Bread and Bread

You are not from my body, but I gave you my body because it was all I had  those lean first months (and by lean I mean I gorged myself late at night when the Bad News Factory had shut down for the day, I hoped; I breathed in quesadillas and breathed out fear). My mind was stuck in a sandy ditch, somewhere between 2011 and our last failed adoption that spring: We skipped stones in a manmade lake and left Reno without a baby. When you arrived, somehow too early and too late,  I was a sad spinning tire, a clock missing half my cogs, but still right twice a day. You: a 32-weeker, a four-pounder, quick to shake off your rocky entry into this world: You arrived breech but righted yourself, right as my world turned upside down, again. I fussed and projected, wondered if I wanted any of this. But your name means baby kangaroo and I pocketed you, like something coveted and stolen. My hold was not sweet, but it was steadfast. When you slept on my chest, our hearts were inches apart. Yo...

You never told me I was anything but beautiful so this feeling—that maybe I'm made of oil instead of breast milk— is a betrayal of what you gave me. I've been obsessing over the contents of the diaper of the second grandchild you never met: the shit, the lack of it, the holding back of something ugly. Was that slick brown thread mucous, a red flag according to the nice lady on the nurse line? Was it me, a sort of gollum, a mirror in a diaper, a monster, but tiny and powerless? Photo by Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash The second child in our family— my first family, I mean, of origin, as they say— is the only person who holds a mirror up to your ghost, the only person who could say "Oh honey" the way you did. Her curly hair, her kindness. But I hated her at first.  Another firstborn might declare the baby to be the monster, the interloper, but I stepped into that role myself just like I stepped into the baby sweater  I'd long outgrown. The yellow acrylic yarn was itchy,...

A couple of years ago, the amazing writer-moms of the IKEA Writers Collective started wishing each other "Happy Fucking Mother's Day" because it's such a strange, fraught holiday (though, really, is there any other kind?). In recent months, we've tried to inject some new strategies into our adoption attempts. So far that's meant a lot of paperwork and frustration. I'm frustrated for many reasons, including old boring feelings of maternal unworthiness, but also because one reason I hesitated about trying to adopt again was that I didn't want to dump all that longing onto the kid I was so, so happy to have. He didn't deserve it. C.C. didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve it. I don't know how to live in the present—a present that, in these sweet, tentatively sunny, vaccinated days, I am grateful for deep in my bones—while still planning for the future. Maybe there is some super balanced Zen person out there who does. But until I become her, ...

It usually goes something like this: We do our morning things. Dash starts angling to see the girls next door . If it's after 11, we walk over and knock on the metal screen. They pop up or they mosey. Change out of their pajamas or don't. Gather up their homework and shoes and spend the next two or three or five hours at our house.  They are three amigos: small, medium, and not-quite-large, ages four, almost six, and newly eight. They play post office and pizza restaurant and school and family. They whiz around on scooters and beg me to push them on the swing.  They want things: raspados and cheddar cheese slices and trips to the beach and to Dollar Tree.  Lately, Jasmine's* wanting has felt like a current that's pushing us along and sometimes pulling us under. She gets upset if we don't all do things her way. This used to manifest mostly in the dynamics of play, typical older kid/younger kid stuff. It was frustrating, but reminiscent of how my childhood neighbor an...

Sometimes moms post pictures of their nine-month-olds to celebrate "nine months in, nine months out." I've never been sure whether to count Dash's gestation in our lives as two weeks or four and a half years, but here he is, four and a half years out, about to start elementary school (technically "extended transitional kindergarten," but it's part of LAUSD and there is a principal and we downloaded an app, so). It's late summer--finally hot after months of mild weather, strangely balmy in a way that stirs my sense of possibility. New life phase? I wonder. I'm always a sucker for new starts, even though much is not new: Dash, a veteran daycare kid, will still be away from me for the same number of hours each week. "Mommy, draw me a Southwest airplane." My sister got married two weeks ago. Dash cried through the ceremony and acted like a crazy drunk throughout the reception. Her husband is kind and clever and has the kind of dark...

1. the middle will write itself (unfortunately not literally) Some small but important things happened since my last post, and it feels necessary to mark them here, because subtle milestones, like subtle angst, have a way of getting lost in the churn of everyday. I mean, they are the churn of everyday, which is why they’re so easy to not see. I’ve been thinking a lot about units of time. I know what I want in the big picture—love, creativity, and whatever makes those things possible on Maslow’s pyramid. I sort of know what it takes to translate those things into a single good day. Read. Write. Connect with people I care about. Clean some small square of my house and take a walk. (I often don’t do any of these things because work, because life, because phone.) But when I think about the middle range, I tend to panic: What is my five-year career plan? Do I have a five-year career plan? Is it utter hubris to assume I’ll be alive in five years? One solution—and I’m not being fa...

Artist Minna Dubin started making #MomLists as a way to continue her artistic practice when time was fragmented but her parenting experience called out for documentation. She encourages others to make them too.  Photo by Nong Vang / Unsplash 1. Our routine is already haphazard. You ate peanut butter crackers and a cookie for dinner. Can I even call it a routine? Or dinner? 2. Neither of us is good at this—the pivot from semi-solidity into liquid night. 3. Your other mom works late. We Facetime with her and you cry into the camera. 4. You shift again. We sing “The Scientist” (the Glee version). Your voice is sweet and I marvel that you already carry a tune better than I do. 5. Your bedtime babble: a pastiche of airplanes, police dogs, your school friends’ catch phrases. 6. The negotiation phase: You run to the living room for “one toy!” I eat the quesadilla you abandoned next to the bed. 7. Yes, we eat in bed. 8. You are distraught. It was your favorite “taco.” ...

Yesterday my friend Holly took a tour of Dash's preschool; she got a new job recently and needs to make a childcare change. She liked a lot of the same things that I like about the school, namely that teachers encourage play, meet kids where they're at developmentally, and take a constructive approach to discipline. But ultimately (and with more apology than was necessary) she said that it wasn't for them. I had these as a kid. I remember chewing on Cookie Monster's eyeball. Approximately 3% of me was like What?! It's a great school! Another 12% was like Uh-oh, maybe it's not a great school and I've been fooled for three years! But one of the factors on the "meh" side of Holly's pros and cons list was that the school has a fair amount of structured learning, i.e. lining up, sitting in a circle, and doing specific activities at specific times. This might seem ironic, because I think of Holly and her husband Joel's parenting style as ...

Yesterday I cleaned the house while AK took Dash to Orange County for some tia time, and I binge-listened to the L.A. Times’ Dirty John podcast. I’m one of those true crime podcast junkies: I was into both seasons of Serial, I squeal and laugh along with the sloppy-funny hosts of My Favorite Murder every week, and I loved falling deep into the Southern gothic tragedy of S-Town . Orange (County) is the new noir. (Photo credit: Christina House, L.A. Times.) At first Dirty John seemed like a well reported but relatively unremarkable imitation of other true-crime cultural phenomena, right down to the Making a Murderer - esque soundtrack. The title character is not an affable possible innocent a la Serial’s Adnan, nor a tortured genius like S-Town’s John B. McLemore. Dirty John is a fairly typical conman with some power and anger issues, who has perhaps seen too many mob movies. It’s not that I don’t think literal psychopaths are interesting (if my not-completely-scientific stud...

At some point in my life, I decided that injustice was the only thing it was okay to get angry about. It could be a small injustice or a big one. It could be a boss blaming me for something that wasn't my fault, or it could be, like, homophobia. I still think it's a good goal not to be the asshole screaming at a CVS clerk because your prescription isn't ready, but you can probably guess that my "injustice only" stance on anger has run into some problems. Because 1) anger isn't a decision, it's an emotion, and 2) there's lots of shit to get pissed off about that is no one's fault. I spent many therapy hours and blog posts sorting through the rage that bloomed in the wake of infertility-miscarriage-cancer. None of these things was anyone's fault, but they were also categorically unfair and shitty. But weren't most of the good things that had happened to me (being born into a middle class life, having parents who loved me) equally unfa...

All the sentences I say to AK lately begin with "In Far from the Tree ...." When I was reading the chapter about prodigies, she would say, "Ugh, what about prodigies now ?" I think I've shown great restraint in not diagnosing myself or Dash with the various maladies and challenges covered in the book, but right now I'm feeling a little extra empathy for the schizophrenics in the schizophrenia chapter. Many of them know that the voices they hear aren't real; it just takes a lot of energy--spoons in the language of disability and chronic illness--to shut them out. In the same vein, I know that my anxieties aren't grounded in a ton of reality, but it still takes effort to whittle them down to a manageable size. It's haaaaarrd, and I don't even have an official anxiety disorder, let alone auditory hallucinations.  Here's what's on my plate today: 1) Is it a problem that Dash dropped a lot of height percentile points between his 18-m...