Bread and Bread

1. embracing your wiggly kid (even if he wiggles right out of your arms) Dash is super wiggly these days. Whereas once the edge of the changing table was a place to put diaper cream and hand sanitizer and something called “bottom spray” that is just a made-up product invented for baby registries, Dash now sees those things as clay pigeons for him to knock over with one sweep of his magnificent grabbing arm. This guy will steal the glasses right off your face. I imagined his near future as a wiggly bigger baby and then a wiggly, curious, running-everywhere toddler. I thought of Matea, Jamie’s year-old daughter, who is gentle and cuddly, though plenty curious as well. I thought about how it wouldn’t be hard, if you were so inclined, to mourn the not-having of a certain kind of baby. Bouncy if you wanted cuddly, cuddly if you wanted bouncy. But just as quickly I dismissed the thought. It would be so much work wishing for another kind of kid! You’d waste so much time! You’d be anxi...

1. first, a bit about MEEEE I’m starting this post a little after 5 am; I’ve already been up for an hour with Dash, who is teething or mildly hungry or maybe just needs to pontificate. His new thing is closing his eyes and waving his arms while shouting, “Ah blah blah wah!” I think he may be doing an impression of me. My point is I know a thing or two about being a tired white person. The past week included mind-numbingly boring yet crazy-making home repairs that resulted in me doing three solid hours of dusting; lots of emotional work stress on AK’s end; and an all-clear cancer check (woo!) that was front-loaded with a ton of anxiety and a margarita and a Klonopin and an emergency mini session with one of Homeboy’s therapists. (“I think I need a quick dose of some of that trauma-informed therapy I’m always writing grants about,” I emailed Theresa.) By yesterday afternoon I felt like I could happily sleep six hours, wake up, eat cereal and go back to sleep—and repeat thi...

In my ongoing, desperate attempt to find writing time in the midst of work and family time, I joined a parent-writers group online. This week one of the members, Hannah Shanks , offered this prompt: Tell us about one of your “little things”—a personal talisman, your daisy-print office supplies, your worry beads, your prayer shawl, your favorite mug, whatever grounds you to yourself and the wider world. Tell us about one of your touchstone items. How did it get to you? Why do you love it? How does it help you get through the day? Who gave it to you? What stories would it tell, if it could talk? One year my friend Meehan set a resolution to wear her favorite clothes more. She had a habit I recognized all too well, of wearing her meh clothes and “saving” her special stuff for special occasions. Inevitably, by the time a worthy occasion rolled around, the clothes she’d once loved too much to wear would be out of style. I love reading the Nostalgia column in Vogue because the w...

1. brave hearts Earlier this week, Homeboy Industries hosted its second annual Global Homeboy Network , a gathering of like-minded organizations and Fr. Greg’s answer to those who say “Homeboy is amazing! Will you start one in our city?” (“We’re not the McDonalds of social justice organizations,” he always replies.) I.e., it would be presumptuous (not to mention financially unfeasible) to think that what works in L.A.—and, honestly, largely in East L.A.—would work everywhere. During our Morning Meetings, whenever the schedule is announced, Marvin from Tattoo Removal says that the machines will be going “all damn day.” Everyone choruses: “All damn day!” Except last year one of our machines broke and we had to cut back on hours, so sometimes Marvin would say “nine to one.” A muddled chorus of “nine to one!” and “half damn day” followed. Can you imagine an employee handbook for Homeboy Chicago (or wherever) explaining when and how to reply “all damn day”? (I im...

1. the trap I took a couple of weeks off from writing because life demanded it. That’s okay; I once thought having a kid might mean taking years off, and I was prepared to do it if I had to. But it wasn’t long before I was sad and irritable and making martyr-y, under-my-breath comments to AK. I try not to fetishize writing too much because it gets in the way of actually writing. I’m not one for fancy pens and pretty bookmarks, and I don’t go on about how much I love books in a general sense, because you wouldn’t talk about air that way, and writing is a little bit like air in my life. Or I want it to be. Or, when it goes away for a while, I feel like I can’t breathe. That sounds so dumb. I know for a fact that the world would be just fine if I never wrote another word, and the part of me that wants to put good things into the world questions whether my time wouldn’t be better spent ladling soup for the homeless. (There is a generic soup kitchen in my mind, where I imagine ...

After my previous post, I got a Facebook message from a friend (who is staying anonymous because she is private, not because she has body shame). With her permission, I ’m posting our exchange. Body stuff is such a loaded topic, so it makes me happy that we can talk about it sanely, in stark contrast to most of the internet. Cheryl, I just read your post about weight and dieting, and I have a lot to say about this post and would be happy to have a longer 1:1 conversation after you have had some sleep...say in 2-3 years! Briefly let me just say that in not one of the photos you posted were you fat by anyone ’s definition -- anyone ’s but your own. To say that you were the “fattest cheerleader ” is a disservice to you and to all of us who are fat. Further, you ’ ve set up a double dichotomy of skinny = good and fat = bad. For your sake, and most especially for your son ’ s, I would encourage you to spend some time reading in the Health At Any Size (HAES) and All Bodies are Good Bodies...

“I’d come to squander an appalling proportion of my mental time on empty vows to cut down to one meal a day, or on fruitless self-castigation over a second stuffed pepper at lunch. Surely on some unconscious, high-frequency level other people could hear the squeal of this humiliating hamster wheel in my head, a piercing shrill that emitted from every other woman I passed in the aisles of Hy-Vee.” --from Big Brother by Lionel Shriver I never think of really smart, self-actualized women—whether fat, skinny or in-between—as dieting, but Shriver’s novel about consumption and excess in various forms (I think; I’m only on page 28) suggests that maybe she’s not a total stranger to the endeavor. I spent my teens and early twenties bingeing and dieting, plummeting to 107 pounds for a brief period and becoming the fattest cheerleader on the squad for a much longer one. Then I came out, and within a year my eating habits were the best they’d been since childhood. Halloween duri...

“I’m in heaven,” I told AK yesterday. We’d just sat down in creaky-springed seats near the back row at Highland Theatre to see a matinee of Inside Out. Dash was already getting sleepy in his carrier (see previous post re: bringing infants to the movies). There was a cardboard tray of popcorn and a mini bag of M&Ms next to me, because we’d just discovered that while a small drink and small popcorn cost $10, a kid’s combo containing the same items plus M&Ms only cost $6 (and you didn’t have to be a kid to order it). It was all of my favorite things. Joy and Sadness ponder a memory. The movie, as you probably already know, follows the inner workings of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley as she navigates a move and a new school. Thus far, Joy has been the main driver at the control center of her mind, but all of a sudden Sadness—a bespectacled blue girl in a turtleneck—is popping up in the most unexpected places, even tainting pleasant memories. Assuming that you you...

There is a Big Lots! around the corner from Dash’s daycare. I’d been meaning to check it out since he started daycare last week; you’d think it was a museum or something, and in a way I approached it as such (hey, you take your thrills were you can). I hadn’t actually been to a Big Lots! before, but I grew up going to Pic ‘N’ Save, its eighties counterpart (Wikipedia tells me that Big Lots! actually bought Pic ‘N’ Save in 2002, although by then it was called MacFrugals). Pic ‘N’ Save occupied most of a down-and-out strip mall in Hermosa Beach. This was back when there were still down-and-out parts of the beach cities. My mom always speculated that the other businesses in the strip mall—an Indian restaurant and a couple of stores that kept heavy curtains drawn at all times—were fronts for something. The price was right. Pic ‘N’ Save was full of cheap crap that regular stores hadn’t been able to sell, but we were a family of bargain hunters. If a brand of kids’ shoes had br...

Friday morning I was pulling into CVS to buy baby sunscreen in anticipation of the Homeboy Family Picnic. A basic errand, but compare it to the day of last year’s Homeboy Family Picnic , when I was trying to finish four grants and text with a potential birthmom who ended up dumping me later that day, all before getting on a plane to New Zealand. I mean, the New Zealand part was good, but I was appreciating this year’s hard-won simplicity. My coworker Sierra with two-year-old Marla. Sierra claims to hate kids. Clearly. I turned on NPR just in time to hear Barack Obama say, “…and then there are days when justice comes like a thunderbolt.” As he continued to talk, and I sat in the same CVS parking lot where I’d once called AAA for a dead battery, I soon found myself in tears, the kind that come when a weight you didn’t even know you were carrying is finally lifted. People say this about finalizing an adoption: Sure, you’re out of the danger zone as soon as your child’s bi...