staples at the local grocery store! I’d like to know how it resolves but not enough to read all seven volumes (maybe Joe will; he loves Groundhog Day). I still have to finish My Struggle, which is regretfully more my thing.

The rest of this newsletter will be about kids’ books. I was also going to do a section about some of the dark, solitary reading I’ve been doing (mostly horror and true crime) but that’s off topic so will save for a future update.

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My kids have obsessive compulsive relationships with certain books, which I find highly relatable. The best way to read a lot is to make it an addiction!

Jojo is 5 and loves a wide range of books during the day, but at bedtime for 6+ months will only allow us to read her Dory Fantasmagory books. It’s testament to how good and funny they are that this has not become completely unbearable. She clearly relates a lot to Dory, who’s also the youngest child and a spitfire, and I relate to Dory’s mom, whose exhausted parenting efforts are so real. I enjoyed this profile on author Abby Hanlon, which inspired me to start transcribing some of the things I hear my kids say while they play. Kid play is wild.

Dory owes a lot to Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, which Eva is currently rereading, but Jojo only wants Dory. The only books with which I’ve been able to get her to briefly break from Dory are Stella & Marigold, charming story collections about super sweet sisters. These books are by the same author/illustrator as the Ivy & Bean books, although the older sister in Ivy & Bean is much meaner, even meaner than the older sister in Dory, which I think turns Jojo off.

Both my girls were also into the Swedish series, My Happy Life, which despite the title is quite sad! These books deal with parental death and near-death, depression, mean girls, and bullying. None of this really comes into play until the second book, so you could just read the first if you want a more sheltered experience. The rest of the books are harder to find (I’ve been getting them from the library and Thriftbooks), probably for this reason, but since death and mean girls have been topics we’ve dealt with recently, I’ve welcomed them, although Jojo (understandably) no longer wants to read them at bedtime after the father got run over.

For Jojo’s fifth birthday we did a book swap, an idea I got originally from ’s newsletter. In lieu of presents we asked guests to bring a kid book they no longer wanted, then everyone got to take a “new” book (or more) home. I felt a little guilty because people brought some really nice hardcover books while we used this as an opportunity to clear out some much less nice ones from our house, but overall it was a success.

Eva is 7 and reading independently, although we still read to her aloud at bedtime. Our current bedtime routine is to read our own books side by side, then I read aloud a chapter of something-- currently Ramona or A Wrinkle in Time, which Joe thought she might like and we’re now both vying to read. For a while, I was having her read aloud a nightly chapter of Henry and Mudge, a delightful early reader series by Cynthia Rylant, who does it all, from picture books to early readers to middle grade. I recently rediscovered and read Eva her story collection, Every Living Thing, which I remember loving in fourth grade. Each story is about a different human-animal relationship, and I was very influenced by both the hermit crab and parrot ones.

Eva’s favorite literary activity is listening to Harry Potter books on her Yoto player, which I’ve begun to regret buying. It’s advertised as a screen-free device for kids of millennials, but the parent needs a smartphone to set it up, so it’s not actually screen-free, and she’s hooked on it the same way we are on our devices, carrying it around all day listening to Harry Potter. At first this was awesome since it filled so much time (some of the audiobooks are 24+ hours) while she did craft projects, and audiobooks are sort of reading, but now she’s listened to all of them multiple times and I’d prefer her to hone her reading skills with the actual books, yet she isn’t interested because the Yoto’s easier.

But recently her Yoto player stopped working, which I haven’t investigated further because I’m kind of glad, even though it will be the second one we’ve gone through, the first one having literally melted while it was charging (to their credit, they immediately got a real person on the chat and sent us a new one the moment I dropped a photo in there). Last night she started reading the first Harry Potter actual book, and it seems to be going well . . .

What are you and/or your loved ones reading? Have you walked through a cemetery recently?

“An Eastern phoebe.”

“That was on the last one.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“It was, I remember.”

“How much do you want to bet?”

“Nothing.” [Long pause] “But I know I’m right.”

Poet Donald Hall wrote of his marriage to Jane Kenyon:

“We did not spend our time gazing into each other’s eyes. [. . .] Most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”

I came across this quote most recently in a piece about and Jon Baptiste’s beautiful farmhouse, which she describes as their third thing. (Suleika also started a newsletter about it called Tunisiana.) My husband and I also have a house we love, but it’s currently inseparable from our young kids, their presence and mess everywhere, and marriages need more than kids as a third thing. While the kids, more than the house, are the source of our contentment, I don’t think it’s good for them to be the constant site of our double attention. That’s too much pressure, like a lover who stares only into your eyes.

Also, if kids are the third thing, then they can’t participate in looking at the third thing, unless they start watching themselves, which I’d like to avoid. So families also need third things, preferably low stakes, amateur things, in other words: hobbies.

Birds aren’t actually low stakes. They’re signs of everything right or wrong with the world -- canaries in the global coal mine. I often think of this essay by Jonathan Franzen (sorry, can’t mention birdwatching without him), which I used to assign my writing students because of how it breaches the gap between low and high stakes, between liking and loving, as he puts it. It’s by falling in love with a small thing--a bird or a child-- that we grasp the stakes of the large things--the natural world, humanity.

I love our local birds (except, possibly, the brown-headed cowbird, which has an unpleasant name and call and is, I recently learned, a brood parasite). But I don’t see myself becoming more than a passive bird watcher. I’m not compelled to travel in search of birds, although I understand that impulse because I have traveled for fish, most notably to La Paz, Mexico to swim with a whale shark. (Joe says swimming with a whale shark is more like hang gliding with geese than birdwatching, but I don’t want to hang glide with geese either.)

Fish, not birds, are the shorthand of my soul. My dreams are full of fish and water—at least, they are when I’m properly connected to myself. In the best dreams, fish swim through the air like birds, although I haven’t had one of those in a while. More often, I dream of forgotten aquariums that I return to with anxiety: will all the fish be dead? They’re not. Usually, they have somehow begun to breed, and I find new species I didn’t introduce. These are dreams about my creative life.

Fish are the most misunderstood pets. I learned how to keep them alive the hard way, which is how most people learn because they’re considered expendable. I had the tragic childhood goldfish (goldfish actually aren’t good for aquariums because they’re vegetarian super poopers that outgrow most tanks and should ideally be kept in ponds) and no one at Petco stopped 20-year-old me from putting two dwarf gouramis in the same uncycled 10-gallon tank, where one promptly bullied the other to death (they’re in the same family as bettas, aka the “fighting fish” sold in cups).

It was the gouramis that sent me off the aquarium deep end. This was in 2003, so my main source of wisdom was the still extant Aquarium Advice message board, where (mostly) patient middle-aged dads talked me through the nitrogen cycle and water changes. The killer gourami lived happily for another year or so, then I replaced him with a magenta betta named Prince. I eventually got a 55-gallon where I kept clown loaches and two pairs of mated angelfish (plus one reject), which outlived many moves and spent their last decade in my parents’ dining room (thanks/sorry, Mom).

When we moved again last year, for hopefully the last time in our kids’ young lives, I comforted Eva (whom I’d already told the previous move would be our last) by telling her she could get a fish in her room. This worked surprisingly well. Just the idea of it was enough to carry her for six months, at which point she started calling me a liar, and I had to get moving.

I set up a 5-gal. for her and a 2.5-gal. (which soon became another 5-gal.) for Jojo, and we welcomed two bettas, Angel (he/him) and Snow White (she/her), into our family in November. They’ve been thriving, thanks to my past mistakes and many advances in the aquarium world. It’s easy to get live plants on Etsy, and bio substrate makes cycling less of an issue. (I recommend Chewy.com, which refunded us for a tank we tried to return and told us to donate it to a “rescue,” aka Eva’s friend who will save another betta from a cup.)

I have mixed feelings about supporting the betta industrial complex, but it’s very rewarding to see how these fish come alive when given a bit more space. Once they know you, they’re fearless, begging like puppies at the glass. Eva said Angel reminds her of a dog and has since gotten over her fear of dogs, which might be a coincidence, but I think is an example of how loving one animal can be a gateway to loving them all.

Meanwhile, Joe, who’s always been a gardener, started self-soothing by watching timelapse aquarium videos set to Erik Satie (soothing and educational). I bought a book called Aquascaping, which he studied, saying he wanted to set up a nano tank in his office. He ended up finding a nice 5-gal. on Etsy, to which I contributed some driftwood, and we decided that this tank should actually be for Snow White, who seemed a bit traumatized in her too small tank in the loud playroom.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to set up a fully planted tank but am always too eager to get to the fish part. Turns out, Joe is my perfect companion in this pursuit. He has many skills that would be useful in an apocalypse, but I met him in the aesthetic fishbowl of a fiction MFA program and apparently love him best when he’s creating new worlds for no reason.

It’s still amazing to me that I can keep small aquatic worlds in my house. Kids, fish, what else can I keep alive? We also have lots of snails and are talking about getting some shrimp. After that, maybe we’ll be ready for a dog?

I was going to also write about our family’s other third thing, books, but this is already long, so maybe I’ll do a reading update next month.

Do you have a third thing? A misunderstood pet? Tell me about it in the comments! Also, if you’re interested in setting up a freshwater aquarium for yourself or your family, drop me your email and I’ll send you my full list of fish geek links.

Shortly after, my mom shared a letter from another former colleague, who recalled being upset over a “lousy” piece she’d brought to an edit. My dad read it and asked if she knew the expression, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” She asked what he meant, and he said, “If you try to make it perfect, you’ll never get anything done. Go for the good.”

In the wake of my dad’s death, I’ve experienced a couple inexplicable “coincidences,” which reinforce my belief (already established) that death is not the ending our materialist culture dismisses it as. This did not feel like one of them. It struck me as a bit cliche. I could vaguely remember my dad saying something like this to me, yet wanted to hold myself to higher standards. Also, he worked in news radio, where there were real time constraints, while I was usually writing fiction, which I could fiddle with forever with minimal consequences. There’s no dead air if you don’t finish a short story.

Also, a discrepancy: Brenda said “better” was the enemy of good, while the other friend said “perfect.” Someone must have been misremembering.

Then I signed up for a paid subscription to ’s newsletter. I’m a fan of her work, plus her latest post was called “On Lost Time,” and I’m also a fan of Proust. In it, Batuman recalls a “French ex” who used to tell her, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” She linked to the phrase’s Wikipedia, where I learned it comes from Voltaire, quoting an Italian proverb in a poem:

Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

(In his writings, a wise Italian/ says that the best is the enemy of the good.)

Here was the third coincidence in a series I could no longer ignore and an explanation for the word discrepancy. Le mieux is directly translated as “the best.” It’s related to the French word for better, meilleur, which derives from the Latin word for better, meliorem (like "ameliorate”). Le mieux could be translated here as “the best,” “perfect,” or “better.” My dad knew French and likely used these translations liberally. Neither of his friends were necessarily misremembering.

My preferred translation is, “Better is the enemy of good.” “Perfect” is an almost meaningless word to me at this point, as I know it’s unattainable, yet that doesn’t stop me from feeling dissatisfied. “The best is the enemy of the good” seems too adversarial: X is the best writer. Y is a good writer. X is the enemy of Y. I’ve definitely framed things like this for myself before, but it’s not true, helpful, or the way my dad meant it.

I also like how “Better is the enemy of good” speaks to the optimization mindset of our tech overlords, whose many “improvements” have made life less rich and meaningful. Putting aside work or writing, most of us are still striving to be better in some way. But what if we’re already good? And what if good is good enough?

Until recent years, when dementia took hold, my dad regularly edited my work. He was often my first--and sometimes only--reader. I took his edits seriously, even if I didn’t listen when he told me better is the enemy of good. So he took things in his own hands and showed me.

At the start of 2009, I was home for the holidays, applying to MFA programs, and in a precarious mental state. I was usually either drinking or hungover, full of hubris or self-loathing. I was applying to at least a dozen different programs to increase my odds of getting into one with funding (don’t go into debt for an MFA). UVa, where Ann Beattie and Deborah Eisenberg taught, had a postmark deadline for January 2nd.

I stayed up the whole night before this date, reworking my writing sample until I was thoroughly disgusted with it. UVa had an acceptance rate of something like 1%, and I knew it was never going to happen. “Fuck it,” I said, “I’m going to bed.”

My dad had just woken up for the day. He forced me to print out my writing sample despite my assurances it was useless. Then I went to bed, and he took my application to the post office and mailed it himself.

A few months later, I was accepted to UVa. It was my only real acceptance, although I later got into another program off the waitlist. But UVa wanted me; Ann Beattie wanted me (I learned later she read my application), a fact that continues to buoy me, even though I don’t feel I lived up to her expectations (she definitely didn’t tell us better is the enemy of good).

My precarious mental state continued while I was at UVa, although my time there changed my life. I read and wrote many things I wouldn’t have otherwise. The degree came with teaching experience and qualification, which is how I supported myself for nearly a decade. And I met Joe, whom I married and had kids with.

None of this would have happened if not for my dad. He lived by his words. He wouldn’t let me sabotage myself to the demon of perfectionism.

Yet even now, long after, I still regularly sabotage myself to the enemy of good, especially with my own writing, although I rarely view it that way. I view it as disillusionment, dissatisfaction, procrastination. It’s all the same, though, an unwillingness to “let go with good.”

So okay, Dad, I hear you. I’ll go for good.

It also feels necessary to point out that this aphorism, while useful in many ways, is not applicable to situations of moral injustice. It’s like when I told Joe about the “let them theory,” which has applications in my personal life, and he said, “It doesn’t work for genocide.”

My dad had a very strong moral code, and I’m glad dementia buffered his awareness of our country and world in recent years. I don’t think he would have been surprised by it, though. I can’t remember the first time he talked to me about Palestine, but it was long before people discussed it as freely as they do now (although attempts to stifle the discussion continue now; they’re just failing. As Rayya Elias said: “The truth has legs. It always stands.”)

At his job, my dad covered the Middle East for many years, so I believed him when he told me about the forced expulsion of Palestinians and the way groups like AIPAC worked to stop him and other journalists from reporting truthfully on it. In retrospect, it’s remarkable he spoke so openly to me about this, as he took journalistic objectivity so seriously he wouldn’t even tell me which presidential candidate he was voting for (as if it weren’t obvious).

Yet he knew what was happening to Palestine1, and our country’s role in it, was wrong. And he told me this at a time when no one else did. I’m also incredibly grateful for that.

In my dad’s death notice, we asked people to contribute to public radio due to the federal cuts and because he helped so many people in public radio. This was my mom’s idea, and it felt right.

Yet if it were up to just me, I would have requested donations to mutual aid groups in Palestine in my dad’s honor. So I’m doing that here. If my dad or his story had an impact on you, please consider donating to Operation Olive Branch, the Sameer Project, or the Zaynab Project. And continue to speak about Palestine, like my dad did, and against the U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinian people.

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The focus of the gentle swim class was getting comfortable in the water. No skill was considered more important than this, and since my kids spent each class getting comfortable, they did not learn many skills. They announced each class they wouldn’t go underwater yet wore goggles in case water splashed near their eyes. They said no thanks to the chance to retrieve rings off a knee-deep step. They floated with a teacher’s hands under their backs and paddled as she held them. At no point did they fully enter the pool without a teacher holding them, although they were in the shallow end and could have stood if they put their feet down.

My younger child follows her sister’s lead in many things, including this swim class, yet has a troubling lack of fear in other aquatic settings. The first time she went to an aquarium, she started stripping off her clothes, ready to jump in with the stingrays. Last summer, we were at my in-laws’ community pool, and the lifeguard took an unannounced bathroom break. We were getting out, so I’d taken off her puddle jumper, and she was playing on the steps as I talked to another adult in the pool. My older kid interrupted in the way she often does, repeatedly yelling “Mom!” I tried to ignore her until I realized she was telling me her sister was underwater, which was in fact the case. She’d ventured off the steps and was now fully submersed in drowning position. I could see the panic in her eyes as I reached out and pulled her back up. She coughed up water and started crying but was soon recovered.

They wouldn’t stop talking about it, though. E talked about the time J “almost drowned and I didn’t have a little sister to play with anymore.” J now seemed to consider going underwater synonymous with drowning, yet still did things like run into the ocean alone. Outside the comfort swim class, neither would enter a pool without a flotation device, while algorithms fed me stories about how dangerous these devices are, as they give kids false confidence and condition their bodies to take the drowning position (see above).

I asked other parents how their kids learned to swim. A few mentioned Infant Swimming Resources (ISR)2 lessons, of which I’d seen videos online: babies rolling from fully underwater to floating calmly on their backs. My kids are no longer infants, but the classes are for kids 6 months to 6 years. I looked them up and saw they entailed daily 10-minute lessons for 6 weeks. I didn’t want to drive to daily swim classes for 6 weeks. Getting to swim class once a week was already, in my view, triumphant parenting. I ordered pizza to celebrate the victory every time. Was I going to order daily pizzas for 6 weeks?3

Then, in an unplanned move, one of the friends who recommended ISR lessons sold us her house. And now she recommended them again because this house has a pool, and drowning is the leading cause of death in the U.S. for kids 1-4, with backyard pools accounting for over half those deaths. I’d learned from above experience how quickly it could happen (30 seconds), as well as an episode of The Pitt which gave me PTSD. The pool already has a lock and fence, and we supervise the kids in it, but water competency is one of the layers of protection that prevent drowning, and my kids didn’t have it.

Water competency describes what I want for them, though. I don’t care about perfect strokes, but I want them to know how to move through water and let it hold them (and not drown). I’m a “fish head,” as a friend once put it, entranced with everything underwater. Swimming is the best way I know to escape the limits of our bodies, and I knew once my kids experienced that, they’d love it too. But when I got in the water and tried to persuade them, the magic dried up into stress and anxiety. I wanted it too badly, the worst state of mind for getting them to do something.

I asked if the ISR teacher could teach in our pool, but she was way too booked for that. She had exactly two spots left for summer: 4:30 and 4:40, meaning my kids could still do the day camp I’d signed them up for before I knew we were going to be spending so much time and money4 on this. Lessons were held in the instructor, A.’s parents’ pool: bright blue with a diving board at one end. The first time I saw her, she was teaching a baby like in the videos, rolling them from face down in the water to face up again, while the baby cried and coughed up water. A. was calm, very pregnant, and joined in the pool by three other water competent young kids—her kids, she explained. Goddess, I decided, especially after she said she was running late because of her “other job,” which I later found out was training lifeguards. How many lives has she preemptively saved?

The goal of ISR is to teach little kids how to survive a fall into the water. Babies learn to roll onto their backs and float until help arrives. Kids who can walk learn the “swim-float-swim” sequence: swimming a short distance underwater, floating on their backs to breathe and rest, then repeating until they’ve reached safety. This sequence is used because it’s hard for little kids to lift their heads to breathe while swimming (if you see them try, you’ll notice they often go vertical, the drowning position). Also, they need to know how to hold their breath underwater (not just blow bubbles, like they did in the other swim class). In other words, there would be no escaping going underwater. That’s the first step, since it’s the first thing that happens if you fall in the water.

A 4-year-old I’ll call Z went before us, and A. started by releasing him into the water a few inches from the pool steps. We’d watched her do the same with another 4-year-old, who’d gone under, reoriented, then resurfaced on the steps with a cough and a smile. Z had a different reaction. He resurfaced, gasped, then howled for the next 10 minutes. Through sobs and pool water, he repeatedly screamed, “I only want to do things I’m good at!” (Honestly, same.) His mom watched stoically, which I could tell took effort, that she was a fellow millennial versed in gentle parenting.

Then in was J’s turn. We decided she’d go first because she had less anxiety. She immediately inhaled water then started screaming, too. I blacked out the rest. We’d received extensive guidelines before class, including a directive not to eat for an hour before, and now I saw why (at least until they figure out how to stop gagging). Other instructions, such as dietary restrictions (no apples?) and daily bowel and urine checks, fortunately seemed intended only for younger babies, although they freaked me out when I first read them. (We eat a lot of apples.)

A. took a slower approach with E, likely because I was upfront about her anxiety in the medical forms (every ISR student has to be cleared by a nursing team) and also because she was clearly terrified: silently crying and shaking. Her effort to hold it together showed me how far she’s come from a screaming 4-year-old. A. took an incremental approach, having E put her mouth then nose then whole face in the water. By the end of the first week, she was swimming a short distance underwater to a bar on the side of the pool. She wasn’t enjoying it, but she was doing it, which felt huge

Z, however, was still screaming, which set off a chain reaction since he went before us every day. When it was J’s turn, she ran away into the yard, and I had to chase her down and carry her kicking and screaming back to the pool. I was worried she’d kick A in her pregnant belly. I tried showing up a later, but Z’s screams greeted us each time we arrived. On the last day of the first week, I waited him out in the car, blasting Meghan Trainor (E’s fave) until it was our turn. I wasn’t sure when this would be (A, like most miracle workers, was rarely on schedule) but at some point, I got out and heard nothing but birdsong and figured it was safe. Yet when we got to the pool, Z was still in it—swimming underwater and surfacing with a smile. He’d “broken through” as A. called it. That was when I began to trust the process, a phrase I can’t say anymore without feeling like I’m on a reality show with a sadistic premise.

Because I trust the friend who’d recommended ISR (who’d also said my kids might “not like it” at first), it was only now that I googled and found accounts of people claiming these lessons traumatized their kids and made them hate the water. This didn’t seem to be happening with my kids, especially J who ran straight to the ocean on a trip there the next week, but it did make me wonder if I was doing the right thing. But parenting sometimes requires the deployment of small “traumas” to prevent bigger ones—e.g. shots to prevent deadly diseases, temporary separation to prevent parental burnout, etc.—which was how I was starting to view ISR. It was a practice in sitting with screaming, my least favorite part of parenting, having faith my kids would “break through.”

And E did the next week, back in my in laws’ community pool. Joe had taken off that week for vacation long before I signed up for ISR, so I paid to maintain our spot and packed for a week at the beach, feeling slightly truant. I bribed E with Yoto cards to practice for 10 minutes a day in the pool (J got the same bribe to stop running away at the start of each lesson). On the first day, I stood near the pool steps and coaxed E to swim to me underwater. She did, then realized she loved being underwater. We all do, I think, once we overcome that initial fear, that our bodies retain some memory of life as aquatic creatures—from the womb or millions of years before.

E stayed in the pool for the next couple hours, swimming between me, the steps, and the side, mostly underwater. I got out and took a video in which my voice belies my awe (I’m trying not to jinx it). She swims to the steps, and I say, “Go out and do it again.” A dad in the background of the video turns to look, and I imagine he’s surprised by my authority. I am, at least. Usually, when I record myself talking to the kids, I find myself speaking more gently than I remember feeling. Not here. I’m speaking like a coach to an athlete.

A. is impressed when we return the next week. Now E is ready to float, which she does beautifully, possibly due to all the practice in the gentle swim class (so maybe it did something). She reclines fully in the water, a skill that eludes me after a childhood of chronic ear infections and tympanostomies. Fortunately, my kids don’t seem to have inherited my dysfunctional eustachian tubes.

J breaks through that day, too, after I accompany her into the pool. She swims underwater between A. and me and is soon loving it. She’s less into floating. My mom arrives later that week and practices in the pool with the girls just like she used to with me. At one point, she’s inside with E, and I’m checking the filter for frogs5 and look beside me to find J bicycling vertically underwater. I pull her up and she cries. She’d swum out to me but didn’t have enough breath to go the full way. The float is truly critical.

The next week, E masters rolling from a swim to a float and back again, diligently staying a step head of her sister. J masters it the following week, but still prefers to be underwater, so needs to be watched like a hawk. By the fifth week, they’re both jumping off the diving board then swim-float-swimming to the side of the pool by themselves. We’re in the final week now, and they’ve practiced after tumbling into the water from multiple directions and while fully dressed. Tomorrow they’ll practice in snowsuits, which I still need to unpack.

We feel a camaraderie with the other families scheduled around us; we know all the kids’ names and cheer them on. It occurs to me this is why people like sports. I’m uncoordinated on land and only want to do things I’m good at, so I never did sports, but it’s satisfying to feel like we’re all working toward the same goal. While not every kid is on the same level, none of the regulars are screaming anymore. They’ve broken through or maybe back: to before they took their first breath and started to cry.

There’s been a feeling of randomness to our living here in Western Massachusetts. We’re closer to our families but not that close. We could have moved closer, but I didn’t want to raise kids where either of us grew up. Also, Joe did a year of medical school at Baystate and wanted to work there. I used to visit him during that year, when he lived in a converted carpet factory in Enfield, Connecticut, and we’d go to Northampton, which felt like a place we could live. For a while, it felt like the only place here we could live, but that was a failure of imagination.

Now we’re moving to a place I didn’t know existed five years ago, yet it feels less random. I think it’s because this move arose from friendship, a human connection, and connection gives things meaning. It’s also good we have some friends already because our animal neighbors will soon outnumber our human ones. Despite being a mega introvert, I hadn’t realized I wanted this kind of seclusion, but Joe did. We’ll no longer have sidewalks, but there are trails in the woods, which is the only place I walk to on the sidewalks in our subdivision anyway.

It’s been interesting to go through the upheaval of moving for no reason except desire. It’s made me think about my relationship to desire, if I craft desires because I don’t know how to be without wanting. I also keep thinking about this passage from Weike Wang’s Rental House:

In Nate’s childhood home, Keru had trouble grasping what being American was. Stagnation was the opposite of immigration. Her own parents had uprooted continents. Her own mother hated old things. But for rooted families that never changed zip codes, the norm was to have a weathered living room like Nate had, that once was the space of comedy and bright mornings, the father in the kitchen flipping pancakes and whistling, the mother flipping picture books for her boys on the new couch. The goal then was to enshrine this room forever, even in its decay.

At the end last year, when I had no idea we were going to move again, I was trying to find a house for my parents here. My dad’s dementia took a downward turn after a Covid infection, and it was clear he could no longer live in their multi-split level home with no first floor bathroom. For a mercifully brief period, I devoted myself to trying to delay his inevitable move to a nursing home, and it seemed like this last ditch effort may pay off. Then a space opened up in a memory care home just outside DC, and he’s been living there since. This was no one’s first choice and still breaks my heart, but at least he’s safe and properly cared for, and I’ve come to accept it as the best of no good options.

For a time, though, I was not in a place of acceptance and also having a lot of fear about my mom aging in the same split-level house and feeling a lot like Keru does about Nate’s family in the passage above, namely wondering: what was the point? Why enshrine a family house with no family in it? I wrote an exhortation to myself to live in such a way that if, in the future, my children ask me to move closer to them, I’ll come quickly, on light feet. My parents’ house is buried under forty-plus years of memories and accumulation, and the task of unearthing it seems so huge that it keeps getting kicked down the line—to the next crisis, the next person.

So maybe we’re moving again to stay light on our feet? We’ve only lived in our current house for two years, and while moving is always a pain in the ass, I keep thinking how much worse it would be if we’d been here longer.

On the other hand, it feels like we’re doing the opposite of staying light by moving to a house where I already feel an emotional attachment, where I can imagine us hunkering down for the end of the world, none of us ever leaving. I understand if you don’t believe me, but the plan is never to move again. At least there’s a first floor bathroom.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this except that I’ve been swinging between extremes: stagnation (at least one of us has been sick since January) and striving (to sell our house while people are vomiting in it), excitement (for the move and my children) and despair (for my country, Gaza, and humanity).

I keep returning to the Wikipedia page for inner emigration, wondering if this is an acceptable response to the current moment. I previously associated the term with people in Nazi Germany who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust, Zone of Interest style, but there have been internal emigres in all eras and regimes. The basic definition describes me and so many people I know: “an individual or social group who feels a sense of alienation from their country, its government and culture.”

I’m especially drawn to the way Boris Pasternak used the idea in his letter to another Soviet dissident poet: “Dig more deeply with your drill without fear or favor, but inside yourself, inside yourself. If you do not find the people, the earth and the heaven there, then give up your search, for then there is nowhere else to search.” So, not turning a blind eye, but going so deep inside that you find everyone. I want to be an internal emigre that way. After one last move.

I read a couple great essays on Substack recently about not moving abroad because you hate the government. This is different from moving abroad because the government is targeting you or your family. If that time seems nigh for us, we’ll leave the country, too. But we’re not there yet, and as puts it in her beautiful “against the fleeing to europe industrial complex”, the best way to ensure we don’t get there is by “protecting those to whom the worst is already happening.” She also cautions against

the constant invocation of past exiled and traumatized generations whose lives and conditions are not one-to-one comparable to ours, for the political situation is different and the most draconian persecutions are now being mapped onto different lines, different bodies. First they came for undocumented immigrants, and you are not an undocumented immigrant. You are a certified public accountant in New York City.

Guilty, say I, having just invoked Nazi Germany and Soviet dissidents in a newsletter about moving to Belchertown. But as Wagner and (who wrote the other great piece: “I regret to inform the United States of America that it is stuck with me for the foreseeable future”) both point out, it’s okay to move abroad! (Or to Belchertown!) There are lots of good reasons to do it, if you have the energy and resources. But unless you’re actually fleeing for your life, freedom, or livelihood, it doesn’t make sense to claim that move’s about fascism or treat it as a widely applicable solution. Also, I think outrunning fascism in today’s world might be like trying to outrun climate change. Wherever you go, there it is.

To understand where the U.S. is headed, it makes more sense to compare it to contemporary autocracies than historical ones. There are plenty to choose from. I was reminded of this while reading about Kseniia Petrova, who may face twenty years in prison for “smuggling frog embryos.” I had to read this a couple times to confirm it was happening here, not Russia, where Petrova was born, since it reminded me of the justifications given for detaining Brittany Griner and Evan Gershkovich, except more absurd. But no, this is the U.S. So Russia continues to be a good analogue.

I’m also frequently reminded of my students from Saudi Arabia, who taught me about the potential for joyful rebellion in autocratic regimes, and whom I got the chance to teach because their autocratic regime, unlike ours, invests in science and education. I wrote about how these students changed me in an essay excerpted here, which I’m happy to share in full with anyone who wants to read it. I’m not sure I shared it online when it was published because the confluence of issues felt too personal, but now I’m far enough removed that I don’t care and also want to say some things that I already said there better.

I didn’t foresee this administration going after international students as hard as it has, but I should have, since they’re a perfect target for the xenophobia and anti-intellectualism fueling MAGA and our country’s endless wars, which aren’t just MAGA. Another issue I’ve seen unite the left and right on my feeds better than any other is a hatred of student protesters, a trend I noticed long before this current movement against the Gaza genocide. It’s sometimes hard for me to understand what drives this hatred, but then I go back and remember my own attitude before teaching Saudi students, who I actually didn’t want to teach at first because of my own unexamined beliefs. I considered myself immune to the Islamophobic rhetoric permeating our post-9/11 culture, but of course I wasn’t. It’s in the air we breathe. Anyway, that’s all in the essay.

But even if you believe student activism is grounds for detention and deportation, how to account for the students targeted by this administration who weren’t involved in any activism at all? For every Mahmoud Khalil or Mohsen Mahdawi, there’s a Kseniia Petrova or Alireza Doroudi, who you probably haven’t heard of because he got little media attention and ultimately decided to get out of this nightmare, despite his fiancee being here. Doroudi’s story is in some ways the most heartbreaking of these to me (although it’s hard to beat Khalil missing the birth of his first child) because I think it’s the closest to how I would respond if imprisoned for no reason. I’m not someone who would easily bounce back from that kind of trauma, and neither are thousands of others in American prisons and detention facilities at this moment. Not to mention their families, the ramifications extending ever outward. . .

I have only one international student right now, whom I teach through a thriving ESL program at the public library. We often meet at my house because at least one of my kids is home sick, and now the library is moving too (temporarily for renovations) and I think my student is a little like, WTF why is everyone moving, but at least no one’s leaving the country. One of my favorite things about teaching international students is that you get to learn about other countries without going anywhere, which appeals to my lazy nature. I guess that’s another kind of inner emigration. As long as it’s possible, I have some hope.

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Aid and food also need to be allowed into Gaza, so we need to keep bothering our reps. I have a new one who looks worse than the old one so I will be calling him more.

1. As we’re leaving the library, a woman compliments me on having children who read books. It feels a little like being told I’m “such a good dad” —i.e, congratulated for something basic. I’ve also been thinking about the ethics of forcing my love language—a shared literary canon—onto my children and answer the woman in turn:

   “I read books, so they have to if they want my full attention.”

   We leave her to ponder whether this is a good or bad thing for a parent to say, which is also what I’ve been wondering. Sometimes, my relationship to reading feels too obsessive-compulsive to be fully healthy (especially when it interferes with sleep). My kids seem to know that when I’m unreachable in other ways, they can still count on me to read to them, and some days, reading to them is the most active parenting I do.

2. I read the second part of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, which is about how kids learn to read. (The first part is about how humans evolved to read and the third part about the neuroscience behind reading disabilities like dyslexia. I have yet to read either of these parts.) The book’s thesis is that there isn’t a specific part of the brain evolved for reading, like there is for early language acquisition. The reading brain has to be built from other parts of the brain, including those involved with everything from pattern recognition to attachment. This reminds me of something Beverly Clearly, a former children’s librarian, wrote in a Ramona book (can’t remember which) about Ramona’s nostalgia for her mother reading her animal stories as a small child and how a desire to return to the warmth of these memories makes her want to read. So there’s an evolutionary benefit, apparently, to books as love.

3. In February, we’re in DC for what I don’t yet know is my family’s last time gathering together in my childhood home. Joe, the kids, and I stay in a nearby Airbnb. On the bookshelf, I find a copy of The Screwtape Letters, which I read, after everyone has gone to bed, in a neon green living room. Joe told me the book screwed (ha) with him in adolescence, and I want to understand his teenage belief system (Catholicism). I also like books that screw with me, at least in the sense of getting under my skin and hard to shake off.

4. The Screwtape Letters does that, but probably not the same way it did for teenage Joe. CS Lewis cautions against saying this, but I don’t believe in demons or the devil. It’s Lewis, however, who gets me thinking about hell as someplace internal, which can grow to engulf us if not “nipped in the bud,” which I quoted here recently, and which this year has given me much occasion to think about. That quote isn’t even from The Screwtape Letters but is, for me, what The Screwtape Letters is about. Although not explicitly a WW2 book, it was written then and ends in the trenches of war.

5. I read Practicing Peace by Pema Chodron who says, “War and peace start in the human heart.” She talks about “hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart [behind which] there's always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear, there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky.” I want to touch the soft spot more this year.

6. At another formative time in life, I read and loved CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, which I still think about, particularly this: “All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved . . . incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.” At another point he calls this “obstinately real.” While he’s talking about his wife, I think about this most recently when my kids are driving me crazy. It’s good, I tell myself, because it means they’re real.

7. I want to read more Lewis, and Joe suggests Mere Christianity, claiming it’s very persuasive. Seeing how affected I’ve been by these other Lewis books, I wonder if it will be the thing that makes an irrefutable case for Christianity. In fact, it does the opposite, convincing me that Lewis and I have fundamentally different belief systems. His argument for monotheism makes me realize I’m more of a panentheist or pantheist (not to be confused with polytheist). I don’t think this is necessarily incompatible with Christianity, but according to Lewis, it is.

8. E and I start reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and stop with a few chapters left to go. It comes up again recently when there’s a wardrobe in this beautiful if somewhat extra version of Peter Pan. “We still have to finish that book,” E says of TLW&W, and I’m sure we will eventually. One of my favorite things about books is that they wait for you.

9. E’s favorite books of the year were the MinaLima Wizard of Oz and graphic novels Swim Team, Parachute Kids, and Allergic. Not a book, but she also loves the storytelling podcast Circle Round, which we listen to nonstop in the car. (Got her a “club” membership for Christmas.) J’s favorite books were the Dory Fantasmagory series and Crowned: Fairy Tales from the Diaspora, both of which she still asks to be read from regularly. I experienced a Proustian jolt of recognition while reading them the Fox books by James Marshall. I have no conscious memory of being read these books yet remember certain details from the pictures like a long lost article of clothing.

10. We got a little bored by TLW&W, tbh. It reminded me of reading The Faerie Queene in Renaissance Poetry in college and having to write a paper about how the lion represents strength etc. I don’t get the point of this kind of algebraic allegory; I’m not trying to study math. We also read Paradise Lost in that class, though, which made it worth it.

11. Just looked it up, and CS Lewis actually didn’t consider TLW&W to be an allegory. I’ll keep this in mind when we read the rest. Still, it’s a spiritual battle between good and evil that takes place outside the human mind.

12. I don’t believe in the devil because it feels too convenient for evil to exist as a separate entity from human beings. This reminds me of Brandon Taylor’s response to the Alice Munro revelations, particularly this part: “There isn’t ‘the art and the artist’ and one does not ‘separate art from artist.’ To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. [. . .] The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.”

13. Taylor’s was the best response I read in the immediate aftermath of the Munro revelations. Rachel Aviv’s recent essay in the New Yorker is the deeply researched dive I’ve been waiting for, including analyses of many Munro stories, which are the reason I wasn’t totally surprised when the truth came out.

14. I wrote my college thesis on three stories in Open Secrets, the collection Munro published after learning that her daughter, Andrea Skinner, had been sexually abused as a child by her longterm partner Gerry Fremlin, ultimately choosing to remain with Fremlin and become estranged from Skinner and her children. (According to Skinner, her mother tried to leave Fremlin “nearly every summer,” “but then the drama of leaving would trip the intimacy wire, bringing her back to him with even greater force,” which also reminds me of the titular story of her following collection, “Runaway.”) One of these stories, “Vandals,” is the most clearly inspired by what Munro called “The Subject.” Another was the titular “Open Secrets,” which seems to have been inspired by Munro’s suspicion that Fremlin may have raped and murdered a 12-year-old girl in an unsolved case from 1959 (Aviv reports it’s unlikely Fremlin was involved.)

15. Why did I choose these stories? I think because I detected a “secret intensity lurking beneath” them, which was not wrong. I still think they should be read, that they have much to teach us. The mistake I made, that many people made, was to assume their “grisly leitmotifs were the product of a saintly lady who was making it all up, out of empathy.”

16. Why did we assume this? “I know why. You know why.” The categories of saint and monster help us deny “the germs of every human infirmity” we have inside us (Thomas Hardy, quoted by Garth Greenwell in Small Rain and here).

17. But it’s a good impulse, essential to literature, to separate fiction from autobiography. Still, some writers are granted this license more than others. Aviv’s article illuminates a whole apparatus, including Alice Munro, her family, agents, editors, publishers, and journalists, working together to preserve the image of her as a “saintly lady,” even once the news was public knowledge, an open secret.

18. I reread some of the earlier Munro stories Aviv references. It doesn’t even feel like rereading since I read most of them during a single year in college and they crowded each other out. At the end of “Dulse,” the narrator has a small confrontation with a man who idolizes Willa Cather. Afterwards she thinks, “What a lovely, durable shelter he had made for himself. He could carry it everywhere and nobody could interfere with it.”

19. I made a similar shelter from Alice Munro, and it’s almost freeing to lose it. “Now, I can see the moon,” as the haiku goes. She wasn’t out-empathizing any of us. She was a craftsperson, transforming life into gold, as her family called it. Her later stories are a study, Aviv writes, in “how a mind can be almost completely closed to the truth, except for a few small pockets of knowing.”

20. It feels important to understand how a mind can do this. It’s also the theme of The Zone of Interest, which I wrote about here in spring and which continues to shape my thinking. It kicked off a WW2 reading jag for me, although looking back, I see it was actually The Screwtape Letters that kicked it off.

21. I read Man’s Search for Meaning and what feels like its spiritual antithesis, Fatelessness. I read Sophie’s Choice, which is riveting and not what I expected. It’s set in post-war Brooklyn and one of the horniest books I’ve read. The infamous choice, which would be impossible to read about for 600 pages, is only revealed toward the end. While a prisoner in Auschwitz, Sophie also reveals she worked as a translator in the home office of Rudolf Hoss, the same commander portrayed in The Zone of Interest. I’m guessing both William Styron and Jonathan Glazer read the memoir Hoss wrote before his execution, since the book and film have some overlapping details.

22. I try to tell Joe about this connection between Sophie’s Choice and The Zone of Interest, which we watched together, and am interrupted by a child. I try again, but he’s distracted by something to do with work. I tell him I’m sad we no longer read the same books, so he starts reading Sophie’s Choice. I mainly want to see what he thinks about the connections the book makes between the Holocaust and the American South, which I know interests him. Sophie’s Choice is a southern Holocaust novel set in Brooklyn.

23. Fortunately for Joe, I decide I don’t care if he finishes Sophie’s Choice and would prefer he use his limited time to read Stoner, which I read for the first time in October after hearing people recommend it for fifteen years (books wait for you). I sell it as a perfect novel, all about work. He reads it and agrees. It encompasses both World War I and II and is much shorter than Sophie’s Choice.

24. I subscribe to our local paper shortly before the election, possibly intuiting the need to overhaul my relationship with news media soon. Although it’s in the name, I somehow don’t register it will come daily. Once it starts, I almost switch to digital, but Joe wants to keep it, and now I’m glad. There are usually local pictures on the front versus, by default, the worst people in the world. But there’s also national and international coverage. I’m trying to quit Wordle and Connections in favor of the crossword here (syndicated from the LA Times) but am still hooked on Wordle, just like they wanted. But this is a plug for your local paper if Bezos hasn’t bought it yet.

25. Well, here we are, and I didn’t even get to dementia and how it shaped my family and reading and country. Maybe next time. For now, I’ll just leave a picture of some of the enchanting picture books I’ve found in stashes pristinely preserved by my mother in law, starting around the time Joe was born. She hasn’t spoken a word in years but speaks across time through the many books she collected, which I’m happy to read to the kids on her behalf. Apparently, we shared a love language.

    

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Play and connection are the best antidotes for anxiety, according to The Opposite of Worry: The Playful Parenting Approach to Childhood Anxieties and Fears. This is the first book I read specifically about childhood anxiety, and it’s a good one, full of suggestions for modeling “lighthearted contradictions to anxiety”1 so you can be the “calm second chicken” for your child. If a scared chicken observes another brood member calmly pecking about the barnyard, the scared chicken will be reassured. This is also the idea behind “dither fish,” which I learned about while keeping aquariums. It can work well in families where one child tends to be less anxious than the other, except when it backfires and the scared chicken transfers their fears to the second chicken. In our experience, this transfer often seems to render the first chicken less scared. E.g. the first chicken is now less afraid of public restrooms and able to reassure the second chicken about them, although the second chicken would likely not be afraid if not for the first, etc.

The concept takes on a fun meta quality if your child is afraid of actual chickens, which graze freely outside her school. A classmate told her they peck people, which is false, but I guess anxious chickens flock together. Last year, I didn’t know what to do about the chickens, but now I’m reading Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD2, which advises: “If your child is able to make herself feel a powerful feeling that is not fear, then she will probably feel less scared.” Humor or anger/ playful aggression seem to work best for this. Don’t overthink it. “Less talk, more play.”

At the beach (another source of anxiety for my kid) this summer, I helped her chase encroaching seagulls while she yelled like a gladiator. A lot of kids do stuff like this naturally, which while annoying, makes psychological sense. My second chicken, for example, enjoys chasing the school chickens. For a while, this worried my first chicken, who was worried her sister was going to “give the chickens a stomachache” or “get pecked,” but now when a chicken gets too close for comfort, we lunge at them, and they always bolt. (The idea of chickens standing their ground is a little terrifying, as anyone who’s seen The Birds can attest.)

Having an anxious child has made me realize how disassociated I’ve become from my own anxiety. I’m aware that I have anxiety; I take medication for it. And yet I’ve intentionally built a life and persona designed to spare myself and others its discomforts (except for the reproducing part). “We may believe that anxiety and fear don’t concern us because we avoid experiencing them,” Harriet Lerner is quoted as saying in The Opposite of Worry. “We may keep the scope of our lives narrow and familiar, opting for sameness and safety.” Touché, Harriet Lerner3. “Our challenge: to be willing to become MORE anxious, via embracing new situations and stepping more fully into our lives.”

The book goes on to suggest doing something “fun, safe, and scary” every day. Adults, too. This is easy to remember, and I’m trying, even if it’s often something very basic like sending a text message. It reminds me that even the most basic stuff isn’t basic for a kid. They don’t have the same luxury of keeping things familiar because everything is new.

Another sign of how disassociated I’ve become from my anxiety: when I heard that Anxiety was a character in Inside Out 2, I thought that seemed gimmicky since they already have Fear. They’re not the same, as the movie explains then shows: Fear protects us from stuff we can see, while Anxiety protects us from stuff we can’t see. (This is an oversimplification, but the movie adds nuance.)

Why am I so dense about an emotion that has in many ways defined my life? Maybe because they didn’t make movies like this when I was 5. I don’t even think I knew the word “anxiety” when I was 5. Yet after seeing this movie in the theater (twice), my kid has a visual vocabulary to talk about anxiety. She can talk about it (or even to it) as something separate from herself. Sometimes she even says, “I’m nervous” (although not in a British accent) instead of melting down. This is the kind of movie that makes me think screen-free parents (of whom we know more than the average amount because of the chicken school) are missing out.

That brings me to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which I’d be remiss to neglect in a 2024 anxiety roundup. I read it and am lukewarm. I was anxious enough pre-social media to be skeptical about Haidt’s causative claims, yet I don’t think it’s news to anyone that social media and other digital substitutes for embodied connection make anxiety worse. Naturally, since “real” connections, with other people and the physical world, are what make anxiety better. I’m not sure anyone needs a whole book to be convinced of this, but I think Haidt’s core suggestions (no smartphones before high school or social media before 16; phone-free schools; more free play and responsibility in the real world) are good ones, although will probably be harder to enforce outside the chicken school.

Some of the best writing about anxiety (and in general) I’ve read lately has been in other newsletters. My friend Helen wrote an incredibly wise and empathetic newsletter about coaching her young daughter through a nighttime bout of anxiety. My friend Claire sent me this gorgeous piece by , whose newsletter I now pay for so I can read more. There’s also this post about anxiety and moral direction, which got a lot of attention and I think is on the right track, except preoccupied with “sexual morality” in a way that feels less relevant to me.

I do believe our collective anxiety has a moral component, though. Carl Jung said that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. If anxiety concerns “things we can’t see,” it seems like we ignore those things at our peril. If our comfort comes at the expense and exploitation of others, if our tax dollars are used to blow up children, if we’re forced to live in ways that violate our core values, it’s unsurprising that the suppression of these realities might spur an anxiety epidemic. For me, this anxiety crops up in my dreams, many of which involve losing my children in an unfamiliar country. They’re anxiety dreams, but the primary emotion is pain, and they remind me of this poem by Wendell Berry, which I’ll end on, since it sums things up better than I can:

The Way of Pain 

1.
For parents, the only way
is hard. We who give life
give pain. There is no help.
Yet we who give pain
give love; by pain we learn
the extremity of love.

2.
I read of Abraham’s sacrifice
the Voice required of him,
so that he led to the altar
and the knife his only son.
The beloved life was spared
that time, but not the pain.
It was the pain that was required.

3.
I read of Christ crucified,
the only begotten Son
sacrificed to flesh and time
and all our woe. He died
and rose, but who does not tremble
for his pain, his loneliness,
and the darkness of the sixth hour?
Unless we grieve like Mary
at His grave, giving Him up
as lost, no Easter morning comes.

4.
And then I slept, and dreamed
the life of my only son
was required of me, and I
must bring him to the edge
of pain, not knowing why.
I woke, and yet that pain
was true. It brought his life
to the full in me. I bore him
suffering, with love like the sun,
too bright, unsparing, whole.

(Wendell Berry)

In another scene, shortly after Hedgwig brags to her mother about being nicknamed the “Queen of Auschwitz,” the camera pans through the garden, lingering on everything in bloom, while the sound of barking dogs, gunshots, and screams are heard in the background. The camera zooms closer and closer onto the flowers, stopping on a hot pink one, which slowly fills the screen until it turns completely red. The screams go silent.

The horrifying sounds do not mute the flowers’ beauty. If anything, the beauty grows sharper in its refusal to accommodate the horror; its relentlessness is part of the horror. The juxtaposition reminds me of this essay by Natalia Antonova about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Antonova, a survivor of child sexual abuse, explains why she loves Lolita, not in spite of but because of her own history:

Before Nabokov, I never really noticed how the world doesn’t bend to the horror of our individual experiences, it just carries on being the world. [. . .] Lolita is a reminder that beauty neither de-claws nor lulls evil, it just exists.

It may be easier to get this across on film, which seems to effortlessly “capture” beauty, than in writing, where any beauty must be created by someone using language. Zone of Interest is loosely adapted from a novel by Martin Amis, which apparently centers on another Nazi’s infatuation with Hedgwig Höss. This is barely in the film as it does not need to be. Aside for a few essential scenes (like the flower closeups and thermal imaging), the camera acts as a neutral observer with one limitation: it cannot breach the wall separating the Höss home from Auschwitz. Much can be heard over the wall (writer/director Jonathan Glazer called the film’s sound “the other film, or, arguably, the film”), but it remains a concrete visual barrier.

In literature (and often life), the wall is internal. Nabokov said he was inspired to write Lolita after learning of a captive ape who made the world’s first drawing by an animal: the creature drew the bars of his own cage. Humbert’s cage is his pedophilia, and he spends the whole novel trying to make it into something beautiful. Some readers are fooled by this, believing the beauty of the prose somehow shows him undeserved mercy, but the whole point is that it doesn’t. Beauty is indifferent to mercy. It just exists.

The Zone of Interest and Lolita are “masterpieces of misdirection,” a term I came across in Geraldines Brooks’ blurb for Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, a novel that also fits this description. Mobility, which is about the oil industry in the way Zone of Interest is about Auschwitz, follows a protagonist named Bunny, who avoids reckoning with the moral consequences of her career choice through a relatable pursuit for physical and financial betterment.

While Bunny may be more relatable than Humbert Humbert or Hedgwig Höss, they all escape themselves in highly familiar ways. Bunny works, travels, and shops. Hedgwig focuses on the domestic sphere and her children, while her husband focuses on his career. Humbert reverses victim and offender.

There’s also Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a 1957 French novel narrated by a jealous man tracking his wife, which is actually about colonialism, or so I argued in a paper I wrote in college. In French, la jalousie is the word for both “jealousy” and also “venetian blind,” the kind with horizontal slats offering a tempered view of the world outside. Jealousy’s narrator pulls such a blind over the brutality of the novel’s setting: a banana plantation he oversees. Sexual fixation operates here like a camera’s zoom, filling the screen with the object of desire, obscuring everything else.

All these works provoke our identification with people we do not want to identify with. They’re about the banality of evil, how atrocities can exist within the familiar rhythms of work and family, and even alongside non-banalities like love and beauty. Author Heidi Julavits, who writes in The Folded Clock about her attempt to read a famous Nazi propagandists’s memoir, calls these works “case [studies] of what people disallow themselves from knowing when that knowledge is incriminatory or inconvenient.”

While I was writing this, Eva came and asked me if Tramp (from Lady & the Tramp) is “nice.” She’s been fixated, recently, on identifying the “good” and “bad” characters in stories and using this information to pick favorites. (She’s 5, but the reading comprehension of many adults is still stranded at this level). Often, her decision is made prematurely, like when she claimed the emperor was her favorite character on the first page of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

I said I thought Tramp was “nice with some blindspots.” She asked what “blindspots” meant and I gave her a literal definition related to cars. “You mean like when I’m looking for something in a room and don’t see it?” she asked, and I said yes, although this scenario usually doesn’t involve any literal blindspots. What usually happens is she’s distracted by the other things in the room or whatever’s going on in her head and overlooks the thing sitting someplace obvious. But that’s what I mean. The blindspots are usually not literal. They’re internal or self-imposed—in this case, by our accumulation of toys. Maybe this is the modern American condition.

Maybe this is why there’s so much about blindness and sight in the Bible. I’ve been reading bits of the New Testament, and it seems like Jesus heals another blind person on every other page. I’m starting to think these stories aren’t about literal sight as much as spiritual sight or grace. “I was blind but now I see.”

When The Zone of Interest won Best International Feature at the Oscars, Jonathan Glazer used his speech to remark on the film’s relationship to our current moment:

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. [. . .] Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization.

Some people in Hollywood were mad that Glazer said this. They purposely mischaracterized his words, lopping them off at “men who refute their Jewishness,” while the full sentence makes clear he was not refuting his Jewishness, but his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked” to wage unending war. He was critiquing the “dangerous conflation” between his Jewishness and the escalating violence of the Israeli government.

The Zone of Interest ends with a scene that breaks from the formal constraints the film has set for itself—breaching not only the physical wall but the wall of time. I won’t say more except that I interpret it to be a scene about hell, which I’ve become convinced is a place we create for ourselves inside the limits of our vision/understanding. “It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “In each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” Hedgwig gardens. Humbert paints a beautiful cage.

Related recommended reading: on The Zone of Interest, beauty products, and Gaza: Terror and Mundanity in a Makeup Bag

What interests me about seasons is change and repetition. A season is both the same thing happening repeatedly and proof it won’t happen forever. The moment my 5-year-old loses something, she laments it’s gone forever. And I get it, even with 35 years on her, since that’s often my first reaction to uncertainty. Permanence feels more manageable. Our extended family has been experiencing a lot of ambiguous loss, or loss without closure. An ambiguous season feels harder to weather than winter, because it’s unclear when it’s going to end or if it’s even winter at all.

On the other hand, a seasonal newsletter could just be a letter in which I share news on a seasonal basis. So in the spirit of seasons as both vague theme and temporal descriptor, I’ll share what feels like it’s changing right now and what feels like it’s not. It’s all changing, obviously, but I can’t feel the earth turning.

Changing:

• Kids: As of last month, both kids are in school, with J starting at four mornings a week. When I fantasized about this last year, I imagined myself sitting atop a vast reservoir of time, which is funny now. Between snow days (just got a text about another one tomorrow!) , sick days, and holidays, four mornings a week remains an aspirational schedule. People also warned me those morning hours go very fast, but with a toddler at home, they were going very slow, so this is still a new era.

• Hair: I’ve long wanted silver hair and am finally seeing enough in my natural color to justify growing it out, I think? Maybe only be in certain lights. In SF, I was getting highlights to bridge the gap, but every time I get them here they turn out blond, which is not what I want anymore. This is what I want:

• Spirituality: While I haven’t had a drink in almost ten years, I’ve taken plenty of “vacations” from my Higher Power, wherein I mistake myself or other people for powerful, omniscient beings. This always turns out to be a mistake, and it’s always a relief to reconnect my divine thirst to a divine source. I’m blessed with a therapist with a background in religious studies, who’s able to connect my sundry feelings and dreams to relevant texts and traditions. She recently took a workshop with James Finley on mystical sobriety, leading me to his latest book about trauma and healing. Christianity feels particularly resonant to me at the moment, but I’m also (slowly) reading When God Was a Woman.

On Repeat:

• Kids: Still working with the 2-year-old on getting poops in the potty, with the 5-year-old on saying that in a nicer voice, with both on getting coats, snow pants, boots, hats, mittens, backpacks on and into the car, getting out of the car and removing coats, snow pants, boots, hats, mittens, backpacks. . . While behaving myself in a manner worthy of imitation.

• Lana Del Rey's Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd: This album sounds like it was made for driving through a winter valley alone, which I spend a fair amount of time doing on the way to and from my kids. Also, I miss my sister, who turned me on to Lana Del Rey back when everyone still considered her a joke. Maybe one day, I will write more about ear worms and their connection to anxiety and how I understand getting your guard up around a musician who creates so many. But I would rather choose my own ear worm than be accidentally infected, so I listen to nothing but this album until the kids get in the car and make me switch it to Moana.

• Maladaptive nocturnalism: I find it extremely challenging to get to sleep before 1AM. I’m not looking for advice on this, especially not from morning people, just putting it out there as one of the ways I’m stuck. It seems like the times available for parents to be alone are early in the morning or late at night, two seemingly neutral options, except our society is strongly biased toward the former. Are there other night-owl parents out there? I’m not looking for anyone to message or anything (the point’s to be alone) but maybe knowing about others will help me feel like less of a dirtbag in the morning.

• Gerontocracy and war: Nothing new to say, so I’ll just link to some places I’ve donated: Anera, Gaza Sunbirds, PCRF, UNRWA

• Ramona books: Putting them here because I read them as a kid then again recently, but they still feel refreshing and comforting and real. They’re also some of the only longer kids’ books I read aloud without skipping over words—not to censor, just because most kids’ books have too many words. We took a brief detour from Ramona after E came home asking if there was “something called Harry Potter,” and I was shaving off full paragraphs there. Those books might be more enjoyable read silently to yourself? But Cleary keeps it tight and easy to read aloud.

• Gus: College friends may remember Gus, the one-eyed terrier mutt I adopted with my boyfriend at the time. Gus lived with me for a while after the breakup, but I didn’t feel I was giving him what he needed, so he went to live with Alex, who’s taken such good care of him that he’s still alive 15 years later. They live nearby, in Vermont, and Gus has stayed with us a couple times this winter. I still don’t feel like I’m giving him what he needs, partly because at least one of the kids acts like they’re being chased by a bear anytime he’s in the vicinity, but it’s been wild bringing these previously disparate parts of my life together.

What’s changing or repeating for you?

At first, I thought they were toads. This was back in August when they were everywhere, especially on the hill in the backyard, which is covered with low shrubs and dead leaves and seemed, before discovering the frogs, like a landscaping problem.

I assumed they were toads because, as far as I knew, toads lived on land while frogs lived in water, and the nearest permanent pond is about a half-mile away (.3 miles as the frog hops). But when I went online to identify them, it was clear from their smooth skin and sleek bodies that were that they were actually frogs. Our yard had at least two kinds: pickerel frogs, bolder with striking markings, and wood frogs, more elusive and distinguishable by their black masks.

I was excited, perhaps because I subscribe to the Frog Trouble Times, where I’ve learned interesting things about frogs. It’s where I read that they technically brumate rather than hibernate and how warmer winters can disturb this process. I wondered where our backyard frogs came from and where they were going.

It was an unusually wet summer, which may have been why the pickerel frogs ventured so far from their pond. After some unseasonably hot September days, most of them disappeared--I hope back to the water.

But wood frogs are more terrestrial than other frogs, with a greater range of movement. They live in forests and breed in vernal pools or ephemeral ponds, which form in the springtime from rain and melted snow. Most notably, they hibernate on land, under dead leaves, while other frogs hibernate at the bottom of ponds in above-freezing temperatures. Wood frogs spend their winters frozen solid, a biological miracle. Ice coats their cells and internal organs, and their hearts stop beating until some unknown process gets them going again in early spring, when they thaw from the inside out.

We hadn’t seen any wood frogs for a while, but I was hopeful they were still out there. Then a couple weeks ago, Joe was digging out a space for a second compost bin on the back hill (got to love a man who loves to compost) and found what appeared to be a large grub. Then he looked closer and realized it had “arms and legs”—a wood frog! He gently examined it to make sure it wasn’t hurt then buried it a few feet away exactly as he’d found it, in an inch of soil under a pile of leaves. Hopefully it got comfortable again, since the temperature has been dropping.

All this has made me hate leaf blowers even more than I did before. They’re very prolific here; you can usually hear at least one blasting away in the background. Joe tells me some of them are battery operated, so not necessarily spewing more emissions than a truck drive from Texas to Alaska. But they still offend me in using maximum force against an adversary as unformidable as dead leaves.

Joe and I agreed to leave the backyard leaves for the wood frogs. But we’ve gone back and forth about what to do with the oak leaves blanketing the front yard. I suggested leaving them, too, since I like how they look and am lazy, but Joe felt a suburban obligation to contain them somehow. I saw his point, too, come Halloween, when it felt necessary to clear the sidewalks and driveway lest a trick-or-treater slip and break something.

After hours of raking, we’ve now contained the leaves to the bottom third-ish of the yard, which is something. Joe did most of it, although I did enough for my Fitbit to register a swim of “29 lengths.” Raking is a little bit like swimming, with the repetitive arm strokes. And I like writing in my head while I do both.

There’s a Little Free Library at the end of our block. I’m still a city walker in that I like to have a destination and walk fast, which can make walking with small children frustrating. The little library is a good walking destination because Jojo can usually make it there and back on her own, and if I do have to carry her it’s not far enough to be excruciating.

A few months ago, we found a Northern Woodlands seasonal calendar in the little library. There were actually two, and I’ll confess I took both because I had both girls, and each insists on taking something from the little library each time we go, which is why we don’t go more. I try to put in more books than we take out, but this often requires sleights of hand so they don’t see I’m giving away, for example, an extremely thorough edition of Old McDonald Had a Farm.

It felt serendipitous to find two seasonal calendars in the little library, but all libraries are serendipitous. I used to request specific picture books from our public library because I have this thing where I need to read every beautiful picture book in existence to my children before they outgrow them. But now I just bring them to the kids’ section and let them pull books off the shelf at random, since they always find seem to find something perfect this way.

Anyway, the seasonal calendar is very educational and sometimes sassy, like the day it just said, “Geese, geese, and more geese,” which was indeed the case. My favorite entry so far was October 7th: “Trees aren’t losing their leaves. They are draining them of nutrients and then throwing them away. It’s an active process.”

There’s a good kids’ book about a tree that refuses to drop its leaves called Little Tree. All the other trees drop their leaves each year and grow taller, but little tree continues clinging, unable to trust the process. I get it. It still seems incredible to me that seasons change at all. Despite all evidence, I’m not sure I totally believe it.

Recommendation: 72 Microseasons, beautiful Substack about the Kurashi no Koyomi, Japan’s seasonal calendar

ICYMI: Remarks from Rashida Tlaib after Congress censured her for being one of its few members to speak out against the extreme, relentless super violence our government is funding and perpetuating, despite the majority of Americans wanting a ceasefire. Have you contacted your reps?

I’ve made peace with reading less than half of what’s in my inbox, since most professional/aspiring newsletters come out too frequently for me to keep up, but I still want to support and receive them, for them to exist. A genre of newsletter I will always read is the smorgasbord--a little of this and that curated by someone with good instincts and taste (e.g. ). Part of the joy of reading is the anticipation of reading, and it’s satisfying to have a spread of good writing open on my phone. So I think this newsletter is gong to be that: an assortment of light fare for a summer day. 

First, movies. The Barbie discourse was giving me flashbacks to a drunk fight with a choice feminist in college, so I felt I needed to see it for myself. We also didn’t have childcare long enough to see Oppenheimer. Barbie was also overly long, but it made me feel things. I cried at one scene in the way I cried over commercials when I was pregnant. Some commercials are made by artists, and this is one of them. It’s capitalist catharsis.

I have since heard from multiple trustworthy sources that Barbie is better than Oppenheimer. says, “Next to sports, war movies and movies with mostly men in them make me want to die”—and I strongly relate. I’m also slightly face blind, so when a movie is all white dudes of a certain age, I have trouble telling anyone apart. I now regret telling Joe I would see Oppenheimer with him and hopefully can save you from making a similar mistake. As we stood in line for popcorn, he said sadly, “I wish we were seeing Oppenheimer,” and I heard another guy lament the same to his girlfriend on our way out of the theater. Maybe they can all get together and see it without me? 

The moment I came onboard the Barbie movie was when the collision of realities is first exposed in the character of Weird Barbie, who reminded me of decapitating Barbies in 7th grade with my friend Lydia (our Weird Barbies were just heads on sticks). Lydia has an extremely topical book out today called Mobility, which will appeal simultaneously to people who love Barbie, hate Barbie, or are too smart to think about Barbie. 

Mobility engages modern consumption in a manner that is both entertaining and incisive, unlike Barbie which is mostly just the former. It probably would have made me feel like I was trapped in a room with a freshman choice feminist if not for the clarifying and essential work of , who has radicalized me on the topic of beauty culture/consumption. I still buy certain beauty products, but she’s made me think far more about which ones and why. She’s not advocating for the banishment of beauty products so much as the banishment of the argument that they are somehow empowering. Read this if you want to see Barbie without feeling like you’re being gaslit. 

I thought momentarily that the new Little Mermaid might be a good candidate for Eva’s first movie theater experience, but she still wants me to fast-forward all scary scenes, so I decided to delay that for at least another year. Then the Little Mermaid came out on Amazon Prime, where I had a credit, so I was able to buy it for $5, and I wouldn’t recommend paying much more for it than that. I found it to be very watchable on land and less so underwater, although my underwater standards are very high, since I’ve seen some amazing things underwater (a topic for another day) and this movie did not do them justice. It seemed to mainly interpret underwater as "very dark," when one of the coolest things about being underwater is actually the light? Maybe it’s because mermaids live really deep underwater? But then why was there a manatee in the dance number?

The experience of watching it with Eva, though, was top notch, the stuff of girl mom fantasies--the way she wants to cuddle up during the romantic parts because our relationship is the closest analogue she has to anything romantic, although I’ve explained we can’t get married, so the possibility of future romance has a kernel of loss in it as well? Also what a fucking retro story the Little Mermaid is, probably one of the least empowering fairy tales of all time—and yet I’ve always loved it because underwater. We consumed an enormous bag of kettle corn over two viewings since the movie is, like every movie made this year, way too long. By the time Ursula turned into a giant, Eva was really excited, saying “I want to see this!” despite having made me fast forward other parts, so we got to talk a little about what a cool villain Ursula is (maybe she can get her own movie like Cruella?). Eva also asked at one point why Ariel was naked, by which she meant why does Ariel get a bra while Triton gets body armor, and I said that was a very good question! I thought it might be a good launchpad for a lesson about patriarchy, but she just wanted to watch the movie.

If you want to watch some less retro mer-content with decent underwater cinematography, I was pleasantly surprised by the Netflix documentary Merpeople. (Was Netflix marketing this to anyone else or just me? It kind of made me suspect they’re artificially engineering shows specifically for me, now, like in that new Black Mirror episode.)

Well, I made it through movies and nothing else, but I want to get outside because the heat finally broke here, leaving us with the kind of clear beautiful weather that makes me rave to my children about how RARE this kind of weather is and how we need to take advantage of it. So I’ll leave you with some recommended reading:

I devoured this essay by Grazie Sophia Christie on envy in The Point, in which she confesses to having made envy “the secret passion of [her] life.” Envy is not currently my secret passion, but it has been at times in the past, and it makes a very good one precisely because of how cloaked it is in shame and longing. I’m starting to think envy might actually be one of the bravest subjects a person can write about, and Christie’s essay reminded me of this amazing one by Kathryn Chetkovich on being in a romantic relationship with Jonathan Franzen (which may have seemed a more appealing prospect 20 years ago when this was written?).

Which brings me in a roundabout way to this essay by Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace, since he and Franzen were buds. I will read anything Lockwood writes, and this is particularly delightful. She may have actually convinced me to try the Pale King? I don’t think I’ll ever finish Infinite Jest (that’s kind of the point, as she points out), but I would happily read Lockwood riff on Infinite Jest for the length of Infinite Jest.

Ok, time to get outside. Hope your weather cools off or you get to spend some time underwater!

I’ve been thinking of this memory over the past month, as we just moved to a house in Amherst, and there are several overlaps with my parents’ move back in 1985. It’s also our first house, and we’re also planning to raise our kids here (although the thought of being here as long as my parents, who are still in Tenleytown, is unfathomable, but more on that later). It’s also a clear upgrade from any of our (20 combined) previous rentals, yet the transition has not been free of meltdowns. Eva frequently says she misses the apartment in Northampton, just like she says she misses San Francisco. I get nostalgic with her over SF, but when she says she misses the apartment, it’s hard to refrain from enumerating things not to miss, like parking, laundry, and fire alarm woes, the time and effort it took to get outside, anxiety about disturbing our neighbors, etc.

But all these things are beside the point. “San Francisco,” Eva once said wistfully: “It’s a place where I was when I was small,” and that about sums it up. She can’t name the things she misses beyond one beloved friend, since she was only 2.5 when we left, but I’m sure the place is embedded in her sensory memory. Maybe the smell of eucalyptus or wildfires or something more basic, like the way the light hit a particular wall. With any luck, light and shadow are some of the biggest dramas in a baby’s day, as I’m reminded nightly when Jojo tries to tell me intricate things about these phenomena. And my earliest memory is a dream involving light, or a light switch in the Cairo apartment, which in the dream controlled the shape of a shelf on the wall, changing it from a circle to a square and so on. When I woke up, I brought my father to this light switch and made him turn it on and off, becoming extremely disappointed when it did not change the shape of the shelf (in reality an oval). I don’t know how old I was but remember not having the words to explain the discrepancy between my dream and reality and the vast frustration this caused me. 

When I can restrain myself from telling Eva to count her lucky stars, I show her pictures of the apartment on my phone. We lived there for a year and a half and have two small children, so I have at least a thousand. After swiping through a few, she stops on one featuring the circular window in her bedroom and says, “I miss my window.” The circular windows were pretty cool; there was one in the master bedroom, too. And being on the fifth floor gave us views of steeples, treetops, sky. From Eva’s room, you could see a strip of mountains. My parents also get nostalgic about their views from the Cairo, which I don’t remember because I was busy trying to figure out the light switches. Dupont Circle has always exerted a strange pull on me, though, and I suspect it’s because it’s where I had my first impressions of the world. 

In truth, the only thing I really miss about our last apartment is being downtown, although that had drawbacks, too. I think Tenleytown ruined me for other places by providing a suburban existence (yards and trees) within walking distance to a major metropolitan transit system: a rare combination in this country. When I was a teenager/young adult, the Metro meant freedom, and I don’t think I ever really got over that. This could easily turn into a screed about car culture and our country’s dearth of public transportation options, but that’s not my point here. I’m bringing it up just to say our new house is more car dependent than is my ideal. It’s the most car dependent place I've lived outside of Sarasota, which didn’t really count because I could still walk to class and a Shell station that sold Yellow Tail.

Besides being car dependent, it’s pretty idyllic here. Or more accurately--in being idyllic yet car dependent, it's an American ideal. There are woods and trails and sidewalks. There are other families with small children, many also recent city transplants experiencing some whiplash. We socialize in the suburban fashion: at each other’s houses. I have a room of my own where I’m writing this, looking out onto other wistful houses and tall trees silhouetted by low mountains. There are supposedly bears here, although I haven’t seen one yet.  

One morning, shortly after we moved, Eva asked me if we were going to be here for “all the mornings.” I didn’t get the question at first, thinking it evinced some misunderstanding about the move. Not just mornings, I explained, but afternoons and nights—

“Will we be here for all the springs?” she interrupted, and I realized what she was actually asking. We keep telling her we’re here to stay, but she’s moved three times in her four years, so I don’t think she really gets it, and honestly, neither do I. Still, it felt good to say yes, all the springs.

I can’t fathom all the springs but can tell you this one has been slow then jolting. Last week, there were still no buds on the trees, and now it’s 90 degrees. I’m waiting to see what flowers in our yard and am hoping the one daffodil and hyacinth that have emerged don’t get singed to death. I’m glad we are not the first people to live here, that there was a family before us who planted bulbs and broke things in, even if we might have made some different choices. But there's comfort in choices that have already been made, just as there’s freedom in form constraint, and what is a home if not a kind of form constraint? I once read Ann Patchett call home "the stable window that opens out into the imagination” and realized that’s what I was looking for, in both writing and in life.  

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She got upset, saying she didn’t want to be a fairy; she wanted to stay herself. I explained the fairy was an older girl dressed up. She considered this for a moment then said, “You shouldn’t have told me that, Mom.”

“Would you rather believe she was a real fairy?” I asked.

She made me repeat the question a couple times, like she does when she’s figuring something out, then answered, “Yes.” 

“Ok,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.” 

The idea of a “Real” and “second Real” comes from this extraordinary essay by Andrea Long Chu about Margery William Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit, a book that broke my heart as a kid. The “second Real,” writes Chu, is: 

Bianco’s greatest insight, the one that made The Velveteen Rabbit a genuinely philosophical work — that the true task of growing up lies not in simple self-actualization but in carefully negotiating the delicate transition from one order of reality to another. Central to this transition is the limiting of the imagination to more indirect spheres of experience (dreams, literature, art) in exchange for an independent, more plastic sense of self. But the process, by necessity, will begin with tragedy. Just as the Velveteen Rabbit comes to believe he will be Real forever, he is thrown out. “Of what use was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this?” the heartbroken rabbit wonders. A tear drops from his eye and out steps the beautiful fairy who promises to make him Real. “Wasn’t I Real before?” the little rabbit asks. “You were Real to the Boy,” the fairy gently replies, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.”

The fairy, Chu writes: 

is not a powerful Other but a slantwise aspect of [the rabbit] that emerges from his own very real tears, which already contain all the magic required to effect his final transformation into a real rabbit. He has learned, in the words of one of Bianco’s early novels, “the eternal paradox that only with love comes the strength to do without love.” The remedy for his loneliness will no longer derive from someone else’s imagination but from himself, in all his wildness and mystery.

The first Real, in other words, is what allows us to survive the second Real— what most adults refer to as real, distinct from the imaginary. Yet a child’s imagination is Real to the child, which is easy to forget as an adult. I had forgotten before having kids, although I remembered being deeply absorbed in imaginary play when I was one. But I remembered it as a break from the Real, rather than the Real, which is what it was for me at the time.

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning,” said Fred Rogers, “but for children play is serious learning.” The psychologist Jean Piaget wrote, “Play is the work of children.” Both were trying to emphasize the importance of play in terms that adults would understand: “serious,” “learning,” “work.” But all these terms fall short in acknowledging child’s play as Real. That’s why I love Chu’s term "the second Real," since it allows us to separate a child's Real from an adult’s Real while still acknowledging the reality of both.

Before having kids, Joe and I said we wouldn’t “do Santa.” I think we both felt the jig went on too long when we were kids and didn’t really see the point. Last Christmas Eve, as I nibbled carrot sticks to make them look like they’d been gnawed by reindeer, I reflected on how things had changed. I now suspect that such efforts, executed in the space between two realities, are the whole point. My conversation with Eva about the fairy girl confirmed this. Pulling her out of her Real before she’s ready would be just as wrong as trying to keep her there without her consent. Such consent might take the form of a question indicating a more adult understanding — e.g. “Is Santa really real?" When she's able to ask a question like that, I plan to answer honestly. But at 4, she isn’t asking that question, and it doesn’t seem to mean much when I dismiss a source of wonder or fear—e.g. monsters— as “not real.” Her fear at bedtime is real, and why shouldn’t it take the form of a monster? How is a monster different from the fears that keep me awake at night? The distinction is mostly linguistic. (What works for monsters, btw, is "fairy spray" or rose water.) 

I apparently had a lot of energy last December. I started this newsletter and also an elf tradition with Eva, inspired by Elf on the Shelf except our elves aren’t cops. And somehow, amidst the holiday chaos, we drove with both kids to DC and back. We’re not doing that this year, and yet I’m still overwhelmed by all there is to do. I wasn’t sure Eva remembered the elves and considered leaving them in the box this year, since the idea of arranging them into different tableaus every night no longer held the same appeal. But then she sat up in bed one night in November and told me her “favorite holiday” was when the elves come and make mischief every night. So they’re here again. And hearing her find them every morning is even better than it was last year. “My elves!” she greets them (one is actually her sister’s but okay). This morning, they’d climbed to the top of a very tall lamp, and she called for us: “I need your help! My elves are losing their minds!” Then she tucks them into beds she’s made so they can rest up for their next wild night. Sometimes she talks to them. “Can they hear me but not talk back?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

I may be better at this aspect of parenting than some others because I never mastered the second Real in the way I did the first. It’s probably why I write: what’s in my head often seems realer than what’s outside it. I wrote more about this in an essay for Vox about my miniature obsession (since dissipated along with pregnancy hormones and pandemic restrictions). I loved playing with dolls as a kid, which possibly led me to idealize parenthood, since I thought it might be similar. I can now confirm that it is not, yet playing dolls WITH my kids can sometimes return me to a former state. I’m also more likely to neglect practical matters than a parent more entrenched in the second Real like my husband. I say this because parents face lots of unrealistic expectations over the holidays, so it seems important to point out what we’re NOT doing as much as what we are. I’m doing the elves but I’m not doing Christmas dinner. 

Joe recently compared Christmas to a time capsule, in the sense that once it’s over, you pack it all up in a box to open a year later and remember who you were the years before. That’s also how I feel looking back on my first newsletter, written a year ago while under the influence of Johnny Cash and oxytocin. I don’t have the Little Drummer Boy on repeat this year, but I did find a beautifully illustrated version by Ezra Jack Keats. Both girls are really into the nativity story, which in a moment of desperation/inspiration, I dramatized for them with the figures of a little creche I have from childhood.

“Keep telling the story,” Eva said, after the three wise men arrived, which is the point at which my knowledge ends, at least for another couple decades. But I told her what I know, like about some of Jesus’ miracles. Before having kids, I thought I’d have to couch these kinds of discussions in caveats about what I believe, the Real versus the second Real, but now I see that I don’t. They’ve already heard hundreds of stories in their short lives, none of which came with such caveats. They know what to do with stories. 

“Jesus,” says Joanna, as she holds up each figure in the creche. “Jesus, Jesus.” They’re all Jesus to her now. 

A few days later, I brought home a seasonal stack of library books, and Eva disappeared into her room with one called The Donkey’s Dream by Barbara Helen Berger. She ran out a few minutes later, saying, “Mom, they’re walking on water!” She remembered the story I told her about Jesus, and indeed, this is one of the images in the donkey’s dream. He also dreams he’s carrying a city and “a lady full of heaven.” Then he wakes up and a Real lady, who has just given birth in a cave, calls to him: “See what we have carried all this way, you and I.” 

When asked why he spoke to his disciples in stories, Jesus answered: “Because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” We’re all children in this view, limited by our physical senses and human understanding. Stories give us a way out. They let us transcend ourselves and perceive the Real.

The frequency of this newsletter will likely drop from monthly to seasonally in the new year. Thanks for reading and happy holidays!

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, 
and wander on the boulevards, up and down, 
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

In French, which I studied for a while, the word leaves, feuilles, can also mean papers. I was reminded of this recently while reading one of Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenska, whom he chides for not sharing her published writing:

"You don’t want to send me your feuilletons, so you obviously don’t trust me to place them properly in the picture I am forming of you. Alright then, I’ll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there is a little anger lurking for you in one corner of my heart."

They were writing to each other in German and Czech, but feuilletons obviously comes from feuilles, although I’m sure there are similar correspondences in other languages, including English (e.g. Leaves of Grass). Anyway, I understand why Milena was reluctant to send Kafka, thirteen years her senior plus Kafka, her feuilletons, but she did, and he wrote back: 

“I just read the letter, your essays, again and again, convinced that such prose does not exist merely for its own sake, but serves as a signpost on the road to a human being, a road one keeps following, happier and happier, until arriving at the realization some bright moment that one is not progressing, simply running around inside one’s own labyrinth, only more nervously, more confused than before. But in any case: this was not written by an ordinary writer. After reading it I have almost as much faith in your writing as I do in you yourself.”

Their relationship was comprised almost entirely of letters because Milena was married (albeit to a philanderer), and Kafka was in a tuberculosis sanatorium (drinking lots of milk) and also because he viewed the situation as an opportunity "to put [himself] to the test.” A purity test, I suppose, although the letters did eventually lead to them meeting, thankfully; otherwise I’d find them unbearably depressing. They met two times before Kafka broke off the correspondence, calling it “pure anguish,” although we know from other letters that he continued to think and dream about her until his death four years later, at which point he left her his journals. Milena’s letters to him "were destroyed,” according to Phillip Boehm’s introduction. The passive voice is interesting—was it Kafka who destroyed them?

I have to read Kafka’s letters in small doses because they feel almost too intimate. I find letters even more intimate than diaries, although I like them both (currently also reading Annie Ernaux’s diary of obsessive desire, Getting Lost, and feeling very pleased about her Nobel win). But letters give you something most journals don’t: the presence of another person, often beloved, which ensnares the reader in a sense of urgency, even if the reader is not whom the letter is for. “Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self,” writes Elizabeth Hardwick, “and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose.” Indeed, I cannot think of another. But I’m a word person.

It’s interesting to think about Elizabeth Hardwick’s ideal self in relation to the letters she wrote Robert Lowell in The Dolphin Letters, which I’m also reading and much faster than Kafka. They’ve hooked me in the manner of a very public literary breakup occurring on social media. They document the dissolution of Hardwick and Lowell’s marriage when he went to England for a fellowship and ended up shacking up with Caroline Blackwood. While doing this, he was also writing to Hardwick, encouraging her to quit her job and uproot their family from New York so they could be with him in England, which ended up being impossible because he was already with Blackwood. Hardwick had to find a new apartment, job, and school for their daughter back in New York, which she did while organizing Lowell’s papers (old letters) for sale. He responded by lifting large chunks of the letters she wrote him during this time and publishing them in his poetry collection The Dolphin, which then won a Pulitzer.

The sum of what Lowell did is almost unfathomably cruel, and in his defense, he was experiencing some pretty severe mania. I don’t know what that’s like, although I do know how painful it is to unwittingly act out unconscious impulses in the real world. “My eyes have seen what my hand did,” wrote Lowell in “Dolphin.” Still, Hardwick protected him from the worst consequences of his actions, particularly the loss of her. She let loose on him a few times, but more letters depict her as kind and transcendent. I wonder if she wrote to him to keep her ideal self alive, if that self was originally forged through their correspondence. Fortunately, she got to go on lots of Maine vacations with her BFF Mary McCarthy, so it wasn’t all bad. She and Lowell eventually reunited (after his marriage to Blackwood collapsed), then she outlived him by thirty years. 

I recently got a letter from Substack about why we should stop calling newsletters letters. (Spoiler: it’s money.) It was honestly the kind of document that made me glad I no longer live in San Francisco. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m definitely writing letters here and also like receiving them, and letters are wonderful and irreplaceable and often free.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf starts when the night should have ended: at 2AM with everybody plastered. Martha announces she’s invited guests over, and more drinking and mind games ensue. The games involve the guests, who have a ruinous night, but George and Martha are really only interested in playing with each other. “They can’t leave each other alone,” said Joe the first time he watched it, and that is exactly it. The script by Edward Albee (mostly unaltered) is perfect, and the chemistry between Burton and Taylor sets everything on fire. Taylor was only 34 when it was filmed, still in her heyday. Nichols filmed in black and white to make everyone look more haggard, especially her. The lighting is unforgiving. Sun starts to creep in the windows; George turns off the lights.

We know the story is set in September because Martha tells of another “September night, a night not unlike tonight, though tomorrow and 21 years ago.” I won’t say more in case you haven’t seen the movie, but I love how Martha describes the night as occurring simultaneously in the present, future, and past, which is kind of how parenthood makes me feel. I was putting a lot of pressure on September this year, since it meant so many things: the end of a long, hot summer; Eva starting school; a more sustainable routine. As it turned out, we had to wait a little longer for most of these things, since we all got Covid. Only now does it feel like we’re getting a rhythm going, which is why I’m sending you this newsletter on the last night of September, and it’s mostly hazy thoughts about movies. 

I watched a lot of movies when we had Covid. Godard died, so I rewatched Contempt. I used to think I was really into Godard but now realize I was equally into Anna Karina, Brigitte Bardot, and Jean Seberg, who are the main reason I watch Godard movies. Godard may be more responsible for my internalization of the male gaze than any other director because he filmed it so beautifully. RIP Godard.

Then Joe and I watched the HBO remake of Scenes from a Marriage, which I didn’t realize had been remade. Watching it with a partner is essentially couples therapy. It felt even more intense to me than the original, maybe because I’m American and not Swedish. There’s also a gender flip, which I appreciated, although I’m not sure it adds anything. I’m halfway through the movie version of the Bergman one and can’t yet say. I watched the original in my twenties and didn’t really get it, but now I do. I guess I’m entering my Bergman era, by which I mean middle age, by which I mean autumn. 

I started writing a July newsletter on the 4th then realized my thoughts were more succinctly summed up by this tweet from a dog and stopped. Fortunately there were no sky booms in Northampton, so I was able to wrestle both kids to bed before dark. Then 100 more nights passed the same way, which brings us to August.

I learned from a recent Ann Friedman newsletter that there is a term for summer hibernation: estivation. It’s how some reptiles and invertebrates survive the hot, dry season, and what I often feel like doing in the hot, humid season. I want to hibernate in many seasons, really whenever the temperature trends anywhere outside 45-75°F. Joe once compared me to one of those tropical fish that dies on the way home from the pet store, but I’m actually more temperate. People say I shouldn’t have left San Francisco, and I likely wouldn’t have were I the only fish in question. But we came to one of those points in adulthood where a sacrifice had to be made, and in this case it was San Francisco. What sealed the deal was the heatwave/wildfire combination of 2020, which made me realize we could no longer depend on the temperateness of San Francisco or anywhere, so might as well live more cheaply closer to family. As if to compound this realization, we were greeted by smoke from Canadian forest fires when we arrived in Massachusetts last summer, which I had not expected. (No smoke this year, thankfully.)

Estivation involves burrowing in the mud, which isn’t a socially acceptable activity for adults where I live, so I try to find other bodies of water to submerge myself in. My in-laws are very generous with their house in South Dartmouth, which has access to a beach and pool, so we’ve been going there as much as possible. It’s a 2.5-hour drive, making weekend trips worth it but also enough of a hassle to quell my desire to travel anywhere else until our children have a higher threshold for puking and screaming. 

On our last trip, Eva became briefly obsessed with the backstory of a cracked plastic shovel I found while plogging. (I don’t jog but have appropriated this term for walks where I pick up trash on the beach.) She wanted to know how the shovel got cracked, and I surmised that a child left it behind on some distant shore where the tide picked it up and carried it across Buzzards Bay, eventually dashing it against the rocks where I found it. This shovel had seen things. She made me repeat this story several times then repeated it several times herself. 

Eventually, she relinquished the shovel to her sister, who broke it more completely, and I added it to the recycling. But I thought of it again when I came across the word “pervious” in this essay by Jean Garnett about her open marriage. You may have already seen the essay online, where it got a flurry of attention, but my initial reaction to the headline was fatigue. The author must not have small children, I thought, scrolling on. But then my friend Claire, who is also tired and very trustworthy, sent it along with some backstory: the author was a parent and the open marriage was her husband’s idea. Figures, I thought, clicking and judging him further when Garnett reveals in the first line that he proposed an open marriage six months after she gave birth. No shade on open relationships—I’ve been in open relationships—but the timing of this request would have troubled me. Fortunately, Garnett is made of sturdier stuff because her open marriage inspired an amazing essay. 

Here’s the passage about perviousness: 

Equality in marriage being now assumed if rarely achieved, the qualifier open has resumed its primary sense of “enterable by outsiders,” or the more degenerate-sounding “pervious.” (It strikes me that sex, marriage, and procreation intrinsically imply an escalating perviousness—will you let another in? Having let them in, will the two of you accommodate a third, or more?)

Family life as "escalating perviousness” strikes me as accurate. We recently had a lot of family visiting, and I realized our family relationships have multiplied exponentially by the addition of just two children. I had a similar feeling when our families came together at our wedding. So many relationships! My kids are young enough that their relationships are still quite simple, but they already form fierce attachments, especially with family and babysitters. Last summer we moved away from a beloved babysitter, and this summer had two beloved babysitters move away, and each has been its own kind of heartbreak. Here’s Garnett on her babysitter:

[When] we need an interruption from outside—M. is that benevolent figure passing through, caring for us without making any promises. After all, M. will not be our nanny forever, just as E. has not remained my husband’s lover.

This comparison made me realize: people who dwell on the “degenerate,” like those “Don’t Say Gay” people, or me when I prematurely judged this essay, are missing the point. Pervious does not equal perverted. We start learning about perviousness from the moment we’re born, when we pass from water into air. We learn how it feels for the loved one to exist apart from us, how it feels when they return, the length of those tides. No one skips this lesson; stories just give us language to talk about it.

The beach is very pervious. I think that’s why it scares Eva a little. She’s more of a pool gal these days, although she loved the beach in San Francisco. But that was a less pervious beach experience, in that we stayed on the shore with our clothes on (often many layers of them). Slathering oneself in sunscreen, plunging into the great unknown, then reemerging to get covered with sand does not currently appeal to her, and I get it, since I felt the same at her age. This world is a lot; it really is. Sometimes a cracked shovel is all the perviousness we can handle.

I wanted to read perspectives on our country’s gun epidemic that extended beyond the latest mass shooting and discovered that Katelyn Jetelina of Your Local Epidemiologist, where I get my Covid stats, is a violence epidemiologist. I didn’t even realize there were violence epidemiologists, although we clearly need them. She looks at gun violence as the public health issue it is, applying lessons learned from wins around other public health issues like vehicle fatalities and tobacco. Our country loves turning irrefutable science into political debate, and there’s quite a bit of irrefutable science available on guns (despite the NRA’s attempts to bury it). Most pressingly, did you know kids in this country are MORE LIKELY TO BE KILLED BY GUNS THAN ANY OTHER CAUSE? WTF are we doing?

Unfortunately everything is politics, so I also spent a lot of time thinking about this interview by Kelly Hayes with Patrick Blanchfield from the TruthOut podcast. It took place before Uvalde but approaches gun violence from an abolitionist perspective, essentially calling out white liberals who won’t own guns but expect police with guns to protect them. If the Uvalde police didn’t demonstrate the flaw in this reasoning, I’m not sure what will. Hayes and Blanchfield also call for an expanded definition of what constitutes a mass shooting. Building on the well-known link between mass shooters and domestic violence, they argue that mass shootings often are a form of domestic violence spilling into the public sphere (if they even are separate spheres) and that we ignore the domestic at our peril. Every headline I’ve seen about the Depp-Heard trial claims we’re entering a new era of backlash against domestic abuse survivors, a scary thought since it’s never really been a good era! 

I also read about things that were not guns. I started Maria Adelmann’s newly released novel How To Be Eaten, which offers the escapism of reality TV while also being very much about our present moment. I’ve loved Maria’s writing since her first workshop story at UVa, so it’s very exciting to have not just one but two beautiful books by her out in the world. I also read a great new story from Alec Niedenthal, who’s been writing fiction that treats our insane politics with hilarious compassion. (I know Alec from New College and also appreciate his perceptive takes on Florida.) And I read my brilliant friend Lydia Kiesling’s latest essay about therapy, which inspired a wave of nostalgia for our old HMO, which is how you know things are not good (especially because they didn’t even cover my individual therapy but you know I like a good group!). But Lydia’s writing is always good, and if you like this essay you should read her novel The Golden State, which I think about whenever I worry about raising kids in this country (so lately daily).

I’m also reading Claire Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19, which is kind of a roundup of things she’s read, but also other subjects like bodies and writing. This passage about writing particularly knocked me out: "I’d done it, I’d crossed over a boundary. I was somewhere I shouldn’t be . . . Writing could do that. Here was a way of reaching someone, of being with them, when you were not and never could be. Here was where we met. Here was where the distinction between us blurred.” That pretty sums up why I write, to cross that boundary. Thank you for letting me.

In lieu of seasonal writing, here’s a summery picture of the girls from our babysitter Ellen Demgen, including rainbows for Pride:

All these illnesses follow the same pattern: Eva is Patient Zero and communicates her symptoms in her 3-year-old way (e.g, “my mouth hurts”). Then Joe and I get the illness and apprehend its true nature. Then the baby gets it, just in time for Eva to bring home the next one. Seasonal allergies have compounded things. We are all tired and hoping to be less congested soon.

Recently, when the nights were still freezing, there was a mayfly on our windowpane. I didn’t know at first it was a mayfly. My first reaction was, “WTF, mosquitoes already?” Then I looked at it more closely, and the word “mayfly” came to me. I confirmed online that’s what it was and searched if mayflies bite. They do not, in fact, because they do not have mouths. They live for a day (as mayflies; prior to that they spend up to a year as aquatic nymphs) during which they mate and then die. 

Maybe this is common knowledge but I didn’t know. It made me think of Virginia Woolf’s “Death of the Moth,” which I often assign when I’m teaching. Of the dying moth, Woolf says:

There was something marvelous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it. 

I wish I’d known what a mayfly was so I could have called Eva over to study a bead of pure life. She’s had a lot of questions about life and death recently. The night before Easter, she asked how eggs grow, which led to an impromptu sex-ed lesson (she said I was “pretty funny”). And I guess death has been all around us with Covid and dog death (RIP Punchy) and the relentless mortality of Disney. She recently confirmed with me that everyone dies, and since then it’s been off to the races. Her questions often cut to the heart of the matter: Where did Punchy go when he died? How do we fight dying? 

For questions without answers, I rely as always on books. The closest thing I’ve found to the “Death of the Moth” for little kids is Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird, which was newly illustrated by Christian Robinson in 2016. Death is distilled here in a small bird, which is already dead when the children find it, so their first focus is on the physical. Then the children hold a funeral for the bird: burying and even mourning it for a time. Honestly, Eva finds it a little “boring,” but I guess that’s what I’m going for at this point: to keep our death discussions frank and banal. I recognize what a tremendous privilege it is to have been able to do this so far. I frequently have to reassure her that I won't die until both she and I are very old, and she has not yet questioned how I know this. 

My favorite line in The Dead Bird is: “And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on its grave.” It’s the “until they forgot” that makes MWB one of the greats.

A related May poem from Phillip Larkin (I’m posting a picture because Substack wants to butcher the spacing):

Until motherhood. It’s what I wanted, but I was honestly unprepared to be in such high demand all the time. I cannot walk into a room containing my children without having at least one physically adhere to me. If I attend to one exclusively, the other is likely to dissolve into heartbroken tears. Recently, the baby crawled after me sobbing while Joe and I attempted to leave the apartment for a date (leaving the girls with Joe’s sister, whom they adore). Eva had a tantrum the other night because I wouldn’t let her stand in the bathroom and watch me shower. It was (way) past her bedtime, or I probably would have. 

“Mama’s very popular in this house,” remarks Joe, who also likes me, although it’s impossible for us to have a conversation at home when the kids are awake, and after they go to bed I often want to sit in the dark in silence. 

Because I sublimate most feelings into maternal guilt, I sometimes worry my children cling to me so tightly because they can tell I haven’t given them all of myself. I hear about other kids Eva's age starting to spurn their moms' affection and wonder why she isn’t doing more of that. Is it because we spend half our waking (and sleeping) hours together instead of more (or less)? Is it because she can tell my mind is sometimes elsewhere when I’m with her? I started out the pandemic negatively judging Joe’s use of noise-canceling headphones but now have my own pair that I use when there’s too much screaming.

I’ve read Winnicott and know that I usually fall into the category of “good enough mother.” I know I’m teaching my kids important lessons when I establish limits and boundaries. I know separation anxiety starts to intensify around Joanna’s age, although I don’t know what Eva's at the peak of since she’s the first kid I’ve had her age. 

I also know this is temporary. The reason I’m writing about it in a seasonal newsletter is that my younger baby, my last baby, turns one this month, so there’s a feeling of finality to every milestone. My days at a premium are numbered. Where there's currently surfeit, there will one day be scarcity, and isn’t this always the way it goes.   

But it’s good to know I crave freedom this intensely. Maybe that will lessen the sting when I one day have it. 

Seasonal recommendation: put on all the colors and go puddle jumping.

There has been at least one thaw since I last wrote to you. When we took our road trip to Maine, Portland was covered in a thick layer of impenetrable ice. We’d gotten the same ice storm in Northampton, but it got warm enough here to melt most of it away. Not so in Maine. I’m honestly not sure how most of the state wasn’t nursing head injuries. I had an exemplary parenting moment clutching Joanna on the frozen sidewalk outside our Airbnb screaming that I was going to fall. But I didn’t, and the next day, temperatures soared to the fifties, melting all the ice. The girls and I went to a very muddy, windy playground on the water.

Since then, it’s snowed again, but a softer, deeper snow, the kind that fluffs up the rooftops, the kind that could cushion a fall.

March also marks an anniversary for me. Eight years ago, I quit drinking in March. The decision didn’t really have anything to do with March itself, or maybe it did. It was almost exactly a month after the birthday on which I’d turned 31, yet I was still drinking like a college student. That is: copiously and messily, navigating drama, blackouts, and hangovers. I never knew what was going to happen when I drank. I kept waiting for this to change, but as I entered my thirties, it became clear that I was the one who was going to need to change. So I quit drinking, and my life has gotten nothing but better since.

I count myself lucky that the solution was so simple. At the time, though, it didn’t feel simple. It felt very complicated, and not drinking became My Main Thing for a while. I went to meetings and became close with other people doing the same, and these relationships were crucial to my ability to follow through with quitting. But then life got very big, and now I have other main things. I still get messy. I’m often not at peace with my own brain chemistry. But I’m a reliable partner, parent, and friend. And the way my life has improved in the past eight years has affirmed that alcohol was the thing that needed to go.

I’ve written about this before in fiction and essays. But I wanted to come out and say it directly here, since it’s not always the kind of thing I want to delve into over the dinner table. It also might explain some things to people who knew me over eight years ago. And finally, I share it on the chance someone reading is struggling with their own drinking. The example, stories, and support of friends were what made this path possible for me. If you feel like you could use any of that right now, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

March is named for the Roman god of war. I wish there weren’t so many people who still worshipped him. I appreciated this anti-jingoistic piece from NYT’s The Daily as a reminder that not everyone wants to die for their country and not everyone has a choice. I’ve been getting most of my news about Ukraine from The Daily, which is at least a more reliable source than Twitter.

It’s hard to have hope about the situation in Ukraine, but this poem by Charles Reznikoff, which George Saunders shared in his newsletter today, gave me a glimmer of something resembling it.