Sunday, July 12. I was grouchy all day. I had an idea of how I wanted the day to go, which I had shared with nobody, and then I was frustrated when the day did not go according to my plan. (Please note that I saw a meme about this, searched for it, and couldn’t find it). Plus, it was really hot, and we had spent the afternoon at an event without AC, which compounded my bad mood by about a thousand. When my husband asked if I would help him unload his truck, I asked if we could do it a little later, when the temperature had dropped below 90.

And so, at 8pm, I found myself moving various tools and discarded construction materials from the bed of the truck into the garage. I set down a case of sockets, which promptly rolled all over the ground. “Oh yeah,” my husband said. “That case doesn’t close. I’ll pick them up.” A few moments later, my right leg was sliding out in front of me in a split, my left knee buckling onto the floor as I screamed. I had slipped on a socket, and was writhing on the concrete floor.

At Urgent Care the next morning, they asked if I’d felt a pop. I hadn’t, but I knew when I fell that it was bad. Several days later, the bruising matched the pain: deep purple, spanning groin to knee. By the end of the first week, my quad and calf were bruised as well.

Urgent Care recommended PT, and when I went to my intake session 8 days post- injury, my therapist took one look at the bruising and told me I needed an MRI. She said she rarely saw bruising that extensive with a strain and that it was probably torn. And thus began a week of referrals: my doctor wanted me to see orthopedics before I got an MRI, so I had that appointment and an MRI this week. A couple of hours after the MRI, my results showed up in my portal: Complete tear of the proximal right hamstring tendon from the ischial tuberosity, with 2.5 cm retraction of torn tendon fibers and extensive adjacent hemorrhage. Even before I typed these results into AI, I knew it was bad.

At my MRI reading appointment yesterday, the orthopedic PA said, “yeah, this is basically the worst case scenario.” One of the tendons connecting two of the hamstring muscles to my pelvis has completely torn. I’m having surgery the week after next, the day after my girls start middle school and high school.

And so, we have not escaped the summer without incident. But, as I told my daughters last night, after the surgery, I will get to recover. When my husband had cancer two years ago, he had surgery, recovered, and then started chemotherapy. Some of the wild goose chase of scheduling appointments and waiting for insurance authorizations feel so similar to when my husband was sick; the what if’s too. What if I’d gone straight to the ER when I fell, had an MRI, and gotten right in for surgery?

At the same time, I can step back and talk to myself the way I’d talk to a friend. I can only know what I know in the moment. I will recover and be skiing with my family (green runs only, kind of a good excuse to ski only easy runs?) and get to resume the strength classes I’ve come to love, and get back on the trails with my dog. I can still watch one daughter perform in a musical while the other runs spotlight, still read, still enjoy the fresh cut flowers from my garden and the handful of Sungold tomatoes that are ripening daily. I’ll be able to celebrate my daughter’s and husband’s birthdays this week, get the girls ready for school, and then shift into recovery mode for a couple of weeks on the couch.

PS. Taking book recommendations, podcast recommendations, TV recommendations, movie recommendations. Also accepting alternate stories I can make up about how I injured myself in the first place.

I started with Project Hail Mary, which falls under the “I didn’t think I’d like this but I loved it” category. I started listening to this book when my daughter and I were in Salida, and it kept me company during late-night mountain drives. I loved Rocky and Grace’s friendship so much, and thought the movie was delightful. Amaze, amaze, amaze. Should I read Andy Weir’s other books? My husband and older daughter read The Martian and neither loved it.

Next, I read Into the Blue by Emma Brodie. I both enjoyed this book and also got a little tired of it; I think it could have been 100 pages shorter and been just fine? I did like that the characters met while working at a video store during high school (former New Boston Video and Pizza employee here). As someone who doesn’t particularly care about improv or niche sci fi shows, I liked that this book took me into a world and made me care about it, kind of like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but with improv instead of video games.

I read Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. I had no idea going into it that this book is about kids whose parents are family friends and then have an affair— which hits VERY close to home— but the plot felt fairly far-fetched beyond that setup (a set up which, alas, is not far-fetched). This was one of those books that I plowed through but felt fairly neutral about.

Dolly All the Time, on the other hand, I plowed through and loved. Loved the romance, loved the Red Sox references, loved the characters. I think I’ve read all of Annabel Monaghan’s books, and this was my favorite since Nora Goes off Script.

Next up was Whistler— Libby served this to me on both audio and Kindle at the same moment! A miracle. Ann Patchett narrates the audio book, and it felt like listening to an older friend tell a good story. I love everything Ann Patchett writes, and found the relationships in this book really compelling. And, I appreciated the lovely stepdad/ stepdaughter relationship.

I read Clutch by Emily Nemens after Whistler, a novel about college friends’ relationships as they enter adulthood. This book reminded me of So Old. So Young. by Grant Ginder; honestly, I’m struggling to remember the plots of both at this moment. This was similar to the Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney book in that I enjoyed reading it and then promptly forgot all details.

On our vacation in Sunriver, OR, I dove into The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. At almost 650 pages, I appreciated that this was another book that was miraculously ready for me in both audio and Kindle on Libby. I listened to the first few hours during our very long flight delay on the way there— the audio is fantastic. This book had great characters. If you liked The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, I think you’d like this.

And finally, this weekend in Steamboat, I read The Reservation, which read like an Elin Hilderbrand book. Close 3rd person narration, multiple narrators, a restaurant… this is a quick and fun read.

Right now, I’m rereading The Five Star Weekend in preparation for the show, which comes out this week. And I’m excited to read Kin by Tayari Jones, Down with the Shipmans by Meg Mitchell Moore, and The Burning Side by Srah Damoff— all of which I have from Libby and all of which are due in 18 days. It’s fine. I’m also planning to read Land by Maggie O’Farrell and The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson, and I have a truly massive stack of paper books that I may or may not get to.

What have you read this summer? What’s on your list?

I think that part of this summer’s ease is due to my daughters’ ages. They’re 11 and almost 15, and they’re completely fine on their own for hours at a time. I like being able to walk and hike in the mornings, to attend the women’s weight training class I started in the spring, to lose hours in my garden while they color and listen to audiobooks and watch YouTube. Okay, I do not love the YouTube part of it, and I don’t love saying ninety million times per week, “Please put the dishes in the dishwasher, not just the sink. That’s a good start, but the job isn’t done.” But rather than being the constant source of entertainment and activity, I’m noticing a welcome shift where (at least sometimes) my daughters and I simply coexist during the long summer days. I’m still a chef and a chauffeur and a laundry service, but no longer quite as much of a cruise director.

My standards were pretty low going into the summer. My husband had cancer in the summer of 2024, and last year, we bought a business and my parents moved here, and then moved back to New Hampshire. When school ended this past May, I was hoping for a couple of crisis-free months, and figured anything else was a bonus. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that they’ve enjoyed the activities they’ve done so far, coming home at the end of their days sharing new experiences— a new aerial silks trick, a funny anecdote about a trail ride, a story about wild first grade boys in the camp where my older daughter is a CIT. And, when they haven’t had structured activities, that has gone okay, too. My older daughter is always happy to read, color, and make jewelry. My younger is now old enough for the library teen space, and spends hours there playing board games and zoning out in front of a screen. I’ve decided I’m fine with it; she’s in a public place negotiating other humans, she walks or rides her scooter there, and some weeks include more screen time than others. (Side note: there is so much noise out there on the internet about giving our kids a 90s summer, and I don’t know about you other geriatric millennials, but my 90s summers included epic Nintendo sessions and movie marathons… so, maybe I’m giving my younger daughter a 90s summer in that way? Sharing in case you, too, need a way to rationalize looking the other way about your child’s tech habits, at least sometimes.)

I still get a little anxious when I wake up at the beginning of an unstructured day. The memories of summers past, when my kids have been less regulated and/ or I’ve been parenting through crises, loom large. Unstructured time has not, historically, been a good thing for us. But then, my girls sleep in, and one goes off with friends to get ice cream, and the other starts an art project, and I do some work/ walk the dog/ putter in the garden/ make another iced coffee. We gather outside for dinner each night, which feels like a victory after many years during which one daughter’s fear of bugs kept us indoors for summer meals, our expansive deck largely unused. These small moments are what make summer feel like summer, and for now, I’m savoring the sweet spot.

My eighth grader, who will only be an eighth grader for seven more days, has a three-night, four-day retreat this week, and is staying with me at night while attending the retreat during the days/ evenings. As I type this, I realize that it sounds as though I am helicopter parenting, or snowplow parenting, or whatever other vehicle might fit a situation where a parent swoops (plows?) in and fixes something her child should have been able to do on her own. And I also recognize the privilege involved— both logistical and financial— in my ability to come to Salida this week. But the reason I laughed at the podcast was the assumption that kids don’t go to camp because parents don’t let them. What about kids who, for whatever reason, are unable to be away from home?

I hated sleepovers as a kid, although by the time I was a teenager, I think I’d grown into them- the intimacy of talking late into the night with friends, the novelty of using someone else’s toiletries, of seeing how another family lived, of sliding into a different life for a night and a morning. I went to camp exactly once, for three nights during the summer before fourth grade, and I was homesick for every second of it. When I write about this, or talk about it, I always end with, “and then, I went to college five hours away, spent my junior year in Paris, and moved to Colorado in 2004.” As in, “see, I didn’t like camp or sleepovers, but I still made it out on my own.” But parenting my older daughter has made me question even that narrative. There are many versions of independence.

During a conversation with friends last week, when I shared that my daughter wasn’t staying overnight on this week’s retreat, people offered things that have helped their own kids to be comfortable with sleepovers and travel away from their parents. “What would happen if you just put her on the bus?” one friend asked. It wouldn’t have been an option; she simply wouldn’t have gotten on. When she was a toddler, she’d refer to herself in the third person when she was angry. “Jia doesn’t,” she’d say about anything she did not want to do. We have had many versions of “Jia doesn’t” over the years. Last year, even with my husband there, she didn’t make it through the end-of-year camping trip. “You know, it’s actually fine with me that she’s not staying over,” I said. “She’s been working on so many things, and it’s okay with me if overnights aren’t one of them right now.” As I said it, I realized it was true.

I recognize that for many kids, going away is an important rite of passage. But when I step back and think about what separating involves, I see independence, confidence, a burgeoning sense of self. Even though she is not yet comfortable with overnights, my daughter is developing all of these qualities. She’s doing tech crew for elaborate musicals, managing her time with fewer reminders, applying to and being accepted for different summer volunteer opportunities. And this week, she’s thriving. She’s able to recharge her battery overnight and to participate in the long days with her peers. She is getting what she needs to get out of the week: connection, closure, confidence that she’s ready for high school. If I’d insisted that the week look a certain way, she might have missed the opportunity to participate in a way that feels meaningful to her.

When my older daughter started middle school, I was just starting to learn about autism. I was certain that if we pushed hard enough and wanted it enough, she could attend the charter school we’d planned on. It took a crisis for me to understand just how differently I needed to parent— how many expectations I had to release, how many norms I had to let go of. It’s a work in progress, of course; a push and pull between protecting and releasing, between attaching and letting go. It’s messy and it’s hard, and I get it wrong a lot. But I think I’m getting better at really seeing my daughter, and at untangling the places where I’m parenting from a sense of what we “should” be doing, rather than from a sense of what she needs. I’m grateful for a couple of days away from end of school logistics to celebrate not only how far my daughter has come, but how far I have come as well.

While I drank my coffee to the sound of the running dishwasher and tried not to burn the waffles, I checked my phone. Had I filled out the various permission slips that needed to be filled out? Did I submit the photos for my daughters’ graduation slide shows in the correct formats after receiving an email admonishment for failing to do so, or did I just think about doing that last night? Had I remembered to putthe tie-dye t-shirts I had washed according to the detailed instructions for my older daughter’s upcoming field day into the car?

I woke my daughters and called them to the table. I excavated the waffles from the counter clutter and served them, sighing. I poured not only the maple syrup, but also my own overwhelm about the end of school chaos, a stream of logistics coming out of my mouth. When I finally took a breath, I saw that my younger daughter’s eyes were full of tears on the verge of spilling over.

I thought of something I heard Cheryl Strayed say many years ago, about turning down the volume on your emotions- imagining the dial on a radio, and turning it way, way down. I put my hand out and did the motion, taking the volume from a 10 to a 5. “I’m so sorry,” I said to her. I owned my overwhelm, both at the state of our kitchen and the state of our calendar. “This is not about you,” I said. I moved more slowly. I showed my daughter a capybara video from our favorite Instagram account. I gave her a big hug.

During Covid, I swore that if life ever returned to normal, I’d never complain about being busy again. I remember how awful those pandemic springs felt. I cried through my younger daughter’s zoom pre-k graduation, the end-of-year teacher car parade, the anticlimactic popsicles we ate outside as a feeble attempt at celebration. And then, just a few years later, when my older daughter was home for most of sixth grade, I mourned our lack of closing rituals yet again. I have been thinking about all of this recently as we transition to middle and high school. My youngest started elementary school on zoom; my oldest started middle school in a mental health crisis. My gratitude for my daughters’ health, and for being able to celebrate without a global pandemic, does not erase the stress of having approximately 452 things to do. And, at the same time, it does help me to put it into perspective. I don’t want to sound Pollyanna, but like so many things, the chaos of April and May is both hard and wonderful. What a gift to be “regular” busy.

Despite her hesitation to engage in remote learning, my eight-year-old daughter embraced her Zoom piano lessons during quarantine. This shocked me; she started playing in February of 2020, and after only a few lessons, they made the switch online in March. Piano anchored her as the world she knew changed; her dance recital canceled, her time with her beloved second grade class over, and family visits postponed. Piano, however, continued, and when my daughter’s teacher asked if she would like to do a Zoom recital to commemorate the end of the school year, she pumped her fist and exclaimed, “Yes!” She asked if she could get a new dress (yes), a new hairbow (okay, I guess so), and send evites (okay, why not?).

When I asked who she wanted to invite, my daughter named her second grade teacher, two friends, my brother and his family, and “all of her grandparents.” I clarified that she really meant all of her grandparents, and not just my mom and stepdad and my in-laws, and she told me that she wanted to invite my dad and my stepmom, too. I had noticed a difference in boundaries during quarantine. While we had not seen family in person (they’re two thousand miles away), my dad and stepmom had more access to us than usual. They watched both of the virtual Listen to Your Mother shows I produced and performed in, and when they asked to FaceTime (thankfully only a couple of times) I wasn’t able to make excuses. During quarantine, I couldn’t claim to be busy.

The day of the recital, my mom texted me: Are your dad and stepmom going to be on the piano Zoom call? I replied yes with the “eek” emoji- a yellow face with a tight grimace. My daughter chose her jewelry and pinned back her bangs, now in the awkward stage after three months without a trim during lockdown. She did a twirl in her dress and prepared her American Girl Samantha doll to watch her. I wondered how it would go. Group calls had been hard for her during remote learning, and would it be weird for her to be on a call with her teacher, her divorced and remarried grandparents, her friends, and various other family members? I’m probably just projecting, I thought, as I noticed my armpits were sweating.

We signed on, and as I introduced my daughter’s piano teacher to everyone, I thought about how I had forgotten to tell our wedding photographer that my dad and I had a complicated relationship. He took tons of pictures of my dad at the reception, recording what would be typical “father of the bride” shots: my dad laughing during the toasts; my dad and my stepmom on the dance floor; my dad giving a tired expression, as if he’d just raised a daughter and had experienced a monumental change as she walked down the aisle, a simplified and inaccurate depiction of our relationship. As I looked at the little boxes on the screen during the recital, I felt like there should be some language, some code, some way to designate my mom and my stepdad as my “real” parents. I bet I won’t sleep tonight, I thought, with dread in my stomach.

Although I think of myself as competent in group gatherings, I have a tendency to analyze every social interaction after it happens, mostly at night when I am trying to sleep. I consider book club meetings, for example, from everyone’s perspective. Did I talk too much? I’ll wonder. Did everyone feel heard? Was it weird when one friend complained about her pregnancy? Maybe she didn’t know about another member’s miscarriages. My mom does the same thing, both of us hyper aware of the emotions of those around us.

My daughter greeted the audience with a smile. She played beautifully, carefully finding the notes of the pieces she had diligently practiced over the past several weeks. My dad and my stepmom commented after each song, using their fake, “we’re being caring” tone. “That was wonderful, sweetie,” they’d say, using an enthusiasm that was disproportionate to the beginner-level songs she played, each lasting only twenty to thirty seconds. The rest of the virtual audience watched on mute, and I watched my daughter, not the computer. I wanted to focus on her playing, and I also didn’t want to witness any on-screen awkwardness. When she finished, my daughter took a few questions from her friends, and then squeezed my hand and raised her eyebrows. Done? I mouthed to her. She nodded. We said goodbye, and then stood around for a few moments, feeling the strange letdown of virtual events. I settled my daughter in front of the tv and then flopped down on the couch to text my mom. Phew, I typed. We did it. She typed back Yep. Phew.

Our piano teacher emailed me after the recital to tell me how much she had enjoyed talking with my parents. A little back and forth revealed that my dad and stepmom had stayed on the call to chat with the teacher after everyone else had left. This is a pattern for them. They learn the names of their servers at restaurants and create inside jokes with them, suggesting an intimacy that always felt forced when I witnessed it. They’re good at small talk and casual conversation; my husband and I call my dad “a wedding and funeral guy,” because he likes the pomp and circumstance of it all. It felt fitting they had inserted themselves as “the devoted grandparents,” even though in reality, their interactions with my daughters are limited to an afternoon once or twice per year. They don’t know my daughters’ temperaments, their favorite ice cream flavors, or the names of their friends.

I imagined a conversation between my dad and the piano teacher, where my dad made it seem like a direct line of musical inheritance existed from him to me to my daughter. My dad is a talented musician. He played trumpet in high school, and went on to sing in and then direct the choir of the church where I grew up. We got a piano when I was in second grade so that I could start taking lessons. When I was in seventh grade, two years after my parents’ divorce, I switched from an in-home music teacher to a larger music school in a nearby city. I started playing in a quartet, and had decided to really commit to piano. My dad got me a keyboard for my birthday that year. I didn’t recognize it then as a preemptive consolation prize-- that shortly after, he would take the piano and move it to the home he shared with the family friend for whom he had left us. I remember my devastation, and how, even though we borrowed a small piano from friends, playing piano lost some of its appeal after that. Whereas we had once played “Heart and Soul” together for hours on end, the piano now represented one more way in which my dad had abandoned me.

When I found out my dad and stepmom had stayed on the call, I felt a wave of anger, a boundary being violated. It felt like my dad was implying he played a role in my daughter’s musical inclinations. I thought of my mom, who had been the one to drive me to all of my lessons, to supervise my practices, to do the invisible work. Of the way she still does this for me-- listening to me vent about parenting, giving advice--while my dad is more like a distant uncle. I thought of the history we brought with us— of my mom and dad buying a piano because I wanted to play; of evenings when my mom would pour a glass of wine and listen to me practice; of countless piano recitals and lessons and milestones; of the divorce and the way my dad used the piano as a weapon.

The following week, as I listen to my daughter practice, I will wonder what piano will come to mean to my daughter. As she begins a new piece, her small fingers finding the keys, I will wonder when, and how much, I will tell her about all of this, and I’ll wonder how she will weave the threads of my story into her own.

I open the old “memoir” folders in my Google Drive.

I look up “memoirs about childhood” and put them all on hold at the library.

I devour them one after another and mean to make notes about what I can take from each one, but I don’t, and then I sit at my computer and try to remember whether the line I can’t get out of my head was from The Liars Club or This Boy’s Life.

I organize the files in my Google Drive.

I copy and paste every word I have written about my childhood into one file and scroll through it to feel good about how much I have written. This makes me feel like I’ve written something new.

I take an “Experiments in Fiction” class and write mostly nonfiction.

I have half formed ideas in the shower, and I call to my phone on the bathroom counter, “Hey Siri, start a new note about how I used to feel like being left was the worst possible outcome, but now I know that being unseen in a relationship is actually worse than that.”

I get more serious about hiking and have long exchanges with ChatGPT about whether hiking 2-3 days a week and cutting strength training back to 2 days a week will cause my middle-aged body to do whatever happens to bodies if you don’t lift weights as much as Instagram says you should.

I hike mile after mile through the foothills above my home, thinking about what strands will go into my braided memoir.

I start to tell people, “I’m writing a memoir.”

And now, it’s time to sit down and write it.

I’ve read that in order to find happiness as an adult, you should think about what you loved as a child. I have always loved theater– from the children’s theater we saw at American Stage Festival during the summers in New Hampshire, to going to plays at UNH with my grandparents, to my first musical love, Les Miserables, when I was eleven, followed by years of obsession with Rent. I’ve always reveled in the feeling of being swept up in a play, the audience rapt.

My younger daughter was not excited about yesterday’s play. “Is it old-timey?” she had asked me. “Yes,” I said. “Very old-timey.” She rolled her eyes.

When we entered the theater and made our way to our seats, though, the familiar magic took over. She looked at the giant drum set in the orchestra pit, absorbed the energy of being in community with the rest of the audience, and took the candy out of the purse I had loaned her. She looked at me and she smiled.

The opening notes began, the familiar overture filling the theater. I’ve seen a couple of productions of The Music Man, and watched the movie many times during my middle school musical obsession. Yesterday, I relished the full immersion into River City, Iowa, where there was no dictator bombing girls’ schools, no half-written essays that feel out of date two days after I start writing them, no to do lists or logistics. It was just us and the audience, and we were along for the ride.

I knew my older daughter was enjoying the show; she is deep into theater tech and had selected this show over a couple of other options when we got a gift card to the DCPA for Christmas. But I couldn’t tell what my younger daughter thought until she turned to me at intermission and said, “I love this.”

Watching The Music Man made me feel joyful in a way that I felt when I watched Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and watched the Olympics. It’s the joy of being in community and watching something magical, and right now, it feels like a reclamation. Even when life feels dark, we can marvel together, and this makes me feel hopeful.

You get up to go to the bathroom and get a sip of water and, against your better judgment, you grab your phone from where it is charging in the kitchen. Just to do Merlin Bird ID, to see if you’re right in your guess that the owl is Great Horned. Merlin confirms your hypothesis, and you almost put down your phone. But then you notice a text from someone you’d asked for advice about your older daughter’s high school plans, and you open it, and then you open Instagram, because of course you do. You remember that in addition to waking up because there is a Great Horned Owl outside, you are also awake because you are worrying about your daughter and school for next year, and also because we are living in a dystopian hellscape and who can sleep in this scenario.

You stop scrolling, finally, and put your phone down after setting an alarm, which you will now need since you have been awake for over an hour. You fall back to sleep, finally, and then are jolted awake by the alarm after what feels like only minutes.

You make a cup of coffee. You make your daughters’ lunches. You make their breakfasts. You take out a checklist for your younger daughter, because you are taking a class on parenting children with ADHD, and it has reminded you of the most basic of parenting tenets: the fewer negative interactions and the more positive interactions you can have with your child, the better, and checklists prevent you from saying “Breakfast. Teeth. Hair. Clothes. Socks. Shoes. Lunch” over and over. You wake your children, feed them breakfast, get your youngest out the door on her scooter. You call your senators while your oldest showers. You ask your husband if he’s watched the Jon Stewart video about the second amendment and watch it together.

You chase your dog around the kitchen, because unlike normal dogs, when you ask him if he wants to go for a walk, he sprints around wildly until you have to build a barricade with chairs and stools to trap him. You finally leash him, put him in the car, and drive your oldest to school. You listen to a four day-old Heather Cox Richardson podcast, which at this point, might as well be years old, because the news cycle is moving so quickly that a day feels like a year. The podcast ends and your daughter chooses a song to listen to that will end at the exact moment you pull up to school. You belt out Defying Gravity because even though you are so sick of Wicked, it feels good to sing, and didn’t you read somewhere that it’s good for the vagus nerve?

You drive to the trailhead. You turn off the car and sit. The world feels so hard, and you have the realization that you have periodically, that even when things are relatively smooth with your children, which they are now, they still need so much of you and from you. You reassure yourself: you’re doing a good job. You zip your jacket, let your dog out of the car, and walk.

I usually choose a word of the year, but this year, the practice just doesn’t speak to me. It hit me this morning that 2016 was an entire decade ago. I’m not sure if things are always as hard on a global level as they’ve been for the past ten years, or if I’m just more aware as I get older and as I raise kids. But I can still feel in my body the way it felt when Trump won in 2016, can feel what it felt like when the world shut down in 2020 and when Trump won again in 2024. On a personal level, I can chart the hard things, too. And after 2025, I don’t think that a new word is going to be the thing that turns any of it around.

2026 will be a big year of transition. It’s our last year at the elementary school where my older daughter started in 2017, and where my younger will finish this year. In August, we’ll have a middle schooler and a high schooler. The girls will turn twelve and fifteen.

What I think I need, instead of a word, is to keep doing the things I’m doing: lifting weights, walking with friends, writing with friends, listening to Taylor Swift with my younger daughter, watching Great British Bake-off with my older, sitting on the deck with my husband, napping with our pets. I do want to write more, and to put my phone away more, and to work on responding with more softness when the world feels hard. But I don’t have a word. I don’t have New Year, New Me energy. I just have the same me, showing up imperfectly in my loungewear with a good cup of coffee.

Fourth Wing/ Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros– These books were a great escape, but I admittedly lost steam part way through Iron Flame and have yet to read Onyx Storm. Maybe my thing is reading the beginning of bestselling fantasy series and not finishing them? Last year I read A Court of Thorns and Roses and then no other books in the series… That said, it was fun to read these with my stepdad, and to talk with him and my sister-in-law about them. They provided a really great distraction during a challenging summer! Social media tells me there’s a fourth book coming, so maybe I’ll tackle Onyx Storm ahead of that?

The Change by Kristen Miller and Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman - I wrote about both of these books in this essay. Both books are about women with magical powers, which they use for the good of women in their communities/ the downfall of bad men in their communities. These books felt like an antidote to so many of the awful things happening in the world right now.

Buckeye/ The Paper Palace/ Wreck - I read these three books over the fall, and while the plots are different, they seem to fall into the genre of “slice of life literary fiction,” where the writers immerse their readers in daily life in all its complexity. These are books about families and friends, about loss and love. None of the books come to a neat resolution, and I appreciated that. I have spent the fall immersed in my own struggles, which feel both mundane and complex. I miss my parents and I’m also glad they’re happy. I understand that buying a new business is a big transition, and I’m also tired of the stress in our house. These books felt like reminders that life is always changing– that we can’t know what will come next– and that there is beauty in this, even when it’s hard.

Ready Player One- File under: Another book I had no idea I would love, but did… my husband started listening to this book this fall and suggested that I listen, too, and we had fun talking about it. I would not ordinarily choose a dystopian novel about video games, but the plot is propulsive, and I was really impressed by the level of research that must have gone into this book. I also admired the thoroughness of the world building. I listened a lot while hiking, which was kind of an odd experience– immersing myself in nature while listening to a novel about Virtual Reality- but maybe that’s no stranger than the actual reality we live in right now…

The Correspondent- This has been on every book list/ guide that I’ve seen this holiday season, and for good reason! This was a really quick read, and while I did not listen to the audio, I’ve heard that’s fantastic as well. I always love when audiobooks are narrated by multiple people, and might listen to this at some point. Epistolary novels satisfy some of my deep curiosity about people- it’s like reading someone’s diary, getting a glimpse into someone’s interior in a way that even first-person narration doesn’t do. I was surprised to learn that Virginia Evans is only 39; she did such a great job capturing an elderly protagonist that I assumed she was older. Admirable, for sure.

I Have Some Questions for You- I listened to this 15 hour book over 4 days last week, listening every spare moment I could. I’d had it on hold for ages, and when it became available on Libby, I couldn’t even remember what it was about. When I started listening, I remembered why I was interested in it: Rebecca Makkai, whose novel The Great Believers was fantastic… boarding school novel… set in New Hampshire. Check, check, check. (Also in boarding school novels I couldn’t put down: The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham). IHSQFY made me think a lot about rape culture, and about power dynamics, and also about memory. I did a deep dive on Rebecca Makkai once I finished this book, and heard her say on a podcast that the novelist’s job is to start with something she’s curious about, and then explore it to find more questions. I just love this idea- that writing is not about finding answers, but rather, about illuminating complexity.

And finally, I’m currently listening to / reading The Frozen River for a book club and am loving it. It feels like a grown-up version of the Kirsten American Girl books or Little House on the Prairie, and it makes me remember my elementary school-aged self, who absolutely devoured historical fiction. We are having absolutely insane weather (cough, climate change) and this has been a perfect book to read by candle (and Kindle) light. My texts have gone through intermittently, and I apparently texted one friend multiple times during the power outage to tell her about this book. That’s how much I love it. Sigh.

Let me know what you’ve read and loved in the comments!

The doctor’s eyes widened (clearly he hadn’t read her chart?), and he looked at my daughter. Don’t say it, I thought. Then, he said it: “No way! I’d never have guessed you’re autistic! You definitely don’t seem autistic!” He went on to make it worse. “My son’s autistic too, and he can pass for awhile too, you know, until he’s suddenly talking about Avengers and it’s like, ‘Buddy, we’ve moved on.’” My daughter and I exchanged A Look.

We finished the appointment and scheduled a follow up for six months. In the elevator, my daughter turned to me and said, “I’m not sure what to make of his comment about how he wouldn’t have guessed I’m autistic.” We debriefed, deciding that he probably thought he was giving her a compliment, but in the most oblivious, non-neurodivergence-affirming way possible. I felt suddenly tired as we drove back to Boulder, and I stole glances at my daughter as we approached her school.

There was a time when I would have been flattered by the doctor’s pronouncement, interpreting it as some sort of signal that I was doing the right thing, a referendum on my parenting. Yes, I have an autistic daughter, but you wouldn’t know it! She seems “normal!” I must be doing it right. But that logic, which was never logical to begin with, is rooted in the fundamental belief that neurodivergence is somehow less than. It implies that neurotypical is something to strive for, a benchmark she could reach if she and I tried hard enough. It’s rooted in stereotypes about what autism looks like, ignoring my daughter’s lived experience.

Throughout the afternoon, I thought about what to do. My daughter seemed to be okay after our conversation, so maybe I should just let it go, especially since we only need to see this doctor every six months. But, when I picked her up from school, I said, “You know, I think we should find a different specialist. He may have been trying to give you a compliment, but we don’t need to go back to him.”

When we learned that my daughter was autistic almost three years ago, I spent a lot of time clinging to the modifier “high functioning.” But the more I have learned about autism, and the more my daughter has integrated this diagnosis with everything she already knew about herself, the less important it feels to add “high functioning.” Now, I can recognize the harm I caused in service of trying to adhere to the “high functioning” modifier.

There are some aspects of my daughter’s neurodivergence that require me to follow her lead. For instance, she prefers to say she’s autistic than to say that she “has autism,” because autism isn’t a disease, it’s a descriptor, and I make sure to use her language. But, in this case, it felt important to show her that I’ll remove her from situations where adults are ignorant. That I’ll take the lead in finding neurodivergent-affirming practitioners. That I do know she’s autistic—that I see her, that I support her.

As an eleven year-old, her blond hair is darker, her lips are a little chapped, her mouth is full of braces, and she has sadly inherited my spilling propensities; we both spill on ourselves constantly (I obviously do not have sponsors for this Substack, but I think Tide Stick would be a really great sponsor. Sigh). She seems eleven. She loves memes and Taylor Swift and has the same curiosity she was born with. As a baby, she’d stop breastfeeding when she heard my older daughter’s voice, turning her head with a mouthful of milk to see what her sister was doing. Yesterday, at the orthodontist, she turned to the hygienist and asked if there were any major issues, or if everything was pretty typical for a kid her age. She wanted to discuss tooth density with the orthodontist and asked him several questions as he explained her recent x-ray. She loves all things new and novel, hence our plan tonight to have dinner at the sushi place with a conveyor belt. Sushi with a side of dopamine.

We spent most of Thanksgiving Break in Moab for the third year out of the past four. Part of the tradition includes at least one of us having a bad cold, and we delivered on that front, but thankfully, nobody was so sick that we couldn’t explore and adventure. We returned to Fiery Furnace in Arches, checked out Dead Horse Point for the first time, and hiked to Corona Arch on our way out of town on Friday.

Last year, as we pulled away from our rental, we booked another— larger, with room for my parents and their dog— for this year. I had a low point a few weeks ago where I wondered why we hadn’t changed our plans once they moved back to New Hampshire. But, we didn’t cancel, and instead, I felt my parents’ absence and made some room for it. So much of this fall has been about embracing “both/and.” I both loved being with my husband and our daughters, and I missed my parents— especially on my stepdad’s birthday and on Thanksgiving.

I have not been writing. It’s not like I’m having writer’s block; that would imply that I am attempting to write. But writing has kind of fallen off my radar this fall as we’ve been in the throes of a new business. I was listening to a year-end wrap-up episode of the Bad on Paper podcast this morning, and it made me think about the distance between where I’d like to be with my writing and where I am. I’m setting up some accountability measures with my writing friends (that makes it sound really official- really it’ll be texting each other about what we’ve accomplished), and I think this will help. I really need external accountability when it comes to writing, and I know that I feel better when I am consistent.

This whole “wanting to write more” makes me think about the tension between wanting to hold myself accountable and wanting to give myself some grace/ cut myself some slack/ whatever idiom fits. On one hand, it makes sense that writing has slipped during a busy time for my family. On the other, there will always be a reason not to write, an excuse not to make any progress on my goal of writing a book. I’m going to look into some workshops and classes and sign up for something in the New Year.

In a nod to my grandmother, Rena, who was born a hundred years ago last month and passed away six years ago, I bought both girls holiday outfits this year— dresses that they can wear to both holiday events and also to unspecified and currently unplanned events in the future. I feel disproportionately proud of myself for this, especially since my younger daughter’s wardrobe consists entirely of sweatpants and tees; it’s not like we could throw together a decent holiday outfit from her existing wardrobe. Tomorrow, we’re going to watch one of my younger daughter’s friends’ performances, and the girls will be in their dresses, and we will get Starbucks drinks in festive cups on the way home.

We have enough holiday plans that it feels festive, but not so many that I feel frantic. I’m looking forward to my favorite holiday activity of all: sipping coffee by the tree. And, since I am now holding myself accountable, picking up my pen and my journal at the same time.

I do not love Halloween.

I love how much my daughters love it. But I do not like to dress up. I do not like to carve jack o’ lanterns. The years I’ve worn costumes as an adult, they’ve been lackluster at best, and my pumpkin carving skills end at crooked triangular eyes and noses, and a mouth whose teeth are always fewer in number than I anticipate, thanks to my poor carving. My husband, on the other hand, is a master pumpkin carver. Starting during the pandemic, the girls would choose elaborate designs, scoop out a ceremonial handful of pumpkin guts, and disappear to play while my husband cut and created. The end results were Calvin and Hobbes silhouettes, Pokémon characters, minions, emojis.

This year, I tried to set the girls’ expectations lower. I knew my husband had late nights at work this week, and I prepared them for more manageable jack o’ lantern designs. “Think of an easy design,” I said, “and then make it even easier.” And still, yesterday afternoon, after I’d spent the majority of the day procuring pumpkins, making Pillsbury slice and bake cookies for my fifth grader’s Halloween party (see also: lower expectations), and hauling out the decorations, my oldest asked, “Could you help me carve the Wicked movie logo?” while my youngest wanted the logo of a K-Pop band.

“Girls,” I said. “I’m sorry. When I say I can’t, I truly mean it. You’re welcome to try, but this is not in my skill set.”

My younger daughter started to spiral. This year, Halloween has felt like a stand-in for all of her nearly eleven year-old worries. Fitting in, doing what everyone else does. I can recognize her concerns as primal questions: Do I belong? Am I okay?

A couple of weeks ago, the same daughter asked, out of the blue, “Mom? What’s better about being an adult than being a kid?” It caught me off guard, as her questions often do. I told her that I feel like I’m better at adulthood than I was at childhood. That I remembered being her age and having the same worries she has now, about whether I fit, about whether I was doing the right thing. I did not tell her that I had those same worries as a grown up. That when my girls were little, there were years when I was convinced that if we had the right bento boxes, or if I looked a certain way, I would somehow unlock a version of motherhood that seemed to be working for the other moms I knew. I didn’t tell my daughter that it took their neurodivergent diagnoses, just a few years ago, for me to realize that not only was it not necessary to strive for this vague ideal version of motherhood, but it simply wasn’t possible for us. I remember that time as devastating, but also as freeing.

Last night, as my older daughter committed to a mediocre, triangle-eyed jack o’ lantern, which she carved almost entirely on her own, I helped my ten year-old work through what to do with her pumpkin. I suggested hopefully that we scrap the whole thing and watch a movie, but she ended up painting it. Later in the evening, she looked at the finished product and said, “I just can’t believe how good it looks.” The pumpkins were nothing great, but they were done, and the girls were proud.

Clearly, my Halloween expectations are the opposite of perfectionistic. But here’s the thing: even creating an average Halloween is a lot of work. I’ve found myself longing for the years when the girls were little, and their costumes were based on a soft set of pajamas with some accessories, or involved throwing on a princess dress over a winter jacket. The stakes feel higher now, and they felt even higher when I realized I had overslept this morning. And yet, my older daughter didn’t balk at my poor application of her green Elphaba makeup. My youngest looked joyful when I saw her freezing in her tank top during her last elementary school parade. She gave me a huge smile before turning back to her friends, knowing that a Halloween party was next. Despite her worries and my own, Halloween makes even my mediocre abilities seem magical enough.

I get up and brew the coffee. I’m grateful to my last-night-self for arranging the pillows on the couch, and spraying and wiping the counter, and scrubbing the sink. I sit in the darkness, thinking that now, it’s almost 5, and 5 is almost an acceptable time to wake up. I do Wordle and scroll. Thirty minutes pass, and I go downstairs work out.

A friend texts me about RFK’s coming announcement, which I didn’t realize was going to happen- apparently, today he will tell us the causes of autism? We joke about our Tylenol use during pregnancy. I make a mental note to prepare my older daughter for this announcement; understandably, she’s full of rage any time RFK makes an unfounded claim about autism or disabilities.

I work out, empty the dishwasher, make lunches for my daughters. I email the dance studio where the girls are starting a class to ask what footwear they need. I email my older daughter’s special ed teacher.

I enlist our dog for wakeup duty, which involves him rolling all over the girls. When this does not work, I blast the Descendants soundtrack for my ten year-old. “I’m rotten to the core” I sing loudly to her. I’m going for playfulness, but I’m about three minutes away from being frustrated by the length of the day I have already lived, and by the task of getting both girls out the door.

My fourteen year-old emerges. I look at the clock, 7:20, and remember that she starts at 9am today at the elementary school, and not the middle school, because Mondays and Thursdays has an elective that allows us to drop her later and closer. We usually wake her at 7:45 on Mondays. “Well,” I say brightly, “Now you have time to work on your social studies essay.” Again, my tone is harsher than I intend.

My husband and I move around the kitchen preparing breakfasts, now both fully locked into everything our fourteen year-old has to do. She eats her crepe in silence, completely shut down from starting a Monday with a barrage of to-do’s from her parents. Meanwhile, our ten year-old still has my phone, which is no longer playing Descendants but rather an obscure K-Pop band she has discovered in the wake of her K-Pop Demon Hunters obsession, and she’s still in bed. I retrieve the phone, which she follows blindly to the counter.

We deliberate about whether she has to eat breakfast (she does). She forces down several bites of yogurt as she agonizes about her dental appointment this afternoon. Somehow, she makes it through her checklist of morning tasks, and pumps her fists in the air when my husband offers to drive her since she has Instrumental Music on Mondays and needs to bring her cello. They leave, and I turn back to my fourteen year-old.

“That was a crummy start, huh?” I say. She nods. “Why don’t you get ready for the day, and then I’ll help you outline the rest of your essay, if you want.” Another nod.

I sit down to eat my own breakfast, and hear my cat chirping his tell-tale chirps that signify the presence of birds not only at our bird feeder, but even more exciting, on the cable railing. Yesterday, I refilled the suet and the black oil sunflower seed, as well as the hummingbird feeder. I stand and eat my daughter’s discarded yogurt, to which I’ve added berries and granola, and watch birds with the cat.

“Momo, look at those birds!” I say. He chirps back a response. I pick him up to give him a different vantage point. He nuzzles my chin with his head and purrs at the house finch and the nuthatch.

Then, a new visitor: a downy woodpecker, which we have seen before, but maybe never at the feeder? It perches on the suet, and then stands on top of the wooden stand my husband made for the hanging feeders. Momo squeaks his approval. I call my daughter, whose shower is done, to come and look. We stand together and watch the cat watching the birds. “Do you want help with your essay before we leave?” I ask her. She nods, and I type a few notes into my notes app while she dictates them.

We drive to school in an easy quiet, and then I have thirty minutes for a walk before I meet my writing group. There is so much to hold: the current political landscape, collecting what my girls need for their extracurriculars, the impending transitions to new schools for both kids next year. But there is also this: a cat watching birds, and a sunny trail that opens up before me.

My parents moved to Boulder in June, a move that was a long time in the making. They were here for a little over two months. Last weekend, they left to return to my hometown in New Hampshire, where they’re under contract on a new house. The reasons for their return are numerous and complicated, and I suspect that it will take me a long time to untangle them. For now, I am in a familiar place of grieving. My sadness feels like a place I have visited frequently over the past five years as my family has faced both mental and physical health challenges.

I know how to be resilient, and I know what to do. Garden. Read. Nap. Pet my dog and cat. Watch mindless TV with my kids. Walk with friends. Sip coffee on the deck with my husband. Go to therapy. I signed up for an online writing class with an instructor that I love, and I ordered some perennials, and I opened Substack for the first time in months. Maybe I will open my memoir document next. When the bigger picture feels too big, I move forward, one word at a time.

I am ready for a break from saying things like, "Please don’t paint your nails on our new(ish) dining room table,” and from constant food preparation, and from the pull between not wanting to over schedule my kids’ summer and not wanting to listen to one more complaint about boredom. I am, of course, ready for a break from tech negotiations.

This summer, when things have felt hard, I’ve alternated between thinking, “at least we are healthy,” and “some of this feels a lot like cancer.” The unknowns of my parents’ house search and of starting our business, the feeling that somehow we should know what you can only know if you’ve experienced something before.

A year ago right now, my husband was experiencing intense side effects from chemo. I was caring for him and trying to figure out how to make my older daughter’s thirteenth birthday feel special after a terrible year for her. Last week, my husband seemed positively joyful as he left for his new job in his new truck. My daughter did stage crew for a play and learned to work the spotlight, and when the play was over, she felt let down. The difference between supporting her through the emotion that comes from finishing something meaningful, versus being in a mental health crisis, feels palpable.

Of course, my gratitude about my daughter’s mental health and my husband’s physical health doesn’t negate the stress I’ve experienced lately, and my skin tells the story through breakouts and dark circles under my eyes from too many 4am wakeups. I am holding a lot right now, and part of me feels sad that we’ve had so much stress recently. But I’m reminding myself that this is a transition, and that my parents will find a home they love, and we will settle into our new business, and the girls will get into the routine of a new school year. I’m reminding myself that it isn’t the end of summer— just of summer break. We still have lots of summer evenings ahead, sitting on the deck with my parents, dogs playing, dinner grilling, hummingbirds buzzing, as summer fades to fall.

When I hear the cat at the door, the light is making its way through the blinds, just barely, and before I look at the time, my guess is that it’s 5am. My daughter turns to me.

“What’s that,” she asks, suddenly alert.

“Just Momo,” I tell her. I try to slip out of bed and into the living room, but I can hear her talking to our dog, and I know she is up for the day.

Miraculously, even though my daughter often sleeps in our room, and even though the cat almost always wakes me in the early hours of the morning, this is the first time he’s woken my daughter. Even so, I feel a dread encoded in my body from my girls’ early years, where days started before dawn and by daybreak, we had already done a thousand things. I’ve come to recognize this dread as being about my own capacity, and not about my daughters’ tiredness itself. I’m not worried about them being tired, but rather, that it will be hard for me when they’re tired.

I’ve been listening to the podcast IMO this summer— Michelle Obama’s new creative project with her brother, Craig. I’ve found myself referencing it frequently, taking solace in their pragmatism and wisdom while the world feels increasingly out of control. On a recent episode, they talked about how parents in my generation, and younger generations, seem to expect that parenting should be easy. They talked about their parents and extended family, and about the idea that life was often hard. “You don’t have to fix it all for your kids,” they said. This is a lesson I learn and relearn in perpetuity, and it feels especially helpful during summer break, which can be both wonderful and challenging.

I know screens are complicated— I’m typing this to the soundtrack of the beeps of my kids’ Nintendo Switch, and I don’t claim to have this figured out. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that negotiating screens is my least favorite part of parenting right now, and I hesitate to even write this next part in case it comes across as preachy. But I have been noticing the times when I allow my kids to do more screen time, and noticing the difference in how it feels to say to myself, “It’s summer, and we’ve been swimming all day, and it’s fine with me if they do an extra hour,” and “My daughter is is bored and I don’t want to listen to her complain.” I may still give her the Nintendo in the second situation, but this reframe has allowed me to consider an alternative: that sometimes, I can show her that it’s okay to be bored. That I can hold her discomfort. That it’s okay for things to be hard sometimes, without me fixing it for her, or for myself. I’m working on not just telling her that she can handle boredom, but also allowing myself to believe it. To say it without clenching my jaw, or giving her the message that it’s too hard for me- both with my words and with my body language.

The same applies to non-screen related parenting concerns, too. I tend to overprepare the girls for transitions, starting well before they need to do whatever it is they’re going to do next. “In 37 hours, you’ll need to brush your teeth.” “When you finish the meal that I’ve yet to prepare for you, please put your dishes on the dishwasher.” Yes, preparation is good, but when I constantly bombard them with tasks and reminders, it’s more about managing my own frustration than it is about helping them to navigate their responsibilities.

“If I get up now, will I be really tired today?” my daughter asks, a note of worry in her voice. Oh god, I think. I can hear times I’ve admonished her about how she’d be tired if she didn’t get to bed, or otherwise previewed a potential distress. I take a breath.

“You may be a little tired, but you’ll be fine. You’ve had nights where you didn’t get much sleep before.”

I say this to her, and also to myself.

In other news, my mom and Dana are here, and Rocket is showing Scout all about being a Boulder dog.