Now I’m realizing that you don’t need more time to make a big decision. You just need to find a way to hear yourself. Probably some low-quality shrooms would have done the trick but I opted to make my friends listen to me wring my hands about it for a year instead. Oops!!!

At one point, I made a spreadsheet called ‘Where to Live’ where I scored cities on weighted metrics. This was more about my interest in setting up a spreadsheet and formulas and formatting it to look cute. Probably also an exercise in avoiding my real, paid work.

I can’t remember what the top-scoring cities were now. But I know I looked at the “winners” of my little mathlete competition and thought immediately, “well I’m not moving there.”

Ultimately, it was a vibes-based decision. I wish I knew another way. We moved to Cleveland because it has sauce and because we could afford to live there.

Read more

I’m sitting at my second PNC bank location of the day on the east side of Cleveland and Banker Shawn with a w is hesitating over my request. I’m nervous. It’s 5:16 and he mentions that it’s a good thing I came in when I did because he is supposed to leave at 5:30. I hear this message as both sincere and coded. Shawn wants to get the fuck out of here but also Shawn knows he is the most capable person at the branch. I can’t linger too long on the knowledge that Shawn might be the most capable person at the branch or I might get short of breath.

Sometimes you walk into a place like a bank or a Mr. Tire or a Taco Bell and you’re carried aloft in the arms of angels in fireproof polos. They’ve handled a version of your crisis a dozen times that day already, be it a jagged nail through the minivan’s bald front tire or a pregnant woman’s need for a large Baja Blast from the drive-thru lest she do a spree killing because it’s 87 degrees outside and she’s five days past due. You are crowdsurfed from team member to team member, vulnerable yet safe, no one is surprised by your emergency, they are in fact bored by it. You are being emailed a ‘how’d we do’ survey before you even really come to!!

And sometimes you walk into a second bank branch because the first branch didn’t know what you meant and you find yourself asking, hey, is my mother Australia’s greatest gift to the world, character actress Toni Collette?? and am I precious little beady-eyed Haley Joel Osment?? because

I

SEE

DEAD

PEOPLEEEEEEEE

Shawn confesses he hasn’t written this kind of letter before and doesn’t know how to submit it in the system. It’s now 5:21. The branch closes at 6. My house closing is tomorrow morning at 10.

We bought the new house in June, moved in July, and had a few false starts trying to sell the Maryland house. So far it’s been one month of double mortgage and bill payments, and the goal is to keep it to one month “only” of that business because we’re not really in a “second-home income bracket” no matter what the lender said!! And because Nick’s job ended in May, we’re just on my income in a precarious and uncertain market. So getting rid of the house in which we no longer live, and as quickly as possible, is important to me.

Last week something occurred to me, as it started to look like we really would get to sell the Maryland house once and for all soon. Kind of floated into my awareness like Glinda in her bubble. Maybe four years ago, we’d taken out a home equity line of credit at PNC, better known as a HELOC, on the house to tackle some high-interest debt.

We paid it off a few months later, and I basically stopped thinking about it. No sense in closing the line and dinging our credit, so we just kept it open with a zero balance, and then both of us forgot about it. I think there was a $50 annual servicing fee hooked up to autopayment. Truly, what HELOC?

Uh, but you can’t sell a house that a bank has as collateral!! and in the middle of last week, I started making phone calls to PNC which every associate answered by saying, “I’m glad you called.” I hate to admit, that line worked on me. Are we friends????

These phone calls are how I learned that officially, it takes 10 days to close this type of account. To start this 10 day window, you must submit your request in writing and send it in the mail. You can’t do it over the phone, you can’t do it online, you can’t do it in a branch.

In the era of docusigning your life away in Comic Sans, of water stolen and polluted so that we have enough compute to rewrite “scary” emails for us, technological efficiency and convenience has always been for the shareholders. It’s never been for us.

Where else to turn but the public library? We hauled ass to the library, wrote up our request, hit print. Three copies. Who knows what I might spill on it in the car to Fedex. At Fedex, we’d already missed the “overnight” cutoff so we were given the chic opportunity to pay $50 to have the letter arrive in a lockbox in Pittsburgh, not the next day, but the morning after that.

From there, it was calling every day to get an update.

Can I get an email notification when the letter is received? Can I get an email confirming the closed account? What can we do in terms of documentation?

Well no, but you can always call back!

Ok, that’s honestly so perfect because, and you had no way of knowing this? but I actually have a phone :)

Finally, the moment arrive that I logged into my PNC account and the HELOC finally showed as closed. I took a screenshot and sent it to the very capable paralegal named Michele who is handling the house settlement. “Will this work to confirm closure?”

Unfortunately, no, I would need a letter, and that letter needed to be faxed to the law firm.

Literally no worries, I have always endeavored to elevate the faxing arts and other folkways in my work as a stressed-out bitch responsible for air traffic control of hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate assets.

So here we are, in the bank, where “Dancin’ in the Moonlight” is playing. Shawn tells me he will issue the fax “in the system” and it will arrive at the law firm “in 15 minutes” and this immediately tells me that I will need to start using malicious mental control.

A promise of sending the fax “in the system” that will arrive “in 15 minutes” is exactly what the customer service person on the phone had told me, and Michele had let me know that no such fax ever arrived, landing me in this very brick-and-mortar PNC branch while Nick manages our small herd of chupacabras at home.

I was now Svengali and it was my moment to turn this perfectly nice banker into the world-class singing sensation I knew he could be for me. I wished I had put on some lip gloss!!

Last week, I flashed a big smile at a middle school custodial worker who helped me with some school questions and the man blushed down to his neck like a Honeycrisp apple.

That interaction confused me! At 40, I have become invisible crone to some, but for a subset of non-skeazy older men, could I now be an age-appropriate objet that was not previously popping out of their Magic Eye painting??? No longer too close in age to their daughters?? Many such mysteries continue to be served to me on the sushi conveyor belt of aging.

I fear I was not giving an aura of feral milf, though. My bangs were flat, unwashed. My cuticles were scabbed over from nervous biting. The stem of my menstrual cup stabbed at me. I was probably working on a big ol’ bloodstain. Pale pink jeans, of course. I cracked my knuckles, even the one that hurts when I do that.

"Do you have a fax machine here? Can we just write the letter together? I’ll tell you exactly what to write.”

I smiled in a way that is maybe considered sex work.

“We usually just do it in the system…”

“I honestly think just having a statement with my account number on the PNC letterhead is going to do it.”

Shawn glanced at his Apple watch. I couldn’t read the display but I had just checked my own watch: 5:26.

Now we were college classmates, unlikely partners in a group project where both of us were angling for biggest dead weight. Let’s go, Shawny boy. You and me. Cs get degrees.

I spoke the sentences slowly to him, the way you do when you’re dictating for someone.

He made a cover letter. He issued the fax.

In the parking lot, I pushed the button that starts my Nissan when my keys are in my purse. Tire pressure light on. Twenty-eight miles to empty. I sent an after-hours email to Michele, right there from the parking lot, letting her know there would be the fax we discussed waiting for her and to let me know if it would work!!!!

I decided I was going to stop to buy beer on the way home, and then two seconds later, decided I didn’t have it in me. I was now an Express train. I would be going straight home. It was 5:38.

That night in bed, I told the entire story to Nick, everything since last week, all of which he already knew because he was there or because I had called him from the car to tell him. I was not trying to entertain, I was not even trying to inform, I was trying to get it out of me like a toxin I was binding to a charcoal milkshake.

“You’ve been doing so much,” he said, “You need a break.”

“I want to be a loser who can’t do anything and who just watches things get done around me,” I said.

Nick has been doing a lot too, but, he would definitely agree!!..not as much as me.

We bought a house, we’re selling a house, we did a million fiddly little home repairs for the sale, each of them costing low four figs it would seem, we rented two different kinds of trucks, there was a junk hauler named Shorty involved, we had to empty a storage unit, we had to direct the relocation of one of those horrible PODS, we asked friends to mow for us, to manage access to the house for us, other things for which we are so grateful, there’s new bath mats, new shower curtains, there’s school registration, sourcing an automotive locksmith on a Sunday morning in rural Maryland, finding doctors in the new neighborhood, transferring prescriptions, and in June, for literally no reason, we went to Colombia for 9 days as a family. Our plates are expired. We have a mysterious sewer bill for $2,000 that we’re just pretending doesn’t exist??? We need to update our driver’s licenses.

I woke up this morning and Michele had answered my email. She had received the fax. The fax was gonna work. By 10 a.m., we had signed the papers.

Then I told the story again, this time here, still not quite free of the poison.

But tonight? Tonight I’m gonna be a loser. I will not be making anyone sing for me. The way I’m going to be a loser tonight? It’s gonna peel paint. The stoics will weep, the way I’m going to be a loser tonight. It’s not really been done before! You’ll see.

yr mate,
Evie
###

1. Pitching any amount of perfectly usable chili crisp

2. Moving a condiment interstate

3. Going to make, I don’t know, a fried egg before we move and wanting to use chili crisp, but having none left

These kinds of exercises keep the romance with myself alive. The home fires burning. A little game of blackjack with no stakes but my own weird priorities. Hit me.

Another bit I’ve been doing, inadvertently..I’ve been conducting myself like an eccentric older woman, the kind who approaches strangers in restaurants to make proclamations.

There is a family I see on Saturday mornings, when young families in my town hit all the spots. (Farmer’s market → nonprofit kid’s art studio → library → home for lunch.)

The mom and both little girls have curly hair that is always perfectly maintained. It looks damp to the touch, like it’s just been refreshed, every curl a discrete unit, unmussed. As someone whose kids rarely look tidy (as an adult woman who rarely looks tidy..), I admire this commitment to personal care. It’s effortful.

Last weekend, I just told her this instead of thinking it. “Your girls’ hair always looks so neat.” We had never had a conversation before. She attempted to demur but I overrode her, an important part of being temporarily possessed by a woman of a certain age with something to say.

I used to compliment people all the time. I wrote my friends love letters. I emailed writers of articles I loved. I told strangers which celebrities they resembled. There was a sort of naive ego to it: people are probably dying to hear this! I was overly familiar. I mistook discomfort or remove for reflexive modesty. I actually didn’t know that, unlike me, many people have confidence independent of external feedback. For example, the lady whose girls have tidy hair knows that her girls look great. She is the one putting in the work!

I guess since I’m skipping town I am indulging in some of this intense verbal noticing again. It feels retro and fun, like a ciggy on vacation. And I know that I’m disappearing soon, so why not make it weird.

At that same art studio, I see a pregnant woman who looks full-term. She has a small frame and her belly is shaped like a football, point side out. I clock that she has two small kids with her and, yippee, here’s my big opportunity to waste her time.

“Going for a third? That’s great! I have three, too.”

It’s risky to imply a stranger is pregnant, even if they are shaped like a football. She nods at me, friendly but not inviting further conversation.

What was I going to say? Did I hope she would ask me how it was? And what’s my answer to how it is having three?

It’ll be fine. Wait, actually, how rich are you? That helps.

How useless is your husband? Be honest.

It’s actually pretty chill, I mean, you know how it is, you have kids, so, you know, your life is already ruined, what’s another one, right? Ha ha ha but actually when my third baby turned 3, it kind of fell apart for me, personally. She’s more like my oldest, who was a really tough toddler. He has ADHD, she probably does, too. It’s so heritable, their dad and I both have ADHD but we weren’t diagnosed as kids, probably because they weren’t really diagnosing that much back then unless you were like, setting fires in the classroom or whatever ha ha. I’d say we did fine, but I’m not really sure that we did, actually? I got so behind my senior year of high school that I stopped going to class, which compounded everything and made it so much worse, I was worried that my college acceptances were going to get recalled. I was forging my own absence notes and everything. And then my husband, you know, he graduated college a year early because of all the credit he got in high school so he was kind of beached onto the shores of the world at barely 21 years old and he had racked up all this credit card debt because back then, you know, they were giving you free Quizno’s subs on the college quad if you signed up for a Capital One card or whatever. All that was legal back then, I know. And so he had this really active and curious mind but was working three or four part-time jobs just trying to stay afloat and the path out of that never really materialized for him until his late 20s. But yeah, my parents saw my struggles with executive function as character flaws so I didn’t really know how to get the support I needed. But anyway, we’ll keep an eye on things with my youngest, early intervention is so key. But yeah, your third will be your easy one, I’m guessing, you’re owed that!! Hopefully your maternity leave stretches into the fall and you can get some crispy cool stroller walks in, although honestly, with my last baby, I was getting a two-digit daily step count, I was really focused on watching as much HBO as possible, which I recommend, but yeah, congratulations, that’s so exciting, it’ll be great.

Anyway, we didn’t have the conversation so I didn’t even have to find out what sort of shit I was going to say to her. One thing about me that’s gotten worse as I reach year three of working from home full-time is that I find out what is going to come out of my mouth at the same time as everyone else.

I am working through a 2-lb bag of pitted medjool dates. Who bought these dates and pushed the entire bag to the back of the cabinet? I like dates just fine but I forget they exist for years at a time.

There was a stretch in 2015-2016 when I was making these peanut butter date bars obsessively every week and pretending it was some sort of granola protein breakfast situation and not very obviously: dessert. And then at the end of each of my pregnancies, I was eating handfuls of dates every day and why was that? It was going to make my cervix into a slip ‘n’ slide or something?

Other than that, I go years without thinking about dates. Now dates are my job. Dates on the table at dinner. Dates for every snack. If you think I am going to throw a single date in the trash????

My father-in-law lived alone and died with a fully stocked refrigerator. We stayed at his house for the funeral, my family and Nick’s brother’s family, but we had to leave the next day. We’d been there a week. The kids had to go back to school. The adults had to go back to work. The house was going to sit empty for months.

Once, I moved into an apartment with a refrigerator full of rotten meat, the interior walls speckled blue-gray with mold. The owner or previous tenant had unplugged the refrigerator. We were in a heat wave, no central A/C. It was an emergency. There was nowhere for us to store our food. I was pregnant and I thought the rolling waves of revulsion and anger might cause me total organ failure. Nick kicked me out of the kitchen to deal with it, which took hours. We had spent all day driving and then moving boxes and now this. I’m pretty sure Nick took two showers afterwards, one for the mold and one for the sweat.

Before we left my father-in-law’s house, I pulled every jar, every container, every jug, every item from his fridge and binned it. I sprayed it all down until the bleach made me woozy. I felt shame hearing the glass jars clank together in the huge black trash bag. We know recycling is mostly a scam and yet not doing it feels so antisocial. But I couldn’t be rinsing out salsa jars. I had three little kids to get on the road.

Nick’s dad was a neat man. We teased him for ironing his jeans. We couldn’t leave his house to fester.

There are people here in town that I have stopped saying hi to because I never really liked them. Before, I needed to keep the community gears lubed. They worked at the college with me or our kids were in sports together or whatever. I can’t really defend this…rudeness? as an M.O. but I also don’t have the energy to spare.

I’ve heard there is a going-away party for us in the works and I might attend that bringing all of our pantry goods and condiments that didn’t get spent down. I’ll insist that people take everything and even if they throw it away before they get home, I won’t know. I’ll have righted the outstanding wrong from the post-funeral fridge cleanout incident. Someone will have to take the dates. Because I’ve eaten so many this past week that they’ve started to look like cockroaches.

We’ll start again in a new place and I’ll meet people and I’ll find out the sort of stuff I say to potential new friends at the same time as they do. I will have new local beef to discuss with Nick. We’ll do a massive grocery haul the day we move in, the kind where we’re buying jarred jalapeños and miso and a jug of olive oil that goes up to my kneecap.

“You’ll make friends so fast in 2nd grade your head will spin,” I told Jane the other night at bedtime.

“That is so unsettling,” she said, a 35-year-old child.

And then she said, “But it won’t be the same.”

It won’t be the same, I said because it’s true.

yr mate,
Evie
###

It’s not fair, really. Desi, for all his challenges, has that Garcia affability and inclination towards a sunny outlook. Jane favors a more Ebert-ian moodiness and occasional volatility. I’ve been trying to spend as much time as I can with Nick since I met him, but I am almost always trying to get away from myself. So things are really stacked against Jane here.

Often, as an adult youngest child, I identify strongly with my younger kids for their experiences being tarnished by an older sibling correcting or diminishing. But lately, I feel for my eldest, who is always having to yield to the emotional temperature and capacity of the younger kids in the house.

We can’t just play a goofy board game at an ice cream shop, because every game has a loser, and few seven-year-olds can accept that. I told Nick later that I didn’t think Desi was ever that nuclear trying to play a game, and he looked at me, astonished.

He reminded me that we had a whole bit we did with Desi in order to survive any type of game. If you pulled a bad card, or suffered some flavor of in-game defeat, you had to perform being a sore loser. Desi, a true thespian, loved “pretending” to be mad about his misfortune. Sometimes, the tears of his true disappointment would break through as he was “in character” pitching a fit. He’d blink them back and keep going.

Wouldn’t it be (chin quiver) funny to care about the outcome (eyes watering) of this game? Ha ha ha ha ha.

Timmy Chalamet could never.

I remembered a night in Puerto Rico, frogs chirping their smoke alarm battery sounds into the thick air, mosquitoes feasting, and Desi and I were playing jumbo chess on the hotel grounds. I claimed one of his pieces and he freaked out, kicked over all the pieces like a kung fu movie sequence, and took off running into the pitch black night. He was…as I’m doing the math here…exactly seven years old.

The next day, I took them bowling and tried to head off any ruptures in the car on the way.

“None of us are good at bowling, and none of us are bad at bowling. Someone is going to get the highest score, though, and we all need to be prepared that we may not be the person with the highest score.”

Jane looked at me like I had lost the plot. “We’re just doing it for fun, right?”

For one hour of bowling, it cost us $52.50 plus $21 for shoe rentals ($7/each). Then another $20 for a grilled cheese, hot dog, and fries. I nearly slipped into a Larry David-ish fit of despair over spending $100 for three people to bowl in the middle of nowhere on a weekday, but I caught myself. If we were on a real vacation, we’d be spending close to $100 for every meal as a family, and I wouldn’t even get to sleep in my own bed at the end of the day.

Jane had bumpers. She downed pins on every throw. No one cried. It’s bowling.

There was a paletería next door to the bowling alley and I insisted we get churros there, which I knew they sold in clusters of three. One for each of us. I hadn’t eaten at the bowling alley because I didn’t want to get diarrhea from a bowling alley grilled cheese. But I was willing to get diarrhea from a big, beautiful stalk of churro, perfectly warm in its wax paper envelope. I’d be honored, actually, to get diarrhea from such a masterpiece.

"Let me take a picture of you guys with your churros in front of this place to send to your dad. He will be so jealous.”

On the drive home, Desi decided to explain the three branches of government to Jane and I gave an expansive churro-fueled sermon about how they didn’t have to settle for a worse future, how politicians worked for them, how we don’t stan politicians even when we tend to agree with them, like Zohran. I told them they could create whatever future they wanted. They pretended to listen and I tried to make myself believe my own words.

I told them that after we moved, we wouldn’t have to drive 40 minutes to go to a bowling alley anymore. They said, ok?? but we don’t really go bowling that much.

That’s true. Maybe we could go more?

"Bowling is really important to you, huh, mama.” This is the style of sentence I say to them when they are explaining something to me in great detail and I don’t really see them arriving at a point. Game recognize game, I guess.

That night, I told Nick that I regretted saying that I preferred to take Desi on outings. It’s not fair to ding a kid just for being seven years old. And oh, did you see the picture I sent of the kids?

"Did you guys get churros? I’m so jealous.”

yr mate,
Evie
###

The day after Jane’s 7th birthday, I took her to get her ears pierced. Piercing guns wielded by high school juniors at the mall has fallen off, if you didn’t know. Now you’re supposed to go to a real piercing studio and have a guy with hairless cats and a tusk through his septum do it. Are you following?

The piercer was a sweetie pie; I was talked through the studio’s approach to piercing kids and how it is all child-led and consent-based. Jane “withdrew her consent” after one ear, let’s say. So I guess the day after Jane’s 7th birthday, I took her to get her ear pierced.

I’m proud of you, I told her, for trying something scary and for knowing your limit. I took the other earring to-go in a dimebag and was told if she decided she wanted the other ear done, we could drop in, no appointment needed.

As planned, we went to the scoop shop down the street for lunch afterwards. We ran into her friend Izzy there which is when I began to panic. Jane had hardly gathered herself from the piercing experience; I’d made her drink a juice box from the car for some stabilizing glucose and her eyes were still filmy with tears.

Now she had to either narrate the experience to her friend (humiliating), or what would make me sadder, pretend it hadn’t happened out of embarrassment. This is me projecting my seven-year-old self rather than just wondering neutrally what might happen.

She ran right up to her friend and showed off her new earring, a round blue stone with pink flecks. “What about the other ear?” Immediately clocked it. Girls stay noticing. Izzy’s older sisters moved in close now, eager to get in some noticing of their own. Jane was unbothered in the face of the most intimidating figure imaginable: anyone’s older sister.

“I just did one.”

That night, all five of us were sleeping in the sunroom, a converted slab patio which is home to my workspace, most of the kids’ toys, a sofa, a TV, a piano, no beds, a sort of catch-all space in a home we outgrew a few months after moving in.

When I hired interior painters as part of Avoidance Advent, I failed to consider that these projects take a few days. Much of the interior of our house was bagged up in protective plastic for the weekend, and even if it wasn’t, the VOC fumes were flowing and we have a reactive asthmatic in the house. A sharper mind might have fucked off for the weekend, went and scooped up some free norovirus at a Great Wolf Lodge or whatever. I was just proud of myself for getting the painters on the books at all.

There is nothing enjoyable about sharing sleeping quarters as a family but it’s an occasional fact of life for us. Naturally in the course of slap-fighting each other or whatever at 9:30 at night, Jane’s brand new earring went flying. She wept, holding her ear, which now had a pinprick of blood from the struggle. “It’s bleeding.”

Desi’s eyes were huge with the betrayal of what he felt were false accusations. In a fit of boomerish exhaustion, I flipped all the lights on and demanded he look for it until he found it. We abandoned the search pretty quickly; this was a needle in a haystack situation and we were all tired. Plus I had the spare earring in my underwear drawer next to my weed chocolate.

I threaded the new earring clumsily back into place, her supercharged child healing powers already fighting back against the piercing, and I thought about money. The credit card bill from Christmas, probably $1,100. Painters, $1,600. Jane’s bowling alley birthday party the following week (two lanes, arcade time, pizza, fries, soda, and a novelty bowling pin drink vessel for the birthday girl, $400. The 3D printed slop rainbow dragon cake topper that I accidentally bought on Etsy instead of the $12 one I thought I was buying, $35 plus $12 shipping, lol, can you believe it. Desi’s neuropsych eval, $1,200 but on the HSA card so “free.” A big old tax bill, TBD, because I don’t know how to guess how much to withhold. New tires for the van, $800. And then the piercing appointment, $80. And the earrings, $40 for the pair.

We had to sleep together in the sunroom the next night, too.

A few weeks later, Nick picked Moonrise Kingdom for our Friday movie. We got to the scene where Sam pierces Suzy’s ear with a fish hook so she can wear the dangly junebug earrings he’s made for her.

“That hurts so bad,” Jane said sagely, a woman who knows about things. Polly, age 4, nodded in solemn affirmation.

Me working from home is the only way our life can really function but I feel it eroding my grip on reality. I hear someone call my type of job a “live at work” job and something ticks into place for me. Collaborating across time zones means that work on “my” projects is happening beyond my working hours, and sometimes if I didn’t get enough done that day because I stared into space too much, I will do what I pretend is “reassuring myself.”

I will supervise a bath and open the app for the project management software on my phone and see if anyone has said anything to me. I will sit in the rocking chair in Polly’s room as she fights sleep and open Slack. It does not reassure me, it just yanks me backwards from everyone, myself included. It’s a game I’ve been playing since I was a girl, “am I in trouble?”, only now the energy is disembodied and I’m trying to take the pulse of virtual rooms.

When I am at work, I can only think of life, of money, of the house, of all the things I need to be doing at night to prep the place to sell but which I can’t do because my brain’s shutters roll down for the night at 8 pm, like a food court Chik-Fil-A on Sunday. Then, when work is over, instead of huffing the smell of my children’s sweat, I reach for my phone like a tweaker to play the world’s driest video game: work. I’m winning the pie-eating contest (making it to quitting time) and awarding myself more pie (opening phone.)

Somehow this all feels especially doomed in the winter, where I can see the sky turn black in real time in my Zoom background on afternoon calls. I’m driving in the darkness to pick up Polly from daycare and the song “Still the One” by Shania Twain on the radio makes me cry. I imagine telling Nick when I get home that it is the best love song ever written, which in the moment I believe to be true. No offense to the People’s Princess (Canadian), but this is enough of an alarming reaction that I decide it might be time to take a peek under the hood rather than wait for spring for my mental health to be reinstalled.

I decide I need a closing ritual. To unbond me from work and signal my reentry into my real life each night. I think of the way my yoga instructor places a fragrant chilled towel over my eyes in savasana. I think of magic spells and rote prayer. I think of Ozymandias and Sonnet 29, which I memorized for class in 9th grade and which I can still recite.

There is a Frank O’Hara poem I cannot remember the name of, and everything I type into Google is coming up short. I know if I can find this poem, I will have my incantation, and I can’t believe that there is something I cannot access for free on the internet via my own adeptness at prompting a search engine. I place a hold at the library for the complete works of Frank O’Hara and look forward to attempting a sort of analog ctrl-F that I invented: reading. In the meantime I try lighting palo santo matches to break the spell of the work day. One day, I find Polly at my desk in the sunroom, which of course is also her playroom, trying to strike the matches as she’s seen me do. I put the matches away.

The weather glitches and we have three 70 degree days in a row. I feel like I’m walking on stilts, almost dizzy from the high height from which the world unrolls around me. When I take Polly to the Y with me for my workout, I offer to take her in the bucket bike instead of the car. She’s never been so excited.

As we set off down our street, I hear a soulful riff humming on the air around me and realize she’s brought a harmonica with her. In between riffs on the harmonica, she is singing her favorite song out loud, Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” I don’t need the Frank O’Hara poem anymore because I have remembered that you can just go outside when it’s a little warm out and that will unbond you from all suffering.

My book comes in and I find the poem and read the whole thing, parked in my sun-baked minivan in the library parking lot, and feel like a sorcerer for commanding an interlibrary loan for the purpose of my curiosities. I find the mystery poem, and bookmark it (“Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births)” ) with a flattened fruit snack wrapper I find on the center console.

Nick presents the missing earring to me like it isn’t the most impressive thing a man has ever done.

“Where did you find it??”

“In the sunroom.”

I realize I can just pause the work apps on my phone on a set schedule, which doesn’t prevent me from opening them, but at least creates enough of a barrier that it startles me, like walking into a glass door. The poem is too long to recite to myself every day, and the verse I like the most feels too decontextualized to say by itself. Polly tells me she doesn’t want to grow up because she wants to be a sister forever. I tell her that she will always be a sister. She relaxes.

At this moment, I don’t need to light a match to feel alive and you can’t really be in trouble as an adult unless you’re disappointing yourself. The numbers are fake, and they never go away. It’s like being tortured by having to breathe air. You can be mad about, and still have to breathe it. Or you can just breathe it.

I ask Jane if she wants to get her other ear pierced and she says no, because it would hurt. Great point, babe. We don’t need to pursue hurt. Hurt will find us and when it does, there is plenty of comfort here at home if you know where to look.

yr mate,
Evie
###

1. How do you guys remember all this, I’m so impressed??? I have to fully close my eyes and take two beats to summon my youngest’s DOB on a form

2. I didn’t write shit last year and that makes me feel so successful??

I do write this newsletter, obviously, a great joy of my life, and I do earn money from it. tysm for that

But I didn’t have a single byline in 2025. There are a few reasons but the main one is that we could pay the bills without it. Brag!!!! I tend to churn up pitch ideas or say yes to assignments when mysterious, spiritual things align in my life such as: the van needs a new set of tires. Not doing that means that my life didn’t feel like a nonstop financial emergency last year. If that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!

On Saturday, I woke up and only one of my three kids had a pair of snow boots that fit. That night, we were forecasted to receive a walloping winter storm and then weeks of bitter cold temperatures to freeze it all in place. We don’t get enough winter weather here for snow boots to be a real staple, and kids grow so much. Maybe twice a year, we get two inches of snow and it immediately dissolves into the mud. I put the kids in rain boots for that.

But I wasn’t willing to have my kids out of school for probably a week, surrounded by snow, and unable to meaningfully play in it. Polly, my four-year-old, was set, but Desi and Jane had nada. If I lived somewhere else, this would probably have just been a shopping trip. But I live rural, without access to retail unless you need to buy a $50 candle or a letterpress card with a rude saying on it.

I started by sticking my hand out to some neighborhood moms. Who has outgrown snow boots in my kids’ sizes? My friend Rosie was able to produce some boots for Desi, and I swiped them from her porch and left in their place a nice water bottle of hers that I’ve been holding onto for months. Desi snow boots achieved.

The other complication was that I was taking a somewhat risky excursion to Baltimore that afternoon, hopefully before the storm, to go to Medieval Times for my friend’s birthday. (Jealous?) I didn’t want to be on the roads for any more time than needed but could I….make a detour to the outlets?

All the winter gear had been wiped out by people, unlike me, who act more than four hours in advance of well-communicated weather emergencies. It took us five stores at the outlets to find any snow boots. We ended up at a Skechers store and the only model of boot in Jane’s size was kind of busted: it wasn’t quite tall enough for my preference and it was hideous in a way that might delight a 7-year-old girl, but also might very much not delight a 7-year-old girl. Jane’s review could gum up the whole operation. I kept my face neutral. “Well, what about these?”

She loved them. They were $30? I was a demigod, my blood was horchata, my hair was a river delta turned silver in the sun. I was a sea maiden carved into a ship, my gown was draped stone. No, I was the ship itself actually, cleaving the ocean in two.

An hour later, I was eating half a roasted potato with my hands in the dark and watching a joust. My car had two pairs of right-sized boots in it. The snow forecast had shifted and it wasn’t going to start until midnight. We would be able to get home safely. Our knight made eye contact with me and whipped a carnation directly into my lap. I thought, “That’s right.”

I was the most powerful and competent person on earth, after all. Not because I was doing something in service of my children, and not because having the right gear at the right time means anything about one’s parenting. But because I had woken up with a problem that I cared about, and I used my wits to solve it. Un/fortunately, no level of professional validation can touch that feeling for me. Not in a sustained way.

It was surprising, during that lawless last week of the year, to discover that the most successful I’ve felt as a writer or creative person has been by having the peace to not write. To experience my life and think about it for one sec without having to desperately produce from it.

I don’t have time to feel like a loser or a failure, anyway. “The Pitt” is back??? Or did you not hear??

yr mate,
Evie
###

Then I almost gave up the first day.

Here is what I did to myself. It was impossible to draft a set of tasks that were balanced in effort but some of them were really 5 tasks in one. This folly became immediately evident.

Monday, December 1. A MONDAY, first of all, Nick’s and my first day back at work after a week off, the kids first day back at school after a week off, a day where we had committed to attending a community meal for dinner downtown, and a day that I had promised the kids we could both decorate the tree and make cookies. The community meal I was fine to keep because it deleted cooking and dishes from the equation. The tree decorating and cookies piece could not rightly be delayed because we had already delayed it all weekend. Oh, and Jane needed to go to bed early because she was having SURGERY the following morning, a thing Nick and I had to prep for as well.

And it was the day I pulled my first task: “Fix broken tile and recaulk bathtub.” ?????

These were things that at 8 a.m. that Monday I had never attempted before and didn’t have the materials to do. It also is like, a multi-hour job. I didn’t want to fail at my first thing, so I went to the hardware store over my lunch, stole 15 minutes here and there from my workday ripping out caulk and…didn’t finish it. Obviously. We did decorate the tree though, and we even made cookies.

But I was able to finish the next day! I had taken the day off for Jane’s surgery anyway. While she was rolling on kid percocet and mainlining Unicorn Academy, I got the tub looking…not professionally recaulked, but at least no longer moldy. The task I pulled for December 2 had me sending an email, which took 15 seconds.

I wasn’t behind, and I hadn’t even failed. I had gotten the thing done that I had been looking at in disgust every time I sat down on the toilet in that bathroom for the last two years.

I have made thousands of lists over the years, in order to draw out The List from my brain, and it has only sort of helped. Writing out The List, I still see all the items at a glance, crowded together in their masses, ganging up on me. “My name is Legion for we are many,” they say, because they are from the devil. I only tick off the ones that don’t scare me, constantly renegotiating and reordering the list, leaving the worst ones for the end, or really for never.

The List still exists but I’ve weakened it. I don’t remember exactly what is on the advent calendar, but sometimes one of the items will pop into my head. I’ll immediately put the thought to bed because one day TBD this month it will come due, but it’s not today. I don’t need to make a plan for it.

When other things (I told you, there are hundreds) fly into my head, I can just shrug and say, that’s not part of what I’m doing this month. I already picked my tasks. Too bad so sad. My stunt life of limited choices does not permit it.

There was a TikTok thing, I think, about hyping yourself up by reminding yourself (you being any commoner regardless of parental status or job sector) that doing what you have to do in a day would put Kendall Jenner in a coma.

I started this with the intention of bullying myself into being better, a tack that has never worked. It has made me realize that I already do a lot, so no wonder it’s hard to also do all the stuff that hangs out in the margins of my mind, exhaling smoke into my face as I pass by. I can usually do one small extra thing though. And I think I deserve a Pepsi for that.

yr mate,
Evie
###

Read more

In 2018, my friend Daniel died because he slipped and fell on the ice after a boozy night out with me and our coworkers. I immediately started removing the cornucopia tattoo because I didn't want to have it anymore, and was I waiting for permission? Someday I’ll get pushed feet first into an incinerator. Daniel was buried but you get me.

In spring 2021, my friend and her husband were killed instantly by a drunk driver. Their kids were 5 and 8. That fall, I had a baby two days before Thanksgiving. I knew I was pregnant before she died, but I hadn't told her yet because I was feeling ambivalent about the pregnancy.

Now why was I hosting Thanksgiving at my house two days after having a baby while still bleeding into the chucks I'd folded and stashed in my underwear? And why did I do it again the next year?

No one will ever make you take a break and no one will ever make you stop drinking so much.

The tattoo is still faintly visible because I'm the queen of 85% completion.

My Thanksgiving baby is 4, I'm in Mexico with my kids and husband doing nada. When I couldn't sleep last night, I was thinking about all the versions of reality that happen when I hold up a mirror to the laser and send it darting back at the face of God or whatever.

And my license got suspended and I had to ride my bike 6 miles to my waitressing job just as winter set in. Or Daniel had a cough and decided not to go out. Or they weren't in the car together so their kids got to keep one parent (but don't make me pick which.) Or I was taking my birth control pill right 100% of the time instead of 85%.

Not even our tattoos we get to keep, they burn right off of us. Now (if we pay up) or later (when they slide us into the inferno.)

If you want to know what I'm thankful for, you'll have to come back with a warrant. But I can give you a hint. It’s something like: help is on the way. But I pull off the Ted Koppel wig and spit out the Austin Powers teeth and it's me. I'm also the help.

yr mate,

Evie

###

Academy Award to Nick for barely reacting when I told him a few weeks ago, “hey, I think I need to go back on meds.” “Ok,” he said reassuringly, like I hadn’t been leading him on a death march for months, like he wasn’t my hostage, like I didn’t have him bound in my trunk, working the zip ties against the rivets on his pants..

I don’t know if dancing in the woods helped, or making a thing helped, but I can’t prove it didn’t, and so it’s my prescription to you, if you need to feel better. You have to go to a party and you have to make something that didn’t exist before.

Also, obviously, Wellbutrin.

yr mate,
Evie
###

Appointment 1 - Saturday, August 9. 9 a.m.

In order to apply for a child’s passport, the parents, with all the required documents, have to appear in person at the passport center with the child. No biggie. Assemble the forms and get your ass there.

We did this once before, when Desi was a baby, when we predicted our life as a young family would be one of casual globetrotting, lol and indeed lmao. The bald baby in that passport photo, taken on the floor of a CVS in Columbus, Ohio, is now 10. His passport has one stamp in it and is now five years expired. It is also one of the documents we needed to apply in person despite its expiration, and which as late as the day before the appointment we could not find.

The other document we could not find in our sophisticated filing system of: one metal lockbox with an ancient Less Than Jake sticker on it, was Polly’s birth certificate. Fortunately, I knew from the one time I flew Southwest with Jane as a baby and needed to prove her too young to require her own ticket, that I could provision a birth certificate with a breezy walk-in at our county’s public health office. A quick bike ride from home and there wouldn’t be a line because like 4 people live in our county. Rural living perks.

I regretted pitching the ease of this mission to Nick when I popped out of my office at home on the Friday before our appointment, a work day for me, and Nick had not yet acquired the birth certificate. It was 2 p.m. He was, I believe, sorting the kids’ Pokemon cards into little cartons and arranging those cartons into a large plastic storage tub. I tried to remove the edge from my voice so I could ask what exactly his plan was.

”I thought you said they closed at 4 p.m.?”

Sure but have you considered that the one person working there might decide to take a late lunch, or close up early for a family emergency, or that the printer might be jammed up and they might need to walk over to a different office to print it out, and that person might have decided to take a late lunch? Basically, have you considered having anxiety and untidy Pokemon cards instead of whatever is wrong with you???

He easily acquires the document and I am relieved and also regretful at the posture I often embody in my family, which is one of Nervous Bookkeeper for the Mob. That everyone around me is behaving in chaotic and extralegal ways despite my efforts to keep our noses clean, and I am both powerless to rein them in and definitely the one who will be going down for it. (Here I will link to the book Codependent No More, for no reason at all.)

On Saturday morning, we are ten minutes early to the post office for our appointment. The girls’ hair is brushed for their passport photos and everything. I have never felt more competent. In this moment, I am not the bookkeeper for the mob, I am the Don. I’m Tony Soprano. I’m Vito Corleone. Conceive, grow, birth, and raise three entire children and obtain government ID for them. C’mon, hit me with something actually challenging next time, will you?

We’re called up to the counter, leaving our kids to put their fingers all over the carousel of greeting cards and bubble mailers. Nick produces the folder from his bag and spreads out our paperwork like he’s opening a suitcase of cash. I’ll let these primary documents do the talking.

The postal employee hits us with a look of disgust. “Ok, so where are your applications?”

The applications. A movie plays in my head, it’s grainy and non-linear. We’re applying for baby Desi’s passport in Columbus. We had an appointment but we’ve been in line for 45 minutes. It’s winter. There are paper applications in stacks and I’m filling one out in ink against the wall. We can’t set the baby down because the snow is melting off people’s shoes, creating dirty, cold puddles everywhere. He’s annoyed to be held for so long, wants to explore. He’s arching himself backwards from Nick’s chest, trying to grab my hair.

”Do you not have them here?’ I ask her.

She looks at me as though I am stupid, and not the kind of stupid that prompts pity.

Nick ventures that maybe we could come back in a few hours? She shakes her head no and we schedule another appointment for Monday. The older kids will be home Monday anyway because we leave for our summer vacation (domestic obvi) the next day. So, ok, we’ll just grab Polly early from daycare. It’s not the end of the world.

The End of the World - Monday, August 11. 12 p.m.

I’ll skip the details but we arrived to our appointment 10 minutes late, in separate vehicles, with half the forms printed single-sided, half the forms printed double-sided, and all of them with mistakes scratched out in ink.

At first, Nick also didn’t have his passport or his driver’s license to prove he was himself, but we eventually found his wallet and within it, his ID, in the van. Kevin, the postal worker, assessed our paperwork like it was a farm cat hit by a tractor, hardly clinging to life. The humane thing to do would be to snap its neck but no one wants to say that just yet. Unfortunately, Kevin was also working two days ago when we forgot that applications existed so I cannot pretend I have no idea how this could have happened. Kevin knows, and I know that Kevin knows, that we are habitually tedious people.

There have been many times in my life as a parent that appearing places with my children has won me unearned patience, friendliness, and goodwill from people in customer service positions.

I’ve noticed in the last year, now that enough of my children have aged out of their cherub forms, more people seem to stare right through me. I’m not a cute idiot 20-year-old who is learning how to be a part of the world, I’m not a heavily pregnant person who should be handled gently, I’m not strapped down with babies and in need of rescue. I’m just a not-young, not-old person who is wasting your time. It was good while it lasted.

Kevin offered that he can attempt to send the applications through as is, but it’s pretty unlikely they’ll accept it. I get the sense that like the bar exam, you still have to pay for the second time if they fail you the first time. At $160 a pop, I wasn’t eager to try our luck.

”You still want to do their photos today?”

We walked out of the post office into the swampy heat of midday August in the country’s armpit. Without making eye contact, I declared that we are walking to the local hipster scoop shop for lunch. We all deserve greasy food served in a plastic basket for our suffering. I clocked from about 50 yards away that the hipster scoop shop is not open today, because it is Monday, the Saturday of the restaurant industry, and because nothing in this town is ever fucking open.

I pivoted to scoop shop number two, which was open but doesn’t serve lunch. You can’t buy socks within 40 minutes of my house but there are two twee ice cream shops a block apart. Lunch for everyone, then, is ice cream, which I ate at a separate table because I was so mad at Nick that I was rapidly regressing and soon would be nothing more than a pile of clothes on the tile containing one microscopic diploid cell.

The ice cream buoyed me, because on top of Nick blowing up our day, there was probably also a blood sugar thing going on. The matte black discs of rage that had surely clapped over my eyeballs were replaced with my regular set of eyes and I engaged with the other members of my family with an almost unbothered ease.

When we got back to the house, Nick and I put our hands on each other’s shoulders in the driveway like sloshed frat brothers steadying themselves. I said the following devastating sentence to him without qualification because it’s not my job to worry whether or not he can handle it:

You
let
me
down.

And he said to me the only thing I needed to hear, which was, “I know.”

Appointment 3 - Saturday August 16, 9:30 a.m.

With our babies’ faces in the plastic party-drug-sachets provided by the United States Postal Service, we returned for the third installment. Plays don’t have a fourth act, do they? Either we apply for the passports today or we all disintegrate, and in doing so we Eternal Sunshine ourselves from the memories of all who ever claimed to know us.

Something we must have done ten years ago, but that I forgot about, is that we had to swear an oath. The ululations of our undomesticated children echoed through the century-old building as we swear it all to be true. I felt shy and incredulous suddenly, like I might cry. We’ll never have a vow renewal, but this felt close. We stood beside each other and raised our right hands and swore before Kevin and his gold chain and the mail carrier dog bite awareness poster that we are who we say we are.

In just a few weeks, the kids’ passports arrived in the mail and I marveled at the engravings of their names. We invented these people, pulled them from the perpetual cosmic pre-dawn like a toy from a tooth-shaped prize box at the dentist! We made up their names, this life together, and now the government has to go along with it!

We are exactly who we have always claimed to be, which is the whole problem and, god, our only solution.

yr mate,
Evie
###

I wrote the following newsletter four days after Desi was born, on August 25. Eventually, I would write the story of his birth too, and since Tinyletter is gone (RIP), those things only survive via my inbox, and maybe yours too, if you’ve been around for a while.

I like to think I made some art from those Chopped baskets. Even if it’s all just a sandcastle to be washed away in the tide when Substack, or whatever comes next, goes away forever.

Desmond finally joined us on the outside last Friday, August 21 at 3:07 p.m. Desi is snaked around me on a nursing pillow as I type this from home, my laptop balanced on my knee and an end table. He's resting against my soft, deflated belly, his blonde (!!) eyelashes catching the light. Earlier today, every time I looked at him (and I look at him constantly) dubstep music would start playing and I'd get hit by a rogue wave of disbelief and overwhelm and obsession. It felt so unlikely that I'd ever be fit to interact in society again.

But now, I'm looking at his little doll's face and just feeling glad he's here. I don't at all feel compelled to hungrily weep. It seems like there is hope for me yet. I must be getting rebuilt chemically, piece by piece, a process that began when I got pregnant and then got winched all to hell last week when I gave birth and started nursing. Tomorrow, I imagine there will be more dubstep, but I'm hoping that eventually this carnival Viking ship ride will even out and I'll just be me, rebuilt, plus my little friend here.

One week before Desi was born, I paid someone to paint my toenails blue. I was out of work early (summer Fridays) and thought maybe I'd get my shit groomed before I had a baby and went feral for a while. As usual, it was about as relaxing as getting a dental filling and I remembered why I don't really get pedicures. I didn't want blue, but they didn't have the shade of orange that I wanted and a group of bridesmaids were waiting behind me to pick their color. The woman in the throne next to me asked the normal safe stranger questions about my pregnancy and then said, "Maybe you picked blue because it's a boy." I resented this, as though she could wrinkle time and space with these words and determine my baby's sex. But she didn't need to, because my baby has always been a boy, has been a boy since last November when we invented him.

Three days before Desi was born, I was gearing up to send out my usual newsletter when the pelvic cramping that had been building since my doctor's visit the day before became so intense as to distract. It came in regular intervals when I bothered to glance at the clock. I had Nick pick me up from work, and we both spent a few exciting hours thinking Everything was Happening, if you will (oh my god, I'm so sorry). Then it stopped. That night I couldn't get the dude to move, couldn't remember him moving all day. (Him! He was so a him last week. Crazy.) We went to the hospital to get it checked out, and got a diagnosis of crowded, lazy baby. It took five years off of my life.

The night before Desi was born, I crawled around the apartment on all fours keening whale songs and apparently atoning for the sins of my ancestors. I had been laboring for close to 24 hours when the hospital finally admitted me Friday morning, only because it was determined my waters had broken (they had?) and not because I was dilated nearly enough otherwise. I still feel like I cheated by getting admitted, by getting to have him on Friday, that there is another version of myself walking around still pregnant.

Someone told me his birthday would be the best day of my life and I thought it was a platitude but I don't know. It might have been the best day of my life. Nothing prepares you, not even having your legs in stirrups and extruding your brain matter through your face pores from straining, for someone to pull a human out of you. It felt both so impossible and inevitable. Here's where the dubstep usually kicks in so I have to be careful or I'll lose a few hours into the panic/disbelief/obsession tornado.
###
yr mate,
Evie

I just read a 500 page book about the generative AI tech arms race and the future as envisioned by OpenAI. Now I feel sick to my stomach 24/7 and am not sure how to carry on. How do I apologize to my kids for the world they are sure to inherit?

That’s such a relatable question—knowing that our kids will inherit a poisoned desert planet unsuitable for life can be hard, especially when we were alive for an era when positive change seemed not just possible, but inevitable:

Here’s a way you could explain it, keeping it clear and affirming of their experience:

“I know you were expecting a future where you weren’t being psychologically mulched by the 150dB hum of machines from the data center they built on top of our house. This might be disappointing, and it’s okay to feel that way. It’s not what we had planned when we started a family, but if the cooling systems aren’t running, there is a risk of reduced computing power. Scaling genAI can’t happen in hot rooms, which I can know can be hard to hear. If you ever have thoughts or feelings about this, you can always talk to us. We’re here to listen.”

This keeps it direct but compassionate, while focusing on the need to maintain operational cooling systems for hyperscalers. Let me know if you want me to tweak it based on your parenting style!

This is a little old for my kids, who probably don’t know what decibels are, and it’s weirdly defensive of the large-scale proliferation of data centers? Can you revise this for a younger audience, and make it more apologetic?

Absolutely! Here’s a version more suitable for fans of Younger that addresses the subject matter with a more apologetic tone:

Forty-year-old Liza Miller (Sutton Foster stuns!) may be able to pass as 26, but I can’t pass as anything but devastated that you stand to inherit the discarded ruins of the only planet in existence known to have dolphins and coffee-flavored ice cream. I’m gutted, not just because I love you and hate this future for you, but also because as much as I want to blame powerful multinationals, I must own up to the personal consumer choices that have gotten us here. I rate the experience—breaking your heart and in doing so, breaking my own—as “rotten.” (Unlike the first season of Younger, which was “certified fresh”!)

Let me know if you would like to adjust the tone or incorporate more about American character actress Debi Mazar. (“There’s nothing Debi Mazar can’t improve,” Decider’s Liz Kocan said of her Younger performance!)

This was not supposed to be about the show Younger at all and this reads as shifting the blame to individuals. Revise to remove references to Younger and place blame appropriately.

Sure! Here’s the revised apology without references to Younger and with a focus on directing the blame for climate devastation appropriately:

It’s time to face the Music, Man. There are a Million Little Things I’d like to say by way of explanation, but I’d be a total Bunhead if I didn’t mention first that seven successive U.S. administrations failed to take effective action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This cleared a path for environmental deregulation where truly Anything Goes, like rapid build-out of AI infrastructure in low-income communities. Now we’re all living a Thoroughly Modern nightmare—and as your parent and an adult with greater power and influence relative to you, a child?—I owe you an apology.

Would you like a printable version of this apology?



(yr mate,
Evie
###)

There was a time, long before a Street View vehicle captured this, that the hill was terraced using wooden beams the thickness of railroad ties. It wasn’t a landscaping feature, I don’t really know what they were for, maybe it made it easier to mow. But it formed a sort of X Games training facility when the bell rang and masses of unsupervised elementary school kids issued forth.

My siblings and I had been instructed not to jump our bikes down the hill, even though everyone else was doing it. It was to be the domain of kids whose parents didn’t make them wear helmets, and who were allowed to watch Beavis and Butthead. We were to ride our bikes home, not stop anywhere, and start our homework. It’s not like we had cable anyway.

This was fine with me, a person who recently was trolled by my own family for being afraid to accelerate in a go-kart on a closed track.

I don’t know why no one else was around when I saw the kid flip and land on his side. He was screaming, there was lots of blood and I was embarrassed to see the waistband of his underwear as he examined his wound on his hip. I remember there was yellow stuff oozing out of it, which alarmed me.

"My mom is a nurse! I’m going to go get her!”

I took off on my bike and pedaled home as fast as I could, feeling like Jessie Alden from the Boxcar Children: responsible, quick-thinking, a leader. My mom drove us back to the hill in the Astro van and she sat next to him on the beam and asked him questions.

Somehow, maybe there had been other kids around after all to spread the word, a parent of his arrived on the scene. They seemed irritated by the excitement. There was an awkward moment where my mom told the dad, whose arms were folded across his belly, that the boy should go to the emergency room and that he needed stitches.

Back in the Astro van, I asked my mom what the yellow stuff was that I saw.

”That was his subcutaneous fat,” my mom said matter-of-factly, not taking her eyes off the road. Then, “I really hope they take him in.”

We moved out of state the next year, and when we moved back, the beams were gone.

I know it’s hack to call myself a teen mom (I was 29) but I was not mature enough to have a kid. Me deciding to have a baby because I was bored and possessing excess confidence must be like kids who enlist in the military right out of high school. “Sure, it was hell for all you dorks but for moi?…..it’s gonna be kinda metal.”

When they gave me the forms to complete on the mother-baby floor of the hospital, I wrote my own mother’s name for “mother’s name.” Then I did it again the next week at his first pediatrician appointment. The way my brain insisted upon being the baby.

Like most things, I suspect you do not become mature enough for anything by waiting for childishness to slip off of you. You become mature via the act of doing something that matures you.

The weeks after giving birth were a struggle not because I was tired (though my bones felt like ash) and not because I couldn’t bond with him (I wanted to French inhale his every breath in a never-ending loop) but because I was blown into the stratosphere by how irrevocable it all was.

Here I had done something fun as a bit and now an entirely new unit of consciousness had been implanted into this sour-smelling baby loaf who lived at my house. And if he ever felt pain, it would be my pain too, and long after I was gone, the canvas of me, my flaws, my expressions, my delights, would be central to his understanding of himself and the world.

It was a little too metal, actually!

There is a lot of prolonged eye contact with a baby. You: obsessed with them. Them: wondering what your next move is. Also, famously, they can’t say shit. You’re both trying to read each other like a couple making eye contact across the room at a house party trying to urge the other one to wrap it up already, I want to go home. And you’re doing this, like, all day.

When Desi was around 6 months old, we left my friend’s house late at night, and it was just him and me. Nick must have been working. I buckled him into his rear-facing seat but there was a little headrest mirror I had just found on freecycle and installed. It allowed me to steal glimpses of him while I was driving, for fun. I looked into my rear-view, and there he was in his rear-view, and we got into one of our classic staring contests. Him: bald, mute, blinking expectantly. Me: grinning with all the inhibitions of someone high on laughing gas.

I said out loud to him, “I can’t believe you’re going to tell me things someday.”

“I’M GOING TO DIE!!!”

Maybe if you saw what I saw, you would also think my first thought, which was: this is a prank?

Desi has a prank kit which contains fake poop, fake vomit, a nail through bloody gauze that can clip over your finger, and a palm buzzer that zaps an unsuspecting handshake victim. But then, just as quickly I knew, no, this is not a prank. It’s just that true gore leans more Spirit Halloween than you might think.

I didn’t see the broken glass because it had fallen through to the other side of the door and onto the floor, where the girls were now standing. I wasn’t thinking about them, though. I was taking in the flaps of flesh the size of my own palms that were hanging from his forearms, the surprising grayishness of his exposed vascularity, and the blood that was both spurting and oozing as though from a partly calcified shower head. Not much subcutaneous fat to be found on a forearm, an elbow.

When I was trying to communicate the trauma of it later to friends, I would say that he “peeled himself like a potato” which is somehow unfairly gross and not grave enough.

I regret to tell you that as I tried to reckon with a situation whose seriousness I could not yet see the full shape of, my rotted brain thought, this is going to ruin the world tour.

I clamped my right and left hands over his right and left forearms, and willed my grip strength to tourniquet the hell out of whatever this mess was. My mom is a nurse!

Like a sitcom where a couple loses the key to their sex handcuffs, we were locked together as dance partners trying to find my phone. We shuffled from the kitchen to the couch and found it. Desi was screaming that he was going to die, and the girls were screaming at me that he was going to die.

I ignored them because I was trying to figure out how to use my phone without unclamping my hand but no solution occurred to me. I had to unclamp.

At this point, it seemed positive that he had the vigor to be standing upright and screaming. We called 911. “Tell them I’m going to die!!!!” he screamed to the dispatcher, which you probably also heard, if you were alive on earth that day.

Nick was not home, he was out buying lice shampoo because all of us were infested with head lice. On the worst day of your life, having a parasite might actually be the B-plot.

The girls tumbled out into the yard, shoeless, splashed with blood that was quickly drying. Desi and I sat connected on the edge of our stoop, me still squeezing him desperately, waiting for the squad. His lips were starting to look pale.

“Am I going to die?” he asked me, quietly this time.

“No,” I said, thinking that it was probably true, but even if it wasn’t, that it was a gentle lie.

The first week after the accident was hell, but we’re finding out new baseline. He’s been offering reenactments to visitors to the house, and he is hoping someone will take him on up on checking out photos of his injuries from his chart.

Earlier this week, he got busted for climbing on top of the washing machine to access snacks from a high cabinet, something that is very stupid for him to be doing but also that I’m impressed and relieved he is able to do at all.

The night before the accident, what I imagine will be Desi’s only real day of summer this year, we were at a friend’s pool at dusk experiencing paradise. Frogs were hopping across the grass, a rippling carpet of movement. I tried to catch one and suddenly noticed them everywhere, lurching and leaping, across all my vision, they were more capable of catching me, really. Fireflies were blinking and the mosquitoes were basically tying on bibs to dine on our exposed summer skin.

It’s been ten years since the summer Desi was born, when I couldn’t get a grip. When I had to contend with the irreversible thing I had gone and done. When he wouldn’t quit staring at me like, “sooo what’s your plan for all this?”

When the kids were really little, it felt like we were hosting a 24/7 theme party where the theme was me and Nick. I certainly know how to behave at such a party, but all hosts want to sit down eventually and look at their phone. All hosts want their guests to take the hint that it’s getting late.

Then the kids grow up, if you’re lucky, if they don’t fall through the glass at a slightly different angle. And the party isn’t about you. They give you the gift of de-centering you from everything.

I try to slide into the conversations my three kids are having now and they look at me, quietly exasperated, because the theme of the party is now an inside joke they won’t be explaining to me.

Desi announced we’d be having a diving contest that night because to a certain extent, as the eldest, it’s his party now. I’m not their clown anymore. And somehow, in doing a pencil dive, I twisted my ankle, because I am definitely not 29 anymore. And when it was time for us to go home, he willingly got in the van, because he’s not 4 anymore.

We all slept on pool hair, not knowing we had nits, and not knowing what horrors awaited us the next evening. Isn’t that it, though? So many bad things will happen to us tomorrow, our imaginations too deficient to even sketch the horrors. Good thing today is: pool party.

yr mate,
Evie
###