I was also going to say that any other celebration of Halloween—especially anything involving adults that doesn’t also include kids—is a travesty and another example of how our society has gone from “it’s good to be an adult” to “we all just want to be kids forever” in a really destructive and pathetic way.

So that’s what I was going to write about, ideally with exaggerated feigned outrage that would make you all double over in delighted amusement.

But then my dog got diagnosed with advanced cancer two days ago, and I didn’t really feel like writing about Halloween anymore.

It’s a complicated thing, our relationship with our pets. Each of us has a unique one with each individual pet we own, and our love, dedication, and interaction vary, sometimes widely, with each one. Anyone who abuses a helpless animal deserves to burn in hell, but other than that, I have no blanket views on how pets should or shouldn’t fit into people’s lives.

Maybe that’s why I don’t know exactly what to say about our situation that would be of universal interest. The vets have all been seen and consulted. We have a bag of meds to give her, and we plan to spoil her rotten for whatever time she has left. That’s all I know.

And then she’ll die, just like every dog we’ve had before her has died, because pets have shorter lifespans than ours (although she’s only six, which seems unusually harsh and unreasonable).

I will come home to the sound of her absence, and when I lie in bed knitting, she won’t be lying next to me. I will still wake up way too early every morning, but I won’t have the excuse of walking her while it’s still cool out, so I won’t know what to do with those long and lonely early morning hours.

Some things will be easier—no more dog barreling at visitors (we have not trained her well), no more trying (and failing) to grab her when someone isn’t comfortable having a dog jumping all around them. No more having to figure out who can watch her when we both go away and no more tensing up when we approach other dogs because she’s socially unpredictable. (That’s probably how people describe me, come to think about it—although with less growling and more faux pas.)

She’s dying and that’s what happens with pets, and it’s also what happens with people, and everything always seems to come back around to “It is Margaret you mourn for.” Although I do think in this case, it is EP I mourn for.

I believe that Halloween should be a kids-only holiday and dogs shouldn’t die young, but apparently the universe isn’t interested in my opinion—or maybe it simply enjoys frustrating and saddening me. It certainly feels that way a lot of the time.

So let’s lift a glass to Esther Perel AKA Stairbo, EP, Ibo, Bobo (a beloved dog has many nicknames), and send up the wish that she have a painless, easy, calm death, surrounded by those who love her.

And while you’re at it, wish the same for me. Thanks.

P.S. You are all kind people, but please don’t send me your commiserations. I’m not writing this for sympathy—I’m writing about EP’s diagnosis because it’s the only thing on my mind right now. And she’s not dead yet! In fact, the steroids are working and she’s in good shape today. So no expressions of sympathy, please, but if you want to comment about Halloween or dog ownership in general, I would like that!

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We are all weird about food and money.

All of us.

You may be thinking, “Not me! I eat what I like and I spend money on the things that matter to me. I am normal about both.”

Yeah? Let’s examine all of this, shall we?

I bet there are some foods you prefer not to eat. Maybe it’s raw tomatoes. Maybe it’s cooked tomatoes. Could be mushrooms. Or mayonnaise. Maybe, like me, you’re a vegetarian because you don’t want animals killed in your name. Or maybe you’re even a vegan, because eggs have souls. Dried fruit might disgust you, too sweet and cloying, or maybe you eschew carbs because . . . you know . . . carbs. We’re not supposed to eat those, right?

Maybe you once got a stomach bug after eating lasagna, and now just the thought of lasagna makes you queasy. Maybe you ate peaches and cream when they cleaned out your childhood home’s septic tank, and from then on the smell of both were so entwined for you, you can’t go near a peach. (If that one seems oddly specific . . . yeah, you’re right.)

Maybe it’s simply that the texture of some food is unappealing to you, or the taste unpleasant.

And maybe you have no idea why you don’t like a food, you just know that if someone serves you mushrooms in any form, you will not touch that dish, even if it means hurting your host’s feelings, because <shudder>.

And—admit it—deep down there’s a part of you that thinks other people are crazy for liking something you find repugnant, and for disliking anything you enjoy. You’re slightly pissed off that your friend would even choose to cook with mushrooms, when they’re so undeniably fungal. <double shudder> Why would anyone make that choice?

Sorry, pal, but you’re being weird about food. Doesn’t matter what the root cause is, or how well-composed your explanations and/or excuses might be. If there are foods that don’t harm you that you still won’t eat, you’re weird. And since those of us in the privileged position of being able to turn down edible food ALL have foods we won’t eat, we are all therefore weird.

Now let’s talk about money, because—sorry that I have to tell you this—you’re also really weird about that. You probably occasionally spend more than you should on really specific things, but you’re also probably really stingy about other things—although you wouldn’t actually call it being stingy; you just think that some things are a waste of money and it’s objectively stupid to waste money. On the other hand, splurging on the things you genuinely enjoy? Well, that’s just part of living life to its fullest!

So let’s talking about what you’re willing to splash some extra cash on now and then. Cocktails on a night out, maybe? Upgrading your seat on a flight? Expensive designer shoes to show yourself a little self-love? The occasional fancy dinner with friends?

Why not? It’s your money! You have every right to enjoy it as you see fit.

Now let’s talk about some of the things you might think are ridiculous to waste your precious savings on.

Like, say . . . cocktails! (You can make them at home for a fraction of the price they charge at bars.) Upgrading on a flight? (You all get to your destination at the exact same time, whether you’re in economy or first.) Expensive designer shoes? (There are cheap knockoffs available that look identical.) The occasional fancy dinner? (You can have just as much fun with friends at a pizza joint as you can at a Michelin-starred restaurant.)

If you’re quick to tap your card for any non-necessity, someone is going to think you’re throwing your money away. And if you decide you’d rather not spend your money on something that seems wasteful, there’s going to be someone who values that thing and now thinks you’re a tightfisted SOB.

Of course, you’re equally judgmental about other people’s choices.

You don’t see it as being judgy. But it is.

You laugh at the cheapness of this one friend of yours who never wants to eat out at a restaurant, and who always says they’ll cook instead, because restaurants charge so much for the same food you can make for pennies at home.

Meanwhile there’s this other friend of yours, who uses DoorDash if they so much as want a Diet Coke and don’t have any in the house. The fees are ten times the cost of the soda and you don’t get it. It’s so stupidly and unnecessarily extravagant.

Basically we’re all pretty sure that our take is the right one and other people are either wasting or hoarding their funds.

If we’re honest, this idea that our choices are the only right ones is true about pretty much everything, not just food and money. It’s true about parenting styles, owning pets (or not), loading dishwashers . . . it doesn’t matter. You have your take and it’s the right one, which means any other take is wrong.

You can see how this doesn’t exactly promote brotherly love.

Clearly the only way to avoid acrimony is to acknowledge that we’re all weird in our own ways, and then live and let live.

You tell me your food issues and I’ll tell you mine and we’ll dodge them both when we eat together. You don’t have to defend why you won’t eat zucchini if I don’t have to defend why I don’t like flan <genuine shudder>.

You spend your money the way you want to, and I’ll spend my money the way I want to, and as long as neither of us goes into debt or donates to a right-wing cause, let’s just agree that different doesn’t mean better or worse. I will wave at you from my upgraded seat on a flight as you make your way to economy, and I hope you will wave just as cheerfully to me when I walk by the fancy new restaurant where you’re eating on my way to Benny’s Tacos.

So long as we’re both generous with our time and our affection and agree that it’s not about right or wrong, the food and money stuff doesn’t even have to matter.

Vive la différence, you lovable weirdo!

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I promise you that this Substack will be as pure as the driven snow and completely G-rated. I make no promises for future posts, but today you can read on safely, secure in the knowledge that the only offensive thing here will be your memories of the previous post.

I had the insane luxury and happiness of spending a day with my son Johnny yesterday. We were so wholesome! We did not use (many) swear words! We went to a revolving sushi restaurant! (A dish got stuck on the conveyor belt and the dishes all got jammed up and they had to stop the whole thing, which was a bummer for them probably, but since we were already full, we found it amusing.) We went to a coffee shop and worked on our laptops across from each other! We went thrifting, because yesterday was National Thrift Store Day! (Look it up; it really was.) We got a drink at a gay bar! We got nachos for dinner! We saw two episodes of The Golden Girls, performed by five men in drag (four GGs and an extra queen to play the guest roles)! What’s more wholesome than the Golden Girls?

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of all of this wonderful happy day, while we were driving around, Johnny and I started talking about our favorite online musical videos—not music videos, but clips of people singing either in musicals or movies.

We both had GOAT videos—the ones we visit over and over again, when we need to be feel cheered up or energized. We discovered, not to our surprise, that our choices overlapped a lot. In fact, they were mostly the same, probably because we shared them with each other at some point, but also possibly because we are the same person.

As we were excitedly coming up with more and more excellent and iconic videos, Johnny said, “This would make a good Substack.”

I don’t necessarily listen when people tell me what I should write about, but since Johnny has an extremely good Substack of his own (if you haven’t discovered it yet, I suggest you start with this absolutely luminous bit of writing), I am inclined to take his advice.

Later that night, when I discovered the ramifications of a dinner consisting solely of nachos and alcohol, tossing and turning while the acid burned in my chest (non, je ne regrette rien!), I distracted myself by coming up with a bunch more of these videos and creating the following list.

They are (mostly) very wholesome! They involve very few swear words! They will delight you if you feel like spending time with them! And you can skip them all if you choose! No need for a disclaimer here—you’re in control of playing these. Do as you wish.

I just have to figure out how to embed media in a Substack. One sec—

Okay, ready.

THE LIST:

This first video is probably the one I’ve watched the most, at least in recent years: it’s the song “On the Right Track” from the 2013 revival of Pippin, as performed on daytime TV.

This is an excellent watch when you’re feeling wrung out by life and questioning the point of existence. (For those who don’t know, Pippin is about realizing you can have a nice life if you stop striving for an extraordinary one, an epiphany that resonates with me a lot.)

Several things to note: 1) I had the great good fortune to actually see this production live, and Patina Miller is as awesomely insanely good throughout the whole thing as she is in this clip—I didn’t think anyone could be as good as Ben Vereen (I listened to the original cast album a LOT) but I was wrong; 2) I was fascinated by the way Pippin’s shirt stretched longer and longer throughout the whole show (I assume he either had a new one every day or washing restored its original shape); and 3) the one swear word in this number is censored for television! IT’S SO WHOLESOME!

This next one is a delight to me, because when I was a kid, I listened over and over again to “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” from the original cast album of Show Boat. I also loved the original cast album of Cabaret and, later, the revival with Alan Cumming (more on that below). I’m an Anna Kendrick fan, so I was ridiculously excited to discover that she had, as a child, done this performance, which is the weirdest melding of the two musicals mentioned above you could find. Is it in questionable taste to have an adorable child with ringlets singing with the half-naked Cabaret girls? Absolutely. Is it fun to watch and are you blown away by her pipes? Also absolutely. At least half of this is wholesome! (If you ignore the weird subtext.)

True confession: I disliked Spring Awakening the first time I saw it. I was traveling in London and was very sleep-deprived and cranky. Add to this a really janky sound system (I couldn’t understand a word anyone sang), a plot that reminded me of a bad episode of 90210, and a very unfortunate reaction to the fog in the ending graveyard scene (my heart started pounding, then I thought I was going to throw up, then I thought I was going to pass out, then I was sure I was having a heart attack and finally I had to run up the aisle during the most emotional moment in the entire show, missing the ending and annoying everyone in the theater) . .. well, you can see why it didn’t charm me. It took a lot more exposure (including my son’s being in a college production) before I realized the songs are actually pretty great—and they just kill one of my favorites in this simplified reunion version.

And no half-naked sex on stage like in the actual show, so . . . wholesome!

Company is another show where the songs are so much better than the book. I’ve seen it a million times, and the book always annoys me, whether it’s the original or an attempt at updating it. It never works. But the songs . . . they work. Oddly my favorite, shown below, wasn’t even on the original cast album, which I listened to constantly as a kid. But that might be a good thing—I doubt I would have appreciated its biting wit as much back then.

It’s an ironic song: Bobby thinks he’s ready for marriage because he’s eager to have a partner, but the song reveals that he still doesn’t understand the truth all around him—that marriage is complicated and hard—so he’s not really ready for marriage.

This song is very wholesome! (Because it makes marriage sound so easy!)

The movie Absolute Beginners sadly falls apart, which is probably why it’s not particularly well-known, but the first half hour or so is truly magical, and I adore this number with the luminously beautiful Patsy Kensit. I was obsessed with this back in the day, and even found a way to record it onto a VHS tape so I could watch it over and over again in the pre-YouTube days.

No swears! Your whole family can watch! Wholesome!

Another song that I put on that same recordable VHS tape is this one from Peter’s Friends, a mediocre movie with an incredible cast. OF COURSE all these British actors, primarily known for comedy and drama, have perfect singing voices, each and every one of them. “The Way You Look Tonight” also happens to be my husband’s and my couple song—but only because one day it was playing somewhere and I said, “I want this to be our song” and he said, “Sure.” Isn’t that sweet and wholesome?

Another song that wasn’t on the original cast album, but which I discovered later really spoke to me is “I Don’t Care Much” from Cabaret (I told you it would come up again), specifically the Alan Cumming version. This is one I turn to when I’m already in a bit of a dark place and don’t want to be cheered up—I want to wallow in it. It’s angry and grimy and bitter and sad.

But still wholesome? (Debatable, but it’s not actively offensive either.)

And while we’re on Alan Cumming . . . I just love the arrangement of these songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch for an actual cabaret show he did. (I guess I have an Alan Cumming thing! Who knew? Me, I did. I’ve always been obsessed with him, ever since he was Mr. Elton in the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma.)

This song is wholesome-ish if you ignore what the “angry inch” actually is!

This next one verges on a cliché—theater kids all love “Wait for Me” from Hadestown. But it’s just so good and moving and inspiring. If it’s too long to watch or you’re over this song, just forward to 2:45 when Eva Noblezada kicks into high gear and your heart leaps to meet her. Wholesome and stunning.

And, finally, sometimes you just need to watch an exquisitely beautiful person singing an exquisitely beautiful song that makes you want to cry but also gives you hope that maybe our messed-up world still has a chance to be okay. Hunter Parrish singing “Beautiful City” from Godspell (oddly yet another song that wasn’t on the original cast album I knew by heart) tears at my heart and makes me want to keep fighting for what I believe in. And truly there is nothing more wholesome than that.

We may not reach the ending
But we can start
Slowly but truly mending
Brick by brick
Heart by heart
Now, maybe now
We start learning how

I could keep going with these, but this is already probably too long for anyone to slough through. If you enjoy watching these videos, though, let me know, and I’ll do another one someday.

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There are a lot of swear words in this post. A lot. Some of them are extremely . . . extreme. Read on at your own peril and do NOT read on if you find four-letter words offensive.

There are a lot of reasons to swear these days. Since this is a politics-free zone, I won’t elaborate—but you all know what I’m talking about.

I didn’t swear as a kid. For one thing, I was too busy sitting in a corner reading Jane Austen and eating pomegranates (I was so fucking weird) to spend much time doing anything that would lead to cursing, like chopping wood or putting my hand in ice water. For another, my parents were very much of the class that found four-letter words vulgar. My father insisted that swearing was the refuge of those with weak vocabularies and little wit.

Not surprisingly, he and my mother used euphemisms for all bodily functions, and not, like, normal ones (like “pee” and “poop”), but truly insane ones like “tinkle” and “making a BM.”

(You know what? My childhood weirdness is making a lot more sense to me now.)

The point is, I grew up thinking I couldn’t possibly be a person who used four-letter words in casual conversation . . . until, one day, I was.

I swear a lot now. Maybe it’s all the fake pearl-clutching by the people who are raping our country and killing its citizens that makes me hate anything that feels even slightly hypocritical. Call things by their names, you know? The sex act is fucking, the bowel act is shitting, the urine act is pissing . . . and, not that it’s a swear or anything, but people die, they don’t “pass.”

That said, swearing is hard.

Not because I’m worried about offending anyone with my vulgarity (fuck ‘em) but because I am dedicated to not using any words that might imply that being anything other than a cis straight man is a bad thing. And you’d be surprised (or maybe not?) how many curse words are needlessly misogynistic or homophobic.

For most of my adult life, I’ve restrained from calling anyone a “bitch.” (Except my son, whom I’ll sometimes call a “little bitch,” but that’s just our love language). I will call a nasty woman a “jerk,” “an asshole,” a “monster”—but since “bitch” tends to be used to denigrate women and gay men, I’m not touching it.

I want to celebrate women—and men who can channel their feminine side—not support the suspect goals of the patriarchy. A term like “cum-dumpster” is going to offend me more than the person I’m shouting it at, and I’m baffled that “pussy” is about as cruel a schoolyard taunt as you’re likely to find: aren’t straight boys supposed to like pussy? Oh, right—misogyny. Being anything like a girl is bad bad bad.

I’m not going to use a swear word that insults gay people. Obviously, that takes the f-word off the table, but it also means I can’t use “cocksucker,” which makes me sad since it’s fun to say, but I’ve got to be true to my own morality. There’s nothing wrong with sucking the cock of another consenting adult, but there’s a great deal wrong with someone who has an issue with that. So why feed into that bastard’s hand?

Oh, shit—I’m not thrilled with “bastard” either: it carries with it the connotation that you’re less worthy a human being if you’re born out of wedlock. That’s dumb and outdated. So is anything that implies there’s something wrong with being promiscuous, like “skank” or “slut.” Fuck as many consenting adult partners as you want! It’s your life!

I’m conflicted about “douchebag,” mostly because I don’t understand the inherent insult there. Am I supposed to be insulting you by calling you a cleansing product? I assume the implied insult is in the proximity to a vagina—which means we’re back in “it’s offensive to be called womanly” territory again, which means I probably shouldn’t use it.

I’m not sure how I feel about “jack-off” or anything else that suggests it’s bad to masturbate. Masturbating is fine! So long as it’s done with a consenting adult!

But maybe these insults are meant to imply that you have a masturbatory personality, only caring about your own pleasure—in which case, you know what? That works for me as an insult. I guess I should only use it with a long disclaimer.

I’m fine with “motherfucker” as an insult because, guys, really . . . I hope we can all agree that no one should fuck their own mother. I don’t want to kink shame, but I’m pretty sure that incest races right past “kink” to “um, just no.”

I’m also okay with swears that are just other names for penises—many people who own penises are such awful human beings that if you want to call someone you hate a “prick” or a “dick,” I won’t object. Same with “dickweed,” which I don’t understand but is fun to say. And, if you’re British, please do call an awful person a “bellend,” because it’s such a fun word. Pretentious for a yank to say, but practically required for those of you who still bow down to royalty. Rolls off the tongue, innit?

I’m okay with “asshole” because assholes pass shit and are therefore objectively kind of gross, but I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum if they happen to find assholes delightful, and I do wonder if I’m betraying some small-mindedness when I use it as an insult. So maybe just calling someone a “shit” is safer than calling them an “asshole.” Plus you can call them so many kinds of shit—“horse,” “ape,” “chicken,” “bat,” and “bull”—a whole menagerie! And “shithead” gives me great pleasure to say and doesn’t offend anyone.

Of course, if you find shit delightful and the above paragraph insulting . . .

I mean, you do you, pal, but I don’t want to know about it.

Clearly there’s a reason I so often settle for a lame,“What a jerk” when I dislike someone. Jerk is really the perfect solution: anyone can be a jerk, so it doesn’t imply anything about your sexual orientation or your gender, neither of which deserves to be insulted—unlike your behavior, which, if you’re a jerk, needs to be called out.

I think I’m okay with “pissant,” but only because I don’t know what it means. “Jackass” is also fine, but these days it just means you’re talking about a movie franchise.

We all use “fucking” in front of other words to make them sound darker and nastier, which is really weird when you think about it, since fucking is objectively a nice thing (insert “consenting adults” note here). “Shitty” objectively makes sense as a negative; “fucking” doesn’t. But I use it anyway, since at least I’m not actively targeting a marginalized group by saying it. Everyone fucks!

Except incels.

Fucking incels.

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(You may have to zoom in to appreciate this one.)

When I got back from England, my husband and son informed me that our house was currently under attack by flies. No idea why, no identifiable source of infestation like a dead animal (I promise you, they LOOKED), but bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bzzz bzz all day, every day.

Sure enough, I get up that first morning, and I can hear the buzzing and see them darting around the kitchen (okay, to be fair, some of the fly-like specks were just my eye floaters because I have those bad—but some of them were actual flies). So I grab our salt gun—we have a salt gun, don’t you?—and I go Dirty Harry on these motherfuckers, and I’m blasting away, and then this guy, this little asshole, this minuscule wanker, TAUNTS me by landing on top of the gun, which not only means I can’t shoot him, but that I also have to watch him rubbing his spindly front legs in absolute glee that he’s outfoxed me.

God, I hated that fly. And also I admired him and would probably have slept with him if he’d have had me. Total Goldblum charisma.

Anyway, I obviously couldn’t shoot him, so he lived to bug us another day, but I’m happy to report that the pest situation has improved, and while I still have to trot out the salt gun now and then, it’s not quite so Fort Apache the Bronx, Maldon Flake Edition around here.

Next photo:

How big is Louie? Sooooo big.

So very very big.

Next:

These are fidget toys (and also I managed to get my son’s card in there—check out his website, and if you like his work, buy or commission something!). Anyway, the stick of butter on top called to me and I couldn’t stop stroking and squeezing it. It felt crazily good. Smooth and soft and squishy but also firm. I know this sounds vaguely obscene but I swear it’s just a really good way to keep anxious hands busy.

I wanted to buy one for myself but since they’re probably bad for the environment, I’m not going to tell you whether I did or not.

Okay, next:

See Claire’s hair. What color is Claire’s hair? Claire’s hair is brown. It used to be brown, then it was gray, and now it is brown again. Claire’s hair is a miracle!

Seriously, how could I not go back to dyeing my hair when that guy said the thing about how my kids made me wait a long time to become a grandmother? And less than three days after I slathered the dye on, someone told me I looked too YOUNG to be a grandmother, so it worked.

Same face but different hair color, and people think I’m decades younger. It seems so incredibly dumb to me that painting stuff on your hair changes how you’re perceived to such a huge extent, but the proof is kind of inescapable.

Next:

It’s a little village. Made of cheese.

A little cheese village.

There’s so much wrong with social media but then you see something like this and you know that it really can be used for good.

A LITTLE CHEESE VILLAGE.

You know you want to go to there.

Moving on:

Excuse the bedhead hair, pre-dye, pre-brush, pre-decency. This is how I look when I first wake up, so ignore the tangle, and focus on the dog.

Because this is her favorite spot. Right between my legs.

She’s a weird dog. She’ll hide out in our room for most of the day, then, when I wander in for some reason, she goes wacko, like she can’t believe I exist, like I haven’t just been in another room in the same house, a few feet away, for the past five hours.

And then she heads straight between my legs.

It’s my fault. I thought it was so cute when she first started squeezing between my legs that I rewarded her for it by scratching her vigorously behind the ears—and this dog loves being scratched behind the ears. So of course she kept doing it. And doing it. And now, she is so committed to being there that when I try to walk, she’ll keep nudging underneath me, continually trying to re-insert herself, until I’m practically riding on her back.

It’s gotten so extreme that now, when I walk into my bedroom and she’s racing toward me, I clench my legs together like a vow-of-abstinence-virgin at her first frat party. Doesn’t do me any good because sooner or later I need to move. And there she is.

Weird weird dog.

Finally:

Now that Louie can crawl, FaceTime has turned into this and it makes me laugh.

He’s soooooo big!

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I know a migraine’s coming on when I can’t see what I’m looking at and can’t understand WHY I can’t see it, until I realize—with a sinking heart—that the dancing lights are starting. The flashing bright specks of light start off right in the center of my vision, then expand like supernovas (I actually have no idea how supernovas expand or even if they DO expand—I’m not a scientist, so get off my fucking back) until they reach the edges of my vision and disappear. Fortunately, the period of time when the aura is obscuring my vision is the worst part of a migraine for me, and doesn’t last that long. But it still sucks and leaves me feeling dazed.

Having a migraine in a First Class Lounge feels very me. Put Claire in a desirable situation and she will find a way to ruin it.

Just to be clear, I’m only in First Class today because we know this guy who magically spins credit card points into flights. I have never flown First Class before, and may never again, but Points Guy found an incredible deal and was like, “You have to try First Class” and I was like, “Yes. Yes, I do.” I feel like I deserve luxury. I don’t know why I feel that way. I have done nothing to earn a luxurious life, and any extras are because my husband works hard and DOES deserve them.

My husband is also the reason I sometimes get to go to the Emmys. Not the REAL Emmys—the Creative Arts Emmys, which is for the non-famous-people categories. You probably meet a better class of people at the real Emmys—or at least a lot more stars—but the parties are the same. They usually hold the CAE the week before the real thing, so it’s like a test run. If something goes wrong, we little people can take the hit.

Anyway, like most galas, the CAE is equal parts glitz and boredom. You have to sit in a theater through the giving-out of a lot of awards, many of which aren’t wildly exciting, and it’s only after you’ve paid your dues that way for 2 1/2 hours that you get to go to the actual party, where there is free booze and cool food, especially if you’re not a vegetarian, which, sadly, I am. (See? I ruin everything.) The venue is always beautifully decorated and there’s live music and attractive young models walking around (no idea why), and the whole thing feels enchanted, especially if your husband wins an award, because the attractive young models are trained to say “Congratulations” to anyone carrying an award, and once I was carrying it for him and an AYM said “Congratulations!” to me enthusiastically and for a second I knew what it was like to do something worthy of congratulations. (I of course felt obligated to say, “It’s not mine—it’s my husband’s” even though the AYM couldn’t have cared less.)

The point is, one year we had one of these enchanted evenings—tux and evening gown, champagne, celebrity chef food, the whole deal—and then the next day we discovered our kids had left our refrigerator open with meat exposed and we had maggots crawling all over the inside of the fridge.

So one night we were swanning around like celebrities, and roughly 15 hours later we were picking maggots out of the fruit drawer and retching from the disgustingness of it all.

See what I mean? Luxury and elegance are wasted on people like me. There’s a pendulum connected to my life, and if it swings too far toward the good stuff, it’ll swing back hard to something bad.

The migraine I’m having now likely is a side effect of the cold I got from the cute little guy in the photo above. Well, more accurately, from his father, because we seem to have established a consistent virus pipeline: the baby gets sick; a few days later his dad gets sick; a few days after that—usually just in time to fly home—I get sick. For some reason, his mother doesn’t seem to want to play this fun game with us and stays healthy. Every party needs a pooper.

Anyway, there’s no clearer sign that the universe can’t let anything be an unalloyed joy for me: I love visiting my grandson more than anything else in the world, but every time I do, I get extremely sick. The virus, plus the jet lag, plus the time adjustment, plus the fact I drink too much during plane flights (in my defense, it helps me sleep, but also it’s stupidly dehydrating and I know better) means that I am a miserable, non-functioning wreck of a human being for the week after I get back home.

Is it even worth going when I pay such a steep price for the trip, when the pendulum not only swings back but punches me right in the face on its way?

All you have to do is look at any of the photos I’ve posted to know the answer.

I’ll keep visiting as often as they let me. You might want to buy shares in Kleenex.

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When I wrote my last Substack, which was about looking old for my age, I considered adding a note that would say, “No need to tell me I look young. I’m not fishing for compliments here.” I decided against putting that in, and guess what?

Not ONE of you fuckers told me I look fine.

Not a single one.

The good news is I don’t actually mind. The terror of feeling unattractive has mellowed in recent years, and I find I no longer care that much about my looks. (My husband is reading this and thinking, "Yeah, she could care a little more.”) I mean, I’d rather not look like a hideous monster, but I accept the fact that sometimes I do, and the last time I saw an awful photo of myself, I burst out laughing. Whatcha gonna do?

I’m truly not that bothered about how I look—it’s everything else that I’m wildly insecure about. Intangible, complicated things, like my place in the world and my lack of marketable skills and my waning ambition and my social awkwardness . . .

I don’t measure up to the people I admire, in talent, ambition, charm, or good works—and I admire most of the people I’m friends with.

Look, I know that self-confidence and self-worth are not necessarily tied to any of the qualities I listed above. There are plenty of people who like who they are simply because they’re well-adjusted and healthy—and you can add them to the number of people whom I admire and don’t measure up to. They, too, have achieved something I have failed at.

Insecurity is weird. When you’re drowning in it (which, for me, is pretty much all the time), you kind of want someone to reassure you that you’re being silly and too hard on yourself, but the second someone does that, you feel worse, because the things they say don’t jibe with what you know to be true. You assume they’re just saying what they think you want to hear, which is unfair to them and humiliating for you.

I also know that accomplishments and status—the things I keenly feel the absence of in myself—don’t mean much in life without love and connection. And I am so lucky: I have four adult children who willingly let me be part of their lives.

Recently, I was alone in a foreign city without the cellular data I thought I’d have, and I got stuck in transit for two hours with no way to communicate. By the time I had access to WiFi, I had received close to a hundred missed texts, all from family members desperately trying to make sure I was okay.

It’s hard to continue to think of yourself as useless and worthless when there are people in your life who make it clear they would rather you didn’t disappear forever.

But it is doable. Trust me. It’s the one thing in life I really excel at.

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It went fine, I guess.

(Don’t think about people staring at your asshole while you’re unconscious. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. DON’T THINK ABOUT IT.)

The only thing that was truly painful about the whole experience was the conversation I had beforehand with the sweet young nurse who was reviewing all my medical records. We were chatting away, getting along great, bonding over this and that, when I happened to mention that my first grandchild was born this year.

And he said:

“Wow, your kids really made you wait for that.”

It took me a moment to process the words. And then I understood.

This guy, this sweet and gentle young man, thought I was really fucking old.

I gasped in horror for a moment, like a hooked fish, and then managed to croak out the words, “I’m not as old as I look.”

I think that’s when he realized that he had insulted me and of course tried to backpedal, mumbling something along the lines of, “I just meant so many people become grandparents early now . . . like in their 40’s and 50’s . . .”

Sorry, dude. Too little, too late. You said what you said, and there’s no taking it back. You thought I was much older than I actually am. It’s not your fault you thought that. It’s your fault you said you thought that.

Nurse Guy is not the first person to assume I’m older than I am. A couple of years ago, a donut shop employee said, “Oh, you must be her son!” when my husband joined me, and twice—twice!—people have said to my husband, “Oh, you look way too young to be a grandfather!” and then looked at me and . . . just smiled apologetically.

I admit I do look old for my age. The last decade has been rough on me. My face is haggard, but even worse, I am now mostly white-haired, and, in LA, that’s basically the equivalent of throwing a 90th birthday party. I went gray young, dyed my hair for a long time, stopped for a while, went back to dyeing it again, and then stopped again, with the intention of being done with roots forever.

But this week I sighed and bought a new box of dye—all because of this one fucking guy and what he said to me. I don’t think I have a huge ego, but even my weak little ego had trouble dealing with someone saying I look too old to be a first-time grandmother.

Putting aside for the moment how old I look to young nurses (75? 80?), my actual number of years is 61, which raises the question: is that old? Is it middle-aged? Is it some weird place in between that we haven’t yet gotten around to finding a name for?

My grandparents moved into Jewish Housing for the Elderly when they were roughly my age. Someone doing a story about the place asked my grandmother what it was like to be “elderly.” She replied, “I buy toothpaste in smaller tubes now.”

My grandmother rocked.

Am I an old lady at 61?

Let’s get objective about this and examine the evidence for my being old:

• a lot of my doctors have retired or, gulp, died

• I hurt in a bunch of stupid places, like the joints of my fingers and where my big toe meets my foot

• I can only sleep under absolutely perfect conditions (i.e. cool room, extra pillows, white noise) and even then, probably not

• I don’t want to go to any event that starts after 7:30 pm

• My first requirement from an outfit isn’t to make people think I look smashing; it’s to be comfortable

• when someone offers to help me stow my luggage on a plane or train, I am thrilled, not insulted

• I went from buying cheap functional furniture to buying nice stuff that would last forever to going back to buying cheap functional stuff

• I struggle with regularity, in the most bowel-y sense of the word

• I eat dinner as early as I can get away with, and if places still offered early bird specials, I would be delighted (why did they stop doing that?)

• I rush to tell my kids about people they don’t know who have died—and I expect them to have some sort of reaction to the news

• When I see people lining up for something, I don’t think, “Ooo, maybe there’s something fun that they’re lining up for! I should go see!” I think, “How do I get away from this crowd?”

• I’ve been known to ruminate at length on dying

• I go to bed right after my early dinner. (I don’t go to sleep right after dinner—that would be insane. But crawling into bed with my knitting at 6:30? Totally reasonable)

• I’m not only a grandmother, I’m a cliché of a grandmother, totally besotted by the kid and desperate for people to ask to see a photo of him

  

That’s a lot of evidence to show that not only am I old, I’m also a complete caricature of an old lady.

But wait—here are some of the ways in which I’m not yet old!

• I have happily adapted to they/them pronouns for any individual who uses them

• I can sit on the floor for long periods of time and get up without help

• I love Waymo

• I worry all the time that people don’t like me. I assume that old age will bring with it more of an “I don’t give a fuck if you like me or not” attitude. (Please don’t tell me if I’m wrong about that. I want to hold on to SOME hope)

• I have no desire to garden

• I don’t watch Fox news

• I have a Substack (which is NOT a blog, since blogs are for old people)

Hmm. Clearly—distressingly—the list of ways I’m old far outnumbers the list of ways I’m still young. Which leads to only one conclusion: this whole listing thing was a waste of time and doesn’t prove anything.

Instead, I’m going to declare that age is a relative concept. When I was 15, 61 seemed indisputably old. (I also thought at the time that Anne Elliot in Persuasion was too old at 28 for me to give a shit about her romantic life.) But I’m pretty sure that when I’m 80, I’ll think about how young I was at 61.

Youth . . . old age . . . all relative.

Which means maybe the nurse who insulted me was simply so young that anyone over 55 seems really old to him.

Of course, the other possibility is that the guy had been brought up on tales of the Russian witch Baba Yaga, and was just so excited to see the hag herself show up in person, as scary and old and gruesome and decrepit as he’d been told, that he simply wasn’t able to think clearly.

It’s probably that one.

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Protect the dolls and make sure you’re registered to vote

***

I once asked a friend I hadn’t seen in a while how his father was doing, and, after a long and uncomfortable pause, he politely reminded me that his father was dead, a fact I had known and then forgotten in the years since I’d last seen him, because I have a wretched memory. It was an awkward moment, and I was so annoyed at myself for the mistake that I couldn’t think about anything else for the rest of the evening.

I’ve often wondered why this mistake unsettled me so much. Sure, I had revealed how bad my memory is, which is a bummer, but it wasn’t like I had confused his father with Charles Manson. “Hey, is your father still in prison for murdering all those people?” does seem like a pretty bad faux pas, if the person’s father is not Charles Manson. But given how sometimes parents are alive and sometimes they’re dead and sometimes they’re full-on-MAGA (which is worse than dead)—is it really so awful to occasionally forget where someone falls on the line?

Why does the subject of death feel so rife with potential landmines? According to all my research, humans are running at a 100% mortality rate, so you’d think, after all these millennia of people being born and then dying, we’d have come to think of death as commonplace. But most of us still panic when we have to talk to someone who has had a recent death in their family, and when we’re reeling from a recent loss of our own, we often wish people had said anything other than what they did say. (Note: if someone I love dies, please don’t tell me they’ve gone to a better place or that it was meant to be. I might have to kill you and then I’d have to talk to your relatives about your death, and I might say something they don’t like, and then they would have to kill me, and it could go back and forth forever.)

People seem not to like it when I reference the fact that I’m going to die and I can’t figure out why, since . . . I mean . . . I am going to die. Plus death is nothingness, which, while hard to conceive of, isn’t actually scary, at least not to me. I like being put under for an operation, and I assume death will be like that. Just … nothing. Now, admittedly, because I wake up from operations, I am then able to appreciate how nice and unscary that nothingness was. Never having died, I have no idea what it’s like not to wake up from the void.

This not-waking-up-again is a level of not-being that I can’t quite wrap my head around, but it’s mostly just a philosophical exercise to me. It’s not terrifying, the way the thought of pain is. In movies, when people are being tortured, I root for them to die. Death seems so much nicer to me than being in excruciating and deliberately-inflicted pain. Sure, death is more final, but you won’t care—no one cares once they’re dead that they’re dead because they’re dead.

I do know that death is rough on loved ones, which is why I’m okay with my own death, but desperately don’t want anyone I love to die before I do. I hope my loved ones feel the same way about me, but that doesn’t stop me from selfishly hoping I die first.

***

The night after I wrote the rough draft of this essay (it has changed a lot since then, almost every word in fact, which tells you something about my process), I had a nightmare about my parents, who are both dead.

In the dream, my parents arrived at an event, but then disappeared. I searched for them, growing more and more frantic, but couldn’t ever find them or contact them, no matter how hard I tried.

I woke up feeling devastated.

That is death to me, in all its banality: wanting to seek out and spend time with someone you love and not being able to. It fucking sucks, but it’s also impossible to get through life without experiencing it (unless you die young, and that’s a way bigger tragedy).

Losing someone you love is awful, but also ultimately just one more addition to that 100% statistic, and maybe that’s where some of our awkwardness about death arises. It’s a reminder that our most personal tragedies don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. At our darkest, most overwhelming times, the rest of the world goes on around us like it always has, and ultimately any individual death gets swallowed up in that 100% mortality rate figure.

These two disparate thoughts—Someone I love has died and it feels like nothing will ever be normal again, and also Everyone dies and that IS what’s normal—don’t play well with each other. We humans don’t feel comfortable holding opposing thoughts in our heads.

In my nightmare, I raced around like an inconsolable mad woman as I pleaded with everyone I could find to help me locate my parents. Everyone I talked to was perfectly nice but also baffled: why was I getting so worked up just because my mother and father had gone somewhere without me? Why was that such a big deal to me?

There was nothing unusual or abnormal about it to anyone except me, and I felt so alone in my fear and sadness.

So I get why my friend was taken aback to realize I had forgotten one of the hugest things that had ever happened to him. Something that had slipped my mind was also something that he never can and never will forget.

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Protect the dolls and work to make America a democracy again

***

In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to try to hide a ninety-pound dog from my husband. But it wasn’t the biggest mistake I made that day.

My husband once said to me, “I’m well aware that if I died tomorrow, within a week the house would be filled with dogs and cats. But since I’m still alive, I’m trying to hold the line here.”

I always want to adopt more pets, and more and more. He puts the brakes on; he says no. No, we can’t keep the free puppy that someone just handed our teenage daughter on the Santa Monica Promenade. No, you can’t adopt another kitten just because the neighbors’ cat had a litter. No, I don’t want to “just go see” that dog you found on PetFinder, because there’s no upside to that.

He’s the careful, thoughtful one in our relationship. I’m more reckless. Like the time I wanted to paint our guest room: I picked out my dream color, brought the paint home, rolled it quickly all over the walls, and called it a day.

My husband came home from work, looked over the job I’d done and sighed, then got to work fixing it. He cleaned off the drips that were all over the floor and trim, put a tarp down, taped all the edges and carefully repainted each wall. It took him days, since he could only work on it at night.

He saves me from a lot of disasters, and I know it, even if I’m not always appreciative. As disappointed as I am when he first says no to a new pet, later, looking back, I often know he was right. I love my animals, but they’re a lot of work, and while I often think I want another one, I’m also overwhelmed by—and occasionally resentful of--the chores related to the ones I already have.

But I’m not good at being thoughtful.

It was the first day of summer vacation, and my daughter suggested that we visit an animal adoption shelter around the corner from where my three youngest kids and I were eating brunch.

My daughter’s like me—reckless, careless, mercurial. She’s usually the one at my side begging for a new pet, but she never helps care for any of our animals.

Her more cautious older brother questioned the wisdom of looking at animals that needed homes. We couldn’t actually adopt any—with two dogs and a cat, we already had more than enough.

I said, “Eh, we’re just looking for fun,” and drove us all to the shelter, where we came across Mabel.

Mabel was a 7-year-old (maybe) Boxer/German Shepard mix. She was goofy looking. (Her looks, we later discovered, belied her very serious and sad personality.)

“We should get her,” my daughter said instantly.

“Yeah,” said my younger son. Then, hedging his bets: “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“We need to ask Dad,” said my older son.

I took out my phone to call, then stopped and put it away again. What was the point? He would just say no and that would be the end of Mabel.

I asked the shelter officer whether the dog was completely housetrained. “It’s hard for us to know for sure,” she said. “But she keeps her kennel clean. One day we weren’t able to walk her at her regular time, and she peed in her cage and then was so embarrassed that she tried to lick it up.”

That was it for me: Mabel deserved better.

There was paperwork and an introduction to be made between her and our other dogs . . . but a couple of hours later, Mabel came home with us, sprawled out over my daughter’s lap in the backseat of our car.

I still hadn’t told my husband. My older son kept shaking his head and muttering concerns, but I ignored him. I felt uneasy but resolute. This wasn’t the nineteenth century: I shouldn’t have to run every decision by my husband. Right? RIGHT?

We brought the dog home. I opened the back door and she went running into our fenced-in yard. Maybe she craved the open air, or maybe she was just scared that she’d be locked in a cage again if she came back inside, but she stayed out there, which was fine with me. I had work to do: my brothers-in-law were coming to dinner and I was cooking.

I was still bustling busily around the kitchen when my husband came home from work a couple of hours later. Mabel was nowhere in sight, and the house seemed normal, our other two dogs in their favorite spots, no sign of anything unusual.

And that’s when I thought, “Maybe I don’t have to tell him about her.” I mean, I knew I couldn’t conceal her from him forever, but maybe for a few days? I could keep her outside whenever he was downstairs, and then when I finally told him about her, he’d be so impressed by how quiet and undemanding she was that he’d welcome her into our family.

Too bad I had forgotten about the folder I’d dropped on the kitchen table a couple of hours earlier. “What is this?” my husband said, picking it up. “Why do we have something from an animal shelter? Who’s Mabel?” He swung his head from side to side, then stopped and stared out the window. “Oh, no,” he said and his tone turned grim. “What did you do?”

So much for keeping the dog a secret.

I tried to explain, but my justification for not calling him from the shelter—that he would say no instantly—suddenly seemed pretty feeble, even to me. He would have said no because he didn’t want another dog in our house—our house, not just mine. And I’d brought one in anyway.

He stepped outside and reached a tentative hand toward Mabel. I watched through the window, holding my breath. Maybe he’d fall in love, too. But she flinched and backed away from him, and he came back inside very much not in love. With her or with me.

My husband doesn’t get angry often. Even when I did that crappy paint job and he had to spend all his evenings after work fixing it, he didn’t get mad at me.

But he was mad about Mabel.

His mouth compressed into a thin line.

The doorbell rang. My husband’s brothers had arrived. He told them about Mabel, doing his best to make it sound like a funny story and not something he was still seething about, and they laughed like it was funny. My sister-in-law, who’s very kind and who likes dogs, argued in favor of our keeping her.

I served dinner, which tasted like appeasement. We chatted pleasantly, all of us. I darted glances at my husband, but he refused to look at me. After everyone left, we silently cleaned up and then silently went to bed.

Mabel was quiet and undemanding the first few days, but the dog experts I talked to warned me the honeymoon wouldn’t last. Sure enough, once she was comfortable in our home, she became wildly territorial, barking at everything and everyone.

When she cowered away from my husband’s hand that first day, it wasn’t just because she was sensing his anger—it was just who she was. Someone (we’re guessing a man, since she accepted women more easily) had probably abused her. So when people offered her a hand to sniff, she always flinched and ducked.

She stole food from the pantry.

She intimidated our cat.

She ate the little dog’s dinner if I didn’t guard it.

She lunged at the window, snarling, when the UPS man came.

I was always apologizing for her behavior--to my husband, to our visitors, to the other pets, to everyone who met her, really. Sometimes I thought wistfully about the “no” I didn’t give my husband a chance to give me.

But then there was this:

As wary as Mabel was of the rest of the world, she danced for joy when I came downstairs in the morning. When I called her name, she came instantly. When I scratched her back, she melted against me like there was no distinction between her body and mine.

She was a neurotic mess of a dog, but at a certain point she became my neurotic mess of a dog.

She and my husband had an uneasy truce: she mostly left him alone and he tolerated her. There wasn’t a lot of love lost between them, but he never made me return her to the shelter. He let her stay, against his inclination and even against his common sense.

He let her stay for my sake.

He had a birthday about a month after Mabel first arrived at our house. I showered him with the normal armful of electronics, books and games, and after he had opened them, I handed him one last small present.

He unwrapped it. It was a framed note that said:

I promise never to adopt a pet without your full and enthusiastic consent from this day forward.

He said it was his favorite present of all.

It’s a complicated thing, marriage, filled with compromise, frustration, kindness and conflict. Sometimes, even after over twenty-five years together (note, now up to 36), your wants and needs are in direct conflict, and it seems almost impossible that you can ever get past that. But then, most of the time, you do.

I make my husband sigh a lot; I don’t always behave the way he’d like me to; I act in direct contradiction to his wishes; I make a lot of extra work for him.

I’m a neurotic mess . . . but I guess I’m his neurotic mess.

***

Update since I first wrote this years ago:

Mabel did not improve with age. Dementia set in and at night, when she was left alone, she panicked and tried to chew her way through doors. She destroyed a lot of door frames and furniture. It was bad. The wary truce between her and my husband deteriorated and it was clear she was upsetting him on a daily basis. Finally she reached a point where she seemed so unhappy and confused, the vet felt we should put her down.

The day we did it, I hovered over her, and when the vet started to inject the euthanasia, I whispered, “You won’t have to be scared anymore,” and suddenly I was sobbing uncontrollably, more than I ever had at a pet’s death. Somehow, this crazy mess of a dog had touched and broken my heart. I should never have brought her home and also she belonged to me utterly and completely. Life is confusing.

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Protect the dolls and do something today to protect democracy—make a donation to the ACLU if nothing else occurs to you.

Anyway, if I’m going to have to choose between writing shit for my free Substack or spending time nuzzling this little man, which do you think I’m going to choose?

So I’m late to post, and I’m also recycling again.

(As I went through this a few times, I decided I didn’t like most of what I had written, so I cut a lot of it, and now this post is late, recycled, AND short. Enjoy!)

((The little man leaves today. I will be devastated but it might improve my output.))

***

Every once in a while, Pandora would wonder why she was blamed for the world’s evils. It seemed kind of obvious to her that whoever had created the evils and then put them inside an easily-opened box was the one at fault.

Then she would remember about misogyny and it all made sense again.

***

Alas, my love, you do me wrong
To treat me so discourteously,
So fuck off

***

(Note: it seems unlikely that anyone who has lived for more than a dozen or so years on this planet has not been exposed to the Rainbow Bridge poem/story/concept. If you have a pet and your pet dies, I promise you someone will give you a card with the Rainbow Bridge p/s/c on it. I kept to the original idea for the first few paragraphs, but then I strayed a bit. My apologies to Edna Clyne-Rekhy, who probably wrote the original version—it has been disputed, but seems likely.)

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. 

Then you start to cross Rainbow Bridge together....

That’s when your beloved pet comes to a halt. “Hold on. Who’s that over there?”

“Sorry?” you say.

“Who’s that brown dog on your other side? And the floppy-eared one behind him? And the one behind her? Who are all these dogs?”

“Oh,” you say and try to sound nonchalant. “That’s Popper. And Cancan. And Ivanka (sorry, she came with that name—never would have chosen it myself). And that little one is Petzel, and the freckled one is Lala--”

“Why are all these other dogs crossing the Rainbow Bridge with us? I thought it was just owner and pet, you and me, forever and ever . . .”

“Yeah, totally! It’s just . . . over time . . . there were others, you know?”

His ears go up. “Excuse me?”

“You were absolutely one of my favorites,” you say and reach out to pet him. He ducks away like your touch is repugnant to him. “You were such a good boy! But humans live decades and decades longer than animals. You can’t expect me to have just sat around and waited—”

“I did!” your pet cries. “I waited, here in this godforsaken place, with no doorbells, for years and years and years, and you were all I thought about! When’s he going to come back? What will we say to each other? How many licks will I give his face? That’s how I spent the years. Thinking about YOU. Like the faithful idiot I am.”

“I appreciate that,” you say. “Seriously, you’re great. Can we keep moving, though? We’ve got to get over this bridge and we’re blocking other people and their pets.”

“We’re only blocking them because you have like ten other dogs with you!”

“What can I say? I’m a dog-lover.”

“Right. You love ALL dogs. Just not one specific one.”

“I love you! I just love them too.” There’s a pause. Ivanka takes a crap on the blue part of the Rainbow Bridge. “Can we go on to heaven now please?”

“You’re not who I thought you were,” your beloved dog says, and he slips away before you can grab him.

He was always faster than you. You remember that now.

***

Julie Jordan: What’s the use of wond’rin’ if he’s good or if he’s bad?

Carrie Snow: Are you fucking kidding me? What’s MORE important than that?

***

When you woke from your long drugged sleep, and the old lady with the spindle was gone, and a strange man was leaning over you, his mouth on yours—when all that happened, did your mind leap to sex trafficking? And when he said you should come and be his wife and live with him forever, were your darkest fears confirmed and your happy childhood lost forever?

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Protect the dolls and protect voting by mail

• Given all the men flying to Turkey for hair transplants, you’ve got to assume that in fifty years assisted-living homes will be filled with old men who have a thick fringe of hair above their foreheads and in the very center of their crown and nowhere else.

• If you claim to have imposter syndrome but you don’t, not REALLY, then you’re an actual imposter. Well done!

• Would a modern day J. Alfred Prufrock measure out his life in Keurig pods?*

• How do you know when blue cheese has gone bad? Can it go bad?

• Dingos don't eat babies as much as I was led to believe. Although I guess one or two is still more than I find comforting.

• Can you think of a single part of a woman’s body that ads and articles haven’t tried to make us insecure about? I mean . . . even our labia and assholes aren’t safe from criticism and cosmetic procedures. Is there a single inch of us that we aren’t supposed to be spending time worrying about and trying to fix?

• Other people are annoyingly picky. You and me? We just happen not to like a few things here and there.

• There are few things happier in life than a bundt cake that comes out of the pan in one intact piece.

• Why are men and women’s clothing separated? Shouldn’t clothing just be sorted by size and style, and anyone who wants to wear anything should because why shouldn’t they?

• You can spend hundreds of dollars at the grocery store and fill the pantry to bursting and you still won’t have the one thing you need to make dinner.

• Middle-aged women all over the world are staring into mirrors, agitatedly painting their gray roots brown, but even as they’re doing that, the gray is growing, moving, pushing up, promising to reappear soon. Sisyphus could never.

• Water cleans things, but if you leave things in water, they get stagnant, moldy, and toxic. Water is the source of life, but standing water can easily destroy an entire house. Kind of weird when you think about it.

• People become stagnant, moldy, and toxic if they don’t keep questioning their own beliefs as they age and find ways to learn and grow.

• Nothing has ever tasted as good as the little cakes I made in my Easy Bake Oven when I was a kid.

  

• You could light up an entire city with the energy generated by middle-aged women walking together in circles on any given morning in west LA.

• People who use air conditioning during the day are wasteful and people who don’t use it at night are crazy.

• My pets don’t appreciate how hard it is to be human. They think we have it easy because we have opposable thumbs and can open up food cans but they don’t know how difficult it is to go to social events.

• How do you know whether you’re middle-aged or old? What’s the cut-off?

• When you’re a kid, it sucks to be different, but if you double down on the things that make you weird, you have a shot at being exceptional.

• Women don’t dreamily massage soap into their breasts as much as 90’s movies suggested.

• If you always eat the overripe avocado because you want to use it before it goes bad, then you never get to eat the perfectly ripe avocado.**

• After 60, you have to choose whether you’re going to fight tooth and nail to stay looking young (well, young-ish) or just give into looking old. There’s no right or wrong answer, but famous women will be told they’re wrong whichever they choose.

• If you let your hair go gray, people in LA will assume you’re over 70.

• Whenever I’ve had any kind of an operation or medical procedure, I’ve been prescribed opioids, which I never take.*** I look at the full bottle of Oxycodone and I kind of want to give it away to someone who it would give joy to. But I also know that would be very bad for them, so I can’t. And it makes me sad.

• Eating dinner late is sophisticated; eating it early is smart (you sleep better, trust me).

• A bullet point list is the new essay.

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*true story: when I wanted new furniture for my childhood bedroom, my father insisted I memorize all of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” before he would agree to it. I did. That poem played a formative role in turning me into the wreckage you see before you now.

**Thanks to Johnny for reminding me that I once said this to him. The smartest thing I’ve ever said and I forgot it the second it left my lips. Fortunately he didn’t. Also, read his Substack. It’s great.

***You may wonder why I don’t just refuse the prescriptions. I find I often don’t have a choice—the doctor just calls in a bunch of scrips and the meds are all bundled together. The other reason is I think maybe I will need them and I’ll regret not having them. That hasn’t happened yet but you never know.

(PS: Thanks for letting me recycle. It’s good for the environment.)

• MARTHA
  

  Martha was in her mid-fifties, busy and active, until, one day, there was a magic “POOF” and she suddenly found herself in a strange room in a strange building. It was an assisted living facility and people kept trying to put her to bed and feed her ice cream.
  “I shouldn’t be here,” she told the staff over and over again. “There’s been a mistake.”
  “Life’s like that, isn’t it?” one helper said kindly. “The years sneak up on us.”
  Martha burst into frustrated tears. “You don’t understand. Something happened and I got transported here, but it’s not my real home. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.”
  No one believed her and there were some days Martha didn’t believe herself, until, eventually, she was just resigned to living this way. She started to look forward to the ice cream, and, honestly, watching TV in bed all day was very relaxing. It didn’t seem worth fighting anymore.
  One day there was another magic “POOF” and she was dead.

• A CHILD’S BEDTIME STORY (#1)
  Did you sleep last night?
  No, I did not sleep last night. There was a noise downstairs.
  Did you sleep last night?
  No, I did not sleep last night. The neighbors were having a party.
  Did you sleep last night?
  No I did not sleep last night. The dog was barking at a coyote.

  Did you sleep last night?

  No, I did not sleep last night. I was too anxious about the political situation.

  Did you sleep last night?

  No, I did not sleep last night. One of my kids is dealing with something difficult.

  Did you sleep last night?

  Yes, I slept last night. I took a Xanax.

• A CHILD’S BEDTIME STORY (#2)

  Should I try to get some writing done?

  I would rather knit and watch TV.

  I could cook a healthful meal for my family!

  But I would rather knit and watch TV.

  My friend asked if we could talk on the phone.

  Only . . . I would rather knit and watch TV.

  You know what I should do? Get some exercise.

  The problem is I would rather knit and watch TV.

  Maybe I should just knit and watch TV.

  That is a very good idea.

• You always wanted to write a story in the second person—it sounded so sophisticated when other people did it-- but you were never able to pull it off.

• A CHILD’S BEDTIME STORY (#3)

  I feel sleepy.

  I know! I will drink a cup of coffee.

  I cannot focus on my task.

  I know! I will drink a cup of coffee.

  I need a break from working.

  I know! I will drink a cup of coffee.

  A friend wants to meet.

  We will meet at Starbucks and have coffee.

  Uh-oh. I am shaking and talking too fast.

  Maybe I should not drink so much coffee.

  Hahahaha. That is a silly thought.

  I laughed so much at that silly thought that I feel tired.

  I know! I will drink a cup of coffee.

• A CHILD’S BEDTIME STORY (#4)

  Should we eat potato chips?

  No, they are not healthful

  Should we eat donuts?

  Oh, no, those are really not healthful at all!

  I know! Let’s have a big bourbon cocktail!

  We can’t. It is not good for our bodies.

  But potato chips and donuts and cocktails make us happy.

  And everyone says that being happy is healthy.

  Yes! Being happy is healthy! I will get the bourbon.

• THE ICE QUEEN AND THE HAPPY WOMAN

  There once was a woman who laughed and loved easily. She knew the world was not kind to everyone, but it had been good to her, and she bore that privilege with grace, doing what she could to ease others’ pain while still enjoying the things that gave her pleasure—her family, her humble-but-well-kept home, the good food she cooked, the times when she was busy and productive and the times when she was at ease, doing as she pleased.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that darker forces would resent someone who moved through life so comfortably. Those who scrabbled in the shadows, crushing the weak and the vulnerable, valuing only money and power, filled not with blood and oxygen but with bile and crawling, stinging insects—these creatures hated anyone who could enjoy a life different from theirs.

  The Ice Queen was such a dark force. She looked down from her palace of ice (not beautiful crystalline ice that might be mistaken for glass or jewels, but dull and dirty ice bricks that did not shine, and within which shifting shadows moved and hissed) and saw the woman who laughed and loved easily and hated her.

  The Ice Queen had minions to serve her and any food or amusement she wanted, and still she was unhappy. The woman’s easy contentment—when she had so much less than a queen—offended her.

  So one evening, when the happy woman came outside at dusk to greet her oldest son, the evil Ice Queen chipped off a bit of the ugliest piece of ice in her castle—a splinter of mold and darkness and whispering shapes—and carefully dropped it in just the right spot, so when the happy woman lifted her smiling face to her son, the splinter fell down down down, whirling and turning, and landed smack in her right eye.

  “Ow,” she said, rubbing the spot.

  “What’s wrong?” asked her son.

  “Nothing,” she said because the splinter was so cold, it had instantly numbed her eye, and she could no longer feel it. “I’m fine. Let’s go inside.”

  Once in the house, she served dinner as she always did, and her children and husband set to eating heartily, with great appetites. Usually the sight of their enjoyment pleased her, but this evening she felt something new: a sense that they owed her more gratitude for her hard work than they were showing, than they had ever shown. As she sat down to eat, she thought, “They might have waited for me to begin. After all, I made the meal—why should they feel they can start without me?” The fact that her husband had raised the sheep whose meat fed them and had tended the crops that allowed them to have potatoes and bread and lettuces, and that her children had helped both him and her in their chores—none of that seemed to matter, compared to the work she had done.

  While the others talked and laughed—for they were a boisterous, good-natured, loving family—the woman felt a strange alienation creep over her. These people—why did she hold them so dear? Her husband, whom she had married when they were both still quite young, barely nineteen, had changed with age, had lost his hair and his narrow waist, and his broad smiling face was now seamed and weathered. He was now nothing more than a squat old man who spat out bits of food when he talked.

  Her gaze moved about the table.

  Her oldest son . . . had she not always adored him, always found him the best of all boys? Had she not pitied the other mothers, whose sons seemed to her nowhere near as smart or as kind or as strong as her own boy?

  Why had she felt that way? His looks were certainly no better than ordinary, and he gave his opinion with more assurance than knowledge. He was a young man of average wit and looks who thought way too well of himself. Why had she been blind to that before?

  Nor was her next youngest son any better, now that she regarded him clearly (for so it seemed to her that evening—that she had gained a new clarity). This son was unkempt and spoiled: while she studied him, he spilled his beer and did not bother to clean it up. He expected her to, she assumed, and she felt an unfamiliar resentment rise in her.

  As far as her two middle children, both girls, went, well . . . the older one had unpleasantly oversized features and the younger one had that perpetually runny nose—really it was disgusting how often she had to wipe it and how her voice always sounded thick with phlegm.

  And her youngest son still did not know his letters. He was slow, that was the truth of it, and yet until tonight she had not admitted it to herself.

  All these things felt true to her in a way they never had before and all the other things she usually thought about her children—how dearly they loved her and one another, how kind they could be when someone was sick or injured, how much they made her laugh—those things seemed very far away. She saw only through the ice in her eye, and the ice made her feel both very far away from her family and also acutely aware of everything about them that was wrong or ugly or awkward—for so the Ice Queen had devised it.

  “Mum’s being quiet,” said her youngest son at one point during dinner.

  “You all right, Mum?” asked her older daughter.

  “I’m fine,” she said, with a bit of a snap to her voice. “Perhaps I’m just worn out from preparing a meal for a bunch of savages who don’t have the manners to say a proper thank you.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence. The family was not used to hearing their happy mother speak so to them.

  Well, good, she thought. They need to learn some humility.

  “Your mother’s right,” said their father then, in his slow and measured way. “We don’t show our appreciation for her enough. You’ve made a fine meal tonight. Thank you, my old dear.” That was his nickname for her—“old dear.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t call me old every time you speak to me,” she said. “It’s unkind.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “It’s just my way, you know, my old—my dear.”

  She looked at the face of the man she had called husband for over twenty years . . . and felt nothing. Not warmth, not recognition, not comfort. “There’s a bit of potato on your chin,” she said coldly.

  When the kids went off to their beds that night, their father whispered to them that their mother was tired, unusually tired, and that no doubt explained her strange behavior that evening. “All will be right tomorrow,” he promised them.

  But it wasn’t. The Ice Queen’s splinter had changed everything.

  The woman who had once been happy now went through the following days much as she always had, cleaning and cooking and feeding the chickens, and mending the clothing and so on and so on, but it was as if some kind of glass had come between her and the world, a dirty pane that made everything look wrong and ugly and soiled. Nothing that had given her delight before—not even her own children—brought her any joy now, and the household tasks, which used to feel meaningful because she loved her family, now just felt monotonous and exhausting.

  She took to her bed whenever she could and she would lie there and stare at the ceiling and wish she could be somewhere else or perhaps even someone else or perhaps even no one at all.

  Her family did not know what to do. Any attempt they made to talk to her or help her or bring her things only seemed to annoy and anger her. If they spoke cheerfully, she accused them of ignoring her obvious unhappiness. If they expressed sorrow for her current state, she said she had a right to be any way she wanted and why did they have to make her feel bad for just being herself? In short, they could not please her.

  The Ice Queen looked down at all of this from her ice castle in the sky and reveled in her success. She had made someone who was once happy as miserable as she herself was.

  One day, the woman’s youngest son came to her with a rag and a dish of water. He said, “I will soothe you the way you soothe me when I am sick,” and before his mother could snap at him to stop, he had soaked the rag with water and put it on her forehead. The water ran down her temples but one drop fell into her eye and washed out the Ice Queen’s splinter.

  The woman blinked once, then twice, then a third time. She smiled at her son. “Thank you!” she said. “That does feel nice! You are my sweet boy.” She held out her arms and her son nestled into them for the first time in what felt like ages.

  The whole family rejoiced to see their mother smiling and loving again, returned to who she used to be. The house sang with laughter and relief.

  The Ice Queen saw this and was enraged. Once again this woman—this peasant, this nobody—was happier than she could ever be.

  And yet . . .

  While the family was in many ways restored to what they had been, none of them could ever quite forget how changed the wife and mother had been for that brief period when the Ice Queen’s splinter made her see them differently. They had lost forever their certainty that her love and kindness were constant and indestructible, and they now knew a tiny kernel of fear that the dearest thing in their lives could vanish in an instant.

  For her part, sometimes the woman wondered whether truth lay in the brightness of her love for the family around her . . . or in the ugly ways they had come into focus when the splinter was in her eye. While she reveled in the restored beauty of her love, she knew now that that beauty was something she chose to see and no more or less honest than the ugliness that had battered her soul and theirs.

  She was never again quite the carefree woman she had been before the Ice Queen’s splinter had entered her eye, but she was a more thoughtful and grateful one, and that was not altogether a bad exchange.

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  Protect the dolls and teach your children to be kind

But today, I’m going to invite you inside for a quick peek. Not like a grand tour or anything. More like when you get to see inside a celebrity’s home and they’re only showing you a few select rooms that someone spent a lot of time prepping to make look moderately normal.

This post isn’t going to be a coherent essay. It’s just little bits and pieces about me and my family. At the end of it, maybe you’ll feel like you know me a little better. Maybe you’ll lose all interest in me. Maybe you’ll stop reading halfway through and go scroll through Instagram for a while. I can’t promise this will be more fun than that, but I can promise you less AI slop. Then again, an AI slop factory could promise you less AI Slop than Instagram.

(Seriously, what the fuck with having to wade through hundreds of fake posts in the hopes of getting to see a photo of someone you actually know and started following five years ago because you genuinely care about them and their family? I’m so over social media. We can’t have nice things because we ruin everything.)

Here we go. Random bits of Claire, in absolutely no particular order:

• Sometimes I think about The Flying Nun, even all these long decades after I actually watched it, and I’m struck all over again by what an insane concept that was for a TV show. I fully expect to think about The Flying Nun on my deathbed.

• Whenever friends are coming over to eat, my husband tries to figure out what foods they’d enjoy, but secretly I really only care about the leftovers, and try to shape the meal around what I’ll want to eat the next day.

• I’m the youngest of the five siblings in my family but I was the first to go totally gray, which seems really unfair and also I don’t know who to write my letter of complaint to.

• I’m a good baker but if I were stuck alone in a post-apocalyptic world and had to figure out how to make every ingredient from scratch, I would have no idea where to start with sugar or flour (I mean, sure, sugarcane and wheat, but what do you do after growing them?). I think I could figure out how to get salt from the sea though—dehydrating it under the sun, right? And butter. I could make butter. (If I had a cow.)

• My wedding album is filled with dead people.

• I wish my hair looked as good at parties as it does randomly some mornings right after I wake up, when I’m not going to see anyone other than my husband all day long.

• When my youngest son was in middle school, I would walk the few blocks to where the bus let him off so I could keep him company on his way home. One day I lost track of time and he was already walking up to our front door by the time I opened it. I apologized to him for being so late, and he said it was totally fine and then added, “You DO know that the whole walking-home-from-the-bus-stop-together thing is for you, not me, right?” I sort of knew it and I sort of didn’t.

• My guilt when I decide to toss a used yarzheit candle instead of cleaning it out and recycling it into a shot glass is the most Jewish thing about me.

• My husband wanted to preserve our children’s innocence and tried hard never to swear in front of them. As they got older, our kids decided they needed to preserve their father’s belief in their innocence and tried hard never to swear in front of him. Everyone swore in front of me.

• I want to be first on everyone’s list—favorite relative, best friend, most inspiring mentor, etc—but also I don’t want to actually make an effort, so I never am.

• Haiku Corner:

  I know they’re normal

  But I still don’t like to think

  About my face mites

• When I get a really good night’s sleep, my first thought on waking up is, “Crap, I’m probably not going to be tired enough to sleep well tonight.”

• For decades, my sister made fun of me for having an absurdly small head. When we were in our fifties, we participated in a medical study where they measured both our heads and we discovered that her head was smaller than mine.

• My fourth child was born on April 4 2000. In 2004, he celebrated his fourth birthday on the fourth day of the fourth month of the year. It felt like it should be meaningful but he didn’t get superpowers or anything. Just cake.

• I think I’ve lost track of the line between ironic kitsch and acquiring stuff that’s actually probably embarrassing to own. Like this frog in waders, who sits on our kitchen table:

  

• I want to be a better person than I am. I think I’ve always wanted that and I’ve had many many years to work on it, but I don’t know if I’m any better a person now than I used to be.

• At night, I sometimes weave this imaginary thread from my heart to wherever my kids are sleeping in the world and I picture them asleep, and wrap the thread around each of them in turn, and then I bring it back home so I can wrap it around my husband lying next to me, and then I pull the end back to me, and picture the web I’ve created expanding and glowing and creating some kind of shield that will protect my family. I don’t believe in magic but if I did, I think it would work like this. It’s nice to do when I can’t sleep.

• I used to think it was gross that people wanted their kids to marry rich and now I kind of want my kids to marry rich. It takes away one thing to worry about. (But also it’s okay if they don’t marry rich, so long as I like their partner and their partner likes me. Which is lucky because I don’t think my kids are going to marry rich.)

• I love celebrating my birthday so much that I never mind getting one year older.

• I sometimes wish I had lived a messier, more dangerous, more courageous life but also I don’t like to leave my house or be alone or not have a nice clean private bathroom.

• Sometimes my sister says that things happened to her that I thought happened to me, and I truly don’t know which one of us is remembering correctly.

• It breaks my heart to watch someone eating quietly, focused on their food. I don’t know why. Also, once I was out to lunch with my mother (long dead) and she ordered a steak sandwich and every time I think about that, I want to cry. Again, I don’t know why.

• On some level, I must believe that I have an invisible audience, because I’m embarrassed when I don’t do well on online games that I’m playing alone in my room.

• On my first day of high school, the tenth grade French teacher went around the room, asking us some basic questions in French. First he asked names and then how we were and then how old we were. When he got to me, he said, “Quêl age as-tu?”And I said, “Treize ans.” And he said, “Non.” And I said, “Oui.” And he said, “Non. Tu n’as pas treize ans.” And I said,“Oui, j’ai treize ans.” And he said, “Tu as quinze ans? Quatorze ans?” And I said, “Non. Treize ans.” And he said in English, “Really? You’re thirteen?” And everyone looked at my now-bright-red face as I nodded. That was my first day of high school. I had skipped ninth grade and my fall birthday hadn’t happened yet but any hopes of blending in vanished then and there.

• I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I was the right age; I was too young until I was too old.

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  Protect the dolls and hug the people you love

I’ve been spending a lot of time here.

To be fair, I always spend a lot of time here. My knitting is here and so are my TV and my dog. I don’t see much reason to be anywhere else.

Still, under normal conditions, I do occasionally wander downstairs or out the door, to walk the dog, see friends, run errands, clean the house, and so on. But not this week. This week I’ve been mostly bedridden, thanks to a spinal disc fragment that migrated and got too cozy with a nerve.

I have the luxury and privilege of not having to grit my teeth and go to work in pain, and for that I am truly grateful. I can give myself permission to ignore the world and let the pain dictate how active I am.

Lying here for hours on end has led to my ruminating on the other times in my life when the universe has narrowed down to a single room. Like right after I gave birth to each of my kids: I would spend weeks doing little more than nursing and changing diapers and napping and trying to make sure my other kids didn’t feel neglected. The rest of the world went away for a while and I did not miss it.

(I never miss the world when I’m not part of it. I am not a social being. My grandmother called me a “stick-in-the-mud” when I was a teenager and I’ve done nothing since then to refute the label. I am happiest at home.)

Visiting my daughter when she gave birth and then helping out with the baby during his first few months of life brought back to me the very specific loveliness of my own post-natal weeks, when nothing mattered but the warm and small human being in my arms.

There have been other times when circumstances took the world away.

It’s probably all kinds of wrong to say, “I enjoyed my mother’s death,” but I don’t know how else to put it. There was a strange peacefulness about that time that I remember wistfully and gratefully.

The kids and I moved in with her for a few weeks after her cancer diagnosis (which turned out to be pretty much all the time she had left). They were still little and easy to amuse: it was vacation time for them, and a few new toys, lunch in a restaurant, a walk or two and they were content. And I was content, knowing that when we were done with all that, I could just lie on my mother’s bed and watch TV with her. Sometimes she had the energy to talk. Sometimes she didn’t. Either way we got to spend long hours together, often with a sibling (or two or three or four) of mine there too. The world was reduced to that room, that bed, my family. Bombs could have been falling a few miles away and I wouldn’t have noticed.

It would have been nice if I could have had those weeks of turning off the rest of the world to be with my mother, and then also have had her miraculously survive . . . but that’s not how it works, is it? Maybe you can’t have the beautiful stillness of those moments without the weight of knowing that this is all you’re going to have.

There was another time I watched over someone sick, another time when the world went away.

My daughter was five and very weak, could barely talk. We took her to the ER. After long hours of testing and waiting, nothing seemed to be happening, so I started asking everyone in the ER if I could just take Annie home for the night to sleep, come back in the morning. Finally a doctor said, “No. If you take her home, she could die.”

I stopped asking to take her home.

At three in the morning, she was admitted to the hospital with a tentative (soon to be definite) diagnosis of Addison’s Disease.

She and I spent the next five days in the hospital, where they pumped her full of steroids and she went from “She could die” to “She’ll be fine with daily medication.” It tells you everything you need to know about my husband that he was able to manage three small children and everything else in our lives while I stayed with Annie in the hospital.

It was pretty much just the two of us, Annie and me, day after day, enduring the miseries of hospital life. I slept in her bed at night and held her hand during the days, cried with the nurse on duty when no one could get an IV into Annie’s tiny veins and they hurt her badly in the attempts. We got to know Annie’s roommate, a teenager who was extremely ill and still managed to be incredibly sweet to the small girl sharing her room. It was a really hard, scary, sad time. But it was also a clear and focused time: the overwhelming medical situation forced everything else out of my head. I thought about nothing but taking care of this little creature I loved.

It felt similar to my mother’s dying days that way, and also to nesting with a newborn.

It’s not awful to ignore the world in order to focus on someone you love. Even when it’s for a sad reason, there’s a beauty and a sanctity to these times in our lives.

Obviously, my current situation is different, because it’s just me here, and I can’t say I’ve ever dabbled in self-love. My relationship with myself is adversarial at best. But spending time quietly removed from the world, simply drifting along moment to moment, does remind me of these other times in my life, and how meaningful it can be to have what matters to you crystalized and honed to something very specific and very dear.

And when it feels like nothing else in the world matters, you get to eat a lot of junk food. That’s nice too.

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Protect the dolls and hug the people you love

It’s probably what killed him.

My parents weren’t big on saying “I love you.” I always assumed it was a generational thing but I had a shrink once who was roughly my father’s age and he said he told his kids he loved them, so there was no generational reason for my own father to have denied me that. (Actually, in retrospect, that was kind of a dickish thing for him to say, wasn’t it? This was the same shrink who burst out laughing when I told him about something humiliating that had just happened to me, which may explain why I gave up on talk therapy and turned to SSRIs.)

For some reason, I feel like my mother got the message across—that she loved us—without her needing to say those specific words. Her hugs and endearments communicated it, as did the way her face lit up whenever one of her grown kids visited.

Things were more complicated with my father, and we also had a lot more years with him, so at some point he became aware that he should probably tell his kids he loved them before he died. But he hated sentimentality. When I burst into tears at my oldest son’s graduation, I instinctively turned away from my father so I wouldn’t embarrass either of us—emotion on display always made him uncomfortable.

The fact that he could only bring himself to tell his kids he loved them mere hours before his appointment in Samarra shows how hard it was for him to get the words out. But he did do it. He got through it. And I give him a lot of credit for that: he did it for us, because he knew we needed to hear the words before he died, no matter how icky saying them felt to him.

Roughly ten years before my siblings and I forced our dying father to be sentimental, I got a call from the dean of students at my kids’ middle school. My daughter was in trouble. Guess why?

She had told a security guard that she loved him.

Not romantically or anything like that. No, he was a nice guy and so she had cheerfully called out “I love you!” to him while walking with her friends across the yard. That was the extent of the interaction, as far as I know, but this casually exuberant shout made the guard nervous. A student loudly saying “I love you” to him? What if someone thought he was soliciting protestations of affection or engaging in improper interactions? He went to the dean of students and expressed his concern. The dean brought Annie into her office for a scolding, and then called me to let me know my daughter had behaved inappropriately.

I was torn between genuine amusement at the “crime” and equally genuine annoyance that my daughter had gotten in trouble for simply being outgoing. I explained to the dean that Annie said “I love you” to anyone who held a door open for her and that it just meant, “You’re nice” to her.

But if she needed to stop doing that on her school campus, so be it.

The irony of it all. I had a parent who found it next to impossible to say “I love you” to the people he loved most in the world, and a daughter who blithely sang out “I love you” to almost everyone she met.

So where does that leave me?

I haven’t historically been a casual user of “I love you,” but I have always said it to my kids at the end of every call or visit. Maybe that’s the happy medium between my father and my daughter: comfortably being sentimental with people you love.

Except . . . in all honesty, I started saying “I love you” to my kids every time we said goodbye because I was terrified something awful might happen, and I wanted that to be our last exchange if we never saw each other again.

What was intended as a profession of affection had more than a tinge of obsessive-compulsive behavior to it.

It’s loving, but it’s not exactly healthy.

Interestingly, with my grandson, the words “I love you” are always on my lips but they’re not spurred on by fear. I just want him to know that I adore him. Plus you run out of conversation when you’re FaceTiming a seven-month-old and “Grandma loves you!” fills in a lot of potentially awkward pauses.

Someday, when Louie is old enough to respond, I’ll have to ask him how he feels about being told that his grandma loves him “so so soooo much!” over and over again, every day. I hope he says it makes him feel warm and cozy and safe and, yes, loved.

But if it doesn’t, if he finds the constant barrage of sentiment unappealing, he can always register a complaint with the dean of students.

I’m sure she’d love the opportunity to call me again.

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Protect the dolls and VOTE for people who will do the same

There is tragedy all around us, from incarcerated children to the selling of our air, waters, and land, and maybe it’s all these recent assaults on basic humanity that have made my heart so fragile, so oozy and tender.

But in all honesty, I think I was born this way.

I became a vegetarian so long ago I can’t even remember the year. I tell people it’s better for the environment and meat isn’t something I crave anyway, which are both true statements, but not really why I stopped eating meat and poultry. The real reason is that it doesn’t take much for me to feel an emotional connection to anything with a face and eyes. Hell, I can’t even watch a Coco robot cross the street without wanting to protect it, and I know they’re just remotely piloted hunks of metal.

After I gave up meat and poultry, I was still eating fish, and then I made the mistake of getting a Betta that had this oddly grumpy face and rose expectantly to the top of the bowl whenever I approached. That was the end of my fish-eating days: the Betta eventually died, but my refusal to consume any kind of seafood lives on.

When I watched the movie It, the scary clown in the drain didn’t bother me at all, but I had to cover my eyes and ears during a scene where a couple of older kids bully a younger one. A supernatural threat is fiction, and I can shrug off make-believe horrors, but people hurting people . . . well, it’s our current reality, isn’t it? The bullies are in charge. Anyway, my loved ones all know to warn me away if a small child is mistreated in a book or movie. They also know I can’t bear it if an innocent person is unfairly accused of a crime in real life or fiction. It’s too painful.

(Many years ago, the family went to see the movie Stuart Little. At one point, the cat frames Stuart for a crime. My six-year-old son leaned toward me. “I hate this,” he whispered and I whispered back, “I do too. Want to leave?” The two of us fled, while the rest of the family finished the movie.)

It’s all about vulnerability, I think. The fact that there are people (or cats) out there who get off on attacking those who are weaker and unable to protect themselves . . . the monstrousness of that just tears at my unprotected heart (and my son’s too, apparently).

And while I’ve felt chesticularly vulnerable™ my entire life, these days I can’t open my laptop without something stabbing me right where my open heart is. There’s just no escaping injustice in our current climate—I mean, our Department of Justice is literally the opposite of that at the moment.

But I can’t walk around in pain all the time. That serves no one, and if I want to take any kind of useful action, I need to be functional. Plus my kids get all squirrelly when I’m noticeably depressed. They’re very observant and also very annoying.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about how to push back against the pain, how to be okay even when the world isn’t. I’m guessing, if you’re someone with some connection to me, that you’re also struggling with this (and I love you for it).

I’m pretty good at searching out contentment, spending quiet time actively avoiding news overload, turning to the things I enjoy doing—knitting, drawing, cooking, watching TV and so on. And it works—it does help the heart pain stay in check—but, as one day after another melts away, then the weeks, then the months, I start worrying about whether I’m squandering my “one precious life.” (Stupid Mary Oliver. Who even asked her?) Shouldn’t I be actively helping other people? Shouldn’t I aspire to more in life than just not avoiding misery?

One day soon I’ll write a post about the meaning of life, with specific and yet oddly universal advice for being both fulfilled and content. (Spoiler alert: it involves Ayahuasca and pickle juice.) But until I get around to writing that, here are some thoughts about alleviating our current collective heartache:

1. Spend as much time as you can laughing with the people you love and who love you, if you’re fortunate enough to be in a place and situation where that’s doable.

2. If you’re sick at heart, know that it’s because the world is an imperfect place and you can’t fix that, so give yourself permission to take a break and do something that’s relaxing and distracting until the pain subsides a bit.

3. When and if you’re up to it, do something to help protect the rights of the vulnerable—doing something meaningful, even if it’s a drop in the ocean, feels better than doing nothing. (If you don’t know what to do, there are lots of organizations with lists of approachable and reasonable actions you can take; donations are also very helpful, if that’s something you can afford to do.)

4. Some sadness is natural. Don’t freak out or feel like there’s something wrong with you if you feel sad because sad things are happening around you or to you. But if your sadness gets overwhelming, interferes with your ability to function, or makes you unsafe to yourself, seek out professional support.

There you have it. Dr. (still no) LaZebnik’s advice for surviving when your heart is an open wound and the world keeps punching it.

I’m still a work in progress, myself, so until I figure out how to stick my heart back in my chest, could someone please get me a bandaid?

A really really big bandaid.

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Protect the dolls and fight for justice

I have never been prouder of her. She gets it.

Sleep is everything for me—and, I’m convinced, for most people. When we’re sleep-deprived, we turn sour, cranky, and fretful. Conversation gets messy: we grope for words that were right there a second ago, start sentences and instantly forget where they were heading, and zone out when anyone else is talking. The slightest inconvenience feels overwhelming and dehumanizing. Other people become intolerable; we know intellectually that we love our kids and spouses but, man, those people SUCK when we’re tired. Small objects escape from our fingers and swan-dive to the floor. Knives deliberately slip and cut us; hot ovens find a way to burn us.

Being overtired is simply the worst, and, as a fully certified medical doctor (I’m not), I can state with confidence that the majority of our worst moods are caused by insufficient sleep.

I knew a guy once who could be sweet and charming and generous . . . but almost never was because he worked long hours, barely slept, and got up ridiculously early every morning. After a week of not getting enough sleep, he’d tear your throat out with his teeth if you wandered across his path. After a weekend with some decent sleep, he could be pretty good company again—assuming people were willing to hang around long enough to give him another chance.

People say teenagers are moody and difficult. Of course they are. Any self-respecting teen will stay up long past their parents’ bedtime, despite knowing they still have to get up ridiculously early for school. You’d be moody and difficult, too, if you were only getting six hours of sleep a night, at a time when your growing body is craving at least eight or nine and every day is filled with intellectual and physical challenges.

When my kids were school age, I horrified other parents by admitting that I never made them breakfast. Instead, I let them sleep as late as they possibly could and handed each kid a protein bar on their way out the door. Ten minutes more of sleep seemed way more valuable to me than a mouthful of scrambled eggs. Honestly, if I had been able to figure out a way to roll them straight from their beds onto the bus without waking them, I would have.

Of course, appreciating the value of sleep and actually sleeping well are two very different things, something I think we can all agree on at two am, when our thoughts and hearts are challenging each other to a sprint: “Race you past the island of disquietude and right over the cliffs of insanity!”

Sleep is a cruel bedfellow, desirable and enticing, but quick to dodge your grasp the more desperately you reach out for it. Nothing will ruin a night’s sleep faster than the plaintive thought, “I really need a good night’s sleep.” You might as well set a fire alarm to go off every few hours in your bedroom. (Which, admittedly, happens at my house all the time—our smoke alarms LOVE to run out of battery at 3 am, leading us to play the “I can’t tell which one is beeping and it’s dark and I’m tired and I hate my life” game, which is only slightly more fun than the, “One of the pets pooped in here—I can smell it but I can’t find it, so help me look” game.)

I wish I could tell you how to beat insomnia, but we each have to grope our way separately toward what works best for us when it comes to sleep aids—and even then, most fixes are sporadic at best and probably based more on luck than chemistry. My theory has always been that the healthiest thing doctors could do is lie and say there’s a terrific new sleep aid and then slip us all sugar pills, since the mere act of taking something convinces you that sleep is forthcoming, and that thought alone can lull you to sleep.

But still, despite pills, edibles, ‘shrooms—whatever you think helps you most—there’s no way completely to avoid those lonely middle-of-the-night self-flagellation sessions, when every cringy thing you’ve ever said or done comes back to haunt you. All any of us can do is resign ourselves to a certain number of sleepless nights each month, hope the good ones outweigh the bad ones, and learn to get up in the morning with the reassuring thought, “Bedtime is only fourteen hours away. I can make it.”

And thank god for coffee. Coffee is your best friend when you’re sleep-deprived. Actually, it’s your only friend, since lack of sleep has turned you into a total asshole, and no one wants to come near you.

Don’t take my word for it—ask my daughter.

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Protect the dolls and anyone else who is vulnerable and targeted

For those who don’t know or remember this particular children’s book, The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstein) is about an apple tree that happily gives and gives and gives to the little boy who plays under its branches: whatever the Boy needs, the GT provides, from shade to apples to construction lumber. The Boy grows up and abandons the Giving Tree, who is lonely and sad without him. At the end of the book, the Boy returns to the tree as a tired old man. The GT is now just a stump—because it gave so much of itself to the Boy—but it can provide the Boy with one last gift: a seat.

The GT sacrifices its own limbs in service to the Boy. It asks for nothing in return. At the end, it barely even exists, except in its one last function as a stool. But it’s happy, because it can still give something to the Boy.

It is all, obviously and excessively, a metaphor for being a parent.

And I say, fuck that shit.

I love my kids. (No need to give me an award—I’ve heard there’s a lot of that going around.) But I have no desire to abnegate every desire or personality trait of my own in their service, nor to find happiness only in sacrificing for them. That kind of maternal martyrdom feels like a one-way trip to family dysfunction. And I certainly never wanted to raise kids who felt entitled to take and take and take and never even think of giving back. What kind of monsters would that sort of selfishness lead to? (Sadly, I think we all know.)

Once, when my younger kids were still in preschool, the stairs there were filled with parents and kids going back up to their classrooms after an event. One small boy decided he wanted to stop and sit right in the middle of the crowded stairway. His mother bent toward him. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Will you please get up?” He refused. The rest of us—holding our own restless and tired kids’ hands, many with younger babies in our arms—were stuck waiting while she pleaded with him, to no avail. “You have to get up,” the mother finally said, speaking firmly for the first time. “You could get hurt if you stay there.”

She didn’t say, “Other people need to get upstairs too, and this isn’t fair to them.” She didn’t say, “The stairs are for everyone, not just you.” She didn’t say, “Look down and see how many people are stuck because of you.”

No. She said, “You could get hurt if you sit there.” (Honestly, given how murderous I was feeling at that moment, she wasn’t entirely wrong.)

It didn’t even occur to this mother to teach her son to look around and notice how his behavior was affecting other people—no, she figured that appealing to his inherent selfishness (because we are all born selfish) would be the most effective approach. After all, why expect any human being to act contrary to their own self-interest?

Or maybe the risk to him really was the only reason she didn’t want him to sit there.

The Giving Tree is fiction, but parents who don’t teach their kids to consider the needs of others are all around us. Every time a parent freaks out because their child ate a bite of something that wasn’t organic, instead of freaking out because kids all over the world are dying from food insufficiency, they’re not feeding their child, they’re feeding The Beast.

The kids who have been taught that only their needs matter do quite well in our current “Grab as much money and power as you can and people will fawn on you, no matter how selfish and grotesque you are” political and professional climate.

I can’t blame all our current ills on The Giving Tree, but, still, think of what a better lesson could be learned from it if the GT occasionally asked for something in return—if it said, for example, “I was happy for you to use my apples, but now I need you to prune my leaves because they’re heavy.” Or “How about you come keep me company tonight? You may be too old to swing on my branches, but I’d still like to see you. And maybe you could pick up dinner for us on the way?”

Or even, “Why don’t you take some of that lumber I gave you and donate it to someone who needs it more than you?”

It would also be a better book if the Boy, unprompted, said at some point, “I don’t need you to give me anything anymore. I just want to spend time with you because you’re my GT and I love you and I want to be there for you the way you’ve been there for me all these years.”

Is it so crazy to expect our kids to do more than just take from us? And from the rest of the world? To teach them to be generous as well as loved? To instill in them an understanding that love and sacrifice can flow in more than one direction? That, in fact, it enriches our lives when we all take care of one another, and that empathy leads to connection and love?

It’s a crowded world. Let’s all be aware of other people’s needs and goals and not block their paths forward, either out of indifference or deliberate malice. And, as parents, let’s encourage mutual generosity, and let our kids know that while we love to show up for them, sometimes they need to show up for us.

Oh, and hey, completely off topic and all, Mother’s Day is a week from Sunday . . .

Protect the dolls and protect people who protect the dolls

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A few minutes later, we found ourselves riding the elevator down with him, and of course we did what any self-respecting young women would do in this situation: we whispered to each other and giggled while staring at him, in a childish and actually quite successful attempt to make him as uncomfortable as he had made me (he was bright red when he hurriedly exited).

Soon after, I interviewed another surgeon, a woman, who didn’t rush to assume my only concern was how I’d look in a bikini, and who spoke to me like I was an adult about the actual operation and recovery. Of course I chose her to do the surgery.

And the surgery she performed left my stomach permanently lumpy, uneven, and ridged. I have regretted agreeing to it since the day the the bandages came off. I don’t actually wear bikinis but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to look good in one.

I hate this story so much. I’ve tried as hard as I can to find some kind of moral or meaning to it. I refuse to accept that I should have put my faith in an assholic man (that rarely works out well for us women), so I still feel that rejecting him was the correct choice—except that it’s possible, maybe even likely, he’d have done a much better job.

Try to read a moral into THAT.

Things happen to us and around us all the time that feel random, and it’s never a good feeling. We want to be able to say, “I did the right thing and I’m so glad.” Or, “I did the wrong thing and learned a lesson from it.”

We look for patterns in our lives, and explanations. We want A to link to B to link to C.

I think there are two ways to look at our desire to find meaning in everything that happens to us.

The dark way to look at it is that the world is chaotic and unfair and good intentions can lead to bad outcomes and bad people succeed while good ones fail and doesn’t that just SUCK? How the hell are we supposed to bring order out of this kind of chaos? And if we can’t, why bother even trying to do the right thing? Why not give up?

The other, more upbeat way to look at it: we feel this way because most of us are fundamentally decent people, who want to believe that the world is a just and explicable place. Being able to extrapolate morals from the things that happen to us helps us envision the world the way we want it to be. Struggling to find meaning in randomness is ultimately an act of positivity and hope.

I don’t believe that life isn’t chaotic and unfair, but I also believe we can fight to make our personal corners of it less chaotic and more fair, to the best of our limited ability.

So let’s go ahead and keep looking for morals. When we can’t find them, then let’s laugh at ourselves for trying to find meaning in a meaningless world. The whole process is funny and desperate, and funny and desperate people are my favorite kind of people, so let’s all be funny and desperate together and maybe, in our funny and desperate community of lost souls, we’ll finally find the meaning we’ve been searching for.

Keep protecting the dolls. And anyone else who’s vulnerable and targeted.

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