smithing words, making space

Homeboy Industries had a beautiful culture of storytelling, but not of reading or writing per se. People would send long emails about the staff barbecue with detailed information about the type of meat the cafe crew would be grilling, and forget to include the date. Someone would inevitably reply-all: What about veggie burgers? And someone else would reply-all: This is so important to our model of kinship and I just want to really thank Rulies for organizing this!!! It takes a village!!! And someone else would say: When is it??? And eventually we'd find out.

I wrote grants, but I also helped a former trainee rewrite a policies-and-procedures manual, and I wrote descriptions for a bunch of salsas I'd never tasted. Word got out that I could write a variety of things, and people started bringing me their stuff, saying, "I was hoping you could wordsmith this for me."

At first, I was flattered but also annoyed, because "wordsmith" sounded like a word that people who don't value or understand writing would use. Like it was some kind of glitter I just sprinkled over things. It seemed to describe a craft, not art.

Then I started working at a writing organization where people Got It, but I still got requests to "wordsmith" various chunks of text. I've been thinking a lot about that word, and I'm coming around to it.

First, because being a craftsperson is great. When I think about the art I like, it's always a combination of concept and craft. Like Ray Eames' smooth birds and planetary hang-it-all. Or my friend Rebecca Niederlander's intricate wooden sculptures. I like skill and versatility. I like imagining myself as a weaver or blacksmith in a bygone time, someone people would come to with their need for a blanket or a soup ladle. I would return something pleasing and practical.

Photo by Sergio Gonzalez on Unsplash

Second--and slightly in contradiction to Point A--writing is thinking, i.e. concept. I had my annual performance review recently, and came away with shoulders slumped because it was clear I'm not much of a manager. Or, in the language of performance reviews, it's a "growth area" for me. I felt small and dumb. And it's true, I have plenty to learn in the realm of management. But if I'm wordsmithing things for my organization, I'm also thinking through our mission and programs and strategies, and that is a kind of leadership.

I had a very satisfying text exchange with my IKEA Writers Collective friends about how frustrating it is to be a person who leads behind the scenes but doesn't command a room or give shiny presentations. There are some ways in which I'm a straight-up slacker, for sure, but I'm also a critical thinker who understands how people work, and those are useful ingredients in the leadership recipe.

When I was processing my performance review angst with my therapist, he made me pause after saying "Everyone thinks I'm a nice enough person and a good writer, but--" because, he said, "people gloss over the things that are easy for them, but they're not easy for everyone. And even being a good writer doesn't mean you can write in every context." He described a student of his who's a wonderful storyteller but struggles with academic writing (I would too). And it's true that I pride myself on being a little bit of a chameleon.

Photo by Matthew LeJune on Unsplash

To that point (this is a transition), AK and I just wrote--drum roll--the profile for our second adoption. That strange and hopeful self-marketing letter to a stranger. It's been a long time coming. First we weren't sure we wanted more than one kid. Then we decided we probably did, but definitely couldn't afford to double our daycare bill, so it made sense to wait until Dash started public school. We took our sweet time completing our home study, which is to say I didn't become a megalomaniac this time around. I can't do that to Dash. It was bad enough when I did it to AK and myself back in 2011-2014. I have to remember that whatever happens, or doesn't, we're already a family. We're not incomplete; we're creating space.

Of course when you create space for possibility, you also create space for disappointment. I worry about our health and our energy levels and our finances and my writing. Sometimes it feels like we're trying to create space where there isn't any. But scarcity thinking has never served me well. So here's to abundance and openness and woven blankets and the baby names I whisper out loud in the shower.

elementary

Friday night I met with my writing group, had a glass of wine, dug into Auzelle's poems, walked home in the humid dark, and started feeling the sparkly urge to write a poem. About the layers of being connected to and separate from another human being (are there poems about anything else?).

Saturday morning, one of the moms from Dash's new school organized a pre-first-day play date so kids and parents could get to know each other, and it was nothing short of a smashing success. Every parent was friendly and chill, and the kids started a group project of Moving All The Sand From The Sandbox Out Of The Sandbox. Dash hit it off with twin boys who were adopted by two dads, and I can't tell you how excited I am that Dash won't have to do all the queer-adoptive-family explanatory lifting himself.

So we're feeling pretty optimistic, and the blurry unknown is coming into focus. This morning I wrote the poem that took shape Friday night, even though Sunday morning is a different place (and Sunday afternoon, when I'm posting this, in a sleepy post-Dodgers haze, is another place still). But here it is anyway, that moment, a prose poem.

*

Photo by La-Rel Easter on Unsplash

Elementary

1.

I hate kindergarten.

Me too.

It’s so boring.

I know. 

We sheltered in a cinderblock cave and glared at the sun-soaked playground. The endless recess, the smug glee of other five-year-olds. Denise Moretti and I knew better, two wise old cynics in ruffled dresses. We might as well have smoked. 

Eventually I peeled away. Learned to hang like a sloth from a metal bar, turned a grounded rowboat into a prairie cabin. The adventures of Janet and Mark, successors of Dick and Jane, remained dull as sand, but when Denise said--maybe in spring, when the hillside ice plant offered thin-petaled flowers--Let’s talk again about how we hate kindergarten, I told her I didn’t. A betrayal. I left her on that splintery bench and rowed off toward first grade.

2. 

You took to daycare like the frog in the pot. We didn’t boil you, but we made you believe these hand-offs were normal. You learned to walk on indoor-outdoor carpet. You marched to the bathroom in a line. Also: the teacher whose face opened when she saw you, a daisy turning to the sun. Also: the boy you wrestle-hugged each morning, two only children merging into brotherhood. These simultaneous truths: We missed something and gained something, and it is all fine as a box of worn blocks. Smooth wood oiled by many hands.

3.

We are rugged veterans of this village life, and yet. In nine days I’ll wait with you in front of heavy doors for strangers to buzz us in. A security measure, though real estate is the gunman in our neighborhood. Children eat free lunches in the shadow of a crane. 

You: uniformed in navy and royal blue. Me: the doubting general, wondering why my metaphors bend toward war. Knowing what will form in those trenches: the fear, the friendships. Alpha, bravo, charlie. 

You curl on our bed two Saturdays before, trying to name some nameless need. You call it cake, you call it water park. Mama and I form a tent around you, hush your kicking feet. 

I want to go to the water park NOW.

I know. 

I know what is coming, and I send you off anyway. If I could hold your hard days in my calloused hands, I would. If I could save your baby skin. And yet this truth clenched like a forgotten sock: I don’t mind turning my back. Every mother is as kind and ruthless as an ER doctor. Here is your backpack, here is my long nose touching yours, here is my heart, intact.

some things old, some things new

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 side that makes me trust him more. He sees her full self, which is what I always wanted for her. They've been together a few years now, and known each other for a decade, so: new and not new.

My work angst has subsided like a tide edging back, slowly returning me to land and revealing a few new shells in the process, their insides pink and pearly.

What will it be like to be an elementary school parent? I love the school we chose--a public school six blocks away with a teacher, principal, and front office person who are warm and enthusiastic. It's not technically our home school, but it has the same demographic makeup, so I think it falls under my umbrella of what's ideologically acceptable. But who knows what needs will be revealed and what decisions we'll make for subsequent years, so I know better than to be smug. I'm just grateful for Ms. Pedroza and her monarch butterfly hatchery.

We're pivoting to elementary life at the same time that we're preparing--so, so slowly--to try to adopt another baby. It'll be a while; don't run out and buy us any onesies just yet. Planning ("planning") this next phase feels like showing up to a baby shower where everyone else is wearing floral sundresses and holding pass codes to the 529 accounts they just started. I am panting and dressed in sweats, ten pounds overweight and too many dollars in debt.

When Dash was born, sometimes I looked at his smooth face and chill demeanor and worried half-jokingly that he was too cool for me, a weirdo who thought about death all the time.

The other day in the car, he said, "Mommy, I have a surprise for you because you listened."

"Oh? Thank you! What's my surprise?" Often it is a sticker.

"It's my fingernail." He handed me a tiny wet crescent he'd just chewed.

While I was giving my toast at Cathy's wedding, he ran onstage, grabbed my forearm like a chin-up bar, pulled himself up, and licked me.

I aspire to be the kind of person who will see the love in this photo before I see my flabby arms, but I also apsire to be the kind of person who has less flabby arms. How cute is my sis, though?

I think he's quite at home in our family of weirdos, and I'm sure our next kid will be too. Everyone is weird because everyone is particular, once they pass the platonic ideal/projection screen stage that is babyhood.

If I bring anything new to this next phase, I hope it's a little bit more gentleness toward myself and others. This past week, I had a slightly odd stomach bug that prompted me to think about cancer a lot. The week before that, I binge-listened to Broken Harts, a podcast about the white moms who drove the six Black kids they adopted off a cliff, leaving behind a chain of half-assed investigations into their parenting and a thread of glowing, well written Facebook posts about raising chickens and creating peace.

Social workers and expectant moms, if you're reading this: AK and I are on solid mental ground and most of my Facebook posts are about how tired I am, so I can't be overselling too much, right? But fuck, that shit shook me up. It seemed to me that Jen Hart suffered from a particular brand of hubris, where she believed that if she couldn't "save" her kids--if she was in over her head, as she and her wife Sarah almost instantly were--they were better off dead than in someone else's care. I think I know when to ask for help. I think I genuinely relish raising Dash in community, and one of my great delights is seeing his agency and personality blossom in unexpected ways (even in the middle of a wedding). But I'm also a recovering perfectionist who thinks everything is my responsibility; I use social media too much; I am prone to crafting imaginary worlds for better and worse (Jen was also a video game addict). So I imagine the tracks veering away from the highway and toward the bluff.

Last week I was on a panel at Book Show about writers with day jobs, which my friend Bronwyn put together for a cohort of summer interns, a diverse and artsy bunch with glowing skin and great clothes, whose general excitement about the world was palpable and contagious. I'm a young enough old person that getting old is still surprising to me. I like that a lot of the pieces of my life have been established, but a part of me is still that college kid who wants to sign up for every extracurricular activity.

The old things: anxiety and PTSD, iffy eating habits, imposter syndrome, envy, a wonderful family of weirdos. The new things: a certain amount of acceptance of the old things, a community that will help raise my kid(s), an appreciation for the fact that (in the half-ironic words of Daniel Ortberg/Dear Prudence) "life is a rich tapestry." Those balmy mornings when the palm trees shake their leaves against gray-pink skies--that old feeling of new possibilities.

a few words of summer

Yesterday my department had a four-hour meeting at WeWork. I arrived in a pissy mood because I'd spent the first three hours of my workday putting together a mailing list and the fourth on a series of freeways.

The Culver City building that housed WeWork was across from the Sony Pictures lot, over which a giant fabricated rainbow arced. I imagined a team of producers and diversity-committee types saying, "We have this leftover rainbow from the set of [something Sony produces]. Can we repurpose it for Pride?"

The lobby of the WeWork building was decked out with bright lounge chairs, palm trees made of balloons, and an old-timey ice cream cart. It screamed "summer selfie." It also screamed: "Haha, you're not at the beach, you're at work."

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

It's been almost a year since our department was reshuffled and I was moved from a higher-ranking position to one that seemed like a better fit for my actual strengths. Except my org likes to proceed with caution, and the transition has been gradual. Glacial, I would say. Thoughtfulness and thoroughness are attributes; my last org was much more of the "Let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, and write grant reports suggesting that everything stuck when almost nothing did" variety.

But caution has its limits. And I'm getting impatient. And we've been without administrative support for about half of the past year, and guess who's admin support in the wake?

I feel like I'm swimming upstream toward my Preferred Job Description, battling giant waves of mailing lists and database management and post office visits and data entry and reports and seating charts, and those waves keep getting bigger, and my destination is shrinking to a dot in the distance.

I tell myself that all learning is good, and I have learned a lot about a lot of fucking databases. I tell myself that all work that supports a good mission is noble. I tell myself I'm paid really well for an administrative assistant. I walk off my rage in the park next to my office and see the dozens of people who live there in tents and old vans and would probably appreciate a job as an admin assistant. Or maybe they already have one, and it doesn't pay the bills.

I also see my coworkers getting (hard-earned, well deserved) promotions. I see my writer friends and writers on Twitter pounding out #1000WordsOfSummer a day. I remember when I went to MacDowell thinking that writing for eight hours a day was impossible, but after a short ramp-up, I was writing eight hours a day. I imagine what I could do if I had the time, at work and outside of work, and I crumple.

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

Everything in life boils down to the serenity prayer: What can I control? What do I need to accept? All the work is in knowing the difference, and I panic whenever I start to feel like I've made a stupid, risky bet. Did I miss the boat by not pursuing a career as a freelance writer? There are lots of reasons why the answer is "no" (the pay is usually shittier than nonprofit work, I'm not a good reporter, I'm not a good hustler), and a few reasons why the answer is "yes" (I'm better at writing than anything else, and there would be no mailing lists).

I've been thinking about futility. And the privilege and self-delusion that made me think I had control over my life, even for a minute. I mean, I have some. I want it all. Late last night, as I bitched to AK and Alberto, I toed Dash's trucks into a perfectly straight line. Alberto laughed at me, and I laugh-sobbed, "It's the one thing I can control!"

I always wear my struggle on my sleeve, and it's no secret to anyone I work with that I'm wilting under the weight of mailing lists. At our planning meeting, I did my very, very best to be honest, firm, and leader-like. I tried to Be The Preferred Job Description I Wish To See In The World. But when someone brought up "revisiting" our the roles and workflow we've spent months finessing, I wanted to scream. And cry and whine and perform all my usual unbecoming responses. Instead I got mad--in what I hope was a professional way?--and said no, we just have to do this. The time is now.

When I came out of the meeting, the summer set-up had been wiped clean from the lobby. I'd thought it was a regular seasonal display, like a Christmas tree in December, but apparently it had been there for a specific, two-hour party. I felt strangely relieved. No more pretending. Back to work for everyone.

housing and home

1. don’t call me moogle

Moogle! began the post in a NELA mom’s group I periodically dip into. Since leaving Parenting for Social Justice and sort of burning out on Facebook groups, I haven’t been super active in any. But a few embers remain, and sometimes the mighty algorithm tosses a match.

My husband and I have been trying to find the right neighborhood to move to to raise our son, but we haven’t found a place in our price range that meets our criteria.

Her price range was up to a million, which in LA will get you a house that would play a poor person’s house on TV, but still. A million bucks. Her wishlist followed: walkability, lots of trees, safety, “a strong school district with good public schools that will nurture our son’s upbringing,” and my personal favorite: “Our son will grow up with a peer group that is motivated to learn, open minded and driven; the culture also scores low on materialism and sense of entitlement.”

Bitch, I grew up in the neighborhood you’re describing, and good luck avoiding entitlement. All my motivated and driven peers (not to be confused with my actual friends) run hedge funds now; sometimes they cut checks to the nonprofits I work for. Or they live in the beach homes they inherited from their parents and start motivational Instagram accounts. They’re often very nice people. I’m sure you are too. (I think she really is; after some back-and-forth in the comments section, we ended with a conciliatory exchange about yoga.)

But pro tip: Don’t use the future verb tense to talk about how you eschew entitlement. Because what’s more entitled than talking about your own amazing future as if it’s a guarantee?

2. getting their berkeley on

Tuesday night, AK sees therapy patients; I usually get texts from her in the ten-minute gaps between clients. This past Tuesday, I didn’t, and by 10:15, I started to call and worry. Finally she replied: Crazy meeting at work. I’ll tell you about it. Students are pissed.

The art college where she works is none of the things you’d think an art college would be. Students are quiet and hardworking and more interested in getting jobs in automotive design than in activism.

Or they were.

But the zeitgeist has shifted and so have the job and housing markets. Tuesday night’s diversity committee meeting took a turn when students started testifying about incidents of racism, sexual assault, and homelessness on campus. All are terrible, but the latter hit me the hardest, maybe because it seems like things are getting worse housing-wise rather than bumpily better.

One student posted a short YouTube interview with a homeless student, who gave a tour of the locker room in which he stashed his belongings--a backpack, a paper bag, and a small box of supplies.

The school has no student housing, steep tuition, and coursework that makes it nearly impossible to have a job and study at the same time.

Students said they wouldn’t leave until something shifted. Administrators agreed to let homeless students sleep on campus that night. AK came home, grabbed our air mattress, and drove back to school.

3. the girls next door

Dash met them on the sidewalk outside our house: a six-year-old I’ll call Jasmine and a two-year-old I’ll call Juanita. He’d encountered some kids from the building on the other side of us a couple of times, but they were older and seemed to be gently making fun of him; my heart cracked a little bit, and the friendship didn’t stick.

Jasmine and Juanita were a different story, though. Before we knew it, they were sharing sidewalk chalk. Then they were running loops through our house, backyard, and driveway. I sort of waved to their dad to let him know they were there, and that it was fine. Dash was so excited that he launched into a mansplainy show-and-tell: Hey you guys, I have a construction truck! Want to see my paints? This is my trampoline!

I cringed a bit, but Jasmine and Juanita were tentatively into the trampoline, and then very into the trampoline, a recent hand-me-down from a friend’s kid.

I texted the IWC: This is kind of my old-timey-neighborhood community dream, kind of my no-boundaries college dorm nightmare.

They kept coming over, and thank god they were sweet and funny and generally better behaved than Dash. I still hadn’t met their parents beyond a few waves and nods. I mentioned something about wanting to, and Jasmine said, “Do you speak both?” She was school-age and fluent in English. “My baby,” as she referred to Juanita, spoke mostly Spanish.

She also told me, “My dad doesn’t mind us coming over, but my mom doesn’t like it.”

What did that mean?? Because she felt strange, as I would, about inflicting her kids on someone else? Because she worried, as I would, about not knowing those people? Because she was religious and not cool with her kids hanging out in a den of lesbianism and Cheerio-strewn floors?

Eventually, AK exchanged enough words with their mom to determine it was more of the first, not the latter (that we know of). She confirmed that their apartment was very clean and very small.

They’ve invited Dash over, and one time he and AK hung around their place for a few minutes, but mostly they’ve played at our place. I find the whole scenario taking up a lot of space in my brain, not just my living room.

Some of it is just growing-up stuff. At irregular intervals since he was a baby, I’ve been spun around like a cartoon character upon realizing he’s entered a new phase. Wait, what, you have teeth now? It’s a big and surprising (and not surprising) deal, this ability to make friends on his own. Also not surprisingly, I’m a little wistful that AK and I are no longer the people he wants to hang out with most--I also got my first “Mommy, I don’t like you” the other day, and honestly in that moment I didn’t like me either--and I am grateful for the breathing room. Parenting is both more temporary and more permanent than I could have realized.

But there are other low-grade anxieties that are more particular. A best practice in #Merica, when your child visits a new home on their own, is to ask if there are any guns in the home. This would be an incredibly awkward conversation to have with an English speaker in my exact socioeconomic bracket, and exponentially harder to have in Spanish, when my vocabulary and ability to communicate nuance is just slightly below Juanita’s.

I don’t want their mom to think that I think that they are the type of family to have guns. They seem like they’re not! Then again, neither did my aunt, but when I visited her farm a couple of years ago and Dash wandered into her bedroom, she said, “Oh, let me make sure I put my gun away,” and my heart stopped beating for like three days.

With their tidy apartment in mind, I’ve felt surges of shame every time Dash doesn’t put a toy away and Jasmine does. “Dash, you don’t have to just throw that on the floor,” she said the other day, when he flung a monkey costume two feet from his costume box. I am trying to learn some firmer parenting from Jasmine’s mother, using Jasmine as a proxy.

I am also trying to push past the awkwardness of our comparative privilege to remember that privilege is something to leverage and share rather than hide. I did almost nothing to earn my current living situation, so it feels like literally the least I can do to open up our home and our postage-stamp backyard to kids who don’t have a backyard. They have plenty: two parents who seem kind and attentive, a chill older brother, clean cute clothes, toys, two cars--I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that a small apartment and lack of English equals “underprivileged.” Honestly, in the current housing market and with three kids, they could be pulling six figures and not be able to afford a backyard. Or they could be making $40,000 between them and still be privileged by many non-material measures.

All this speculation rattling around in my brain seems gossipy and precious. I remember how curious my parents always were about what my friends’ parents did for a living. My response was essentially: Don’t you see that you’re boring adults and the kids are the main characters in this story?

It would be as fair as anything if the government seized everyone’s land and redistributed all the wealth, although historically that hasn’t gone well. I’m more and more confident that end-stage capitalism is serving most of us poorly and is literally killing others. My family and our neighbors are at different parts of the middle of the 99 percent.

My coworker, who has older kids, smiled when I told her about Jasmine and Juanita and said, “I’m so happy for you. These kinds of friendships last a lifetime.” I hope she’s right. But she lives in Laurel Canyon, and her kids were born in a different housing market.

I hope Jasmine and Juanita’s family isn’t contemplating a move to the Antelope Valley. But why wouldn’t they?

My reply to the Moogle mom was: I hope you’re thinking not just about neighborhoods that check boxes on your wishlist, but also about what you’ll be bringing to your community.

I often don’t do much more than think, and thoughts and prayers are cheap. Backyards are not.

Dash is crushing so hard on Jasmine and Juanita that on Tuesday night, when we took a breath between play dates, he just stood on the sidewalk looking at their house, like a sad kid version of the Tethered family in Us.

These boxes have been checked on my own wishlist: nice kids my kid can play with, positive relationships with my neighbors. They pile blankets on boogie boards in the backyard. They fight gently over Magna-Tiles. They chase after our beleaguered cats yelling, “Gato!” Dash has already picked up Jasmine’s habit of saying, “Juanita, ven! Juanita, mira!”

Growing up in Manhattan Beach, there are things I didn’t know I needed, and I think that’s the real meaning of community: an openness to life outside your wishlist, a willingness to pause and look up.

running down a dream when already quite rundown

This is a post about how rundown I am, and how I want it to be otherwise, so get ready to be bored and scroll on by, or to relate wholeheartedly, or maybe a little of both.

Many days here in my Very Nice Life, I feel like I'm swimming upstream, just constantly trying to find the motivation to do the next thing. That makes it sound like I'm lying in bed, though. Ha! Almost never. I'm usually doing the previous thing. I am cleaning up mailing lists at work and replying to emails ("Sorry for the slow reply!" they all begin) and cleaning up toy trains and changing peed-on sheets and contemplating the fact that I might smell a little like pee myself. I am trying to help Dash through a difficult phase and trying to work through a difficult phase at work that has lasted longer than any easy phase, even though I Still Believe.

I complain the whole way, and then I apologize for complaining, and then I eat things I shouldn't, and too many of them.

In some ways, this feels like an economic/generational/life-phase issue that's bigger than all of us. In other ways, I think it's a mood thing and a self-care thing, and the solution is simple if not easily attainable.

I realized that a typical night for me goes something like this:

• 9:48 pm: Dash finally falls asleep.
• 10 pm: I climb in bed and eat snacks so I can stay awake long enough to unwind.
• 1:32 am: Dash wakes up from a bad dream, I stumble into his room and lug him back to bed with AK and me.
• 1:33 am-2:10 am: I look at my fucking phone. It tells me nothing helpful.
• 5 am: My alarm goes off because in my exhausted delusion the night before, I really thought I would get up at 5 am and write a memoir. I hit snooze.
• 5:55 am: I finally get up. Make coffee, set up my writing station under a blanket on Dash's old crib mattress in our office, look at my fucking phone.
• 6:12 am: I write literally two sentences.
• 6:23 am: Dash screams from our bedroom (even though he is laying right next to AK) "Mommmeeeee!" His voice is full of accusation.
• 6:24 am: I run in and begin my day, already behind. I won't get more than a half hour to myself until the weekend.

Portrait of me by Anton Murygin on Unsplash.

So I made some goals. I'm always making some goals. But goddamn it, I want to give myself a fighting chance (to look how I want to look in my dress at my sister's July 20 wedding, among all the other things). I feel like the odds are stacked against me, in plenty of ways, but getting some decent sleep will give me one more tool with which to beef up my will power.

I have other tools, and when I'm feeling like the odds are stacked against me (against my mood, against my will power), this is important to remember. I have a great support network. I have legs and a good neighborhood for walking. We are not in a great place financially, but I can still afford fresh fruit and vegetables. We just hired an enthusiastic young person at work, who will eventually clean up some of the mailing lists that haunt me. I have a nice boss and coworkers. AK is rundown herself, but she makes sure I have time to write on Sundays, and her TLC of our yard keeps our house from looking abandoned. The lovely Ikea Writers' Collective doesn't get tired of my complaining. Books exist, not just my phone.

Anyway, the goals, starting this magical Monday morning:

• No coffee after 3 pm (allllll the coffee before; let's be realistic).
• Stop eating after 8 pm, for fuck's sake.
• Brush teeth, wash face, feel like a person?
• When Dash wakes up, go back to sleep and don't look at my fucking phone--YOUR PHONE IS NOT ON YOUR SIDE, CHERYL.
• Get up at 5 to write OR DON'T. Sleep or don't. No more of this snooze nonsense. 
• No sweets? I mean, that's a thing some people do.
• When I feel like I'm melting down, take a 20 minute break. Walk, breathe. Like a person. I want to set an example for Dash, who has also been doing some melting down when exhausted. I want to stop running him into the ground too.

We have a big work event coming up, and, much further down the line, a little baby coming up? It's hard to not to feel like: Why even try? But there are a million good reasons to try, and some frivolous ones too. 

no one is free when others are tethered

One evening back in the fall, I pushed Dash around Highland Park in his stroller. A carnival had sprung up like a cluster of toadstools in the park next to the library. The lights blurred in the fog and paint peeled from the signs on the rides and exhibitions. It felt like we were in 1992, or 1955, or 1890. The carnival was crowded with families and packs of teenagers and couples with their hands in each other’s back pockets, but I was the only white person I saw the whole time. The sense of witnessing a ghost Highland Park, a fading twin of the mixed, gentrifying neighborhood it is in daylight, was palpable and eerie.

Us opens on the Santa Cruz boardwalk in 1986, when a little Black girl named Adelaide wanders into a funhouse called Shaman’s Vision and returns shell-shocked and changed forever.

In the present day of the film, it has been renamed Merlin’s Forest, presumably because we don’t appropriate Native American culture anymore. That’s all in the past, right? 

Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) tells her husband what happened that day: She saw a little girl who looked exactly like her, and she’s always had the foreboding feeling that the girl is coming for her.

These opening scenes, of Adelaide moving through her family’s sunny beach vacation steeped in dread, felt a lot like the past two weeks of my life. If you think that’s an exaggeration, you haven’t met PTSD. I had my semi-annual cancer checkup right on the heels of Molly’s death, and everything I hoped I’d left behind reared up. It rattled my door and stood in my driveway, creepy as a family of clones in red jumpsuits.

Spoilers ahead. Spoilers are how we know we lived to tell the tale.

The family of doppelgangers takes Adelaide and her husband and two children hostage. Red, her double and the only Other who talks, explains in a deep, halting voice that she and her kind live underground, their bodies separate but their souls tethered to the humans above ground: the ones enjoying roller coasters and candy apples and epidurals during childbirth. Meanwhile, the Tethered subsisted on raw rabbit meat and never saw the sun. Who are these people?

“We’re Americans,” says Red.

The film turned for me in that moment, from a terrifying but personal tale of PTSD to a social story—more poetic, less spikily scary, but more horrifically wide-reaching in its implications.

The central metaphor of Us is that if America doesn’t face its past and present—of slavery and oppression, of carnival rides on the backs of humans whose suffering we conspire to make invisible—it will come for us and tear us down.

But here’s the twist (more spoilers): As we relive the Shaman’s Vision quest through Red’s eyes, we learn what really happened that day. The girl from the world above was dragged underground, and the Tethered girl went to live in the sunshine. The Adelaide we’ve been rooting for, the one willing to fight to the death for her children, is the changeling.

But she isn’t some evil witch in disguise. She is, basically, a kid who leaves a rough neighborhood for a good job in corporate America. She wants what everyone wants, but she knows whom she left behind, and she doesn’t have the luxury of blindness to the Tethered. Meanwhile, Red—as the once-loved child who longs for what she lost—has to be the one to lead the revolution. You can’t summon the appropriate rage if you don’t know what you’re missing.

Adelaide’s fear strikes me as a kind of survivor guilt. She knows—in her bones and blood and hair follicles—that she’s no different from the Tethered. Of course, I don’t have Molly’s blood on my hands in the way that white people have Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous blood on our hands. But I know that the difference between a good outcome and a life cut short is as arbitrary as a flipped mirror. I know how much of my energy and anyone’s is devoted to maintaining the fictions that say otherwise.

As in Get Out, Jordan Peele reveals the terror inflicted on Black bodies and souls as particular, visceral grief. The howling rage, sadness, and cautionary bleakness of Us feels truer than any documentary.