This week, my children went back to school. Many people will say, so soon? It’s not even Labor Day! but knowing now the fresh hell summer inflicts on parents, I cannot imagine white knuckling it through three more weeks of this languid chaos. Just kidding. I can imagine all kinds of hell! I’ve been a mom for seven years. I’ve experienced several circles of it! I hope it goes without saying, I love my children. Boundlessly. But transitions are hard, ya know? And for my family, the one between the amorphous summer afternoons of eating popsicles on the couch and playing Roblox for hours, to the 7am alarms and Great Clips haircuts of the school year, is especially so.

My youngest child is entering pre-kindergarten at the big kid school where his brother goes, despite his wishes to remain a googoo gaga baby forever. I was deeply comforted when, listening to Anne Lamott on the Good Hang podcast, she commiserated with host Amy Poehler, “Now I know you’re a parent of sons also, and you know, nothing worked, right? Nothing worked but bribes and threats. I mean, anything else? No. Bribes and threats.” If emotional black belt Anne Lamott cannot tame her sons without the disciplinary cudgels of bribes and threats, then certainly I, a person of average emotional intelligence and intellect, never stood a chance! In dealing with my youngest, bribery wins out over threats, which he finds so ridiculous as to be laughable. So when he feigned illness at drop off on the last day of preschool, I promised him his own copy of the school’s coveted insect encyclopedia if he’d stop saying his “belly hurt.” This weekend, shopping for school supplies, I bought him the Chomping Wonder Bowser Junior action figure so he’d stop whining and pick a fucking backpack. And on Wednesday, the first morning at his new school, as he clung to my thigh and wept, after sympathizing that being new is scary, reassuring that he’s brave and he’s got this, instructing that he breathe in and out and in and out while gently rubbing his back, I finally offered to buy him the Sonic Knuckles robot he saw at Target if he could make it through the week.

When David Letterman used his monologue to confess he’d been having sex with his female employees, he taught the world a valuable lesson. The #MeToo movement was destined to fail! (The way the audience chortles at “creepy stuff I did,” 😬.) But also, there is no placating an extortionist. With the Chinese sweatshop smell still fresh on my son’s Wonder Bowser Junior toy, he’s already coveting another lump of plastic that will someday clog a landfill. I don’t blame him. I blame myself. This is how consumers are built, one useless piece of junk their mother buys them at a time. And I can relate to the manic thrill of wanting, because I want roughly 100% of clothing the Instagram algorithm serves me, and I’m pretty sure if I buy whatever housedress or two piece set I’m pining for this week, it will fill more than just my closet. It will fill the housedress-shaped hole in my heart. My point being, how does one teach a child values one does not live by herself? Or help a child break unproductive patterns of behavior she has yet to unlearn? Which brings me to my first born spawn…

Share

The second morning back to school was relatively peaceful until, walking out the door, my older son realized he had misplaced the pencil case his teacher gave him the day before. The panic at the heart of the meltdown that ensued made me wonder, since I had yet to actually meet his teacher, if maybe it was Hitler? The tears and screaming continued on the walk to school, then in front of school, through the first and second bells. After burning through all the patience in my arsenal, I just stared at my child’s wet, quivering face, wanting to throw up and run away. Walking home, all I could think was, I hate this. I don’t want to do this. In the abstract, I could recognize the silliness of my despair. Why should one bad morning drop off signal doom any more than one lost pencil case? Still, I wasn’t laughing. Instead, I was dreading having to pick my sons up that afternoon. What was the next minor tragedy I’d have to try and fail to untangle? And yet, at the end of the day, they bounded up to me happily, albeit both with broken water bottles.1 Meanwhile, I’m the one still writing about how hard transitions are. So maybe the person they’re hardest for is me?

So often, my children resemble wild animals, like when they try to open the car door on the highway, or drown each other in the pool. I’m not here to kill joy! I think to myself indignantly, while they act like my voice is tuned to a frequency they physically cannot hear. I’m just trying to keep everyone alive! But all that wildness they act on, I recognize! I feel it too! I just handle it like an adult. By drinking alcohol, watching Bravo, and crying in therapy. My husband says that in parenting, it’s important to remember what it feels like to be kid. I would argue that at its core, it feels the same as being an adult, but more nakedly so. (Literally. I cannot get my children to put on clothes.) I’m constantly in awe of all the complexities of the world humans have managed to wrap our heads around — astronomy, DNA, the defensive chemical synthesis an onion produces to punish you for slicing it. How have we come to know all this shit? How have we been able to discern so much about what we cannot see, to evolve so completely, when the feelings that animates us throughout all of human existence have changed barely, if at all? Almost everything about a person grows over the course of a life, except feelings. In time, you aim those feelings at different targets, or process them in different ways, but when you shoot out of your mother’s womb like a slider on a skeleton sled, your feelings are fully formed. What else is that true for? Just eyeballs, I think.

On New Years Eve of 2018, my husband and I told our close friends — who are married and share the same gender-neutral name but somehow not in an annoying way — I was pregnant. Our friends had become parents three months earlier, so we were confident they could give us encouragement, sympathy, and most of all, hope. To give the Reader a sense of the sort of people they are, that evening, with their infant eyeing us severely from her Boppy, our friends hosted a New Years Eve party. And not some let’s-do-a-Martinelli’s-toast-at-7pm-so-we-can-be-fresh-for-Mommy-and-me-yoga-tomorrow party. There were pitchers of French 75s. Their charcuterie board looked like a Dutch Old Masters still life. They’d imported Spanish ham for the occasion, which is, frankly, a very silly thing to do. We wanted to talk to them about becoming parents, because they were living proof that a baby didn’t have to blow up our lives. (It didn’t have to, which is different from saying, it didn’t.)

With eleven months more experience under their belts, our friends gave us permission at critical moments to buck the punishing purity tests of early parenthood. Why would anyone NOT get an epidural!? Sleep training is actually HEALTHIER for the baby in the long run! If she’s still hungry, I’m giving her the damn formula! As those long days have bled into short years, our lives continue to evolve in tandem. In 2020 — after my husband and I moved from New York to Los Angeles with an infant and two cats, only to have COVID grind the world to a stop two weeks later — we were elated when our friends told us they were making the same cross-country move. In 2021, we had our second babies just four months apart. And sure, between plagues and infancies and the Terrible Two’s-through-[INSERT AGE WHEN CHILDREN STOP BEING TERRIBLE], we haven’t gotten to spend as much quality time together as I’d have liked. But five years later, here we are, on the other side of the chaos — relatively speaking — raising our kids in the same city as some of our top tier friends. What could possibly stand in our way?

Share

As the Reader may have gathered from their imported ham, our friends are used to a “different lifestyle” than my husband and me, who are simpler, hardier, salt-of-the-earth folk — the kind of people who opt out of the charcuterie game altogether, and serve veggies and homemade baba ganoush instead. French 75s do not flow freely in our abode, but please, help yourself to a humble microbrew from our beverage fridge, which is an entirely separate fridge from our food fridge. Still, we’ve always been able to see past the fact that we come from #differentworlds, apart from one small detail: our friends’ world is on the west side of LA, ours in on the east. Some Angelenos will tell you this type of geographical dissonance spells a death knell for relationships. “No one drives across town to see their friends!” But that’s not entirely true, because my husband and I DO drive across town to see our friends. Sometimes on a Saturday during rush hour with our children screaming from the backseat! But do our friends extend the same courtesy? Sadly, they do not. Thus, hurt feelings ensue.

Our friends would surely contest this version of events. Didn’t we have dinner on the east side just last week? They’ll say. And they did, because if seeing us happens to align with a day of shopping for granite countertops in Burbank, and hitting up a very particular diving board in Pasadena, they're more than willing to accommodate. But do they undertake the hero’s journey of a crosstown commute for no elixir other than the pleasure of our company? Also yes, but only in the abstract. They say, we’d love to stop by for lunch! Lunch? Is this a second date? Did we meet in AA?? My husband says I shouldn’t take their reluctance to venture past the zip code of their favorite Sweetgreen personally. But come on. Let’s have lunch? Don’t take it personally? Does anyone I love actually know me? Between the four of us, there exists a playful rapport that can skew passive-aggressive in tone. We tease each other so relentlessly about which couple is willing to inconvenience themselves more for the other, sometimes it overshadows the restorative joy at the center of our fellowship. But also, they can’t really think they friend as hard as we do, right? I mean obviously, we’re the givers and they’re the takers, right? I need this to be true, because through my eyes, it seems so irrefutably so. Also if it’s not true, what else am I wrong about?

On the one hand, it is said that in relationships, you should never be keeping score. On the other, according to my therapist, everybody does anyway so fuck it. Last weekend, I told our friends about a girls' trip I’d recently taken with a new mom friend of mine. “Why did you take a trip with a second tier friend when you’ve never taken one with me?” Mocked my friend with the same name as her husband. “Because she asked me. Which I think actually makes her a first tier friend.” Meanwhile, our children ran around naked, spraying each other with the hose. Ironically, it was the adults’ immaturity on full display. Still, if I’m being honest, whether she was kidding or not, the fact that my friend would even want to take a trip with me, the mere possibility she’d be hurt I did so with someone else, it felt kind of nice. Presence is love’s truest currency. When I (sit in the passenger’s seat while my husband) drive(s) across town for my friends, I am saying, I want to be around you because I love you. When I tease them for not doing the same me, I am saying, I want you to love me as much as I love you. But now that we have all these feral children to educate, I suppose we should be modeling that loving with an abundance mindset is basically the coolest most badass flex there is. You get what you need in moments you don’t expect, like when your friend wishes you’d gone on a trip with her instead of someone else. And the truth is, no matter which side of town we’re on, when we’re all together, I’m just happy to be there, ignoring my children alongside friends who really know me, and still want to.

As readers of this newsletter may already know, I play soccer. I’ve played it since I can remember, which is different from saying I’ve enjoyed playing soccer since I can remember. Growing up in Denver, Colorado, soccer was just a thing most girls did1, along with playing FMK: lacrosse player, snowboarder, pothead and wearing fleece down to our underwear. Still, for all the hours I spent hauling my pancake ass up and down those immaculate Kelly green fields as a youth, I was never short on room to improve. On my club team, I was the C-team player the B-team brought along to travel tournaments, (yes, there was also an A-team). In high school, I won JV’s “best teammate” two years running, but never even warmed the varsity bench. Some might say I was — and continue to be — not quite a good player. (See: previous anecdote about my husband telling me I never learned to “kick a ball right”.)

Share

While the possibility of my own mediocrity has occurred to me, I’ve chosen to ignore it. Instead, I believe I am an exceptionally talented soccer player who, at 43, is still searching for a way to unlock my true potential. Every five years, when I score two or three goals during a single game, I think, There she is! How nice of you to join us, REAL me. Better start practicing our bicycle kick, we’ve got a Brazil ‘27 Nike spot to train for! Like any performance, soccer has been a way to convey myself to the world, and when you’re balancing your identity tenuously atop your own accomplishment, how can you aspire to anything less than greatness? And yet… watching this year’s 2026 FIFA Mens World Cup with my children, I’m forced to square my own belief system with what I hear myself telling my kids, and it’s making me wonder if the conversation I’ve been having with myself lo these many years is the wrong one. Is the dream I’ve been chasing vapor? The steam that rises when the good/bad binary of youth boils off? The very thought makes me feel foolish, and shame is one of the hurt-iest of the feelings.

My older son, nearly seven (his age, sadly not his name), wants to know who the BEST soccer player is. “Who’s better, Renaldo or Mbappe? Mbappe or Messi? “Messi or [Insert your Happy Meal FIFA Squishmallow of choice]?”. His obsession with needing to coronate a soccer king annoys me, so I try to shift his focus to the details of a sports journey, not a sports destination. When he laments his own small frame, I tell him about how Messi wasn’t supposed to grow past 4 feet 7 inches. (I’m not totally sure what lesson I’m imparting. That if he’s not bigger by eleven I’ll pump him full of ‘roids?) The other night, after watching the original Space Jam, I made sure he knew that Michael Jordan was cut from his varsity team. (So that when my boy takes his place in some sports Hall of Fame, he can tell his high school coach to go fuck himself?) As if my job as a parent is to explain how hard he’ll have to work to be the best. He asks me, “Which do you think I could be better at, soccer or basketball?” At the risk of projecting my own experience onto my son, I suspect I know what he’s beginning to want. I remember, as a child, soliciting feedback from my parents about my own potential. They’d tell me, “Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” I hated hearing that. All that answer told me was that I had to bust my ass to get somewhere. It didn’t say anything about where or who I already was. I tell my son he’ll be better at the sport he takes more pleasure in, because joy is what keeps you showing up, and showing up is what makes you better. But I don’t think that’s the right answer either.

Last night, I played soccer. It was the hottest evening so far this summer, and our only sub never showed. At halftime, we all agreed our legs were leaden. We agreed the referee didn’t know a foul from the very tight hole in his ass. We agreed everyone should get hydration breaks, even if they’re not selling space for David Beckham ads. But then the sun dipped below the horizon. The aired cooled a little and the glare stopped blinding the keep. We began passing better and running quicker. We were finally playing like a team; blending into a choreographed swarm, a unanimous mechanism. (-Ish. This is still an over-30 women’s rec league we’re talking about.) My teammate lobbed a solid cross in front of the opponent’s goal and I jumped for it, striking it squarely with my forehead. The ball soared in the right direction. We all held our breaths. It rose higher. And higher. And then too high, clearing the crossbar by an inch. But my team cheered! “That’s some World Cup shit!” yelled a teammate. It didn’t make it! But they still cheered! And today, I’m still thinking about how good my header that amounted to nothing felt. What I wish I could explain to my son is, how well you perform will only ever be for you. For years, you will think people are watching you and judging, until you realize you’re the only one tracking your stats. The point is to choose the thing you take more pleasure in, yes, because joy is what keeps you showing up. But nothing after that really matters. Life is just about finding ways to fill your time with joy; to feel so inside your body, even you’re not watching you.

Lately, I’ve been doing some punch-up work for a forthcoming animated show. (I’ll take what I can get, but my voice is really better suited for a live action tweenie bopper romp like Austin & Ally or Girl Meets World, so feel free to reach out, Disney!) Once or twice a week, I drive to a fancy building, sit in a conference room flush with every cauliflower-based snack you can imagine, and, alongside five other writers, try to pitch jokes that are funnier than the ones already in the script. I am grateful for the work, grateful the other writers are kind and collaborative, and grateful somebody told me they keep better snacks in the cafeteria.1 And yet, while the opportunity has been incredibly positive, while it has been, at its most basic, an opportunity, which are currently few and far between, I’ve come down with a mild case of hurt. In the feelings department. So to the world wide web I’ve come to exorcise my woes.

Perhaps by coincidence, or perhaps because of the nature of this particular show, our punch-up room could throw an impromptu Kevin Smith Lookalike Contest and the winner might be too close to call. Kevin Smiths of all shapes and sizes crowd around the conference table, from the rotund pre-heart attack days to the intermittent-vegan-fasting-Weight-Watchers-sponsorship era. All I’m saying is, among the gentlemen in the room, there are many beards, an abundance of hats, and more than one extra long t-shirt. Conversely, I am one of two female writers, and physically, spiritually, emotionally, neither of us is giving Kevin Smith. But as the days wear on, I worry I may be giving Silent Bob2. I blame myself for this, but more than myself, I blame society, because that makes it less my fault. You see, the other woman writer in this punch-up room is exceedingly gracious and warm. As our co-workers geek out over live streaming the new Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred on Twitch, she and I exchange knowing looks, as if to say, we don’t know what they’re talking about. We’re too busy having sex. This angel showed me where the bathroom was, and tipped me off to a special closet full of free Apple headphones. But this woman is also younger than me, remarkably pretty, and extremely good at the work we are being asked to do. She’s smart, funny, confident, and she comes up with almost all the best ideas. As I fixate on these details, I become a Silenter and Silenter Bob, and when your only responsibility is to vomit a firehose of jokes for eight hours straight, that’s not the kind of Bob you want to be3.

Share

My therapist talks a lot about the “second arrow” parable. In Buddhism, the first arrow is the inevitable pain of life, the suffering we experience from causes outside of our control. The second is self-inflicted. It’s the pain we cause ourselves from our reaction to the first. As I sit in this punch-up room, feeling envious and self-conscious, then disgusted that I’ve taken the only other woman in my position and needlessly made her my competition, I feel so riddled by arrows — second, third, seventh, ninth — I might as well be Saint Sebastian tied to a gall darn tree, minus the whole “for a noble cause” part. My rumination feels deplorable on so many levels. I want women to succeed! And I don’t want us to feel like we have to subject ourselves to merciless aesthetic upkeep to do it! And yet — maybe always, but especially during these times when professional prospects seem scarce — I assume another woman’s ability to thrive begets my failure. And I reduce how well she is received to her youth and beauty rather than her objective expertise. Instead of pitching jokes — the job I’ve been hired for! — I start collaging my own mental vision board. I will lose ten pounds and use a retinoid, as if rewinding myself ten years will me smarter, funnier, better at the thing I do. As if ten years of experience — working, mothering, marriage-ing, grieving, celebrating — are a fair price to pay to get rid of my forehead wrinkles and my cortisol pooch. As if getting rid of them would get me anywhere at all.

Not long ago, my husband and I were discussing confidence, which I feel he exudes and I do not. “I wish I was a man,” I said, chalking up his entire personality to his dick. “Or maybe I’ve had to build confidence by necessity, because no one else was telling me how great I was.” (I better say I’m paraphrasing or he’ll be on my ass.) The photonegative of self-entitlement is self-abnegation. They are both pictures of stasis, one backlit by the belief you shouldn’t have to try, the other by the feeling that no matter how hard you do, you’ll never be worthy of relevance. The older I get, the easier it is to believe that the people around me are not constantly thinking I’m terrible, that more likely, they are focused on how their own projected image is landing. But how does a girl convince herself she isn’t a massive disappointment, if she has no respect for the value of her own regard? I’ll tell you what doesn’t work: asking other people to do it for you. They will get tired of reiterating what life’s experience should have already convinced you of, and you won’t believe them anyway. What else won’t work? Hating yourself for hating yourself. It’s back to that second arrow business, and you don’t want those smug Buddhists getting the best of you. Perhaps the only path to self-possession is to be generous with the girl herself, to choose to look for the best in her the same way you do for everyone else you love. My husband says you build confidence by being confident, a plan that sounds woefully lacking in tools or materials. Am I supposed to MacGyver a sense of self by whatever Mr. Beasties and bread crusts my kids shoved in the couch cushions? But I guess that’s all writing is: you write something by writing it. And I know I can do that.

But a few weeks ago, I had an exchange that made me worry something terrible had been set into motion. As I was dropping off my boy, his buddy bounded up to me. My heart pounded with anticipation: our first official conversation. “Hey, I gotta tell you something,” she said, in a tone I now find a little too upbeat for what followed. “My mom says I can’t just play with [YOUNGEST SON] anymore. She says I have to play with other friends too.” Hmmm. Should I be the one to tell her that kids can actually hang out with whoever the fuck they want at school and parents can’t do shit about it? Maybe not. This chick was giving major narc vibes. At a loss for words, I simply responded, “Okay,” at which point my son, who’d been putting away his lunchbox out of earshot, crept up behind his friend to surprise her with a “BOO!” of glee, and off they ran. But in their wake, the chemtrails of foreboding lingered. For the moment, my son’s feelings had been spared. Mine had not.

Share

Unable to work myself into a lather directed at a modern day Little Match Girl, I turned my panicked rage toward her mother. Why was this lady intent on cockblocking my son? My son! Who — and I say this without an OUNCE of parental bias — is universally adored! He’s exceedingly silly and unflappably sweet. He loves taping his face like Pee Wee Herman and listening to John Carpenter’s Halloween score to lull himself to sleep! And while at home, he can fly into the kind of rage that once possessed him to break a ceramic plate over his older brother’s head, they don’t even use ceramic plates at school! His teachers have done nothing but coo over him and the friendship he shares with this little girl. “She’s probably just one of those overprotective moms who thinks her daughter’s gonna get married at 10 or some shit,” my husband shrugged. “Let’s not make it a problem before it actually is one.” But a week later, my son started begging not to go to school. At drop off, he clung to me, soaking the front of my bootleg Lorde concert tee with snot and salty tears. “This isn’t like him,” his teacher remarked, befuddled. The next day, the same outburst. For a week this continued, my son, grief-stricken but unwilling to name the cause, me, pretty sure I already knew it, morose over my inability to help.

This past Sunday, my son told me his friend wouldn’t play with him, and that he “never wanted to go to school again.” On Monday I marched my Karen ass up to his teacher and demanded she intervene. Was my son doing something wrong? Why wasn’t he good enough for this mom’s daughter? “I think she just wants [LITTLE GIRL] to be more independent. I will talk to the children,” the teacher assured me. A young family is its own ecosystem. When one member is suffering, everyone else’s equilibrium goes to shit. Like my son, I was glum. And I ached, an emotional equivalent to the pain I felt having my first IUD inserted, when I thought to myself, Hmmm, I never knew these body parts were here before, but now they fucking HURT. My children are young and (I’d like to think) spoiled with affection. Until now, I hadn’t witnessed one bear the impact of love’s casual cruelty. Watching your children take the punch is so much worse. You feel it like it’s happening to you, but it’s not yours enough to fix. Nevertheless, that day after school, my son seemed in better spirits. “He said he talked to his teacher, but he wouldn’t tell me what she said,” relayed my husband after putting the kids to bed. The next day, with only the minor bribe of a popsicle promised, I got him out of the car and into the classroom. His teacher embraced him warmly, and over his head, she whispered, “I told him he needs to be happy when he comes to school because it makes Mommy sad all day when he isn’t.”

Wait. What? How did this become about ME? I was feeling his pain! Had I fabricated this whole situation? Had I projected my fears of rejection onto him? No, I don’t think so. But had I gotten so worked up with worry that I’d made my son feel worse? Possibly. Here were two children, trying to navigate the nascent overwhelm of being close to another person, and their moms, with all their grown up baggage masquerading as wisdom, were making it harder. Too often I think of motherhood as being the anchored ship, the house that shelters, the stump that gives your kid a place to park his ass, but only when he needs to. I want to believe that my children have the luxury of being less attached to me than I am to them. But there was once a cord that ran between us, and an organ that only existed for us to share. Maternal and fetal stem cells swirl inside each of us like the grossest ever snow globe. I am happily stuck to them, because I chose it. But it’s so important to be careful, because there’s no known way in modern medicine for them to unstick themselves from me.

How was your spring break, Reader? And if you spent it on some beach where the water is as warm as amniotic fluid and as blue as a Gyllenhaal’s eye, actually don’t tell me because I don’t give AF! I was in, not Pittsburgh proper, but a humbler city 30 miles southeast called Greensburg, population 14,700, which just happens to be the commercial and cultural hub of Westmoreland County so suck it LaTrobe, New Kensington and Slickville! Seriously tho, it was nice! The weather was unseasonably warm for western PA which, had I not been reading George Saunders’ Vigil about moral culpability and climate change, I would have totally been able to appreciate. Still, my in-laws graciously let my husband and me sleep in every morning, fed our kids enough chicken strips to give them grown man poops, and allowed us unfettered access to their garage home gym, where I was able to do light cardio while barrelling through most of the third season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. (Remember TFP’s Bachelorette debacle? Feels like a decade ago in Bravo years.) My in-laws’ help came without hesitation or condition. (Could they actually be….enjoying my children’s company? Like, in real time? Not just after putting them to bed, while scrolling through pics of their little faces covered in Easter chocolate?) One evening, my husband’s stepmom remarked, “I can’t believe how hard it must be for you guys to raise kids without family nearby.” It’s true. My husband and I are heroes. Especially me.

At the end of our trip, inclement weather pushed our travel a day. But did I stress? No way. I’d been in western PA so long, I was as chill as a Task character on Percodan, (which I assume most were, it being Hillbilly Elegy-adjacent territory and all). The airline simply rebooked us on the same flights for the following day, so what could possibly go wrong lol? Alas, this is America, whose transportation infrastructure is a house of cards ready to topple at the slightest change or pivot, which is why the next day, after a three hour flight and a two hour layover, we boarded the last leg of our trip with four separate middle seats assigned between me, my husband, and my four and six-year-old kids.

Did I personally object to letting my children sit far away from their parents, sandwiched between strangers? By no means! I’d prefer it! But while I knew the plane’s other passengers would be unlikely to want to help, I also knew the situation would be worse for them if they didn’t. So began the tedious groveling to switch seats with people already seated in an aisle or window, with only a paltry middle seat to offer in return. I sized up my potential victims - a bunch of manspreading white dudes and one woman, traveling alone. So I asked her, would you mind switching seats so I can sit next to my kid? Her face pinched into a tight smile. “Sorry, I can’t.” Okay, bitch. Let’s just pretend I’m too stupid to comprehend that you definitely CAN, you just don’t WANT to. I stared at her heavily revised face (this was a flight to LA, after all) hating every ounce of filler in it, then moved on to the oldest of the white guys, hoping maybe he had grandkids. Nevertheless, while I couldn’t exactly blame that heartless c*nt, it hurt my feelings.

Share

And yet. Even in the moment, my own blatant sexism did not elude me. As a woman myself, I know that we are constantly called on over men to inconvenience ourselves because it’s less scary to ask us to. You want to swim laps in an already crowded pool? You don’t ask the be-speedo’d man with a violent backstroke to share lanes. You ask the nice looking lady in the responsible swim cap. Running late for your flight? You don’t ask the twenty-something bro in track pants to let you cut him at security. And how could you? He’s made himself a fortress of sunglasses and headphones. Better to ask the woman who clearly showered and put on real clothes this morning. She’s not going to refuse you right in front of her kids. When I implored that woman on the plane to switch seats, I wasn’t proud about fanning the flames of the patriarchy, but also Jesus Christ I couldn’t let my little kids sit by themselves! They barely tolerate sitting next to their father! Panic was setting in. Where was that village Hillary Clinton promised me? My children began to cry. I could feel the red hot scorn from other passengers bearing down on me. Did they think I actually booked these particular seats, crossing my fingers that the kindness of strangers would rule the day? Didn’t they know that after six years of bringing children into public spaces, I expect NOTHING from the masses except the collective hope that I’ll leave soon? I know you all hate me! I wanted to scream. But someone has to carry the torch for the future of mankind, and sometimes that someone has to travel!

After some minutes of dissociation, I came to sitting between my children, with my husband in row behind me, beside the c*nty woman with the fucked up face. Somehow, without her help, it had all worked out, and without total disaster looming, I had to admit, I kinda respected the bitch. Good for her for not buckling to my misogynistic demands. She’d clearly chosen not to have children — to put the money she could have wasted on diapers and daycare toward vandalizing her face instead — so why should she have to sit next to one of my whiny spawn? I was no longer angry, but I was, and I remain, concerned for humanity. Specifically, American humanity. People seem to think we each get to live in an a la carte reality based on our individual choices, that if you don’t have kids, you should never have to cross paths with them, or that if you own a phone, you should be able to talk as loud as you want on it, even on a crowded elevator, or that if you pay a lot of money for an experience, you can disregard the limitations of the human beings providing it. (I’m talking specifically about Below Deck here, which may seem a little out of left field, but I think my argument still applies.) We may not be responsible for other people’s choices, but where does what you’re entitled to end and what I’m entitled to begin?

On the same flight, a woman was traveling alone with three small children. I couldn’t help but notice them, because they were all wearing matching outfits, including the woman. Weird. Somewhere over Arizona, she hurried her two older kids, both still in diapers, to the bathroom to change them. When she passed me, she looked at me imploringly. “Can you hold my baby?” She asked, before thrusting him into my arms to chase after the rest of her brood. The baby was chill as hell, with big blue eyes that looked shocked at being so casually pawned off on a stranger. I stood in the aisle rocking him back and forth on my hip, missing the time when my own kids were small enough to rock so easily, feeling flattered someone saw me and assumed I understood the most essential truth: we’re all turbulating through this beautiful, miserable shitstorm together.

Last Saturday, in preparation for a clothing swap I was planning to attend on Sunday, I cleaned out my closet. I had been avoiding the task for years, not wanting to engage with the reality that I’ve changed even slightly since 2018, when I was a childless size two, kicking all the asses and taking all the names, professionally speaking. And yet! What I expected to be a depressing trip down the Room & Board furnished rabbit hole of a white lady’s fear of aging and body dysmorphia…. was actually totally fine! Life affirming, even! Sure I couldn’t fit into those provocatively short rompers that once codified my signature sexy baby style, but honestly, I didn’t fucking want to. Give me a shapeless taupe sack and some chunky loafers and let’s get a martini, honey! I had been afraid cleaning my closet would make me feel old and fat. Instead it made me feel capable and mature. If grownups fold their pants into neat piles and hang their clothes in order according to length, goddammit, color me a grownup.

Thus, I was in the perfect mindset to embark on the following day’s clothing swap, poised to select pieces that complemented — not the girl I once was — but the woman I’d become. I even brought a bottle of wine from an actual wine shop, instead of the local Trader Joe’s! (Who did I think I was? A lawyer????) And while the evening took a little time and a few tiny glasses of a chilled red to settle into, (several of the women participating were meeting for the first time), soon we were running through ‘fits like Pretty Woman on Rodeo Drive, telling each other “You try this!” “That’s your color!” and savoring the warm feeling of watching dresses, jeans, shoes, and even one poncho we’d outgrown (emotionally/spiritually/physically) find loving new homes.

Not quite ready to come down from the high of acquiring new clothes for free, my friend and I snuck off to the local taco bar post-swap for some skinny margaritas, (did I mention we’re middle aged white ladies?). As we debriefed, my friend noted, “So-and-so was being kind of mean to you. Did you notice that?” Reader, I hadn’t noticed, which actually felt like personal growth — a rare evening when I wasn’t painstakingly combing through every interaction for clues that other people thought I sucked as much I did? Maybe I really was becoming a woman. Still, to what was my friend referring? “Maybe not mean, just being kind of dismissive of stuff you said. I can’t really think of an example. Like she thought you were giving little sister vibes.” Little sister vibes. With that, the maturity I’d embraced only a day before disintegrated like a laundry day pair of underwear that’s become more hole than fabric. I couldn’t help it, Reader. It hurt my feelings.

Share

The thing about “giving little sister vibes” is that I AM a little sister. And look, I know this position come with a lot of perks: bein’ kewt, gettin’ spoiled, the wisdom gained from watching your siblings fuck up, parents who’ve been worn down to a nub by the time you come along. Alas, respect from your older siblings ain’t one of these perks. No matter my resume, my references, my writing samples, I cannot convince my older siblings I am qualified to be an adult. My memory doesn’t do me any favors. I’ve retained lots of details from my 43 years of living, but in no particular order. It’s like all the pieces of my life got thrown into a junk drawer, so when I try to string together an anecdote, I never know if what I’m saying is accurate, or if it’s a bunch of real moments rearranged into something narratively compelling but ultimately… a total fucking lie. The second I utter, “Do you remember when…” I can see my brother and his wife clock each other and roll their eyes. Let’s see what this moron pulls out of her ass this time. I also can’t give you directions in places to which you are new and I have lived a very long time. If you point to a building near my home and say, “Tell me about that building,” I probably won’t be able to. I also can’t answer any of your questions about Latin American history even though I majored in the subject. In fact, history in general is pretty fuzzy1. To be clear, I’m not a TOTAL idiot. For example, I can identify a lot of actors simply by hearing their voices. But recognizing Lucy Liu’s voice in a Mercedes commercial is unfortunately not enough to make my siblings believe I am a serious person.

I see youngest siblings struggle to command respect all around me. My husband mocks his little sister at Christmas dinner over the way she passes the salad. My six-year-old teases his little brother over not knowing his alphabet until my four-year-old explodes, dealing my older son blow after blow until I pull him off like a bad dog at the dog park. Any human will tell you they suffer for their birth order. Ask an eldest daughter about her crippling sense of responsibility. Observe a middle son battle the chip on his shoulder over not being coddled enough. Then be grateful you’re not an only child, cuz they all freaks. But the phenomenon of aging as both a woman and a youngest sibling is its own particular type of strange. I continue to amass things that need to be cared for: a husband, two children, a mortgage, boobs that now demand an annual mammogram, a womb that needs babies kept out of it most of the time, except when it doesn’t, which is even more work. And yet, despite the burdens of adulthood that I — and all of us lucky enough to make it here — must shoulder, in the eyes of some, none of it counts. There is still something fundamentally silly about me, simply because in one particular family, I showed up last.

And yet, despite my allegiance to those of my same birth order, it’s funny how it shakes out as a parent. I am quicker to defend my older son, of whom I worry we demand too much maturity because he’s forever our test case. And my husband, an eldest child himself, seems unable to resist our youngest’s charms. Even when my younger son — who’s a brick house compared to our little lord Fauntleroy of an eldest child — brutalizes his brother, my husband tends to scold the oldest for needlessly tormenting him. I often think about how the most important relationship in our family is the one between my sons. Maybe my husband’s and my protectiveness toward our respective children isn’t a reaction to how we were treated as kids. Maybe it’s a callback to the love we have always felt for our siblings, who, more than anyone else on earth, made us who we are.

Because I am a 43-year-old mother of two, here’s a fact that sometimes surprises people: I play soccer in an adult women’s rec league.1 I am OKAY at soccer. My husband asserts that I never learned to “kick the ball right”, which, pretty dick thing to say, no? Look, when I kick the ball, it definitely goes somewhere. Maybe not where I intended, but I’m here to play soccer, not God. Still, I am pretty fast, and above all, I am tenacious. When I chase the ball, I feel like that blur of a dog at the dog park, completely divorced from any human frailty that could slow me down before I get it. Nothing’s getting in this bitch’s way except heart worm or a moving car. I don’t know if I’m tenacious in life because I am tenacious in soccer, or the other way around. I DO know that being able to recognize my own tenacity in soccer gives me the confidence to apply it elsewhere. I’ll just keep doing this until it works, I tell myself often in myriad contexts. Is this emotional fortitude or the definition of insanity? I guess I’ll find out when I die.

The other night, driving home from my soccer game, I was thinking about a memoir I’d finished that afternoon by Claire Bloom, an actress once married to Philip Roth. If you believe Claire Bloom’s account, and I guess I do, Philip Roth was a real piece of shit to the women in his life. Bloom described the end of her marriage with such evocative devastation — that moment when something irreparable undoes your whole present, when the safety of everything familiar is snatched away — I felt as if I myself had been emotionally napalmed by a winner of the Booker Prize. (I haven’t. YET.) But with those soccer endorphins pumping through my bloodstream, I couldn’t help but project my own tenacity onto Bloom’s tragedy. I could survive total romantic betrayal, I thought. I could survive the obliteration of a marriage. I mean, don’t tell my husband. I don’t want him getting any ideas. But I think I could keep trying to be happy again until it worked. Pretending to survive my own divorce made me wonder, what couldn’t I survive? Predictably, my thoughts went immediately to my children. If something happened to my kids, it’s hard to imagine enduring life after. That seems like the biographical Big Bang to wipe out existence as I know it.

Share

Youngest child with no interest in teaching or babysitting that I am, I never thought children were particularly precious until I had my own. Then I realized that their preciousness is literal as well as figurative. Did you know children under six can break their legs just by bouncing on a trampoline? Did you know their kneecaps don’t start developing until after they’ve turned two? Every inch of my kids is delicate and pristine, and when it’s not, it’s my fault, because I should have put cream on that inch. Did you know that their hearts are ACTUALLY pure? Even when they’re assholes. Even when they punch you in the dick, like my four-year-old did to my husband last night. I know this because when my kid saw my husband double over in pain, he burst into tears. Did you know they have no clue how shitty this world can be? They think us grown ups are just out here trying to be kind to each other, like we tell them to be. They think we’re doing our best to take care of the earth and other people, because they’re already learning about the black and white of right vs. wrong, but they haven’t yet gotten to all the gray adults use to get away with evil. Kids, I’m figuring out, are quite something. Could it really be that we all start out this way? They’re such beautiful, perfect idiots it can make you weep like a fist to the groin.

Here’s what I didn’t expect about having children: that it would make me obsessed, not just with my kids, but with ALL kids. Because the more kids I meet, the more I realize that my children aren’t special, they’re just special to me. And so lately, when I see a little boy in a blue bunny hat being hauled away by ICE, or I read that an elementary school full of little girls ages 7 to 12 has been blasted to oblivion, it hurts my feelings. It enrages me. It makes me sick. Don’t the people behind these decisions know what they’re destroying? Don’t they know that behind every perfect life they end, there are two parents who are now being asked to survive the unsurvivable? There’s no good reason to kill or mistreat children. But ask the people in power right now why they’re doing it, and they can’t even give you a bad one. It’s so stupid and senseless, it makes you wonder how the people calling the shots could have ever been children themselves.

You might be wondering how I’m going to land this one. We started off yucking it up about old ladies playing soccer, then somehow we’re unpacking Philip Roth’s misogyny, now I’m getting on my soapbox about dead kids. I guess I’ll just say this: one of my favorite parts about being on a soccer team is that one player’s fate is inextricable from another’s. Win as a team, lose as a team, and so on and so forth. Maybe we should think of the whole human race as one big team. Because my fate, and the fate of my kids, can’t be untangled from you and yours. But dang, the most powerful among us don’t care about soccer! They’ve got their minds on ye olde cha-ching! So let me put this in economic terms. When you degrade the value of a child’s life somewhere in Iran, it degrades the value of our kids right here at home. When you show a parent how little you think their perfect child is worth, it chips away at the entire market value. Children’s lives, sadly, are not inflation proof. Or to put it more plainly, caring what happens to other people’s kids is how you take good care of yours.

This isn’t about a funeral. However, to attend the thing this isn’t about a few weeks ago, I had to fly to Denver.1 While the reason for my return to (not home!) the city of my youth was very sad, it was not unexpected, and since it meant three full days without my children, a part of me looked forward to it as a kind of vacation. Knowing I would have some downtime, I reached out to one of my oldest and closest friends, who I always try to see when I go h--to Denver. As I luxuriated in my middle row Delta seat, preparing for takeoff, my friend and I texted about logistics, and she asked if I wanted some reading material for the flight. She said it would help me get up to speed on what was happening in her life, so that we could start our IRL catch up in the middle of something instead of the beginning. Folks, if you got tea, I’m gonna need you to spill it. Send ASAP-about to take off! I texted back.

I won’t give a full post mortem on the five emails she forwarded me (including one 12 page attachment) because they’re not my business, let alone yours! I'll just say they involved a conflict between her child, who is in junior high, and her child’s friends, and that somewhere mid-conflict, a “friend breakup” note was written to one of the kids. When I came across this detail somewhere above Utah, I began to feel discomfort, confusion, and maybe even some long buried, residual hurt. How strange to be a voyeur into this preteen drama with my dear old friend as my guide. Strange because, thirty years ago, she wrote the same kind of note to me.

Were we in fifth or sixth grade? I can only remember that she passed me the note during science class. We had the same diabolical science teacher both years, Mr. Macaulay2 , who we regularly prank called after school and on weekends. (Usually we’d meow or bark into the phone, but when we were really fired up, we’d yell “I’m gonna get you, Macaulay!” in our most threatening tween voices.3 ) In all fairness to my friend, I started it. The note I passed her read “ARE U MAD AT ME?”. It was a question I asked a lot back then, along with “DO U HATE ME?”. Nowadays, I’m more mindful of not asking questions I don’t want the answers to. I knew, when I saw the tome my friend was writing in response, that it was going to be bad.

Share

A lot of her note is fuzzy to me now, except the phrase, I don’t want people to think YOU then think ME. And while it hurt, I was pretty sure I understood why. I was chubby, and not enough of a physical comedian to make it work for me. Additionally, I was painfully insecure, very judgmental, and inclined to bouts of moodiness and self-pity. (In my defense, SEE: all teenagers.) Also, I would frequently ask friends to wait in line for me because I thought of myself as unusually (but adorably) impatient. I later realized that an aversion to waiting in line was not a personality trait and that everyone hates waiting in them. At any rate, I was self-loathing enough to believe that being chubby alone was a sufficient reason not to want to be associated with me, so I didn’t demand much explanation. I was already humiliated, I wasn’t going to beg for more. Summer break came not long after, during which I ate three bowls of Kix cereal a day, lost twenty pounds, and reconciled with my friend that fall. (While I have no right to assume that my friend simply wanted a skinnier counterpart, it has been my experience that the world is egregiously kinder to skinny people.)

Anyhoo, my trip home for the funeral corresponded with the recent ICE protests, and while we are two white girls, you don’t have to have studied abroad in Argentina (which we did puta carajo) to know FUCK ICE, so my friend and I decided take our hang sesh to the streets. There’s a certain quantity of laughter that only this friend can draw out of me. I don’t realize how much I’ve missed it until I’m laughing with her again, and then it’s like being reminded I’ve gone deaf in my left ear by hearing Mariah Carey’s voice in my right. To heighten the unreality of hanging with my adolescent bestie, five of Denver’s biggest public high schools had canceled classes that day, so we marched in a swarm of protestors roughly the age we used to be when we were constantly together. My friend, who a teacher once described as so gregarious she was practically “from another species”, tried to ingratiate herself to the kids we walked among by yelling the loudest to their call-and-response chants, thumbs-upping their signs, and by inquiring, “Do you like my friend’s sign?” (She made a sign that read “The only ICE we need is —> [PICTURE OF ICE CUBE] and let me carry it.)

But even though my friend makes me feel like a little kid, we are also moms. And while it’s an identity I’m constantly, foolishly trying to distance myself from — isn’t being a mom better than being a girl who hates to wait in line? — I felt like a mom that day. Nobody needed my tears, but I cried at the signs protestors carried of Liam Conejos Ramos in his bunny hat, looking so much like the kids in my four-year-old’s preschool class. And I tried to imagine my sons a little bit older, and what I’d have to do right as their parent for them to show up at a protest like this. And then my friend and I talked about her child and how much change and growth happens in that sliver of time called adolescence. “Because, remember?” She said, “I wrote you a break up letter too!” Kids are so beautiful, in their compassion, in their innocence, in their capacity for cruelty and their willingness to amend it. When we are young, we are the compressed carbon versions of ourselves, and as we age, a blob congeals around our diamond centers. It’s a gift to spend time with people who recognize the diamond in you, who see it so clearly, they barely notice the blob.

I offer this anecdote as a paltry excuse for my absence. Reader! Welcome to another year of FEELINGS. In the immortal words of Matthew McConaughey, I get older, they STILL FUCKING HURT! I’d like to chalk up my inconsistency to the inhumane and entirely self-inflicted demands of parenting, but that wouldn’t be totally honest. See, during the holidays, I attended the annual Joyeux Noel party of two dear friends who I believe to be the photo negative images of my husband and myself1 Minutes after crossing the threshold of their WEST side abode (see previous footnote), I ran into Elise Hu, accomplished author, reporter, and podcaster. (My neighbor and friend Darby Saxbe, who writes the newsletter, Natal Gazing, says that to Win At Substack it helps to “get in the conversation” and do “cross-posts and collaborations with other writers on here.” Am I winning yet? 🤞) Anyhoo, Elise greeted me warmly and mentioned that she reads this very newsletter, to which I replied something performatively self-deprecating like thanks for slogging through it. With a warm smile and genuine playfulness, she added, “I know. It’s been DREARY! When I read it I’m like, is everything okay over there?” And as I stared into the friendly, flawless face of this woman who openly disavows a skincare routine, Reader, I couldn’t help it. The word, DREARY. It hurt my feelings.

Share

Later, as I picked at a plate of imported jamón and watched my husband rest his hand on the small of a random woman’s back across the room, I wondered why exactly Elise’s comment had left me wallowing in self-pity. She hadn’t meant to hurt me. Honestly, in the moment, the directness and precision of the word “dreary” had been so shocking, it felt like the kind of cold plunge very respectable people like Amy Poehler swear by. But in the somatic rush that followed, I’d begun to free associate. I thought about a note a classmate wrote in my 7th grade yearbook, “You’re so funny. You could have fun in a paper box!” Kinda weird to still be clinging to that for emotional reassurance, right? I thought how I’d tried to assure my therapist the week before that “A lot of people think I’m fun. I know you probably don’t believe it, it’s true.” I’d been doing a lot of TELLING not SHOWING. In fact, I’d been trying not to make eye contact with my own dreariness for months, but there it was. What had always felt like a combustable reaction to my day-to-day, a manic oscillation between joy and despair, had browned into a limp banana peel of gloom. And this newsletter had become the artifact of my dreariness.

To be cringe-inducingly straightforward, I have been feeling depressed lately. The world is terrible, my industry is falling apart, the content of every doomscroll is a testament to the banality of evil, and I’m alone in my house all day. So I haven’t wanted to write anything, in the same way that you don’t want to go shopping for new clothes when you feel bloated and keep falling asleep without washing your face. But, as my friend, Matt Starr pointed out, “Everyone at all points in history has thought it can never get worse but it can and it does. Those people still lived their lives. What’s your excuse?” And in her own newsletter, Hu’s Letter?, Elise recently wrote, reflecting on a past eating disorder:

“…liberation from an obsession with our external selves is not only soul-expansive, but increases the good we can do in the world (because appearance obsessions, in whatever form, are cruelly solipsistic).”

An obsession with our internal selves is also cruelly solipsistic. To liberate oneself from either sounds like a tremendous relief. Admittedly, I feel a twinge of humiliation every time I publish a newsletter. When people comment, online or off, I feel both flattered and deeply embarrassed for sharing. But I’d like to transcend that. My hope when I started writing That Hurts My Feelings was that in revealing my own comically hyper sensitivities, others would feel entitled to not only feel their own, but share them. I haven’t known exactly how to incite that sort of commiseration, so I’ve just me-miserated. The result is a black hole of introspection. Dreariness that collapses in on itself. But #2026goals, I’d like to make this newsletter a place of more conversation. Please, tell me, what hurts YOUR feelings!? In the comments or you can email me directly. Think of this as a home for insulted blind items! A Deux Moi for indignities! Did your friend tell you your six year old looked like John Candy’s son? Did your husband hate the comedy special you saw as a window into your soul? Did someone at a party tell you the newsletter you painstakingly curated to sound IRONICALLY dreary was UNIRONICALLY so?2 What I’m asking you to do is CONFESS to me what stupid shit made/makes you feel bad, so we can laugh about it together! I’d really be so grateful if you’d share. The world feels so bad right now. Let’s make it so bad it’s funny.

I’ve been thinking a lot about lying. According to me, it’s not something I do very often, (obviously what a liar would say). I don’t do it because the thought of being caught in a lie makes my armpits moisten and my bowels churn. Even small lies feel needlessly risky. There’s no greater unforced shame than being exposed for saying you read a book that you haven’t, or that you remember someone’s name when you don’t. I do so many stupid things already, why add lying, which is so easily avoidable, to the mix? What I’m trying to say is, fragile ego that I am, you could hurl myriad insults my way and I’d be inclined to believe you. But call me a liar? On THAT, I call bullshit. Which is why, when my six-year-old accused me of lying — literally screamed “You’re a liar!” — on our walk to school the other day, I felt wronged. I felt misunderstood. I felt overlooked, unknown, seen only as a maternal husk with nary a contour to my personality. Reader, put simply, it hurt my feelings.

We were discussing my children’s holiday vacation, which is a mystifying THREE WEEKS long. The Los Angeles Unified School District generally goes to great lengths to care for its students. They offer access to three meals a day for kids who would otherwise go hungry, have taken a firm stance on protecting undocumented students against ICE raids, and organize so many spirit days of such bizarre specificity that a slightly disorganized mother doesn’t stand a fucking chance. (Years from now, my child will be discussing the unshakeable trauma of me forgetting to dress him in his Hawaiian shirt for Mele Kalikimaka Monday with his therapist.) So it’s surprising that LAUSD would find it appropriate to give children a three week break when a parent generally has to supervise kids when they’re not at school. Someone’s got to make sure they don’t juggle knives or drink cleaning supplies or write their name on my wall in permanent marker and then say it was an accident because their hand just slipped. Since most jobs don’t give parents three weeks off during the holidays, who did LAUSD think would be around to mitigate the havoc children wreak? Now, the district isn’t leaving us entirely out in the cold — which in LA is 68 degrees — because it IS offering an optional “winter academy” for the last week of break. (Interestingly, in some cultures, the word “academy” is interchangeable with “school”.) The point being, on our walk to school, my six-year-old asked me if he’d be attending winter academy, to which I answered, “I’m not sure yet.” Skeptical, he pushed further. “Did you sign me up?” I told him yes, but that I was trying to figure out another childcare solution in the meantime. At that point, he called me a liar and burst into tears.

Share

My children have been doing this a lot lately, saying that I’ve said things I never said then calling me a liar when I contradict what they made up. Since they are both white men, at first I assumed these accusations were just the early signs of their inveterate tendency toward gaslighting women. But upon further reflection, I’m starting to wonder if, in an effort NOT to be a liar, I’m supplying them with TOO much information for their simple 4-year-old and 6-year-old minds to sift through. Maybe, instead of a rich tapestry of how I plan to logistically navigate three weeks without childcare, my children just need a YES or NO.

It’s ironic that over-communicating to my children would be negatively affecting our relationship right now, because the opposite is true with my husband. In the 1990 blockbuster Flatliners, Julia Roberts’ character tells Kiefer Sutherland — re: what he experienced when he had his friends kill him (just for a couple minutes!) so he could see what death was like — “You withheld information, that’s the same as lying.” Evidently it really made an impact, because I was eight when I saw that (rated R!) movie, and the line still haunts me like the paranormal consequences hounding Julia and Kiefer for trespassing on the afterlife. After working from home since our eldest child was 8 months old, my husband recently returned to an office job. I, on the other hand, continue to work from home. The result is that 6 years into co-parenting, we’re confronting the challenges of running a household of four people who are almost always in four different places for the very first time. There have been a lot of arguments over who needs our sole Kia Niro, who’s making dinner, who can take our four-year-old to school and pick him up when one of us has a mandatory work Happy Hour and one of us is freelancing for a random YouTuber who posts four videos a day. The arguments usually spring, not from an unwillingness to cooperate with each other, but from a mutual assumption that each of us is intuitively abreast of the other one’s schedule. They’re compounded by the fact that, along with our schedules, neither one of us is particularly good at communicating our feelings, and AT LEAST one of us is very sensitive. What follows is a lot of tension, silence, and rumination. And if what Julia Roberts says is true, if withholding information is the same as lying, then maybe my son is right. At least when it comes to my husband, I can be a real fucking liar.

I’m not a very intuitive mother or caretaker. I chalk this up to being a youngest child who hoarded my allowance. (A financially independent seven-year-old grows up looking out for Number One, baby!) But the part of motherhood I understand in my bones is the need to cultivate my children’s trust in my unconditional love for them. Maybe that’s because when it comes to my relationships with anyone else, unconditional love feels like a mirage. The easy part of being a mother is that you can’t help but give your love away, even when you don’t get it back. The hard part of being a mother is that you have to have relationships with people besides your kids, and those feel a lot scarier. Kids and adults need information communicated differently, which is a huge fucking pain in the ass for anyone trying to intertwine their lives with both. It’s like cooking each member of your family a separate meal for dinner every night, and I don’t even like cooking ONE meal! But I’m trying to remember that the one thing everyone needs communicated is love. If I’m not doing that, I’m lying, and that’s not who I want to be.

I’m deep into a rewatch of The Sopranos, which I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys good television and wants to remember what actresses looked like before they all Instagrammed their faces. (Someday I’ll show my granddaughters a picture of Adriana and say, See? Your lips didn’t always have to look like the first signs of anaphylactic shock to meet society’s beauty standards!) Anyhoo, I’m currently white-knuckling it through Tony and Carmela’s separation, and last night, in the throes of an argument over the astronomical costs of heating a pool (I’ve been there, Carm!) Tony grabbed the laundry basket clutched to Carmela’s breast — a metaphor for how she shields herself with domesticity — and pleaded, “Come on, Carm. It wasn’t all bad.” Good art reflects us back to ourselves and in doing so reveals something new. I immediately thought of the intoxicating bully in MY OWN life, the one who manages to dictate the terms of my existence, not through explicit force, but by dangling my dependency on him over me like a thousand pound piano I fear will one day crush me. I’m talking about my iPhone, and Tony was right. Even the most toxic relationships don’t start out bad.

Of course screens are killing us. Of course they’re rotting our brains and breaking our children. But until recently, that seemed like a reasonable price to pay. When my six-year-old was an infant, I’d spend those long lonely nights in my Wayfair recliner glider, clutching my baby with one arm and my phone with the other. I read every Elizabeth Strout book I could find on the Libby app, then everything by Ishiguru. I recorded all the minutes I breastfed in my Notes app as visual proof that my child wasn’t starving. And sure, I would regularly google “Does [INSERT TOTALLY NORMAL THING BABIES DO] mean my baby is dying?” and it would spit back, “No, that’s usually okay except in the rare cases when it is ABSOLUTELY a baby death indicator”, but for the most part, my phone transported me from the smallness of my own world (miniaturized by the double whammy of both Covid and having babies), and helped soothe my hormone-addled brain. And here I am not so many years later, nearing the end of this labor camp stint known as early parenthood, still using my phone to get me somewhere else when I can’t physically leave. But something feels different. Bad different. I noticed it this past week over Thanksgiving and I’ve been brooding ever since.

We spent the holiday with my husband’s mother, two sisters, and their partners at my sister-in-law’s house. Miraculously, my husband’s family seems to be tickled by (rather than tolerant of) the company of children. Even more miraculously, my children and the adults in my husband’s family share many of the same interests, things like Pokémon, my sister-in-law’s dogs, my sister-in-law’s chickens, playing chutes and/or ladder based board games, the original Magic School Bus series. The result of these small miracles was that, for a few days, I was not constantly servicing my children. Suddenly I was faced with a nearly unrecognizable phenomenon from my childless years: down time. Bewildered by the blinding newness of the moment — like a prisoner taking to the yard after months in the SHU — I reached for my phone. I scrolled other people’s Thanksgiving Instagram posts. I texted friends and family, alerting them to my #gratitude. Mostly, though, I scoured the internet for Black Friday deals. I gorged myself on targeted ads and holiday gift guides. Things it never would have occurred to me to want, I was suddenly convinced I needed. This linen dress from a small business in Portland, Oregon! That beachwaver B-series curling iron! Then, as I was about to click “purchase” on a $350 Oura ring (down from $500, in my defense!), it suddenly occurred to me, my life will feel exactly the same with or without this Oura ring. My sister-in-law had taken the kids to the playground. My husband and I were sitting next to each other on her couch in silence, staring at our phones. My body is aging. My children are growing. My time is running out, and here I am, trapped in the addiction cycle of the internet. I felt hollow and nauseous, in that sugar-sick way that comes from eating too much raw cookie dough, or listening to a Taylor Swift album recorded after 2014 more than three times. I was queasy, Reader. I was hurt.

Share

The more I began to pay attention, the worse I felt. See the inbox flooded with hundreds of emails daily, but rarely from a friend or family member. Try to find a personal text message somewhere amid the crush of shakedowns from the DNC and the latest Andie swimwear deals. A few years ago, my phone was a lifeline to people and stories, a portal to the human experience. But slowly, right under my nose, it’s become a firehose in my face, dousing me, DROWNING me, in shit I don’t need.

Recently, I listened to an episode of the Heavyweight podcast (yes, on my phone, not all bad, Carm!) in which the host, Jonathan Goldstein, reflects on his decision to give up alcohol. In it, he describes the comfort of drinking during his son’s infancy:

“At night I drank. It evened me out, and allowed for a feeling of bliss, perhaps the only bliss I’ve ever known. While other forms of joy were complicated by guilt or intrusive thoughts, drinking alone in that kitchen was always simple. There was a liquor store across the street, and seeing it through the window, luminous in the night, stocked with all those bottles representing the nights of drinking that lay ahead made me feel like everything was going to be alright. Night after night in that small Brooklyn kitchen, I drank and watched YouTube videos of old Jerry Lewis appearances on talk shows and kissed the top of our baby’s head. Each night was like biting into the first square of a miles-long Hershey’s chocolate bar. But as blissful as that time was, when I think back on it, I’m unable to recall very much. It’s all a vague Calgon bath. That is the exchange I made.”

For me, becoming a parent has been full of all the transformative, untranslatable moments people who already have kids promise you, knowingly and often with a wink of condescension. It has also been terrifying, lonely, and heartachingly boring. But faced with the new responsibility of a helpless human life, one cannot (or at least really SHOULD not) indulge this angst. (Imagine how difficult for a person whose muse is her own hurt feelings!) To cope, you drink, you eat ice cream, you put your credit card into Apple Pay so you can buy garbage on your phone faster than you can crack a wine bottle. You fold all the laundry with your headphones on and try not to resent the other scared, restless person with whom you’re co-parenting, if you’re lucky enough to have the help. Then one day you look up and it’s not so terrifying, it’s funnier, your children suddenly make you feel safe instead of painfully alone, but your wheels are still gripping the tracks of the habits you developed to survive. It can seem like every time you grow into a new life, it immediately outgrows you. The hours of Magnatiles and Legos and Blaze & The Monster Machines go by so slowly, you wonder how it can be so hard to keep up.

I can get smug watching new parents contend with the challenges of learning their way around an infant. (Give them the fucking formula! Don’t make yourself crazy about the naps! Crying it out will not result in lifelong trauma!) Yet every time I enter a new, daunting phase of parenthood, it seems impossible that any person in human history has walked this path before, in spite of the paved roads, the stoplights, the public transportation, etc. So here I am, overloaded with bad habits I collected because at some point, they helped me get this far, dreaming of a future version of me who laughs at the naive, floundering me I am today. Isn’t she precious? I’ll say.

From a young age, I self-identified as an object of the teacher’s gaze. Male teachers, female teachers, hot or not, it didn’t matter. I wanted them to love me. Not in a May December, Mary Kay Letourneau way - although it’s probably for the best that I never caught a predator’s eye, cuz ur gurl want- 👏 ed 👏 attention! In part, I think I found comforting the easily decipherable roadmap for expressing affection and receiving approval. I showed love by doing well in a teacher’s class, they returned it by giving me a good grade. Although in hindsight, maybe that’s kind of a fucked up way of thinking about school? Maybe it should have been more about learning? If only I’d been less busy worrying that my grades were an appraisal of my personality, I might be able to tell you what a quadratic equation is for. All this to say, my need for a teacher’s recognition has unfortunately NOT receded with the passage of time. Which brings us to my son’s parent-teacher conference last week.

Share

My child’s teacher is a nice man to whom I’d never spoken directly until last Friday. I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me. He seems to genuinely care for my child, was kind in his feedback and encouraging about my son’s good brain and good heart. He wasn’t overly effusive, but it was the end of a long day, one he probably spent busting his ass to say something nice about other people’s inferior children, I told myself. “He’s at solid B+/A- levels across the board, you guys should really pat yourselves on the back,” he told me and my husband. And yes, a B+ is still a B, but whatever! Not a grade I’d be happy bringing home, but sure, pat away, me! Still, leaving the meeting, I felt haunted by an inexplicable sense of melancholy. What had I wanted from this man? Did I really need him to rubber stamp my son’s potential? Potential is the promise of what someone can become. But to me, my son already is. Of his future, I simply hope there is a lot of it, and that in it, he continues to be him. I was starting to wonder if my melancholy had nothing to do with this teacher’s impression of my son and more to do with — as always — my own impression of myself.

A child is a taut rubberband of the grown up they’ll become. It must be kind of awesome to be a teacher, with a front row seat to so much possibility and the proximity to reach out and make an impression when a person will remember it most. But these days, sitting across from a teacher and realizing they’re simply seeing you as another adult, an ally in this mission to mold the minds of those who’ll populate a future in which you are irrelevant, is sobering. Was this yet another situation in which I, a middle aged woman, had become invisible? The day before the parent-teacher conference, I was listening to the podcast so good I wish I’d invented instead of Jonathan Goldstein, Heavyweight, when the episode’s protagonist, Gregor began to wax poetic about “that era when it still seemed like life had potential to go a bunch of different ways. Now it seems less so. It’s not even squandered potential, it’s like ‘you could have been somebody’ becomes ‘you didn’t.’” All this gloomy backward glancing, these moments of mourning unrealized versions of myself, were accumulating mass and momentum, like the saddest Katamari ball. I told my husband, it’s kind of depressing that I’m just someone’s mom now. He said, “You’re not! Come on. But that’s one of the things you are.”

My husband says that the most cringe this newsletter gets is when I paint myself as disappointed and disappointing. I have a great life! I’ve gotten to do a lot of cool shit! It gives thin-woman-complaining-she’s-fat-to-a-bunch-of-other-women-who-may-or-may-not-be-fatter (which, shamefully, I have also done). Is there any value in copping to a feeling that you may not be entitled to, if only to be another voice amplifying that so many of us feel it? According to my husband, fuck no. It’s actually funny (it’s not funny), a startling number of male teachers in my youth became romantically entangled with female students. I always assumed the psychological draw for the teacher had to do with inhabiting the idealized version of what that young student believed the adult to be. In that way, I guess lecherous teachers and myself are trying to outrun the same disappointing truth: grownups ain’t shit.

Even as I lament no longer being the object of the teacher’s gaze, I know that in my children’s eyes, I am in sharper focus than ever. But what’s so fun about that? My kids aren’t going to make me a mixtape because they want to influence my budding music taste. (Everyone’s English teachers made them mixtapes, right?) I guess the best you can do under your children’s watchful eyes is show them that even as we age, we can still evolve, have adventures, learn new skills, be new ways. Kid or grownup, we are all still baking. But to do that, we first have to believe it ourselves. So that’s my assignment, to exorcise the notion that I’m all out of runway. It’s proving to be a challenging one. Still, I take comfort in knowing that I’m toxically committed to acing everything, so I’ll have to figure it out eventually.

In addition to the student-to-student aspect of the fundraising royale, kids were being pitted against each other by classroom. My son’s class was exceptionally high-earning, locked in a battle for first place with a fourth grade class, with all other rooms trailing behind by such an absurd amount, you’d think the neighborhood homes their parents owned DIDN’T cost $1 million. I became fixated on winning the class competition, an admittedly stupid goal since the prize was just a party I wasn’t even invited to. And yet, there I was, with a tab open on my computer, refreshing the stats each morning, shedding $100 like it was hair postpartum when my son’s teacher sent a desperate email that the fourth graders were closing in. Hours away from the final deadline, we’d outpaced the competition by over $2000, which seemed like an insurmountable lead. But that evening, when I went to confirm our victory, the nauseating, heartbreaking truth was revealed. We’d lost by $45. Forty five fucking dollars. Had I only known, I would have robbed a bank, or pawned my wedding ring! Naturally, I was devastated. Which — yeah, I know — was completely counter to the spirit of the achievement. The PTA was rolling in cash money! And yet, losing, well, it hurt my feelings.

I really hate losing. I’ve been known to take multiple runs on the last day of a Garmin challenge to not be outdone by my younger competitors. But now, in addition to the sting of failure, I also felt embarrassed, for getting so wrapped up in something I was conflicted about to begin with. (I said I’d get to it, didn’t I??!) At back-to-school night last month, my son’s teacher, who’s been at the school for nearly twenty years, credited the PTA for a vast improvement in resources he claims to have witnessed over the past decade. It’s hard to imagine my kid’s school wanting for anything. His classroom is stocked with tiny guitars, a miniature drum set, beanbag chairs, a pet snake and a bearded dragon. It overlooks a garden flush with sunflowers and dinosaur kale. Last year, at the school’s science fair, I walked through every class room to see the students’ work on display. Each fifth grader had constructed their own pair of shoes — in Southern California, every child dreams of growing up to be a sneaker mogul — and each kindergartener made their own pinball game. It was a warm evening, with the setting sun spreading colors across the sky like an overturned Aperol Spritz. I thought, this is a nice place. This is exactly the kind of school you dream of sending your kids to. And yet…

Share

I live in Eagle Rock, a lush, hilly neighborhood in East LA in the mid-to-late stages of gentrification. My street is a patchwork of Eagle Rock’s eras. My septuagenarian neighbor across the street has lived in her home since she was six. Friends further down the block moved in during the early aughts, and would gawk at what my husband and I paid for our totally adequate 1,596 square foot single story home just four years ago. In 2013, the house I live in sold for $513,000. In 2021, my husband and I bought it for $1.2 million. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’M PART OF THE PROBLEM. In the twelve years since my home has more than doubled in value, money has poured into my son’s public school through the PTA. And to some extent, the influx of private capital is a sign of a just system at work. Eagle Rock public schools are part of the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) which distributes tax-payer funds equitably between neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty, like Skid Row and Watts, and famously flush neighborhoods like Brenda Walsh’s Beverly Hills and the Fresh Prince’s Bel Air. I say equitably because LAUSD provides resources proportional to student body need, meaning high poverty schools get more than wealthy ones. Call me Bernie Ocasio Cortez, but it makes sense to me! It also provides a perfect talking point to a member of the PTA in Eagle Rock, who can argue that it’s the parents in the community who need to make up the deficit between the public funding my son’s school is receiving, and what’s being forked over to Skid Row Country Day.

But how much is enough? At back-to-school night, a representative of PTA gave us rubric: “Think about how much you paid for your child’s preschool or daycare or nanny before they came here. If you donate a month’s worth of what you used to spend in a year, the PTA will be in great shape.” For many parents at my kids’ school, that means donating the monthly fee they paid the Montessori preschool down the street, which charges roughly $20,000 annually. (Don’t ask me interrogate why a three-year-old needs a $20,000/year education. I wanna be able to grab a box of frozen samosas from my local Trader Joe’s without being stoned to death.) I see the logic in this framing. It makes a $2,000 seem like a steal, compared to how much we could be spending. But it’s also an uncomfortable reminder of how much we could be (as in how much we are capable of) spending. In two days, the federal government will suspend benefits to more than 40 million people who receive food assistance (and look at me, helping my son waste all that pie.) At the end of the year, health care premiums are on track to increase by an average of 30%. I know I can’t fix a broken social safety net by not donating to the PTA, but when citizens are meant to plug the holes of a rapidly sinking system, how are we supposed to know which holes to prioritize? I want my kid’s class to get the pizza party. I want his teacher to have every resource he needs to teach. I want my son to get the field trip to the aquarium and the new playground and the music class. But how much of this stuff does he need? What’s more worthy of investment than a freaking public school? Am I a bad mother for wondering? Does it help anything at all to wonder?

I ask that question sincerely. I don’t think my performative liberal hand wringing makes the world a better place. But it scares me that even though I feel like I’m constantly worrying about money, I have enough of it to render it a total abstraction. I want a nice life for my kid. But what does that mean? I want him to get everything he needs but not everything he wants. I want him to understand that getting everything you want comes at a cost, that the more he has, the less someone else does, and part of being a responsible citizen is knowing where to draw the line. If only someone had taught little Jeff Bezos that. We might not be able to get compression socks, a carpet steamer and an edible Korean face mask delivered to our house within six hours of realizing we wanted them. But that’s a sacrifice I hope I’d be willing to make. Not my kid, though. Choose the lower carbon delivery option for his Pokemon cards and the boy loses his shit.

One of the most harrowing aspects of parenting young children is the game of Russian roulette you face when your kids make friends. Until children reach a certain age — I’m unclear what that age is because my kids haven’t reached it — you have to supervise them like a prison guard escorting Hannibal Lecter to the courthouse. I’m talking straight jacket, face mask, and that human hand truck they wheel him around on, metaphorically speaking. One consequence of the constant surveillance a parent must provide is having to mingle with other parents. If your kid likes another kid enough, you and that kid’s parents may even be forced to become “friends”.

That said, I feel #grateful to have stumbled into an exceedingly pleasant, remarkably hinged parent group, full of people I’ve come to consider, not just “friends”, but friends. Our kids are all buddies through school. We gather for family barbecues, pool parties, and the occasional holiday. Sometimes we grab dinner without our children. A couple of months ago, the moms even got out of town for the weekend. Before I had children, a father I knew warned me, “It’s hell making friends with other parents. You’re seeing people at their absolute WORST.” (I don’t know if that’s true, but I do feel a lot of vicarious humiliation watching a grown man in a button down argue with a four-year-old.) All to say, my current reality has exceeded expectations. Still, I’m gonna be real with y’all, the mom group chat can pop off. We go back and forth a lot. As with all things phone, our text thread can be accessed in various states of exhaustion and/or sobriety. Sometimes tone gets lost, misinterpreted, or a person feels emboldened to make a comment they would never say to someone’s face. All these variables were at play the other night, when one mom texted a picture of John Candy’s adult son from the new Amazon documentary John Candy: I Like Me, insisting that he looked like my eldest child. Was she trolling me to appear in this very newsletter, which I know she reads? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Regardless, guys, it hurt my feelings.

I have not seen John Candy: I Like Me. If Chris Candy is anything like his father, he must be a god damn prince. But my son is six. What is implied when you compare a six-year-old’s appearance to that of an average-looking man in his 40s? Since there are no glaringly obvious similarities — my son is four feet tall, weighs forty pounds, has no beard or fine lines to speak of — I’m left to draw my own conclusions. Based on the single screen grab (which is obviously unfair, we’ve all seen unrecognizable pictures of ourselves) this man appears to have “lived hard.” Does my friend think my child is destined for a hard-living future? Does she see something deviant or chaotic in my son? Some sort of darkness or pain for which he will eventually self-medicate? Does she think I’m hard-living, and am parenting my child toward a similar future? Is this my unconscious surfacing to plant a red flag on my own lifestyle? I don’t know, people! I DO NOT KNOW! I do know that when you tell someone their six-year-old looks like a schlubby middle-aged man, it’s got to mean something! I can’t put my finger on what, exactly, but it doesn’t seem…hmmm…..how you say?…..good.

Share

Humans are a terminally vain species, but we at least aspire to believe that a person’s character should not be inferred based on his or her physical appearance. Don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s what we’re taught and what we teach our children. So why should I take it personally when someone compares my child’s cover to some other book’s cover? If that book’s cover says nothing about the book itself, then it says even less about my child! And yet, I’ve always projected a kinship onto my own doppelgangers; as if our physical likeness signaled something deeper and more connected about our identities. When I was young, people used to tell me I looked like a certain singer from an indie rock band. I let myself believe I was giving rockstar, when really, people were just pointing out we both have red hair. Months ago, I met a woman whose face I thought I recognized but couldn’t place. When I mentioned it to her, she responded with premature disappointment. “Are you thinking of Martha Plimpton?” I was! But she clearly didn’t relish the comparison. When I asked her why, she explained, “She’s not exactly known for being super hot.” But she’s so cool! I insisted. And yet, why should this woman take comfort in Martha Plimpton’s winning personality and extraordinary talent? This woman might look like a cool actress, but that ain’t getting her cast as Mark Ruffalo’s boss in Task.

We like to look at beautiful things. A sunset stimulates the same pleasure center as a symmetrical face, which is probably why people were so mean to Shannen Doherty (RIP, asymmetrical queen). But one thing I don’t think I truly understood until I had children was how much beauty we derive from that which reminds us of what we already love. When I was a child, I thought I had to be physically pleasing for people to love me. (Sad! Facile! I know! Blame society!) Now that I have my own children, I realize how beautiful I find my children because I love them. How gorgeous I find my youngest’s chubby fingers and my eldest’s tiny teeth. How my love envelopes every inch, with no spare skin flap or freckle unaccounted for with which to find fault. My love for them is so overwhelming, it even finds its way back to my own appearance. My eldest son and I (and Chris Candy, I guess) have the same face. When I look at my son’s face and see my own, it makes me electric with joy. Not only because it means I must not be terrible to look at, but because our faces signal to the world that we belong to each other. It’s superficial, of course, and it being true doesn’t mean the opposite is also true. But when likeness has a way of activating a chemical love response, you can understand why feelings about doppelgangers might get confusing.

This whole ordeal just proves something I already knew in my heart: it’s never a good idea to tell someone who you think they, or their children, resemble. I should know. Last year I wondered aloud to my friend who made the Chris Candy comment if she thought her son bore a slight bit of a likeness to the lead singer of Everclear? I obviously meant it as a compliment. (C’mon, Everclear is the most underrated band of the power pop, post-grunge era!) But I think she appreciated the comparison about as much as I liked the Chris Candy one. The truth is, our little boys are both remarkably adorable, as all children are, because they have to be. If kids were ugly, we’d never put up with their bullshit. But more importantly, our boys are sensitive, funny, curious, and kind, and if they' grow up to be half the men Chris Candy and the lead singer of Everclear are, we’ll be lucky.1

No matter where you see yourself in the radioactive rainbow of American political views, I’m guessing you’re not having a lot of fun right now. Like you, I read the news. It makes me want to climb into a sensory deprivation tank and not come out til everyone’s dead or the water dips below eighty degrees. So given the state of world, this is no time to be gatekeeping delicious escapism trash that can cheer a person up. And yet…

Share

I am a fan of the Bravoverse. I offer this assertion humbly, because there are many whose wisdom of the text surpasses my own. I am by no means a completist, but have I been to the clubhouse for a Watch What Happens Live taping or two? I have. Have I taken a selfie in the now defunct Schwartz & Sandy’s bathroom? Also yes. Did I receive a Raquel Leviss cameo the day of my wedding and a James Kennedy cameo congratulating me (but mostly my husband) on the birth of my first born child? I did. I’m not saying this to be cool. Historically, Bravo fandom hasn’t been cool. It’s been shrugged off, dismissed as reality soap opera smut by a society still guided largely by the tastes of straight white men. (I could say the same about The Power Broker or Goodfellas but 🤐.) And sure, now and then, an elite stumbles into the Bravoverse and marvels at the highbrow amid the lowbrow (see: this Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker piece). Which is fine! Let fancy intellectuals write think pieces about what many women, gay men, and Michael Rapaport have been discussing for years! All are welcome in the Bravoverse. There are plenty of espresso martinis and caftans to go around, I’ve always thought. Until now.

Recently, the algorithm has been serving me clips of famous, funny white men preaching the Bravo gospel while promoting their own creative works. John Oliver went on Late Night with Stephen Colbert to wax poetic on “magnificent monsters” of RHOSLC. Seth Rogen confessed to bingeing all eleven seasons of Vanderpump Rules while on a press junket for The Studio. Watching these guys tout their less-than-complete knowledge of the Bravoverse — Lisa Barlow grew up in Chicago, John! Not New York! — annoys me in the same way my 6-year-old gets annoyed when my 3-year-old copies him. Which is to say, I know I’m being a petty little bitch. Why shouldn’t these men be allowed to like what I also like, for the same reasons I like it? As John Oliver puts it to Stephen Colbert, “I think this show [RHOSLC] is amazing. They’re both intentionally funny and unintentionally funny. They think they’re self-aware. They’re NOT. They’re hawking products that are various degrees of disaster. They’re in marriages that go from the inexplicable to the catastrophic. It’s better television than both of our shows!” Why should it embitter me that a famously well-spoken man is giving voice to my admiration? And yet, it hurts my feelings, for reasons that are all mixed up inside me, and I don’t know how to get to the bottom of them except to excavate.

I have no idea if what I’m about to say is true, but I’m 99% sure these dudes discovered Bravo the same way most heterosexual men do. They walked into the room when their wife or girlfriend was watching, said, “Why are you watching this crap?!” then lingered, drawn in by the poetic chaos of what they were witnessing, and after one viewing, never looked back. So what? Everyone has to find their way to what they like somehow. Why am I watching the aforementioned clips with teeth clinched, waiting for Rogen or Oliver to acknowledge the guiding influence of the women in their lives? Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to a podcast about George Balanchine’s influence on ballet and reading a memoir by the former (female) assistant to Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Ballet, cooking, watching Bravo. All institutions built on the backs of women, so that one man at the top can bask in the glow of mainstream adulation. It’s the women who twist their feet into ragged claws en pointe, the women who make sure their own children are eating three meals a day, the women who clock the hours watching all the seasons of Below Deck, even Below Deck Sailing Yacht, just so one dude can go on TV and slay by mentioning Ariana and Katie’s sandwich shop.

But to peel back another layer of my hurt-feelings-onion, I’m skeptical of the laughter men like Oliver and Rogen elicit when they profess their Bravo fandom. These shows have millions of viewers, so what’s so funny? Is the audience delighting in the incongruity of learning these paragons of prestige comedy watch these “both intentionally funny and unintentionally funny” shows? Rogen and Oliver mention Bravo in moments of self-promotion because it’s surprising, ridiculous, even. The outrageousness of their fandom makes for a silly, memorable anecdote. But there’s nothing particularly entertaining about learning women watch Bravo, is there? It’s exactly the kind of garbage people expect us to watch.

Let’s call it what it is: CULTURAL APPROPRIATION. And hey, like I said before, these are trying times for the fragile American psyche, and our means of escape seem to be dwindling every day. Media behemoths are consolidating. The creative class is struggling to make a living wage. When there is less and less quality trash to choose from, it would be wrong of me to shame white men for consuming some of the best of it. Bravo isn’t a finite resource, so okay, okay, I’m willing to share. But a little respect, a little acknowledgement for who initiated your first fateful RHOSLC viewing, who walked you through Mary Cosby’s genealogy when you thought you couldn’t possibly be getting it right, that would be nice. I guess what I’m trying to say is, dudes, stop acting like you’re the number one guys in this group. We’re the number one guys in this group.

Recently, the algorithm has been serving me a lot of videos titled things like “getting coffee with your beta friend”, “what a beta girl’s bedroom looks like” and “ten signs your algorithm might be trying to tell you you’re beta”. I get it, algorithm. I’m a beta, not a fucking idiot. Society gives a lot more airtime to the alphas, precisely because alphas want it and demand it, but surprise! We betas also make up a sizable portion of the population. Too often, beta traits like being agreeable, impressionable, malleable, and maybe even a little chaotic (adorably so), are maligned because we live in a society that fetishizes aggression and equates success with dominance. IT’S CALLED THE PATRIARCHY, EVER HEARD OF IT? My own belief is that personality distinctions like “alpha” and “beta” are value neutral. After all, the world needs one to distinguish from the other. However, recently, I’ve been getting the sense that I’ve taken on a role for which the beta sensibility is ill-matched, if not dangerously incompatible. I’m talking, of course, about being a mother.

A few nights ago, with my husband out for the evening, I was thrust into the position of “primary parent” during my children’s night time routine. Things usually go pretty well when it’s just me and my sons. Bad cop is off duty. The Oedipal battle is backed into a temporary ceasefire. Plus, I let them watch TV, which is generally forbidden on school nights. (All things in moderation, including moderation!) Anyhoo, dinner went how it always goes. My six-year-old, practical by nature, inhaled his well-balanced meal then asked for a popsicle with an unsolicited please, which made me feel awfully smug about raising “one of the good ones” (see: the soft bigotry of low expectations). My three-year-old, an early adopter of the Paleo Diet, housed only the flesh on his plate, then cried when I half-heartedly urged him to finish his vegetables like his brother if he also wanted a treat. After two bites of broccoli, I abandoned the ruse and got him a popsicle too, an injustice my six-year-old was willing to look the other way on because neither of us wanted to listen to the baby scream.

Bath time was typical bedlam, wherein my children writhed, squawked, peed on each other, wrestled the handheld shower head from my hands to douse me with it, while I dissociated, allowing the experience into focus only long enough to ensure their poorly wiped butts got sufficiently scrubbed. After the tedium of toothbrushing, which they permitted only after I pantomimed vomiting from the smell of their breath, it was time for stories. This is always my favorite part of a night alone with them: when we all nestle into the bottom bunk of their unsettlingly creaky bed, a damp, sweet-smelling head resting on either one of my shoulders, and we read a book I force on them because it was one I liked as a kid. Usually it’s Dr. Seuss, which feels the closest to poetry and promotes gentleness, self-respect, and environmentalism without being super condescending about it. That night, we read The Sneetches and Other Stories. My children have yet to glean much from the main parable, but the last story is about a bear who keeps running into a pair of pants that can walk on its own, and that really cracks them up.

Off went the lights, on went the Sharper Image Planetarium Projector their grandparents gave them in lieu of say, a seashell nightlight. And yes, we may be burning through an unconscionable number of lithium batteries, but at least my sons will be able to navigate by the stars when the climate apocalypse comes. But wait! I’m about to get to my point! There we were, ready to pop in whatever Yoto1 card they could agree on to lull them to sleep. What was it going to be? The Polar Region? Volcanoes? Rain and the Water Cycle? It didn’t matter to me which one they chose. After all, wasn’t each Yoto card designed to be so boring that the human brain powers down in protest? But it mattered to my children. My older son wanted Rainforests. My younger one wanted Oceans. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Share

In next to no time, they were screaming at each other. My older son insisted that the younger one had gotten his way the night before, which, okay, fair enough, I guess it’s the big boy’s turn. But then my younger countered, reminding me that my older son, being the more intense and opinionated of the two, disproportionately gets his pick of things. This was quite a pickle. As I deliberated, the situation continued to escalate in hostility and decibel. I summoned my sternest mom voice to tell them if they couldn’t come to a mutual agreement, maybe we should forego the Yoto altogether. My older son was apoplectic. My younger one seemed pretty okay with the idea. Another pickle. Someone needed to take control of the situation. But there was no alpha — or at least no grown alpha — there to do it. I was paralyzed, desperately wanting to make a fair decision, resentful that I had to make any decision when this had nothing to do with my preferences, all while knowing that what my children needed was simply for me to put my foot down. It didn’t matter where I put it, just so long as it was down.

My husband once told me there are people who like taking care of people and people who like being taken care of and I am the latter. A decade later, I am still holding that against him. Maybe it’s because I find the assertion simplistic and unfair. I like taking care of myself. I know what I like to eat, what I like to watch on TV, I know what I want to do with an afternoon of total freedom. I just don’t want to tell YOU what to do with it. But I guess if you sign up to be a parent, that comes with the job. Because kids really have no fucking clue what they’re supposed to be doing. Think about it, the next time you’re standing at the DMV or sitting in a library, the only reason the scene hasn’t erupted into wild, terrifying, shit-slinging-like-the-monkeys-do pandemonium is because enough parents of people in your proximity performed the tedious but necessary task of civilizing their children. So okay, I’m gonna work on my inner alpha. I just hope that, along with the ways I know I have to change to be an effective parent, my children might be getting something out of the person I like to be, and already am.

But that’s not the worst of it, obviously. You don’t need me to tell you why it’s bad that our demented president wants to put a muzzle on anyone who doesn’t want to kiss his leathery ass. What blows my mind is what is at the heart of it. As news of Kimmel’s “indefinite suspension” broke, I was (naively) shocked to come across this in Variety:

Media conglomerate Sinclair will replace the Friday timeslot of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with a Charlie Kirk tribute special on its ABC affiliate stations — and is offering the special to all other ABC stations across the country.

In addition, the company is demanding that Kimmel apologize to Kirk’s family and send “a meaningful personal donation” to them as well as Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded that advocates for conservative politics in high schools and colleges.

A meaningful personal donation. As Trump sues the New York Times for $15 billion, as the federal government shakes down higher education and law firms that dared oppose it for cold hard cash, the resounding emptiness of all this destruction is laid bare. This is all about money. It’s the strangest thing. I’d honestly respect it more if the felling of our most sacred institutions really came down to the deranged ideology people like Charlie Kirk espouse. But while us regular folks are out in the world, being hurt by, fighting over, paying with our livelihoods and our lives for what we believe, the people at the top really don’t believe in anything. If they did, a meaningful personal donation wouldn’t be enough to make it all go away.

Share

It was grotesque to watch footage from the recent dinner Trump hosted for tech giants Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Tim Cooke, etc. What a hollow fucking banquet hall. Welcome to the feast of empty suits. Grab a seat next to the money vampire of your choice. Remember when Bill Gates wanted to eradicate measles? Now he’s gargling the jizz of a president who is happy to let his HHS secretary eradicate its vaccine! Remember when Mark Zuckerberg wanted to “go back to Facebook’s roots of freedom of expression”? Now he’s rimming the man who told journalist Jonathan Karl just last week that his justice department would “probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly….You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC. ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they will have to go after you.” (Again, note the proud extortion. He wants revenge, but silence isn’t enough. There has to be a payout.) I wish I had something funnier to say about it, but there’s no substance to mock, no misguided value system to puncture. The people who are officially and not-so-officially running the country exalt only one thing: money. And why shouldn’t they? Their reverence seems to yield them more and more of it.

As a writer, it’s been conveyed to me often over the course of my career that because I love what I do, I don’t deserve to get paid for it. People who run media conglomerates like Disney Media and Sinclair Broadcast Group think they should make billions off the work of people like myself, but as for the actual “content generators”, the assholes at the top seem to think the dang joy of creation should be its own reward. And while this enrages me, it’s also taught me a valuable lesson: how not to shut up. The Trump administration’s simultaneous fixations with squashing dissent and getting its nut run counter to each other. Taking away our jobs, our livelihoods, suing us for the money we have in our bank accounts WILL make us poor. But it’s not going to make us quiet. Rich people like Trump have been trying to get out of paying us for believing in things and expressing those beliefs forever. Why would it start working now?

Things aren’t getting bad, they already are. As much as I use this platform to bemoan the relentless tediousness of motherhood, I’m so infinitely grateful for the hours before and after my kids are at school, when I get to pretend — so as not to scare the shit out of them — that everything isn’t deeply, perilously fucked. It terrifies me that the most powerful people in America are motivated by money and money alone. But maybe that will be what saves us. Yes, I’m not an idiot. I know (too well!) that we all need money to live. But think of how much worse off we’d be if these shitcans who are ruining everything actually believed in something real.

Last week, while languishing in the no man’s land between my eighth wedding anniversary (Monday) and my forty-third birthday (Friday), I got a wonderful surprise: my husband whisked me away on a two-day getaway up California’s Central Coast. The sweetest beginnings of an event like this are imagining the forethought put into it, the conversations between my husband and his mother to secure child care for our time away, the curious interest he began to take in a challenge I’d entered at my gym to take 30 classes in 60 days that had to be reached by last Thursday. All the sudden he was constantly checking in to see how far along I was, how many more classes I needed to take to hit my goal. What the hell was going on? I mean, yes, I was ALWAYS talking about this stupid fucking challenge, but like most of health-related white noise I spew (“My fingers go numb when I fall asleep, is that normal?” or “should I be concerned about producing too little earwax?”) I didn’t think he cared. Then he suddenly he’s all personally invested? Did I need the added pressure of my husband breathing down my ripped thick-ass super toned neck, when just weeks ago he’d asserted that exercise doesn’t even COUNT as a hobby because you HAVE TO do it? As it turned out, he just didn’t want our surprise getaway becoming a reason to blame him for missing my goal. But let me reassure you, I didn’t miss my goal, because yer girl never backs down from a challenge. Especially when that challenge is just about showing up for something over and over again. Mindless persistence is my superpower.

This was only the second time since our eldest child was born, six years ago, that we’ve had the chance to “get away” just the two of us, unless you count the 36 hours we spent in Denver for my sister’s funeral. (That trip wasn’t particularly chill or relaxing for anyone but my sister, who got to lay down the whole time.) The only other real escape we’ve made from our spawn was back in May of 2023 to attend a friend’s wedding in New York. It was our first return to the city since we’d moved away three years earlier, and a stark reminder of how much our marriage had improved since we left. 360 degrees of hot gray-brown concrete, the all-pervasive smell of urine, the absence of two tiny beings who needed us to act like grownups, inspired a kind of regression. One of us may have gotten drunk and accused the other of lusting after former co-workers. Another, similarly drunk, may have vomited down the sleeve of his or her sports jacket. All to say, it was not much of a liberation tour. It was more of a frightening reminder that being good co-parents is not synonymous with being good partners.

But last week, two years more rehearsed in the grinding choreography of parenting, we weren’t dumb enough to squander a respite. We stayed at a notoriously kitschy hotel and drank dumb, delicious cocktails, but not too many. We ate so much sushi, I was forced to re-examine my belief that you can never actually get full on sushi. We went sea kayaking and saw so many sea otters, I’m now a little skeptical of their “endangered” status. We had conversations that did not revolve around our children. I swear! It was bliss, it really was, until our last night away, when we FaceTimed our children and my husband’s mother to check in. The general chaos didn’t surprise me, but my mother-in-law’s visible agitation did. This woman raised three children of her own, ran a daycare, can whip up homemade play-dough without looking up a recipe, and genuinely enjoys playing Pokemon GO. In short, she’s a kid-whisperer. Were our children monsters enough (and we such terrible parents) to push this Good Samaritan — not only a childcare guru, but bound to these heathens by blood — to her limits? After our call, my husband and I considered the question, and knowing our kids, it seemed plausible. Until our return the next day, I kept asking myself, were our children too wild for even a grandmother to love? I wondered and I wondered. And it hurt my feelings.

Share

The good news is, my kids are not unlovable. When we got back the next day, my mother-in-law addressed the issue head on. “I should explain my tone yesterday. I didn’t want to worry you while you were away, but right before you called, I walked into the kitchen, and I saw a….” She struggled to get the words out. “….I saw a rat.” A rat. A fucking rat. You know, the kind that spread THE PLAGUE? Where had this rat been that I didn’t know about? Had he scurried across my children’s pillows? Had he nibbled on crackers I then packed in their lunches? Had he made me complicit in passing along some rat-born illness that would blind them, or paralyze them, or give them one of those fevers that makes you bleed from your ears? Look, I know a rat isn’t the end of the world. But anyone who’s been ambushed by parasitic vermin (lice, bedbugs, people who only want to be your friend so they can use your pool) knows how personally violating it can feel. And like I said before, my husband and I met in New York City. In a single day, I used to see more rats than I saw people being paid a livable wage. But that’s part of the reason I left! Maybe today (September 11th) isn’t the best day to make this point, but to be young/not rich in New York is to test the limits of your tolerance to discomfort. My time there was an exercise in surrendering to my total lack of control. I remember waiting for trains that would never come, or mopping up water from roofs that would never stop leaking, or scattering boric acid for the roaches that would never abate, and thinking, panicked, in the early years, God is punishing me. Then, in the middle years, more seasoned but responsible only for myself, God doesn’t care. Then finally when I was pregnant during a measles outbreak, God doesn’t exist, so who am I trying to prove myself to? I spent fifteen years in New York, and I loved my life there. But leaving wasn’t hard. Living there was hard. Even the people who adore it know that. It’s part of why they do.

Of course, leaving New York to escape my unrelenting sense of powerlessness taught me a valuable lesson: I’m powerless everywhere! Covid came for my family in California too. So did work troubles, and personal tragedy. Now, even the rats are here. So I called someone, because my husband told me recently he “sometimes wishes” I’d “take more initiative.” And yesterday, a nice man from La Cucaracha Pest Control walked me around the perimeter of my house, showing me every tiny crevice a rat could shimmy his way through. “It’s really not that bad,” he laughed when I grimaced in disgust. Next week he’s going to come back and cover all the holes with screens for a very reasonable price. It was a small but comforting reminder that you can’t stop bad things from happening, but you can call Hector from La Cucaracha when they do, and that rats will surprise you anywhere, but so could your husband, with a really nice trip.

Recently, every time I sit down to write another installment of this newsletter, all I want to say is, are you guys gettin’ a load of this? We’re discouraging herd immunity after we just had a pandemic? We’re kidnapping human beings La Noche De Los Lapices-style? What the actual fuck is HAPPENING TO AMERICA?? Because while this place has always kind of sucked, right now, there’s an overpowering WICKEDNESS that pervades the day-to-day like the smell of a dead animal rotting in the walls. But you, informed and astute Reader, don’t need me to tell you that. And yet, I worry, what will you think of me if I simply disregard the stench in favor of more quotidian gripes? How dare I waste five minutes of your afternoon complaining about my girls’ trip to wine country, when I discovered all the mothers I’m friends with are better at meal planning than I am? So what if my lack of initiative to impose structure on my family’s little world hurts my feelings, when I still have the good fortune to take a friggin girls’ trip at all? I’m trying to thread a needle; to not be a total fucking downer, but also not be a basic white whoman (shout out, Greg Iwinski) either. So let’s talk about homework.

Privately, I’m incredibly smug the fact that my sons go to public school. In the abstract, I plan to keep it that way forever. So what if America is teetering on the precipice of dissolving the Department of Education? No matter which crumbling public school my sons land at (assuming “schools” in general survive this administration), my husband and I will always be their parents. And boy, are we great at it! We spend an obscene amount of time with our children. We read to them and feed them vegetables. We take them to museums, but also make them play sports. And when they ask us questions like how do magnets work? I can’t respond, because I have no fucking clue. But I CAN say, ask your father! and my husband will explain it to them in terms they understand. That said, the public school in our very gentrified district is exceptional. (Partly because of the incredibly well-funded PTA!) And my children, now three and six, are currently pretty low maintenance, as in, they have yet to manifest any personal or developmental challenges that a large public institution might struggle to accommodate. Point being, I’m smug, but my smugness has yet to be challenged. I’m holding space for the possibility of being un-smugged.

Share

A few weeks ago, my six-year-old started first grade. Along with the upgrade to a sweet-ass classroom stocked with tiny guitars, a violin, and a pet snake, the transition from kinder to first has come with a significant uptick in homework. You might be thinking, homework for kindergartners? And first graders? What on god’s once-green-now-increasingly-fallow earth?! And typically, I would ignore your incredulity. Not my lane! I’d tell you. After all, teachers already have to deal with a landfill-sized heap of trash from parents who think that just because they pay their taxes, an educator is their child’s personal Sophist, and that the needs of a group are irrelevant when they conflict with the needs of their whiny little mouth-breather. Seriously, remember all that stuff I said about being a dynamic, creative, attentive, fun-as-hell, A+ parent? According to my logic, if a teacher has a pulse and is providing basic child care, I should have the rest covered, right? At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Unfortunately, when my child is the unhappy kid, it hits a little differently.

The meltdowns started last Thursday, when my son and I realized we’d overlooked a significant portion of the homework assigned the previous Monday. I was about to make dinner, so I told my husband, “Get him started because it’s going to be disaster if he waits til later.” Nevertheless, a disaster ensued. When my son clocked the sheer quantity of worksheets he had to get through, he began to panic. Long before I’d adequately scorched my chicken thighs, he was hysterical, and I could hear my husband telling him in a firm, not-completely-chill tone, “Look, I don’t care if you do your homework. But you’re not going to get to do fun things if you don’t!” That didn’t sound right. I cared if my son did his homework. Just like I always cared that I did MY homework. The consequence of abstaining had never been about not getting to do fun things. The consequence had been about being a fucking loser who didn’t do your homework. And yet I also have potent memories of being in my son’s position, of waiting to do school work til the last minute, then becoming inconsolable over the prospect of not getting it done. My parents do too. I know, because 35 years later, they still bring it up! When the chicken was no longer raw enough to kill us all, I tagged in for my husband. My son calmed down a bit — a Mother’s Touch, Oedipal rivalry, toxic masculinity, etc. — but he kept repeating a phrase that worried me. “I hate school,” he told me with tears in his eyes.

This week, I tried to nip the situation in the bud by making sure he completed the portion of homework allotted for each particular day, so it wouldn’t pile up. But on Tuesday, after a long soccer practice (coached by his father, another inevitable sword fight 🙄) and a late dinner (my bad for making potato soup on a 90 degree day), we were back in the throes of a meltdown. It had been going — not smoothly — but reasonably well, until, already exhausted, my son arrived at the last of his math worksheets. “Tom has seven dogs. Draw four big dogs and three small dogs,” it read. The task at hand was clear enough, but when you have the fine motor skills of a six-year-old, drawing seven dogs takes a fucking long time! “I hate dogs! Why are dogs so stupid?! Why are dogs so hard to draw?!” He screamed, which seemed unfair to dogs, who never asked to be drawn. Don’t worry about it, just draw shitty dogs! I thought. But another characteristic I also see in myself was getting in the way. My son doesn’t like to do anything badly. Maybe nobody does! But since he was a baby, reluctant to speak til he could do it in nearly full sentences, overwrought when encouraged to take his first steps, he has always seemed deeply embarrassed to struggle publicly. Again, “I hate school!” he informed me broken-heartedly. At this point, I was of two minds. It’s probably good to make kids do things they hate, right? Won’t it help prepare them for adulthood, when 95% of the what you have to do is stuff you hate? Also, doing hard things encourages resiliency! One day you’re pushing yourself to draw seven dogs, the next, you’re singlehandedly skinning a 1200 lb moose on Alone! Nevertheless, hating school at six seems treacherous, since ideally he’ll be spending 12 more years there. I want him to love school. I want him to love learning. What greater freedom is there, in a world that every day seems a little less free?

Last night was Back To School Night. I entered my son’s classroom with my heart-pounding, wondering if I was about to become one of those parents I’ve not just rolled my eyes at, but seen as true community saboteurs. The kind people I always think of while listening to The Beatles’ I Me Mine. (We all think that song is about entitled white parents, right?) But before I could cross over to the dark side, my son’s affable teacher informed us, “I don’t really care if your kids do their homework. I want them building Legos, wrestling with their siblings, hanging out with you. That, I think, teaches them much more.” I was relieved. But also, strangely, disappointed? I’d come to face my son’s teacher, but also to face myself, to figure out when I feel comfortable advocating for my children, and when I need to back off for the greater good. And even though I wasn’t forced to draw the line last night, I’m still thinking about it. I guess in that way, twenty years after setting foot in a classroom, school is still making me reckon with big questions. And while I’m not sure my son would understand what the hell I was talking about, I’d like to ask him, what’s not to love about that?