The day-to-day of parenting changes so fast that I sometimes wonder (while knee deep in yet another leap or regression): have I learned anything since this whole adventure began? In the grand scheme of parenting, my knowledge is absolute peanuts. And yet, I also have absorbed enough to change my entire worldview. Here are the highlights of what I’ve scraped together so far.

1. Your kid turning 3 means that you’re actually almost through 4 years of motherhood, because pregnancy absolutely counts. Your body isn’t your own and you’re not sleeping? You’re a mother, baby.

   

2. While you’re pregnant, learn all the words to a few soothing songs. You’re about to be singing, a lot—I don’t care if you never set foot in a choir before, this is a biological imperative—and the vibes are generally better when you’re crooning lyrics that remind you of your own childhood or your love for your partner, and not, like, “The Wheels on the Bus.” (I was going to say “no shade to Wheels on the Bus,” but you know what? No. "The mommies say shhhh!” while “The daddies say I love you”? GTFO.)

3. Having a baby is not “hard on your marriage” for some universal, mysterious reason. It swings a spotlight directly onto the cracks in your communication skills and the secret hopes you have for yourselves, at exactly the moment when both parties are their rawest. You can skip at least some of this! You can use the dragging hours of pregnancy, once you’re too whale-like to leave the couch, to navigate these waters ahead of time. What do you want the postpartum period to look like? Who’s allowed to come over, and when? What will make you feel taken care of? What are you worried about? No one can read your mind. Say it all out loud beforehand, so you’re not screaming it, in tears, while both changing and wearing a diaper.

4. All the influencers who tout a “natural” (aka drug-free) birth as something to strive for can go straight to hell. No one has actual control over their birth experience, and setting women up to feel like failures if they have to (or want to!!!!!!) use pain medication is borderline criminal.

5. You will never see them again, but you will remember the nurses in the delivery room for the rest of your natural life. It strains credulity that they could have been women working through a normal shift, because actually they were angels. There were two of them, and then the heart rate monitor did something funny, and then there were a legion, sprinting in their pastel scrubs and assembling around you as the doctor barked orders. You were in so much pain that it almost obliterated how scared you were, and then a nurse in box braids wrapped her arms around your thigh and pulled it up to your shoulder. She counted the breaths with you, sang to you, pushing up as you pushed out, and though it was your husband’s hand that you were clutching, it was her brown eyes you were focused on when you heard your baby’s first cry of life. You will think of her on every one of his birthdays, and wish her every happiness this world has on offer.

6. There’s loving a man, and then there’s seeing that man hold the baby you made together. Drugs could never.

   

7. Every newborn on record is goofy looking. They’re just not fully done when the head size + vaginal canal math dictates they’ve gotta come out, and so we’ve all collectively decided to just not really assess cuteness until a few months in. Except for your baby. The moment your baby emerges, he is the most perfectly formed creature that has ever graced the earth. (Months later, when he is objectively cute and you can see the newborn pictures more accurately, this will be a hilarious take. And it will also, somehow, be true.)

8. If we can put a man on the moon, we can coordinate hospital check-ins so that people who just gave birth can string together more than 45 consecutive minutes of sleep.

9. We can probably also find a moniker better than MAH-maaaah! with which to address brand new mothers. Hi MAH-maaaah! How we doing, MAH-maaaah? We could go with, like….their names. Which are on the white board behind their heads.

10. There is no way to avoid the fact that the weeks immediately after you give birth will be physically rough. Human birth is just medical trauma. Get this situated in your mind, so you don’t feel like you’re not “bouncing back” fast enough. Physical healing is tough, but if you can rest, the miracle of the human body is that it happens on its own. You don’t need to think through how to heal, this is a “biology take the wheel” situation.

11. The part you will not expect—and therefore the part you won’t prepare for—is the full-blown emotional assault. There’s a biological explanation for what’s happening: your hormones are undergoing the single largest drop a human experiences in their lifetime. But that’s not what it feels like. It feels like you’re being asked to defuse a bomb, with no prior training, while drunk. Like every car on the road and peal of the doorbell is a looming brown bear, fangs exposed and lunging at your child. The only way out of this is sleep. Do everything in your power to get as much sleep as you possibly can. Call in every favor, save every dollar, use every ounce of creativity you possess to make this happen: friends who will drop by so you can take a nap, hiring a night nurse, whatever. Telling yourself you can muscle through it is not only incorrect, it is dangerous. Do not mess around with this shit.

    

12. There’s going to be more vomit than you bargained for. Make peace with it.

13. When you’re immediately postpartum and feel completely untethered from reality, you might take your baby’s constant, nervous-system-rattling screams as an indication that he doesn’t really like you very much. While the crying is awful (you are not imagining it), you don’t need to be concerned about his allegiances. Being a newborn is just incredibly hard, and—even though you made this whole human out of two cells and suffered all manner of indignities to bring him earthside—it’s not personal.

14. If you can manage it, get outside with your newborn. Not like, to a party. But fresh air makes everybody less insane, and for the first month or so, they will sleep anywhere and through anything. Go sit outside and eat lunch, get a drink, take a walk. Stroller naps are your very best friend.

    

15. For you, the right move is to unfollow every person on social media who has a child around when you do. Watching the highlight reel of someone else’s life is inadvisable, but absorbing the highlight reel of someone else’s kid unfolding in real time? That way lies madness. It sounds trite that “all kids develop at their own pace,” but it is true. You do not need to know when a baby you’ve never met sits up before yours does. If you’re going to be on social media at all, winnow your attention to the people who are talking about your non-parent interests: books, fashion, whatever. Anything you can do to stay tethered to your core self during this transition is worth its weight in gold.

16. Similar to having a personal board of advisors, pick two motherhood experts to whom you’ll go for advice. Maybe three. They need to be sufficiently ahead of you to have some hindsight, but not so far ahead that they haven’t raised a child in 30 years. Tell them explicitly that you’re adopting them as a motherhood mentor, and that you’ll be texting them every question you have. (They will, inevitably, say, “Oh, girl, absolutely.”) Then do it! You can’t bother them. They have been through this crucible and remember the women who pulled them up out of it. They are honored to take their place in that chain.

17. Pick a pediatrician you trust, and know that if your well-visits are short, it isn’t because he “doesn’t take your baby seriously.”1 You just got lucky enough to have a kid whose health is uncomplicated and easy to assess. (Make sure you get all your questions answered, though! Keep them in a Note on your phone so it’s easy to add to the list whenever something pops into your brain, and you’re sure to have it on you in the doctor’s office.)

18. Pretty much every baby is going to have a “thing.” Some are not great sleepers, or not great eaters, or are slow to reach a particular milestone. That is the baseline: that you will be dealing with something. The baseline is not that your child eats, sleeps, poops, and vibes perfectly all the time. To the extent that you can, pay close attention but hold it lightly. Most of it shakes out within a year or so, and very little of it is going to make a mark stronger than the funny story it’ll be someday.

    

19. You’re going to need to take your Type A Achiever personality and put it in the freezer for at least a year. You are used to getting things done and being very good at things, and if that’s where you continue to place your self worth in this first year, motherhood is going to deal your ego a truly devastating gut punch. Try to reorient. Being very good at this in the first year means: everyone is alive, healthy more days than not, and emotionally bonded.

20. That being said, hold on to your penchant for “reading ahead.” Your goofy baby will go to sleep and wake up a boundary-testing toddler, and there will be no advance warning this was coming (except, like “the passage of time,” but c’mon). People made (gentle) fun of you for talking so much about parenting philosophies when the little guy was still mostly a blob, but you will be internally fist-pumping when you know (theoretically) how to handle behaviors the first time they crop up. (You will still fail to handle them correctly 50% of the time, because theory is only half the equation.)

21. The “just you wait” people are absolutely right, but in reverse. Just you wait until he smiles at you, for real. Christ, just you wait until he laughs for the first time. You will experience all these milestones as blows of joy, elation that hits you so hard it almost hurts. But it doesn’t hurt, really, and ah! Here comes the next one: just you wait until he says “Mama,” and looks right at you, and that current of understanding runs between the two of you that he is able to put a name on what you are to him.

22. Walking is wild. Walking is a shift in the continuum that is about so much more than one developmental advance. It means you’re going from a baby who can more or less be happily contained to a toddler whose need is to launch himself headfirst into a world that is not made with his safety in mind. The days of early walking are ones of constant vigilance. There will be enough crouching that you can skip leg day for months. And still, he will bang his beautiful, enormous head on floor after floor. Tamp down your internal panic and be the coolest possible customer as you scan him for blood and bruises. Hold on tight to the knowledge that toddler skulls actually thicken in preparation for exactly this phase.

    

23. You might feel the need to introduce your child to “kid music.” Do not do this. Play the music that you love, and they will love it, too. Children crave repetition, and if you are going to have to listen to one song over and over again, it might as well be “Hooked On a Feeling,” and not “Elmo’s Song.”

24. You will need to be extremely convincing that everything is okay, especially when it is anything but. Your small child essentially shares your nervous system, and can read your energy fluently. To be a mother is to constantly play a character who is braver, more energetic, more resilient, more creative than you actually are. You will step into her shoes with every midnight fever, every fear, until the boundaries between you start to blur. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to have your own emotional landscape. It means you become good enough at projecting confidence and calm in front of your kid that he never wonders—even before he has the language for such thoughts—whether the people in charge of him are capable and the world is basically safe.

25. Baby and kid laundry is gross enough that you more or less have to do it right away. This means you will constantly be doing laundry, but also that his clothes will be clean and ready to wear again within a few days. Unless it brings you great joy to plan your kid’s outfits,2 he doesn’t actually need that many clothes. If you have enough stuff in his size to last a week without laundry (which will inevitably happen also), you’re pretty much good.

26. The best children’s books are I Want My Hat Back and the Circle/Square/Triangle trilogy, all written by Jon Klassen. I will not be accepting argument on this matter. I will, however, extend honorable mention acclaim to Wolfgang in the Meadow, Little Witch Hazel, and Knuffle Bunny.3 (Little Blue Truck will haunt me in my dying dreams and can go take a short walk drive off a long pier.)

    

27. There is never enough gross motor play. Never. Do more. It is your fastest route to better sleep, better eating, and vibes that are chill rather than feral.

28. If, as your child is learning to talk, they cannot quite get all the syllables of “I love you” out, and it becomes “iu,” get that tattooed on your wrist.

29. First birthdays are about the parents, not the kid. To him, this day is like any other. To you, it represents a metamorphosis: from mewling, helpless animal into laughing, chubby guy. From a dazed car-wreck to a woman with competencies, schedules, a stellar track record of keeping her baby alive for an entire year. To everyone else, it is the anniversary of the day you became a mother. But only you can fathom what the year leached out of your bones, and what it poured back into your arms. Rejoice. Celebrate it in whatever way makes sense to you, whether it’s a cowboy-themed party with everyone who can make it, or an evening stroll around the neighborhood with champagne in your water bottle.

    

30. Time will start speeding up now, in a way you’d heard of but hadn’t quite believed in. There isn’t anything to do about it; it’s just something to be aware of, so you don’t feel crazy when you look at pictures of your child from 2 months ago and see an entirely different person.

    

31. The best thing about your child starting to talk is that your family unit starts to develop inside jokes and a secret language. Even when it’s just a couple of words, borne of your kid’s mispronunciations, using them will give you the buzzy high you’d previously associated with falling in love with a new friend. As you’re getting your kid ready for society, you’re first (whether or not you’ve consciously decided to) creating a little secret society at home. Normal people would call this “family culture,” and the realization that you get to make it out of whole-cloth is invigorating.

32. The greatest hits of toddlerhood behavior management are: 1) give your kid a heads up a few minutes before they need to move on to something new, 2) “it’s okay to be mad, but it’s not okay to be mean,” and 3) “I’m all done talking about that now,” when there’s nothing further to be said on the matter. Honestly, the less you say (about “behaving,” specifically), the more successful your toddler parenting becomes. There is no secret combination of words that’ll unlock “good behavior” in a person who must test boundaries. Be the sea cliff, let him be the ocean. He will throw himself against you as many times as he must. Pick him up, kiss him, make it unendingly clear that you are in charge and that you will always, always love him.

33. Grace, baby. For him, for your partner, for yourself. There is no way to “get this right” all the time. And there is no way—do you hear me? no way on Earth—that you’re going to get it really wrong, as long as you lead with love.

    

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…with that out of the way…

Here’s the pitch for the novel and Chapter 1

And the first half of Chapter 2

(and here we’re picking up where we left off in Chapter 2, still in Sadie’s perspective)

* * *

It’s not far to the police station from City Hall, maybe a couple of blocks. Usually there’s gridlock, a stop and start lurch through this busiest part of downtown, but tonight we’re slipping easily across lanes of traffic, around corners. It’s wrong, too loose. Everything that happens next should come at a snail’s pace, so we can pick it up and examine it and breathe an appropriate number of breaths. So we can figure out what to say.

We slide past a row of streetlights casting wide circles of gold on the inky street. The inside of the car illuminates with staccato bursts of light like Morse code. Pop! Black. The Chief accelerates. Pop! Black. Dribbles of panic leak in with every burst of light, and so I inhale, gulping air until my lungs strain, and clamp a hand over my nose and mouth. My heart bangs against the inside of my chest--let me out let me out --and I count, reminding my animal body that I am in charge. I get to 60--I can always get to 60--and let out a shuddery breath, loud enough that the Chief turns over his shoulder to look at me. I shake my head just a little. I’m fine. I’m fine.

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But if you’re anything like me (I’m sorry), you keep setting unwieldy, ambitious goals for yourself, and then being surprised when the results don’t roll in automatically. Turns out manifesting only gets you part of the way there, and then you (a mere baby!) have to figure out how to get the rest of it done. But how do we do that, given the time crunches and the exhaustion and diseased vegetation?

I don’t really know, but I can fake it! Welcome to the next installation of “pretending to give advice while actually just talking to myself.”

1. Get really incredibly specific about the thing you want to do.

   Sounds basic, isn’t. So much of our desire is amorphous, and setting a goal like “write a book” is going to do fuck-all toward helping you actually achieve it. What kind of book? Why? Do you just want to type “THE END” into a Google Doc (an impressive goal unto itself, to be clear) or will you not feel complete until you walk into a Barnes and Noble and see your blood/sweat/tears in a paper jacket on a table? We can’t break through the ribbon at the finish line until we know which race we’re running. (Take it from someone whose goal the first 30 years of her life was “be successful.” I speak of what I know.)

2. You know you have to put in the reps. Get clear about what that looks like, too.

   If you sit down “to write” (and you are me) you are low-key wondering if you’re doing it right the entire time: does working on my outline count? What if I use up all my time reworking one paragraph? But if you decide a rep looks like “write 500 words,” there isn’t any conversation to have with yourself. It’s binary: you did it or you didn’t. (You probably had a good reason if you didn’t! Big love. But we’re just trying to edge all the possible uncertainty off the table here.)

   

3. Understand who you are and what motivates you.

   I would rather die than miss a deadline, as long as someone else is watching. (Internal motivation? I don’t know her.) So when I really want to do something, I tell other people so they can hold me accountable. Most of the time, they actually forget that we even had the conversation (because they’re focused on their own lives, as they should be). But the tiniest chance that someone might be looking for the thing I said I’d do, and be disappointed? A dagger to my heart. I will get that shit done, come hell or high water.

4. Tell yourself a story about who you’ll be when you’re done. What’s it going to mean to your self-image to have accomplished this? If you care enough about the goal in the first place, hopefully it’s a strong enough mental picture to carry you through. But it can’t be just a sentence, like “I will be a published author.” That’s hollow; it can’t carry any weight for you when you’re tired.

   We’re looking for a whole sensory image that carries the promise of what you’re setting out to do (even if it’s a fuzzy one). Is this future version of you wearing black trousers and a heavy gold bangle on her book tour? Listening to Jon Batiste on repeat as she sketches out her next project? How is she spending her time, now that she’s not working on this goal? What excites her? You have to hold all this loosely; it may not happen. Still, tell enough of a story that you fall a little bit in love with this future version of yourself. It’ll help you reach her faster.

   

5. Make it aesthetically pleasing. Look, I am not above a lit candle and a hot coffee being the reason I get my butt in the chair initially. And not to be groundbreaking about it, but hard work is hard! Be kind to the soft animal of your body and let her have a treat while the iron taskmaster of your mind forces her to crank out pages.

6. Get your stakeholders involved. Oops, sorry, who let Business Julie in here? But she does have a point: who are the people who would otherwise be “preventing” you from working on this goal? Your husband, who might need to take on some extra childcare shifts so you can write? Your toddler, who sees Mommy’s laptop as an opportunity to practice percussive hand strength? Bring them in.

   They’re gonna be pretty different conversations! This obviously depends on your individual kid, but you might be surprised at how tickled they’ll be to know the details of something you’re working on. Mine listened for a full two minutes (I’ll take it! He’s 2!) before running away to find a paper and pen to write his own book (which will probably be better than mine).

   As for your partner, might I suggest waiting until a rare date night when you can have a soul-baring conversation, sharing the passion you feel for walking this creative path, encouraging him to also reengage with his musical dreams, drinking 3 bucket-sized margaritas and then accidentally buying an electronic piano?

   I mean, you do you.

   

7. Don’t have a constant conversation with yourself about whether it’s worth it to keep going. Past You thought you could do this. Future You will be there to clean up the spill and pick a new direction, if that becomes necessary. Pick a time when she’s supposed to show up (2 months from now? 12?). Whenever she gets here, it’s her job to do the evaluation. Don’t do her job early. Just do yours, right now: keep going.

8. Give yourself rewards! A reward for making progress is a totally different thing from the treat you get for sitting down to work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. (I do, I’m doing it right now).

   So few people even try, guys. To the extent that you are financially and operationally able, reward yourself liberally for every milestone (and make them up if you have to). You get a fun new lip product for finishing a chapter, an ice cream for finishing a page. I don’t care what it is. I just care that you’re congratulating yourself for the act of pouring effort into something you care about.

9. Don’t shrink. It’s not a dumb goal. You’re not delusional for wanting it. There are more than enough forces in our lives trying to compress us into palatable blobs who exist just to consume. Don’t join them. If it’s important to you, it’s important. If you’ve generated a desire out of your own weird and wonderful mind, consider it just as worthy as the rest of the demands the world makes on your energy.

Alright, that’s all I’ve got. Serious request, here: how do you make yourself do the thing? Please share your best tips, we need all the help we can get.

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But! This is the season to just push through and do it. Motherhood waits for no (wo)man, and without the accountability of having to show my work every few weeks, I will honestly just keep getting distracted by shiny objects until yet another year has elapsed without me finishing this draft.

(If you’re wondering what I’m talking about—honestly same, most of the time—I’m working on a novel and decided to publish it here in installments, Dickens-style. Here’s the first chapter, if you want to get caught up.)

Before we get into this week’s pages, I thought it might be kind of fun to do a little bit of a casting exercise. (I know some people would really rather envision the characters themselves, so if that’s you, feel free to skip this and head to the actual writing.)

I personally love these games; I think the best writing is cinematic, and if I’m already seeing a movie in my head, it might as well be populated by real actors who might want to sign on for the eventual adaptation. (I am on my third coffee of the day and the manifesting has clearly reached slightly manic levels.)

And so, I present to you my ideal cast for the movie version of the book I have not finished writing. Starting with:

And then we have…

I’m feeling pretty confident in these choices, even if just because these actors are so accessible and would all clearly jump at the chance to be involved in this project. Obviously.

But I’m completely stuck on the POV characters, Nora (13) and Sadie (18). I am deeply out of touch with today’s bench of teen actors, and so I’m hoping one of you might have some ideas for me?

And with that, I’m officially done stalling. Chapter Two starts below, and you can sign up for a paid subscription if you’d like to read the whole thing. (If you can’t/don’t want to pay for it, please let me know and I’ll be happy to gift you a subscription. Making money on this is certainly wonderful, but my main objective in putting it behind a paywall is just to ensure that it isn’t splashed across the internet, so that I can still query it when I’m finished with this draft.)

Chapter Two

Sadie

After a while, someone gives us two foil shock blankets. I shake one out and sit down next to Nora on the floor of the police van, pulling the crinkling silver sheet around our shoulders. I hold the edges closed with a fist, and we stare out into the street. The lights on the cop cars flash blue and red, but their sirens have long been quiet; the boulevard looks like a TV set someone muted. I want so badly to shut off the rest of my senses, too. Maybe forever.

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I sometimes feel like a robot could slip into my spot and no one would notice: I’m just saying the same things to my toddler, every single day, over and over. I know this is normal; he’s new in town,1 and there’s a lot going on. It’s developmentally appropriate for him to need a lot of reminders.

But I’m only human, and so yesterday I was internally groaning as I opened my mouth to tell him (for the fifth time) to set his trucks down and come eat lunch. And then my stomach rumbled, and I realized: I’m starving. He’s too occupied to eat. I’m too occupied to eat. Maybe ol’ Mommy could do with some repetition of her own.

And so I offer you: my inner monologue, as channeled through the phrases I repeat, every day, to my two year old.

Listen to your body.

You know that squicked out feeling you get at the end of the day? The restless sensation that descends when it’s time to go to sleep, even though your bones weigh a thousand pounds each? It’s because you’ve been staring at a screen all day, from a seated position, curled up like a productivity gremlin.

You have forgotten this, but you are an animal. Animals move around during the day, go out in the sunshine, commune in packs. Hunting looks a little different these days (getting electronic dollars deposited in your bank account when you hit KPIs) but you still have to run around, or you’ll go nuts. Sign up for a yoga class. Go for a walk. The Slack DMs will still be there when you get back.

Also, quit forgetting to pee for hours at a time while you’re hyper-focused on a task. That’s how you get a UTI.

Of course I’ll read you a book.

Reading used to be essentially your whole personality. You earned enough personal pan pizzas during childhood library summers to feed a small country. (They might have discontinued the program because of you.) When did you decide you didn’t have enough time to read?

Reading fiction is transportive. It’s a shot in the arm of empathy, of adventure. Every book you open is a little side life you get to run through, before coming back to your own. Do you remember bawling at the end of Heart the Lover, gasping through Bunny, marveling at The Raw Shark Texts? Remember how cathartic it is to let those emotions run like freight trains through your body, leaving you spent and wiser on the other side?

Yes, these are not your “lounging on a deck chair with a spritz” reading years, but there’s time at night. While you’re waiting in line. While you’re brushing your teeth. But instead of reading during those moments, you’re doing something else. Which brings me to…

We don’t play with Mommy’s phone.

Girl, get the ever-loving [redacted] off your phone. Look around you. Your kid is watching everything you do.

This object is not for playing with. It’s for cueing up Potty Time2 for the seventeenth round in a row and Google Maps-ing to the doctor’s office you should really know how to get to by now. It is a tool to accomplish things, not a crutch to help you tap out of moments that are frustrating or boring or sad. Those interludes are not going to kill you. Breathe through them. All your creativity is on the other side of some mental white space, and if you keep shoving jump-cuts of other people’s lives in the way, you are never going to get there.

(Also: this shiny rectangle might kill you, if you don’t cut this shit out. Yesterday, you almost fell down the stairs because you were reading it while walking and missed a step. What is this insane behavior? Stop it.)

Please be nice to your penis.

You know what, actually, this one’s all him. Not a lot for me, here.

It’s okay to be mad. It’s not okay to be mean.

You’re not super loving your circumstances right now. This is a nice way of saying that living in your suburban hometown (where, in order to get a coffee, you have to drive past your elementary school, your high school, and the Buca di Beppo at which you ate before senior prom) feels claustrophobic. When you have to make up excuses to see people outside your family and participate in society (like purposely not getting all your groceries at once, so you have an excuse to go back to Trader Joe’s the next day), it is reasonable that you feel a little like a cat backed into a corner.

But it’s not okay to scratch. The people around you—your kid who could be happy on the moon, your New York native husband who feels equally unmoored—are trying their best, and are not repositories for your grump. Channel your frustration into your plan to get back to where you want to be. Research kindergarten options in Astoria. Try to talk your parents into buying a two-family home. Go on Zillow and keep bumping that max price until one that would work for you pops up. Click on it and see how much work a million-dollar house in NYC would need, just to be inhabitable. Cry. Go back to your budget and try again. Nothing is going to keep you down; it’s all a matter of strategy. Dream a little dream, why don’t you?

It’s time to get dressed.

So you work from home. So the only people who see you are your husband and your kid and your mom, who would all love you and think you were cool if you were wearing a garbage bag. That doesn’t mean you can wear a garbage bag.

Suit up, babe. You need to take yourself seriously as a human being, one who wants to maintain a sense of self and a healthy marriage. This requires some effort. Climb out of the primordial swamp that is daytime pajamas and go put on some jeans. Yes, I know everyone you work with (on the rare occasion that they even turn on their cameras) is wearing a hoodie. That’s never been you. You care about your personal aesthetic, and you’ve let it go out of pure apathy. You are your own audience. Pull your hair back into a ballet bun and slick down the hairline wispies until you recognize yourself in the mirror.

I love you and love you and love you.

Alright, you know what?

Some of that up there wasn’t that kind. And yeah, you do need to change some of your behavior—you’re a human, fallibility is part of the definition—but ultimately effort isn’t really your issue.

You’re getting up at dawn to get the creative work in. You’re standing on your head to kill it at work. You’re showing up as a daughter, and as a wife, and as a mother, even when the frenzy of that juggling act means those glass balls are constantly just a kiss away from hitting the ground.

What do you say to Jude? When you murmur your love into his hair as you hold him over his crib at night, and he asks, “but why, Mommy?” Why do you love me?

Because, you say to him, you are you.

I’ve never met a person so kind and so smart and so cute and so funny. But even if you weren’t any of those things, I would love you the most because you are my best one. I love you because you’re my Judo guy.

I mean, you really pile it on for him—it’s not your fault, his hair smells like strawberries—but you do know some of that should go back to the source, right?

Give yourself a break. Or some chocolate. You’re somebody’s baby, too, and life (even with all your blessings) ain’t easy. Do what you can, to be better and do better, and then at the end of the day, as Emerson would say, “be done with it.” The sun’ll always be creeping back over the horizon in a few hours; another chance will be on the way. Sit with yourself in that liminal space, and be gentle. Be grateful.

If there’s one thing you want him to remember you saying, it is “Give everyone grace.” Better make sure he hears you say it to yourself. Better make sure he sees that you mean it.

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But it turns out—shocker—that trying to write once a week here and make progress on my novel is too many things. (Or rather, it’s too many things when the rest of the list is: raise a child, work a full-time job, and sleep.) I don’t want to give either one up; the novel is the passion project I’ve been carrying around for years, and I’ve already made real-life friends through this platform who have taught me how to get dressed and make me laugh every day.

So, in noodling through potential ideas re: How To Do Everything (my favorite chaotic conversation to have with myself), I thought…what if I just write the novel here? If publishing in installments is good enough for Dickens, surely it’s good enough for me?

I’m not flying in the same talent cosmos as ol’ Charlie, but I think this could be really fun. Here’s why I’m gonna try it:

• I am really good at hitting a deadline if someone will be even slightly annoyed with me for missing it, and absolutely garbage at it if I’m only accountable to myself. So knowing that I “owe” pages to people who are tuning in will be a game-changer for my pace.

• I love building in public. My favorite part of writing classes is getting workshopped, getting critiques and having a chance to make my writing better. (So if you do read my work, this is my express invitation to tell me what you think! Nicely.) I know novels go through huge amounts of revision before they’re ready for prime-time/a submission to an editor. I don’t think I’m going to magically turn out a perfect book the first time around. This is just about getting through a draft.

So, how’s this going to work?

For the next couple of months, I’m going to:

• Publish a section of my work-in-progress novel, every other week. (I’ll go in order, obviously, starting at the beginning.)

• Turn on paid subscriptions (setting them as low as Substack will let me) so that the fiction is only sent to people who affirmatively want to read it (I know it won’t be everyone’s bag). If you’d like to read it but don’t want to/can’t sign up for a paid subscription, lemme know and I’ll find a way to gift it. It’s important that it stay behind a paywall so it’s not just chillin’ on the internet, in case it turns out to be decent enough that I do want to try to publish it someday.

• Continue writing free essays as usual, but publish them every other week (instead of weekly) to give myself more time to turn out novel pages.

Is this dumb? Maybe. But I’ve got a pretty complete outline and a dream, and so I’m going to try it for a few months and see how it feels.

Okay, so obviously I’ll give you the pitch here, so you can see if you’re interested in going on this crazy journey. And then below I’ll include the first chapter; the first part above the paywall, and the second part after it, so you can opt in if you want to read it.

(I’m not nervous, you’re nervous. Don’t be weird about it.)

Okay, here we go! I don’t have a title yet (I’m all ears if you think of a good one) but here’s what I’m envisioning will go on the jacket copy:

Nora and Sadie Greenberg are sisters, though you might not know it to look at them. Brilliant 13 year old Nora is a tornado, battling a body and emotions that are suddenly out of control, while Sadie—polished and popular—is about to leave for a prestigious art school to get her BFA. The girls are also the daughters of Nathan and Joanna Greenberg: a rising star on the progressive political scene and his picture-perfect wife. Then suddenly, they’re orphans, when their parents are assassinated at a parade celebrating their father’s second mayoral term. The day’s tragedies compound when the sisters are separated from each other in the aftermath of the chaos.

Devastated, Nora is grateful when Dr. Alessia Presa—an older woman who claims to be an estranged friend of the family—appears and promises to help reunite Nora with her sister. They set off on a journey across the country, along with Rishi, Dr. Presa’s adopted son. Together, Dr. Presa and Rishi (who has some unusual abilities of his own) teach Nora how to harness her growing intellectual and physical skills. Enthusiastic at first, Nora grows uneasy when the lessons start to veer in a direction she never anticipated.

Meanwhile, Sadie tries to track Nora down, but quickly discovers that she is also being pursued; a shadowy organization known only as The Order hounds her at every turn. With the help of her father’s aide and his oldest advisor, Sadie must save herself and find her sister before Nora goes down a path from which she can’t turn back. To reach her in time, Sadie will need to untangle the family secret that set everything in motion, long before any shots were fired.

Below is the first part of Chapter One! Subscribe if you want to read the whole thing (and again, if you can’t/don’t want to pay for it, let me know and I’ll find a way to gift you a subscription. I don’t know how that works yet, but I’m sure I can figure it out).

Chapter One

Nora

I pick the cookie up with the very edges of my fingers, but the metal sheet is still about ten thousand degrees. Jesus. I shove it in my mouth anyway, sugar scalding my tongue. I can read happily for the fifteen minutes the cookies are in the oven—I don’t care if it’s Anna Karenina, or a graphic novel, or the back of a cereal box—but I can never wait the ninety seconds between the timer ringing and when they’re safe to eat. So dumb. I flip the tap on the kitchen sink, and the cool water stings as it hits my hand.

The swing comes fast, this time. One second I’m fine, maybe slightly annoyed that I burned myself, and the next second I’m volcanic. Fury races through my brain, a thousand tiny, angry voices shouting be careful, you idiot! The back of my neck heats up. I squeeze my hands into fists, tamping down the urge to send the stupid sheet pan clattering to the floor. My eyes screw shut and I try to drag in a deep breath, but my lungs won’t cooperate. It doesn’t matter; it never helps. The muscles along my spine clench, and there’s that pulsing in my legs again, the impulse to run until they give out. I have to hold the kitchen counter to keep myself from sprinting away. And then the anger just drains out of me, like someone pulled a plug, leaving a gritty residue that feels like sand inside my chest.

I open my eyes, and I’m back in our kitchen: copper pots hanging from the rack above the marble island, the window above the sink letting in the weak January light. The swing is gone almost as fast as it came. Super normal. Love being a teenager.

On the counter, my phone buzzes; one message after another from my mother.

Sadie and I are in the car.

Where are you? Where is your father? We need to leave.

Nora! Let’s go!

I roll my eyes and shove the phone in my coat pocket, grabbing another couple of cookies. Dad’s office is right around the corner from the kitchen and I can hear him moving around. (To be fair, you can hear a mouse walking around like two floors away in this giant old brownstone. We’ve been here for four years and I still haven’t gotten used to all the creaking.)

I push the door open without knocking, and hold the stack out to him.

“No,” he says. He’s on the phone, his back to me, looking out the bay window at the traffic outside. A yellow cab with crusts of old snow on its roof crawls by. His voice is low, scratchy. “That could be anything—” A buzz from the other side cuts him off. He shakes his head, turns to start pacing the office. Seeing me, he holds up a finger. Just a minute.

I lean against the doorframe and eat another cookie, looking at the wall of photos. My parents at their wedding, the big group shot with all their college friends, arms slung around each other’s shoulders and everyone looking in different directions. (Why do pictures of drunk people always look blurry? It’s hilarious.) Sadie as a wide-eyed five year old, holding a scrunchy newborn (me) on the couch. Us a few years ago, at the beach for her 15th birthday, Sadie looking normal in a cute little bikini and me looking like a freak, already three inches taller than her. Dad with his hand on the Bible, repeating after Senator Macey and trying to look serious. God, I hated that outfit. I didn’t care how “appropriate” it was for the inauguration, I looked like an overgrown flower girl with that dumb white sash and the little buckle shoes. Gross.

When he speaks again, he sounds lighter, a little fake. “Well, Nora’s just walked in to remind me that we’re running late! I gotta go.” He pauses. “Yeah, I’ll tell her,” he says, and hangs up.

“Your Uncle Theo says hello.” He takes the cookies. “Yessss, chocolate. You are now my favorite child.”

I scoff. “Some rando you talk to on the phone every day is not my uncle. I’ve never even met him.”

Dad grabs the dingy grey puffer coat lying across the back of his armchair and shrugs it on. “He’s an old man! So what if he doesn’t want to be bopping across the country all the time? Some people want quieter lives.” He pulls me into his side for a hug, steering us down the echoey hallway to the garage. “And I’d be nice if I were you. Mom sends him pictures every year, and he’s got a lot of blackmail material from the headgear era.”

I elbow him, and he dodges and runs ahead. “No one likes a sweaty mayor!” I call after him. “Let’s have some dignity, please!”

“Keep up, Bug,” he yells over his shoulder. “We got babies to kiss!”

The limo’s engine is running in the driveway. My stomach sinks a little when I see my mom and Sadie perched in the backseat, looking generally annoyed. Okay, so maybe I didn’t need to start a baking project right before we left, but like: blood sugar is important! And we’re always waiting for Dad anyway. Everyone knows he doesn’t really get started until the late afternoon.

“We’re already late, Nathan,” Mom says, as we clamber in and sit across from them. Her white coat skims over a pale pink suit, the pleated chiffon skirt draped around her on the seat like it wouldn’t even dream of wrinkling. She shakes out a camel overcoat and hands it to Dad, motioning for him to change. He takes it from her, smiling sheepishly, and shucks off the puffer while he taps on the glass to let the driver know we’re ready.

“And some of us were ready to go on time,” says Sadie, “despite having other things we could be doing.” She snaps the gold cap back on her lipstick and passes it to me. I swipe some on, and grimace. The wax is caking on my lips, and it smells like someone shoved a cupcake up my nose. I wipe it off with the back of my hand; I’ll stick to ChapStick, thank you very much. Sadie sighs and hands me a tissue.

Dad pats her knee. “Thanks for coming along on this, Sade. Did I tell you happy birthday yet?”

She scrunches her nose a little, but she’s smiling at him (for once). “Like a thousand times.”

“Well, one more can’t hurt.” He reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a small jewelry box, popping it open to face her. “Happy birthday, Lady Sadie.”

She bends over the box, the platinum curtain of her hair swinging forward, and pulls out a slinky silver chain bracelet, studded with tiny diamonds. Her hazel eyes widen. Okay, apparently we’re stepping up the present game around here. I mean, for my birthday two months ago, I got a membership to the Natural History Museum. (Although to be fair, I was obsessed with the Cosmos exhibit and I’ve been like 10 times since then, so I guess that was actually pretty cool.) Sadie drapes the bracelet over her wrist, next to the one she always wears: a thin silver cuff. I have a matching one, but on me it looks like a costume. Sadie could make a Hefty bag look elegant.

“This is beautiful,” she says, looking at our mother. “Thank you both so much.” She holds out her wrist, and Mom fastens it and presses a kiss to the clasp.

“Hey now, I’m the one who went to four stores to find just the right thing!” Dad says, then throws his hands up at Sadie’s skeptical look, chuckling. “Alright, I might have asked Cleo what the coolest gift would be. She said I should add to your ‘arm party’, whatever that means.”

Sadie blushes like she always does whenever Cleo’s name gets mentioned. Neither of my parents notices, as usual. I raise an eyebrow and make a little kissy face at her, and Sadie stares daggers at me. Shut up, she glares. Like I even care, I smirk back.

“I’m glad to see you’re feeling serious, Lady,” Dad says, steepling his hands in mock solemnity. “Because eighteen is a very serious number. You can go get married to that oily musician who’s always hanging around the house, and your mother can’t do a thing about it.”

Sadie groans, and Mom knocks the side of his leg with her Manolo. “Keep your genius ideas to yourself, sweetheart. Sadie is tutoring that poor boy in Economics. And I didn’t go through the hell of childbirth to have these girls grow up to be anything other than Nobel Laureates. They aren’t dating until they’re 30.”

Okay, I genuinely hate when she trots out this Mother Martyr thing. I know she’s kidding, and yes, I’m sure being pregnant isn’t the most chill life experience. But like: she wasn’t up all night changing diapers. We always had people around, and it’s not like they left at five. That’s when she left, for whatever fundraiser or dinner thing was that night. When I was really little, I’d try to make myself stay awake until I could hear her heels come clacking back in on the foyer tile, so I’d know they were home. But after a few weeks, I started faceplanting in my Cheerios, so I gave up.

She’s always thought Dad was going to be President (which: obviously) and that apparently her being some perfect Stepford Political Wife was the way to make it happen. So could she just be honest that that’s what she cares about, and that “create two well-groomed children” was part of the White House Checklist? Don’t act like motherhood was so laborious when the nanny was the one cutting our cinnamon toast into triangles. I’m just saying.

“Ah, they’re already well on their way to Oslo,” Dad says, snapping me out of my silent tantrum. He leans into my shoulder, smiling. “Especially this one. You’re gonna have to quit setting the curve in all your classes, Bug, or they’ll make you go straight to college with Sadie.” I give him my yeah yeah smirk, but I’m surprised. Did he actually look at yesterday’s report card? Usually Mom handles school stuff and he just goes, “Keep doin’ what you’re doin’!” I get that it’s boring, though. The report cards always look the same, and he’s got a lot going on.

We pull onto Adams, heading into downtown gridlock. I snuggle deeper into my furry coat and watch a girl with bouncy red hair and a tiny, yappy-looking dog strut down the busy sidewalk. She’s moving a lot faster than our car, her long legs swinging in heeled boots, chatting animatedly on her phone. She ends the call and goes to put the phone in her purse, but it must ring again, because she brings it back to her sunshiney face and breaks into a wide smile. The hot feeling in the pit of my stomach curdles to life. I know that’s unfair, and probably she’s got her own problems, but man. Must be nice. Just floating along effortlessly, so cute and normal, fielding calls from all the people who want to talk to you? I squeeze the silent rectangle in my own pocket. Maybe I’ll try Jess again later, when we get home from the parade. Mom did say to give her some space, but it’s been almost a week. She’s gotta be over it by now.

The redhead rounds the corner, out of sight, and we’re still just inching along. Good thing we live practically on top of City Hall. Dad’s whipped his phone out, and is tapping out an email.

“What were you talking to Theo about?” I ask him. “You sounded weird.” He’s wearing the cologne Mom bought him for Christmas, some smoky thing, but he still smells kind of funny.

He shrugs, still typing. “He’s an advisor, Nora. He was giving me some advice. Don’t worry your lil head about it.”

My mother snaps her clutch closed. “Was he worried about tomorrow, Nathan? Should we cancel?” He shakes his head slowly, distracted, as his thumbs fly across the phone. She clears her throat. Eesh. I would not want to be on the receiving end of that look.

Dad pauses. “Of course not,” he says, setting his phone down on the seat. He dips his head down to look in Mom’s eyes, putting both hands on her knees and giving them a quick squeeze. She smiles back at him, but it’s a tired sliver. I hope they’re not fighting again. “He spooks easily, he’s an old man. He spends too much time online.”

She raises an eyebrow, and he laughs, stuffing his phone away in his pocket. “Touché! I know, not while we’re all together! Merson can wait for the speech edits.”

“I mean, he can’t,” says Sadie, pointing. We’ve turned right onto Main, and now the gold dome of City Hall is visible at the end of the park. “We’ll be there in three minutes.”

A little shiver of excitement runs across my back.

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Yes, is the answer. Which begs the question: why am I just learning about it now?

Let me back up. If you’ve been pregnant, rewind to that mental space. Remember the experience of navigating the world with those brand new constraints? They were rough, but you knew them ahead of time, because they are part of our shared societal consciousness. Don’t drink. Step away from the soft cheese and lunchmeat and oysters. You’re gonna feel nauseous. And even when the blind exhaustion hit, when the third trimester stopped being nice and started getting real, you probably thought, “whew, I didn’t realize it’d be this bad.” The surprise was the degree to which you felt flattened, not the concept of fatigue.

But the rest of parenting…is not like that. People say obliquely that it’s Hard, and social media is full of affirming content about how tough it is (“You’re not imagining it, Mama!”) but it’s real light on the details. The ways in which it is hard are opaque, because we—the collective we that produce movies and books and cosmopolitan dinner conversations—don’t talk about it in any detail. So parents just set out with their knapsacks across rough terrain, and it’s only once they fall face-first into ditches full of their peers that they discover a) the hole exists, and b) tens of thousands of people have fallen into it before and learned how to climb back out.

Could we not just…publish a map?

Take toddlerhood, for example. What does our culture tell a childless person about it? That it sucks, that toddlers are unreasonable tantrum maniacs, that you’ll have to grit your teeth for two years and let Jesus take the wheel.

Maybe that’s kind of correct, if your only data point is the overstimulated kid you didn’t ask to sit next to at a restaurant. But it’s a completely worthless take for people who are about to reach that landmark. Turns out toddlers are whole people, albeit ones with fewer coping skills and less language than adults. They want reasonable things: a small amount of autonomy, some respect for their goals, a predictable and safe home base. Imagine if you had known, years before you became a parent, that as a regulated adult, it’s totally within your power to provide those things. More importantly, imagine if you went into the whole shebang knowing how to provide them, because it was common knowledge in our culture, rather than niche information you had to seek out? What if—like pregnancy—the hardship was the degree of effort, rather than the effort and the constant emotional free-fall of wondering if you’re doing it right and having to build a whole new skillset while being screamed at?

Why don’t we know these things?

Theory #1: A few generations ago, we weren’t really crossing coasts for schools and jobs and marrying someone whose family lives thousands of miles away. And when you stay in one place, you’re part of a multigenerational cohort that teaches you what you need to know before it’s your turn. You’d see older cousins have babies, have your mother nearby to show you how to swaddle. For much of history, the idea that a 30-something woman would start “learning how to parent” from scratch, by purchasing books and video courses from people she’d never met, would sound ludicrous.

I’m not trying to romanticize the past; I’d probably have suffocated in a stationary existence like the one I’m describing. My point is just that we used to have a form of cultural knowledge transfer that equipped the next generation of parents, and now we’ve largely lost it.

Theory #2: Our popular culture doesn’t care about the minutiae of parenting, because it isn’t sexy enough to be the subject of drama. Pregnancy and childbirth, on the other hand, whew! You’ve got blood, you’ve got pain, you’ve got a sequence straight out of an Alien movie and then brand new people. Nothing more dramatic than a birth scene: gore and glory in one hysterically brief pushing sequence. But do you notice how, once they wrap the baby up in that ubiquitous striped blanket, the camera just…pans away? We fade to black, and the great mystery begins.

I find this bananas crazy. Parenting is one of the most high-stakes, common life experiences out there, and I don’t really care that it doesn’t lend itself to an A24 plot. (Except, you know what, it easily could. Give me a couple months and I can give you a fucking banger script about matrescence and power struggles with a two year old that would make Full Metal Jacket look like a tea party). Why is this not already an entire genre? Probably because women still do most of our nation’s caregiving. And just like women will read a novel from a man’s point of view, but few men will reciprocate,1 creating popular media about raising little people isn’t a box office certainty the way yet another film about a complicated man shooting a gun would be.

Now, before you start warming up on the world’s tiniest violin, I’m not aiming for sympathy (though I absolutely will take an extra coffee if you’re already headed that way). I know I’m not the first person to stumble through my kid’s milestones. And I have a very involved partner, family help, and the resources to resort to amphetamines, if things get that dire.

My point in bringing this up is just that we need to bring this up. Like, outside of these digital walls in which we do a pretty excellent job of listening to and championing each other. The fact that I was blind to what being a parent is really like before becoming one, even though I am 1) a person who always knew she wanted children, and 2) am very interested in the experiences of other people is pretty telling.

What do I mean, “bring it up?” Okay, three things:

I want us to get specific.

Not: “Whew, motherhood, amirite?”

But: “I have a six month old and we’re starting her on solids. Watching her gnaw on a strip of bell pepper is giving me thrice daily panic attacks, so I learned how to do the Heimlich on babies just in case. Here’s how you do it, if you ever need to know.”

Or: “Our three year old was afraid of being left alone in his room, so we followed the ‘Little by Little method’ and now he’s almost sleeping through the night again. Here’s how you do it, if you ever need to know.”

Too specific? Disagree. Tim Ferriss has been yapping about his morning routine for about twelve years. It would be okay for us to take up an equal number of airwaves getting pre-kids people up to speed on how to raise human beings.

And I want us to talk to people who might be unlikely audiences.

Like yes, obviously commiserate and get tips from other parents who are going through it. But I will also be sharing the deets with people at the grocery store, my childless male coworkers, and my 60 year old CEO. In our 1:1 last week, he asked how I was doing, and I just…told him. In detail. Not like, gross details, just that I’d been up 6 or 7 times the night before because my kid was going through a sleep regression, and so I was prepared for our meeting but like, in a way where I might forget the word “computer.” He laughed, and talked about how the physical tax of early parenthood gets replaced with an emotional tax as your kids get older, and that his main distraction right now is that he’s about to drop his first kid off at college. Yep: it was a bonding moment. Prior-me shied away from this kind of stuff at work because I was worried it would make me look unprofessional, but this last round of sleepless nights has radicalized me. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and know that I managed to accomplish this extremely competent shit while basically brain-dead. Imagine what I’ll be able to do when he starts sleeping again? It will be over for these KPIs.

(Also, this is the point where I have to acknowledge the plethora of media out there—parenting podcasts, Substack newsletters—that is covering parenthood in beautiful, helpful detail. Y’all: only parents consume that media. We’re not fixing the problem until Chad from accounting just knows not to give honey to a baby under one. Chad can handle knowing that. The next time you’re caught in that awkward two minutes of dead air at the beginning of a Zoom call, before everyone joins? Tell him.)

And let’s not just make it about kids.

If people learn you’re pregnant, or you have a little baby at home, they’re suddenly backing away slowly from any expectation they were going to place on you, hands held high. “Oh, sit down! Oh, that must be so hard, you must be exhausted!” But no one’s pulling out a chair or giving you a leave of absence when that same kid is 2, 3, etc, and it turns out that shit continues to be bananas to a degree that often makes it fairly hard to participate in society.

But I know parents with young kids aren’t the only ones in that boat. There is so much else that could be going on in someone’s life that would make it, shall we say, challenging to show up fully as a good capitalist worker bee. But we don’t really talk about any of those things, when we see each other at the grocery store or on the soccer sidelines. Why not? Everyone I know has gone through periods of desperately deserving that pulled-out chair. But I’ll never know to drag one out unless you tell me.

You give me an “Oh, fine, just so busy!” and what can I do with that, other than offer you a similar platitude? Throw the platitudes in the fire!! Let them burn down into something true. We are all fighting for our lives here, and if your thing isn’t psychotic sleep loss brought on by your beloved child, it’s bound to be something else just as compelling, and I want to hear about it.

I want to know the nuance of what’s keeping you up at night: an aging parent, health anxiety, a war raging in a place that feels like home. Why are we all winding bubble wrap around our burdens? Show me what yours really looks like. Let me learn about a place I haven’t been yet, so I can get ready in case my path heads that way. Let me hold your hand while you walk through it, even if I know I never will. Let me carry it with you, so we can see its lighter side: the memory of the fruit your mother cut up while you studied, the race you want to run when you’re well again, the language you teach your child when you can’t show them the city.

If we are all just walking each other home—and what more important thing could we be doing?—then let’s tell each other everything on the journey.

No secrets. Let’s go.

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I’ve been plagued by this feeling lately (honestly, since November) that time is running out. This is straightforwardly nuts, since my career in tech is on the rise (despite the years I spent doing a high wire act in start-ups), I have a beautiful kid and a healthy marriage, and the birthday last fall that kicked off this worry was my 40th, not 90th. In what way, you might ask as a sane person, are you running out of time? Time for what?

Last Thanksgiving, we went around the table and tried to articulate what it feels like to be in our own heads, how our brains work. My husband described his mind as a room with filing cabinets: ordered, accessible. My mother said hers was more like a tree with infinite branches: everything and everyone felt connected at its root. Mine is a watercolor. Intense, maybe a little fuzzy on the details. I’m an imagistic thinker, and the sense of an experience has always been more powerful to me than the facts.

And so there are two images—fuzzy, half-developed Polaroids—that are haunting me. No, that’s too macabre. They’re just sitting with me, like a devil or angel might perch on your shoulder. But they won’t leave.

In one picture, I’m sitting with my family on the couch. We’re watching TV, I think; at least, we’re all looking ahead, so I only have my peripheral vision. I can feel the warmth of Jude curled into my left side, his heavy head burrowing against my chest like it does when he’s getting sleepy. Jason is on my right, his long legs stretched out to rest on the coffee table, his arm curled over my shoulders. And there’s someone on his other side. I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but even out of the corner of my eye, I can see a downy fluff of brown hair that matches Jude’s, can see the tiny shape curled into my husband’s side. And the picture, the feeling it gives me, is a sense of rightness, of peace: the pack all together, warm in our burrow. No one is missing.

In the other picture, I’m in a bookstore. It’s a tiny one, an indie, with sunlight flooding over my shoulders onto the crowded wooden table in front of me. I’ve just picked up a hardcover from the stack: it has a vivid cover, electric blues and greens. It’s weighty, heavy in my hand, but I feel carbonated, so light I could lift off. I’m running my thumb over the author’s name, my name, and I’m grateful and proud and feel again that sense of rightness. Like I made it across a big field of mistakes, to who I was always supposed to be.

* * *

They’re pretty common ambitions: have a second child. Publish the novel you’ve been chipping away at for years. I have known that I want these things for most of my life, and for much of that time, it’s been totally okay that they were kind of twinkling off in the distance.

Now all of a sudden, time feels finite.

Part of it is that I’m now measuring time by a person. Before I gave birth, a year or two meant something, but not so much. I could try to place a memory and be off by five years, maybe seven. Now, every week is a leap. A year is the difference between a snuffly toddler and a boychild who asks me, with deep sincerity and perfect diction, “But could you please not say no to me?” Once you start marking the weeks you’ve kept someone alive, I don’t think you can ever go back to a casual relationship with time. Every casting into the future I do, there’s a running corollary: by then, Jude will be…

And, of course, I will be… You can’t be an “older” parent (or perhaps, delightfully, a “geriatric” one) without doing constant arithmetic re: what the numbers will be on any given occasion: when he goes to high school, when he graduates from college, when he’s (gulp) as old as I am now. (Or, rather: probably a more well-adjusted person could, but I have not been able to.) I never felt much of anything about time before, except an expansive gratitude to have so much of it to muck around in. Now I’m counting out all these shadows of my future self—at 50, 60, 70—and wondering what she’ll have done for us.

Oh, and one other thing that I’m sure is totally unrelated and not at all undergirding this: moving back to my hometown and spending much more time with my parents, watching their relationship with Jude deepen into a funny, sweet friendship. Like this Saturday, when 3 seconds had elapsed since the candles had been blown out, and Jude asked with real worry in his high little voice, “Why am I not getting any cake?” and my dad laughed until there were tears in his eyes. On his 80th birthday. Anyway. Not sure why I brought that up.

* * *

My sister in law recommended a device to me, a little gadget that fits onto your phone. You pee on a stick every morning, the app measures your various hormone levels, and then displays its instructions in cheerful colored blobs. Orange = take a breather. Purple = go find your man. It is simple, straightforward, a boon for someone who wants help getting pregnant.

And it is the worst. Now that I have committed to using it, pulled the mysticism of conception down into the world of the App Store, I am addicted. I’m analyzing the arcs of progesterone and estrogen as though I have the faintest idea what they’ll tell me (I do not). Every negative pregnancy test lands me in Reddit forums, a behavior I know creates spikes of anxiety (the copious amounts of coffee I drink while scrolling them in the morning probably doesn’t help? But like, leave a woman her few vices).

One benefit of reaching forty is self-knowledge, and boy did I know this would happen. I don’t know how to hold things loosely. I was on the fence about having a second kid for so long because I knew the moment I decided we should, it would turn into a consuming quest. It has been like this my whole life: if something is not for me, I can easily admire it in others and be so chill about my own lack. Athletic ability? Being a good cook? Love that for you, I probably won’t get there. But if I truly want something, and I think it’s within my power to get there…oh, fuck. Something deep in the recesses of my brain creaks awake, and there is no telling this thing to chill out and “see what happens.” It is constantly on, always reviewing the data, wondering if there’s another route, spinning, calculating.1 This is helpful when you want to, say, take the LSAT. Less so, here.

And the reason I don’t just throw the colored-blob-app away is: we do need to act quickly. I need help, here. Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman might be examples of what’s possible, but I think they probably arrived at their current (gorgeous) state by doing a lot more than having a few glasses of wine. If we want another kid, the reality is that our window is closing. It would be wrong to count myself out now, but also incorrect to act as though we have all the time in the world. We don’t.

* * *

When I am not moonlighting as a fake fertility specialist, I am writing a book. Or, I am trying to write a book, but my writing time keeps tripping over and falling into other buckets: mainly, my day job. Someone very kind helped me get my foot in the door, and now this company is paying me to be an executive and expecting me (a mere child!) to act like one.

I am deeply grateful to have this job. I’ve been broke for long stretches as an adult, and I’d rather not revisit the era where I had to check my online balance surreptitiously before heading in to meet a friend for lunch. Our economy is not the work of a stable genius, I don’t want to put the full burden of being the breadwinner back on my husband who shouldered it for years, and hey—didn’t I just say I wanted another kid? Those are rumored to be kind of expensive.

But.

I have always wanted to write instead. “Instead” of whatever else I was doing, which has been many things: being a lawyer, running start-ups. The difference is that the desire used to have a comfortable pattern in my body, like a dog turning around a few times before settling down to sleep. I could, if not ignore it, pet it a little and tell it I’d be back later. But that comfort is gone now, and the want feels more animal. I am craving alone time to pull words out of myself, I’m irritable when interrupted. (I’ve never actually bitten anyone, but the year’s not over.)

And I think it’s because, as doors start to close in mid-life, I am realizing: I might not get this. Even though writing has been one of the most important through lines in my life, the practice that brings me the most joy, I might not manage to make it my work without some pretty Herculean efforts in the margins of a life that is already very full. It’s that part that matters (to me): that I make it “my work,” that I can check Writer off the list of things that are true about myself. And I don’t see an offramp from my current situation into one in which I kiss my kid goodbye at the preschool door and then sit down to make art. If anything, I am driving in the opposite direction: trying to save for a house, for retirement, maybe another kid. All things that require me to double down at work so there’s more money. Less time.

* * *

Look: it’ll shake out however it does. We’ll have another kid or we won’t, and both paths will have patches of unanticipated beauty and grief. And there’s no biological clock on a debut. I can’t see my hands in the Polaroid; who knows, maybe they’re covered in age spots. Maybe it’s a fake cover my grandchildren stuck on someone else’s book because Nana just wouldn’t shut up about her novel.

If I’m honest, I know that I’m having this conversation with myself because, these days, my own wants and needs are sublimated. They should be. In this season of having a very young child, I am not the most important person in my home. But the (temporary) compression of your self, having to ration smaller slices of your desires and ambition, can take you from the reality of wishing for more room right now to the story that there isn’t any time.

And the truth is: there is always as much time as there ever was, minus—in a few hours—today. And this thrashing I’m doing, this obsessing over what might not happen, doesn’t change that. It only weakens me, saps the muscle I need for the work that stands between who I am now and the woman in those Polaroids. Because it is always two kinds of work, this process of moving forward through your life: effort and appreciation. Do what you can to climb the next mountain, and give thanks on your hands and knees for the summit you’ve reached.

So I will say to myself: plot a scene instead of scrolling. Read back your work, and think maybe it is getting better (even if it’s not). Call a real doctor. Go to therapy. This sense of scarcity, of time slipping through my fingers, only comes when I back away from the actual work to climb a tree and stare at the horizon. And, sure, you have to do that sometimes; that long distance vision is how I spot those Polaroids that tell me where I’m going. But then good grief, girl, climb back down into the flowers. Everything you have and hold dear today was once a blurry image, too. Focus.

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Like lots of other women in the 2010s who read Sofia Amoruso’s book while drinking a particularly strong cold brew, I became convinced that entrepreneurship was the answer. In hindsight, the actual question— “what should I do with my life?”—wasn’t something a career pivot could solve, but I was a millennial eldest daughter who lived for Achievement and “building an empire” seemed like a much better idea than working at a law firm.

So I quit the firm…

…and embarked on the wildest 10 years of my life (so far). There was a ballet/Crossfit mash-up (that’s what I’m doing—very seriously!!—in the photo above), a care package company, and a “make it easier to stay close to your friends” app. All of them got off the ground and had paying customers who loved them, and I sold the last two (for extremely non life-changing amounts of money).

So when I say “failed” founder, this wasn’t an “I ruined my life and bankrupted everyone around me” situation. But I sure as hell didn’t build any empires, and those 10 years were a cortisol bath. A few months after Jude was born, I finally had to call it. The human baby had to take precedence; only one thing could keep me up all night and suck up all my resources.

I spent a long time feeling guilty and embarrassed about this, that I hadn’t broken through the noise and turned any of these concepts into stable companies that I could run for years. But now I’ve gotten some distance from the whole thing, and I think maybe the narrative that I “have nothing to show for it” is sort of bullshit.

A lot else happened in that time—three cross country moves, a divorce, a marriage, that human baby—but launching and running start-ups taught me a couple of key things that I’ve taken into the rest of my life (in addition to: “it is okay to work for someone else and have them pay you” which I think is probably too obvious to elaborate on further).

Here’s what I learned:

Have ruthless admissions criteria for your personal board of advisors.

The start-up world is full of Professional Opinion Givers, and alllllmost all of them are full of it. Most of them want equity for being an advisor, which can mean they serve as real thought partners, but often means they’ll give you a few minutes every few months to disapprove of everything you’ve been doing. Once, I took a meeting with an “advisor” who called in 15 minutes late to a 30 minute Zoom call, on his phone. He then set the phone on a table and ate an everything bagel over it, so my view was the underside of his mouth (open, chewing) and the crumbs of his bagel dropping onto the screen. 10 points for interactive experience, I guess, but I’m deducting 15 for full body revulsion and the fact that he told me I’d need to raise some money so I could invest it in marketing. Hadn’t thought of that, Brad.1 Thanks.

Brads of the world aside, the problem wasn’t with the concept of advisors. It was that I was (initially) too eager to listen to anyone who was willing to talk to me. Having an open mind? Great, but you’ve gotta gate-keep your limited capacity and only take directions from people who’ve been where you want to go.

I’m not running a company right now,2 but I do have a personal board of advisors, a handful of people I run everything by. What’s the right age gap for siblings? Should I move across the country? They don’t vote, but I do take their opinions seriously because their qualifications are beyond reproach:

• They know me. Like, actually intimately know my hopes and dreams and fears. They were there when the deep magic was written, if you will.

• They don’t have an agenda for my life. They want it to go well, obviously, but what I do doesn’t reflect on them, the way it does with a parent or partner.

• I’d be proud to switch places with them. I’m only taking marriage/parenting advice from someone raising secure kids in a loving partnership, and so on.

I used to have a significant amount of internal debate over how to make the “right” decisions, and could get stuck in a loop of seeking infinite information. Now I just take it to The Board^TM and move on (I’ve also kind of abandoned the concept of “the right decisions,” but that’s a whole other thing.)

First, money (independence and security). Then and only then: vibes.

What other people can see of your company, everything you’d talk about in the NY Times profile piece to which every founder aspires—branding! culture! a sexy photo spread!—is just the tip of the iceberg. You cannot accomplish any of it unless the financial bones work from the very beginning.3 In BusinessLand, this concept is called “unit economics”: before you ever think about pricing, you need to know what it costs you to a) create the thing, b) get it in front of a potential user, and then c) physically get it to them once they buy it.

But there was such a “the sky’s the limit” mentality floating around during the 2010s that financial rigor seemed—not to be mean about it, but—kind of for nerds? Venture backed businesses were following a model that had absolutely nothing to do with financial reality: using their buckets of cash to flood a market with good vibes and artificially low prices, with the intention of pushing out all competitors and then gouging people once they were hooked. They didn’t say that aloud, of course. They said, “we’re focused on growth.”

It was very easy to get caught in this hype cycle and think perhaps: if the fundamental rules of business don’t apply to BoyBosses…maybe they don’t apply to GirlBosses either? Perhaps if we also ignore the math we were taught in elementary school and focus on growth, results will follow.

Shockingly, this was not the case! I found my way to the right unit economics for each of my companies eventually, but it should have been the absolute first thing I did. Not because money is the most important thing in the world, but because having a baseline necessary amount of it informs everything else you’re able to do. It’s like the business version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Allow me to hurt your eyes with my lack of design skills demonstrate:

Products that work are created by people, and people need money to live.4 So if the source of that money is uncertain or drying up, getting more money in the door will pull all your attention from the work you want to be doing OR you will go into debt (or both!). And both options are (revolutionary opinion coming) pretty bad.

And it’s obviously the same for regular life, but I didn’t really internalize this until after the start-up dust had settled. As a young(er) adult, when I thought about “my life,” I thought about only the self-actualization stuff at the top of the pyramid.

I spent a lot of time with all those things—paying off law school debt, future kid college tuition, maybe a house, vacations—assigned to the “someday” bucket. I figured I’d definitely get there, even if the details on how were a little fuzzy. I was living in “today,” where I really only needed enough to cover rent and wine. But when Jude arrived, those two timelines collided, and it became painfully clear that we (aka Jason and I, the load-bearing middle of this pyramid) needed to get the unit economics of our household in order, if we had a fighting chance of making Someday a reality.

That was a huge deciding factor in stepping away from running my own start-up: we both needed to be making stable money in order to get there. And I needed to internalize the fact that it is not weird or bad to focus on money. Money is a tool, and you need enough of the tool to function. This meant creating a pretty stringent personal budget, running our family finances like a business, and prioritizing a job that pays me a decent amount, instead of working part-time so I can spend more time writing (what I’d ideally like to do).5

The good vibes will desert you. Look for the signal, not the noise.

One thing about me is I love a vibe. A vision. I have ideas coming out of my ears, and if you give me a glass of Malbec and your attention, I’m sorry in advance for how many of them you’re about to hear. But in the world of business-building, a vibe is a fickle thing. There will be days when what you’re doing resonates with the world, and (oh God, so many more) days where obstacles stack up until it feels like the only sane choice is to walk away. But those day to day swings are noise: messy, staticky. If you tune into it daily, trying to use that noise to set your direction, you will go nuts (ask me how I know).

What I found worked (a lot) better was to decide ahead of time: what are the pre-determined times that I’m going to look at the signal, rather than the noise? And how will I measure it?

What I mean here is: we’re not taking the emotional temperature of a situation every day, and acting on that. We’re getting through every day as best we can, making whatever seems like the next best decision. And then every 3 months (or whatever interval makes sense), we’re clearing the schedule, sitting down with a coffee, and looking back with eyes that are as clear as possible, to ask: how did that feel? Are we making progress? Is this still worth it?And then we’re making decisions based on that analysis.

Sound basic, but without it, I’m prone to a constant background whirring that distracts from my ability to be present. Knowing I have that appointment with myself in three weeks to think about something deeply makes it Future Julie’s problem…but like, in a healthy way.

Get used to asking for help. Give help, whenever you can, before someone asks you.

It is a particularly deep rung of hell to be an early-stage founder, because unless you are independently wealthy (love that for you), you will have to ask other people for help. You will ask friends for introductions. You’ll ask investors for money. You will send out so many emails, to so many people, that Google will start to think you are a spam account. And at a certain point, scouring LinkedIn for second degree connections just starts to eat into your soul, and you feel your locus of control start to drift out of your body.

But! I am now—not to brag—so incredibly good at asking for help. Now that I have a kid, it is my super power. I am solo parenting for the week? I have texted every local friend telling them the dates I’ll be alone and asking for a buddy. I am tired? I have told my husband I need a minute and am already out the door. It’s like a ring of fire situation: all my shame has burned away, and my life is better for it.

I am running the other side of the game, too. I most certainly kept a running tally of all the people who helped me, and it is my mission to give that love back into the universe, not just to them, but to anyone I can see who needs it. We are not islands, people, and radically helping each other is the only way through.

One quick addendum here: if you have a friend who has a small business/start-up, the fastest way to sainthood in their eyes is be a vocal supporter. If you can buy their stuff, great. But it’s almost even better to be the friend who’s liking and commenting on every social media post, bringing up the company in rooms where the founder isn’t, introducing them to anyone who could help without being asked. Entrepreneurship is so. lonely. and having someone in your corner who uses their voice to spread the word about what you’re doing means everything.

You are a renewable resource, until you are not. (Burnout, baby.)

Honestly, my biggest regret about my founder era isn’t that I didn’t become the next Zuck (shudder). It’s all the time I spent grinding; sacrificing lazy Sunday mornings and evenings I could have spent reading on the couch, and vacations I never took because there “wasn’t any time.” There was time. Now that I’m responsible for keeping someone alive 24/7, I finally understand what “always on” really means, and it’s not a thing anyone should strive for unless it’s a biological necessity.

Look: the rest of the world, and the demands it’s going to make on you, are always going to be there. And no matter how Energizer Bunny your stamina levels are, if you don’t schedule in some rest, there will eventually be a reckoning. As someone who went through the “if you don’t decide when to rest, your body will decide for you” cycle a few times, I finally started to pay attention to the early warning signs. I think they’re different for everyone, but mine looks like physical exhaustion (duh) but also increased feelings of helplessness and apathy.

So these days, whenever I start hearing a mental track that sounds something like, “I mean, what is even the point of doing any of this anyway, I can’t even…” an alarm bell goes off. As soon as I can reasonably pause, I exit that situation and make a beeline for:

• A book: an escape into another world to short circuit the doom in my brain.

• Some water: turns out you’re supposed to drink 8 fluid ounces a day, not a year. Who knew.

• Takeout sushi and soft pants: I feel this is self explanatory.

Anyway!

I don’t think I have another company in me; my huge (impossible?) dream these days is a life where I can support myself and my family by writing. But now that I’ve had a few years to get some perspective, I’m still glad I spent that time taking those huge swings. I got the experience I detailed above, but also there’s the quieter, simpler lesson, which is just: regardless of however many mistakes I rack up along the way, I can bet on myself. Whatever “it” is, I can figure it out. And these days, as I try to navigate the wild west of parenting and working full-time and existing as a human in this year of our Lord 2026…that’s a really good thing to know.

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• One activity per kid at a time.

• No phones until at least 8th grade.

• It’s crucial that you build community (but it doesn’t matter as much where you get it, as long as you do).

I’ve included their fuller answers below, because the nuance is the whole point, and I’m really excited for you to read them. But before we get there, there was one thing that stood out to me as I was reading their responses that I really want to highlight.

Many of the mothers said something akin to this, but I think Sophie said it most succinctly: “My parenting philosophy is probably best described as ‘watch the child in front of you.’” And…whew. Of course. Obviously that’s like 90% of the answer! Reading that sentence made my shoulders descend three inches, like my nervous system had actually relaxed a little bit.

I’ve been able to feel my way through every development that my child has undergone so far, but it hasn’t been because I knew The Answers (though, yeah, some directed reading has helped). We’ve been able to make our way through because I’ve been watching him so carefully. Is he hot? No, itchy. Bored? Oh, frustrated. I know how to take in the signs that are specific to him: how sucking his thumb means he’s wiped out and could use a cuddle, how a grumpy exchange means with 98% certainty that he’s hungry.

What made me think my skill at reading those signs would disappear, or that I wouldn’t be good at picking up the new ones when they arrive? There’s just no data to support that argument. From the moment Jude was born, I’ve made it my mission to get to know him, and in that arena: we are doing fine. He’s a thriving, goofy, sweet little guy who will probably grow into a bigger guy at a pace I can keep up with.

So, it turns out—again, surprising absolutely no one except for yours truly, who is sometimes a little slow—that perhaps what we’re talking about here is less “How to Parent (period)” and more “How to Make the Next Right Decision For Your Particular Kid.” That’s too long a title, though, and God forbid Substack starts truncating those too.

Anyway! On to the actual intelligent thought processes of the moms I asked to help weigh in on these matters. I’ve structured this like an interview, because I think that helps with clarity re: who said what, but each of these women took time out of their very busy lives to respond to me in DMs and email. Thank you (so much!) to each of them for their honesty and their help. Pour yourself the beveragino of your choice (and open Substack, because this is for sure getting cut off in email) and let’s dig in.

Julie Schechter: How do you think about which activities to sign your kids up for? How many? Specifically, how you think about the balance between wanting to introduce them to new things and cultivate important skills versus just giving them time and space to be kids who get bored?

(An Unquenchable Thirst for Color): Okay, back in 2000-2001 I was working as the editor of the parenting channel on a popular website, and I had to write a synopsis of a book called The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, written by Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise. Once I read that book, I knew one thing and one thing only about my future parenting: I would NOT overschedule my kids.

When I actually started having kids, I followed their lead and my instincts; they did not have personalities that would have flourished in an overscheduled scenario anyway, it turns out (they are my offspring, after all.). My kids were not into sports, but they had widely varied interests. They’ve been in Lego camps, science camps, acting camps, music classes galore, Claymation classes, nature camps where they made fairy houses out of items foraged in the nature preserve, seining classes at the local maritime museum, and lots more.

At the end of the day, I followed the philosophy that “Play is the work of children”; they spent a lot of time in playgrounds, the local beach, at parks, [mostly kids’] museums, at the grandparents’ houses, playing with the neighborhood kids, and honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. Little kids have the rest of their lives to do homework and chores and follow overly rigorous schedules.

(Rambling in Style): I learned this one the hard way. When my kids were younger, I tried to keep up with the rat race and signed them up for everything. I used to get so frustrated and stressed when they didn’t want to participate, complained, or cried. One of the things I love about kids is that they’ll tell you how they feel—either verbally or through their behavior. I had to learn to recognize those signs and pivot. What is best for some children isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone.

My strategy has become simple: lean into their strengths, but don’t overbook them. We try to limit activities to no more than ~1 per child each season (winter, spring, summer, and fall). We’ve embraced the power of saying NO (!!!)—not doing everything just because we feel pressured to do it. This usually means one practice and one game each week. If a team requires more than that, that’s where the power of an unapologetic no comes in. If we miss something, we miss it, and we don’t carry an ounce of shame about it. My kids have vocalized how much they love “do-nothing” days so I have done my best to honor that.

Protecting that time gives our kids the freedom to just be kids: climb trees, ride bikes, play board games, get creative, and simply enjoy being children.

(Point of View): I grew up in a very calm and organized house that prioritized downtime, so I think I’m hardwired to parent the same way. One activity that happens once per week feels right for us, and it still allows for plenty of free time on nights and weekends. My four-year-old daughter takes ballet on Saturday mornings, and my seven-year-old son is between activities at the moment. He is not interested in playing sports, but he has taken swim lessons and taekwondo in the past. We are now looking for painting classes for him. He’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met, so I really want to nurture that. I did swim team as a kid and really did not like it, and my mom took it seriously when I told her. Once I finished out the season, I went back to ballet as my activity of choice, and it felt really empowering to make that decision. Because of that experience, I really want to trust my kids the same way I was trusted! There’s a fine line between encouraging your child to do something that makes them a little uncomfortable because it challenges them, and making them do something they genuinely do not like. I believe that as parents we know our children and can differentiate accordingly!

(Immensely Dramatic): My husband and I agree on this -- our kids have to do something, and they can’t do everything. We live in a fairly HCOL area, where club and travel sports can be intense and expensive. As a high school counselor, I’ve seen the consequences of kids being over-scheduled and overcommitted. Helping them learn to make choices about what they value and where they spend their time is such a valuable life skill.

My oldest is nearly six and in kindergarten. She has a weekly practice after school with the children’s choir at our church. Twice a year she does the Healthy Kids Running Series, and she races on Sundays for 5-6 weeks. She has been asking to try a dance class, so we’re doing a camp at the local studio this summer. I want to be mindful of protecting play time at home, too. I notice a big change in her behavior and energy when she doesn’t have a little downtime (and honestly, I’m the same way). We said no to Girl Scouts in the beginning of this year because she was still in occupational therapy a few afternoons a week. I know she’s been disappointed to not be involved, but I do think it’s important to learn that we can’t always do everything.

(Sophie’s Obsessed): My parenting philosophy is probably best described as “watch the child in front of you.” I’ve never been particularly interested in signing my kids up for activities simply because other kids are doing them. Instead, I try to pay attention to what they’re naturally drawn towards and use that as my guide. If they’re showing genuine interest and desire to try something, I’m happy to facilitate it. If they’re not interested, I’m not going to force it.

That said, I’d be lying if I said I never feel the pressure. There are definitely moments where I look around and wonder if my children are somehow falling behind because they aren’t doing extracurriculars. But then I remember that I didn’t get interested in team sports until I was in late primary or even high school… and my kids are only 8 and 4. The exceptions for me are swimming and riding a bike. Those sit firmly in the life-skills category. I don’t really care whether my kids become competitive swimmers or cyclists, but I do care that they can safely navigate the world around them.

(Party Cut): This is a great question. Have you seen the article going around about being a beta mom?2 I haven’t dug into it, but I can relate to that title and feel strongly about not having kids over-scheduled. I let each kid pick one activity per semester -- it has gone from ukulele to piano to dance to gymnastics. And then they can re-pick another semester. This has gotten a little more complicated with religious school (which they both started in 3rd grade) and school plays (which both of them love!), but for the most part, it works. Side note, we’ve loved Blue Balloon Songwriting School, where they learn music through songwriting and get to put on a cool concert in the end!

(No One Asked, But): It depends heavily on the season, and the cadence of the whole week. I don't know if it's because my husband and I both work outside the home, or if it's just our personalities, but we prefer to not have activity-driven weekends. One-ish thing per kid works really well - it gives an anchor/structure to the day, but also plenty of room for us to decide what else to do for our "family days." So, in general, we don't sign our kids up for activities until they are 4 or 5, and we try to only have 1 scheduled thing per kid per weekend. This is becoming less possible as my son is getting older (he wants to play on 2 soccer teams in the fall!), but it's a goal. Then, there are few things that my kids are very lucky to do with other adults -- my dad takes my son to a coding class after school one afternoon a week and my godmother takes my youngest to a gymnastics class -- something she has done with each of my kids when they were little. I see both of these as more about the opportunity to have special time with an adult in their life, and less about the activity. If we weren't so lucky as to have someone to take our kids to these things, I probably would not seek these out.The activity conversation hard for me as a Very Competitive Person and Chronic Overachiever™ because there is always someone doing more.

(Double Dutch): My husband and I have decided to put our kids into one sport per season once they’re in kindergarten. We have three kids, but because the youngest two are 3 and 2, only our oldest (8) is in scheduled activities right now. We’ve set a rule that once you make a commitment, you stick it out for the whole season, even if you really don’t like it. This year, it’s been a mix of lacrosse (tolerated), tennis (loved), basketball (one and done), and soccer (meh from my kid, but I would excel at Soccer Mom-ing).

We live in a very sports-centered culture, obviously, and I can tell you: the suburbs of Philadelphia are no different. The majority of my mom friends out here have children who are in 2-3 sports per season, and often on a mix of rec and travel teams, which means practices and games every single day, sometimes multiple a day...as SECOND GRADERS! I feel like a total slacker when I admit we only have 2 practices a week and one game—which UGH, I know I shouldn’t.

Although our son is athletic, we’re realizing he doesn’t get a lot of joy out of team sports (and it’s not because I’m a sideline yeller, I swear!). I’m curious to see if that changes or if he’s more of an individual kiddo (track?!) or if he just doesn’t love sports.

And then, of course, rattling in the back of my head are nagging thoughts of whether I should put him in piano or guitar, learn a language, art classes—and, oh yeah, he has shown an interest in martial arts. Right now, I feel like full-day preschool is enough activity for my youngest two, but that doesn’t stop me from checking out gymnastics classes for toddlers and preschool soccer.

But I’m really trying to stick to one activity/sport per season because...they’re only a kid once. We have a creek in our backyard and a bike path nearby and we love traveling, so hopefully those things will contribute to what I suppose most of us are striving for with all these activities: a well-rounded, curious, healthy child.

JS: How about technology? Specifically, when do your kids get their own tablet/phone? When can they use it? What are the benefits/risks that you’re weighing in making those decisions?

: I’m a bit crazy when it comes to technology. We used to let our kids have their tablets every day after homework, but that changed after a family trip to Aruba this summer. It was their first international trip, and they were so focused on when they would get their tablets that they couldn’t fully enjoy the experience. That was a wake-up call for us. Now, our kids have no tablet time Monday through Friday. On weekends, they get two hours total—one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. It has been one of the best decisions we’ve made as a family. It forced our kids to experience boredom and figure out how to fill their time creatively. My daughter discovered a love for Legos, which eventually led her to robotics classes. Our kids are 8 and 11, and they don’t have phones, access to messaging apps, or unlimited gaming. They can only play games that my husband and I have pre-approved. Our plan is for them to get cell phones around 8th grade, and we do not plan to allow social media until age 15. Much of our approach is influenced by what I learned from The Anxious Generation, as well as my own firsthand experiences working in a school as a teacher. For our family, creating these boundaries around technology has opened the door to more creativity, conversations, independence, and real-world experiences.

: We limit tech heavily. No phones until high school. Tablets are available only on planes (and maybe if someone is home sick or some other extenuating circumstance.) We will probably get a landline of some kind in the next year or so - which I see as a way to let my son call his friends and make plans without me constantly being the facilitator. I am aware of how tech is available to my son in his elementary school, and very vocal in my support of their fit-for-purpose tech curriculum. I get pushback here - my son is aware that our rules are not the same as the rules that his friends have. Honestly, it's been good practice to start conversations about having our own family rules and not always doing the same thing as other people. In these decisions, I feel very confident that I am following the data and doing what's best for our family - which is limiting their access to technology, making sure they are appropriately tech-literate for school, skill, and life development, and giving us all a break to veg in front of the TV from time-to-time.

: This one is tough! The short answer is keep them off screens as long as you can! We will wait until 8th for phones (it’s a whole movement!), but we got my son an Apple watch when he was in 5th grade for communication and tracking because that’s when he started to be able to walk home from school by himself.

: Here’s my philosophy when it comes to technology (or anything, really): Just because your child wants something and you can afford that something, it doesn’t mean your child should have it.

I held off on getting my kids video games and cell phones for a long time, until it got to the point where it was kind of weird that they didn’t have access to video games at home or cell phones when they were out. We didn’t use iPads at all, really, especially in restaurants; that always felt like a bridge too far for us. There is so much value in being bored! That’s when the amazing crayon drawings happen on the back of a diner menu; brains need time to daydream in order for creativity to flourish. That being said: Sometimes adults need to have a conversation at dinner, and if the iPad makes that possible, then so be it. Anyway, my older sons now say they’re glad they didn’t have access to the digital world until they were older. There’s a nice window where they don’t know what they’re missing when it comes to technology, and my advice is to milk that window for all it’s worth.

It’s a different story with my youngest son, who is seven years younger than my middle child. He grew up with video games in the house, and we got him a cell phone for his 8th grade graduation, which he really had to have because he was getting older, going out with friends on his bike, and he has severe food allergies, so we do need to be able to reach one another easily. This is obviously a personal decision, but I would hold off as long as you can on all aspects of the digital world; you’ll know as a parent when the time is right.

(Midimalist): My kids are 9, 7 and 5 but almost from the moment my first was born, I took to learning about modern parenting. I didn’t always feel like I had the best framework for parenting so I read a lot of parenting books (I still read a lot of parenting books because the challenges don’t go away, they just change). I quickly realized that what I wanted for my kids in their formative years was to create an environment that was intentional and creative with lots of time exploring and being outside. All of this self-education really set the stage for a very low-technology home, which we have maintained as my kids have grown. We have opted not to purchase tablets for our kids nor give them regular use of my husband’s and my cell phones. We bought a Physical Phone, which is an old-school landline they can use to call grandparents or friends but that’s the only tech my kids will have for years. We have no plans to introduce regular technology use to them in the near future.

Now that my older two are in elementary school, we are navigating two additional forces. The first is the technology inherent in learning today. Both of my kids have computers the school assigns them so we have had really frank conversations about how easy it is to be on the internet and find content that is bad for your mind. The schools have safeguards on the devices but I’ve watched enough kids navigate past firewalls to know that I need to empower my kids to purposefully choose not to find it. The second issue involves the technology available to friends and neighbors, as some friends have smart devices or unlimited access to screens at home. Again, my goal has always been to parent with the long term in mind and to help my kids make the choice for themselves. We talk about how playdates are for playing (outside when possible) vs. being on a computer/TV. I’ve bitten my tongue when my kid came home saying he watched a friend play video game at their house and then we have a nonchalant conversation about whether or not that was fun, whether they wished they had done something else, etc. Since we have been low-tech from the beginning, my kids sincerely prefer it.

All of that to say, I am very much the driver of no to low-technology in my house but I try to bring my kids into the decision making so they can understand WHY I’m saying no.

: I joke that we’re a screen free home- as in, we’re all free to use screens as much as we want. We do have a Google prompt that goes off at 6:30 every night that says “It’s time to turn off the iPad and Nintendo Switch.” My kids are so respectful of Google. “She” also announces when it’s time for a bath, and time for teeth brushing and pajamas. That’s my pro tip. Kids will listen to a robot over their parents. Way less pushback!

My younger one uses an iPad occasionally, but she actually self regulates very well and will decide she’s had her fill and put it away. I’m always supervising her when it’s on. My son plays educational games on his iPad and we have to cut him off, which is really funny to me. The one he’s hooked on now is called Legends of Learning (IYKYK). He also has a Nintendo switch and plays a game called Mario Maker, where you build your own levels from scratch. I love seeing what he creates. It’s mind blowing actually! I don’t know when to give him a phone- it’s not even on my mind right now. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it!

(The Hardware Store): This is such a tough one. My kids are still quite young (2 and 4) so I feel grateful to be able to take the lead from mom friends whose kids are a bit older and who are navigating this in real time.

I will say that I feel as though parents are more prepared to deal with the topic of tech than say, ten years ago. Then, it seemed if you restricted access to technology for your kids, they would be an outlier. Now I feel that (at least some of) the impacts of technology are better acknowledged. Meaning however you decide to tackle technology with your kids, there are others who have interpreted the research and are doing it the same way.

Overall, I fall as a parent on the side of more restrictions than less for my kids when it comes to technology, especially phones and tablets, while acknowledging they also have to learn to live with it (and in some cases, there are benefits too!) Kelly Williams recently recommended a book called The Anxious Generation, which addresses some of these issues. This prompt reminded me to order it and it’s on route to me.

: Our oldest is in second grade and is the “ONLY PERSON IN HIS ENTIRE SCHOOL WITHOUT AN IPAD”—or so he tells us. :) I think it goes without saying that screens are not great for kids (or adults heh). Because of that, we’ve joined a chapter of “Wait Until 8th” at our elementary school, which is basically a pact that your child will not get their own smartphone until at least the end of 8th grade.

I’m currently hoping to wait until age 16 for a phone because that’s when I got one (when I started driving) which makes sense to me. But maybe I’m in the Dark Ages?

We know a lot of parents who have gone the Apple Watch route if their child needs to get in touch, which I would be okay with if it was used only for communication with parents. No games, no texting friends, no fun. But honestly...can we all just Tin Can it instead and call it a day?

JS: How about religion? This probably doesn’t apply if you’re an active member of a faith, but if you were raised without one (that’s my situation, which is why I’m thinking about it): did you join a faith community anyway, so that your kid could have the benefits of it? Or did you consciously create that community for them in other ways?

: This is a great question, and I do think about it even though I was raised within a strong faith. I consider being Jewish to be as cultural as much as it’s religious, so I wanted my kids to have that foundation, too. In the neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn, there wasn’t much non-Orthodox Judaism, so friends and I started something called B’nai Brooklyn, where we mostly meet up for pizza party Shabbats in the park. We know it’s so needed because such a crowd assembles to light candles, say a short blessing, and then mostly run around as kids do!

I also knew I wanted the kids to be bar and bat mitzvahed, so we joined a more traditional temple in preparation. Unexpectedly, they both absolutely love learning about their religion (religious school is famously something a lot of us dreaded growing up!), and we’ve found a sweet community there, too.

: I was raised Catholic. I am no longer a practicing Catholic, however, I did have my three sons baptized and they did celebrate their communion. My oldest did get confirmed, but my younger two sons were not. I did all of this out of a sense of tradition and so they won’t have trouble getting married in a church one day if they want to (is that so old-fashioned of me?). Truthfully, if I had a do-over, I wish I had stayed true to myself and opted out of it. We talk a lot about humanity, faith, beliefs, and morals in our home (so much so that my youngest often asks us why we can’t have ‘normal’ conversations – as if), but church never aligned with who I am as a person, as a feminist and as a humanist. My sons are good people of strong character; I’m proud of who they are, and one does not need religion at all in order to have a strong moral compass.

: We aren’t religious, and this question is interesting because it never really occurred to me that we’re missing out on an opportunity for community because of that. I did go to church growing up, but I stopped going around age 14. We were never active in our church community though, so I don’t have this association. When we outgrew our Brooklyn apartment a few years ago, we moved to Jersey City simply because we had the biggest concentration of friends in this area. So I feel like we intentionally sought out a community of friends, and that feels like enough. I feel lucky, but also proud we figured it out. Now no one is allowed to move!

: My husband and I were both raised Catholic. I left the church in my twenties and felt strongly that I did not want to raise my kids Catholic, but I did want them to have an exposure to faith and religion so they could decide for themselves. We joined an Episcopal church ten years ago when we were getting married, and it has been a great source of community for our family. During the school year, the children’s choir families take turns cooking a weekly dinner for the group. My daughter is known to most of the congregation as the most chaotic sheep in the Christmas Pageant. I’m really grateful for the community we have, but I also struggle because I feel like Christianity has been co-opted in a lot of negative ways, and I’m not comfortable aligning myself with that version. In my experience, the Episcopal church is generally more inclusive, affirming, and progressive than most. I hope my kids feel at home in our church for a long time, but I will always make space for them to question and explore their faith on their own terms.

: We’re not a religious family, but we’ve tried very hard to teach respect and curiosity. Our approach has been less “this is what we believe” and more “this is what other people believe, and here’s why it matters to them.”

I think faith can provide people with a sense of community, belonging, comfort and a framework for how they want to move through the world. Even if those beliefs aren’t our own, we want our kids to understand and respect the role religion plays in other people’s lives.

My son’s best friend is Jewish, and his family has been incredibly generous in sharing their traditions and explaining what those traditions mean to them. It’s been such a lovely opportunity to encourage curiosity rather than judgment. I don’t necessarily need my children to share other people’s beliefs, but I do hope they grow up interested in them, respectful of them and willing to learn from them.

* * *

That’s it for now. Again, thank you so much to all the mothers who contributed to this piece; we’re just out here crowdsourcing wisdom and realizing the answer is usually: trust your gut and pick whatever is best for your particular child. I’m hoping these thoughtful answers make some other parents feel a little less nervous about whichever big decisions are coming up. We’ve got this!

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But wow did it ever rearrange the way I saw the world. Up until my divorce, I was so Type A I’d make your teeth hurt: the good girl ballerina who went straight from graduate school to practicing law in a pencil skirt and never ever needed anything from anyone. This was the first huge stumble in my orderly life, and it was terrifying: if this relationship—one that had been a throughline in my life since I was 17—could implode, what other important parts of my identity could cease to be true?

My marriage ended during the summer of 2015, and Nathaniel Rateliff’s Son of a Bitch (Get Me A Drink) was everywhere. Never has a song better encapsulated a moment, both the “are you fucking kidding me right now?” energy I was radiating into the universe, and my semi-troubling whiskey ingestion.

The next five years were a whole thing. I bumbled through awkward first dates as my peers registered for wedding china. I collected memoir material, like the date that involved a hike up the side of a mountain (?) in 95 degree heat (??) that was so unexpectedly strenuous that my body’s defenses broke down like I’d run a marathon, and as we crested the mountaintop, I peed my pants (???) and had to pour my water bottle over my head like a Baywatch character to camouflage it and maintain my dignity. Mostly, I leaned on my friends and learned how to be a whole person by myself for the very first time.

And eventually, I met my (current) (hopefully permanent) husband. I wouldn’t say that I believe in fate, but I will say that we went on our first date two days before NYC issued its city-wide Covid lockdown. Having absolutely nothing else to do for a year and a half besides talk to each other meant we were able to speed up the “when you know you know” moment by quite a lot, and pretty soon after that moment, we were getting married.

That wedding—a beautiful, loud, Brooklyn affair—ended up being almost exactly 10 years after my first. And while I try to think back on my younger self with fondness, if only to appreciate her abundance of collagen, I’m ready to say it with my whole chest: everything about my second wedding was better than my first. Here’s what I learned in the intervening decade that made that true, and what I wish I could tell the version of myself at 25 who was…trying her best.

Dear baby self,

It’s just a party! Plan (and spend) accordingly.

At 25, you want everything to be perfect. You want the princess dress and the flowers and the general Cinderella vibe. (You also do not yet quite have a fully formed frontal lobe, which may or may not be related.) You become obsessed with the details, spending hours poring over wedding blogs (RIP Snippet & Ink) to determine exactly what your aesthetic is going to be. Everything has to be perfectly engineered for guest comfort (lemonade in mason jars in case they get thirsty before the ceremony, and color-coordinated flip flops for when they want to kick off their heels and keep dancing) because you are Telling A Story about who you’re going to be as a married couple: mature, cool, community-oriented. In a choice of wedding favor that perfectly encapsulates the situation (and will later cause you significant embarrassment), you burn each guest a CD with the wedding playlist, with your engagement photos printed on the front.

There’s fun attention to detail, and then there’s bursting into tears because the programs and the menus were misprinted. Sweet girl: the ceremony was 20 minutes long and in the dominant language of everyone in attendance. The food was food they’d all eaten before. They didn’t need Paper Source paper goods to keep up, and no one was holding up the invitations to the centerpieces to determine whether they palette-matched.

Obviously, individual mileage on all of this may vary: someone who’s naturally aesthetically-oriented would probably want to spend the money and time on finding the right paper weight and taper candles because it that’d be fun for them, and to them we say “Right on.” But you are not that girl. You are a raccoon of a human who exists on vibes, and all of this planning gives you hives. You just think you have to do it, because it’s all part of growing up and getting married.

But by 35, it clicks that a marriage and a wedding are completely separate entities. Your marriage is yours to define and nurture on a completely different plane of existence than envelope liners.

A wedding can simply be a party: raucous dancing, plenty of booze, great food to soak it up, your very best people sweating and bopping and laughing beside you. And when you decide to go that route the next time, I say this without reservation: it will be the best day of your life.1 You’ll be too wrapped up in yapping and frolicking to actually drink much, but the whole evening will be permeated by the feeling you get after the first sip of your second cocktail; the one where you’re weightless and expansive, and life suddenly looks full of possibility.

You don’t need to ask 25% of the guests to be in the wedding party to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

Only ask every female relative and every female friend you’ve ever had to stand up with you in a lavender dress from J.Crew, and conduct seventy-five email chains about variations on said dress and where to buy it on sale, and mediate several intense conversations about feelings re: who stands where in the processional order if you really want to.

You don’t even need to have a wedding party, if you don’t feel like it. All these traditions are made up, and you’re allowed to choose only the ones that serve you (just like, y’know, in a marriage). You can just ask your kind, sweet brother to stand up with you, and he’ll say, “Of course,” and that can be the only conversation you have about the whole thing.

(Maybe remind him to brush his hair before he walks down the aisle.)

If you are not a person of faith, you get to decide who officiates your wedding.

The parents of the people getting married do not get to decide. You do. Listen to your gut when you think it’ll feel nuts to have someone you’ve met once in a diner “so he could get to know you” stand up in front of your assembled friends and family to pronounce you man and wife. You’re right; those boilerplate questions will probably lead to a standard-issue ceremony that’ll make you feel like a paper doll instead of a woman beginning a seminal new chapter. This person is an older man with a clerical collar and “gravitas” so that the elder generation feels comfortable? Cool, and also irrelevant. They are not getting married today.

Ask a dear friend, like you wanted to. Walk down the aisle toward a face that makes you feel whole and calm, toward someone who’s seen you through the darkest storm of your life. Laugh and shake off your nerves when he tells a funny story about how much his kid loves your new husband. Let the people who have walked with you on the road to finding love be the ones to throw open the door to your new life.

You’re allowed to make choices that only make sense to you,

Especially when they only concern you. If you badly want a short party dress to change into after the ceremony, don’t pass it up because your mom thinks they’re kind of declassé. The second time around, when you still want one: buy it, and rejoice that you can actually breathe and get down on the dance floor for 6+ hours without overheating. Hilariously, your mother will pull you aside at one point to tell you how wrong she’d been and that you look glam. (Be cool about it, she always means well. Love you, Mom.)

Pick the right person.

Some might argue this is the most important part! You tried to do it the first time, and I could throw up my hands and say, “Well, you just never know,” but…you do.

The act of planning a wedding can tell you whether you’re getting this part right; like any stressor, it shouts the signal pretty loudly, even when you don’t want to hear it. Look around: are you going to every appointment alone? Are you taking vendor calls in a parking lot, trying not to cry into a cell phone, because he needed quiet to focus on the work you both have in the morning? As you get ready to walk down the aisle, does your stomach twist in a way you brush off as anticipation (but know in your heart is more like dread)?

Not the next time, baby girl. The next time you’ll learn what partnership looks like: the person who makes your hopes and dreams his first priority, and (perhaps more importantly) makes you a fancy cocktail every time you have to do yet another boring revision of the seating chart. When you walk down the aisle this time, the only discomfort you’ll feel is the pinch of something new: high heeled sandals you’ll break in that night, dancing with everyone you love. And this time, as you walk, even though you can hear the beautiful string arrangement of Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now that you picked as an entrance song, you’ll be thinking of the words to a totally different wedding standard.

At last.

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It works fine-ish, most of the time.

And like everything with parenting, you sort of have your feet under you and then all of a sudden the front door swings open and a huge developmental spurt (why do I always picture a rhino?) is charging straight for your sweet baby. You blink, and his neurons have rearranged themselves: power over a red vs. blue drinking vessel is no longer enough. The autonomy footprint is greater. He’s growing up.

Which: great! It takes me a second to recalibrate, but we just widen the bracket of available choices. Hell yeah, choose your own clothes in the morning, bud! I truly don’t care if you look like a color-blind rummage sale as long as you’re comfortable and we can pull your pants up over your lil tummy.

But lately these jumps have been occurring with such regularity and speed that I can’t help but think ahead to what’s coming. What about when we’re no longer talking about jacket/no jacket choices (why is it always no jacket? what do tiny people have against warmth?) but instead about big stuff? Childhood-defining stuff, like: should he be a free-range goof who gets bored a lot, or a kid who gets exposed to varied activities in the interest of finding his thing? Life-defining stuff, like: do I expose him to a cell-phone or a religious tradition before his prefrontal cortex is fully formed?

I know what our family non-negotiables are: a lot of adventuring and time spent with the people we love. But that leaves a lot of play in the joints, a lot of unanswered questions. I guess what I’m really asking is: as a kid becomes more able to make their own choices, how much parental-imposed structure should a childhood have?

A very casual question, to be sure. And I know there’s nuance in any intelligent answer, but I’d love to hear the thoughts of big kid parents who are in the thick of dealing with this (or little kid parents who just already know what they’re going to do!).

In the meantime, my stressed-out musings on activities, technology, and religion are below. (And before you’re like Girl, those are odd bedfellows, just hear me out.)

What are we doing about activities?

I’m viewing this as a spectrum, with pretty entrenched camps on each side. Over here, we’ve got your “free-range” parents who view an AYSO practice like a cult ritual, and think kids should just be running through fields until it gets dark and Mother rings the dinner bell. And over on the other end, you’ve got the hyper-scheduled 6 year olds who are shuttling between Mandarin and violin lessons, eating dinner in the car and falling asleep in class. Like all extremes, they are both dumb. Where in the middle should we actually land?

The only thing we had to do in my family was some kind of physical practice. My dad was militant about this, and signed me up for many a soccer camp (no) and even the high school cross country team (almost ran away) before finally agreeing that dance fulfilled this requirement just fine (our relationship has since recovered). Despite maybe needing a little workshopping, his reasoning was unimpeachable: becoming an athlete—or even just finding a form of movement that you like—sets you up for an entire lifetime of good physical and mental health. He knew 45 minutes of P.E. class wasn’t going to lay that foundation, so we pursued it after school through something structured.

That feels right to me for Judo, too, as he gets older. I feel strongly enough that he should have a physically healthy body that I don’t really want to let him choose whether to pursue it. He can pick the sport! (It doesn’t have be a team sport, it can be…rock climbing, I don’t know. Jiu-jitsu. Not football.)

But what about other values? Learning a musical instrument would also serve him well for the rest of his life, and so would a zillion other artistic endeavors. If his behavior so far is any indication, he’s gonna be a ham and a half; should we put him in theater camp? What about the mind, y’know? What about the soul? And I’m obviously joking, but also I’m not. Kids’ brains are elastic: they soak up new languages and skills with ease.

But his brain could also just soak up…the world around him. My dad’s other tenet when we were growing up (this is really becoming the Steve Schechter Show today) was: “only boring people get bored.” Which, harsh, but he only had to say it a few times before I incorporated it and went back to my Babysitters Club book/elaborate fantasy world that included dressing my baby brother up like an Irish washerwoman. I want that for Jude, too: development of the muscles that control imagination, creativity under constraint, happiness with just your own company.

Our world is frenetic. I want his childhood to feel the opposite: calm, spacious. Actually, I want that for our entire family. I want us all to walk in the door at the end of the day, shuck off our shoes, drop the needle on Lake Street Dive, and pour a glass of Malbec. Jude and his imaginary future siblings can have water, but they’re helping chop, sauté, set the table. That sounds way more fun than shuttling him around all evening.

(Unless that’s selfish, in which case I’ll do the shuttling. Help.)

Technology: where’s the line?

This one I feel more clear about: so much data has come out about the dangers of social media exposure before the age of 16 that he’s just…not doing it before then. End of story. He’ll complain that everyone else gets to, and I’ll be like yeah, we’re the worst, but I will be strong in my convictions.

EXCEPT.

There are so many more micro-decisions to be made here. When should he get a phone (even if it’s a “dumb” one)? When can he use a computer in his room, unsupervised? Is he ever allowed to use an LLM? (No.) And I’m sure by the time this conversation is relevant for us, the landscape will have evolved and there’ll be a zillion elements I’m not even thinking about yet.

Our parents legitimately just did not have to deal with this. I got my first cell phone at 17, but texting my mom “COME PICK ME UP PLS” took 25 minutes of cycling through buttons. I liked downloading ringtones, but the phone mostly sat in the bottom of my backpack and did not try to hijack my entire adolescence by showing me every girl on the planet who was cuter than me. (I am aware that’s the shallow end of the trouble here, but if I think about the deep end too much, I want to throw up.)

Moving on.

What about religion?

Okay, so obviously none of this applies if your life trajectory goes: born in the faith, still digging and identify with the faith. You will probably…raise your kid in that faith, and (as long as you’re not being a total rights-snatching weirdo about it) that works. I offer you a giant hug and wish you a happy Whichever Holiday Comes Next.

I’m talking more to the growing legion of us who weren’t really raised with anything. My dad is Jewish; my grandparents made the holy pilgrimage from Long Island to Florida, where they lived out their days in the sun. My mom comes from a big Irish Catholic family; she still feels faint at the smell of incense and her father went to Mass every day.

By the time they got together as adults, neither of them actively practiced anymore. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a lot of conversation about maybe joining an “in between” church (it was never clear what that meant, exactly…maybe Unitarian?), or embarking on a kind of religious studies homeschool program, where we’d go to multiple houses of faith and (respectfully) observe, to learn about the differences. That never happened. The reality was that our parents’ religions canceled each other out, life got busy, and they raised us as (for lack of a better term) secular humanists. Dan and I spend a lot of time stressing over our own moral footprints, so our heathen upbringing probably was fine.

But: even if I don’t “belong” to a faith, should we join a church1 for Jude?

As a kid, I was really attracted to the concept. Gathering with other people in a calm, beautiful place every week to meditate on being better to each other? That sounded pretty compelling. I tagged along to my friends’ Bible Studies in junior high and gawked at the hot youth pastor pretended I knew the stories, too. At my friend Dani’s engagement party, she and her fiancé linked hands as the rabbi said a blessing over their bowed heads. Both sets of parents, all their living grandparents, almost everyone else in that beautiful backyard: they knew the words and chanted along under their breath. I wanted that. I wanted to belong.

We could. My husband is Jewish, in the full matrilineal/Hebrew school/bar mitzvah sense. He hasn’t been to a synagogue in years, and frankly has no interest in opening that door again, for a multitude of reasons. That said: he’d do it, if I asked him to. For him, it would be picking up where he left off, repeating words that he might not believe in a literal sense, but that resonate on a deeper level: family, tradition, history.

But they don’t resonate for me, at all. When you’re raised without a religious structure, to consciously pick one up as an adult feels like you’re cosplaying. You can’t decide to believe something. And if you don’t believe it, and you’re not leaning on the muscle memory of family ritual, it feels too deeply weird—too false, disrespectful—to adopt the whole just to get the parts you want. Do you know what I mean? I can’t picture myself sitting through a service and then responding to Jude’s “Do you believe this, Mommy?” with some derivation of “No bud, we’re just here to make friends.”

And yet. It’s a pretty big club to not belong to, and I don’t want to be too blasé about not signing him up for membership. I’m not particularly worried about the hellfire and damnation part of it (and please keep your thoughts to yourself if that’s your brand). None of my desire to exist in these spaces has ever been about fear that I’m missing out on a universal truth. But what about the rest? I’ve had an easy life, all things considered: I’ve gotten to keep the people I couldn’t live without, I haven’t been sick. What if (fuck, now I’m crying) that isn’t the case for him? I want to send him into the rest of his life with all the armor and skill I can possibly collect, and that’s what faith is for a lot of people: something softer than the world, something that doesn’t waver, a source of strength. I haven’t really needed it. What if he does?

I know people have all kinds of nuanced relationships with faith, whether they were steeped in one as kids or came to it later in life. And we can certainly get community in other ways. It’s just…this is a question I’ve been debating for the better part of my life, and I thought I’d pretty much settled it. But there’s nothing like having a child to make you re-examine everything. I guess his endless chain of “why?” has finally seeped into my own brain.

* * *

Anyway. In reading this back, I can see that I’m basically just asking: “Hey Parents, how do you do childhood right?”

So. Let me know.

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When we moved to California, the deal with Jason’s work was that he’d come back at least every four weeks for Leadership Stuff. We knew I’d have the infrastructure in LA to make it doable to solo parent for those 4-5 days he was gone every month, and I do! My mom and best friend live here, we have a babysitter at the ready. But a couple of times (because I’m nuts) we’ve just gone with him instead.

How’s it been going? Oh, like this:

Hahahahaha, just kidding. It’s always deeply chaotic and rushed. We forget something important, someone gets a horrible snivelly cold, there’s a 4-hour delay, yada yada. Jude is pretty good on a plane, but “pretty good on a plane” for a 2.5 year old is like: a caged wildebeest who chomps off your hand gently. A pyromaniac who only sets fire to the garage. (I could keep going.) We stay in a hotel, so it’s an unfamiliar space for him to get used to. And the last few times we’ve gone, it’s been so. cold. that his experience has been less “cavorting through Central Park,” and more “clinging to Mommy in a snowsuit as freezing wind screams in his face.”

(The wind was not the only one screaming.)

And so of course, by the time we get back to California and do 17 loads of laundry and gear up again for “normal life,” I’m always asking myself: is this good for him? Or is it just way more than he needs/can handle right now, and I’m being a jerk for dragging him around the country?

After a pretty decent amount of soul-searching, I think the answer is yes, it’s worth it. Here’s how I’m thinking about it:

The family is a unit, and the health of every member matters.

The last thing you want is for your kid to be absorbing the externalities of what you need, right? But I really do need to go back “home” (that’s what it feels like) periodically to feel sane. When I can wipe the grease of an actual pizza from my fingers,1 sit next to strangers on the subway, touch grass concrete, it’s like surfacing to take a huge gasping breath before going back down to swim under the surface for another few miles. Is that dramatic? I don’t mean it to be, it’s just the truth. The sparkling, staticky parts of me turn back on when we descend over that skyline. I turn back into myself.

We’ve definitely had periods during/after these trips where I can tell he’s assimilating a metric ton of sensation and information. You can watch the synapses firing in real time. And that assimilation doesn’t all happen quietly; we’ve had our fair share of tantrums over going outside on any given day (or staying inside. Or looking at him funny. He’s two). However, (I am talking to myself here) that is okay.

Toddlers can (and need to) do hard things. In our family, that looks like getting used to planes and different environments; in other families, it might look like going to daycare. Part of being little is learning to work within a group: within your family system, within the larger world. Toddlers are resilient, and as long as you’re providing the scaffolding they need to handle big stuff, they will show you they can do it. And the most fundamental need they have, before optimization of their daily routine, is a parent who is mentally and emotionally healthy.

(Did I come to the above conclusion all by myself? Absolutely not. If you have a toddler, get thyself over to Layne Deyling Cherland. She dispenses intel on Instagram for free, but I’ve had several coaching sessions with her, and she is actual magic: knows her shit beyond belief, gentle, creative, warm. When I am Queen, every mother gets a free massage and time with her.)

I want him to have a wild range of experiences.

This whole deal, this liminal time of early childhood before the world imposes its schedule on him: it’s whatever we want to make it. Where it needs to be steady, I want it to be rock-solid. There are non-negotiables in his life, things that never change: Mommy and Daddy always come home, always whisper, “I had so much fun with you today,” as we kiss the little shell of his ear and lower him into his crib. One of us is always there to pick him up out of that crib in the morning, saying “I am so happy to see you.”

But where this time can be wilder, I want that for him, too. We’re not seeking chaos for its own sake. He kind of takes care of that on his own? We’re just trying to pack in of all the experiences that take (extreme) effort but will give him a bigger world.

In California, we play at the neighborhood park in the evenings. It is so green that it looks like someone took a magic marker to the grass, and so quiet that you can identify individual bird calls. In the mornings, we walk to my parents’ house, smelling every flower on the way. He stacks blocks in the calm of their home, where the most exciting thing that happens is the black cat who sometimes wanders into the backyard. On Saturdays, he pours a beach’s worth of sand into his pants, and dances in and out of the foam like a tentative crab.

In New York, his beloved excavators and cement mixers spring off the page and into real life; he watches them shovel and haul dirt from mere steps away, slack-jawed. We ride the train, and for weeks afterward, whenever we’re late for something, he says “Gotta take the 2, Mama! It goes express, fast, fast!” He cranes his neck at the bus stop, impatient for it to stop in front of us so he can clamber on. We go “visit the dinosaur bones” and walk through halls that echo with the languages of people who look nothing like him.

I want him to be at ease in both extremes. I want him to have the context to know what he loves about each, to make a decision for himself about what kind of life he wants.

And I want him to have a wild number of people who really know him, and can therefore really love him.

I’m sure everyone’s mileage varies, but I didn’t really know many adults as a child. My parents never had big social circles: my mom is one of five sisters, which I think may have tapped her out on social interactions for a lifetime, and my dad could happily live on a deserted island with his books. My brother and I were very loved, but our family was a little island. I want something different for Jude.

We are careening, right now, toward a future that looks a little dimmer and more confusing than the one our generation was handed. I want to build him a net made of every single person who could love him, and I want him to have a chance to love them back. When he finally gets a phone of his own (when he’s 35), I want the list of his possible emergency contacts to go on so long, it looks like a CVS receipt. I want there to be a litany of Aunties and Uncles in his life with whom he is comfortable in his bones. I want him to have no choice but to become a vociferous Mets fan, to make a fucking great Mezcal mule, to know how to fix a carburetor (I had to Google how to spell that, but he won’t).

Our friends come over to our hotel room, when we’re in the city. It’s easier than corralling a toddler in a restaurant, and cheaper, too. We get wine, some plastic cups, and they hang til his California bedtime (which means 10pm in New York because sometimes time zones work in your favor). Last time, as they cracked open the door and flashed him huge smiles, he said nonchalantly, “The aunties are all here.” Like: eh, not a big deal. I see these jokers all the time. And I was like: fuck. We’re doing it. He’s known these people all his life, and even in the ephemeral sandbox of his toddler mind, he hasn’t forgotten them.

This last one, the net I’m building, isn’t just about the people in New York. When we lived there, we were trekking out to LA, Austin, Palo Alto to see the members of our family (blood and non) who’d sprawled in those directions. No matter where you are, keeping your people tethered to you is an exertion, something you can only really do if you’re willing to fork over the money,2 to give up the easy Sunday morning to spend it wiping down an airplane tray table.

But if there’s one thing I’m good for, it’s being stubborn as hell. Sometimes not such a great quality (see: not knowing when to call time of death on start-ups or toxic romantic relationships). But in this context, I think it’s right. If I love you, we are doing life together, no matter where we physically are in the world.

And I am even more determined about this now, for Jude’s sake. We are building this community, and no matter how many airline miles and dollars and moments of discomfort it takes, I am not letting it go.

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• I was serious about the t-shirt. Maybe the best t-shirt of my life? The right shade of grey, the softest hand feel (is that the right term? sounds weird) and some pretty good This Is An Ivy, Goddamnit graphic design. I’d never owned something with a coat of arms before. Or is it a crest? I wear it to sleep every night that it’s not in the laundry pile, and it comes along on scary business trips to remind me that if I made it through the bar exam, whatever I’m worried about handling right now will be fine.1

  

• A pitch perfect moment, upon learning of my acceptance, in which to say: “What, like it’s hard?” to my then-boyfriend who had refused to tutor me for the LSAT, even though he was working as an LSAT tutor.

• The knowledge that there are people who use “summer” as a verb. I do not come from Money. I sort of thought I did, when I was a kid: we always had pizza on Fridays, and went on summer vacations to San Diego where we splashed around in the hotel pool. Like obviously we’re rich if we’re eating room service burgers in our fluffy robes? And then I got to law school and quickly learned about the people who were raised by a legion of nannies and skied in the Alps on Winter Break. Turns out there’s “you can always buy cotton-candy flavored lip gunk at Limited Too” money, and then there’s an entirely different echelon of wealth. Made it a little weird trading backgrounds with new acquaintances (“my dad’s President of the World Bank, how ‘bout you?”) but we all had to study for the same tests, and drinks at the crusty neighborhood bar were cheap enough. (Also, they did not seem to be generally happier people.)

• Absolutely unimpeachable dark academia vibes. This is the law library, where they’d like you to study…

  

  …and here’s where they want you to respond to the Socratic method like you’re not actively peeing your pants in fear:

  

  For a kid from suburban Southern California, it felt like walking into a movie. There was literal ivy, and gorgeous old red brick, and I’ve never been more aesthetically at peace in my entire life. (The palette of my current days is Lightning McQueen red and macaroni yellow, and I fear I may never feel that way again.)

• A ticket to the summer internships of white shoe law firms, in which you occasionally check into an ocean-front hotel in Newport Beach where they leave earplugs on your pillow instead of a mint, in case the waves get too loud. Y’know, because that’s a sane allocation of resources. I think my cognitive dissonance about having a law firm career started in that moment, looking down at that bed and realizing I was joining a group of people soaking themselves in luxury to the extent that they needed to be protected from it.

• A problem with alcohol. I ordered martinis at law firm events because there was never really any food around, and it was the only drink that came with a snack (blue cheese olives, I owe you my life). We were expected to have killer work product and be the life of the party, and both ends of that spectrum were battle-tested: could you keep up with the big boys? I was 25 and going round for round with male partners who were twice my size. Once, when a waitress came around at last call with another cocktail for me, the partner next to me yelled, “That’s my girl!” and gave me a literal noogie. My capacity to keep up started to feel like a superpower, and I leaned in. The idea that it was a Cool Girl trait to be able to drink someone under the table didn’t evaporate until I got pregnant a decade later and suddenly the smell of booze made me want to throw up. I can have a whiskey after dinner now without an issue, but gin still tastes like someone’s daring me to leap off a building.

• A truly impressive bait and switch. Law school is basically just a series of deep conversations about how the world could and should be ordered: what does it mean to own something, and who should get to decide? Why and how should we punish people who harm us? That shit is my jam. Let’s start from first principles and think about how we can better relate to each other! I’ll bring the chips! Working at a big law firm, however, is just (and it’s going to sound like I’m exaggerating here, but I’m not) sitting in front of a search engine, trying to find cases in which a sufficiently powerful (ideally dead!) white man agrees with your client. I lasted about two years before I pulled the rip cord.

• Crushing student debt. I might be paying this experience off until the day I die, but again: great t-shirt.

• The quiet realization that there wasn’t any “there” there. I’d always held up Harvard (and schools like it) in this hallowed light, like it was a magical realm, separated from the real world by a chasm only those with a superior intellect could cross. It…isn’t. They make it tough to get in, and a few of my classmates were really fucking brilliant, in a “let’s donate your brain to science when you’re done with it” sense. But the vast majority—myself included—were just regular-degular dudes, and people said boneheaded things in class all the time. The veil dropped, and I could see some of the actual levers that were moving the world: (for a small group of people) incredibly hard work, and (to a much greater extent) access and money.

  I don’t regret that disillusionment; it’s one of the most important things that ever happened to me. I walked onto that campus not only wanting to be Atticus Finch, but thinking it was a realistic goal. I came out on the other side understanding that (for the most part) that isn’t the way the world is ordered anymore. It’s not that individual people can’t make an incredible difference, or that the practice of law can’t be noble: both of those tenets are still true. I’m saying that my experience helped me wake up from the “America as meritocracy” dream we were sold as kids.

  Chris Rock joked in an interview with NY Mag that if poor people knew how rich the rich actually are, there’d be riots in the street. Except it…isn’t a joke. I didn’t become close friends with any of the wealthy kids I mentioned above, but I saw how they moved through the world and (maybe more importantly) what they took for granted. Wealth was their birthright, and accumulation/protection of money shaped how they saw the world. They actually didn’t think all people had an equal right to a level playing field, and they sort of thought you were a little naive if you did. I watched them walk into meetings of the Federalist Society then, and today I’m seeing them sit in confirmation hearings and conduct oral arguments for an administration that deals only in greed and destruction, and I’m sad but I’m unsurprised.

• The reassurance that even if the institutions are currently screwed, most of the time individual people are deeply good. Harvard has an endowment that rivals the GDP of a small country, and it’s no shining city on a hill (though I was happy to be an alum the day they told Trump to go kick rocks). And those wealthy kids I’m talking about above were the institution embodied. But for every person who turned to the dark side, I know someone who became a public defender, or works for the ACLU, or founded a non-profit that protects migrant children. Those “let’s study your brain for science” people? One of them is one of my closest friends, and he’s decided to forgo the zillions he could be making in tech to run for office as a progressive (if you’re in Seattle, vote for him!). The kids—at least those who are not actively contributing to the downfall of civilization—are alright.

* * *

If you’re going to get divorced, get yourself a doula. You can’t go through it alone; like giving birth, it’s an experience that scrambles both your internal organs and your sense of self.

I had Caitlin, and if I ever write a full story about her someday, it’ll be called Reading T.S. Eliot Aloud While Your Life Burns Down. We did a lot of that, tumblers of whiskey sweating in our hands as we sat side by side in her Koreatown living room. I was so broken that I couldn’t make conversation, so she gave me somebody else’s words. We passed the old paperback back and forth, looking out the window at the palm trees silhouetted in the sunset.

“Do I dare? Do I dare?”

I did not. I was so sad that I was physically sick, breaking out in full-body hives on a random Wednesday. I was terrified of being alone, drunk-Bumbling my way through the Peter Pans of Los Angeles. Under normal circumstances, I am a pretty good time (if I do say so myself) but for the months that I spent on her couch, I was a self-centered, wounded animal.

And in the middle of her very full life, she made space for me. Taught me how you make a home for just yourself: lay down all the rugs, put Eric Clapton on as soon as you walk in the door. And how to be with just yourself: light a candle, pour a glass of wine, look out a window. She carried so much water for me, buckets of fear and rage and hunger. And sometimes we just watched old Queen Latifah movies and she scratched my back.

I was a box of broken shells, and somehow she turned me back into this:

I got my happy ending eventually: my kind, funny man. I love him quite a lot, and probably I’ll write a whole thing about it someday. But the point of this is that I was only whole when I met him because she put me back together first. Whatever the world does to you, it is always the women who heal you.

There’s this scene in Fleabag where Kristin Scott Thomas says:

“Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny—period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here, inside.”

She’s talking about menopause in this scene, but also just…sketching out the general parameters of why things are the way they are.

* * *

I am—like everyone—finding it hard to look away from the news right now. As the right pushes its tradwife agenda, I am holding onto my law degree and my 401k with clamped teeth. These losers are taking away my professional identity over my dead body.1 But something is happening as a result of them beating the “return to the home” drum that I didn’t expect, which is: I am thinking about (non-domestic) care work more than I ever have. I am seeing it everywhere. I am bowled over at our capacity, and it is giving me new hope.

Okay, first of all: you know the circulating meme that goes “imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women that this is oppressive” and the image is like… a woman with false eyelashes, baby-wearing in a meadow, holding hands with her toddler and petting some cows. First of all, my guy: have you met a toddler? They’re not standing still long enough for you to capture this bucolic image. By the time you’ve framed the shot, he’s already stuck straw up the cow’s nose and I’ve gotten him in a football hold as we sprint away from death by bovine. No adult should be taking this image seriously.2 But the idea that women have to be told that motherhood is magical is the most unserious thing of all.

We already know, okay? We know. We’re the ones who feel it when two glasses of wine turn into an alien on your chest, rewiring you into a blinking neon sign that blares LOVE LOVE LOVE. We’re the ones who get a front row seat as that big-eyed alien gains the power of speech, a personality, the ability to give tiny, perfect, slobbery kisses. We’re just asking for a little support; none of us are denying the miracle.

But the fact that they think we need to be told means: they don’t actually understand how far the magic stretches.

The funniest (most tragic?) part about this Look At The Wonders of Traditional Womanhood agenda is that it’s too zoomed in. If you were to reality-tune it, yeah, you’d remove some of the beauty and ease (and the cow, because who invited this cow?) but there would be so many more people in the frame. Older parents, grandparents, friends whose marriages are crumbling, friends who are having babies of their own. And every woman is at the center of that circle, growing more and more arms to hold more and more burdens for all of the people she loves. THAT is the magic: that we have always, always understood that “the family” is bigger than the house you live in, that we find a way to do the care work of keeping each other whole, no matter what.

I think this is what I’ve been struggling with, trying to figure out how to find the time and energy to be a good citizen when, as Kristin said, I already have it all going on in here, inside. Why is it my job, I’ve been asking myself, to do the work of these useless men who requested to have the honor of being our public servants, when I’m busy taking care of a tiny person and working full-time and and and.

Well. Because that’s how it always is.

Because when it was my ex-husband’s fault that I was unable to function, it was Caitlin who cut up my apples and listened to my fears until I could. She healed a wound she didn’t inflict. For months and months, when I felt homeless, she was my home. And that’s kind of a lot of work for someone with an already full life to do, but to be perfectly glib for a second: the girls get it. We know what to do with pain: take care of it until it goes away. Wait for it to come again, and take care of it once more.

Maybe this is what is going to get us through: we can see the world in cycles, and we are not strangers to the labor of care. And now more than ever, I can see that labor turning into literal societal glue. Care work is running the mutual aid networks that keep immigrant families fed when they can’t go outside. It is running for office against Lindsay Graham when you’re an overworked pediatrician. It’s reporting on the stressful political landscape so that people have intelligent information, even when you have a cortisol disorder. (There is no end to these examples.)

We shouldn’t have to do any of this. None of this is me cranking Pussy Riot to paper over the fact that these men owe us something.3 We should continue to call our reps, and protest, and call them to account for the damage they’ve done. And I know that there are men in the trenches with us (I hope I’m raising one) and some women doing evil of their own (and I’m not even talking about the horrific lip filler, Kristi).

This is instead me saying: with this framing, I can see some light in the dark. It is giving me some comfort to remember that most women will extend ourselves beyond what is reasonable, in order to do what is necessary. As our girl Emily said, "If your Nerve, deny you—Go above your Nerve." And fuck me if I haven’t seen one example after another, my entire life, of women doing exactly that. That no matter how much damage is done by the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps and other Average Terrible Joes out there, that all the women standing nearby will be digging into some hidden wellspring, finding the strength to shelter the people around them.

I’m not religious, but that knowledge feels like a blessing to me. So lately, when I get discouraged, I think of my own personal angel and send her a prayer, which is actually just a text with too many double-heart emojis. And then I go back to that same park where I passed my rings across a table, and I take care of my kid. And I try my hardest to watch out for everyone else’s, too.

Let me back up.

I’ve run several start-ups (a story for another time, preferably with wine) so I spent a pretty decent amount of time in the NYC/LA/Miami angel investor scene. Picture it: expansive living rooms off Central Park West with floor to ceiling windows, free-flowing organic wine. I was usually pitching/asking for money in these scenarios (but like: in a v. cool, understated chill kind of way, of course) so that was my primary focus, but I would sometimes look around at the crowd and get distracted by how attractive everyone was.

Glowing, poreless angel skin. Thick manes of shiny hair falling around their cut jawlines and sculpted shoulders. There wasn’t any ostentatious lip filler, just women in their 40s who looked rested, healthy, at the height of whatever “beautiful” could look like for them. Did I mention most of them had kids? Yeah. And the flat abs of an influencer.

This wasn’t a “what’s your secret?” scenario. These women were obviously wealthy (hence their investments in start-ups), and once you got to know them, they were also pretty forthright about what they “did”: facials, Botox, hair extensions, personal trainers, yada yada. Over dinner one night, I mentally tabulated it all, and it was so fully out of reach as a broke-as-a-joke founder that I wistfully sighed and moved on with my life. (I mean I probably did an extra clay mask that week or something, but you get it.) I was just a ballet and lipstick girl: I was super physically active, and I wore a little make-up, and that had always been enough to make me feel healthy and cute.

Fast forward a couple of years. I’d moved into a corporate role, so I suddenly had some disposable income for the first time in forever. I could engage in some of this self-care, if I wanted to, and I was browsing options. Maybe it was the time to start “getting serious about it” (whatever that means), because I was nearing 40.

And then I had a baby, and—gird yourself for a really original sentiment—that changed everything. I was looking and feeling like I’d been junked for parts not my best: hair falling out, skin going nuts. Pregnancy/breastfeeding and then the realities of caring for a little person meant that ballet (or any reasonable facsimile) was out of reach. Lipstick was not cutting it anymore. Not only was I frantic to “do more” to feel and look like myself again, I needed to do it all, and right now. But I had no time or mental space to fit it in (because: baby and job) and also felt very weird about spending money on it, now that we had this baby, because isn’t all money for babies? I went on this fabulous emotional rollercoaster of trying to decide what to do, getting grossed out by how much I was focusing on myself, and then abandoning the entire discourse until the next time I caught myself in the mirror on a shitty day and started all over again.

I’m obviously not alone in this. As we age, and go through major body changes, we just…have to do more maintenance (are we cars??), if we want to look and feel the same. But how long should we expect to feel the same? And how hard should we fight to stay there?

Jude was born two and a half years ago, so these days I’m feeling slightly less unhinged about the whole thing. Postpartum hormones may have had something to do with this feeling more like An Impending Crisis instead of something to chat with friends about over dinner. But I still don’t know the answers.

So, the whole point of this meandering yap is: how much time, money, and mental space is the right amount to devote to the project of feeling/looking as good as possible in your body? Obviously the short answer is that it’s a spectrum that depends on the person and their resources/values, but I’ve never found the short answer to anything to be all that helpful. I want to talk about this in depth because I need to hear from other women how you all are approaching this mentally, financially, and—this might seem like a weird one, but hold on, I promise it makes sense—morally. K, here we go.

Being hot is expensive

Anyone who’s ever read a services list at a cosmetic dermatologist has probably had the same jump scare. This all…costs so much. If you’re a fan of , you might have heard her talk about the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. Go listen (she’s much more eloquent than I am) but the basic idea is that participation in beauty upkeep is a) an expense that should be viewed as an opportunity cost (i.e. what else could that money could be doing for you?) and b) recurring by design (there’s no such thing as being done with “getting your hair done”).

I am anti-Hamster Behavior, and I’m fully with Katie that when you stop engaging in a beauty ritual that was never your idea in the first place, it loses its power, and you become a free bird. For example: I hate getting manicures. I like the look, but I don’t want to hold hands with a stranger and stare at a wall for an hour every week. So I stopped, and it didn’t take very long for my personal Overton window to shift, vis a vis what attractive nails look like. I just…don’t really care anymore, and now I have that time and money back.

But what about the parts of “glowing up” that you do miss, if you stop?

The first start-up I ever launched was a fitness brand that married ballet and Crossfit. It was a boutique class offered on ClassPass, and was a freaking killer workout, which I tried to demonstrate in our marketing materials by…gazing serenely out a window?

This lil guy didn’t make it (the company, I probably do still have the sports bra, embarrassingly) but I was personally all in on these classes. Barre, Lagree pilates studios, CorePower Yoga: if it was really hard and other people would be there, I was in. It was expensive, but I didn’t think about whether I should spend the money. If I had it—not always a guarantee—I was going.

Then the pandemic hit. (Anyone remember that?) I moved in with one of my best friends, and we worked out every single day (to stave off the crazies, more than anything). We had a membership to an online workout platform (probably 50 bucks for a yearlong subscription) and we got 2 sets of weights, which were actually hilariously expensive because we were living in the Upside Down, but typically they’d have been like $20 each at Target. Most of the time, we were working out in sports bras and pajamas. It was zero glamour, almost free, and we actually stayed pretty fit.

When the pandemic restrictions lifted, we started going back to Barrys, which was around the corner from her apartment. The energy lit me UP. I loved being back—the people, the noise, the energy that pushed me harder—but all of a sudden, I felt super conflicted about the whole thing. I now knew that if I tried hard enough, I could pretty much replicate this outcome for free. In my underwear or some old sweatpants, not the buttery sleek leggings that I bought to fit in and that made me feel hot as hell.

Is it reasonable to spend serious money on the part of personal care that isn’t a “need”? I think it’s probably safe to say that if the money isn’t there, don’t go into debt just to lift weights in a place that has Kiehls products in the bathroom. But if the money is there…

Is it still weird to spend it on this stuff?

On the one hand, like: don’t be a killjoy! Live your life. If you have the funds to support it, buy the fancy skincare, get the Botox, do whatever makes you feel good. But there are two spirals I keep getting caught in every time my Sephora bill is too high:

Participating in the beauty industrial complex makes it stronger. Every one of us who engages makes it harder for someone else to walk away. My narrative self wants to be the woman shouting “Ya Ya!,” flipping off the patriarchy, and going fucking grey when I feel like it. I don’t want my artificially smooth forehead to be the reason another woman looks at her own face with concern.

and also…

We’re all coming from a place of finite resources (and if you’re not, can I tell you about my next start-up idea?). Spending on personal care means we can’t spend as much on other things: money you spend in Bucket A is money you can’t spend in Bucket B, right? And the world right now feels like very important buckets are proliferating at an astonishing speed. We’re (very) lucky that our personal family needs are met, but what about everybody else?

As we face whatever our fully insane President the news has in store for us every day, the clearer it becomes that no one is coming to save us. (Sorry to make this darker than mascara.) There is some in-person/logistical work we can do, when problems are right near us, and we can certainly call our reps. But most of the pressing problems we’re facing as a country can really only be solved with money. (Probably because most of those problems were created by billionaires extracting money from the system, but I digress.) ICE only left Minneapolis because the angels in that city beat them back, but they were only able to take care of their vulnerable populations because the rest of the country sent cash. Establishment Democrats are doing a real poor job of protecting us, but we can only primary them and get new candidates in office if we…send those new candidates cash. You get it. More money has always meant more power, and right now it feels like we need to throw our power behind mutual aid and political action like our lives depend on it. Because they do.

And yet I still want my stupid expensive powerful skincare that makes me look like a dewy angel. Do I keep buying it?? (Real question.)

To be super casual about it: what matters in life?

Any significant amount of time I spend thinking about this puts me here:

Which: yes. Yes! There is no faster way to feel confident and sexy than to stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about what you can do for others (I assume that’s the implied second half of this).

Except.

There’s this thing about becoming a mom where if you don’t think about yourself…no one will? Small children are focused on themselves, as they should be developmentally. And absolutely no shade to male partners (mine is wonderful), but most of them were not raised to do the proactive care work of intuiting the emotional/mental needs of everyone else in the house. Before parenthood, I could just disappear for a while to go get a haircut. Now, I need to have an out-loud conversation where the subtext is, “it is important enough that I get this haircut that you give up your scant leisure time and this percentage of our family resources for me to do it.” And that’s kind of uncomfortable! Not for a haircut, really, since that’s generally considered a grooming necessity across the board, but for facials? For multiple workout classes per week? For Botox?

For the record, Jason has never once made me feel selfish for doing any of these things. (And he happily took Jude to the park so I could write this newsletter, he is not the problem.) It’s the act of having to have the conversation that makes me uncomfortable, because now I’m examining every choice. What’s worth it? There’s no beauty-and-youth-preservation syllabus that all women follow (although if someone wants to make one, I’ll take a copy). And that means every time I decide to do something in the interest of staying attractive or youthful, I’m choosing myself over something else. Time I could be spending elsewhere. Brain space I could be spending elsewhere. Money I could be spending elsewhere.

And I don’t want to be too self-focused, but I also want to hold onto my integrated self as long as I can in this one wild and precious life. I want to recognize myself in the mirror. I want to feel young and healthy, and revel in the body that I have while it’s here. It feels so fun and powerful and feminine to put on a cute dress and heels and lipstick and feel myself, and then go out and trade compliments with other women in the bar bathroom. I don’t want to give that up, yet. I’m not ready.

I’m a gentle person, but I do want to do a little raging against the night. I want a little more time with the planes of my face and the curves of my body as they’ve always been, before we all move on together. The question is just: how long?

Anyway.

If you have a second, please just tell me the exact answers to all these easy questions I’ve posed above. I hope you have a wonderful week.

xo,

Julie

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We asked people to give us vinyl as wedding presents. I’m not sure where I heard the idea (definitely didn’t come up with it myself) but it was the best choice I could’ve made (other than the groom, who is also great). Some friends sent time capsules, like the Regina Spektor album I played to death in 2006.* Other folks were like: we give unto you the cornerstones of any serious collection: The Rolling Stones! Bob Dylan! Evanescence! Some people gave us instructions: play this Tom Waits on Saturday nights before you head out to the bar. Play this Miles Davis on slow Sunday mornings when you’re making coffee.

My parents gave us so many, filling in our shelves with the soundtrack of my childhood. I can drop the needle on any of them and be transported back to the moments they underscored: Queen’s Night at the Opera (scream-singing in our old baby blue Camry), Paul Simon’s Graceland (eating tuna pie** at the dinner table), the Beatles’ White Album (pretending to dust during Sunday morning cleaning sessions, while actually hiding under the table to read.) Once my brother and I had opinions, we got our turns, but most of what I remember about the sound of our house growing up was the music my parents loved.

* * *

In our new California house, we’ve had a few albums on repeat; not sure if you’ve heard this about toddlers, but “AGAIN!” tends to be a favorite word. Jude is currently obsessed with Lake Street Dive’s Bad Self Portraits, partly because it’s fantastic, but mainly because: it’s pink. So last night at dinner, that was playing (again), he was vibing out in his high chair, and I was half-watching him while talking to Jason about work. Judo forked up a bite of macaroni, went to eat it, and then stopped because he wanted to sing the rest of the lyric.

And for some reason it hit me (because sometimes I am very slow): he knows this music. He loves it, not because he discovered it, but because it’s part of us; this is what his home sounds like. These are the sense memories that he’ll be transported back to, as an adult. We’re building them, right now.

(No pressure.)

Home, to him, is going to sound like this:

Driving to Zuma Beach, sunroof down, winding around the canyon roads. Whipping through the tunnels, their quick shadows and flickering lights on his face. Turning the corner, seeing the whole blue sea. I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier.

Dancing in the living room, shouting, “Give me your hands! Go in a circle like me! I never get dizzy!” Falling down. Gettin’ up. We are never, we're never alone.

Crawling in traffic on the 405, on the way to LAX. Writhing and whining in a too-hot carseat, kinda hungry, In N Out still miles away. Yelling with delight as he experiences the mood-turning magic of a beat drop. Wake up in the morning with a head like, “What ya done?”

Standing in his green kitchen tower, sprinkling salt into cracked eggs, feeling determined and fiercely proud as he whips the mini-whisk around, around, splattering a decent amount over the lip of the bowl. Listening to his mom tease his dad about his penchant for Sad Dad Rock. Pick me up, love. Every day.

* * *

My parents have both been having some health stuff recently, and being back home means I’ve been seeing more of it, and more closely. Aging is normal—is a privilege—but I’d be lying if I said watching it wasn’t a struggle. Last week I was having a moment about it, and I put on a Sam Cooke record. I typically think of him as a crooner, of the kinda corny, lilting romance of “You Send Me.” I always forget that he was a gospel artist first.

If I could only touch the hem of his garment / I know I’d be made whole.

For an old Jewish guy from Brooklyn (are you picturing Bernie Sanders? There, you’ve got him), my dad sure played a lot of gospel in our house. There was nothing religious about it, he just loved the music. Actually, that’s wrong. That’s what religion is to him: human beings who are capable of beauty like that.

So as I’m listening to this song, and crying (not just like “oh! a sentimental tear!” but one of those situations where some suppressed emotions hit you like a freight train and you’re suddenly weeping at your kitchen table on a Tuesday morning) I realize I also feel a little bit of peace. Like: there he is. He’s not sitting here with me, kissing the top of my head, raging against Trump, eating lox. But he might as well be. And because I found him here, I feel the smallest bit calmer about being able to find him again, when I need to.

This is what we give a kid, when we give them art: it’s a through-line, something they’re always going to have access to. There’s so little we can control about what his life in this insane world is going to look like. I don’t know if I can give him a sibling or a functioning democracy. But no matter where Jude is in ten years, twenty, fifty: I want him to be able to drop the needle, and when he hears that anticipatory crackle of it hitting the record, feel us sitting down right beside him.

*Begin to Hope is a no skips banger and I stand by that.
**Don’t ask.

There were pretty good reasons for this move. My mom, a career child psychologist and general angel, finally retired and was offering free childcare. One of my very best friends had moved back and bought a house. We want to have a second child, and after the white-knuckle experience of postpartum in New York (where we didn’t have any steady help that we didn’t pay for), the idea of doing Pregnancy-and-Newborn v2 inside of a community of people who could help us seemed like a no-brainer.

It’s been 5 months now, and most of the parts we thought would be worth it absolutely are. Jude loves hanging out with my parents, and the feeling of dropping him off in the morning with someone who would jump in front of a bus for him really does a lot for my general anxiety. On Saturday, we had a backyard happy hour with my best friend that looked like something out of a Super 8 film, with kids and puppies and a bubble machine. (I’m not pregnant yet, so TBD on how well v2 will go, but that’s a whole other story.)

The point is: we are so fucking lucky to be here, to be near people who love us. So why am I still so heartbroken about leaving New York?

For the record, I don’t think the city is the center of the universe. I know the John Updike quote about New Yorkers believing “people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding,” but I know deeply rooted folks who are perfectly content with their lives in Austin, Montana, here in LA. NYC smells like hot trash (at least) four months out of the year, you fork over barrels of cash for inches of personal space, and I’ve been face to face with more rats and cockroaches than I’d consider ideal. It can be a tough place to live.

But it fit me. Because I could walk to coffee.

No, really. This is the central thesis that I clung to in all the years I swore I’d never move back to LA. Before you scoff/laugh, go with me for a minute on this, I promise it’s bigger than it sounds.

Okay, so most mornings in our little Astoria neighborhood, I’d walk in one of two directions.

If it wasn’t my childcare morning, I headed to the bodega across the street from our apartment. This club had everything: wacky ice cream flavors, paper towels, a surprisingly good bacon egg & cheese, and (obviously) coffee. I could be back at my desk in ten minutes, and still have time to chat with the Palestinian guy who owned it and also do the “we’ve seen each other a million times but never actually spoken” acknowledgment nod with all the folks out walking their dogs.

If I had Judo (and therefore a few hours to fill), we’d amble the 4 blocks to Little Flower. (If you go: get the pancakes.) When he was tiny, I’d tuck him in the stroller and we’d wave to the violet bursts of morning glories opening on the alleyway fence as we set off. Once he could walk without regular face-planting, we’d shuffle along together, me gripping one fat little paw as he used the other to point: “Da tree, Mama! Da doggie! Da doggie go pee-pee!” That way took a lot longer, but about seventy-five years later, we’d push through the doors of the coffee shop. We’d get buttery croissants, usually, and overhear a few conversations about art showings and start-up pitch meetings. There were “Know Your Rights” anti-ICE pamphlets on the counter. And when we swung back outside, it was time to hit the swings, down the street at the neighborhood park.

It’s different here.

I wake up most days at 5am, to work on this albatross novel I’ve been “writing” for years. (Don’t clap yet, this routine started like 3 weeks ago. We’ll see what happens.) I head downstairs and do the whole grind/fill/brew thing on the machine, and unload the dishwasher while the coffee brews. There is nothing unpleasant about this! We bought fancy beans, I get to listen to an interesting podcast. But I’m doing it by myself, in my pajamas, under florescent light. Could I go get coffee outside? Sure, but I’d have to get in the car and drive for 15 minutes, and I’m just not that kind of hero. Once I drop Jude off with my mom (again: so lucky), I come back and sit at my desk and do my email job.

This isn’t a sad sack meditation on how hard my life is (because it isn’t). It’s just that a life in the suburbs means we’ve lost automatic, natural access to what the coffee ritual conferred: sun (or disgusting wind, let’s be real here, but some kind of weather) on our faces. Putting on clothes. Moving our bodies a little bit. Being part of a macro community.

You can still have all those things here, I know that. It’s just not automatic anymore, and I have to try a lot harder: make myself get dressed, even though no one other than my toddler and husband see me (and one of them thinks Lightning McQueen pajamas are the height of fashion). Wrestle a kid into a car seat (currently accepting tips on how to do that with beauty and grace) when you want to go somewhere. Find other ways to just be around people, when you aren’t rubbing shoulders with them just by going outside.

Is it reasonable that this just…makes me kind of sad? My rational brain says eh, that’s pushing it. You’re not really allowed to whine about not walking to neighborhood bars and bookstores in this Year Decade of Daily Terrors. But I’m not mourning the loss of ease, really. I just feel isolated. Especially when the global outlook is feeling bleak, those micro-interactions make a difference.

I think maybe this is it: you have the sense when you’re younger (at least I did? maybe I am particularly delulu?) that you’ll get to set up your life the way that works best for you. You think, I love cities, so I will live in one. I love children, so I will have a lot of them. I love my family, so I will stay close to them. I will decide how things go. You approach it like designing a dream house, walking down an imaginary corridor of open doors: pink paint in this one! A library in here! A Nancy Meyers kitchen at the end!

But even the dream house has to fit on a plot. Other people’s dreams are pressed right up to the property line, and as you’re building, now you realize I will decide how things go doesn’t mean that all the open doors belong to you forever. If you’re lucky, it means you get to choose which doors to close. You can be with your family, or you can be in the city you love: both are gifts, pick one. This is a tough part about (almost?) midlife: you get joy, but you don’t get everything.

Or maybe you just don’t get it all at once. Maybe at some point I’ll be totally integrated here and these feelings will have faded. Maybe something will shift in our larger family structure or finances, and we’ll have the freedom to be true bicoastal babies. I don’t know anything. Right now I’m just having a little trouble taking my hand off the door.

The tic is getting genuinely embarrassing. I was surrounded by millions of years worth of natural beauty, being granted a couple minutes of peace in a setting that’s so relaxing it’s a cliché, and my most powerful instinct was to see what some of my parasocial besties have posted about they’ve been up to lately.

The phone was at the bottom of the beach bag, so my non-lizard brain had enough time to catch up as I was pawing around, and by the time I found it, I had enough self control to just take this picture and then throw it back in the bag.

I really, really want to stop doing this, because I’m not just doing it at the beach. I’m pretty good about leaving my phone in another room when I’m taking care of Jude, but when I’m on my own, I’m doing it during any moment I don’t have to be doing something else. And by “it,” I mean: scrolling on social media.

I think there are two reasons I’m still doing this, even though it grosses me out when I come up for air: 1) because of gestures broadly at world events, and 2) because motherhood is powerfully exhausting, and I want (even a thirty second) vacation.

We live in a brain-breaking timeline.

When I was doing a lot of research on loneliness and relationships for a company I started a few years ago, I came across “Dunbar’s Number”: essentially, our brains are only wired to support 150 concurrent social relationships. Fine in real life (unless you are extremely popular, in which case: bless). But when you think about it in the context of trying to stay aware of/participate in world events, our phones are skipping us from traumatized ICE detainees to casualties of the war in Ukraine to Gaza to…you get it. It is a variety of trauma happening to a number of people that our brains are literally not designed to hold.

Lest you think I’m going to use that as an excuse to say we shouldn’t look or (more importantly) participate: fuck that noise. All I’m saying is that living in this dumpster fire timeline in which a sociopath holds the reins and is “On Donner! On Dasher!”-ing us into World War III is mentally exhausting. If our brains aren’t responding well to that, I think we could argue that at least they’re responding rationally.

It feels like things are worsening daily, and other than the obvious (calling our reps, telling everyone I know to follow ), I haven’t come up with much in the way of intelligent strategies to fight back. What I’ve realized I’m doing now—without actively signing off on it as a coping strategy—is adding in a torrent of bite-sized content about fashion and books and all the stuff I love, to try to drown out some of the despair. Makes some sense, when parsed like that, but it doesn’t actually help. I don’t forget about the atrocities, and I’ve wasted time I could have been thinking about how to help.

I had a kid and (hold on to your hat) I am tired.

Before we get into this part, I feel like I’ve gotta tell you that I love my little guy like a truly jawbreaking amount. He is cuddly and beautiful and has a startlingly good sense of humor. He likes to shout, “Play a big one!” and then dance around the dining room when we comply and put on a Jon Batiste or Lake Street Dive record. He smells like strawberries regardless of how recently he’s actually eaten them. In every corner of the multiverse, I am grateful to be his mother.

Also.

Jude is two and a half, and if my pre-pregnancy self could see how mentally and emotionally exhausted I am on a daily basis, she’d think I was being a real pansy about the whole thing. Yeah, newborns don’t sleep, (this is her talking now) but you’ve done so many hard things. You made it through law school, you’ve founded companies, you’re not still gonna be knocked on your ass multiple years into this experience.

Girl. The thing no one tells you about having a kid (at least no one told…me?) is that it once you get past the physical hard stuff in the first-ish year, here comes a toddler who is programmed to push. every. boundary. all. day. I genuinely like him, as a person (hopefully most people feel this way about their kids?), which is I think what makes toddlerhood exhausting: it’s like getting in 10-20 small fights with your best friend every day. You want to experience life with them! You love them! You maybe love slightly less the moments when they’re screaming and writhing on the floor because you broke the news that we do still have to wear our shoes every time we go outside. And that particular example is not a big deal. It’s just that it’s only Piece 1 of the thousand-piece puzzle of getting through a day with a small child.

What I’m trying to say is: this isn’t really about sleeping through the night. It’s about not having deep, clear tranches of space anymore, the kind you need in order to consume the ideas or create the work that takes time and focus. So I think I’ve started telling myself the story that those little moments (like today, on the beach) are all I have—that I should take the opportunity to disappear into another world in those minutes, because I might learn something or have a laugh, and be able to return to reality a better, more regulated version of myself.

When I have the ability to actually sit down and read a full article (and drink a hot coffee, if we’re really shooting for the moon), that story can be true. , , and helped me understand how to get dressed again after having a kid and being like what do I do with my hands clothes. has given me more insight into the book/publishing world than I have any business getting for $5/month. has been making me laugh for years now. I could cite a zillion other women (I don’t really want to add up my paid subscription totals, I don’t need that jump scare) but the point is that consuming other people’s thoughtful content is not the problem.

The problem is not leaving any space to create, because I’m consuming at a velocity that generates a cloud of white noise to fill all the uncomfortable blank spaces of my life.

So here’s what I’m going to try to do, instead of flipping through my phone constantly like a dork.

Today, when we got home from the beach, I ran an experiment. I took a shower while Jude was napping, and instead of listening to a podcast, I wrote this post in my head. I organized my own thoughts in the quiet of my own space, and like…was any of this discourse groundbreaking? No. But the sheer act of doing it made me feel a tiny bit more human, and when I sat down at the keyboard with a towel on my head and it all poured out, I felt more myself than I have in months.

So: I’m going to try to let blank space exist, so that something good can come out of it. Maybe something creative. Maybe something that contributes even the smallest bit toward making this timeline less dark. I’m going to set the phone down. We’ll see where it goes.