Bread and Bread

1. PGSD I spent the last couple of weeks preparing for 826LA’s big gala. My coworker Shawn—a woman whose superpower is asking people to do hard things in the most graceful, inspiring way, a skill I wish more powerful men would watch and learn—led the charge, but I was second in command. It was all sales and numbers and making multiple donor management databases talk to each other, none of which is my jam. Toward the end, I was working 12-hour days. Also not my jam. My eating habits tanked. My parenting was meh. I relied on AK for a lot and didn’t give much in return. The night of the event, I worked registration in the role of “trouble shooter.” At Homeboy’s gala, if a name wasn’t on the list, I just sent that person down the line to the Lady With The Laptop. Now I was the Lady With The Laptop, which was mildly terrifying. I went in feeling rather proud of my meticulously devised and revised seating chart, and I finished in tears. Being the Lady With The Laptop at a gala e...

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.” ...

My predecessor at work just had a baby; this morning I did the math and realized that she must have been in her first trimester when she left to start a freelance career. Inexplicably (or totally explicably, if you have access to my therapist’s notes from the last eight years) this revelation filled me with rage, despite the fact that she has been nothing but generous to me, and I almost never see her. When she departed, she left a 20-page, impeccably organized legacy document with links to relevant spreadsheets. When I spoke with her on the phone the day before her due date, she said she’d had her hospital bag packed since her second trimester. She’s that kind of person, the kind who makes a brilliant plan and sticks to it. My boss often gets wistful about the good old days of her, and that doesn’t help my feelings of inadequacy. According to my messed-up brain, my predecessor is living a better version of my life, and I’m slopping along behind, splashing in the rainwater in ...

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 ...

Back in the day, whenever a woman ran for office, some dude would fret about what would happen when she got her period (now we’ve found both more nuanced and more blatantly hateful ways to take swings at women running for office). The idea being that there were only two ways of being in this world: cerebral, level-headed Enlightenment machine or crazy, Medusa-haired PMS monster. Me on Thursday. I haven’t gotten my period in almost five years*, but if this week was any indication, my moods are still going strong. I will never be a level-headed Enlightenment machine—as mythical a creature as Medusa anyway—and, because of the way I was raised, I’ll probably never see that as completely fine. Even though it is. I am thinking of the time I told our couples therapist I was hesitant to take anti-depressants because I didn’t want to put chemicals in my body. She said, “There are already chemicals in your body. You get to choose whether you want to flood your body with cortisol or Z...

1. The girl who learned to shoplift from her mother builds websites for old family photos: Here is the alcoholic grandfather and the aunt with pancreatic cancer and that Christmas everyone posed with faces as serious as the 19 th century. Digitization as affirmation— her story will not be stolen. 2. The archivist’s friend was stabbed leaving a piano concert at 23. Her blood slick black in the dim parking lot. The man moved on to guns and the archivist nursed a fear of flickering street lamps. 3. The child who fled his empty house for the thrum of the street stabs a man in prison but sends his daughter to college and watches her fall from an airplane, holds his breath until her parachute opens. She flies toward him, a nylon flower billowing behind her. 4. The ex-gang member considered his past a fading tattoo until old enemies came for his son. The boy’s headstone shows him stone-faced; the cursive promise...

Here’s a problem that, like much of what I write about on this blog, exists mostly in my head. But that’s why I have a blog, so here goes: What if I should not be writing a memoir? Flashback to November 2012. Coming off the Great Mind-Destroying Miscarriage of 2011, I was diagnosed with cancer, and my third thought (after Am I going to die? and Will I die before I get to be a mom? ) was: Fuck it, I’m writing a memoir. I know that a memoir needs to be more than just the story of several shitty things happening in a row, and soon enough, I found a theme for my series of unfortunate events. My memoir, in its current half-draft form, is about how my mom’s death led me to worry I didn’t deserve parent-child love, and how I eventually convinced myself otherwise. It’s also about what a bitch imagination is—how storytelling can be the hypochondria that nearly kills you, or the hopeful meta-memoir that saves you. How’s that for an elevator pitch? When I write it out like that, I...

1. people vs. principles I’ve been thinking a lot about ideological vs. relational ways of moving through the world. Bear with me. I was raised to put the former on a pedestal, and in my unpublished novel (one of them...), the protagonist takes a stand against foreign adoption and risks her relationship with her partner. I still think it’s a good novel, but I’m no longer interested in critiquing foreign adoption in any kind of definitive way, and I now give hard side-eye to people who stand on principle at the expense of their loved ones. For many years, AK’s mom—a Catholic-raised Mexican-American woman who currently attends an evangelical Christian church—wasn’t really down with AK being gay. Because the bible and all that. But in practice, she always accepted AK and, later, me. I came to understand that while her ideological world is homophobic, she’s relational by nature. Ideology may close borders or open them; relationality (spell check tells me this isn’t a word) usually ...

In keeping with last year’s pseudo-resolution to focus on my strengths rather than my deficits, I’m making a list of…well, “accomplishments” isn’t the right word, because I’m always trying to be more process-oriented and to just be period (while also trying desperately to accomplish all of the things). Most of the items on the list below are just milestones in ongoing challenges. Of all the generic inspirational quotes I might want to paint on a chalkboard in a curly font for 2018, Progress Not Perfection would be the winner. #ThingsToDoodleInYourBulletJournal With that caveat, here are my favorite things—about myself and in the arts—of 2017. Six things I’m proud of: 1. Joining 826LA/knowing when it was time to grow: I was happy at Homeboy Industries. Or so I told myself. I’d gotten the hang of grant writing and I liked my coworkers. So what if there was a low hum of sexism and an organizational culture that didn’t cater to quiet worker bees like myself? I’d built a ...

Everything Cheryl does, she’s totally joking and completely serious.             --AK 2,628,000 minutes 2.6 million moments so dear 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure, measure five years? In new jobs , in boob jobs , in blog posts, in cups of coffee In coffee, more coffee, in coffee, and tea In 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure five extra years? How about love? How about love? How about love? Measure in love Seasons of love 2,628,000 minutes 2.6 million plans gone awry 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure public places I’ve cried ? In grants that I wrote, and novels on the side   Facebook rabbit holes are no source of pride It’s time to kiss Dashaboo Though he’s sticky with jam Let’s celebrate, remember five years Of making people deal with who I am Remember the love Remember the love Remember the love Measure in love Rent rent rent rent reeeee...