Life Lately

Taking a page from Pantsuit Politics’ Instagram page, (who apparently take this practice from Emily P. Freeman, so I’m just another link in the chain at this point), to list the things I learned in June:

• If you have the option for your kid to be bussed to an activity instead of driving them, you should do it. Every time. It will be worth all the dollars.

• I can’t keep up with anything lately and feel like I’m failing at everything. There are too many small children around and also we’re coming out of a pandemic which I’m sure has something (read: almost everything) to do with it, but I don’t have time to unpack that now (see: I can’t keep up with anything). I feel like I’m behind in every area of my life and also things feel like they take between 2-5 times longer than I think they should. The kids should be nicer and the kitchen should be cleaner and I want to get back to doing yoga and I want new furniture for almost every room of my house and maybe the kids would be nicer if I set a better example instead of snapping at them. However, if my little corner of the internet has anything to say about it, apparently that’s how everyone is feeling lately. So maybe that’s just how life is, at least for right now. Solidarity.

• I think number one on this list might have a decent amount to do with number two on this list, since I have spent approximately all of June in my minivan. So. There’s that. Maybe I would have more time to do all the things if I weren’t driving around the entire Twin Cities every single day.

• Driving hours in the car by myself with a bunch of podcasts and good music (read: Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo) is my new favorite form of self-care.

• Grilling anything and throwing chips and a sliced melon on the table is a good enough meal when it’s one million degrees out. We can just pretend the kids ate a fair share of the fruit instead of gorging themselves on chips and processed white buns from a package. It’s fine.

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Action Item

The disaster in Surfside, Florida and the unprecedented heatwave in the Northwest are both on my mind this week. CNN has a great round-up of organizations to support, if you’re able, who are on the ground in the Miami area. Bustle has a list of organizations to support in the Pacific Northwest, as well as general links to organizations who are advocating for climate change solutions. We had our own unheard-of heatwave here in Minnesota in late May/early June, and unfortunately, these climate events are only going to continue. Less unprecedented, much, much more commonplace.

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Around the Internet

• This thread is an entire sermon in ten slides.

• Because I can always have to link to at least one Anne Helen Peterson piece, and this one is everything.

• “Families desperately need help. In other countries, they get it. In the United States, they get empty homilies about the importance of family.”

• An important read about female athletes, especially as we move forward into the Olympics.

• I feel this piece in a very deep way.

• Have you heard of FaceTune? This read was both fascinating and gag-inducing. “Cosmetic surgeons who spoke to HuffPost said they now regularly have patients come in with photos of themselves that have been so heavily Facetuned they would be anatomically impossible to replicate.”

• “A residency is typically designed to give the artist the space to create. In the art world that translates, almost always, to being alone, she explained. ‘It felt quite offensive that somehow you are more creative away from your family than with them,’ she said.”

• In case you haven't seen the “Dear Intern” thread yet. It will make you feel ten types of encouraged with the world.

• I’m in a (usually) happy marriage, but damn if I don’t wish I had someone to break up with so I could blast this perfect mash-up.

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Eating

• These harissa meatballs with whipped feta. Though—UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT—I don’t actually care for the whipped feta. I make the meatballs and bell peppers, omit the zucchini, and serve it all with homemade pita chips, hummus, sliced cucumbers, and kalamata olives.

• These cheesesteaks but add more bell pepper, onion, mushrooms, and cheese, and buy prepackaged shaved steak from the store so it all comes together ridiculously fast. And deliciously.

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Fun Things

• Back in April, I told you to get a For Days Take Back Bag. Now I’m telling you to buy this relaxing romper because it looks like I put effort into getting dressed but feels like I’m wearing pajamas, which is my exact goal with every outfit.

• The tagline of this product is “the (cashmere) sweatpants of lipstick” and I co-sign that 100%. I’m always on the look for a product that glides on like a chapstick but deposits a little bit of color; something I can use whether I’m in the drop-off line or date night. Ultralip is that thing. I bought it in Lucite but will definitely be back for more.

• This tank. I’ve dressed it up with black shorts and all the way down with athletic shorts and a ponytail. The exaggerated shoulder/extra fabric under the armpit means you don’t have to worry about flashing your bra. It runs large—I tuck it all the way in or it’s a lot of fabric for me. Recommend sizing down if that’s an option for you.

• Okay, I’d seen this Supergoop Unseen Sunscreen going around my corners of the internet and finally tried it out. It’s not shiny or greasy but glides on smooth and matte as the perfect makeup primer. I’m a believer.

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Another thing I learned this month is that June doesn’t quite feel like summer yet. The kids spend the first two weeks wrapping up school. Caden had an activity that’s started at 8 am (!!!) the last few weeks. (See: if there’s a bus option it will be worth all your $$$.) Baseball has largely taken over our evenings. All of these activities have walked us right up to a point where we’ll be traveling for a few days at a time here and there, where it feels like I’m either packing for or unpacking from a trip. And, you might be saying, what do you mean it doesn’t feel like summer? Baseball! What’s more summer than that?

I know. And these things aren’t bad. I’m so glad we’re able to do them this year. And also: it doesn’t feel like summer to me until we’ve had a chance to lay low, sleep in, and do a whole lot of nothing around the house for days at a time.

Those days are coming. I just wrote up our July calendar and am admiring all the blank spots on the calendar. The same blank spots I will then probably curse around the second week of August. Because: balance!

What Self-Care Isn't

Self-care.

Could there be a buzzier, more millennial mom catch-phrase than that? Honestly, I roll my eyes a little at myself just typing it.

Not at what it entails: I am here for all the self-care. It’s important to know what fills us up, whether a book, a movie, or the now synonymous with self-care pampering that is a bubble bath with a glass of wine. I applaud the fact that women are stepping up to say they are no longer interested in being martyrs, but in the care of ourselves as entire people with emotions and thoughts and physical and mental well-being to think about. I don’t want to go back to the time before self-care was part of our collective consciousness.

No, I’m rolling my eyes at how ubiquitous the phrase has become. It’s been co-opted by capitalism as virtually every other post in my Instagram feed tries to sell me everything from skin serums to beach towels to smoothies all under the umbrella of “self-care.” (Okay, but I did buy the skin serum, though.)

But what makes me roll my eyes most of all is when I see things labeled as self-care that just…aren’t.

A few years ago, an influencer I followed posted a photo of herself at a doctor’s appointment. In the caption, she discussed how she’d finally made a doctor’s appointment to get something checked out that she should have been seen for a long time ago. How she got a babysitter and that was self-care. How she was so proud of taking this step in self-care. And ended with a rejoinder to her fellow moms to make their own doctor’s appointments that day for the sake of their own self-care. (Really, the post was littered with “self-care.”)

It was then that my brain exploded.

Because hear me out: taking yourself to the doctor for something that should be medically checked out by a professional is not self-care. It’s just what you should do.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective

Scream Day

Does anyone else feel like they could walk out to their backyard…

…or lock themselves in the bathroom…

…or drive around alone in the car…

…or shove their face into a pillow…

…and let out one long, loud, visceral scream?

If so, you’re not alone. I’ll join you. And it’s not just me: the idea of screaming out the entirety of our frustration, bewilderment, pain, and anger from the past year has become so popular there’s been a push in the United Kingdom to set aside an official holiday: Scream Day.

According to the official Scream Day website, “Scream Day was created to bring awareness to the benefits of screaming.” I went down my own Internet rabbit hole to research those benefits, which are primarily related to the way screaming helps our bodies release intense emotions. Similar to our body’s need to complete the stress cycle—through exercise, deep breathing, crying, and more—screaming can help complete the emotional response to events in our lives. 

Psychotherapist Zoë Aston sums it up on the Scream Day site by saying, “Screaming creates a chemical reaction that is similar to the one you get when you exercise—you get a dopamine hit and some endorphins going.”

While I don’t remember everything I learned once upon a time about brain chemistry, I do know dopamine and endorphins are exactly the kind of chemicals I want flowing through my body. And those are probably the exact chemicals we’ve been missing out on far too much over the past year.

The New York Times also caught on to this idea earlier this year, creating their own Primal Scream line, especially for moms. Women were invited to call in to record their own primal screams, to rage, vent, and let it all out. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing quite as cathartic as a good vent in a safe space to clear the emotional room in my brain.

Read more about Scream Day over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

After the Pandemic

I was sitting at my desk last Friday while all three kids were at school, a rarity the past several weeks, and I was avoiding writing, because paradoxically this is what people who call themselves writers do. I decided to hop on a vaccine finder website and work my way down the list, an effective way to kill ten minutes, knowing I would encounter rejection after rejection, “No vaccine appointments available near you.”

Except, this time, when I clicked the first link for a random Walgreens, a green notification popped up.

“Appointments available near you!” 

I sat for a second in disbelief before clicking through, certain they would all be gone in the matter of seconds it would take to select an appointment time and click through from one page to another. 

But it worked. It worked enough that I was able to log myself out, create an account for Tyson, and log back in under his name to create an appointment for him, three days later but still with several time slots available.

I didn’t expect to feel the euphoria I did in that moment.

I called Tyson. (Who was two floors beneath me working in the basement, please let’s bemoan the laziness of our society and the general perils of cell phones. Kidding, it’s freaking fantastic.). 

“Guess what I just did?” I asked him excitedly, my voice full of exclamation points.

“What?”

“I got us vaccine appointments!” 

I sat back, mind buzzing, and what little productivity I may have had left vanished. I couldn’t sit still long enough to focus on words or the screen in front of me. Instead, I possessed a restless energy, which led me to wander around the house to tidy the kid’s desks and organize the mudroom. 

I felt excitement tangled with anxiety in my stomach and marveled not for the first time at this strange new world.

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The post-pandemic world fills me with almost as many questions as answers, almost as much anxiety as relief. Though I primarily identify as an ambivert, my introvert side totally and completely took over this past year. The idea of regularly meeting up again with other people sounds daunting, unnerving, draining. It sounds like a lot.

Honestly? My biggest challenge the past year was the sheer amount of time the kids were home. If only I could have quarantined at home, by myself, with stacks of books and cups of coffee, tea, and Moscow mules at the ready, I feel as though I could have sailed through. (This was my pandemic daydream, during day 482 of togetherness with the kids when one was crying, another shred scraps of paper all over the floor, and the third raided the panty for the 38th time that hour. I understand those who flew solo during the pandemic experienced their own challenges. Please leave me alone with my flawed-yet-idyllic pandemic fantasy.)

As I celebrate each and every vaccination card photo in my social media feed, I can’t help but wonder: what does re-entry look like, anyway? I see so much about not returning back to normal. How this past year—socially, politically, racially, psychologically—has affected us all so much that it would be impossible to return to our normal of the Before Times.

I agree I don’t want to go back to normal. But I’ll also admit I don’t even know what that means. What was normal before? The kids going to school and attending activities—give me alllllllll of that back, please. The ability to meet up for drinks on a whim, to hire a babysitter for a date night, to get a pedicure, to plan a trip without any guilt: these are the norms I’d like to return to.

I think, at least sometimes, the more progressive wings of my internet bubble mean they don’t want to return to the norms of society, of mass shootings, systemic racism, sexism, and general oppression. Please read: I don’t either. And also: radical change of the criminal justice system, paid family leave, gun control, and healthcare for all aren’t exactly going to happen overnight.

So I’m not sure what the new normal looks like, what this new normal is that people want to enter into. I do want a new normal. To dive back in and dismiss the entirety of the past year would be to have missed the whole entire fucking point. 

Maybe a new normal does include kids attending school and playing baseball and taking vacations. But maybe it also includes more intentional family time. Maybe it continues to include making homemade pizza every Saturday night. Maybe it includes getting more involved in our local communities. Maybe it looks like getting more involved in politics, in door knocking or phone banking or emailing our representatives or attending meetings. Maybe it includes shutting myself away from the world for awhile because sometimes that’s actually really nice. Maybe it involves, decades from now, a conversation where we say, “Remember that year we all stayed in our homes?” and instead of dismissing it with some sort of, “Yeah, that was wild. Remember all the toilet paper memes?” we actually remember what it felt like, the amount of pain and lives lost, the ache of broken systems that left us without childcare and education and healthcare and the time and space to grieve.

Maybe a new normal means we actively remember what happened, that we hold it deep in our bones. If March showed me anything, it’s that my body is holding onto the trauma of the past year whether I want to or not.

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I received my first shot on Saturday. I imagined my vaccine moment to be the type I’ve heard friends and others on social media talk about, with tears and a collective “look at us we’re doing it” sort of vibe. In a large, communal room with appropriately spaced chairs and some sort of quip-y banter, perfect to post on social media, with the nurse.

My experience...was not that. Please remember I was at the most random of Walgreens. The pharmacists, probably because it was noon on a Saturday, were overwhelmed with people who were there to pick up their prescriptions both inside and out, as well as with people like me who had made vaccine appointments. 

After abruptly receiving my vaccine, no quip-y banter to be found, I sat in a chair at the end of an aisle to wait my 15 minutes. The vinyl on its padded seat was peeling and I faced a display of wart removal options. The soundtrack to this historic moment was listening to one of the pharmacists continually shout “What’s your name?” to someone in the drive-thru who I hoped had better eyesight than hearing, what with the fact that they were driving and all.

I tried to work up some emotion in this anticlimatic environment. Instead, I scooched out of the way for people walking by, found a place in my wallet for my vaccine card, and scrolled my phone. Maybe the getting out of this pandemic and into whatever new normal there is to be found is going to be as unceremonious as it was going in.

Life Lately

A couple of Wednesdays ago, I found myself shaking at lunch.

The door of our washing machine broke that morning—it had been wonky for awhile, it was only a matter of time—and I texted a neighbor to see if I could effectively take over theirs for the day, what with my four loads of laundry on the docket. I was trying to do laundry before we traveled to Iowa to see Tyson’s brother and his family for the first time in fourteen months, to meet our three-month-old niece for the very first time. I save up our laundry before a trip because then it’s easier to just toss everything in suitcases and not have to worry about laundry when we return home. But the washing machine broke. 

Anyway, the shaking. The washing machine was the breaking point, the proverbial straw breaking the poor camel’s back. You know how it goes, when you collapse over a spilled bowl of Cheerios or a smear of toothpaste or dropping a contact lens, but it’s not about the Cheerios or the toothpaste or the contact, they’re just the thing behind the thing?

I found myself trembling at lunch because the washing machine, this silly yet essential thing, broke and upended my entire day. And even though I only had to haul the laundry across the street and a few houses down it threw off my entire rhythm. I spent the morning trying to catch up on writing and emails, but was mostly thrown off by going back and forth to the neighbors and having conversations with Tyson about the annoying, broken washing machine. And our house then was a disaster, it truly was, every single room was full of things that didn’t belong or simply needed to be put away. So I spent the morning adulting and figuring things out and bemoaning the general state of our house and then I ran around picking Nolan up from preschool and getting our grocery order and swapping out loads of laundry at the neighbor’s and reprimanding Nolan when I found him on my laptop which is NOT AT ALL ALLOWED when I discovered it was 1:00 and I hadn’t eaten so I sat down to eat something.

Anyway, I was trembling at lunch.

But it wasn’t just the washing machine. It’s that that week of all weeks was the week leading up to spring break, and then it WAS spring break, and my body? She remembers what happened at this time last year.

The kids had an entire week off for spring break plus the following Monday (because for some reason spring break is one week plus one day now) and that Monday, too, almost pushed me over the edge. Because in my brain spring break was over, yet they were still home, and I was almost convinced they wouldn’t go back to school, just like last year, when spring break was extended for a week and then the world turned upside down which resulted in them being home for the better part of 40-something weeks.

So my body decided to communicate all this to me. It communicated this to me through the shaking and the nights where it feels impossible to sleep and the other nights where it feels impossible to get up in the morning. It communicated all this to me through a scattered brain and the feeling that everything I’ve been doing lately has been like trudging through mud, where everything takes 2-10 times longer than I think it should. My body is carrying the trauma (Oof that feels like a loaded word and yet what else to call it?) of the past year, of this time last year, and it let all out this month, an attempt to alert me that “Hey! We’re not okay over here!” when my brain would rather stuff things down all “La la la everything is fine!”

It’s both completely irrational and also not at all.

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Take Action

Gun control, gun control, gun control. We Americans were tragically reminded this month of the need for reasonable gun control measures, including background checks, waiting periods, and a ban on military-grade weapons. Really, I’d settle for anything at this point.

• Consider a donation to an organization such as Moms Demand Action.

• Contact your representatives in Congress, particularly your Senators and any Republican representatives, to demand that gun legislation be brought to the floor. (The House passed two bills to strengthen gun laws earlier this month.)

• Remember to center the victims in the shootings, not the shooter. I appreciated the New York Times’ coverage of the lives lost in Atlanta and in Boulder.

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Around the Internet

• “That all adds up to a picture where having schools open is pretty clearly safer than having indoor dining open, since you can’t eat with a mask on. In a world where they’re still giving people snacks on airplanes, letting Ted Cruz jet off for a weekend in Cancún, etc., having schools closed represents an irrational social response to the pandemic.”

• Sooooooooooo excited for this. LMM forever.

• Give me allllll the think pieces about the Meghan Markle/Prince Harry/Oprah interview. This one stood out to me.

• “You’re probably going to feel exhausted when you want to feel exhilarated, panicked when you thought you’d feel safe, combative when all you want is to feel soothed. Your social skills have atrophied and you’re probably going to get in some big fights that will seem like they’re about nothing but are actually about everything. You’re going to crave some of the parts of quarantine life you swore you never would. You’re probably going to over-plan and over-schedule and feel an alarming and unexpected need for solitude and have to pull back and re-evaluate.”

• The title of this piece says it all: “Pandemic Moms: Long Days, Short Fuses”

• On motherhood and the Beanie Baby boom.

• “Among all this trauma — Spears’s, mine, that of many women who grew up in the ’90s and early aughts — I can see why a viewer would find relief in concluding that Spears was always in complete control. But it is absurd to discuss her image from that time as though there was not an apparatus behind it, as though she existed in a vacuum where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms, rather than in an economy where young women’s sexuality is rapidly commodified until they are old enough to be discarded.”

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Eating

• One of my favorite spring pastas. (I use the whole box of pasta because who wants a leftover 1/4 box of pasta? Also, I use an exorbitant amount of basil instead of mint because I can’t stand mint: you do you.)

• We make homemade pizza almost every Saturday night and this is my go-to pizza dough recipe. I make it in the morning, let it rise in Ziploc bags in the refrigerator, and it’s ready to go by dinnertime.

• This feels like some sort of mid-century throwback, what with the cake mix and the Jell-O and all, but it’s THE BEST light, bright, lemon cake. Everyone raves about it. I have to give a nod to those 50’s housewives with their new-fangled processed foods because they knew that ish is delicious. I’ll be making it for Easter—it’s even better topped with raspberries or sliced strawberries which as far as I’m concerned balances out the processed food part.

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Fun Things

• This salt cellar makes me feel super fancy. I ditched my salt and pepper shakers and now keep a pepper grinder and this next to the stove, with Kosher salt in one half and regular table salt in the other.

• We finished our basement bathroom and I’m in love. <3

• I’ve tried to get the kids into podcasts before, but none of them clicked before we began listening to Wow in the World. Now, I often hear them listening in their bedrooms on their own Echo Dots while they doodle or play with toys and it makes for the best quiet time ever.

• A couple more shout-outs to Target for this perfect spring tee and these shoes, which keep my ankles warm like a boot but are comfy like a sneaker and make it look like I tried when really I didn’t at all. 10/10 highly recommend.

• Okay, because Target is my BFF I’ve got one more for you: these roller skates are the kids’ new jam.

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We’re on the verge of April, on the verge of Easter. I don’t know what my body will continue to try to tell me in the coming month. Hopefully, there will be less trembling. Or maybe that’s the wrong thing to hope for; maybe instead I should hope that I continue to pay attention to it.

I wrote last year, on the eve of Easter, that it made sense to me that Easter was the first holiday we as Christians would be celebrating in the pandemic, a holiday that involves, as Glennon Doyle says, “first the pain, then the waiting, then the rising”, and that this time last year we were waiting for our very own rising. I’m not sure many of us knew just how long that wait would be.

Yet here we are, with many of us vaccinated and many, many more of us ready and waiting to get those shots in our arms when we can. A year (Has it only been a year?) later and what a hope, what a rising there will be. Trembling bodies, hearts, minds, and all.