This week, we bought our first Costco pumpkin pie of the season. Doesn’t it seem absurd that such a thing can be purchased in August? It is only made more bizarre by the fact that you must first traverse an aisle of Christmas trees and a double-decker display of Halloween costumes before arriving at the baked goods. Absurd or otherwise, when I caught sight of the pies, my pace quickened. I scooped my son up into my arms so he could see over the display case.

“LOOK what they have!”

I tossed one in our cart before he even asked. He’s been talking about pumpkin pie for months. “When is it going to be pumpkin season?” “How many days until Halloween??”

He’s a fall.

That morning, I watched Arturo slip on a squishy, ripe guava on his way to the car. I was instantly transported back to last September. We were just getting back from five weeks in Canada where we’d spent the tail end of summer. I was clinging to the last few days before equinox with tooth and nail. Plump, overripe guavas obstructed our path every time we left the place we were now calling home. We tried our best to maneuver around them but occasionally, we miscalculated. As the soft fruit ripped open, its tropical aroma whooshed into the air and, for a moment, summer didn’t feel like it was slipping away. But my son’s new obsession with fall tugged me hard in the other direction. From the moment our plane touched down in San Diego, he hadn’t stopped talking about jack-o’-lanterns and ghost cookies.

Part of me considered just walking past and pretending that I didn’t see the pies at all. He really doesn’t need the sugar. Surely, we could make it at least another month without pumpkin pie.

But not so many hours before, my husband had called me from his brother’s house where he was helping prepare their rental property for the new tenants. He was slurring his words. He told me he had almost blacked out walking down the sidewalk.

“If I had gotten pulled over, I would have failed a sobriety test. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to drive home.”

In twenty years with MS, he said he had never felt quite like that before. As I tried to make sense of his words between the crackles of bad reception, I frantically put my son’s favorite show on the TV, desperate for a distraction that would give me some space. We hung up and I locked myself in the bathroom and sobbed. The TV program ended. I wiped my eyes and packed up the car for play group.

I’m a spring.

Summer is my second-favorite season and the list descends from there. If it weren’t for Christmas, winter would be all but unbearable. I need every single blown-glass ornament, glittery Christmas craft, and twinkle light just to make it through. By the time spring finally rolls around, I’m so blissed out of my head that Easter comes and goes with only the most minimal recognition. Lay me in a field of little, yellow flowers to soak up sun like a lizard. That’s all I need. Little plastic eggs and chocolate bunnies just feel like the guild on the lily.

This time last year, I felt a special sense of hostility towards the changing of seasons. A heavy negativity clung to me, sitting on my chest with the obstinacy of a basset hound. I wasn’t ready to let go of a summer filled with ice-cream, water balloons, cousins, and doing daily life with people who love our kid so damn much (and who he adores in return). I wasn’t ready to have to figure out what this new chapter meant for us. Meanwhile, my son gleefully carved pumpkin after pumpkin, each rotting in the subsequent heat wave. Most of them never stood the faintest chance of making it to October.

Maybe, I just needed the day to end with a win. Maybe, I’m determined to roll into the colder months with a little more joy and grace than I did last year. Maybe, the predictability of seasons changing feels oddly comforting when you’re faced with bigger unknowns.

Arturo stood behind the cart. His vacant expression softened for a moment as his eyes met mine. A subtle smile crept onto his face. I already know he’s ready for the cold.

He’s a winter.

Hello there! We made it to week three of Sunday Stuff from The Other Stuff Too, look at us!

Thanks again for letting me pop into your email inbox each week with a humble little reading recommendation from the TOST archives (and an occasional new piece arriving on the same schedule). Today’s post is another one from my Snapshots mini-series, a little something about summer.

You can click here to see the original post or just keep scrolling to read it right here in your email or Substack app.

As always, thanks for being here.

Yours,

Alicia

"By the time we got home, you were fast asleep. Before rolling you upstairs, I looked down at you and smiled. Your feet were covered in dirt, your face was stained with berries and your skin was soaked with sunshine. 'This is what summer should be,' I thought."

Today, you discovered butterflies— like really discovered them.

You chased them around the flowers and short bushes at the park, all the while laughing hysterically and looking back at me like, “Mom, are you SEEING these things?!”

And I did. I really saw them. I saw them in a fresh new way, just like the old cliché says that having kids will make you see things. I saw them through your eyes.

By the time we got home, you were fast asleep. Before rolling you upstairs, I looked down at you and smiled. Your feet were covered in dirt, your face was stained with berries and your skin was soaked with sunshine. “This is what summer should be,” I thought.

As I pulled the stroller up the stairs, I knew it didn’t matter what happened for the rest of the day. Today was a good day. Today, you discovered butterflies.

Welcome to week two of Sunday Stuff from The Other Stuff Too!

If you’re new here, my name is Alicia and these days I usually write about early motherhood and having a chronically ill partner. The idea of keeping up with a weekly newsletter feels pretty daunting in this season of life but I really like the idea of getting cozy in your email inbox every week. So here’s my offering: a weekly suggested reading... occasionally something new but, for now anyway, probably something old (aiming for a new piece about once a month. Fingers crossed!) Last week, I made you click an annoying link to read the end of the essay. This week, you can choose to read the original post here or scroll down to read the full text right here in your email or Substack app. Thanks for being here.

Yours,

Alicia

Friendship in Motherhood

Friendship in motherhood is strange and sacred, illusive yet essential and, perhaps above all else, complicated.

It's hours of conversation that used to happen on the front stoop at a house party or the kitchen floor of a shared apartment all squeezed into ten-minute WhatsApp audios punctuated by babies screaming and profuse apologizing. It's keeping track of which friends are still on Facebook, who hates video calls, who never manages to listen or respond to voice notes and who lives for them.

Sometimes, it means meeting a new version of a woman you've loved through many lifetimes. Your college roommate who once held your hair back while you puked your guts out into a stranger's toilet, now texts you parenting advice at similarly odd hours of the late night and early morning. Travel buddies from your twenties send you boxes of hand-me-downs or Amazon packages from your son's Christmas wishlist.

Other times, you're forced to forge love in the trenches. This new love finds a way despite never having known versions of each other with those crisp edges that once separated you from other sentient beings.

She's only known this messy, melted version of you with two heads; the one that cries so much and sleeps so little. You've never once sat together in a café for hours with nowhere to go. Your friendship wasn't built on a foundation of drunken heart-to-hearts, middle school memories, or cross-continent bus rides.

Instead, you scoured for signs of potential compatibility at your local playground. You scanned through a vast sea of black yoga pants and messy mom buns for a cool band shirt, an intriguing tattoo, or an interesting book peering out optimistically from the top of a diaper bag.

I once met a mom in the park who I connected with immediately. While our toddlers took turns throwing pebbles into gopher holes, it took her all of ten minutes to peer straight into my soul and offer up the exact advice I desperately needed. She lived a bit far away but we made a point to stay in touch. We attended each other's kids' birthday parties. We set aside little gifts that we knew the other would like.

One evening, my husband, son and I drove into Tijuana to attend her birthday dinner. With some cajoling, another friend of hers convinced her to pull out her guitar and, in an instant, her tiny kitchen was transformed into one of the most powerful and intimate live music venues I've ever experienced. My jaw dropped. I never even knew she played let alone that she made a living doing so before her kids were born.

I turned to her six-year-old and asked him if he could please continue telling me his favorite movie scene by scene in a few minutes when his mom finished singing. The small audience was spellbound. Between the bridge and chorus, her younger son interrupts to ask if they can have fruit and yogurt for breakfast the next day. It feels like glass breaking.

She smiles sweetly and puts her guitar down. "Sí, amor," she says. They can have yogurt.

On the ride home, I thought to myself, "Maybe that's it."

Maybe the most important thing about friendship in motherhood is holding a simple truth for each other— a reminder that a whole universe of a human being still exists inside each of us. Maybe all of the women who saw our souls in various chapters of life are with us now in one form or another, along with all of the women we have been.

Friendship in motherhood may mean feeling connected to someone for years before you discover certain basic truths about who they are and what their life looked like before kids. Some of those connections may extend beyond this chapter of early care-taking and unfold into something different. Some will stay in this moment, crystalized by the power of bearing witness to your matrescence.

Friendship in motherhood is bathing your kids in each other's bathtubs. It's soup left on your doorstep when you've had an impossibly hard day. It's someone else putting your kids' shoes back on when they fall off. And in those moments when it feels like motherhood itself is hellbent on robbing us of our personhood, it's holding up and reflecting back this simple truth: I see you.

Welcome to Sunday Stuff from The Other Stuff Too!

I am so excited by the idea of bringing a little suggested reading to your email inbox every week. Most of it will be from the TOST archives although I am hoping to send you at least one new piece every month. Wishing you the coziest Sunday. Thanks for being here.

Yours,

Alicia

Around the time I got my first and only tattoo, I stumbled across a quote about how getting ink is like getting a dog. Both have a strange ability to calcify a moment, forever searing into your memory a snapshot of exactly who and where you were when they happened.

Here’s a snapshot of what life looked like when we got Crush. It was a year and a half into our marriage. It was nine months into our first global pandemic. It was laundry day. It was the week we made an impromptu decision to sell the van after receiving a series of panicked messages from a van-lifer we met traveling across the US months earlier. His van had broken down yet again and he was marooned in Yuma, Arizona. This time, it was deemed irreparable by a local mechanic. We decided that he needed a home more than we needed a surf van. We’d since settled in Ensenada and weren’t planning on any major travel so we decided to give her a tune up and drive to AZ on a rescue mission.

Crush proved herself an excellent adventure companion on that trip. She snuggled right up between our two bucket seats and was entirely unfazed by the long hours of driving, new people and new smells that were characteristic of the life we had just left behind. A few, very long days later, we were here. The van’s new owner snapped this family photo before driving off. Looking back, it feels like a freeze frame of a time when we were straddling two worlds. In one, we were nomadic and completely untethered. In the other, we were cautiously putting down some small roots.

We’d been living in Mexico for two months and it felt like we could finally catch our breath. We finally had a place to be still, a place to plant a garden, a place to soak beans. For years, we had talked about a home base in Baja especially as I came to the realization that I wanted to get back to grassroots literacy work. The details were still blurry but things were beginning to take shape.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It can cause us to glance backwards through rosy glasses, not remembering the sharp edges of moments passed. But this one is vivid for me in all of its sweetness and complexity. I remember the people we were then, still blissfully unaware how a life that revolved around swells and tide charts would promptly restructure itself around puppy training and then again around baby naps and a house with a never-ending list of repairs.

We buried our sweet, rambunctious Crushy girl two Sundays ago. We buried her in the backyard of the Baja beach house where we’ve now been living for just shy of three years. As I rack my brain to come up with another place I’ve lived in that long since leaving home at 17, I cannot.

After taking her to two different vets, we couldn’t get a straight answer about what was wrong with her but she was extremely sick and increasingly feeble during her last weeks. She finished a thirty-day course of antibiotics on Saturday night and we found her dead in her dog house the next morning.

In this photo, I see two people who adapted to four radically different lifestyles in their first year of marriage and barely made it out alive. They bounced from downtown San Diego to Vietnam and abruptly back again to navigate shutdowns, living with family, and worsening MS symptoms before a full-time life on the road with endless lessons to learn and problems to solve. They had the privilege to experience amazing things that many will only ever dream of. They are grateful. They are exhausted. read more…

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about invisible love and all the places it hides.

Invisible love is when my dad instinctively scans a pile of cups at the swap meet for the one type that doesn’t hurt my husband’s hands to hold. Or when he waters the strawberries in his garden (the ones he planted because they’re my son’s favorite). It’s every time a friend wonders how you’re doing but doesn’t manage to reach out and ask. It’s a birthday card purchased but never sent.

When you worry about someone in silence while washing dishes or laugh quietly to yourself at an old inside joke, that’s invisible love too.

It’s every nice thing you think about someone but never say out loud. Invisible love is my in-laws keeping their guest house vacant for a year just in case their son needed emergency steroid treatment and had to be quarantined at a moment’s notice.

It’s my mom turning the ringer on her phone every night at nine when she goes to bed, just in case I have an emergency and need to call. It’s with every person whose said “let me know if you need anything” and meant it with their whole heart. Even when (especially when) neither of you quite know how to squeeze those words into any form of practical support.

Invisible love surrounds us every day, coming at us from a dozen different directions. It’s given freely and actively and, on the receiving end, it feels like nothing.

But one day, as I sat in the wake of one of those long, crushing days, something began to shift. The house was dark and quiet and my whole body felt like a skinned knee. I made myself a warm tea and carved out a moment to sit in my own thoughts for the first time since waking up. And as I sat there, feeling the kind of loneliness that creaks in your bones, I began to unearth some of that invisible love that I had never before stopped to notice. The last rays of sun leaking through our cardboard window cover, I remembered a movie quote, as corny as it is accurate. This has become the truth that I softly return to:

love

actually

is

everywhere.

July was a month of summer sickness. It seems like the same (or maybe multiple??) virus(es) have been boomeranging between the three of us for weeks. So, I really needed something fun to look forward to in August. Enter, Sunday Stuff from The Other Stuff Too.

The idea of keeping up with a weekly newsletter is honestly, pretty daunting. I don’t think I have it in me to produce new writing weekly at least during this chapter of life but I do love the idea of cozying up in your email inbox every week.

So, here’s the vision… a weekly email with a suggested piece of reading… something I’ve written, maybe new… probably old. I’m hoping to keep this up basically until I run out of pieces to send you. The algorithm may hate me for it… but hopefully you won’t.

See you Sunday!

Yours,

Alicia

Find The Other Stuff Too on Instagram and Facebook too!

September, 2024

This summer, you turned your first ratchet. You saw your first movie in theaters. You took your first flight.

You go to sleep a bit later now, which has given us your first summer of sunsets.

Bedtimes aren’t the battle they were this time last year. I don’t put so many miles on the stroller or waste gas driving circles through the neighborhood to get you to sleep.

Side by side, we make and eat hundreds of homemade popsicles and pop thousands of kernels of popcorn in our 90’s style air popper. You can even assemble it all by yourself.

We go to the park and the beach almost every day and I watch as those places become part of you. Our trips to the lavandería and tortillería aren’t quite as frequent, but they are a part of you too and you of them.

One evening, we pile into the car and head into town for an ice cream cone.

“He just climbed into the back without help!” I shout into the front seat. You’d never done that before.

Read More…

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“The word ‘mortgage’ comes from ‘mort,” she snickered, “French for death.”

We giggled over flutes of cheap champagne, perched on the stairs of the back porch. On Sundays, we wore pearls.

We were coworkers first, then friends and finally, through a fortune twist of fate, neighbors. The old Victorian we cohabited had been converted into a series of little apartments. Hers was upstairs, mine down. The pittance we paid to our landlord in rent merely evaporated from our pocketbooks each month, never to be seen again. We’d heard all of the arguments about how renting was silly and wasteful. We’d heard the lackluster dreams of our peers and the dewy-eyed way they talked about home ownership as though it was the ultimate aspiration.

Ours was more than just a playful conversation between college girls. It was an oath. In a world of expectant homeowners, we vowed to rent. Although financially it was foolish, it beat being hogtied to a singular version of what life could look like.

Graduation came and our paths diverged, each filled with its share of distinct experiences. Hers would look like anthropology, academia, activism, addiction, punch-drunk love, and prison food. There would be frozen Minnesota winters and oppressively hot summers in the Sacramento Valley. Life would take her through Eastern Europe, past Iowa cornfields, and into dive bars in the deep south. Next came sobriety, swim lessons, and a blissful yet brief brush with full-time motherhood. There would be creation and destruction, relapse and resurrection, writing grants, and raking leaves.

My share of experiences would unfold in furnished rooms and on unpaved roads, in smoggy cities and seaside villages. I would take two dozen jobs in less than a decade: pouring coffee and concrete, teaching English and bar-tending after class. There would be swanky cafés and ice-cold showers, comped flights, and cross-country bus rides. It would be high highs and low lows, working nights and surfing at dawn. At times, it would look like fearlessness. Too often, it would be shaped by fear. For what seemed like forever, it would look like fleeing the country and never looking back. At some point in my late twenties, I would come crawling home in pieces.

“Home” is where I met Arturo— San Diego, the home I had left when I was 17 and hadn’t resided in since. We met in the world of W-2 employees, a place neither of us was particularly comfortable. On the surface, his life looked a tad more conventional than mine at that moment. He was a homeowner with a respectable credit score and I, of course, was still a renter.

My renting situation at the time was particularly sweet. It was a steal of a price for San Diego, my first real “big girl” apartment downtown. My first time living alone. After fluttering around for so long, I had landed there when I desperately needed stability. After so many years of keeping minimal belongings, moving multiple times a year, and joking that I couldn’t commit to pets or large pieces of furniture, I was buying art for the walls. Every item in that place was thoughtfully purchased. I didn’t want to buy a hamper until I found the hamper. My couch had a name.

It was there, in the dappled light of the living room where I had allowed furniture to grow, that the topic of marriage was first breached. “If I told you that I really liked you,” he said, “would you burn all of your stuff and flee the country?”

Later, those words would appear in our wedding vows.

As my dear college friend wobbled to regain stability after release back into the free world, I reveled in the reluctant realization that love could indeed be adventure’s companion rather than its nemesis. Almost a decade after we’d sworn solidarity on the back porch of a shared rental, I was coming to a slightly altered understanding of settling down. Where marriage had always been erroneously tied to limited options and mediocrity, it now felt like a whole new avenue for adventure.

Home ownership, I was discovering, still felt the same. As my new partner and I flirted with conventionality and entertained the idea of nine-to-fiving it for the long haul, we settled into the understanding that somewhere, deep down, I had had all along. It wasn’t worth it, not at the cost of who I am… not at the cost of who we are.

So we set off to figure out what the hell that actually meant for us. We were without a road map and certainly not without trepidation but putting the pieces together slowly felt like a pitfall we’d already watched so many trip into; deferring happiness for a later date that may not ever arrive. As we tiptoed to the precipice, we looked to each other for strength and validation. There was nothing left to do but jump.

July 6, 2019. We set a date. I bought a white dress. His mother was over the moon. “Por fin se van a sentar cabeza— Finally, you’re going to settle down.”

But instead of coercing me into a life that didn’t fit, he was whispering these delicious words in my ear, “Let’s get out of here.”

So we set a second date, September 11, 2019. We bought two one-way tickets to Southeast Asia and we haven’t stopped moving since. Every new chapter, challenge, and change brings growth… sometimes painful but always necessary.

It’s been a few years since I lost the last working phone number I had for my old friend. Sometimes, I wonder where she landed. I wonder if she eventually decided that home ownership was right for her after all. Maybe she fell back into old habits or maybe her path led her somewhere beautiful and new.

“The Cost of Who We Are” is the fourth (extremely delayed) essay in a miniseries titled “The Women I Was.” After this, I will be returning to my regularly scheduled TOST programming. The remaining four essays that I planned to release as part of this series may or may not ever see the light of day (in case you hadn’t noticed yet, I’m just making this shit up as I go along).

You can read the first three essays here:

The Women I Was: Brujo

The Women I Was: Nostalgia is an Illusion

The Women I Was: A Time to Die

And, if you’re new here, welcome! My name is Alicia and I usually write about my experience in early motherhood and having a chronically ill partner.

You can also find The Other Stuff Too on Instagram and Facebook . Thank you for being here.

Then, I got thinking about my third bullet point, “human person in her own right.” I decided to polish off some old pieces that give a glimpse back in time to chapters that came before motherhood and share them with you here. This will be a departure from my usual The Other Stuff Too essays. If that’s not your cup of tea, feel free to delete what pops into your inbox from me for the next three to six weeks. After that, we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

If you’re new here, I usually write about early motherhood and navigating my husband’s chronic illness. You can read some of my usual content by clicking here, here or here.

The Women I Was: A Time to Die

It was already a heavy week when the news of his death reached me. The aunt of a good friend in Peru had just been killed and I had spent most of the days prior in Talara sitting through burial preparations, family arrivals from Lima, and all of the various stages and formalities of a Catholic funeral. More than anything else, my friends and I just lingered around waiting for Luchito to have a spare second when we could steal him away from the sadness for a few moments of laughter and an empanada or two.

On that particular day, I had spent the afternoon hunting for lice shampoo and popcorn kernels in 100-degree weather. Nico texted that he and Emi had nabbed the last two spots in the combi back to Lobitos. I knew I was cutting it close. The children’s film festival was set to begin in just a few hours and there was still so much to do. Somewhere between my lice treatment and running down to LCP headquarters to make palomitas for 100 kids in a pan that was comically small, I logged into Facebook and found a message from Jeff. He had sent the link to an article in the Orange County newspaper. I clicked to read a vague description of a young man who had been fatally injured after being hit by a car on the freeway. Between the ticking clock and my itchy head, I barely had time to process that Nick was gone. I shouted goodbye to Mari and ran out the door to meet Emi and get ready for the event.

As we stood over the tiny gas stove in her kitchen, already popping batch five or six of a dozen or so pans of popcorn, I told her I had just gotten word that a friend from college had passed away. Her shock overshadowed mine. Between scratching our heads and finding humor in the horror of having contracted head lice for the first time in our adult lives, we shared a somber moment for sad news sent from far away, a reality we both knew all too well.

Just like that, the film festival was in full swing. As usual, any stress or sadness inside me was squeezed from my lungs by a stampede of beautiful, little friends. All mental energy would now be channeled into entertaining them, distributing snacks, and preventing the event from erupting into total and complete chaos.

With our tiny helpers in tow, we pushed the plastic folding chairs into long rows, transforming the fisherman’s hall into a makeshift cinema. An old projector and a white sheet completed the scene.

Melina, one of my preschool students, wrapped herself around my neck like an oversized piece of jewelry. She demanded my uninterrupted eye contact and attention without saying a word.

“Miss Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicia,” another kiddo whose name I couldn’t pluck from my head was pulling at the hem of my dress. The lights dimmed.

I shuffled the last few stragglers into their seats and shot a teacher’s glare at the boys in the row behind me. The roughhousing immediately ceased as their faces, mischievous but sweet, melted into sheepish grins.

By some small miracle, we managed to keep the kids (mostly) quiet enough for Nico to introduce the videos. Afterward, an impromptu game of duck, duck goose (pato, pato, ganso) kept them occupied as we cleaned up.

As the crowd thinned, I walked up the hill to La Casona where my girlfriends had gathered to have a few beers. I wasn’t up for it. I hadn’t eaten all day and hunger and sadness were starting to creep in. I snuck off towards the only store that was still open to buy a massive bag of fried banana chips. As the grease settled into my stomach, I stomped on thorns and wandered toward the sea. I kicked off my sandals and let my feet carry me to the water. Flopping to my knees at the shoreline, I gave myself up to everything I finally had the space to feel: confusion, anger, emptiness, and overwhelming loss.

I had never felt the presence of death so thick around me like I did during those weeks. It seemed like every day, another one of my expat girlfriends got news of an unexpected death back home. One of the kindest men I knew had backed over my best friend’s puppy after a particularly rowdy Corrazón Serrano concert and, back in Lakeside, my own family was torn up after the sudden loss of a loved one just days before.

Later, I would find a photo of the program from Nick’s funeral on his mom’s Facebook page.

“To everything there is a season

and a time to every purpose under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die.”

It’s a hard pill to swallow that a twenty-five year old veteran’s “time to die” was on the side of an Orange County freeway, crushed by a reckless driver. But I guess fairness was never something that death took into consideration. Whether by way of cancer, stroke, the back wheels of an F-150, parachutes that don’t open, or grenades thrown through bedroom windows, death is not something that is earned or deserved. It just is.

I pressed my grief into the sand and bioluminescence rose up to meet it, gathering like little galaxies around my fists. I stared up into the sky at a billion stars unpolluted by city light.

The reality that Nick and I once cohabited felt worlds away. I thought about our big back porch and the old Victorian that had been divvied up into “Gustafson Apartments.” There, we shared war stories and confessions over Sierra Nevada Pale Ales. The porch connected two little units where we each lived with our respective partners and it looked out over a big backyard filled with the smell of orange blossoms and feral cats. Nick and I kept our own cats inside our apartments, away from the perils of Chico alley cat life. We wandered out when we needed fresh air, perspective, or the occasional cigarette. It was a strange little community but we always had each other’s backs.

Together, we protected our shared bike rack from theft (the number one crime in Chico, California). Old Man Smitty kept most of the tenants in weed, of course. Joe’s moms (whose names I never knew) warded off evil spirits with some kind of regular séance ritual, the smoke of which was visible from our perch on the porch steps. Mattie took in the big, orange cat abandoned when the previous tenant was dragged off to rehab and Chrisanna was part anthropologist, part degenerate older sister. When I shipped out to Chile and broke up with Jeff, I left him in Nick’s care. They became gym buddies, Friday night pizza partners, and eventually, the best of friends.

Nick was no stranger to death. After serving in Iraq, he knew it well. He had shown me the scars left on his flesh by roadside bombs and talked about the deaths of his comrades casually. The only thing that really got him teary-eyed was thinking about his daughter who he didn’t get to see as often as he wanted to. He was honest and sincere, tough but not too tough to admit his mistakes. In fact, our friendship began with an apology.

The ocean, dark and immense, swallowed the sound of sobbing. The vastness of the black waters carried my sorrow out to sea. So disoriented that I couldn’t find my shoes, I stumbled home barefoot through the desert.

This piece was renamed and reworked for this series with the help of my editor and friend, Chase Boisjolie.

Then, I got thinking about my third bullet point, "human person in her own right." I decided to polish off some old pieces that give a glimpse back in time to chapters that came before motherhood and share them with you here. This will be a departure from my usual The Other Stuff Too essays. If that's not your cup of tea, feel free to delete what pops into your inbox from me for the next three to six weeks. After that, we'll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

If you’re new here, I usually write about early motherhood and navigating my husband’s chronic illness. You can read some of my usual content by clicking here, here or here.

The Women I Was: Nostalgia is an Illusion

Silhouetted by the skeletons of old fishing boats, now put out to pasture, gulls squawk and ferrell dogs scrounge for breakfast through the heaps of garbage that line the coast. The sun is rising on Talara, a city of few charms.

Thirty minutes down a long, dirt road from home in Lobitos, Talara houses the only large, "Western" (for lack of a better word) grocery store in the area as well as an expansive fruit/vegetable market, bus station and my preferred internet café. With time, I have come to view my frequent visits as a necessary annoyance. The burden can usually be softened with some special treats from Plaza Vea, fun school supplies for my English classes and perhaps a tamal and beer from Cocoro's. Today's trip affords no such luxuries.

Sandwiched between a sleepless night and a full day of teaching, a six a.m. drop-off at Talara's EPPO Station was less than ideal. Regardless, when Moises brought the car around to pick him up, I couldn't say goodbye. Instead, I threw myself in the back seat like an extra piece of luggage.

"You've never seen this place without Jackson, have you?" Seth had asked me a few days before. I hadn't.

"To be honest," he said, "it's exactly the same. People come for a while and then they fuck off. You'll get used to it."

I was only a third of the way through my one-year work contract then and Seth was just a few months shy of finishing his. Jackson had just completed the longest volunteer stay in the history of the development organization we worked for (six months in total). Since I arrived, he had become one of my best friends and an integral part of my life in Lobitos. It was the first, but far from the last, significant goodbye I would have to say in this town.

Seth wasn't wrong. Here, “despedidas” come in such abundance that they rarely mean much anymore. At the time, I couldn't imagine my Lobitos life without one of the people who had become so ingrained in it. Now, the constant shuffle of employees and volunteers that have come into and out of my life over the past year is a virtual blur. I've seen four members of our tiny team arrive and four others leave, abruptly. With just shy of one year in Peru, I am currently the longest-standing international staff member on-site.

I've seen well over a hundred volunteers pass through the organization. I've lived with them, cooked with them, dined with them, worked with them, surfed with them and said goodbye to them. Each time, the deck is shuffled again and a new hand of friends is dealt. With it, comes a new soundtrack, a new routine, new recipes, new jokes and new values.

The last few months have been sprinkled with a handful of goodbyes that were particularly hard to swallow. Tied to fond memories and paths that vow to cross again, they protrude from a bleak backdrop of a dozen meaningless ones. A fresh batch under my belt, I am reminded of another conversation that I had with Seth, many months later.

“Here, nostalgia is an illusion,” he interrupted as I started to wax poetic about some false notion of the “good old days." We were sharing a beer on the tree swing at La Casona, looking out over the ocean. Life here, he reminded me, has always been a constant cycle of adjusting, recalculating and scrambling to pick up the pieces.

In the span of six months, I watched every member of the staff that received me upon my arrival to Lobitos as they packed up and left town. Between the four of them, they had taught me almost all of the simple, but important, things about daily life here. They taught me the best times to take public transportation, how to pump water and where the vicious street dogs hang out. They taught me how to avoid being eaten alive by mosquitos, how to light the oven and how to coax coffee out of a particularly fickle espresso machine. They taught me a lot of the big things too. It was largely through my conversations with them that I came to understand what we were moving towards, what we were fighting for.

At times, I still find myself clinging to the memory, though perhaps partially flawed, of a team that marched together triumphantly towards a common set of goals. I remember each individual blow as that train was repeatedly derailed by one unexpected despedida after another. As the cliché goes, the only thing that has been constant is change. Ironically, it can also be summarized succinctly with a classic Tali-ism: adapt or die. There were times when the latter seemed all but inevitable.

Now, I find that reminiscence comes in a variety of flavors. Sometimes, it curls up the hole left by a particular person's departure. It's the caffeine headache around noon because your standing coffee date has left town. It's the lazy feeling of rolling out of bed late now that your solid dawn patrol crew has been broken up. It's the guitar collecting dust now that Tom isn't there to play Shins covers, Seth isn't singing Bob Dylan songs and Jackson isn't incessantly strumming the four chords that make up the chorus of “Fast Car.”

There are times when I miss the naivety that once allowed me to feel like I was part of something solid, secure, stable. Luckily, stability comes from other sources. I find it in the tranquility of small-town life. I find it in my relationships with the amazing people here and even long-distance from loved ones elsewhere. I find beauty in a lifestyle that allows for days filled with surfing, ceviche, sunsets, good chats with Zoe and hugs from small children. I find comfort in feeling one step closer to finally figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.

I find hope in the knowledge that dovetailing interests and paralleling good intentions will continue to spark group synergy. Wonderful people will continue to find their way here and happy things will continue to happen.

This photograph by Aino Huotari accompanied my original 2014 blog post.

Then, I got thinking about my third bullet point, "human person in her own right." I decided to polish off some old pieces that give a glimpse back in time to chapters that came before motherhood and share them with you here. This will be a departure from my usual The Other Stuff Too essays. If that's not your cup of tea, feel free to delete what pops into your inbox from me for the next three to six weeks. After that, we'll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

If you’re new here, I usually write about early motherhood and navigating my husband’s chronic illness. You can read some of my usual content by clicking here, here or here.

The Women I Was: Brujo

I didn’t believe in messages from the universe in the same gentle, curious way that she did. Still, in that moment, I tried to listen for one. My devout agnosticism allowed for neither belief nor disbelief in anything. Sometimes, I was smug about it; feeling exalted above the need for false security and “absolute truth.” Sometimes, it was exhausting.

“El universo es sabio,” my girlfriends told me, borrowing from a variety of clichés and languages– the universe is wise. “Everything happens for a reason.”

Perhaps it was a chink in my armor that allowed me to entertain the idea. I try not to linger too long near the doors of churches in moments like these. There is something about the things you allow to touch you when your guard is down.

My incredulousness wasn’t reserved for conversations on religion. It also extended to modern medicine as a whole and, with more tangible reason, to the medical system in the small Peruvian village where I’d chosen to carve out a home. The pain was bad, but the nearest clinic was not only a hassle to get to, but offered little hope of resolution. I ruled it out almost immediately though I was vaguely enticed by the promise of strong, easily-accessible painkillers, illegal in the country I had left behind.

Later, a friend from Lima would laugh at me over cervezas and ceviche about the route that I had chosen to take. “Fucking gringos,” he would say as though my decision was typical of my kind. His reaction was fair enough, I suppose. I couldn’t keep a straight face through the story myself and as soon as the word “brujo” (shaman or wizard) escaped my lips, the table erupted into laughter.

As I walked home from dinner through the chilly desert night, I thought back to the so-called “brujo” who had pushed on the back of my head in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In my mind, I had neatly labeled him as a chiropractor. Still, in his own, the work he did was irrevocably tied to God’s. It made it hard to maintain the secular, little bubble I so wished to confine him to.

After a few minutes of pressing his fingers deep into my shoulder blade, he paused. He left his hand cupped a few inches from my head, presumably to stop my soul from spilling over. Moving his hands over a few inches, he went back to work. Something cracked deep in my neck and a gaggle of goose bumps flew south down my spine. He slipped softly from the room.

I could hear his kind voice from the other side of the door. “Está durmiendo,” he said— she’s sleeping. I wasn’t.

Her voice softened to meet his. Their conversation slid under the door into the tiny room which was barely wider than the cot that supported my wilted body.

She had come to the brujo with burdens of her own and her hopes that he could help her seemed much higher than my faith that he would put an end to my two weeks of migraines. Her man, she said, could not be brought to God. I wondered if the problem was really his lack of faith or its perceived connection to his lack of faithfulness.

Familiar with the machismo reality in which we existed, the latter seemed, to me, the most probable. I understood her desperation intimately. I did know a few honest men who had seemingly been kept honest by religion here. Far more common, however, were contradictions definitively not unique to this corner of the world. Splattered across the windows of every motorcycle taxi and family restaurant in town, God was flaunted ostentatiously but seemingly absent from day-to-day dealings. The incessant cycle of sin, repent, sin, repent was as deeply ingrained as the other rituals rarely questioned in Catholic country. It dribbled out of the churches and into the men we were trying so hard to love, or not to.

Hold him, that was his answer for her, simple and precise. Instead, she held me. Tiptoeing into the room where I lay, she hovered over me and draped her arms across my bare back. Hot tears trickled from my pounding head into my ears and I wanted nothing more than to run. I wanted to run to the place that felt closest to home here, so far from my own. I longed to sit in his parents’ earthen-floored living room. I ached for the familiar smell of his mother’s cooking and the resolute way his father talked about God. I cautiously toyed with the notion of prayer and how nice it must be to have a one-size-fits-all remedy for everything. I knew that I was playing with fire, even just thinking it.

The next day, the migraine intensified, just as the brujo said it would. The world around me blurred and pulsed to the rhythm of my beating head. I strained my eyes trying to find beauty in the reality I had chosen. The distinct life I had carved out on this seemingly randomly selected speck on the map made increasingly less sense. At the end of a long day, I collapsed into a puddle of pain, exhaustion and doubt.

In the morning, the clouds parted. Once again, I had the necessary headspace to grapple with the uncertainty of the unknowable. Once again, everything was equally as likely as it was unlikely. God was everywhere, and nowhere. The pain was gone.

I didn’t believe in messages from the universe in the same gentle, curious way that she did. Still, in that moment, I tried to listen for one.

Tomorrow, you complete four whole years on this planet and they were right, it was a blink— a hazy, euphoric, life shattering, life giving, relentless, dreamy, magical blink.

And here you are. Emerging from the fog, my favorite little human, fully-formed and spewing facts about how birds evolved from dinosaurs and orangutans have learned to use medicinal plants on their babies.

"Mom, do you like to be surprised?" you ask, "Did you know that lions run from bees?"

I do and I didn't. 

I promised myself from the start that I would never wish you smaller. Instead, I slow time the only way I know how, by slowing myself. 

I slow to take in the details of the incredible little being that you are in this moment. I pause in the chaos to observe the unique artifacts of three: your precious dino field guide on the bedside table, tiny toy animals tucked in every crevice, a bag of wet pool towels perpetually waiting to be hung up.

I snuggle this you tight. I do my best to wrap him in words with hopes that I may carry him with me as you become someone new.

I’m not sure at which point I switched the word “nomadic” in our Instagram bio over to “nomadic-ish” but right around the time we hit two years at the beach house, I started wondering whether this thing we were doing even qualified as nomadic-ish anymore. We passed the four-year mark in June, just in time to pack up our belongings and haul ourselves back across the border to San Diego… 32 short miles and yet somehow a whole world away.

The decision was made quickly. I’ve said before that Arturo and I sort of live at the intersection of painstakingly intentional decision-making and serendipitous spontaneity. This felt like that. There was just one conversation about it, maybe two. It wasn’t hard to get us on the same page. It felt right. It felt necessary. Just two weeks elapsed between decision made and last box packed. I watered our plants until the very last day.

“Just in case,” I thought, “who knows how long this move will take?”

Is there any greater lesson in detachment than continuing to tend to a garden that will likely die before harvest?

The morning we left, I pressed the last bits of springtime between the heavy wooden pieces of the flower press he made me for our fifth anniversary: purple Musk Stork’s-bill, yellow daisies and pink Mexican primroses.

Since leaving my parents’ house at 17, the beach house in Rosarito is the only place I’ve lived in that long. Since graduating from college in 2011, Mexico is the only country I’ve stayed in for four consecutive years. No matter how much time you spend somewhere, there are pieces of being nomadic that never leave you. That nagging feeling that you won’t be there long keeps you from hanging things up on the walls. I once slept on an air mattress for an entire year in college because I was so sure I’d be leaving the country at a moment’s notice that I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of getting and getting rid of a real bed. I didn’t want to be tethered down in any way. And while that freedom can be exhilarating, rebuilding can also feel frustrating and cumbrous sometimes. When I left Santa Fe after just six short months in 2016, I flew all of my newly-purchased spices with me in my checked luggage; a tiny show of resistance to starting all over, yet again.

As we meandered through Tijuana traffic with our SUV packed to the brim and our three-year-old asleep on my lap, something felt so familiar about the whole process– it’s the way your friends take the news, how they offer to foster your belongings as you try to give them away. “In case you need it,” they always say, “In case you come back.”

But thanks to surfboards that never made it out of Vietnam and a rice cooker that a friend in Peru has been “holding onto for me” for almost a decade, I now (mostly) know better than to say yes. It’s funny how these pieces of you– your things, your places, your people– can so easily get scattered all around this little ball of a planet just waiting for you to come back one day and pick them up.

There was something new in this move though and it scared the hell out of me. It was the desperation in his voice, his need for something lighter, softer, more comfortable as he navigated his progressing illness. His words pushed hard against my chest, so raw and real and simultaneously such an affront to everything we had built our lives on. We had never leaned into what was easy, comfortable, or conventional. It was a visceral reminder that, though plenty of passion and excitement have driven my adventures, fear has been a big motivator as well. Being terrified of getting stuck in a life that doesn’t suit you has a way of keeping the fire under your ass lit. These are the push and pull factors that have tugged at my life for as long as I can remember.

Suddenly, I felt trapped between continuing to be true to myself and build the life I wanted for me and my family and meeting the very real needs of my favorite person. Fast forward five months and I wish I could report back that this story has a neat and tidy happy ending. Alas, it does not. Life still feels wobbly in many ways. It feels like we’ve started and stopped and then started over a million times in these few short months and while that can be maddening in and of itself, it’s also proved something to me. I no longer see this move as a resignation.

Every day, we put one foot in front of the other, facing life head-on and prioritizing what we value most. This is just a new chapter of figuring things out on our own terms… with another adjustment in the terms and conditions we are operating within. Time will tell whether that continues to look like some level of nomadism or perhaps something that feels more akin to settling down… without settling for less. For now, plenty of boxes remain unpacked but tiny pieces of artwork are creeping up the walls of our new place. Onward we go.

August, 2023

Today, you discovered butterflies— like really discovered them.

You chased them around the flowers and short bushes at the park, all the while laughing hysterically and looking back at me like, “Mom, are you SEEING these things?!”

And I did. I really saw them. I saw them in a fresh new way, just like the old cliché says that having kids will make you see things. I saw them through your eyes.

By the time we got home, you were fast asleep. Before rolling you upstairs, I looked down at you and smiled. Your feet were covered in dirt, your face was stained with berries and your skin was soaked with sunshine. “This is what summer should be,” I thought.

As I pulled the stroller up the stairs, I knew it didn’t matter what happened for the rest of the day. Today was a good day. Today, you discovered butterflies.

Snapshots is my new, Substack miniseries. Each Sunday, I’ll share an old photo accompanied by a short text that captures what life looked like at a particular moment in our journey navigating early parenthood and chronic illness. If you enjoy following along, please consider subscribing and sharing my work with a friend.

Share The Other Stuff Too

It’s my birthday. Don’t buy me a coffee.

If you have spent any time on the Substack platform, you have probably stumbled across a “Buy Me a Coffee” button or ten. On the surface, it’s a cool way to give one-time support to creators. I love that it gives potential patrons who may not have the financial means to pledge monthly patronage or give a large lump sum a tangible way to support artists and say, “I appreciate what you’re putting out into the world.”

But here’s the thing, integrating a “Buy Me a Coffee” button also feels like an admission of something. It says, “Hey, I’m not a real writer. I’m not quitting my day job any time soon but you can buy me a latte as a fun, little treat if you like this thing I made.”

A few weeks ago, I decided to turn on the paid subscription option on my Substack newsletter. For reasons I can’t quite verbalize yet, that step felt really scary. Even though the very first thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was a writer, I’ve never actually entertained it as an option for making money. I’ve never considered myself a “real” writer (whatever that means). Plopping a “Buy Me a Coffee” button on my work honestly just felt like an invitation for more imposter syndrome.

I can’t say that being a writer is my singular dream. For those of you who know me in real life, you’re probably much more well-acquainted with my other big dream, Free Range Imagination. My passion for the work our organization does is still strong and this is in no way the end of that. It’s just the beginning of getting serious about another dream, my first dream, one that I wrote off a long time ago as something that may actually have the potential to earn me any type of income.

I believe in the power of telling our stories and I want to continue to offer mine up for whoever wants to read them without a paywall being a barrier. I also believe in a writer’s right to get paid for their work. I haven’t quite reconciled these two ideas but, for now, my hope is that there will be enough people who see value in this work and choose to support it financially in order to allow me to keep everything free and accessible to all. My greatest wish in creating The Other Stuff Too was that my words would reach others grappling with the challenges of supporting a partner with chronic illness or navigating the disorienting transition to parenthood and help them feel less alone.

So no, as much as I love a well-made cappuccino, please don’t buy me a coffee. Send me $5 if you think my work has value and you want to help me get one step closer to supporting my family as a writer.

Whether that looks like paid childcare or investing in social media promotion to get my work in front of more potential readers, every cent you send me will go towards making this all a bit more… real.

The other day, my three-year-old asked me, “Mommy, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Adding reassuringly, “You can be anything you want to be.”

So fuck it, today I turned thirty-seven and it feels like it’s time to say it out loud. I want to be a writer.

With your support, I’ll keep putting words on paper… and making my coffee at home.

September, 2024

It’s strange how gratitude and grief often seem to walk hand in hand. Is it because they occupy the same part of our viscera? Maybe they just surface in similar moments, moments when our hearts feel more raw.

At the end of last summer, we finally took our first real vacation as a family of three. Traveling with a wild toddler and chronic illness as an invisible fourth companion made for many such moments.

“I used to have travel down to a science,” you said as we waited to board our flight to Denver.

For me, it was more of an art— the art of getting lost in a new city and serendipitously ending up exactly where I needed to be. Navigating airports and train stations and clocking hundreds of hours on buses and cars had become second nature through the years. Still somehow the logistic challenges of this new, cumbersome arrangement made it feel like a brand new endeavor. We were more than just out of practice. We were in uncharted territory.

We hadn’t even made it to take off, and already the travel preparations alone had all but wiped us out. And so the trip continued, punctuated with poignant moments like the one captured in this photograph.

Stolen moments in an old friend’s kitchen laughing quietly about distant memories from a past life while keeping eyes on our baby monitors.

Moments that felt like hundreds of little hugs from loved ones and strangers— tiny arms carrying us along what, at times, felt like a near-impossible journey.

And then there’s this one: the moment I watch the color fade from your face as you sink into your airplane seat. Our little one is finally satisfied after 20 minutes of rambunctious play with Papa. Expending energy you didn’t have to begin with, you bounced and sang, launching him into fits of giggles and securing your spot as the favorite parent.

As I watch you wilt before my eyes, my heart is pierced with blistering grief and immense gratitude.

What a peculiar and beautiful honor it is to bear witness to a love so pure and strong that you literally kill yourself to give it.

There is so much to be thankful for.

Snapshots is my new, Substack miniseries. Each Sunday, I’ll share an old photo accompanied by a short text that captures what life looked like at a particular moment in our journey navigating early parenthood and chronic illness. If you enjoy following along, please consider subscribing and sharing my work with a friend.

August, 2022

When I look at this photo, I will always see what have become the unmistakable signs of MS fatigue on your face.

I will see my hair down for the first time in God knows how long and all of the short little frizzy bits protruding from the places where our son has tugged and ripped at it.

I will see new parents on their very first baby-free coffee date since earning this title eight months ago.

I will see a dad who, just yesterday, couldn’t take a deep breath without the excruciating pain of his back spasming.

I will see a mom about to begin a week of sleepless nights with debilitating cramps and a crying baby.

When I look at this photo, I will feel the dappled sunshine dancing through the patio trellis and onto our toes.

I will remember a week of frustration and miscommunication and all of the struggles that sometimes compounded in this particular chapter of our lives.

I will remember this moment of joy and silliness amid the stress of a hard week. It will smell like hot lattes. It will feel like all of the love of those who rally around us even when things are the messiest. It will feel like all of the love of your cheek pressed up against my face. It will feel like all of the love.

Snapshots is my new, Substack miniseries. Each Sunday, I’ll share an old photo accompanied by a short text that captures what life looked like at a particular moment in our journey navigating early parenthood and chronic illness. If you enjoy following along, please consider subscribing and sharing my work with a friend.

December, 2020

Around the time I got my first and only tattoo, I stumbled across a quote about how getting ink is like getting a dog. Both have a strange ability to calcify a moment, forever searing into your memory a snapshot of exactly who and where you were when they happened.

Here’s a snapshot of what life looked like when we got Crush. It was a year and a half into our marriage. It was nine months into our first global pandemic. It was laundry day. It was the week we made an impromptu decision to sell the van after receiving a series of panicked messages from a van-lifer we met traveling across the US months earlier. His van had broken down yet again and he was marooned in Yuma, Arizona. This time, it was deemed irreparable by a local mechanic. We decided that he needed a home more than we needed a surf van. We’d since settled in Ensenada and weren’t planning on any major travel so we decided to give her a tune up and drive to AZ on a rescue mission.

Crush proved herself an excellent adventure companion on that trip. She snuggled right up between our two bucket seats and was entirely unfazed by the long hours of driving, new people and new smells that were characteristic of the life we had just left behind. A few, very long days later, we were here. The van’s new owner snapped this family photo before driving off. Looking back, it feels like a freeze frame of a time when we were straddling two worlds. In one, we were nomadic and completely untethered. In the other, we were cautiously putting down some small roots.

We’d been living in Mexico for two months and it felt like we could finally catch our breath. We finally had a place to be still, a place to plant a garden, a place to soak beans. For years, we had talked about a home base in Baja especially as I came to the realization that I wanted to get back to grassroots literacy work. The details were still blurry but things were beginning to take shape.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It can cause us to glance backwards through rosy glasses, not remembering the sharp edges of moments passed. But this one is vivid for me in all of its sweetness and complexity. I remember the people we were then, still blissfully unaware how a life that revolved around swells and tide charts would promptly restructure itself around puppy training and then again around baby naps and a house with a never-ending list of repairs.

We buried our sweet, rambunctious Crushy girl two Sundays ago. We buried her in the backyard of the Baja beach house where we’ve now been living for just shy of three years. As I rack my brain to come up with another place I’ve lived in that long since leaving home at 17, I cannot.

After taking her to two different vets, we couldn’t get a straight answer about what was wrong with her but she was extremely sick and increasingly feeble during her last weeks. She finished a thirty-day course of antibiotics on Saturday night and we found her dead in her dog house the next morning.

In this photo, I see two people who adapted to four radically different lifestyles in their first year of marriage and barely made it out alive. They bounced from downtown San Diego to Vietnam and abruptly back again to navigate shutdowns, living with family, and worsening MS symptoms before a full-time life on the road with endless lessons to learn and problems to solve. They had the privilege to experience amazing things that many will only ever dream of. They are grateful. They are exhausted.

They are soaking in the goodness of a little slowness, a bit of stability, and a whole lot of puppy love.

This photo serves as a reminder that, though no one thing is perfect, each of the lives we’ve lived has been damn good in its own ways. We look back on this time with fondness, with compassion for the people we were then and the ones we are now. We look back with visceral gratitude for everything that life was and all it has become. Still, there is also somber recognition of something lost.

We miss our freedom.

We miss our dog.

Snapshots is my new, Substack miniseries! Each Sunday, I’ll share an old photo accompanied by a short text that captures what life looked like at a particular moment in our journey navigating early parenthood and chronic illness. If you enjoy following along, please consider subscribing and sharing my work with a friend.

September, 2023

So long, summer.

You were sweet.

Your days were slow— exquisitely slow, excruciatingly slow.

You were stillness and sunshine, sunsets and shadow puppets.

You were dandelions and discoveries and also teething... so much teething.

You were contact naps and strolls around the neighborhood, sweaty cuddles and belly laughs, hungry caterpillars in the garden and brain scans that look like butterflies.

You were play dates in the park and hours of conversations over coffee with a million interruptions. You were dreams coming true... poco a poco.

It would be dishonest to deny June and it's little pings of jealousy as my feed filled with surf and travel photos but thankfully, July was wiser. August too.

Now, in the fading sunlight of late September, there is nothing left but gratitude, joy, peace.

A cool breeze passes and, just like that, you're gone in what feels like the blink of an eye.

Snapshots is my new, Substack miniseries! Each Sunday, I’ll share an old photo accompanied by a short text that captures what life looked like at a particular moment in our journey navigating early parenthood and chronic illness. If you enjoy following along, please consider sharing my work with a friend.

Share The Other Stuff Too

Friendship in motherhood is strange and sacred, illusive yet essential and, perhaps above all else, complicated.

It's hours of conversation that used to happen on the front stoop at a house party or the kitchen floor of a shared apartment all squeezed into ten-minute WhatsApp audios punctuated by babies screaming and profuse apologizing. It's keeping track of which friends are still on Facebook, who hates video calls, who never manages to listen or respond to voice notes and who lives for them.

Sometimes, it means meeting a new version of a woman you've loved through many lifetimes. Your college roommate who once held your hair back while you puked your guts out into a stranger's toilet, now texts you parenting advice at similarly odd hours of the late night and early morning. Travel buddies from your twenties send you boxes of hand-me-downs or Amazon packages from your son's Christmas wishlist.

Other times, you're forced to forge love in the trenches. This new love finds a way despite never having known versions of each other with those crisp edges that once separated you from other sentient beings.

She's only known this messy, melted version of you with two heads; the one that cries so much and sleeps so little. You've never once sat together in a café for hours with nowhere to go. Your friendship wasn't built on a foundation of drunken heart-to-hearts, middle school memories, or cross-continent bus rides.

Instead, you scoured for signs of potential compatibility at your local playground. You scanned through a vast sea of black yoga pants and messy mom buns for a cool band shirt, an intriguing tattoo, or an interesting book peering out optimistically from the top of a diaper bag.

I once met a mom in the park who I connected with immediately. While our toddlers took turns throwing pebbles into gopher holes, it took her all of ten minutes to peer straight into my soul and offer up the exact advice I desperately needed. She lived a bit far away but we made a point to stay in touch. We attended each other's kids' birthday parties. We set aside little gifts that we knew the other would like.

One evening, my husband, son and I drove into Tijuana to attend her birthday dinner. With some cajoling, another friend of hers convinced her to pull out her guitar and, in an instant, her tiny kitchen was transformed into one of the most powerful and intimate live music venues I've ever experienced. My jaw dropped. I never even knew she played let alone that she made a living doing so before her kids were born.

I turned to her six-year-old and asked him if he could please continue telling me his favorite movie scene by scene in a few minutes when his mom finished singing. The small audience was spellbound. Between the bridge and chorus, her younger son interrupts to ask if they can have fruit and yogurt for breakfast the next day. It feels like glass breaking.

She smiles sweetly and puts her guitar down. "Sí, amor," she says. They can have yogurt.

On the ride home, I thought to myself, "Maybe that's it."

Maybe the most important thing about friendship in motherhood is holding a simple truth for each other— a reminder that a whole universe of a human being still exists inside each of us. Maybe all of the women who saw our souls in various chapters of life are with us now in one form or another, along with all of the women we have been.

Friendship in motherhood may mean feeling connected to someone for years before you discover certain basic truths about who they are and what their life looked like before kids. Some of those connections may extend beyond this chapter of early care-taking and unfold into something different. Some will stay in this moment, crystalized by the power of bearing witness to your matrescence.

Friendship in motherhood is bathing your kids in each other's bathtubs. It's soup left on your doorstep when you've had an impossibly hard day. It's someone else putting your kids' shoes back on when they fall off. And in those moments when it feels like motherhood itself is hellbent on robbing us of our personhood, it's holding up and reflecting back this simple truth: I see you.

We used to have the luxury of drowning ourselves in words and tears. It was simple in those early days. Before we were parents. Before you were sick.

Whenever something came up, we would lock ourselves in and figure it out. We would talk for hours and hours, both so determined to fix whatever felt broken. Words filled the gaps between two minds that functioned so differently but were equally determined to handle each other with care.

Sometimes, I would talk so much I thought I would throw up. Sometimes, I would cry so hard I felt hungover the next day. Those were the times when I felt most betrayed by words, so imperfect in their relaying of what was in my head and heart to another mind wired so unlike my own.

With time, we started needing fewer words. We reached new levels of understanding and intimacy that I'd never even attempted.

Parenthood came and there was suddenly less time for words than ever, but we also seemed to need even fewer. Our nightly texts pinged between separate bedrooms.

"Thank you for all you did today. I know it was a rough one."

"Sorry I get so tired. Thanks for being such a great mom."

You don't mention how short I was with you as I pushed our screaming baby out the door or the fact that I left all of the kitchen cupboards open. You just get it.

Still, there are some days when things aren't so seamless. Days when it feels messy and cloudy and you feel so far away. Weeks when we're sleep deprived and extended so far beyond capacity that all of our sharp little bits prickle up against each other. Times when, through no fault of your own, the version of you that I need simply isn’t available.

Those are the times when I am flooded with words; words I wish could span the gaps in the way they once would. But nothing I could say could reach you now. You're in your own flood; not of words but of pain, mental fog, and confusion. Without you needing to say anything, I know you're fighting like hell just to keep your head above water.

So, instead, I shed a scrunched face full of silent tears as I nurse our son to sleep. I shoot you a quick text to say goodnight and try my hardest not to be the girl who needs all of the words.