Welcome back to Dear Babies, my monthly follow-up to Dear Baby wherein I pose a question I received for the column to all of you. Today’s round features a question about moving cities in your thirties—a fitting followup to our last Dear Danny episode in which we passionately discussed the difficulties of figuring out where to live after the motives …

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As I turned over the idea, I thought of my good friend Harling Ross Anton and her fashion newsletter Gumshoe, which is about shopping thoughtfully. Was the premise of her work somehow in conflict with my nostalgia for a looser approach? I asked if she’d be interested in talking about this with me for Maybe Baby, and thankfully she said yes. Below is our conversation covering the tension between a free and loose approach to style and a more curatorial one, the occupational hazard of freebies and affiliate marketing, and, finally, a synthesis between our two perspectives.

Please enjoy the imagery produced by the dizzying number of photoshoots Harling and I did between 2017 and 2019, a period during which we devised many mystifying dress codes. This post might be too long for email, in which case you can view it in full online. It’s also just long…in general. This one’s for the style heads.

HALEY

It feels right that we’re having this convo over text because of how much we already text. Typing paragraphs to you comes so naturally lol.

I was inspired to bring you on because last week while I was conceiving of an essay about shopping I realized that my thesis was in part straining against the thesis of your shopping newsletter (Gumshoe, which I love and abide by philosophically). The basic premise was that I miss shopping, and I miss my relationship with style when it was a little more free-wheeling and curious and exploratory and less laser-focused on carefully building my wardrobe. Like, going to Forever21 with my friends in college and having absolutely no idea what we were going to get and bringing heaps of clothes into the dressing rooms and falling in love with the most random stuff or else crying laughing at how bad some things were. Obviously my style was atrocious at the time, and my shopping habits were so wasteful. It’s no way to build a wardrobe or treat the planet!!

But I noticed recently—and there are a variety of factors at play here, both societal and personal—that my relationship with style now is a lot more strained and precise. I worry about finding the perfect thing. I look forever and never know if I’ve found it and end up waiting so long to pull the trigger that I stop knowing what I like anymore. There seem to be unlimited places where I could look for something. I largely shop alone, on my computer. The social and playful aspects are gone, and I feel the void of that at times. (Also most things suck in quality and I don’t know what to trust, although that’s a whole different conversation.) So my question to you or to both of us is: Where did the fun go and why, and is it possible to rediscover it without bringing back all the baggage of that super wasteful era of my life as a consumer? If so, how?

Let me hit you with a more specific question to start though: For people who aren’t aware, what is the premise of Gumshoe and how did you land on it? Did it feel like a response in some ways to how you covered style at Man Repeller, or how you related to style before that period as just a lover of fashion or an amateur blogger?

HARLING

Hi! I love you. I’m so glad we’re having this convo. It feels very full-circle to be reflecting on shopping and style together now, exactly 10 years after we met working at a fashion blog!! Both of our senses have evolved so much since then (I think unequivocally for the better, lol).

A little background on why I started Gumshoe and why its ethos might be relevant here: It came out of two things colliding. The first thing was moving into my thirties and landing in a much healthier relationship with shopping, eschewing fast fashion in favor of secondhand and natural fibers, things I knew would actually last. The second thing was a frustration I kept running into as a freelancer. So much of the work I was doing for legacy outlets came with pressure to build shopping roundups in service of affiliate goals—fewer secondhand picks, more new-and-currently-shoppable, ideally with a high commission for the publishers. I started craving a platform where I could write about what actually interested me as a reader and a shopper: Etsy rabbit holes, wardrobe workhorses, pieces that might not even be shoppable anymore but still say something about what makes an outfit great. I also started it because I LOVE doing the stuff that a lot of people (maybe you included) either aren’t interested in or don’t have time for or both, i.e. scrolling through endless pages of The RealReal until I find the most wonderful random thing, and I figured some of the stuff I’ve learned through that process could be interesting to write about.

Something you’re prompting me to think about is whether being a super thoughtful shopper, in an ideal world, can also be supportive of whimsy and impulse. I don’t think I have explicitly touched on that question in my writing for Gumshoe.

HALEY

Okay, yes, exactly. This also makes me want to clarify why I described my essay thesis as straining against the thesis of your newsletter, because that might not be totally fair. In practice I think your relationship with style feels extremely fun and whimsical! Maybe primarily because of the places you find things and how you put them together. Where I think the tension exists for me is in the more philosophical underpinning of your newsletter, which is that we ought to shop slowly and carefully with an eye toward building a sustainable wardrobe that we can conceivably love and work with for a long time. Obviously a good idea I agree with! The term “building” feels especially important here, almost like your wardrobe is a curation or collection that is developed with a really keen eye toward a broader vision. This is also the part that feels intimidating to me sometimes. Like, I want that! But it’s a lot of pressure.

Reminds me of a few months ago when I asked if you ever bought things that you regret—things that make you think, who do I think I am??? Because I STILL do that sometimes, and when I do, often my first thought, even if it’s like below my conscious awareness is: Harling would never.

HARLING

I do buy things I regret sometimes, but I think what I told you at the time is that at this point it’s rare. Being a thoughtful shopper, in addition to being a passion of mine, is also literally my JOB, so that’s part of why I’ve honed the skill. Like, I wish I was as engaged with culture and news and had thoughtful takes on those topics like you do, but that’s your job and that’s part of why you’re so good at it. I’m not saying I’m “incredible” at shopping lol but you know what I mean. I don’t think everyone has to obsess over hundreds of pages of secondhand items in order to have a solid approach most of the time. I think it’s more about your overall strategy and goals than it is about how much time you’re spending considering every purchase.

I also remember mentioning to you that I think receiving free things from brands, which I do on occasion, also makes it easier for me to experiment, and I didn’t want to get on a high horse and weigh in on your predicament without pointing that out!

HALEY

Oh yeah I was really interested in you mentioning freebies. Because we talked so much back in our Man Repeller days about the upsides and downsides of “the swag pile.” I used to say I think the free clothes, despite being such a windfall that I was absolutely starry-eyed over, probably ultimately made my style worse, because I was always wearing the most random stuff and never buying anything for myself because I couldn’t justify it and also was not making a lot of money. But you describing it as a venue for surprise and experimentation totally resonated. There’s that tension again—my wardrobe might have been made worse by freebies, and yet they were also very fun to get, and led a certain levity to getting dressed. It felt like playing dress-up a lot.

Curious how you feel about press gifts these days. Does it feel different from MR press gifting?

HARLING

It does feel different. Back then brands would just send mountains of stuff to our office, and we were young and excited and basically just took everything home with us because it was FREE, and I agree this made our style a lot worse. Still, we were always marveling at our luck. It was very fun! But I do think it made my style less personal and more shaped by random outside forces. Now brands always reach out to ask if I would like to receive something before sending it, and I’m extremely selective about what I say yes to because I don’t want to be wasteful. I probably decline 95% of gifting now.

I try to be honest with myself about the ways gifting can both aid and compromise my goals as a style writer. I appreciate how it helps me cast a wider net in terms of personally vetting things than I would be able to otherwise. I’m not really interested in reading endless shopping round-ups of things someone hasn’t personally tried on and lived in. It’s not as interesting or helpful. The free pieces I get give me more material to work with on that front. But they also make my wardrobe larger and more varied than it would be otherwise, and therefore less relatable.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy getting free things… I love clothes, and I’m human!! But I understand why the free stuff economy gets a bad rap, even if it’s not unique to fashion. Book critics receive advance copies, film critics attend free screenings, many restaurant reviewers are comped. People are right to be suspicious of how it can affect the content they consume. In an ideal world. getting free access to things would expand your knowledge base though not change your standards, but that’s just not always the case. I think about this a lot because the idea of recklessly endorsing something makes me sick to my stomach!

HALEY

That reticence definitely comes through imo. I can tell how picky you are in your style!! Which is so clear-eyed these days. (I’ve never loved your style more than I do now.) I actually think gifting probably inspired a lot of our cynicism coming out of MR, because we saw the way it warped fashion media. When someone is getting a lot of free stuff and is just kind of riding the novelty wave, I think it def shows up in their style. In that way gifting has the same hazards as like…those Forever21 trips in college.

HARLING

Totally. And you’re right, people are smart and can almost always tell when someone is wearing an outfit of entirely new, unvetted things. Sometimes in photos you can still see the creases on the shirt from being folded in the package lol

HALEY

Those creases always devastate me…

To be fair though I don’t think people who are constantly recommending new stuff are always doing so cynically. New stuff DOES feel so nice compared to old stuff, it’s easy to mistake it for “better.” This is basically the entire underpinning of the fashion industrial complex. I guess it does come back to goals and remembering what you’re aiming for long-term, which I think most of us forget.

HARLING

I’m not trying to make it seem like I’m perfect, but it’s something I’m always giving a lot of thought. I also want my writing to focus just as much (if not more) on the relationship we have with our existing clothes vs buying new ones, so I don’t think I have the same pressure as other fashion writers might to constantly try out and write about new stuff, which is nice.

I love to talk about analyzing the details of your own wardrobe almost like you’re an anthropologist. Paying attention to the fabrics that you love and that last, the silhouettes or particular details that suit your body, the brands you keep returning to. Once you encode that information into your brain and it starts informing the way you shop and get dressed, I think it overrides the sheen of newness. In other words, those are the things that will jump out to you and feel special, regardless of how old or new.

HALEY

You seem to have such a precise understanding of what you like and how to translate that for yourself, which I really admire! I think I have a pretty strong sensibility but maybe a somewhat weaker sense for how to translate that for myself, or maybe a penchant for getting distracted in the process of that translation.

I think there’s this fantasy that, if you shop well enough, you will never hem and haw while getting dressed. That every time you get dressed it will just come together perfectly because you’ve done all the work upfront. But I’m sure you still feel poorly dressed sometimes! (praying)

HARLING

10000%. Especially now that I’m a mom. I simply do not have time to stand in front of my closet and get my outfit perfect every day. That’s why I repeat outfits so much. The stylist Reva Luft says something I love: If you don’t know what to wear, put on something you wore yesterday. Not necessarily the whole outfit but a piece of it, and go from there.

Also, don’t you think occasionally wearing bad outfits actually kind of helps make your style better?? Like, it helps clarify things because it’s that tension that evolves your style and pushes it forward? That’s what I tell myself whenever I hate what I’m wearing: at least it’s teaching me something!!!!

HALEY

I need to take on this mindset. Maybe it’s just the phase I’m in that’s making me pessimistic or less able to draw useful conclusions. I’m pregnant, unable to access 80% of my wardrobe in the peak of summer, a season I’ve never really liked getting dressed for anyway, none of which can be discounted. But sometimes I feel like I’m also in an era of my life more broadly speaking (just parenthood? getting older? both?) where I don’t feel like I have the time or energy to approach my wardrobe like—to use your word—an anthropologist. And so then I end up kind of lapsing on the whole style endeavor and end up missing when it felt easier or something. Or more…fun to shop?

Do you ever miss the more social/improvisational aspects of shopping? Remember just “going shopping”? (What a concept.)

HARLING

Okay, to be honest, no, I don’t miss it that much, and maybe that makes me weird, but I always disliked the sunk cost fallacy of buying something just because I made the effort to go to the sample sale, or the store, or whatever it was. I don’t run into that when I’m shopping online. I have more nostalgia for simply being in my twenties and having the time to just kill a whole afternoon goofing around with my friends—the shopping part is secondary. I don’t like that this is my answer but it’s the truth!! I wish I was someone who romanticized shopping in person more. But I love efficiency.

Do you feel like you get the same buzz that you did shopping with friends in your teens/twenties if you’re like…wearing a cute outfit out to dinner now with a group of girlfriends who all care about or engage in style in some way? I feel like that’s a big vehicle for me.

HALEY

I wouldn’t say that quite feels the same to me. Maybe more like “getting ready together”? Trying things on, being like, “does this look right,” lending each other clothes, etc. That feeling of communal style engagement versus just assessing the finished product because you met up after you all get ready alone.

HARLING

Fair point. But again that feels like such a part of that era of life in general even apart from clothes!

HALEY

Totally. Am I just being nostalgic for youth? I still get it sometimes when I’m visiting my sister or am on a trip with people or I’ll force it on a friend by coming over before we go somewhere to “finish getting ready together.” Even though all we’re doing is like, putting on earrings.

HARLING

I also feel like we got some of that from just working in the Man Repeller office and showing up in our outfits and kind of analyzing what we were wearing in real time every day, which was so fun. Nostalgia for youth and office life.

HALEY

Oh yes that was such a fun side of working at MR! When do you think getting dressed or shopping feels most fun to you now?

HARLING

I think it’s when I have the chance to really play around with stuff in my closet and land on something I feel excited about and then going out in the world and being around people who notice, which is making me think about your original point about the Forever21 dressing rooms. The fun part wasn’t necessarily the buying (even though of course getting something new is fun), it was the looseness.

HALEY

So funny that Forever21, the store from hell, has become the bastion of fashion fun in this convo. Sorry about that!

Okay but yes, what I’m hearing is like…getting dressed is most fun for you when you have TIME. Maybe that’s the real crux of my issue these days—that my relationship with style feels constrained across several different metrics. It’s just not fun when it feels like that, which comes across in my style, and then I blame my wardrobe rather than the circumstances of my life, and assume that I need to be thinking harder to dress better, and I don’t have time to do that, and then I’m annoyed. I assume this is why fashion can feel like a luxurious hobby sometimes. You need to have a little bit of time to enjoy it?

Shit, it’s 6pm. We both have to pause and take care of our kids now, which is ironic.

HARLING

Poetic. Let’s pick this back up later!!!

[LATER]

HARLING

Hi circling back! Just to recap: You miss when shopping used to feel loose and fun but the downside was that it was wasteful and your closet was crazy. Now you’re not over-consuming anymore, but trying to evolve your wardrobe feels high-pressure and stressful because you’re shorter on time and your standards are higher.

When was the last time you cleaned out your closet? I feel like I remember you saying you went too far during a closet sale a few years ago and sold too much and you’ve been scared to purge ever since.

HALEY

Yes! I can’t believe how heavy my hand was. I think sometimes when I’m cleaning out my closet, I mistake my current mood for my now-permanent preferences—a kind of recency bias I guess—and end up paring my closet back to an inflexible degree, which in turn makes me have less to experiment and play with as my moods change (and also as trends start to trickle into my preferences whether I like it or not).

Reminds me of the idea that I think we’ve discussed before that there’s always some stylist or influencer out there who is claiming something that is actually trendy is a “classic” simply because it feels classic in this particular moment, and because there happen to exist some vintage photos of people wearing said thing. I think sometimes it can be hard to see beyond our current tastes and self-conceptions. This can make the project of building a “life-long wardrobe” feel treacherous.

Maybe a better term than recency bias is end-of-history illusion, which if you recall is (pardon Google copy-paste) “a cognitive bias where people recognize how much their values, personality, and tastes have changed in the past, but incorrectly believe their current self is fully formed and will change very little in the future.” I suspect this is what your newsletter is trying to hedge against. Like you’re trying to help people understand their style through a more strategic lens than their temporary emotional whims, which is obviously very needed.

Maybe I’m just mourning using the emotional whims as a weathervane because they’re more fun…but I will concede the point. I think you would probably say this work isn’t supposed to constrain creativity but to use constraints in a way that can inspire creativity, and most importantly inspire less waste. Which is vital not just for systemic climate reasons but for personally philosophical ones. Consumption as a heat-seeking novelty missile is a plague on the human soul!

HARLING

I am dying to come over and help you clean out your closet!!! I feel like it could be helpful to have a sounding board next time you do it given the recency bias fear you mentioned, which I totally understand. It’s easy to mistake mood for permanent preference and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of the fantasy that there’s a final, “correct” version of your personal style and if you work hard enough you can realize it, when in reality I think there’s always something new and interesting to learn about our taste. Even though I’m a pretty ruthless closet purger, I also think it’s okay for a closet to have a little slack in it—things that might not work for you right now but your gut is still telling you to keep.

HALEY

Yes I need you to whip me into shape!! Let’s do it in…five months.

Setting my own hang-ups aside, I think it might be interesting to take this conversation to a more macro level, because something we haven’t really gotten into are the parallels that exist between the state of shopping and the state of other normal human activities. The transition of “used to be fun and social and experimental but now exists on a feed and is primed for optimization” feels broadly familiar. Obviously we can try to push against this by making personal tweaks, but I do think it’s worth acknowledging these larger cultural forces that are sapping what used to be messy and lively endeavors into something more strategic and (supposedly) streamlined.

Curious what you think about the constant posts coming out of, say, The Strategist, about “the best white t-shirt” or “the best jeans” or whatever. I have a theory that they’re parading as streamlined and strategic but are covertly speaking to whims and trends. Trying to scratch both itches at once! Something about them feels dishonest and sexless.

HARLING

I never click on those Strategist-type posts. I really only care about “best of” recommendations that come from specific people I follow and trust who I know aren’t saying that about a new t-shirt every other month, or via word of mouth from friends…which I feel like is the case for most people? My sense is that everyone is much more wary now of how things like gifting and affiliate marketing and brand relationships impact recommendation culture online, because it can be so obvious.

HALEY

At least the savviest people are! I was really fascinated by that Substack piece about how certain affiliate brands will push certain products to influencers and then suddenly they’re all recommending the same thing at the same time, but couched in spontaneous-feeling language? And by push I mean there will be firesales where you get a higher commission for a certain thing for a limited time or something. Did you read that? [Ed note: After much hunting I could not find the piece I am referencing! But this one by Emilia Petrarca covers the same concept and might be even more thorough.]

HARLING

I am definitely aware of that happening! It’s one of the reasons why I was really hesitant to use affiliate links at first in Gumshoe, because I understand why readers might be suspicious of them. I just started introducing them this year because I felt like I’d built up enough trust at this point that it would be okay, and I also like having the analytics that show what kinds of pieces and price points my readers are most drawn to. I loved that piece Emilia wrote and also this one by Kelly Williams. I’m glad there’s more information out there about how all of this stuff works.

HALEY

Me too. If I recall correctly there was a lot of talk a couple years ago about the role affiliate marketing played in the High Sport pants mania. Apparently the commission was huge, and everyone was highly incentivized to link them!

HARLING

Oh that’s SO interesting, I didn’t know that.

HALEY

Shout out to you still being a huge High Sport pants fan. Your purity shines through.

HALRING

😂 They never gifted me, for the record.

HALEY

You deserve a pair lol

HARLING

I think it’s interesting that you’ve been feeling such a block when it comes to your personal style lately because, especially as I look back on the decade that I’ve known you and the evolution of your style during that time, I feel like you’ve honed it so much. You’re much less susceptible to trends now, there’s a lot more consistency with the colors and silhouettes you gravitate toward. I love how you’ve leaned into a more androgynous aesthetic now than you had in your twenties. I feel like I could look at an item of clothing and immediately identify whether it would suit you, which to me says you have a very distinct sense of style. So I guess I’m wondering how much of this current state you’re in feels influenced by being pregnant? Did you feel this way before getting pregnant?

HALEY

Omg bless you. It’s funny how you can feel blind to the specificity of your own style just by nature of living inside it for so long. But anyway, yes, a lot of this ennui is inspired by pregnancy. I hate getting dressed while pregnant. I just don’t feel like it’s well-suited to my taste (which usually guides me toward more structured/tailored/less feminine things, which are obviously out of step with pregnancy lol?).

As for how much of this was present beforehand, I think a few factors have been in play. As a parent, I have a lot less time to shop so studiously, or even to play around with my closet all that much, two constraints that are happening at the same time as my standards are increasing for what I wear and buy. There’s a lot of content out there that’s trying to solve for this—e.g. capsule wardrobes—but it always seems to involve buying more stuff or, in my case, lying to myself about how limited of a palette I’m willing to work with. Sometimes it feels like the only solution is to just lower my standards and think about something else, which is kind of a bummer (with the upside of saving me money). Often I just feel like I’m lacking the necessary resources—mainly time and energy—to nourish my relationship with clothes.

HARLING

It’s tempting to offload the work of discovery to algorithms when you’re short on time, but I think we’re both aware of the pitfalls of that, whether it’s cultural input you’re seeking out or style inspiration. Do you remember that trend online (the irony lol) about introducing more “friction” into your life? I feel like this is relevant here.

HALEY

Oh yes, great point! Friction might actually be the quality that connects the whimsical approach of my youth with the more grown-up approach that we both now endorse. Whereas before the friction may have been more social and physical (getting together with friends, trying things out, blindly sniffing around—which I do genuinely miss and want to bring back somehow?), now it’s more intellectual and philosophical. Meanwhile the frictionless route—compromised best-of roundups, unlimited online return policies, the bottomless ad-filled Instagram feed, people hawking end-all-be-all style solutions—is what actually feels really deadening to me. And while I may resent that the slower route doesn’t always fit in my life, it’s still the approach to aim for.

I guess this leaves us with the question of whether it’s actually realistic to expect your style to really sing and develop if your life can’t accommodate the required friction to make it a worthwhile/grounded/sustainable pursuit. Another failure of the you-can-have-it-all industrial complex? Is it even possible to make fashion feel “easier and more approachable” to people without compromising some of these values? Maybe democratization isn’t the answer! For the record, I don’t think Gumshoe is trying to make it easier for people, I think of it more as a guide for taking on the burden of the harder path. Am I making this sound so depressing? Maybe a more positive spin is that it doesn’t have to be HARD, but you do have to be patient, per the pieces I’ve written about time being the most important quality of good style.

[Ed note: Here I’m referring to three things: This piece on Emma Chamberlain’s home, this essay on taste, and this podcast on influencer style.]

HARLING

Considering adopting “a guide for taking on the burden of the harder path” as my new slogan!!

I too feel aesthetically deadened by the frictionless route you described, which goes down as smoothly as fruit juice but is so completely un-sustaining. I think what friction does is make you pay attention—react, notice, discover what you actually think. An algorithm is frictionless because it does the noticing for you. I think that’s why I love style content that doesn’t focus as much on what to buy but instead on figuring out how to notice what you already respond to. In other words, not necessarily democratizing the answers, but democratizing the questions so you can arrive at the answers yourself. In that sense I agree that having good personal style requires patience more than it requires time or effort, and I think there are different ways into that, i.e. it doesn’t have to involve spending hours scrolling on eBay, it can just be shopping sparingly, living in your clothes, and paying attention to how they make you feel.

HALEY

Yeah this is really well said. I like thinking of patience as the more meaningful input than effort (or money, obviously), because it pushes against what a lot of “modern tools” are trying to solve for, regardless of context. If you think of style as a creative practice then it reasons that the process of exploring your taste is just as important as the outcome of said exploration. The same might be said of how you make art, or communicate with the world, or even “get things done,” to name other pursuits that are being ravaged by convenience culture. Being patient is hard but it’s obviously also a relief to realize we might not have to play as active of a role as we may think we do to develop our tastes. Like you can be passively observant/curious, etc.

This is an uphill battle in today’s fashion environment. I don’t think everyone has the passion to make the pursuit of personal style as alive as you do when the pursuit these days often resembles…scrolling alone in your apartment. Scroll your way to self-knowledge!

HARLING

Yes, not everyone finds the deep-sea scroll as thrilling as I do, lol.

HALEY

No, but I think you’re onto something with the fact that you’re typically doing that on second-hand websites that are full of surprises. If we’re purely talking about consumption, I think the second-hand market (especially offline but online too) is probably the best answer we have to feeling alive these days in the vein of college-era Forever21 mania, may she RIP. The weird things you find, the opportunity to be surprised, the often social nature of how the goods change hands. Maybe I should get into it more. But also consumption might not be the best place to seek out “fun”/aliveness anyway.

It’s funny that I started this convo thinking the problem lay with the modern state of fashion and am ending it realizing that I am also the problem, looking for a sense of looseness and freedom in the act of shopping rather than searching for those qualities in my approach to getting dressed (or…elsewhere in my life). I’m particularly taken by the idea that what might be lacking in my relationship with style right now isn’t effort or time (unsolvable!) but patience. Shout out to my podcast on Wednesday, which is about patience in a completely different arena of my life.

HARLING

I loved that pod btw. And a lot of your desires when it comes to your style are motivated by getting older, so it’s a nice parallel in that sense too. I think it’s interesting to consider patience as a missing ingredient because, to your point, it’s more a state of mind than a resource. It’s a vehicle for friction as well, the opposite of instant gratification. I like that it engenders the kind of approach to style that is circuitous and often unresolved (dare I say loose?) but still quite purposeful.

I’ve also been reflecting on my answer to your question about whether I miss shopping IRL because I was remembering the time when you and I visited Amelia in Pennsylvania years ago before we had kids, and we walked around her town and stumbled into that little consignment store and I ended up impulse-buying those vintage Gucci loafers that ultimately became and still are my favorite pair of shoes I’ve ever owned. (I almost didn’t get them because I’d forgotten my wallet but you insisted I let you buy them on your credit card and venmo you later, lol). My first instinct was to say I don’t miss shopping in person because I love efficiency, but I wonder if I’ve just tricked myself into thinking that because my life doesn’t have as much room for inefficiency anymore. Maybe I need to try and be more open to the occasional detour.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this conversation. Please weigh in!

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Last week’s podcast on turning 37; last Friday’s 15 things.

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

Wednesday’s podcast was a Voice Note about my “goal” for my 37th year. Thank you for your comments that made me cry!!

1. “The Carrion-Eaters: What We Did to Jason Arday,” by Sam Kriss for his newsletter, Numb at the Lodge. I was nervous to wade into this topic based on some of the discourse I’d seen around it but I’m so glad I finally did it with this p…

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In today’s voice note I reflect on something Michelle said to me on my 36th birthday last year, the goal I came up with impulsively at my birthday dinner this year, and how the two are spiritually connected. I also talk a lot about motherhood and what it’s forcing me to learn right now, which is to say: lessons I constantly resist learning. They app…

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It’s my birthday! Was laughing again this morning while remembering one of Avi’s gifts to me last year: to get rid of 10 items of my choosing from his closet ❤️ Beautiful, heartfelt gift…boyfriends/husbands of Maybe Baby, feel free to steal.

• Sunday’s essay, “The Trick of Revealed Values,” explored the idea that some of our values exist below our awareness, only to be discovered through self-observation.

• Wednesday’s podcast was an episode of Dear Danny, featuring many canonical DD topics such as where to live, roommate drama, alcoholism, poop, and bad bfs.

• Below, lots of good reading/listening, a genuinely transcendent pancake recipe, my latest investment purchase, and more. The rec of the week is best day trips outside of NYC.

• This Sunday I’ll be observing MB summer hours—no essay! Will catch you on Weds.

1. “Why We Like Things,” by Celine Nguyen for Asterisk Mag. I love how seriously she takes taste in this essay (employing Hannah Arendt!). Made me want to revel in/expand/challenge/explore my own taste(s).

2. “Joy is the fruit of well-lived grief” (and other sentiments I found moving), care of a 70-year-old farmer standing sweatily in a field. This one’s all in the delivery.

3. This podcast on the Jungian concept of “coniunctio,” which I’d never heard of. Addicted to this episode…gave me so much to think about. Might think about it forever.

4. “A Dying Art,” by John Semley for Harpers, a wonderful piece on the slow disappearance of “restorative art” (aka making dead people look nice for open casket funerals). Thrilling the whole way through.

5. One hundred variations of a “toddler reading chair,” a market that is surprisingly saturated and thus impossible to navigate. Became obsessed with this sold-out Zara Home one for like 10 minutes before I saw it on a resale site and it looked like this. Always humbling when that happens.

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Today we’ll be answering five questions featuring some canonical DD topics involving how to navigate: where to live, booting a roommate, a boyfriend who drinks a concerning amount, storing a poop sample, and dating a hilarious deadbeat. Weigh in please:

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Thanks for listening!
Haley

p.s. Should I have censored the word “d*k…

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If a few details were different, I might feel guilty about this, reason that we ought to get our shit together on this front, commit to a strategy, etc. I flirted with that position for a while, but eventually the lack of change stopped feeling like an accident. Avi and I are pretty meticulous about our parenting style—agreeing on precise words, precise tones, precise strategies for any given situation. Our boundaries are firm. So eventually I had to conclude our choice to let the mess slide was intentional in its own way, however unconscious. But if that was true, what was our reasoning? Given how exhaustively we discuss and stress other values and value housework ourselves, why weren’t we emphasizing tidiness with Sunny? It’s been fun to be curious about this choice rather than judgemental, like I’m conducting an investigation into our psyches.

In economics, there’s a concept known as “revealed preference,” which is the idea that a consumer’s behavior is a lot more telling than their stated preferences. That is to say, preferences are more reliably revealed than proclaimed. Consumers say they want one thing; buy another. There are plenty of ways this can be applied to everyday life. We say we want to go to the gym then avoid it, we say we want to read more theory then pick up another buzzy novel (completely random examples that don’t apply to me…). I’ve been drawn to this concept ever since I heard it. It seems obvious and utterly human, and yet, most of us continue to operate as if our thoughts and opinions determine who we are. When our behavior diverges, it’s an oversight, a mistake. Hypocrisy!

I’ve been thinking of our tidying “oversight” as a kind of revealed value. We may say we care about Sunny learning to clean up her toys, but when measured against other values we emphasize—curiosity, kindness, patience, respect, attunement—we actually don’t care that much. To be fair, we do encourage her to tidy throughout the day and she “helps” a lot around the house, but we’d rather end her night by reading her books on the couch, surrounded by chaos, than marching her through a reorg. When I think more deeply about this choice, a value emerges. I don’t think every day needs to end in perfect order; I don’t want her to believe connection and relaxation must be earned through compliance—two of my own preoccupations I resent. (Also, she’s a toddler. It’s just not that serious yet.)

What I find compelling about this value is that I became aware of it through observing my own behavior rather than through a conscious decision-making process. I assume most of us think of our values as something we thoughtfully choose or willingly inherit. But as with revealed preferences, I suspect many of our values are lived out beneath our awareness, only to be uncovered through self-observation. And I’m not just talking about values in the principled or political sense (I value hard work; I value sustainability), but something softer: the things we can’t help but care about; how we want to be, feel, live; the ways of operating we’re drawn to almost involuntarily, that resist our attempts at redirection.

When I was discussing this idea with my friend and editor Mallory Rice, she told me that one of her revealed values is her affinity for editing. For years, she identified primarily as a writer (which she is, and a good one), but she’s come to see this as somewhat in conflict with reality. In fact, she spends most of her time and attention on editing, and not just because it pays the bills, but because her energy naturally channels that way, leading her to commit again and again to editing over the odd writing assignment. While she could see this as a betrayal of her writing practice, she instead sees it as a kind of revelation: Her reverence for creative collaboration is equal to or greater than her desire for authorship. Some part of her knew this before her thoughts did.

Obviously we can betray our stated values for other reasons than secret inner truths. We can feel stressed and take shortcuts, be low on choices or resources, plainly fuck up, be avoidant or neurotic or otherwise unwell, and as a result fail to live the way we actually want. Sometimes our stated values genuinely do align better with our characters than our behaviors. But just as often I think the opposite is true, and not just in the gotcha sense. I think there’s a lot to be gleaned from our actions, our pleasures, our impulses. From the trade-offs we make again and again, despite our attempts to trade otherwise. If we say one thing about ourselves but continually do another, maybe the more interesting pivot than course-correcting our behavior or living in shame, is to say something different about ourselves, and accept that we already are.

Endless self-policing is certainly an option, but aside from being an unappealing way to live, I wonder if it can foreclose on more useful insights. When I noticed how little we stress cleaning up with our kid, it wasn’t just a relief to eschew judgement in favor of curiosity, it was the far more productive approach. Yes, we value cleaning up, but what else do we value more? There was something there we weren’t seeing; something true about us that we’d never noticed. Of course, if we had been betraying ourselves, that question would have led us there, too. Insight was the reward either way, curiosity was just a softer route there.

The density of parenting—hundreds of decisions made every day—is what allowed me to approach the observation this way. Regarding the verdict that we were being lazy, I simply had too much evidence to the contrary. Values are revealed through accumulation and repetition; at a certain point, they can’t be denied. This must be one of the upsides of aging: our choices rack up and offer us a different story than the one we’ve been telling for years. As young people, our stated values are our only compass. I care about this therefore I ought to do it. Later, this can invert. I do this a lot therefore I must care about it. I appreciate this inversion of the neurotic insistence that we’re intellectually in charge of who we are and what we do. I like the idea that rather than choosing who I am or what I value, I can encounter it instead.

Last Friday’s 15 things included the winner of my eye mask debate, two YouTube essays I took notes on, my new favorite IG account, and more.

The rec of the week was RAINCOATS.

On Wednesday, Dear Danny is back!

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Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

• Sunday’s essay, “Are Men Really ‘Bad at Taking Photos’?” takes aim at a stereotype that’s pickup up speed.

• Wednesday’s discussion thread was on aging parents, especially those going through medical crises, a topic I’m seeing more and more of in my submission form. Thank you for all your loving advice. I learned a lot!

• The rec of the week today is rain…

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Welcome back to Dear Babies, my monthly follow-up to Dear Baby wherein I pose a question I received for the column to all of you. Today’s round features a question about an aging parent in a quiet serious medical situation. I’m noticing this topic showing up more in my submission form—a sign my readers are getting older alongside me. This is a new a…

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On men being “bad at taking photos”

“Would be so curious your thoughts on this article:

‘Sorry But The Boyfriend Photo Is Weaponized Incompetence’”

Excited by this prompt—I had so many …

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• Sunday’s essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” is about my evolving relationship with documentation, and how parenthood has ratcheted up its stakes.

• Wednesday’s discussion thread was about anonymous Substack writer father_karine’s latest opus, “The Anti-Reality TV Essay Every Woman Should Read,” which I kicked off my sharing some points of disagreement with the essay.

• This Sunday for my advice column, I’ll be responding to another Substack essay—this time at the request of a Maybe Baby reader: “Sorry But the Boyfriend Photo Is Weaponized Incompetence,” by Liz Plank. Love this topic (lol), and feel differently from Plank.

• Below, a transcendent subject-author profile pairing, a great addition to the informed exceptionalism canon (if you recall, I explored this term in my Emrata essay), a perfect book cover, and more. The rec of the week is best book covers.

• To free subs, this concludes my month of sharing 15 things previews. If you’d like to received the full list every Friday, upgrade below! I’ll share previews from time to time going forward.

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1. “Backsliding,” a stunning essay by Meghan O’Gieblyn for Harper’s about will and attention, inspired by her “backslide” into alcoholism and religion in her late thirties. It’s long but honestly could have been longer! Will definitely be revisiting.

2. Backrooms, which I liked enough (reminded me a lot of the Giallobrutalism piece I shared last week). Fascinated by it being the highest grossing A24 movie of all time. Is that a YouTube thing? (I know the director started as a YouTuber.) As usual, Avi and I split this across two nights and I can’t say I recommend that strategy for this movie…drop your thoughts in the comments.

3. The wikipedia page for “bread and circuses,” a great phrase Avi used this week that I hadn’t heard before (or forgot about?).

4. “Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose,” by Keyana Sapp for Worse on Purpose, a newsletter/blog that investigates the quality of popular consumer brands and products, with particular care to categories overrun by private equity scammers. Some moments of this dragged for me but so happy I finished it—will never buy cookware without referencing it first!

5. A bunch of cat calls from two twenty-something girls at Clandestino, who were so amused to find me at a bar while pregnant that they couldn’t stop shouting at me (benevolently). Love you girls for life.

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“WRITING EVERYTHING DOWN IS NOT A LIFE!”

My panic betrayed me. Mallory laughed, which I deserved. When I read, last week, in various places (The Paris Review, The Oxonian Review), about the writer Rachel Aviv’s penchant for interview subjects who keep diaries, because their records tend to give their stories a fullness that mere testimony lacks, I likewise experienced this information as a personal attack. Nevermind that I had no desire to be interviewed or plans to write a memoir; the betrayal—by Plante, by Dunham, by Aviv—was in their implication that detailed documentation was useful for understanding or processing a life. It’s uncontestable, I recognize. And yet, how dare they?

I’ve worked to build a fairly robust defense system against record-keeping. Primarily because I am so liable to be overtaken by it, and feel cursed to live in fear of not having done it adequately, forever appraising life with Didion’s presentiment of loss (“On Keeping a Notebook,” 1968). Which is to say, I’m easily triggered by this topic. It’s material that I have this anxiety as someone who has written close to a thousand personal essays in the same 10 years during which I claim “I did not journal”—this is, I fear, a sad reality of the record-keeper: The correct amount of record-keeping will always exceed that which has been recorded.

Coming to understand my impulse to record, retreat, repeat as pathological has been helpful to me. When I turned 30 and started working for myself, posting myself online less often and taking fewer photos in general, I began collecting anti-documentation sentiments whenever I encountered them: Sarah Manguso’s suggestion “to forget it all so that I’m clean for death. Just the vaguest memory of love, of participation in the great unity.” (Ongoingness, 2015). Tavi Gevinson’s “trust that I’ll retain what I need to later, and if not, accept the price of a life fully lived.” (Rookie, 2016). Alan Watts’s claim that “you cannot think simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are enjoying listening to the waves.” (The Wisdom of Insecurity, 1951). These pronouncements remind me that record-keeping can obscure, distract, interrupt; that it’s unethical to worship the records unless we also grapple with the costs of making them.

It’s notable that Didion, Manguso, and Gevinson are or were chronic record-keepers; no doubt Watts speaks from experience, too. There seems a clear, poetic line between neuroticism and the desire to write one’s way out of it. To strain against one’s own psychic impulse for capture. To recognize that, for many of us, the satisfaction gained by record-keeping resembles pleasure less than Lacan’s jouissance: compulsion indulged to the point of pain. And so abstaining from documenting, or at least occasionally resisting it, can become, for the neurotic, a kind of wellness exercise—a sacrifice of preservation made for the sake of presence. “The ways we miss our lives are life,” Randall Jarrell once wrote in a poem (“The Girl in the Library,” 1951). Why not welcome this part of life too?

When I became a parent, my fledgling willingness to forget my life was catastrophically interrupted. Fine, fine, I could forget the details of this or that vacation, or the precise way I felt on a Tuesday afternoon aged 32, but forget my child? As I wrote in 2024, I took more than 3,000 photos of Sunny during her first four months of life. Right away I recognized this as an expression of anxiety as much as amazement: Babies change so quickly that the preservational quality of photography takes on a new urgency. This is what Sunny looked like on the car ride home from the hospital; this is how she sounded when she started making noises on purpose. Tomorrow she’ll look and sound different.

As she got older and became aware of the camera, I tried to slow down. I made an effort to recognize, once again, that the act of recording could be an imposition; a besmirching of the present for the benefit of the future. At the same time, the pressure to document had assumed a new dimension. Sure, yes, documenting was a channel for my paranoia, drowning out my discomfort with the passage of time by insisting I could somehow pin it down, but there was more at stake now, no? This wasn’t just about me but about Sunny—about imparting her with a gift, an archive of what she herself would be incapable of remembering. It was about responsibility.

So many parenting tips supported this view:

• Interview your child on camera at least once a year.

• Curate photos from every season into a book so they don’t get lost in your camera roll!

• Keep a journal to capture the silly little things your kids say and do.

• Save your kids’ artwork in frames that double as archival storage containers.

• Take a photo of your family in the same place every year to track how they’ve changed and grown.

The first year of Sunny’s life, I bought and tried to keep a five-year line-a-day journal (ma’am, five years?), filling it out in random bursts—every day for a week; nothing for a month; every other day for two weeks, filling in two entries at a time; a smattering of entries recorded in a single afternoon, using photos to jog my memory. Sometimes I would flip through it wistfully, comforted by the details I’d already suspended in time. Slowly the entries grew sparse, though, less detailed, more paranoid:

March 25, 2024: “Took Sunny outside to see the tree on our block start to blossom little pink blowers. Diaper-only underneath her too-big fleece winter suit. She was uninterested.”

May 7, 2024: “I swear her front left gum is so swollen but the tooth never comes. Today we laid on the bed face-to-face just smiling and laughing, inches away. The most magical feeling in the entire world. I love her so so much.”

September 26, 2025: “Recently our love for Sunny has been bringing us to tears. The more she understands about the world, the more I want to protect and preserve her spirit. She is so sweet and clever and delightful and hilarious. Been trying to accept that 90% of these memories will be lost to time.”

January 19, 2026: “I am backlogging some entries this morning, which I know isn’t the spirit of the journal, but this time is so precious and difficult and FULL that I feel a sense of loss at not recording it. But I need to accept the loss. The loss is life! Being present matters more.”

Then blankness.

I resent the sheer scale of this book; nearly 2,000 possible entries, of which we’ve filled out maybe 50. I imagine Sunny taking note of this as an adult. Huh, she’ll think. They couldn’t write one line a day? This is, now, the primary purpose of the book: to be a white-hot point of shame balanced on my bedside table, taunting me in my sleep.

I write entries nearly every day in my head—always when I’m with Sunny, my hands tied—that never actually make it into the book. Yesterday’s: “After a lifetime of enduring ponytails begrudgingly during meals (to keep food out of her hair), this morning Sunny requested one for the first time. ‘I look like mom!’ she said, delighted.” Today’s: “This morning Sunny held up a skunk figurine and declared to the room, with the authority of a teacher, skunks are a type of dog.” She’s never made me laugh more. Why don’t I write things in the book? I can’t. I can’t. Stop making me.

WRITING EVERYTHING DOWN IS NOT A LIFE!

“There’s [a] sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse,” writes Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks, his pièce de résistance on “time management.” Here he’s talking about compulsively planning for the future, which is, in a sense, the ultimate aim of the record-keeper who fears she’ll one day forget. “The real problem isn’t planning,” he writes. “It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t.” This is especially true when it comes to parental documentation. The practice we start in order to allay future anxiety—the specter of time passing, the details gone with it—induces present anxiety; present loss.

Something to consider: Sunny’s adulthood will not be transformed by knowing the day on which she requested her first ponytail (July 22, 2026). Yes, there is pleasure and amusement—for me, maybe one day for Sunny—in reading the entries, but they won’t change her life. And they’re certainly not worth the thrum of anxiety their blank counterparts have sent pulsing through me for two-plus years, some of the most vulnerable of my life, during which I’ve never tried harder to be present, to observe more closely, to love more deeply. They’re worth a little anxiety, maybe, but not that much. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. Documenting is fine; it might lead, one day, to a sweet afternoon of remembering, a detailed interview, a great memoir. But the most thoroughly documented life will not bring it back, make it real again, in all its detailed splendor.

A memory I never wrote down but which sticks out in my mind like a bookmark: Sunny was eight months old. It was the Fourth of July. Avi and I took her to my friend Michelle’s parents’ house in Jersey to swim and grill out. We sat around their pool on squeaky lounge chairs in the hot sun, catching up. A rotund Sunny bounced on my leg in her first bathing suit. “Do you remember Michelle at this age?” I asked her parents, a sparkle in my eye, leaning in to catch the details. They looked at each other and then at me, amused, and with laughter in their voices, replied easily: “Not at all.”

Read last Friday’s 15 things here—the weekly free previews are coming to an end but I’ll keep previewing every once in a while!

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Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

• Sunday’s essay, “Dispatch from the Tunnel,” was a personal and ethical exploration of surrendering to tunnel vision when your life calls for it, inspired by advice from a friend over a recent dinner.

• Wednesday’s podcast, “Small Room, Small Thoughts,” was a somewhat ironic followup to the essay in which I explore, by way of three things that happened to me last week including a fight with a friend, the necessity of challenging said tunnel vision.

• Below, another breakfast innovation (lol), a documentary I’m intrigued but scared to watch, cute kids clothes, and more.

• The rec of the week is WALKING PADS, and whether you recommend them despite the nefarious circumstances (sedentary computer lives) that have brought them into the spotlight. I want to know your setups, your tips, your warnings…

1. “Giallobrutalism,” or Why Everything Looks Like That,” by Ella Dorn for her newsletter, Fairyland. This is super long and there were parts I wondered if I agreed with but ultimately I found it convincing, fascinating, and refreshing. When people say there is nothing new anymore, only nostalgia, the claim always feels incomplete to me—this piece challenges that simplified view.

2. This red-striped canopy from Etsy for Sunny’s toddler bed, which remains an amusement/play space more than an actual bed…(she’s still in the crib). But I’m obsessed with this canopy. I debated getting one for a long time and can confirm they really do add something to a kid’s room.

   

3. The platonic ideal of a diner breakfast at Montague Diner in Brooklyn Heights. Actually the potatoes could have been crispier but otherwise I loved this place so much. Protect all good diners.

4. This honestly beautiful drug-mixing chart posted by Playboy (??) on Instagram (lol, I saw it on Twitter) that I studied dutifully despite being a pregnant mother of a toddler who falls asleep at 9:30pm.

5. This technical analysis of Taylor Swift’s songwriting style by Dave Moore that places it in the context of rap (!) that I honestly did not expect to find so interesting, and now I want to read all the other parts—although can’t vouch for them yet. (Started with Part 6 because someone linked to it somewhere.)

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Back with another Voice Note, this time reflecting on a kind of ironic realization that sprang from my essay on Sunday, as inspired by three things that happened after I wrote it. This is a meditation on tweaking your perspective without changing your life.

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It’s easy to diagnose now. I was so consumed by thoughts of what needed to be done that tasks I formerly thought of as one single act—screwing the lid closed on my water bottle—were split into multiple steps: screw enough so that the bottle wasn’t exposed to the open air, attend to other more urgent tasks, then return to the bottle to finish screwing so that it might be safely thrown on the bed. Of course, in my state of extreme mental and physical exhaustion, I often forgot about the last part.

I’ve been thinking about that era of singular mental disarray as I anticipate returning to it in three months, or have perhaps already arrived. Maybe disarray is the wrong word; in a sense I’d never been more focused in my life. This is one of the paradoxes of parenthood—that you can spin so many plates and achieve, in the cumulative and tangible sense, so little. I recently saw a video of a woman brushing her teeth and eating an Oreo at the same time. “What it’s like to clean your house when you have a toddler,” the caption read. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. In the year I spent caring for an infant, the demands on my psyche were even more acute: Any psychological digression from motherhood felt like a triumph.

During my second pregnancy, I’ve returned to this narrow frame. The shift is hormonal, obviously, but also practical, spiritual. To say that it’s occurred against my will isn’t to say that I haven’t enjoyed it at times. In the first days of my pregnancy, I was surprised to feel a dim satisfaction at the opportunity to turn inward again. In my second trimester, I nested so zealously I sometimes worried I’d lost touch with reality. But as I enter my third trimester, my unrelenting domestic focus has wrought a certain shame. I feel out of the loop socially, culturally, professionally. And out of ideas.

When I told my friend Tavi about this at dinner the other night—lamenting that my only essay pitches concerned motherhood, which people only want so much of, and that most of my attention seemed to funnel involuntarily toward (how dare it!) my body and my people and this precise moment in my life—she asked whether I’d considered exploring that. What would it feel like to consent to the frame this pregnancy was imposing, rather than resenting it? Could I go deeper instead of struggling to go wider? She suggested Rachel Aviv’s new essay collection on mothers and daughters, You Won’t Get Free of It, and I bought it the next day.

In the book’s introduction, which I read yesterday, with a creative interest I’ve struggled to muster in recent months, Aviv quotes an entry from her mother’s diary, written when Aviv’s older sister Sari was two years old: “My real life, my family, began to take precedence over my imagined artistic life. … Sari is my life. Everything she is and does is my life.” When Aviv herself was first pregnant at 33, she feared this very “rupture in values and commitments.” Although she couldn’t quite explain why: “I remember a friend pointing out that he did not consider me especially happy. Why then was I so intent on staying the same? I had no answer.”

You Won’t Get Free of It is a collection of essays concerning mothers and daughters that Aviv originally wrote for The New Yorker, when she felt “existentially” like a daughter, which she has now revisited upon the acquisition of her new vantage point as a mother. The book is, among other things, her attempt to “redress what I saw as a kind of imbalance, a deficit of curiosity about the mother half of the couple.” I don’t know whether Tavi understood the double-resonance of her suggestion—to go deeper into my mother frame by reading about another woman going deeper into her mother frame—but it was as apt as the title of the book.

Last week, while reviewing questions in my Dear Baby submission form, I bristled at two queries from pregnant readers who feared losing touch with their pre-kid lives, values, and concerns. They were gripped by the same anxiety described by Aviv. Would their friends still invite them to parties, on trips? They didn’t want to be mistaken for washed up! Normally I enjoy these questions, so when I cringed, I reasoned I’d become jaded: Three years after wringing my hands over the same fears, I now knew “the truth”—that your pre-kid life, values, and concerns weren’t that important, and that everyone’s insistence that they were was precisely what made modern parenthood in America so much harder than it needed to be. What was so wrong with committing to motherhood? Was it really so awful a fate?

But my reaction merely highlighted a bruise. On some level, I realized, I still shared these letter writers’ fears. My mother frame just happened to cast them in a different light. Whereas I once saw these preoccupations as grounded and moral, I now see them as impositions—a cultural inheritance I feel obligated to hold in mind lest I lose touch with the culture entirely. I no longer fear that parenthood is prosaic or will render me so, because I know it’s not and it hasn’t. Instead I fear the social and professional consequences of being overly associated with motherhood; a different thing.

And yet I have to admit that external pressure doesn’t account entirely for my current disquiet either. Until my second pregnancy thrust me back into this strict mode of attention—family, body, home, child—I’d reached a gentle understanding regarding this era of my life. These were physically taxing years, yes, and there were freedoms I looked forward to experiencing again, but the general spread of my attention softened. Screwing my water bottle tight had become a cinch. As Sunny got older and I adjusted, I’d made space for other values. I’d mostly dispensed with my obsession over how the world viewed my motherhood. Or at the very least, the perception of my experience had become less interesting.

So a third dimension enters the chat: I think I also bristled at the questions because, currently, I relate to them viscerally. My concerns may take a slightly different shape, but the emotional core is familiar: The attentional demand of pregnancy and postpartum is intense and destabilizing. It asks a lot of us, and costs something, too. The letter writers can see this coming. The question, then, isn’t whether this focal shift involves sacrifice, or whether the sacrifices can be avoided—that’s an unequivocal yes and no—but whether we can allow ourselves this elasticity. Whether we can resist moralizing the frame, accept it as temporary and necessary, and through that acceptance discover what it offers.

Zooming in doesn’t necessarily suit my nature. I’ve long entertained a kind of fetish for perspective, believing I was better off—and a better person—the wider and more expansive my view. One of my earliest memories of “feeling mature” was when my parents didn’t let me go to a bonfire with my friends as a young teen and I neutralized my disappointment by reassuring myself I wouldn’t care in a month. Miraculously, this trick of perspective worked, and became a load-bearing pillar of my personality. In hindsight, wallowing over a missed bonfire at 14 would have been perfectly appropriate. It might have granted me a certain presence.

There are plenty of life experiences, I think, during which contracting your perspective is the only way to participate fully: falling in love, breaking up, grieving a loved one, studying for finals, writing a book, learning a skill, navigating a crisis. There were years in my early twenties where I scarcely thought about anything other than “who I was going to be,” and while that would be inexcusable now, it was appropriate then. Broadening our attention is easily considered virtuous, but a narrow focus isn’t always a failure of imagination. It can signal immersion, commitment, surrender. We need all modes of being.

Before Tavi suggested Rachel Aviv’s new book, I might have resisted reading it, reasoning I needed to think less about mothers and daughters rather than more. Not to oversell the gesture, but in picking it up, I was reminded of the vitality that becomes available when you stop fighting yourself. Ironically, then, my resentment of the mother frame was a framing issue. In motherhood, as in any experience that asks us to commit and consolidate parts of ourselves we might rather protect and diversify, consenting to the experience can offer its own kind of freedom. I’d like to try to revel in it before, inevitably and mercifully, it’s time to move on.

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Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

• Wednesday’s podcast, Dear Danny: Are my friends toxic?, featured a question about a broken beach chair that had me, Danny, and the commenters desperate for answers!!

• Below, two writers who have suddenly filled my to-read book list, the page-turner I just finished, a dress worn as a skirt, a treatise on “moral stupidity,” and more.

• The poll of the week is about reclining on airplanes. Need to know where the community stands…

• Regarding our health: No eating produce ✅ No walking outside ✅ Got it!

1. This 2014 Paris Review interview with Adam Phillips that I loved so much and has made me eager to read his books. Think I’m going to start with On Wanting to Change and Missing Out.

2. Endless do/don’t lists for avoiding the Cyclospora outbreak. For some reason I found this random Reel by a looksmaxxing IG doctor to be the most visually useful (shout out to him). Although apparently they’ve zeroed in on lettuce? At least it’s been confirmed as one source!

3. The toddler-friendly recipe for “breakfast cheesecake.” Honestly this was really fun and easy to make with Sunny. Use if you are insanely sick of breakfast. Hit me in the comments if you have other recs in this vein...eggs and oatmeal have me in a chokehold.

4. “Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity,” by Abdaljawad Omar for Equator. A devastating account of the role of “intellectual argument” in the plight of Palestinians. Gave me a lot to think about re: where “moral stupidity” shows up in other aspects of modern life. (I found sections 3 and 4 a little difficult to get through in terms of managing names and details, but I’m glad I held out for sake of sections 5 and 6.)

5. Two thirds of Amadeus (the 1985 period drama about Mozart), which somehow took Avi and me two separate viewings over 10 days. At this point it’s taking us so long to finish that it’s just going on the list. We’ll finish soon……it’s really good! I think?

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It’s time for another Dear Danny, BUT FIRST: I’m collecting questions in two new places! The first is a question submission form specifically for Danny. The second is a question submission form specifically for crowd-sourcing answers from the Maybe Baby comment section. Both of these are for newsletters I plan to publish when I’m on maternity leave …

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• Sunday’s essay, “Misshapen Bones,” was some observations from my week and life right now.

• Wednesday’s post, “Notes on Nesting,” offered a peak into my current neurotic home-makeover journey, including my to-do list and a few photos. (I love everyone who commented on this, we are family.)

• This Sunday I’ll be off for summer hours (50% chance I am currently crouched in an airplane bathroom holding Sunny over the toilet as you read this), but if you’re in the mood to read something, might I point you to my 2023 essay, “Unhappy Medium”? The region-beta paradox has come up with friends 3x this week.

• Below, a delightful essay on “bad taste,” some recs for pregnant-friendly dresses that aren’t technically “maternity,” the perfect polenta recipe, and more.

• If you are a free subscriber reading a preview of this post, I publish this list every Friday!

1. “35 and 1,” a tender and funny essay about grief and motherhood by Maria Zorn for Longreads. Laughed, cried, loved it all.

2. The amazing art curation of Abigail Bell Vintage, particularly this 1909 flower still life by Alexej von Jawlensky, which I want to buy but can’t decide on a size. Also love this 1912 painting of “girls in white stockings” by Léon Spilliaert.

3. So many links and reviews for dish drying racks that I’ve entered the philosophical stage. What is “a dish”? What is “a rack”? Obsessed with the product description for this one. Really gives family-run business. I want it! But probably going with this one due to needing lots of cup storage. (Also in consideration…a dirty dish rack??)

4. This heavy weight tee from Buck Mason, which I bought for Avi. This is the perfect mens t-shirt IMO—waited to link until it did a few rounds in the wash.

5. This profile of Rachel Aviv for The Guardian, by Greta Rainbow, about her upcoming essay collection. Keep thinking about this line: “[I]f you hold on to the identity you first developed in young adulthood, in middle age you’ll end up small and afraid.”

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