To the little girl.

A healer I work with occasionally asked me to address my inner child as “my little girl.” It’s softer, she said. More familiar.

By now, many of us understand the concept of the inner child—the part of us that holds old wounds, shapes how we move through the world, determines the love and validation we seek, and the gaps we try to fill. Tending to the unmet needs of that child is often the portal to the deepest kind of healing we can experience as adults.

My work is alongside children in the formation of those very wounds. My hope is to soften them—to create space for self-awareness and integration, rather than empty chasms sealed off by time and pain. No one moves through childhood without wounds; it’s impossible. They are no one’s fault. They are simply a byproduct of leaving the flawless plenitude of the womb and entering a world full of humans, each carrying their own stories and pain.

I think of this often at school. What stories are these children already beginning to carry? How do they see themselves? What needs are they asking to be met—especially through behaviors that appear disruptive or clingy? How can we help them grow emotional literacy and tools to navigate the hard things—not to avoid them, but to make sense of them? How can we honor who they are and how they exist in the world?

Essentially, how do we raise children who know themselves well enough that, when the sticky parts arise, they can meet those parts with love, compassion, and gentleness? So those parts become portals to their healing, too.

This idea of the inner child—my little girl in particular—has been heavy on my mind since last weekend. I canceled our camping trip at the last minute, following what felt like a wave of negative feedback on Friday. In truth, I may have latched onto that feedback to justify something I didn’t want to admit: that I was already mentally and physically depleted. That the idea of hauling gear into the woods to set up camp in the mud—especially as a single parent—felt like more than I could manage. Especially when my own girls are less than resilient in inclement weather these days.

There was also the familiar weight of feeling responsible for everyone’s experience, mixed with the disappointment of not being able to control the weather when I’d dreamed of a sunny weekend romping in the creek. And the potluck was unraveling—several families who’d signed up to bring food were waffling on coming at all.

None of it was huge on its own, but together it became heavy. The task of making a group decision while feeling unclear and overwhelmed tipped me over the edge, and canceling the trip felt like the simplest, most relieving choice. I had talked with the teachers, received their support, and felt good about my decision…

Until family after family messaged me to ask if they could still go. A deluge of texts reactivated all the anxiety I’d tried to quiet. Of course, I should have expected this. I wanted people to camp if they wanted to—I just didn’t want to feel responsible for it. And I didn’t want to go myself.

That’s a hard thing to admit when you’ve built your life and work around being a physically and emotionally resilient outdoor wanderer.

By Saturday afternoon, the messages kept coming. I found myself obsessively checking the weather, hoping for a downpour that would justify my decision, make me feel less guilty—less like I’d failed the community. But the skies cleared after a heavy morning rain. Families went out. More messages came. And I spiraled.

A friend offered reassurance: You made the best decision you could. It’s okay to choose rest. They were all things I knew to be true, and yet, none of them soothed me.

Because the part of me that was activated wasn’t rational. She was young. Tender. Emotional. She was the version of me who cried when she got 99% on a test because it wasn’t perfect. The one terrified of disappointing anyone, even a little, as if it meant she wasn’t allowed to exist. She felt responsible for other people’s happiness. And each message that hinted someone might be disappointed sent her into panic.

She didn’t need to be reassured she wasn’t wrong. She needed to feel the fear of being wrong—and let it move through her.

So I went into my closet and cried. For a long time.

Despite being a seemingly emotive person, crying is hard for me. I struggle to let go of control long enough to fully feel. I don’t want to make too much noise or disrupt anyone. I don’t want to be seen in my pain. But the closet under the stairs, dark and small, became a cocoon—safe enough to let the tears come. To give my little girl the space she needed. I howled and heaved and offered that girl just what she needed— my full attention, my willingness to sit with her, even in her fear that she was wrong, my love, my time. It wasn’t conditional; it was me showing up fully to be with her in that experience.

I still felt sensitive afterward, but I also felt settled, clearer.

As I sat with these feelings in my closet sanctuary, I found myself thinking about my own children—especially my eldest daughter—and how our most challenging relationships often become our greatest teachers. I kept thinking about the suggestion to call the inner child my little girl. I thought about my own little girls—my babies. Specifically Melby, who already seems to carry her own imprint of perfectionism and anxiety, intensity and fear.

Another thing that’s hard to admit as an educator—someone who has built a life around working with young children—is that my own children trigger the hell out of me. Especially Melby. She is a mirror of me in so many ways, and sometimes it’s so painful to look at that reflection.

And yet: she, too, is a portal to my healing. She is my little girl. A reflection of the wounded one inside me, and a living embodiment I can now love and tend and nurture into something more whole than I once was. When those more challenging parts show up in her—most often in direct reflection of ways in which I struggle too—how can I meet her with supreme kindness?

How can I say to her not that 99% is enough, but that even 1% is enough, as long as she is showing up fully as herself? That all I ask is authenticity. There is nothing to prove. I don’t want to convince her she’s enough; I want to assure her that being herself is all that’s required.

I want to repeat it again and again until she feels it in her bones and it ripples back through time, through her previously unborn body, into the little girl within me—so I feel it, too.

Being yourself is all that’s required.

As the year comes to a close, my deepest hope is that you’ve felt that here. That your children have felt seen and welcome, just as you are. That you have, as well.

On a walk shortly after my tears, Mary Oliver’s words came to me again, as they so often do: “You do not have to be good/ You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,/ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

You do not have to be good.

The further I go on the journey of forest school, the clearer and more simple it all becomes: our work is simply to be ourselves—and, as educators, to create an environment in which it’s simplest for children to do just that. When we know ourselves, we can love. We can learn. We can grow. We can create boundaries. We can expand and stretch and connect and become.

Everything else is extra.

For all of your selves, for all of the comfort and discomfort and learning of this space, for this beautiful year together, for our animal bodies ever reminding us where we came from, for all the little ones—both those at school and those inside you, dear readers—I am so deeply grateful. Thank you, thank you.

On modern love.

One of my favorite poets/ contemporary authors, Joy Sullivan, offered a prompt to write about modern romance— any twist that felt appropriate. This piece is what came forth. It sits in clear contrast to my previous post, where I wrote about parting ways with this same person. And yet—here we are. Life is brief and blooming and strange. I won’t apologize for following joy when it calls, or for the occasional birdlike nature of my own heart—ever flitting about.

When I left the cocoon of my childhood home for college, I made a promise to myself: I wouldn’t touch alcohol in this lifetime—or a man's penis until I was married. Sobriety and virginity felt deeply important, shaped by the conservative values my parents had instilled in me.

Two decades later, I found myself unmarried, in a toxic relationship that had nonetheless gifted me two beautiful children, and regularly drinking too much to escape the ways I had learned to gaslight myself. I justified staying in a life that felt completely out of alignment, clinging to the belief that somehow, it was all my fault.

This year marks three years since I began choosing clarity. I started by quitting drinking, and then, in quick succession, I left my marriage. We had gotten married in what, in hindsight, was a last-ditch effort to salvage a relationship already beyond repair.

Leaving was monumental—especially after a lifetime of fawning over men. For as long as I can remember, I believed my worth was tethered to the approval and adoration of the opposite sex. In my twenties, I threw myself at the feet of men, hoping for praise, allowing them to touch me in ways that degraded and devalued me. Sometimes, they took what they wanted despite my protests. My now-ex-husband was one of the first to commit his attention and energy to me, and somehow, that—along with an adorable man-bun—blinded me to the ugliness beneath the surface of our “playfulness.”

After the birth of my two girls, something inside me began to shift. Every choice I made grew sharper, clearer. Instead of fumbling through life with a wobbly compass, I could now ask myself: Would I be proud to have my children repeat this choice? Could I explain it to them? Would it bring me joy to see them live in a similar way? This was its own kind of romance—pure, searingly clear.

When I asked myself if I’d be proud for them to emulate the relationship I had with their father, the answer was painfully obvious: no. This was not the version of love I wanted to model for my daughters.

After our separation, I embarked on a painful, radical journey of self-love. I began dating myself—not in the cocktails-and-roses kind of way I once imagined, but in the quiet, daily act of choosing myself over the comfort of old habits. I fumbled through therapy, medicine-work, solitude, journaling, meditation, inner-child work, Shamanic journeying. I cried. I cried so many tears I had once pressed beneath a heavy veneer of rage. I became softer.

Much of this work happened in a literal closet under the stairs—my own self-imposed Harry Potter quarters. I’d transformed that little story space in our tiny one-bedroom house into a little fairy nook for my girls, but also, for me, a sacred refuge for writing and journeying, praying and sobbing.

As a counterpoint to this quiet personal revolution, one of the most joyful—and still terrifying—parts of my unraveling has been learning to open, even just a little, in the presence of others. For a long time, I stood on the sidelines of ecstatic dance, both drawn to it and scared of what it might unlock. The idea of moving freely, without pretense, felt too vulnerable. Too naked. But eventually, I showed up. And then I kept showing up. Slowly, something in me began to thaw.

On that dance floor, I started to feel the edges of my aliveness again—not just the pain, but the joy, too. I let my body lead for once, not my fear or my mind. I showed up in presence, and motion, and feeling. And somewhere in that authenticity, I met a man—ten years my junior—who is now my boyfriend.

It’s not what I expected from this chapter of my life, or from my first real relationship post-marriage. Someone so young, so clearly in a different place in life. And yet, here he is: evolved, tender, gentle, receptive, and abundantly kind—so much my ex was not.

I don’t expect to be with him forever. He wants to travel, to have his own children, to live so much of the life I already lived prior to meeting him. And that’s part of what makes it so beautiful. For the first time in my life, I’m in a relationship where I don’t need anything from the other person. My biological clock isn't ticking. I’m not looking for financial support or a roommate to split the bills. I’m here for presence, for touch, for connection. There’s a deep freedom in loving without expectation or timeline.

He meets me in my softness. He listens. He sees me. He witnesses the daily things I’ve long called ugly and names the beauty in them. He has become a mirror for the goodness I so long prayed to find in someone else—only he’s shown it to me in myself. Loving him has become a portal into loving me.

This lifetime, I expect my greatest love story to be the one I create with myself, and other relationships have been a vehicle to developing that love. My ex-husband taught me to love myself by forcing me to advocate for myself—fiercely, even through discomfort and lies. My daughters taught me to love myself by clarifying my values and desires. And this man has taught me to love myself by loving me exactly as I am. Not a version of me, but the whole messy, wild, unfolding bundle I am becoming.

And our impermanence has allowed me to hold that lightly—not as an attachment to him, but as a gift to myself.

On one of my journeys, it came to me in this language: he is a delivery of love from the universe. Not one I’m meant to keep or cling to or ask anything of—not praise, not permanence, not a hand in marriage. He is love made manifest. And like all sacred gifts, he’s meant to be felt, embodied, and then released into the wind— to curl around other women in the breeze as they dance beachside, perhaps reeling, too, from their own journey of self-discovery.

This is the shape of modern romance, at least for me: not a contract, not a destination, not a cure, but a container for presence, a practice in being with what is, a celebration of love for love’s sake—without needing it to last forever to mean something. And in this wild, fleeting, luminous chapter, I am in love, not just with him, but with the way love has taught me to belong to myself.

The starling and the tree.

At 40, I realized—I am a tree.

The realization came powerfully during a journey. My body transformed—roots stretching from my seat, branches unfurling from my crown, my trunk strong and steady. My treeness carried neither ecstasy nor grief, passion nor pain—only perfect equanimity.

My mind kept searching for problems, for questions demanding answers. But none arose. That human desperation for knowing flickered at the edges of my roots and limbs, but it never touched me.

I was grounded. I was peace. There was no need for answers because everything just was, without effort. I kept hearing this line: "From now on, whatever is meant for me will walk right up to me."

That very day, a beloved and necessary teacher walked right up to me. For so long, I had searched—desperate for partnership, for love. And then, unexpectedly, it arrived. The evening of that journey, he came to my house. We talked for eight hours, made love until the morning, and then, with that same intensity and fervor, spent two months inseparable, tangled into each other. He is ten years my junior, inexperienced in many ways, and the most absolute beam of pure living light.

Our love felt like teenage love—unafraid, unguarded. No games, no wounds pulling the strings. Just radiant love propelled by the simple longing to bask in each other’s light. A tumble of mutual generosity, compassion, silliness, sweetness, desire. I felt safe. Seen. Held. We danced, hiked, cooked, kissed, laughed, and talked for hours, wrapped in our little world. It was a gift—an unguarded lesson in love. In our short time together, I processed an incredible amount of pain from my marriage, deeply defined my desires and boundaries in relationship, and experienced my calcified heart absolutely cracking open.

On another journey, I learn he is a starling—fluttering, restless, expansive, ever in motion. He was born to roam. I provide nurturance and shelter. He can spread my seeds, generating new life. We serve each other on a fundamental level but are not meant to be together for a lifetime. He could rest in my branches, but he could never root beside me.

And so, there was pain, too. I often felt our differences. In the vortex of my house, where we spent so much time cocooning in a little bubble of love, we were in perfect, endless harmony. But as soon as we entered the world, there was the pain of disconnect. In each other's communities, I felt the misalignment, of mismatched perspectives and direction. I felt his flittering, his longing gaze. Even when he stayed anchored with me, I could feel his desire to fly. It is innate to his being. 

As always, I put him before myself. I tried to fly for him. But I am no starling. I am a tree. The hardest truth: I didn’t want to change him, but I needed something he could never be.

Last night, I let him go. I had done so earlier in the week on the heels of a glaring example of our disconnection, but that time it was tinged with anger. A week of drifting back to and around each other still returned me to the searing clarity that our romantic relationship no longer serves me. Every superficial fiber of my being wants that to be untrue. I want to keep going. I want to keep playing and loving. I want to keep being fed and held. But my inner knowing is abundantly clear that our romance has run its swift and powerful course. 

Part of truly loving myself is trusting that knowing, even when it seems to wound me in the short term. That knowing has been waiting a lifetime to be heard. She has been there, sometimes whispering, sometimes yelling, but always available. 

And in truth, I realized the love I am longing for is not from some man; it is not even from the most rooted, grounded man. It is not from any man. It is from myself. It is connecting with that voice and listening to her, believing her, cherishing her, following her. My starling reminded me how easy I am to love and now it is my work to give it to myself. 

In parting, I wrote him a love letter about how he has healed me. I have written quite a few love letters to men over the years, and now, with this newfound clarity and purpose of falling in love with Beth, it is time I write one to myself, too.

Sweet Beth, 

You are a tree.

You are steady and strong. You are nurturing and magical. People come to you for comfort, respite, play, shelter, anchoring. Something in you is ancient; it has been growing over centuries and lifetimes. It is connected to the earth, it is wise, it is a conduit for truth and grounding, it is loving in the most quiet, stable way.

What is meant for you will walk right up to you. There is no need to search, strive, or effort. You have everything you need and everything you need will continue to be provided to you without effort. Wait. Always wait.

Whenever you feel alone, reach down through your roots and feel how you are connected to every living thing below the surface, reach up and feel how you are also part of the sky. You are connected. You are alive. 

You are worth loving. You can be slow. You don't need any answers, any proof, any permission or reasons. You don't need to earn anything. You can wait. You are safe.

Your steadiness is a gift to the world. Your breath gives breath to others. You are a place of repose and peace. You are whole, you are abundant, you are generous, you are powerful, you are love. 

You are a tree.

All you have to do this lifetime is be a tree. Be. Wait. Love.

May you spend each day inspired by your own sturdiness as you expand quietly through time, ring by ring, year by year, out into this glorious world. I love you. 

I love you,

Beth

On purpose.

Why am I here and in service to what? What is wanting to live through me in this world?

I'm hungrily taking in this podcast Mark recommended, two and a half hours of content seemingly gathered and presented exclusively for me. These are the questions Jungian psychoanalyst and author, James Hollis repeats in various iterations, saying we must ask ourselves such things if we want to live our lives not just with purpose, but with fulfillment and joy. He speaks to the stimulus-response cycle in which so many of us become entrapped, the hell of our unconscious patterns, the deep loneliness of an unlived life.

Why am I here? 

When I allow my gaze to be too hazy, sometimes the answer to that question starts to leak. It drifts in many directions, following rivulets branching off from the strong current of my life. Before I know it, those little streams have dried up and I find myself lost. Why am I here? How did I get here?

This permeability has often been my challenge in life. I morph. I shapeshift. I meander and wander. In some ways, it's a gift. I find myself able to relate to most people; it is easy for me to make connections, understand others' points of view, feel what's beneath the surface. I also, too often, find myself then identifying too much with the parts that feel resonant and then also absorbing ways of being in the world that are not truly my own. I end up confused and drained.

My marriage was one long tributary I followed, refusing to stop long enough to realize I had set out on the wrong path. It was the ultimate example of deviation from self; I followed something too far that only kind of fit. Extricating myself from that relationship has encouraged me to know and see myself the most deeply I ever have, even, especially, when it is painful.

Conversely, at this point in my life, I'm learning to release the desperate cling to identification of any kind. I long to identify, name, articulate, encapsulate, define the world around me; I also recognize not just the futility and constriction of such, but the falsity of it. Self is an illusion. We are all part of an inextricable whole. The snake was always a garden hose. 

I can increasingly live in this emptiness, this interconnectedness, and I can recognize that there is a particular frequency to my humanness this lifetime that I am meant to embody. And that trying to deviate from it quite literally makes me sick. It feels like an incurable loneliness to live a life other than the one that is mine.

And so I return to the question, why am I here?

I've known some glimmer of it since the earliest days of my struggles. I was once 19, seeing Horacio Miller for therapy while attending UC Berkeley for undergrad. He was an older man from Argentina; I remember him as always in glasses with a newsboy cap. He communicated often through poetry, which resonated with me even then. I'd ride the 18 bus to Solano Avenue to sit in his small office near the Safeway where Emma and I would buy endless sandwiches and Wyder's pear ciders. When I was with Horacio, I'd wring my hands, bite my nails, and scribble endless fraught words in my journal--rescued kernels of clarity to carry with me out into the muddy world.

I was objectively depressed and diagnosed as such, but hindsight illustrates clearly that I just didn't know myself and that that distance from self filled my life with a haunting loneliness, an endless desperate search from some thing I craved, which, unbeknownst to me, was the woman herself on that very search.

I think about Horacio now, because he asked me a question that has stuck with me more than two decades later. I came to him, wet. I came to him in the murkiness of other people's opinions, their styles, their mindsets, their stories. Everywhere I went, I tried on a bit of what I found. I carried it all with me. It became heavy and confusing. I became lost. I was a hippie, retro, vintage, goth, emo, straight-edge, drunk, liberal, religious, agnostic, good girl/ rebel/ intellectual/ slut/ prude. There was no self. There was too much self. I was lost.

I admitted to Horacio I didn't know who I was. I was a different person everywhere I went. I was an endlessly absorbent sponge. I was exhausted.

He asked me, What's true about you no matter where you go?

Maybe it is just decades of memories of memories, but I feel like I can remember that question, because at that moment I arrived. Someone invited me in-- me, independent of all the parasites I willingly took on. And I had an answer, my own answer. I said that I loved being with children. I felt good, clearest, most like myself when I was with kids.

That has been true about me my whole life. It was true when I said I wanted to be a teacher at 5, when I started babysitting at 11, when I volunteered my time at summer camps at 12, when I nannied throughout my 20s, when I pursued an ECE degree at 25, when I taught for preschool for years, when I had my own children, when I opened my own school. My own moral and emotional barometer sometimes feel murky, but when I ask myself if I'd be proud to share my way of being in the world with a child, if I could explain it, encourage it, rationalize it, give it heart and life and love through the eyes of a child, that is my clearest truth. My most radiant self is evident absolutely through the lens of a child. Nothing makes more sense to me.

Why am I here and in service to what?

I am here in service to childhood. Not just for children, but for adults as well. I am here in service to play, to ease, authenticity, joy, simplicity. I am here in service to community. I am here in service to love. I am here in service to nature as a vehicle to remembering our own true nature. I am here to as radically and totally live my own life as an invitation to others to do the same-- to strip the pretense, the labels, the identification, the limitations, the fear, the projections, the stories, the constrictions and just be. To shift out of so effortfully doing life into simply being alive. Childhood is the natural embodiment of that all. It is liberation. It is expansive thought, endless creativity and curiosity, open-heartedness, energy, joy, natural connection, fearlessness, and radiant love. I am here in service to childhood.

I am not a teacher. I am in service to love. I am here in service to love.

I feel so absolutely clear on that. It's been true since I was depressed at 19 and it's true now. I am so grateful to be on the path that is mine. I feel unsure where exactly the expression of this mission will lead me and concurrently so absolutely clear I'm just where I'm supposed to be. I trust it's unfolding. I am listening, always.

This weekend, I listened and something new and important came to me.

While I am in service to childhood, I struggle remarkably as a parent myself. I feel constantly challenged, unappreciated, run ragged, lonely. At its core, these feelings come from a fear that I am not enough, that no one hears me. They come from my own lostness-- from, yet again, looking for my completeness, my identity, in another person. It is asking someone who is so early in the process of becoming in the world to affirm me. It's so much cognition, so many years of learning and studying early childhood development and then clinging to that as my identity. I should know how to be with my children, how to support them, how to respond. My constant failure to do everything perfectly makes me angry. It challenges this "why" I identified as my path so long ago.

This weekend I took the girls to Vedanta for one of their Sunday morning talks. They roamed around the verdant hills overlooking the Channel Islands, picking flowers and eating lemon bread with the Sunday School teacher, while I listened to a talk on the Divine Mother. I spend quite a bit of time contemplating the balance between masculine and feminine; I know so much of my purpose is in holding the nurturing feminine energy, that softness and fluidity. I once received an intuitive massage-- a combination of physical touch and intuitive readings. The man told me my left side, the feminine side, felt like a great oak tree, a grounded force that provided shelter and comfort to so many. This reading felt so resonant for me, and there was this sneaky bit of pride in that connection that has proved to be my challenge.

Listening to the talk, I had a revelation, the missing piece in all this work. I have been attempting to offer that nurturance from myself. I've been delivering it from a human place, from my own effort; it is laden with ego. In the end, that will only exhaust me, as well as having clear limitations. The true invitation is to offer that love, that feminine wisdom, through the channel of the divine. It is not mine to offer; it is an infinite, unending source of love, which I can embody and express but it is not generated from me as an individual.

The Divine Mother is my mother. The Divine Mother is the source of any comfort I might offer. I am simply a vessel.

I so often fail to allow myself to feel nurtured in this life. I am constantly seeking it, seemingly in futility. As if to challenge that idea, which flickered into consciousness as I had this realization on Sunday, the most glorious breeze swirled around me at just that moment. I was sitting on the porch of this beautiful temple on the most perfect fall day, my face blissfully shaded and my legs, warming in the sun. The breeze was a Disney breeze; it was somehow visible; it was the twirl of magic at Cinderella's feet as her rags turned into a ball gown; it was palpable. 

It came to me and said, I am your mother.

I almost laughed.

I've created this entire world where my life happens predominantly outside. I extoll the gifts of nature so often. And yet somehow I've been missing this very obvious message that the love I crave is quite literally all around me. She is my mother. The breeze is my mother; the coast live oaks and their abundant season of acorns are my mother; the Channel Islands are my mother; the lemonade berry and the coyote brush and the wild fennel and the elderberry and the nopales are my mother. Mother Nature is my Divine Mother. She is my messenger, my guide, my mentor, my pathway to love. She has a strong back, a soft front, and a wild heart. She is always here loving me, showing me, teaching me, holding me. I don't need to go in search of that love or nurturance myself; it is truly just outside the walls of my home. She is everywhere.

I want for nothing. I have landed on the exact path, in the exact place I am meant to be. I am here in service to childhood and nature is always here to remind me.  It is expansive thought, endless creativity and curiosity, open-heartedness, energy, joy, natural connection, fearlessness, and radiant love. It is seasons, death and rebirth, patience, perseverance, blatant or sometimes almost imperceptible rhythms, collaboration, harshness, resilience, beauty, and radiant love. I am here for what is wild, for what lives both so firmly in its identity and also entirely outside of it, for all the ways in which we are inextricably linked. I am here in worship to all of this daily. It is a reverent prayer. 

It is not an identity. It's a purpose much greater than me. I am here in service to love, to childhood, to nature. Two decades later, I don’t just know, I don’t just feel it, I have built my life in service to this mission. I am aligned, I am clear, I am nurtured, I am mothered by the universe around me, I am safe, I am loved, I am love. I am so, so grateful.

On longing.

Michael asks what I'd tell Melby were she in the same situation.

I immediately know I'd tell her about when we were ready to have a baby. During a visit to California, Nic and I had high-fived on Hendry's beach after practicing our handstands.  The high-five sealed our decision to start a family together. That same day I told my parents we were going to have a baby and, perched on a stool in the kitchen, somewhat anxiously requested their permission to name her Melby, should she be a girl.

Once you are ready, you're so ready, but first I also wanted to make sure my body was healthy. After decades on birth control, I needed to know my cycle was regular, strong. So I removed the hormones, continued my somewhat orthorexic diet and exercise routine, and saw my acupuncturist routinely to monitor my health. Several months in, we decided I was stable enough to begin trying to conceive. And then several excruciating months later, I one day found myself the crankiest I'd been in ages, my nipples an unfamiliar kind of sore. Somewhat unceremoniously, during a pee break from some show Nic and I were watching together, I pulled out a pregnancy test and discovered I was having a baby. A baby girl, of course. My Melby.

The part of that story that's important now is the waiting— the painful stretch of time between that high-five and the positive pregnancy test. While it certainly wasn't long, maybe a matter of months, half a year at most, that time was made of the stickiness of longing. The impatience for a new chapter to begin.

It challenged me, and, once she was born I knew I had been waiting for her. I was not meant to have any other baby. I was meant to have her, my fierce, reluctant, sensitive, curious, brilliant child, and that required some waiting. We cannot rush what is meant for us, only await it with grace or torturous impatience.

Currently I am in the latter category. I am waiting.

This is the story I will tell Melby when she is one day waiting, too. There is no way to race for what's meant for you.

Today I am not waiting to have a baby. I am waiting for partnership.

Saying it is uncomfortable. I feel like I am not supposed to want such a thing. The law of attraction says I just need to emanate, embody, live love and love will come to me. I should not wait. I should not want. I should blissfully live my most aligned life and love will come when I least expect it!!! 

The truth is, I've always been looking for it. Male attention has been important to me my whole life. So much of the work I've been doing lately has been in balancing my own masculine and feminine. I have this powerful masculine energy. It is wounded warrior energy. It is always on high alert, ready to fight and protect. He is prepared and fierce and capable. He is also exhausted and overworked and makes very little room for this soft, creative, flowing feminine I also long to embody. I have been working to meet him with kindness and respect, but also with an understanding that allows him to lay down his swords. So much of my longing is for someone to hold that grounded, protective energy for me. It was always my job to hold that for Nic and myself. I hold it for my girls. I hold it at school. I hold it and hold it and hold it and I feel like I can never quite relax because the vigilance is mine to uphold. It is beyond my nature. I'm tired.

I listen to a podcast from an astrologer who urges me to explore my wildest sexual fantasy, followed by prompts to unearth what's beneath it. When I close my eyes and imagine what I deeply crave, what my animal body is screaming for, I only see myself folded over the arms of a man. I am just being held in full surrender. I am completely relaxed. I want to be cared for. While I am a progressive woman in many ways, I do believe the masculine balances the feminine and I am looking specifically for that, and specifically in a man. I am looking for a truly embodied, grounded man to balance my deeply creative and juicy feminine. I am looking for a partner.

Recently, a friend I made last year at a training came to visit. We spent two days in my sweet little house living my tiny fantasy. We roamed around outside and laughed and talked endlessly. We sat by a watering hole after a sweaty hike, looking into each others' eyes and speaking truths that would have otherwise felt uncomfortable to me. We read good words together. We held each other. I could feel my heart open and flowing and his as well. I could feel my swords being laid to rest.

My heart was so full and then when he left, I felt cracked open. He was a drop of water in the desert. It was almost unbearable to my physical body, my heart.

Shortly thereafter, I sat at the playground one day, while my girls played, blissfully unaware of the heartache of adulthood, and cried. I kept asking myself what this pain meant, where did it begin? Because it wasn't with him.

When I close my eyes, I'm in front of the Gap Kids that still stands in the open air mall in downtown Santa Barbara, sobbing. I must be 8 or 9 years old, in third grade. My hair is in a short blonde bob and at this age, I'm already crying when I miss a single percent on French tests. Several decades later, I don't speak a word of French but I do still carry a seemingly primordial fear of imperfection. 

My dad, always deeply generous, wants to buy me this denim bomber jacket I must have seen on one of my dozen of other classmates. It has snaps and tan sleeves with striped ribbing at the sleeves and neck. I remember being desperate to own this article of clothing; even then it seemed that one more thing might be the portal, the missing piece to feeling complete. Complete or maybe, just a little bit less like myself, a little incomplete, just different enough.

It is being offered to me, but there is this deep, sticky part of me that says, You do not deserve something you want so much. So I sob in front of the store, resisting my dad's desire to do something nice for me. The tears are not a denial of the gift; they are a fear I don't deserve it. I can almost feel my prayer that his own will to give to me will override my resistance to allowing it. I need a tsunami of love to overtake me. It has to be that big. I need someone to insist I am deserving.

As an adult, I frequently find myself asking others, What is your relationship to want? As in, can you allow yourself to want? Not need or deserve or earn, but just to deeply want something? Can you indulge without justification? Can you allow yourself pleasure?

Am I allowed to want to be in love? Am I allowed to want partnership? Am I good enough to be loved, wholly? Is it possible that one day someone will see me as I am and fall in love with exactly that person? Who is this girl who can't accept a nice gift and how is she keeping me from what I want? Or is it just timing?

My deepest longing right now is to be seen, to be met, to be held. I've been solo parenting for 2.5 years now, running a school alone for 4, protecting myself fiercely for perhaps 40. Some radical part of me wishes I could escape this longing, outsmart it. I wish I could be so satisfied by my own presence that I wanted absolutely nothing else. I am not delusional about love. I don't think it will fix me, make me love myself. I think it's a mirror, a portal to knowing myself better, a joy, a source of both pleasure and pain. I long for the radical source of growth, expansion, and connection that is sacred partnership.

What I understand is that my heart has broken open. I’ve received energy work many times over the past years and every time receive the message that there’s something constricting my heart. There’s a cage around it, a rope, a big squeeze, a suffocation. It’s all the love I tell myself I don’t deserve. It’s all I long for but don’t allow myself to acknowledge. It’s all I’m afraid to want. It’s all my shame and self-loathing and pain braided into a noose.

I have tried to unshackle it myself to no avail. I believe the hurt I felt after my friend's visit was the beginning of the softening of a lifetime of constriction. We heal in connection and he cracked me open. He was a portal to beginning to healing something that has long stayed guarded. What feels like pain is actually a coming back to life, my heart willing itself once again to be open, to breathe. The bittersweet agony of allowing myself to be vulnerable. 

I'm in it. I feel impatient. Someday, in hindsight, I will understand this waiting. I will see how I needed time to become the person who was ready for the exact kind of love I wanted. I will hold this winding road of unfolding as a story to tell my babies when they are again someday in the forest of their own murky becoming. I will look back and it will all be crystalline.

I will love and I will be loved. I will be love. My heart will continue to soften, to open up, however terrifying, and when the moment finally arrives that someone extends a gift my way, the one that connects to my deepest longing, I will look at him and say, yes, yes, yes, yes. I deserve this.

To beth on her 40th birthday

The day I turn 40, the first thought I think upon waking is a very clearly articulated, Thank you. My gingham covers are swaddled around me; the leaky grey morning light of Santa Barbara's May is eking around the corners of the bedroom curtains; I am in the same washed out waffle knit sleep pants and tank I keep returning to; the house is quiet; I am alone. At 40, I wake up alone. Whatever this all is, this exact moment, thank you. 

To this last year of my life, thank you. Thank you for such incredible transformation and growth. Thank you for being over.

I keep thinking of the stretch before I turned 30. It was filled with the fervent beginnings of new love with Nic— long distance letters and longing. Passion and projection. Radical devotion and self-abandonment. It was devouring each others' faces on public transportation and Muir Beach hikes in search of heart-shaped rocks. It was belabored runs along the Embarcadero followed by farmers' market pluots and pastrami sandwiches from Wise Sons. It was wistful eye gazing and road trip adventures and so, so many arguments, such an incredible exchange of volume. 

On the day I turned thirty, one of my best friends threw me an elaborate party. She had coordinated so many people I loved to contribute and create truly one of the most beautiful tributes to another person possible. It was filled with floral aprons and manual typewriters, cupcakes and kegs of locally brewed beer, music and celebration. I wore a strappy dress covered in colorful giraffes. I pinned my hair back to one side and watched as my friends got drunk and hammered out love notes to me on index cards that were then filed away in a vintage recipe box. I felt so loved. I felt like I had arrived, newly in love at the beginning of a new decade of life.

Thank you thirties, for all of your beauty, for the birth of my children, for your sage and brutal teachings.

In contrast, two weeks before I turn 40, I receive news that Nic and I are at last legally divorced. Despite spending two years prior to that in separation, despite pushing for that bit of closure for so long, the reality of it fills me only with grief. I listen to Ray LaMontagne's "All the Wild Horses" on repeat for an hour, unloading my tears into the rug as my forehead presses down, down into the looped fabric below me, my body in child's pose.

I've been coming to this position again and again. Returning to reverence, to some sort or prayer, prostrating myself before the universe. Recently, after such a wasteland of emotion, I learned to cry again. Not the tears of a touching movie or news of a loved one's death, but the everyday tears of disappointment or fear, hurt or grief. The tears of being so wonderfully human and all the ways in which, painfully or joyfully, I encounter the world with so much raw feeling. I remembered how to cry and then I began to sob daily, emptying this reservoir of rigor that I've been upholding for four decades now. I stopped trying to understand why exactly and just felt grateful for the lightening of the load.

May no man's touch ever tame you

May no man's reign ever chain you

I am becoming untamed. I am releasing my shackles. I am saying, Fuck this shit to the lies I’ve been fed about being a woman, a mother, a human, about my body, my role in society, my limitations. Extracting myself from the lies about education, our food systems, the government, medicine, health and wellness, religion. For the first time in my life, I'm experimenting with what it feels like to allow myself to be justifiably angry at times. Thank you, Beth, for waking up enough to blaze your own path, for undertaking such liberating and excruciating work.

For the last year, since removing my IUD, each month before my period, I experience this high vibration feeling. It feels like a high-pitched squealing, a tautness that's just waiting for some sort of release. Usually for at least two to three days, it feels like the world is ending, like nothing could ever be right, like I am frustration and grief and discontent embodied. I am a rabid dog, a machine of rage. I want to eat bloody meat and be loud and hurt people around me. My anger is terrifying, unfamiliar, unacceptable.

And then I'll bleed and instead of holding my energy, the weight of the entire world, up above my heart, it flows through and out of me, a sweet liberation.

The time prior to the transition to this new decade has felt like the Groundhogs day version of that frenetic energy. It is a never ending loop, a constant quiver. I have felt, quite honestly, like I'm going crazy. I can almost feel the tension between who I've been and who I want to allow myself to become, that frantic line between the old neural pathways and a totally new way of being. My ego is dying and thrashing for dear life to survive.

Thank you, body and mind, for trying so hard to protect me. It’s okay to let go now.

I keep looking for the next thing to do, as if there's some undisclosed road map to growth. Lately, so much of my communication looks like calling my healer in desperation, pleading, Tell me what to do, knowing full well, he will never do such a thing. His voice always full of humor and compassion, he slows me down and asks me to listen to my own guidance. I always know the answer, even when I don't like it.

I always know.

Michael was the first person in my entire life to make space for me to hear my own voice, to assure me that I already contained all the wisdom in the world. He never offers advice; he just offers the most gentle, loving space, one in which my usual severity and fear can relax enough to practice seeing clearly. Every time I grasp for answers, for the right thing to do next, he says repeatedly what I now, finally, understand: It's not something to do; it's a way of being with yourself. Be, don't do.

That has become the salient message in my life as I embark upon my next year on this planet. Be, don't do. Be, don't do. Be, don't do.

Be wild, be weird, be big. Be you. It's not what you do; it's how you do it. It's not a list to complete; it's a way of being in the world.

As a gift to myself for my fortieth birthday, I take three days to go camping in the desert alone. When I arrive, I set up my tent and shade shelter. I make a little kitchen and add some wildflowers and chunks of quartz to decorate the table. Ravenous, I sautee veggies and rice with bacon and add a fried egg. I eat quietly in the blazing heat, taking in the beauty of the mountains and the curling sheets of sediment in the dry riverbed that are peppered with yucca and brittlebush.

And then I sob.

Because I'm uncomfortable. Because I want to feel happy. Because I think, this is what I wanted so now I'm supposed to be happy.

Except in this instance, happy is just another thing to do. I want to do happy. To act it out. To check it off my list. To prove it, to say I've done it, to achieve it.

I suspect at least phantoms of this instinct will exist in my life for a long, long time. Except now I notice. Now I see that judgment and expectation come up and I can say, oh hello.

So I let myself cry. Hello, you are disappointed that you got what you want and it still feels uncomfortable and now you are crying. 

Thank you tears, thank you body, thank you inherent wisdom.

After I allowed myself those tears, my trip was happy. I read three full books, took barefoot ambles to the base of these glorious mountains, made a nature wheel, cooked beautiful meals, made some truly shitty attempts at whittling, collected rocks, almost never wore clothes, and napped. Oh I napped. One morning, I laid like a rotisserie chicken in the sun for almost two hours, making a quarter turn every fifteen minutes or so, just gliding in and out of consciousness. No music, no reading, no conversation with myself. I just let the heaviness seep out of me into the earth. I said thank you.

Thank you, desert. Thank you for your teachings of solitude, extremism, resilience.

Throughout the trip, I repeatedly stepped over a latex glove that had dropped out of my first aid kit. It was on the ground with its middle finger up. The first time I saw it, I laughed out loud, the sound of my voice almost startling me from my own murmuring silence. I loved that offensive glove so much I decided not to move it until I left, and despite so much wind, every time it landed in a new spot, that middle finger stayed up. It felt like a humorous little message from the universe that said, Fuck off, it's not that serious.

Each time I laughed, audibly.

Thank you humor for keeping me afloat during times of tumult.

It’s not that serious.

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

What do I love? What am I here to do?

Everything I read says to circle back to childhood. The secrets to your desires, your purpose, your joy is in the games you played, the things you imagined. I am so clear on the fact that I work with children in part to tune in to this creativity and joy in myself. That inner child is so alive and vibrant within me; she's just rattling around in the prison of calcified expectations.

I know just who she is and what she loves. She loves to sing, to dance, to be big. She loves to love. She loves to read. She loves to be alone and then with people and then alone.

So the way forward looks like this.

I will sing and dance and be big. I will love. I will read. I will be alone and then with people and then alone.

I found some dance classes that aren't classes at all, but just opportunities to move my body in community without the alcohol or unwanted touching. I found spaces in which to chant and sing, to open up my throat and be heard. I don't want to perform. I don't want to do. I want to express, not impress. I want the deluge of life force that is me to flow freely through my body. I want to allow myself my fullest expression without concern for how it looks, what anyone thinks, if it's good enough, if it's right. I do not have to be good. I want to be with people and love them with my whole emphatic heart and then I want to be alone and recharge and read and listen to myself.

I am trending away from asking external guides— even those that are healthy— to tell me where to go next. I am turning inward. I am finding joy. I am creating clarity. I am opening up. I am healing. I am grateful.

Thank you inner child for showing me the way. Thank you for your certainty and clarity. Thank you for your unbridled joy.

I feel quite clear that on the other side of all of his endless introspection is something much greater, more interconnected. That my true liberation lies in releasing myself from the constraints of internal conflict and recognizing my place in a much broader community, within the cosmos, within all of time, within nature. I am most clear when I'm outside, listening to birds, toes in the dirt.

Within forest school, I am gifted a container for my own healing. Each day I visit the woods, remember what it's like to be a child, to sing, read, laugh, move, play. I drink up sunlight and the companionship of those who value me most as my most authentic self. I am stripped bare. It is the ultimate being and not doing. I did not make that school. I do not own it. It was truly an expression of divinity; it came from a moment of alignment, so crystalline I can recall the exact place and time everything clicked into place. It is both my purpose and my healing combined.

And I am grateful. I am healing through my work, I am healing through my tears, I am healing through my discomfort and my undoing and my humor and my whole big tumbling heart. I am healing and I am so grateful.

I woke up 40 and I said thank you. Out of so many words, they are the only ones that matter. They are the prayer I awoke with, the prayer I will continue to make, they are my freedom, my connection, my source. For every messy bit that’s been and all that is to come, for this decade, for my voice, for my integral part in this beautiful web of life, for all there is to become and know, for the chance to just be this lifetime, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chatham 1986

In the photo, my mom is holding Kate and me as young girls on a beach. We are both small pink barnacles clinging to her hips as an anchor in the wind, Kate peering at the camera, while my face is nestled into my mom's neck. The beach is all tangles of seaweed and silvery strand grass blowing sideways. An overturned yellow dinghy lies behind us. The sky is no color, a smear of cold nothingness.

I've revisited this picture a thousand times over the years. Of all the photos I've squirreled away from my parents' haphazard collection of memories, this one resonates with me most. Something about my mom's face makes my heart ache— her squinted eyes, her relaxed closed-lip smile, the effortlessness with which she holds us both. She feels like motherhood, embodied. In truth, I feel a longing to crawl back into her arms in the same way and allow myself a moment of respite from the elements, a moment to feel so safe and sure of my place in the world.

One evening, at the suggestion of one of my guides, I sit on my bed and do nothing. I don't meditate; I don't do breathwork; I don't listen to relaxing music, I don't read or journal or journey or intentionally radiate lovingkindness; I just sit and allow myself to exist without my usual urgency or insistence upon productivity. My eye catches this photo where it is taped on one of our drawers and in that stillness, I immediately begin to cry. At this point in my healing journey, it feels clear to me that tears don't have to "mean" anything; oftentimes it's just stored up emotion and stress leaving my body. I am grateful to have this photo to tether me; we stay in contact for nearly 30 minutes and at the end of my time of nothing, I peel the photo from its place and flip to the back where in my dad's handwriting it says:

Chatham

8/19/86

I recognize the date as my parents' 19th wedding anniversary. My mom was 39, just as I am now. Outside of this I know nothing; I have so many questions about this trip, about the people they were, the person I was, how this moment in time filters into each of our personal kaleidoscopes of becoming, how this latent memory was part of the vein of my own evolution into present-day Beth.

These questions fuel the idea for the gift I give my dad for his birthday, just a few days later, which is actually a thinly veiled gift for myself. I offer that twice a month we'll sit down to look at a family photo together; he will tell me whatever comes up for him in viewing it and I will take some time to commit my rendition of those stories into something written. It is the gift of storytelling, togetherness, transcription, sharing memories.

We decide to have our first meeting at Handlebar on his birthday— an extension of his usual 3 pm visit for a cup of coffee, ever a man of routine. As we stand in line, he pulls out a leather planner the size of a billfold that is embossed in gold with the words "Boston Diary 1986." He used the planners as journals to collect little tidbits of what his days then held and has kept it pristine almost 38 years later. As I flip through it, the baristas shout birthday tidings to him over the counter; they clap for him, they cheer. Part of his routine, his essence, is also being deeply lovable. His two dollar bills, his consistency, his generosity and thoughtfulness, his quiet kindness are all part of his charm.

After a birthday latte splurge, I learn the trip to Chatham was inspired by a visit to East Weymouth Savings Bank, in which my dad had invested. For a lifetime I'd known my dad manages investments daily, but not until last year did I know those investments were exclusively in small banks. Knowing him this doesn't surprise me, but somehow I still missed this explicit fact. 

This kernel of knowing emerged over one of our dinner conversations that happened while I lived with my parents for a year and a half after separating from Nic. When the girls were with me, dinner conversations orbited around the girls themselves almost exclusively, but in their absence, my parents would become somewhat of a mental reel of memories. First dates. Old apartments. Family trips. High school teachers. Dinner with friends. They each had pieces of this tape of their mostly shared history they were splicing together with words— a ricochet of remembering, a tumble of recollection, each of them feeding off of each other's prompts.

I remember few of the details of the stories themselves, but so much of the energy of watching my parents recall the life they've lived together. I could feel them disappear together to past moments, reliving them in real time. I could feel the joy and innocence and sheer pain of their evolution together. The loss. The triumph. They became a symphony, their parts so deeply intertwined to make something whole and beautiful. Somehow inside of all that was a love of investing in small banks that I hadn't yet heard until I was 39. 

Of course we took a family vacation to chase a small bank.

When we arrived, apparently one of our bags was missing at the airport, our room wasn't ready, the machine to make room keys was down, the front desk man apparently asked my mother to keep a 2 and 4 year old quiet after we'd been traveling all day and were denied access to our room, and then later when we were finally nestled in our room, the fire alarm went off. My mother will proudly add to this story that she refused to leave the building at this point; it had been enough chaos and we'd burn down with the building if we needed to.

As a mother myself, I fully understand.

Other high points of the trip committed to transcription were apparently many trips to the Stop N Shop, during one of which, I peed on the floor. Eating haddock every night; ("your mom was in heaven"). Ice cream at Emack and Bolios. Me creating chaos in the children's room at the Mother Church in Boston. Also, clearly, beaches, wind, overturned dinghies. It is a swirl, little bits of history. I can feel the spaces gaping between them, all the moments unseen, even the spaces where my mom's voice should be chiming in to complete things, how quiet and somehow incomplete my dad seems in her absence.

The question I then ask is, why Cape Cod? What felt so special about this place that he went home and named an entire room after the place? My real question, the one I ask myself and others constantly, is, is it your place? Is it the place your body, heart, and mind feel most connected, most alive, most seen? Is it a home you didn't know you were missing? Does that place exist for all of us? Are we constantly fumbling our way back to someone unidentified place that brings us back to life?

Is that where you belong?

Without really waiting for an answer, I offer that Big Sur feels like that to me. Dad laughs in agreement, says maybe Big Sur feels that way to everyone. And then he adds, "You're kind of like Big Sur— majestic...gloriously beautiful, but also don't go around the corner thinking it's going to still be there. At any moment, there could be a landslide."

I pause to write the exact words down. I pause because I've been seen. I pause because so much of our tumult as humans is in the spaces we feel not allowed to be our most authentic selves, and here, in two effortless sentences, my father has shown he knows me, me exactly.

My whole life I've been at war with that person. I've tried to be something tepid, balanced, neutral; I just wanted to feel like I belong. I've tried to be a little less turbulent and consuming than the person I appear to be now, but in truth I am exactly what my dad described— my surface has the potential to crumble at any moment and yet I am anchored by the ancient roots of an entire forest of trees. I am both rugged stability and turbulence, not one or the other.

In my question about spaces, I realize what I'm wondering is what the process of becoming your truest self feels like for each person. Do they experience it in physical spaces, on trips, in jobs or relationships or children? Do they one day stand at the edge of a dreary beach clutching their babies to their hips, so sure of their own place in the world despite the wind beating against them? Do they close their mouth and smile calmly knowing that one day they'll radiate this energy forward into the universe into a single photo their daughter will herself witness while falling apart as a means of just beginning to collect herself again? Do they one day realize they are Big Sur, embodied, when their dad so aptly relates its essence to their own?

I come again to the image of my mom on the beach. I, too, am a mother of two young girls. I, too, am on the cusp of turning 40. For a moment, I feel connected to everything— to her, to that time we shared together, to my childhood self, to myself as a mother, to my dad who has cradled us and the memories of all these experiences for a lifetime, to the wind that whips at our legs, to all that crumbles, to all that stays standing. It is all part of this unfolding, this becoming human.

Wherever you go, you belong. I can see it in my comfort in the crook of my mother's neck. I can feel it in my dad's words about me as a reflection of Big Sur. I stand in it now as a mother myself, having become someone else’s anchor against the elements.

After staring at this photo for two weeks straight, I  tape it back to my drawer where this all began. The bedroom I now share with my girls fills with the warmth of my mom’s calm smile. I step outside into the afternoon sun where, as if from a dream, the wind picks up just for a moment as if to say, You belong here. You belong. 

to beth on her 39th birthday.

Two weeks before my thirty-ninth birthday, I start reading the obituaries. Rather, I consume them. I sob audibly in public, mouth full of al pastor, the stories of the deceased, and the subtle flavor of loneliness that always haunts me these days. Engineers and mothers, veterans and professors, grandfathers and dancers. They lived their lives, which, through the lens of grief and gratitude, are all filled with unique shades of magnificence and now they are gone.

I sob because the obituaries are just what I needed. Not death itself. But the swirling stretch of life that preceded it. The clarity with which we view what has already happened. The way even the most tragic of events end up having their place in the puzzle of things. When we stand back, the mosaic of life— all the shattered but colorful little bits we cobble together— seems beautiful.

Life is beautiful.

The last time I remember feeling this retrospective clarity so deeply must have been ten years earlier. In my imagination, I will pretend this experience, too, was at the doorstep of my birthday. Perhaps as I approach the last year of each decade of my life, I am met with a moment of reckoning that insists I look back in awe.

In this memory, I am standing on 27th Street in San Francisco outside the house where I live in a basement in-law in a senior couple's home. Rita, my landlord, is witty, attentive, thoughtful, and kind, but not overly so. She occasionally leaves a bundle of alstroemeria from the backyard or some leftover soup on my doorstep but also intermittently, the slightly aggressive note about my indoor plant which might leave a stain on her carpet. I frequently straddle the line between feeling awe and annoyance in regards to her.

Today she is her warmest self and she meets me outside to share some news with me. She lets me know that she is divorcing her husband, Greg, after some decades together. He has always struck me as a bit bumbling and a poor match for her, but I have long since learned that the mysteries of others' relationships are not for me to judge. He is moving out soon and she will live alone in her castle on the hill.

Something about the way she speaks and the fact that she is choosing to share something so personal with me at all feels deeply significant in a universal sense. As if she is opening a portal into a certain window of life that I have not yet begun to understand. I remember looking out at the fading light of San Francisco, the rolling hills, the way in which the city is both so compact and so full, and feeling the ache of transition. The palpable pause between what was and what lies ahead, and the gravity we feel when we stand witness to what we have chosen for ourselves. The feeling of being suspended in that hallway between two seemingly different realities. I am wistful and raw, an open wound.

If I could look forward to the decade ahead of me, would I do it all again?

Later that year I met Nic.

Recently I was in line at my neighborhood coffee shop when I saw Pliny the Elder sitting in the refrigerated case. After so many years of tumult, I am slowly learning not to be so reactive to every single thing which stirs me internally, but this double IPA somehow feels like a personal attack and brings me to tears before work.

That same decade ago, Pliny was hot on the beer scene and nearly impossible to find. The one Whole Foods in town would receive a delivery once a week on Wednesdays and customers were limited to purchasing a maximum of two for the few fleeting moments they remained on the shelves. Early on in our love, Nic and I managed to get our hands on a duo of Pliny and spent a magical afternoon in Dolores Park intoxicated by this strong beer and the fervor of new love. I can still see my big gold hoops, his beard, the wild parrots, and the repeated image of the universe collecting itself with precision to create this exact moment just for us, now. 

This moment stands in direct opposition to that of an obituary. In my memory, our Plinys on a hill are so full of possibility, of anticipation. It is not the memory of what was, but rather the hope of all that might be.

Sometime years later, we tried Pliny again and agreed it had either gotten worse, beer in general had gotten better, or our memory and experience had colored it with a value that wasn't quite there in reality.

Does it matter which one is true?

Tomorrow I am 39. There is something about this moment in time that feels like all of those aches combined. It is both anticipation and remembering. It is an ending and a possibility. It is the understanding that, in fact, everything is always changing. Both the hope of change and the fear of it have proved themselves to be absurd because the one constant is change, itself.

Maybe that's what I learned this year. Whatever claims I make about my life, myself, are pointless because they are constantly changing, as am I. For so long I've clung to certainty; I've made a life raft out of security, a buoy out of knowing, but now, only in burning my life as I knew it to the ground, have I found any certainty at all, and that is, essentially, that I know nothing.

I give up, in the best way.

I'm not afraid of being forty. I'm not afraid of wrinkles. Despite how I live my life and endlessly talk in circles over it all, I am not even afraid of being fat or ugly. I’m not afraid of being poor or alone or wrong or stupid. 

I am afraid only of living my life halfway and so sometime recently, I refused to do so any longer. 

I started to write what I want, wear what I want, eat and move and love how I want. I started saying no when I meant no, speaking my truth, holding boundaries even when it’s uncomfortable. I stopped asking for permission or approval. It’s been scary and I’ve stumbled a lot, falling back into self doubt and a certain desperation for comfort but continually I reroute myself into alignment.

Life is beautiful. If anything, this is what I know. If we choose to look at it with the clarity of hindsight, we can see how even the messy bits, or often, especially those, add so much beauty to the kaleidoscope of life. It is fractal and ever-changing and tumbling and wild and when I can stand back to just behold it all instead of planning out each moment, it feels like a total fucking miracle.

My mom asked me recently if I wanted to write my own obituary. She has a neighbor friend, who has written her own, now years ago. This woman is poised and beautiful. Her house is a wood-roofed cottage covered in ivy and filled with perfect things. She regularly gifts handmade baked goods and bundles of homegrown sweet peas to her friends and neighbors on every holiday and birthday. Externally she seems every bit immaculate, quaint, enviably together. Naturally she has plans to close her time on earth with equal tidiness and grace as she lived on earth by pre-writing her own obituary.

My swift answer to my mother was no. I will not be writing my own obituary. Despite or maybe because of my deep love of words. I will be sure to close my time with the same recklessness and wild abandon that I have lived my life on earth. I will daily acknowledge the reality that I am becoming, every day, that whatever I think I know surely won't be true another moment from now, that my ability to sum up who I was will be impossible until I become whoever I will be. I will not be caged in, especially not by my perception of myself.

It's all changing.

I longed for a place for so long. I longed for an identity, a title, a partner, a home, a role, a landing spot. I longed to carve out that Beth-shaped crevice in the world, to nestle into it comfortably, to find security in knowing.

I have let that longing go.

What it will say when it's all done, I don't know. I don't know the details. I don't know the facts. I don't know what will become. All I know is that when I'm gone, there's no iota of possibility that it will say: she lived her life halfway.

Instead let it be, whatever the details: She was absolutely, totally, unabashedly alive… until she wasn't.

And then may they scatter me to the wind, so I can live again.

on a moment.

This is not the picture or the moment, and yet it is. My wild girl, all her own.

Watching Melby and the flickering bits of sun through my half-opened eyes feels like something between a memory and a dream. I rarely feel so relaxed as a mother, as I do now, lying horizontal in the warm morning sand, witnessing my girl dig in the quiet inlet to Hendry's beach. She is catching fish with a stick, wading in the shallow water, except the fish are bits of seaweed she carefully lays across the end of her stick and carries back to me, an offering at my feet.

Usually Melby insists I play in some particular fashion; more often she achieves whatever she thinks she wanted, only to ask for the next thing and then the next, but now, in this peaceful moment, she is content for me to lie watching her. I wonder, again, if I am calm for once because she is playing peacefully, or if she is playing peacefully for once, because I am calm.

And I'm sure, really, that both are true. There is no greater evidence of the complex interplay that is all relationships than the parent-child dynamic that can so quickly escalate to a place of stress and anger or so quickly return to something peaceful. Both parties are culpable and both are responding to the other's energetic output.

Over a month into quarantine, I wouldn't say I'm relaxed, but there is some element of suspended reality that allows me to feel slow in ways I don't normally feel slow. And that, in turn, I think has given Melby some peace too.

She is wearing an oversized red gingham swimsuit-- a hand-me-down from one of our generous older girlfriends. At this point, I can't remember what came from whom, but each new thing we uncover is a treasure, filled with even more meaning because it lived a life before now, it is filled with the wisdom of earlier 2 year olds. The suit puffs out around her torso, a little blue bow clipping it all together at her back. Her thighs are starting to tan and she has her first freckle on her right cheek. 

I feel both in awe of this girl and also slightly terrified by how much I love her. I still can't believe she came from my body, and suddenly it occurs to me that she no longer clamors to crawl back inside me. This revelation makes me want to crawl inside her somehow, to stay attached, feel what she feels, see what she sees.

Sagging with the strength of ocean breeze is a  wispy top-knot in her silky hair that doesn't tell the story of the tantrum that went along with it this morning, but I know. I think about it watching her. How I motioned to put a pony in for her, she screamed NO! and as I, choosing my battles, went to put the brush and hair ties away, she collapsed at my feet, immediately sobbing. I asked her to use her words and she unraveled. She wanted a pony but didn't want a pony but didn't want me to remove the option of the pony. 

I look at that tiny knot of hair and for a moment it is all the twists and challenges of motherhood in one-- not just fixing my child's problems, but giving her the space, the language, the ability to recognize them for herself. To name them. So they have less power over her. So she can call them out into the open and either ask for help in solving them or create her own solutions. But then also demonstrating and teaching compassion-- the ability to recognize someone else's challenges and help without being asked, to give freely.

Sometimes I get mired in the details. Everything I do right is some thing I am also doing wrong. Every line I draw I question. I just want to do right by my girl. And often the moments, the days even, are harder in creating a future I think is right for her.

I crane my neck to look at her more clearly, and she shouts, "Lie down, mama!"

She has started calling me "mom"; she must feel, somehow, how much it leaves me gaping, like the space between us is far too great. She is practicing her distance from me. But in this moment, she calls me mama. She is my baby, not a baby at all, and I listen. I lay back, grateful that today, all she wants from me is to be quiet and watch.

And what else do I have to do?

Watch this girl. She is now and she also, somehow, feels like a memory. She feels like forever.

I push my head back into the sand, and keep my eyes loosely tracking my small fisherman, the girl who grew inside me and is now growing me daily in always unanticipated ways. I feel an overwhelming urge to call her into my arms, to beg for a hug, to swallow her up, but just then she runs down the edge of the water, her arms spread out in the wind, her single stick acting as a divining rod for adventure.

She looks back and almost catches my eye, but then, keeps going. 

on the glorious awkwardness

I don't know if I remember, or if I've replayed it so many times in my head that I remember each subsequent version of the memory, which has been on a decreasing-in-frequency yet perpetual loop since 2002, but I remember it well regardless.

It was move-in day for freshmen at Berkeley. It was, in fact, the first of two possible move-in days-- a fact my family hadn't realized. We were, of course, prompt and I'd been deposited on the first allotted day after the transfer of much emotion and things from our Volvo station wagon. 

I had awaited my two roommates with great anticipation, especially since I'd sent them both an email at the address provided by the school some time before our arrival, but clearly it lacked the casual charm and wit I thought it conveyed, because neither of them responded.

So my parents drove home-- a feeling, side note, I cannot possibly imagine now having two of my own babies I spend no more than a few hours away from at a time, whose hearts I cannot imagine ever being separate from no matter how big they get-- and awaited these new people who would create the emotion and clamor and texture that was my everyday experience. And they didn't come.

A full day passed. Whether it was, in reality, some number of hours between the time my parents left, the passing night, and the girls' staggered arrivals the next day, I don't remember, but it felt interminable. I waited that whole first day to choose my bunk, because I felt sure it should be a discussion between me and my college roomies. So I didn't immediately stretch out my extra-long jersey twin sheets, but eventually night came, and after realizing they weren't coming, after chatting with uncomfortable sadness, false assuredness with my parents on my newly-acquired Nokia, I chose the most neutral spot I could muster (one top bunk, which left a bottom and the maybe-preferred other top bunk that stood above a desk), and slept.

The next day, finally, Lindsay came.

I don't remember how it happened, though she likely will, except to say we were standing outside the door and she and this boy walked up together both with cropped, bleached hair. I'm sure she introduced herself or I blurted out some line I'd been practicing in my head, but we met, we were confirmed roommates, this person was finally here, and then I said, referring to the bleached-hair boy beside her, "Is this your brother?"

To which she replied, "This is my boyfriend, Asa."

And that was it. The glorious awkwardness.

I called her boyfriend HER BROTHER.

I turned red. I don't mean my cheeks flushed in some lovely, subdued Jane Austen way. I mean I turned head to toe cherry red. 

My skin betrayed me often throughout those teenage years. When I got called on in class. When someone talked to me. When I felt embarrassed or excited. Few people believe this about me, based on my seemingly very outgoing personality, but my heart still clatters in my ears when I'm in a room and expected to introduce myself, to just say something normal like my name, where I'm from, and why I'm here today, but I don't turn red like that often anymore, and yet I can feel it still. How it felt like every bit of blood in my body was suddenly only a skin’s-depth away from erupting into hot lava, drenching everyone in my flagrant self-consciousness. How it only intensified when some teenage boy would inevitably say, "Look how red she's getting!" and how much, then especially, I longed to disappear.

I turned red because I tried to contact this person and didn't hear back and waited for this person and she didn't arrive and then when she finally did I assumed her boyfriend was her brother simply because their hair had been chemically altered in the same way.

Looking back, though it seemed with some immediacy like their hair had betrayed me, I realize too, that my 18 year old self could not imagine a person would arrive at their college experience with a partner rather than their family. I had just been dropped off by my parents in their Polo sweaters and trim dark jeans and penny loafers. I had definitely never had a boyfriend myself. It just didn't register in my brain as a possibility.

I'm not sure how long that hot, red moment of longing to implode lasted.

I think it was momentarily exacerbated by the reality that Lindsay also arrived with only 3 plastic tubs of clothing and two big picture frames filled with collaged pictures of so many friends, while I had brought a small lifetime of knick-knacks and resources that surely precisely mirrored whatever packing list the school had provided--lamps and shower caddies and books and a brand new Macbook, supplemented by a small collection of vintage typewriters that were part of my finely-crafted, very fragile persona.

I remember, vaguely, that to my horror she didn't make her bed at first— those grey sheets I had to implore her to wash over the coming months and which I often just ended up doing myself, I, always most comfortable being a mother hen. We just exchanged some words and then she and Asa went off to eat somewhere or explore Berkeley or whatever you do when you're the kind of person to have bleached hair and to arrive at college with your boyfriend of all people, or to even have a boyfriend in the first place.

Suffice it to say, we were clearly different people leading seemingly very different lives and I offered that up immediately in our awkward first encounter.

And yet, eighteen years later, we are still friends.

She was there when I met the first boy I ever loved. In fact, I inadvertently stood her up for a dinner date because I was so engrossed in talking to him. She was there when he died. She was there when, years later, someone made a small movie about our experience together and the tattoo I got because of it. She was there when I moved to San Francisco and when I had my first baby in Louisville and many many many of the seminal and everyday moments in between.

It seems somehow worth mentioning that we slept in bed often together, all through college and far into adulthood. Maybe that tied us together deeply. Even when she was in med school, across the bay, she would always make time to come see me. We'd eat and drink too much and sometimes sneak cigarettes and eat canned corn off of the floor of my basement apartment at midnight and then we'd fall asleep and she'd leave, in a suit jacket she ironed into presentability on my folding yellow kitchen table, before I even woke up. 

Lindsay will remember what I don't out of this. She has a borderline photographic memory and holds many pieces of my experience for me that I forget either with willingness or absentmindedness. At this point, each with 2 kids, living in different states, we'll sometimes go years without seeing each other, but when we do, it is an immediate return to both our friendship and some understanding of myself that lives in the way she both carries for and has crafted with me.

This was meant to be a story of glorious awkwardness.

And it was, and it is. I remember that moment of meeting her like every moment you replay in your head of someone wishing you a happy birthday and your replying, “You, too”. It was the culmination of so much anticipation; it was a microcosm of so much self-absorbed self-consciousness which still plagues me today-- my naive inability to comprehend that someone might live differently than me, my lack of perspective, my failure to just pause long enough to think sometimes. It's all still real even though I don't turn so red anymore. It was real in that moment and it's real now.

And yet, despite it all, despite myself even, I have gotten to create some of the most lasting, genuine relationships of my life, relationships that are better than me, that see me as my best self, that make me more than I allow myself to be on the daily.

I am grateful for my shortcomings, for my blurted words and red skin and small sightedness, because they prove to me that no one is looking for perfection. That you can start all wrong, make a fool of yourself, and still move through it in a way that builds a lifelong friendship.

Lindsay is now a radiation oncologist. I am a stay-at-home mom. I'm not sure which one of us you'd expect to not respond to an email or to say the definitely wrong/ weird/ awkward thing upon a much anticipated or to turn red or to bleach our hair or any of it. We are, by now, too many layers deep in being too the same and too different and too intertwined and for that, I am so grateful. 

I am grateful for the moment of glorious awkwardness that was our first meeting and all the moments since then, in which we weave in and out of each other’s lives in presence but never in energy, because, in that way, we are bound together always.

I am grateful, in fact, for every weird moment that has become something bigger and more meaningful, that’s grounded me in some way or bound me to some person. And for those that haven’t, those that just left me simmering red and feeling small, they don’t matter.

That’s what I’ve realized as I’ve grown older. They don’t matter. Not like the ones that become something so good.

I might replay that moment again and again, even til this day, but it no longer plagues me clearly. It is a funny, shared memory of the beginning of a forever friendship, and for that, I am so grateful.

Writing prompt came from Suleika Jaouad’s “Isolation Journals”:

As a human being on Planet Earth I’ve experienced my fair share of awkwardness. (Maybe more than most). I have learned to love these moments for in discomfort, valuable epiphanies are often found. Also, in retrospect, they can generate great laughter. Ah, the Glorious Awkwardness!

Reflect on a particular moment in your past when you felt most in touch with your “Glorious Awkwardness.” It could be a cringe-worthy moment you’ve replayed a thousand times in your mind. Or something essential about who you are, something unchangeable. Go back there.

What did you learn from it? Can you laugh about it? And if not, why?

help.

Nic and I have been having the same argument for nearly six years. 

It unfolds in nominally different ways each time, but usually centers around my feeling that he needs to do more around the house/ give better input about meals or activities for the family/ offer me more positive feedback/ be more engaging/ plan dates/ pick up his shit/ something similar. 

I will begin the rest of this by saying, all those things are likely true. Nic's suitcase permanently exploding week-old boxer briefs and airplane packs of mixed nuts across the entryway of every house we've ever lived in is supremely annoying. He has a unique way of rapidly opening every cupboard and jar and making a huge mess in the time it takes me to go pee. He spends a majority of his time at home just looking at his phone; he will never ever ever initiate an out-of-the-house activity; he brings attention to my flaws and insecurities in a matter-of-fact way which I recognize is both only because I  am screaming about them, asking to be noticed, and which is done in a way that is impersonal above all else, if that makes sense. They are just words. But still none of the argument is actually about him.

Because the point is, he is not perfect; we have this same fight; and then at the end of it all, I realize that all I'm fighting about is the fact that I am supremely, totally bored.

I am bored. I am so bored I could just shrink up and die.

And the fact that Nic is not operating is some imagined perfect way is only me noticing how fucking bored I am and projecting it onto his actions.

I know that if I were not so bored, I would look at Nic's pile of chonies by the door and think Good God, this guy is messy and it is annoying af but I would NOT think Nic doesn't respect me or care about how much work I do around the house and this old pair of striped underwear is a direct affront to me as a person and I should probably scream at him until I'm hoarse.

If I had other things to flush out my idea of myself, my interests, my concept of how valuable I am, then the underwear wouldn't be quite so big a deal.

I have sort of known this for years. I have made zero changes to fix it, except I get to the realization a lot faster these days.

Two nights ago, I was moping around the house-- my state of being far, far, far too often these days, and when Nic tried to drag it out of me, whatever it is-- the sickness, the discontent, the source of my malaise, I said, almost immediately, "I just want to be interesting."

This is the point at which many well-meaning people tell me I just moved/ had a baby/ had a baby that last time I had a baby/ whatever other life changes excuse a person's not being knee-deep in new new jobs, recreational activities, and leisure interests. And they would be right.

But that doesn't matter, because if I didn't mind my current lifestyle— if I were content to be moving slow, figuring it out, adjusting— it would be one thing, but I most definitely mind.

I mind. I mind.

I am a horrible stay-at-home mom. I love my girls. I give them so much love; I make them good food; I keep my house clean; I plan fun activities; I create developmentally appropriate spaces and invitations to play; I love being with them. I am good at it on a superficial level. Except I am crawling out of my skin. I am just so motherfucking bored.

I feel like my brain is literally atrophying from not being engaged. I can't remember anything. I feel physically and emotionally unmotivated. I am constantly exhausted.

It's not a baby. It is a spiritual crisis.

I need to get started. I need whatever it is that lights a fire under my ass and inspires me to write or move or dance or plant or grow or whatever else. I need that cascade. I need the energy of movement that begets movement.

Certainly I would like a job at some point. Certainly we need income. But I don't just want something to pass the time. I want something that ignites me. 

And I have literally no idea what that is.

I feel embarrassed writing this in some regard and also, it is so totally me that I feel also assured in doing it. The way I find the resources I need is often by these sweeping appeals. People feel connected to me, to my often blatant misery or lostness, to my self-criticism, my flaws, my worries. People like me, because I am willing to like and listen to them, because I can see a part of myself in literally anyone. And so I often find what I need where I don't expect it. Or, I guess, exactly where I do.

Before I make my big request, that also bears mentioning.

I moved cross country with a newborn and a very demanding 2 year old and I have to say: I did it because people helped me. People came out of the woodwork to hold my kids or take them on walks or to the zoo. An old coworker I hadn't seen in maybe a year or more came to literally pick up a truckload of trash from the alleyway behind my house. So many people brought me food. And wine. And food. People showed up at my house early on a Saturday and helped me pack all my shit away in wooden boxes bound for California. People listened to me rant and constantly asked how I was and gave my heart space and my body space.

I still fell the fuck apart. I was so frazzled and anxious. But I made it here, regardless, and I made it because people helped me and they helped me because I asked and even when I didn't ask overtly, I did with my desperation.

So before I ask for more, thank you. Thank you for being a person, who reads these words and finds some commonality or maybe also just gawks at how transparent/ verbose/ trivial/ whatever I am. If you read the words, I know it's because you relate, somehow. If you take time to be here, it's because you are also me, somehow, and that is true whether you feel solace or judgment in response. Thank you for being that person, either way, because it makes me feel alive. Thank you for being a person, maybe, who offers to help, who says something, who comments, who is part of this. Because what I need, ultimately, is to feel not alone. I need to feel connected, to myself, to the earth, to the people around me, and every bit of that that I get helps. It makes me less bored. It elicits that firing of neurons that makes me someone alive, now, in this world. It makes me human.

That was my aside to say, thank you for being human with me. That is the one thing that happens semi-regularly that makes me feel alive in the exact way I am seeking.

And now, for my request. I need help.

I need to do something. And I don't know what it is.

I'm not asking for a job. I'm not asking to pass the time. I'm asking to move/ do/ learn/ be/ grow/ start. I am a firm believer in the cascade-- how you begin one thing and it can snowball into something lovely you never anticipated. I wish I knew what I were asking for. To kayak with you? To go on a backpacking trip? For you to teach me to knit? To volunteer with you? To have a job in your cafe? To do the writing for your blog? To draw the cartoons for your yoga teacher manual? (This one I've actually done...) I don't know what it is! I don't know what it is. But if there's a spot in your life that needs filling, or maybe even just a spot that has space somewhere near you, consider me.

I wish that could happen organically. But I have gotten too far away from it. I've thought too much and sat too long and fretted too much and now I'm sitting here with nails chewed down to the quick and a raging case of anxiety and what I need a spiritual awakening. 

I hope you understand when I say that. I think many people won't. I think whomever I'm hoping to reach with this will.

Everyone else is walking around summarizing their years in hopeful or resigned words, and all I can think is, whether tomorrow is the first of the year or a debatable decade or just a random Tuesday, I have got to switch shit up. I am dying inside. I feel like a polar bear trying to live in the Sahara. I feel like a butterfly trying to carry a piano. I am just not living right. I am not living who and how I’m supposed to be. I am fighting it and fighting it and have gone so long not doing or being whatever I’m supposed to do or be that I can’t even see straight. I need help.

And I will reiterate, again, this isn't about a job. I'm afraid people will respond and try to get me to do remote clerical work for them.

This is not that. 

Though I'm not sure exactly what it is.

All I know is, I keep saying that I'm lost here. 

But I'm not really. What I am is stripped bare enough of my routines and daily noise to step back and pay attention to how done I am with the life I've been living. 

When whatever transformation comes that I've been waiting for, I honestly don't think I'll look any different. I'll probably still live here. I might still be a stay-at-home mom. Maybe I still won't make any money. But I won't be bored. I won't have to pick the fight. Because I will feel all the ways in which I am valuable and interesting and engaged because I will be living them.

I just have to find out where to start.

If you know, if you know at all, please tell me.

And in the meantime, sorry Nic, for yelling at you about the underwear. It’s not about the underwear.

But also, please, pick them up.

on trusting.

We are looking for a space to rent in Santa Barbara. I knew, in coming here, it would be no small feat, but didn't quite realize how it would feel to be in it. With a budget of about $3000 a month at maximum, which could have bought me the house of my dreams in Louisville, we are most optimistically looking at a 2 bedroom apartment, or ideally a duplex or even a small stand alone home. It is bleak at best.

So far I've spent basically an entire calendar year looking at Craiglist/ Trulia/ Zillow postings and have gone to 6 showings. Two were laughably horrific. One was decent, but just joyless and in a questionable area. One was nice enough, but so close to the highway I could feel my ears ringing. Another one I loved the owner, wanted to talk with her and know her and have her know my babies, but with no closets and a terrible lay out, I had to admit the home itself, even with infinite charm, would make me nuts. And lastly, one of which I loved beyond all belief. It was perfect. 

That one I built a home in, in my mind. I mentally bought a new buffet table for the entryway. I planned for a cluster of our Adirondack chairs and a fire pit in the quaint outdoor area. I dreamed up the layout of the girls' bedroom, anchoring the down easy chair in the middle of the room so I could nurse and hold babies in the night. We could walk to my favorite ice cream shop, be at my parents' house in five minutes, and were close enough to the highway that Nic's commute would be a breeze. The landlord was bordering on curt but seemed mildly charmed by my humor. 

It felt so deeply right. My mom agreed.

And then, after several days of waiting to hear back, I received a clipped email, devoid of punctuation, that the place had been rented to another applicant.

I was crushed.

I've thought about this for days and days now. I keep thinking about that place.

And then suddenly it reminded me of Keven. 

Keven's greatest failing was that his name was spelled like a typo. Otherwise I found him supremely charismatic, interesting, and attractive. We met at Brass Tacks in San Francisco, a thousand years ago now, when my sister came into town for less than 48 hours. We went to some bars, and at this one in particular, I ended up in a dynamic conversation with the poorly named Keven. I was witty and drunk enough to feel beautiful. He was smart and engaging. We talked and talked. And then he left... with his date.

He had apparently been on a first date with someone who proved much less interesting to him than me, and she had been very interesting to my sister, so in true rom com fashion, we swapped partners and chatted the night away.

When the conversations had waned, like a gentleman, Keven escorted his date home. 

And then, like either the most ungentlemanly of gentleman or just perhaps like a true romantic, he had come back, immediately, to ask for my phone number.

In retrospect, I can't decide if it was charming or horrifying, but there was immediately and palpably enough between us that I was glad he had done so. Shortly thereafter, we went on our first date. I learned he was a Harvard graduate, a COO of an environmental policy company, and a lover of dogs. We drank good beer, laughed, ate an insane amount of food, and kissed, but just enough. It was easy and funny between us. It was smart and all just a little bit coy in a way that made me feel perfect.

We went on, oh, I don't know, a handful of dates and then he went to India for some reason or another. He last minute suggested I come along, which, of course, I could not. I was working two jobs and didn't even have a passport at the time, but how impossibly romantic the whole thing felt-- this smart and accomplished man-- for once not just a boy on a skateboard-- who felt so compelled by our connection to come back for me, to take me out to eat and drink nice things, to invite me to India. And plus, I just liked him. I liked to be with him.

I had not liked someone in so, so long. It felt exhilarating and fun. It felt easy. It felt right. I thought?

We exchanged emails the whole time he was gone— fervent, frequent, flirty emails. We went to a Giants game when he returned. 

And then, like too many love stories end, especially in San Francisco, he basically ghosted me. I learned he was also dating someone else, which is fine, which is to be expected early on. But I think, in essence, he chose her and instead of telling me directly, he let things uncomfortably and painfully peter out. At some point he acknowledged it, after some time and a shrewd yet kind email from me, and I felt resolved about the whole situation. It had its place in the unfolding of things.

Today was the day I saw the place I loved the owner but not the place. It only made me extra sad about the place I dreamed up our fire pit and buffet table. I had such a feeling of loss about it all.

I came home and kept thinking about Keven. Why did I keep thinking about Keven?

Because, I realized, he, too, had seemed right. And in the end, he wasn't, because he didn't choose me too. I don't harbor any ill will about it. It was a flicker in time in the scheme of things, but I did feel that same loss of so much potential, so much imagining of spontaneous international trips and drinking fine wines and saying endlessly witty things to each other. Maybe it could have been glorious. But it wasn't.

He wasn’t my guy because he wasn’t my guy. And just the same, this place wasn’t my place, because it wasn’t my place.

You can feel like all the parts of something are right, but if they don’t choose you too, they’re not right for every single reason which comes down to not wanting you too, to not being because it wasn't. 

After Keven, I dated someone pretty atrocious for a very short period of time. It feels unfair to say that about him now. He was kind, very kind, just not very smart or aware. He took me out, once, for an Italian dinner in North Beach, and then we went ice skating by the big Christmas tree in Union Square, because he knew I’d like both these things. He wanted to charm me.

He worshipped me, it seems, tried to tell me he loved me when it was far too soon to love me, when I asked him to please stop. 

And I thought about settling. Kind of. Definitely not really but fleetingly, kind of. How easy it would be to be loved by someone, whom I felt always in control of. That feels ugly to say, but it’s true. It would have been easy for my ego, for my fragile sense of self, to be with someone because they wanted to be with me.

But I knew it was wrong and I, having been so recently hurt by indirectness, told him clearly. I like you, but I no longer want to date you. I do not love you.

I kept wondering how you'd ever know. When it was right. Every person I'd dated seemed right for some reason and wrong for others. Keven had seemed so right, and yet, when I was honest with myself, I felt some need to impress him. Not in a hopeful maybe-I-can-always-be-my-best-self way of being with someone new, but because he seemed like more of an adult than I was. In retrospect, the least adult thing a person could do is not have the decency to let someone go directly, but in the midst of things, it felt that way, that I had somehow snuck into an echelon above me. And the ice skating boy was wrong in every way, but I tried for a while to tell myself he wasn't, because, shouldn't we all do something silly and easy and fun? And couldn't that just be love?

How would you ever know? How could you know?

I decided to give up. I decided I would really really never find someone to love.

A month or so later, I met Nic. A few months after that, I moved to Louisville. And now, six years later, we have two babies, a pretty darn sweet love story, and have come full circle back to California.

I don't think this is true for every love story, but it is for mine: I knew I loved Nic the minute I met him. I felt vulnerable and sweaty and imperfect and dumb and the most impossibly beautiful and seen of anyone in the entire world. He twirled me, and I KNEW. I knew. I knew. I knew.

Six years later, I am still getting to know him, to understand all of what that immediate, instinctual knowing meant, what I was looking for, how I needed him, how he has helped hone my life into something the most beautiful. I never could have pieced it all together then, but the instinct was there. Something deep in my gut and heart said, YES.

That didn't mean it was easy. We have had many many many hard times as a couple. We are still working out how to best communicate and understand each other, how to work as a team, how to not take things personally, how to separate our personal shit from our feelings about each other, how to allow them to coexist, how to physically coexist, how to co-parent, how to give and take. All of it. Our love required a cross country move, an extended period of time in a urine-soaked house with basically no furniture, and many hours spent navigating the weirdness of my giving up what was most dear to me: California, my family.

And yet, I knew.

I knew.

I knew because he was him. And in spite of, and also because of, all the problematic things, he chose me too.

I knew because I knew and he chose me too.

I didn't have to ask questions. When questions were asked, I still knew.

And so today, after being charmed by a house that I could make seem really right in my head that really wasn't right in reality, I remembered to listen to my gut and to say, that was not it. And even the house I loved so much was not it, because it didn't choose me back.

I feel like I've spent a lifetime second-guessing myself. I can easily overload myself with information and rationalizations. I seek input from others. When I'm looking for a certain kind of feedback, I unwittingly seek it from those, whom I know will say exactly what I want to hear. I sway my decisions accordingly. I get so deep in thinking and convincing and explanations that I lose what's so deep and yet so accessible within me: my instinct, my knowing.

I have to value that. And then I have to value the response too. I have to listen when I choose something or someone, and it doesn't choose me back. It's not confusing, it's not not obvious. The feeling we get from people and experiences is clear. Some things resonate. They feel clear and energizing and hopeful and right. Even if they're not easy. Some things deaden us. They feel exhausting and depleting and confusing. We have to justify, create caveats, excuse. Our heads know. Our bodies know. And we ignore it, because we want things to be right before they’re right.

This is all a very long way of saying, I haven't found us a home, yet. I have this sneaking part of me that insists I settle. That I live somewhere that feels not quite right, because it's insanely expensive and competitive to find somewhere to live here. So surely I would settle. But I keep reminding myself, my expectations are not absurd. I'm not asking to live somewhere huge or fancy or elaborate. I'm not asking to pay too little. I'm just asking for exactly what's right for me. 

And I refuse to make a choice out of fear or desperation. I won't let it confuse me. I am not scared. I will know when it's right, when it feels right, and when it chooses me too.

I'm so grateful for the shit that doesn't work out. I'm grateful for disappointment and fear and longing, because every time I've felt those things, I have also been able to look back and understand their place in the scheme of things. I am grateful that I'm beginning to know when I know, to trust that. It is not unclear, it is not hard to discern, it is not murky.

I know.

I know when I know.

And until then, I will keep looking, and waiting, and trusting.

Amen.

on sisters.

I originally wrote this article for a series online called This Book Belongs To. It was never published. Today, I realized it’s not about the book at all, but rather, sisters. How appropriately timed.

Somewhere in my first month postpartum, a package arrived unexpectedly at our door. It was from my sweet sister, Kate, who already has two children herself; there was a sentimental, motherly wisdom in that package that understood the benefit of frivolities during a time where so much was raw and pragmatic and, dare I say, boring. It contained the children's book, Life by Cynthia Rylant, a hand-printed onesie (that read "We really like each other," meant to match the t-shirts my partner and I had jokingly/ not jokingly made to wear early on in our romance when we were just that in love) and a pair of painfully cute, knit unicorn slippers. 

I cried immediately upon opening the package, mostly because, at that point, sunk in a fog of way-too-long undiagnosed postpartum depression, it was a reminder that the outside world existed, when I felt so very trapped between a seven pound newborn and my couch. How singular, timeless, shapeless, one's experience becomes with the arrival of a new baby; some, I think, relish it, while others, like myself, feel lost, like they are tumbling, amorphous, through it. This repurposed Amazon box felt like a tether to the outside world, a tiny lifeline. The onesie and slippers were, on my small girl, still gaping. The book, however, fit perfectly right away.

Life is the most simple story. It's a story about how life grows, how each creature relishes their habitat, their experience. It is filled with stunning landscapes and stoic animals and a quiet reverie that somehow captures both the magnitude and the smallness of life all at once. 

On one page, a deer watches a flock of birds scattering from a nearby tree, their cluster of bodies silhouetted against the night sky or stark against a glowing moon. The edges of the page are curling with foliage, the ground is covered with a grass that seems to dancing, moving, almost visibly pushing its way into the moonlight. The scene is all awash in shades of blue, so serene, yet so full of life. 

And the story reads, "All these [animals] know something about life: that everything is changing. And it is worth waking up in the morning to see what might happen." 

I have read this book no less than a hundred times at this point, and, without fail, by these pages, I cry, just like I cried the first time. I cry because, if I have learned anything about motherhood in the past 17 months of doing the darned best I can, it is that everything, indeed, is always changing.

Whatever good routines I think we've built-- those healthy eating habits or solid nap times or predictable moods/ schedules/ needs-- they often transform or straight up evaporate as quickly as I claim them as victories. Whatever traumas I think I've inflicted-- frozen waffles for dinner or very, very impatient words or, holy smokes, the time my daughter fell out of the sink onto the floor-- are erased from memory as soon as I claim them as insurmountable failings. Parenting is a constant practice in non attachment.

I have learned to, in a small way, look at life as a parent as a series of seasons. The uncomfortable and traumatic: it is changing. The triumphant and joyful: it is changing, too. But whatever the season, it really is worth waking up to find out what's next. If we can step back from it just the tiniest bit, take in just that moment, it can be really magical. It can also be horrifically boring/ exhausting/ trying. But either way it's okay. We keep moving.

I didn't really know that one month in. I didn't know when the package arrived, when I first read this book, but I had an inkling of it. I am sure that, in some ways, I barely know now. I have mothered, relatively speaking, a very short time, but long enough to know, I have no idea what's ahead, except that it will always be changing. But even though the journey of that discovery had only just, just begun when this book arrived at my doorstep, something about that page was comforting to me. It ripped me out of that very narrow moment in time; it said, You are a part of this. Part of the earth, part of the changes, part of the animals, living in their exact places, doing exactly what they are meant to do. In fact, I am one of them. 

I remember padding out to the car with my daughter where my partner stood, tinkering. I was clutching the book in my hands, weeping, insistent that I read it to him immediately. I needed to show him the contents of this package, my book. I needed him to see what my lifeline looked like, what it might look like to save me a little.

Life felt grounding at a time, when I felt dramatically untethered. It didn't fix anything, necessarily. I will still depressed. I still struggled in a huge way. But it did feel like a very real, very small moment of meditation, of solace. I am so grateful to my sister for knowing what I needed.

We haven't read Life much in the past few months. My daughter is old enough now that she prefers instead to flip through board books, herself, comfortably reclined in my lap, but always in charge of the pages at hand. But last night, after a week of everyone being sick, on a quiet day filled with grey skies and recovery, we huddled on the floor of her room and I chose the books, I turned the pages. 

I chose Life.

At 18 weeks pregnant, I needed the reminder. I am scared to have this baby, scared for labor to unfold like the first time, scared about my body recovering, scared to relive how dark the months following felt the first time, scared to figure out how to manage two small children. 

So I come back to the book. And it reminds me. "Life is not always easy. There will probably be a stretch of wilderness now and then. But wilderness eventually ends. And there is always a new road to take." I let that echo a minute. I cried. My daughter, curled up in my lap, so always appreciative of time spent reading together, yet so clearly sure which books she likes or dislikes, was oddly still. I believe there is a reverence to this book that translates, even to a toddler. She, too, knew.

Postpartum, this time around, it still might be a wilderness. We might get lost. Heck, much of life might be a wilderness. But I believe, deeply, in the simple, beautiful message of this book: we are a part of the natural cadence of things, and there is always something to love, even when it's hard.

I have started making a list for when baby two comes-- ways to cope, things that help, reminders that eventually, even if it doesn't get better, it changes. On my list so far is: exercise, mascara, sparkling water, yoga, Life, Kate.

on trusting.

I woke up at 1:30 am, overcome by a wave of nausea, accompanied by several hours of consistent contractions.

This is it, I told myself.

I didn't panic that Nic was gone, that I was alone, that it felt uncomfortable. Instead I felt relieved by its arrival; those tight waves in my belly felt like the most long-awaited friend, and there was something about experiencing them alone in the quiet darkness, atop my freshly washed sheets that felt serene, primal.

While versions of this have been happening intermittently throughout the past two weeks, this time it felt different. I felt like I knew. I timed contractions for a bit, I peed too many times to count, I thought about future phone calls with the pediatrician in which they asked for my daughter's birthdate, in response to which I'd say, 7-27-19. Eventually I coerced myself back into a few stretches of semi-restless sleep, because if Melby's birth and the last two weeks have taught me anything, it is that, despite how exciting things may seem, sleep is of utmost importance.

I allowed myself into a relaxed wakeful time by 6 or so. Nic is flying, but passes through Charlotte twice today-- just a quick 1.5 hour flight home to Louisville from there. We chatted and I said I'd check in at both junctures. I didn't want him to preemptively miss any work, but more so do not want him to miss the birth of our second child. I texted my doula and friend, Erica, not to say anything concrete except, stand by... maybe. I took a shower and went so far as to dry my hair.

Eventually Melby did her morning calls for MOM! and JUICE! from the cracked door of her stuffy room and I went in and scooped her up with the arms of a woman about to gift her with a pristine baby sister. We laughed our usual morning laugh and she nestled her head into my neck, so full of love, and said it again, her whisper of morning adoration, "Juice."

And then, after 6+ hours, the contractions stopped.

Apparently this is normal. Everyone, everything tells me, it is normal.

And yet, as usual, my brain is full of worry, judgment, and doubt.

One of the things I've been grappling with the last few weeks is the belief, the fear that my body doesn't know how to do this. Before Melby was born, I cherished so vehemently the belief that one's body just does the exact right thing, just exactly when it's time. And then, in real life, everything went haywire, and now I'm left with this lingering feeling that maybe my body is just flawed somehow.

I don't believe that really. I don't. And yet it's hovering there, so easily reinforced by a labor that keeps starting but doesn't progress. It's there with all its ugly friends, who say unhelpful things to me about this whole experience.

I have decided, just now, to leave them all here. I am going to get them out, and then, who knows? Erase them. Burn them. Exorcise them.

Here they are:

I am afraid of Nic not being here. I am afraid in a way that has very little to do with logistics, with his body actually being present or not present at the birth, but in a way that his potential absence digs at some deep feeling of loneliness I carry around with me always, that no one is ever close enough, committed enough, loves me enough, thinks I am enough. I am afraid of seeming silly by calling him home too early, asking him not to go back to work for no reason. I am afraid of him not seeing the process and that having some hugely negative implication that I can't even begin to articulate but only exists as a phantom feeling of doom in my body.

I am afraid of the logistics. Afraid of figuring out the timing of when someone comes to be with Melby; I need it to be at the exact moment I need it. No sooner, no later. I don't want to labor with anyone else in the house except Nic, but I also don't want it to be time to leave and not be able to. I'm afraid of not having the right food for Melby, not having left all the information. I'm afraid she'll be asking for a bandaid or toothpaste or that particular lotion and no one will understand and she'll cry both because I'm not here and she's not getting what she wants and my heart will break from just imagining that. I'm afraid of buying too much food and having it go to waste, but also not enough and everyone not having what they need in my absence. I'm afraid of there being laundry in the laundry basket and dirty dishes in the sink. I'm afraid of waiting two more full weeks and losing my goddamn mind.

I'm afraid it will be awful again. I'm afraid my midwife won't be there. I'm afraid I'll be exhausted and unable to own the moment. I'm afraid of how tired and crabby I already am without a newborn to take care of. I'm afraid I won't seem powerful. I'm afraid I will give into fear. I'm afraid my body has no idea how to have a baby. I'm afraid I'll succumb to some preemptive intervention, because I'm tired of waiting and that will throw things off their natural course, create even more problems. I'm afraid of Nic looking at me and thinking I'm weak; I'm afraid of how much I want to impress him in this experience-- I want to seem fierce and clear and capable, so we can both heal from last time.

I'm afraid of looking at myself and thinking I'm weak, not because I think I actually am, but because I've chosen to give in to fear as a way to live my life. I'm afraid this experience is a glaring microcosm of the misery I've chosen as a lifestyle-- one of doubt, of fear, of negative self-talk, of the self-fulfilling unhappiness of all those things. I'm afraid to let go and be something different. I'm afraid of what happens when I give up the narrative of not liking myself, of being "crazy," of suffering. I'm afraid of suffering and I'm afraid of not suffering. I'm afraid of it all being my fault.

I'm afraid of it all being my fault.

That I am miserable right now, because I have a seemingly legitimate excuse to be miserable, and I am diving into it, swimming around in the gory resplendence of an almost universally-accepted reason to complain and stress and drink up attention. I'm afraid of how terribly personal I've made all of this.
So now. Take that. Burn it. Rip it up. Incinerate it. For the love of God, MOVE ON.

Because it all might be true, it all might be valid, it all might make sense, but it is getting. me. nowhere. It is definitely not getting this baby out of me.

Which leads me to something I've been thinking a lot about lately. As I've been calling it: the unquantifiables. And by that I mean, I've been thinking about the things we can't list on paper. The things to take into account when everything might seem right, but still it's not right-- you might find the house with every feature and square inch of space you asked for, but it doesn't feel like home. You might choose the job with the most money and prestige and best schedule and benefits, but it doesn't fill your soul. You might find a potential partner who checks every box you could have imagined, but still you don't feel drawn to them.

There are things to be accounted for that we can't often actually count or name. It's come up in many conversations lately. I feel like I'm at this point of trying to button down my life, somehow. Tally it up, see if I've hit all the marks, if I'm doing well. Do we have enough money? Own enough things? Have the right titles? Weigh the right number of pounds? Lift the right amount of weight? Can I check a bunch of boxes to say I'm doing well, I'm happy, my kid is healthy, my relationship is good?

And the answers to all of those questions differ, but also, the answers don't matter at all. It's not something that can be charted. Because the real assessment, at the end of the day, is all my own. It's how I feel about it all while it's happening that matters; it's how engaged I am, how present, how comfortable, how joyful, how at ease. It's a lot of things I can't quite put a mark next to, take a picture of, or write on a list.

Which is a very long way to say: part of me believes I am also not having this baby yet, because I have a shit attitude. Because I am wallowing in those aforementioned fears and anxieties, because things start happening and then I flood that happening with anxiety and fretting and fear, instead of just letting it flow, and I'll be damned if this little girl wants to come into the world that way.

So let me challenge my own ugliest self for a moment and assert what I actually believe to be true, what I feel at my core, when I strip away all the drama:

She will come when she comes. She will come how she comes. Everything will be fine-- regardless of the logistics-- because at the point of its eventual unfolding, it will be whatever it is and the only option is to move through whatever circumstances present themselves. 

While I am indeed carrying this baby, doing the work, I did not create the cycle of life. I did not create the rules of science that lead to conception, I did not imbue that creation with the magic of all of those unquantifiables-- attitude, energy, intention-- that eventually lead to the actual implantation of a baby. I am not the creator. I am not in charge. I was not in charge of the moment this baby came to be inside me, nor am I am in charge of the moment she joins us in the outside world. I am a channel of expression, a vehicle for perpetuating life and love, but I am not the boss of it.

I am not a victim. I am not in suffering. How many times I have looked back and realized the thing I resisted, often most vehemently, the thing that I fought like it was attacking me-- in this instance, waiting, not knowing-- was just the exact thing I needed, that it had its place, that it couldn't have been more perfectly planned, and, indeed, it wasn't. At least, not by me. 

When we tried to get pregnant the first time, it took a handful of months. It is surely sacrilege, borderline painfully offensive to suggest that that small amount of time was difficult for me. I know many families suffer through so dramatically much more to conceive. And yet, it was still hard-- the waiting.And then, after however many months of waiting, plus however many months of growing, our Melby arrived. And every single day of her life, I have understood that whatever waiting, whatever exact movements, both in terms of conception and literally every other moment of my life, were right because they resulted in her. I waited for that girl; I moved here to create that girl, every single second of existence has been the right thing because she is my daughter. Nothing has ever felt more crystalline to me. Her cherubic face, her wispy hair, her defiant tone, her silly attitude, her engaged mind, her always remembering, her head in the crook of my shoulder: everything about her is so right that I am reminded, I am not in charge. I could never plan such a divine unfolding.

This isn't a religious statement necessarily. It can mean whatever you want. It just means: I relent.

I don't have to fill everything with meaning. I don't have to try to guess about the implications of small moments in a tremendously far-reaching orchestra of existence. Each pang doesn't mean labor. Each moment of comfort doesn't mean "nothing" is happening. I am too small to see the bigger picture; I just have to remember that it's there. And trust it.

I need to trust it.

My job is this: to make space, to welcome change, to accept the unknown portions of the unfolding. That's my unquantifiable.

Whenever I get wound up so tightly, I feel like I work through all this mentally and at the end of it, the message I need to give myself is: I AM NOT GOD. Whatever that means to you, personally, I think the message is clear. I am not the master of the universe, I am not science, I am not nature, I am not in control of every moment and system and chain of events. My job is to relax my body, breathe into it, and get out of the way.

She will come.

My baby girl will come.

Baby girl, I have spent so much time worrying and trying to control that I've spent very little imagining you, loving you, welcoming you. We are so excited for our second girl, for a sister, for a whole new person we will not insist is one thing or another, but just allow to be. We are excited to have you be a part of our family. We are excited to hold you, to love you, to make space for you. We are excited to see your eyes for the first time, touch your skin for the first time, to introduce you to our world. But I will stop trying to rush it.

I trust that you will come when you're ready. I trust in a much bigger picture than I could ever imagine. I trust in your safety, my own, the evolution of things, the process, our love, the rightness of things. I promise to stop talking about it any other way. 

I trust our place in things. I trust us.

See you soon, little girl.

on food.

When I was first pregnant with Melby, awash in the worry that I would definitely infect my future child with all of my unresolved issues (and trying frantically to solve them in a flurry of therapy appointments), a friend recommended the book, "Parenting from the Inside Out." It hinges around the idea that our childhood/ past directly shapes our own parenting, and while we might coast along through certain stages, once our child reaches a point at which we personally experienced some sort of trauma (or even just have a negative association with that time) that we can be unknowingly triggered and take that out on our own children.

Honestly, I couldn't read it. My brain was too thick with worry already and this seeming insistence that I might unwittingly sabotage my child at some point unless I dealt with my own issues was too overwhelming to me.

But the idea stuck. And it makes sense, clearly.

How do we guide our children through stages or experiences with which we have our own unresolved issues? 

I don't think this means to raise a healthy child we have to have it all figured out, but it does mean we need to pay attention, be aware of our triggers so we can head them off with intentionality. And one such arena I knew would be difficult for me, even before Melby was born, was: food.

I have been through the gamut with food. I've restricted, dabbled in bulimia, binged, ate truly atrociously and drank even more, found some moderation, saw a nutritionist, counted calories, been strictly paleo, panicked when I breathed near a refined carb, learned to cook after an ungodly number of years almost exclusively eating out, and now am somewhere in the middle of all of those things. My hard, fast rules are that I do not count anything, ever, ever, and I try to listen to my body. Currently my biggest challenge is that I eat way more treats than I know is good for my mental or physical health. But I'm pretty okay, all things considered. I make a good majority of my food from scratch; I eat tons of vegetables, healthy fats, protein, and fruit; and most importantly, I don't obsess one way or the other. I've said many, many times, that while I was once much more physically "fit," the emotional turmoil that accompanied that: the fixation, the worry, the self-flagellation, the panic was not worth it. Replacing dietary gluttony with the gluttony of obsessive self-control was not any healthier for me.

And while I feel pretty okay now, not necessarily my most shining or balanced or filled with clarity, but pretty okay, I still carry with me that lifetime of food chaos. And decidedly did not want to put that on my daughter. Of that, I was sure.

How to go about it was another issue altogether.

Early on, Nic and I had agreed we wanted to feed Melby only veggies, fruits, fats, and protein. We skipped any and all refined sugar, dairy, and grains. Like many babies, she was in love with food. She'd sit down and devour sautéed mushrooms and zucchini, blueberries, avocado, and an entire scrambled egg for breakfast. 

The early eater is such an easy invitation to congratulate oneself on their (premature) successes as a parent. While I know not all babies like or are even remotely interested in food, if they're going to be into it at all, it is easiest when they don't know enough to ask for something else, see the crackers on another kid's plate, succumb to the allure of crappy packaging in stores, know the significance of the crinkle of cellophane, or throw a tantrum/ hold out for some preferred flavor.

As I remind myself often, I don't have anything figured out as a mom. Whatever I think I have conquered, checked off, or succeeded in could just as easily be undone entirely at some unexpected future juncture so I am learning to keep my goddamn mouth shut.

Because, yes, our food journey has devolved in certain ways. Or expanded, or however you choose to look at it. What's important is: Melby tasted ice cream for the first time last week. She eats all the grains now. She enjoys a weirdly stinky cheese now and again. Pretty much everything is on the proverbial and literal table these days, and, while I feel okay about that, I still feel worried about her personal relationship with food. Because she's a kid! And she has taste buds. And she will still eat cucumbers and peppers and all the other veggies I sneak into eggs, but she has a clear preference for refined carbs and cheese and, dear me, that ice cream, and, while I can control myself, I have some deep fear of not being able to control her.

And here's my big moment...

I can't!

I cannot control my daughter. I could fiercely insist she not eat anything that somehow landed on my "no" list until the end of time. It could "work" for every second that I'm with her. But at some point, I won't be with her. Snacks will be served at school, friends will trade lunch box items, one day she'll have her own money, make her own choices and... what then? Surely, it seems, if I could manage it that long for her, delay the onslaught of culinary horrors that are everywhere, it would be that much better for her?

But also no. Because, as I realize for myself, again and again, the more restricted a person is, the more they crave whatever is restricted. It's an attitude, a language. No one likes being told no. NO increases the allure, cultivates an obsession.

If I spent 7 years telling my kid sugar is "bad," and then one day she had sugar and it was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted, what would she think of all the things I told her? My guess is, she'll think, "My mom is full of shit" and go ham on all the sugar she can get her hands on.

This is a very long way to say, while up until this point we have still really focused on nutrient dense food, I've also conceded that including a full array of options is probably healthiest for my girl. And, honestly, easiest, because I am eating those things myself.

And I felt okay about that, and still... Melby was obsessed with food. I cannot tell you how many moms' groups I posted in, how many mom moms I talked to, how many friends I complained to: this kid will literally not stop asking for food. She was predominantly obsessed with "bars." Bars, for the most part, are Larabars or knock-off versions of them. Whole 30 approved? Sure. But she'd eat one, and then immediately ask for another. The bar dragon was never tamed.

And it became a thing. Every time we'd leave the gym, from the moment she saw me, she'd start screaming for snacks. For bars. Sometimes, if she asked in a reasonable way from the get go, or if I had something I really, really needed to get done and just didn't want to fight the battle, I'd give her a bar or a snack container full of chopped apples, and it would buy me some time. But most of the time, as soon as she was done, she'd demand more. And I would feel like I was losing my fucking mind. Most days, she just screamed at me, and I held out, unwilling to allow her angry tyranny to be the avenue through which she got what she wanted. 

But none of it felt easy or clear for me. I rationalized why she would or wouldn't be so hungry, why she did or didn't need yet another bar. I felt, honestly, as out of control as I do when I tackle my own food issues. Like there were just too many factors at play, too many emotional and physical elements I couldn't possibly suss out, like the "right" decision was impossible.

I didn't ever want her to feel deprived or ignored. I wanted to respect her growing use of language, her desire to communicate, so much of which hinges around asking for something and being understood, illicing a desired response. I also want her to eat well, to get enough nutrients, to thrive. Mostly, I just didn't want her to be obsessed with food.

And she was obsessed. We were both obsessed. I felt totally unhinged.

Then one day, I had a revelation. It came from bits and pieces of many things I'd read, many things people had told me, many things I'd experienced personally with Melby, many things I actually already knew, but it was just that particular day that it all came together for me to make sense.

Melby was asking less for food and more for clarity on what to expect. Sometimes I'd hand her a bar in the car, sometimes I wouldn't. Sometimes I was tired and would conceded to letting her munch on veggie straws all day, and sometimes I'd lay down the law about snacking. How was she to know the difference?

Also (this came mostly from my reading), kids, just like adults, can often be eating literally all day but still not actually be satiated or full. Our bodies require a balance of carbs, protein, and fat to survive and just grazing on salty bits of compacted air all day would not sustain her. I was getting emotional about it all; Melby felt that and was getting emotional about it in return.

Basically, I was doing everything wrong and I was creating my own problem.

So I took the advice of most experts and landed on a 3 meal, 2 snack a day plan, which, most importantly, took place at a table and included an array of elements (instead of maybe just a bar or just crackers), including those big time desired ones. Bars included, cheese and crackers included, blueberry crumble bars included. That doesn't mean that each sitting involved one of those things; I think the most salient point in all of this that I unearthed is, I'm still the boss. I choose what's served. But giving Melby some say in it lessens the drama between us. And the sitting, I think, clarified that this is the time we eat food and not every single second in between.

And what more so eliminated the drama? Talking about it. Or not talking about it, rather. Not talking about any aspect of it whatsoever. Food is food. It is not a value judgment, a reward, or an evil villain. If she wanted more berries, I said sure. If she didn't touch a single vegetable, I said nothing. If she didn't eat anything at all, I said nothing. I didn't chastise her, warn her, coax her into eating bites, offer some special alternate food if she ate the bites I wanted her to eat, none of it. The food was on the plate; we talked, we ate, we cleared our plates.

And I will be damned if, two weeks later, she doesn't scream for bars when we get in the car. She DOESN'T SCREAM FOR BARS, PEOPLE.

I will not pretend this has solved all of our issues. She gets frantic for food sometimes or some particular thing she wants, though that's pretty consistent with where she is developmentally in other ways. She does ask for bars sometimes. Some days she only eats the bread, crackers, and then rice off her plate. But the drama has lessened considerably. And I am beyond relieved.

I didn't go too much into my revelation, but I think, in essence, it is this: we can't control our kids. We certainly select elements of their environment and experience, but the shit that exists, exists. The less focus we put on creating a scale of value surrounding that, the better. The less attention we give to each exact moment of our child's relationship with food (or toothbrushing or sleep or wearing clothes that are not just capes and socks or whatever), the better. Because they're struggling for autonomy and the more they feel us struggling against them, the more they retaliate.

I am not saying let them go hog wild and do whatever they want. I am saying find a consistent routine that allows them to know what to expect and then minimize the drama and conversation within that. Melby wanted some control over her food experience. So ultimately I took actually more control but then loosened the reins within that paradigm.

I am 100% positive this journey is not over, that I still know basically nothing, that new challenges are just around the corner. But for this small moment in time, I actually feel really good about where we are. Like both of us are a little less obsessed, a little happier with a predictable plan, a little more in control because no one's actually trying too hard to control anything at all.

I cannot wait to meet this new baby, because I feel assured she will challenge me in some totally different, likely even more challenging, way. Because that's what parenting turns out to be. An opportunity to face our own unresolved issues, to maybe begin to solve them, to breathe through it. It is not easy. It's not natural for me. It doesn't really feel effortless, ever. But at the end of the day, I'm so grateful for it, for the insistence that I grow, learn, change. This time I can't just put down the book. I've got to face it. So here I go, one step or bar at a time.

on my 35th birthday

Somewhere around 23, I started baking all the time. I worked in bar, baked cookies and cupcakes on the regular, and brought them to work in a hat box I'd decorated with some matte vintage wrapping paper that was covered in peaches. I doled out my treats to regulars and people I wanted to charm with the universal allure of sugar, eventually earning myself the all too appropriate nomer, "Cupcake."

I can't remember how many times I tried, or really, if I'm honest, if I tried at all, but at some point, I decided that, despite my love of baking, making pastry dough specifically was out of the question. It was not something I'm good at.

And so it remained. Every time in the last 12 years I have served a homemade pie or tart, it has been with store bought dough-- an affront, really, to the pride I take in making sweets from scratch, like my mama, but, after all, dough was, I said, just not something I'm good at. And to be clear, I have made a shitload of pies.

Two weeks ago, just that many days before my 35th birthday, I was preparing to make a savory tart for dinner, store bought crust in hand, when it suddenly occurred to me that a lot had changed in 12 years-- I had moved states, learned to cook not just passably but pretty darn well, developed a consistent work out routine and generally become a much healthier person, developed an emotionally stable, fulfilling relationship, had a baby, was about the have another baby, and overall more or less gotten my shit together-- so maybe I should just try making the dough.

So I did.

And it was the most goddamn flaky, shortbready, buttery perfection of dough a person could ever imagine.

I was shocked and not shocked and mostly aghast that I'd spent 12 years not making dough because of some story I told myself at one moment in time and then held onto like it was the last puff of air in a life raft keeping me afloat in what now turns out to have been an empty baby pool. For the love of god, why? Why did I waste so long cherishing an idea about myself that turned out to be totally untrue?

I do it often. I live through a symphony of voices in my head that tell me so constantly who I am and what I cannot and the truth of the matter is, I really don't believe a lot of them.

So today is my 35th birthday. And on the cusp of it, I felt it suddenly imperative to perform some sort of ritual for the occasion. I had a flash of an impulse to reach out to a person I am friends with on social media, with whom I actually have almost no real life relationship with, and yet, that's what the impulse told me so I followed it. And she kindly entertained my weird request and said the actual most perfect thing.

She suggested: "Light the candle for yourself and your life all the way up until this moment, all the yous at every past birthday and now. The intention of the practice (any practice you choose) is an honoring of your past and present self. When closing blow out the candle with intention to let go of anything you no longer need at this time of rebirth" along with some extra info about how to meditate looking at the candle.

And so I did. I lit my $3.99 Trader Joe's candle, sat cross legged on my yoga mat, and started at a flame while I told myself:

I honor Beth, who was a happy, easy baby, who, according to my mama, just slept and ate for two full years. I honor Beth, who turned two only to "start talking and never stop," Beth, who changed her clothes so many times a day that mom stopped washing them, who knew just what she wanted. I honor Beth, who went to school, loved school, and made best friends with a girl named Lauren, always swinging her hand vigorously during assembly to comfort her when she was sad because she missed her parents. I honor Beth, who loved playing the rice table, who dressed up as a bee on Halloween, who pretended to sleep at naptime so she could be first to choose a sticker to put on her lunchbox. I honor Beth, who was desperate to have homework like her sister, who begged for a neon three ring binder just to pretend she was doing work, who cried when school was out.

I honor Beth, who started to feel anxious sometime far too young, who feared desperately, constantly her parents dying, who grappled with something she could only name "the empty feeling." I honor Beth, who was so young and uncomfortable and smart. I honor Beth, whose whole world was so small and she didn't even know it.

I honor Beth, who went to highschool and fell apart, who longed to be part of something, to be something she was not. I honor Beth, who demonstratively cut her wrists, threw up her food, discovered how to write the saddest words, listened to angry music, and felt lost beyond all reason. I honor Beth, who sang and danced in sparkly sack dresses as her only respite from whatever imagined misery she suffered. I honor Beth, who was constantly wanting to be loved, to be wanted, Beth, who could not yet possibly understand what that meant. I honor Beth, who got a trashy tramp stamp, who had horrific acne, whose body she sought both to destroy and make sense of at the same time. I honor Beth, who always did well in school, even when shit was hitting the fan.

I honor Beth, who made a bold choice and moved to Berkeley. I honor Beth, who dyed her hair, wore gummy bracelets and combat boots, who smoked clove cigarettes and ate donut holes at 2 am. I honor Beth, who drank and compromised herself. I honor Beth, who was lost. I honor Beth, who loved a boy who loved her back. I honor Beth, who loved a boy who loved her back, who died. I honor Beth, who graduated in 3 years, kept a full time job, learned to love writing, expanded her world view just ever so slightly. I honor Beth, who met her best ever friend in college.

I honor Beth, who got a shitty English degree and immediately became a waitress in San Francisco. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love. I honor Beth, who was desperate for that boy's love and that boy's love and that boy's love and that boy's love. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love, who accepted far too little, who valued herself not at all. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love. I honor Beth for every restaurant job and bartending gig and alcoholic drink and shitty choice and lost moment of her entire life. I honor Beth, who learned to love to dance without inhibition. I honor Beth, who formed loving, crystalline, healthy relationships despite all her bullshit. I honor Beth, who found her solace in writing. I honor Beth, who secret smoked cigarettes for a thousand years. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love.

I honor Beth, who one day went to yoga. I honor Beth, who tried. I honor Beth, who had trouble being still. I honor Beth, who earned a degree, during stolen hours, that licensed her to run a preschool. I honor Beth, who found something pure and clear in being with children that didn't exist in the rest of her life. I honor Beth, who always worked hard.

I honor Beth, who one day married her best friends in their backyard and then went home the next day to, hungover, talk to a boy named Nic. I honor Beth, who recklessly and immediately decided she loved him. I honor Beth, who was desperate for love, but who also knew when something felt different. I honor Beth, who invited someone relatively unknown into her life, thinking she could be open, but she still fucked it up. I honor Beth, who kept fucking it up but forged ahead anyway. I honor Beth, who left her whole life to move to Kentucky for the boy, who didn't quite love her yet.

I honor Beth, who fucked it up, who didn't understand yet. I honor Beth, who stuck with it, talked it out, conceded in very small increments to growth. I honor Beth who worked in the most soul sucking childcare facility imaginable, who tried to make it better until she realized she couldn't. I honor Beth, who moved on, who grew with each job she had, who escaped the endless allure of the restaurant industry. I honor Beth, who learned to live an everyday life, to feel instead of drinking, to slow down. I honor Beth, who began to do yoga regularly. I honor Beth, who found vulnerability scary. I honor Beth, who became too committed to health, who let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. I honor Beth, who finally became a little less desperate, who felt secure not because of some repeated reassurance or promise from her relationship, but because it was, simply, healthy.

I honor Beth, who decided to have a baby. I honor Beth, who decided to have a baby out of wedlock. I honor Beth, who struggled with childbirth and postpartum. I honor Beth, who named her daughter after her sister. I honor Beth, who feels at once the best mama to her baby girl and also a constant failure. I honor Beth, who is bored at home and also who would have it no other way. I honor Beth, who dreams of a terrifying future where she is connected and powerful and useful in ways she cannot yet imagine. I honor Beth, who is about to have her second daughter, who lives in fear but also certainty. I honor Beth, who is 35 today. I honor all the joy, disappointment, frustration, hope, excitement, fear, and confusion she feels.

I honor Beth.

I honor Beth, who spent 12 years not making pie dough because she thought she couldn't. I honor Beth, who, one day, decided to try again anyway.

I tried not to feel sad about how much of my life I've spent selling myself short, living in desperation, ravaging my body, entirely fucking shit up. I feel like way way too much of the misery I’ve carried through my life is just from stories I tell myself about myself. It’s a trickle down. It’s years of so desperately grasping onto that life raft that I’m afraid what will happen if I let go, even though it’s pretty darn clear now that we’re on dry land.

But I was meant to honor those moments, that person. I had to tell myself again and again.

I honor all those moments, because not in spite of them, but because of them, I am at this exact moment in time today, and I would have it no other way. I would have it no other way than to be alone, in bed, exhausted at the end of my, in some ways, pretty great, in some ways, pretty lame birthday.

I blew out the candle.

I release anything keeping me from making the dough; I no longer need you, and yet I honor your place in bringing me exactly here. Thank you.

I am 35.

on birthing melby.

For weeks I've been fixating on who will care for Melby, when I give birth. In the 20 months of her life, I've never spent a night away from her.

I don't wear that as a badge of honor.

I don't think the moms, who went on work trips 3 months postpartum or who enjoyed a weekend long bachelorette party at some other early juncture are lesser somehow. It just simply happened that we arrived at this point, that by circumstance, really, rather than choice, Melby and I have never truly been away from each other.

Like prolonged virginity, it seems magnified in importance somehow at this point-- like I missed the initial window to check that box and now the box is luminous with some sort of rare importance. Leaving my daughter for the first time for an extended period of time and then arriving home with a whole other person just seems so much. So last week, I cried at the dinner table and made an emotional scene when Nic didn't have an immediate answer for me about what on earth we would do.

I mourned, yet again, being so far away from my family. I could, in an instant, call my mother at any hour of the day and know that she would come be with Melby, love and care for her better than I have likely ever done a day in my life, and I would have not a single worry... were she not living 2185 miles from my doorstep. There are, of course, many people we can ask, but they're all people with jobs and kids and responsibilities of their own that don't really lend themselves to being on call day and night for basically an entire month.

And last time we were in the hospital for FOUR almost full days. That's a long time for everyone.

In my panicking, I realized, what I am really worried about is both so many looming unknowns, which include the reality than an actual person is going to exit my body in the next two months-ish and remain in my life forever. That all feels terribly overwhelming so focusing my fear into this one small element of the whole equation makes it feel almost manageable, like if I could fix that problem then birth and postpartum and two babies and everything else will definitely be fine. Definitely.

And in the microcosm of that worry is a sincere terror about giving birth again. I only realized this fully when I read a line tonight about one woman's quest to help other women "integrate the birthing experience."

Reading those words, I acknowledged immediately that I did not integrate mine at all. I feel like Nic and I were shell-shocked for weeks, maybe months, and then we just set it aside, resigned to our experience, but readily, still, shuddering at its mention.

In retrospect, I feel angry about the whole experience. I birthed with a very reputable, highly-regarded practice in a lovely facility. And almost every part of it felt awful to me.

Whether or not it actually was, I realized recently, doesn't matter. Because it felt that way, and so it was. It was a kind of trauma, because it felt like trauma.

Early on in the week I delivered, my ankles were swollen for the first time. My due date was still two weeks away, but it felt significant somehow, as if my body were announcing its settling in, its preparation. A change was coming. That Friday evening, I woke up early on in the night to just a pop of moisture in my underwear. I knew I hadn't peed myself, but it also seemed so distinctly not the experience of water breaking that I had heard and read about in every context. I called my midwife and she, semi-irritated, I assume, from the late night call, assured me that if my water had broken, I would know.

I half-slept that night, flushed with excitement, worry, anticipation. I kept waiting to know. Surely soon I would know.

By the next morning, nothing had happened. We continued with life as usual, which looked much like, replacing a tire on the car, Nic, shirtless, trying on vests at Target, and attending a 2nd birthday party for our tiny friend, Aurora. I cradled Aurora's stuffed flamingo throughout most of the party, trying to envision myself holding an actual baby, my baby. Her parents, both acupuncturists and close friends, assured me my real baby was coming soon. Nic cancelled his trip. And we waited.

That night, the same thing happened again as the night before. Some unfamiliar release of liquid, except this time, multiple times. But still no deluge. It's so hard to shake that image of the woman in a mall, a sudden splat of water on her fancy shoes, before the next frame of her being rushed to the hospital. I felt sure that, even though I'd never experienced birth before, I should know. Even the midwife seemingly suggested that I would know.

I didn't know. I just didn't. I feel like so much of how both birth and motherhood are talked about leads you to believe you’re just supposed to know what’s going on. Like somehow you are failing at the whole thing if you don’t have an immediate connection to and understanding of your experience. I’m here to say: Fuck that.

I called the midwife again. She told me to check in in the morning. And I spent a sleepless night, again, waiting.

My sweet doula, Erica, came over after my frantic early morning text about being unsure if I was in labor. We got bagels. Took a walk. Surely I could shake this baby out. By 10 am, the midwife insisted I come in to check.

Erica and I went to the hospital for them to test whether it was actually amniotic fluid, in which case I'd be admitted. Nic stayed home and mowed the lawn-- a gesture, I realize now, that is both his preferred method of distraction but also a great intimation of love. He arrived at the hospital just shortly enough after us, dressed is khakis and a button down, to receive the information that, yes, it was amniotic fluid. Our baby was coming.

The first hours were wonderful, bordering on hilarious. I wasn't experiencing any contractions yet, except lazy, erratic ones I didn't feel. We only knew they were happening because both the baby and I were being monitored since, technically, my water had broken almost 36 hours prior. Karen came and gave me acupuncture. We did silly walks in the hallway, trying to encourage my uterus to begin contractions. We watched TV, ate popsicles, joked.

At some hour I don't quite remember, the midwife came in to ask me what I wanted to do. In most other hospitals, at this point, I would have had a C-section, because a broken amniotic sac that preemptive to the actual delivery puts both baby and mama at risk for infection and other issues. But we were being monitored consistently and everyone looked fine, so they allowed us to wait.

I wanted so badly to give birth with no interventions. In retrospect, I don't know exactly what the drive is: some knowledge that birth is truly not a medical condition, but a natural process, or just some desire for the ability to say, I gave birth with no interventions. Pride.

I asked for the midwife's opinion. I remember her leaning against the wall at the foot of the bed. She said something like, "I'm not good at deciding what to do; I'm good at catching babies." I don't know if I decided then, or way, way earlier that I did not love her, but at this point, I definitely knew. Or at least in retrospect, I can admit that I knew. While it wasn't necessarily her job to make decisions for me, her attitude was thick with apathy. I felt like a genuine bother to her.

We decided, as a mom/ dad/ doula/ acupuncturist team that I should try a breast pump and a cervical balloon to encourage contractions. The breast pump did actually nothing. The cervical balloon was a different story. A balloon is inserted onto either side of your cervix and then inflated. It puts pressure on the cervix, encouraging it to soften. Best case scenario, they said, within 12 hours it helps you dilate naturally. Often, it does nothing.

The midwife came in to put it in, maybe somewhere around 6 pm, and, I kid you not, fisted me. I can't imagine a scenario in which inserting a BALLOON into your cervix is pleasant, but she was incredibly physically rough, so much so that I immediately cried, spontaneous fear and pain tears. All I kept thinking was, if I couldn't handle this, I surely couldn't handle delivering a baby. The mood in the room changed tangibly. We all became quiet.

After inserting it, she realized she had done it wrong, so removed it and then did it again.

If I could go back in time, at this point, I might decide not to have a baby altogether. I was mortified and in pain. I asked for some time alone, and within 45 minutes, I had gotten up to pee and the balloon fell out. I was initially horrified, thinking we'd have to reinsert it, but after a cervical check, to everyone's surprise, I'd dilated to 6 cm. Evidently I had scar tissue on my cervix that had kept me from dilating, which was then broken up manually by hand.

That is as fun as it sounds. But surely now we were rolling.

In fact, we were not.

The time after this was just more waiting. By 2 am, still nothing had really happened. And it dawned on me that, if we were to continue to wait, another night would pass, amounting to basically 3 now, in which I hadn't really slept.

I have never been good at not sleeping. Even in my wildest party days, I always went to bed eventually. I didn't wait to watch the sun come up. I always cherished my rest.

Several of the nurses suggested what they called "a whiff of Pitocin." Just enough to kickstart things. I called Kim, finally, my other doula, who had been waiting in the sidelines, because, really, not much was happening. She reassured me that this was okay and set out on her way to the hospital herself.

I got the Pitocin. I insisted everyone sleep. And, in fact, they did, while Kim sat with me through the beginning of my contractions. It wasn't awful. I think it some ways, the pain felt like the greatest relief. My body was finally going through the motions to birth our baby girl.

By morning, the Pitocin was not a whiff, but fully flowing. And in this span of time, it all becomes grey. I remember, only, feeling totally out of my mind.

My plan had been to labor in the tub as much as possible, but because my water had broken more than 24 hours prior, I was only allowed to use the showerhead, not to soak, because of the risk of infection. I just remember moving and not moving. Wanting to be touched and wanting not to be touched. I would get under the water and then not be able to stand the water and get out. I would lay down but not be able to stand laying down and get up. I would get up and need to lay down. Everything felt searing, like even having skin was impossibly uncomfortable. I was connected to an IV, because I was GBS positive, plus the Pitocin, so every time I moved, I rolled along with my needy sidekick.

The one part of our birthing class I'd really taken with me was this promise that even though contractions are extremely intense, there is a break between them. Even if it's a short break, it's a moment in which your body is actually experiencing no pain. Plenty of women psyche themselves out in anticipation in those moments, but the reality is that there is no physical sensation happening. I clung to that promise. To the break.

But the break never happened. Melby's head was pushing on my back. Later we learned, she was just ever so slightly at the wrong angle, her head tilted into my spine, which made it both difficult to push out her head, but also to experience contractions themselves.

They came in to check me, and after literal hours and hours of what felt like my body was being destroyed from the inside out, I had dilated only one more centimeter. I have never felt more defeated in my entire life.

And so, I screamed for drugs. Nic tried to talk calmly to me. We took a moment alone together in the room. He tried to help ground me, to bring me back from whatever place I was reeling.

But I was too far gone. I would have had a voluntary C-section at that moment. I would have taken any drug. I did not care. I just needed the baby out of me so I could stop feeling the way I felt.

We agreed that nitrous was a good place to start. And, I think, this was the only thing that got me through. I still felt all the pain, I just felt suddenly more able to handle it. Lying down was awkward, holding that mask over my mouth was awkward, but I felt like I would make it through alive.

I kept asking when I would push, and, they'd say, again and again, you'll know.

Unlike my water breaking, this time, I did know. In 2 subsequent hours, my body had relaxed enough to be ready to birth a baby. In retrospect, I think things didn't progress because I was just so incredibly tense. I was pumping adrenaline, petrified, excited, anxious beyond all anxiety, just ready to do the damn thing people spend so much time working up. There was no way my body was going to relax enough to have a baby in those conditions. But the nitrous helped magnificently and, suddenly, I knew.

The midwife came. So many people came. And I pushed like a motherfucker. I pushed and I screamed bloody murder screams, not necessarily even because it felt so awful, but because I finally got to do something after all those hours of waiting and suffering. And one hour later, Melby was born.

The truth is, I don't remember feeling anything. I didn't look at her with wonder, I didn't feel amazed. I was just so fucking glad to be done. I only distinctly remember the feeling of relief in my ribs, my guts, my whole body, to no longer have a baby inside me. They laid her on my chest. We had a baby.

The part that came next is maybe what I am most angry about, the part after it felt like it was all finally over, but it was not.

Instead of allowing my placenta to come out entirely on its own, the midwife basically pulled it out. And then didn't get it out in its entirety, so after 10 hours of physical torture, she exacerbated it by having to fish around inside my body to make sure she got the last bits of shredded placenta. Just thinking about it, I am furious. My birth felt like an inconvenience to her-- something unworthy of her energy or attention, something that just needed to get done.

All I say, again and again, is that, while she maybe birthed hundred and hundreds of babies, this was my first one. And I will not forgive her for creating the feeling that it was just another taxing day on the job for her.

I bled and bled. I layed with Melby on my chest a long time. I was in a haze.

I think that haze lasted the better part of 6 months. During my brother's wedding weekend, 6 weeks postpartum, I was in Anthropologie, finally surrounded by my family, and I sobbed audibly by the sweaters. I have never felt so tremendously lost, depleted, and blankly sad in my entire life. I can't say how much of it was physical, or how much of it was the total loss of identity I experienced, or how much of it was not quite having the time or resources to recover from that whole experience, but it was intensely real.

I went to my 6 week check up, where they always have women fill out a form to assess whether they're experiencing postpartum depression. Mine, I guess, clearly indicated that I did. The midwife said "You definitely have something going on." And that was that. No suggestions, no directives to seek help or offering of resources.

I have never felt less cared for in my life. I only realize it now.

Maybe I brought it on myself. Maybe I should have known earlier it wasn't right. Maybe I should have been stauncher in asserting my needs. But I didn't know until I knew and now I know I'm mad.

I'm mostly mad because I'm about to experience birth again. And all I feel is fear. And residual trauma.

We are seeing a different midwife this time. I have been explicit with her about what I want, what I did not love from my last experience.

But how do I feel anything but scared? I feel afraid my body can't handle it. I feel afraid it will be awful again. I feel most petrified of afterwards, the recoiling, of how I felt so hollowed out and lonely in such a nameless way. I feel like I was robbed of something by not having a different kind of experience the first time. Not that the timeline should have looked any different somewhere else, but maybe the attitude surrounding it would have.

All that being said, I am so so so grateful for Nic and Erica and Kim. They were the only part of it that kept me afloat. I know that is a lot of afloat, mind you. I just needed more. I needed the person who had agreed to help bring my first daughter into the world to give two shits about us. And she did.

So I'm angry. And I'm scared. And I'm crying about babysitters for Melby, largely because I need someone to babysit me. Because I don't know where else to put this petrified energy. Because nothing makes me feel like I need a mom more than becoming a mom all over again.

It is a huge experience. One I know many women love and fall naturally into. I did not. My immediate postpartum experience mirrored my birth experience in many ways. I was unprepared, despite being so prepared. I felt alone. I didn’t integrate my experiences, I merely soldiered through them.

I want to bring this baby into the world with joy and power and resilience. But this is my admission that, at this point, I really don't know how.

on the book?

For years, maybe my whole lifetime, I have said I would write a book. Also, I would say, I don't know how.

I don't know how to begin. I don't know how to write without prompting. I don't know how to get something published. I don't even know who or how to ask about beginning or prompting or getting something published.

This morning, I found out how.

I read the line, "You have to decide what you have to say." It was in an advice column-- a response to a struggling writer from a writer who had herself struggled, as, it turns out, we all do.

The line seemed to quiver on the page. They were the words and nothing else were the words.

This is the advice I have been looking for for my entire life. Not the right person to ask about agents or publishing. Not the right writing course or person to motivate me or author to read for inspiration, but just the simple advice, admonishment almost, that I am the only one who knows what it is that feels so burning inside me that I feel like I need to say it.

It seems simple and yet I've been running from that for years, for also maybe my whole lifetime.

I read a book a few years ago, at, I think, the strong suggestion of many women I didn't really know but thought I'd like to be on social media, called Women Who Run With the Wolves. Surely it talked about many things, but what I took away from it is that women, like wolves, are inherently deeply instinctual creatures-- connected by nature, by being part of what creates and perpetuates nature itself to the pulse of everything around them. That we know. We always know. And yet that knowing has been shamed and educated and misdirected out of us into some very false idea of what a woman should be.

I knew, then, reading it, that this was true for me. I knew I knew things but had forgotten how to know them. I knew when someone asked what I wanted or felt or thought that I did know what I wanted or felt or thought, but the ability to access it, or acknowledge it, or say it without fear of condemnation or judgment or even just not total overwhelming joy and acceptance had rendered me frozen in time, unable, or unwilling to just be.

For years, maybe my whole lifetime, I have practiced not knowing.

This morning, I knew.

I read the line that said, "You have to decide what you have to say." And I knew it, without hesitation. So much so that I cried as I clamored for my clothes, trying to quiet the sounds of my footsteps and tears as I descended the stairs, hoping to get these words out before my daughter wakes up. I had resolved to let it be the story, to let it out of me, at last.

The story is hard for me to tell, maybe mostly because it is not my story to tell. Because I fear cheapening it. Because I feel like once I say it, I am giving something up or away. Something about it, I want to keep close. But in the end, I realize all stories I'm telling are this story anyway.

I realized it when, the other day, I tried to tell another story that was also just this story.

The story was about one morning, when I woke up to the sound of rain pecking, nipping at our bedroom windows, as if it were pleading for breakfast, and I immediately flashed back to a memory that is actually not my own. In my memory that is not a memory, I am standing by the lockers, watching two high schoolers talk. It is morning there, too.

The boy is slender with a trim haircut, bright-eyed, confident. He is wearing a shirt and tie, which is not a uniform, but a choice. The girl wears stockings, a skirt and blouse. Her hair is puffed delicately around her face, as if to appear bigger than it is. She looks inherently kind, inviting in her softness.

They greet each other, familiarly, as if many mornings have passed in this same fashion. But today, he has something more to say.

Without ceremony or warning, he announces, "It rained this weekend, and I thought of you."

I, bystander, can see the blood rush from the girl's toes, her fingers, every canal of her heart, directly into her cheeks. Her heart, even devoid of blood, is visibly hammering in her chest. I can see her effort to stay poised, the impossibility of it.

What she does exactly, what she says, in real life, at this point I don't know, because I've only been told the story, which affords me the inner monologue of both parties. And at this point, the story is always told from the perspective of the clattering heart.

But in my imagination, she says something kind, receptive that attempts not to betray how much she feels in that moment.

When she tells this story, somehow we are always in the kitchen, and I can see her not just describe, but actually feel those feelings all over again. It is not just a story; it's a reliving, which must be precisely why it feels so real to me, as if so much a part of my own memory. I have witnessed it in action, on many occasion.

Every time this moment becomes reality again, she patters her hand girlishly at her heart, as if still flustered, her feet arching up onto her toes in some combination of surprise and excitement. His statement, she says, seemed to betray an affection between them that went beyond the assumed daily school interactions.

She loved the rain. He knew. This particular weekend, it had rained, and he had thought of her. When she wasn't there! Such a truly romantic gesture. A quiet admission of devotion.

Fifty-six, maybe -seven years later, my parents are still together, nearly 52 of which they've been married. They are the epitome of that story's very love and devotion.

I think of this story often when it rains.

I think of all they've lived and how hopeful, joyful they've remained. I think of the stories I'll pass down to my daughter, if she'll tell them, if she'll feel like she's lived them, too.

Before she was born, I sat on a therapist's couch for the first time in too long. I needed to be there and suddenly I felt frantically in need of therapy. I was soon-to-be pregnant with my first child-- surely, I knew, somehow-- and I needed to fix myself before I had a baby. She opened by asking if I'd experienced any trauma in my life.

Trauma was a framework within which she contextualized so much of what people were contending with. The way we move our bodies or speak or love or seek comfort-- so much of it is not just inherent, but its a reaction rather. A reaction to injury, a learned behavior, a desperation to fill some space that was gaping as a child, a reckoning.

We walk around our pain, even if the pain is long since gone. It becomes who we are.

I could not think of anything. I talked a long time about my anxiety and my striving for some perfection I both know doesn't exist and don't even actually want. And then, moments before we were done, I realized what was sitting there, beside me, the story I wanted to tell that seemed too not mine or too cheapened or too easy or too given away to say:

Before I was born, my parents had two children who died in a car accident.

I could feel her stop. I could feel all the breath go out of the room. Mine was already gone. Maybe I had not even brought it, but now hers went, too. I have spent a lifetime, thinking about it, writing around it, trying to give it up as the story I want to tell, as the story that impacts me, because it's not mine. Because I am terrified, gut-wrenchingly afraid of hurting my parents more in the process. Because they were just babies in love at a sometimes rainy high school in Santa Maria and then, when they were practically still babies themselves, their babies died and how could I have the audacity to spend my entire life thinking about how that affected me?

But it is the story. It is what I have to say. It is what I think about and write about and, now that I have my own daughter— my own shining, genuine, joyful baby girl— what I live, not in fear, but total disbelief that anyone, ever, ever, ever, ever could survive.

On Thanksgiving Day, in 1977, my parents were in a car accident. A tire blew out on their car-- somehow I always imagine it to be the white Volvo station wagon, I, too, drove in as a child, even though, I know, clearly it was not-- on the mountain pass between Santa Maria and Santa Barbara, flipping the car and killing their firstborn children, Melby and Donald. They were 7 and 5 at the time.

I remember my mom, much later in life-- after a seeming eternity of the same sweet Melby and Donald stories, ones of refurbished Christmas tricycles and uncomfortable new pairs of little girl shoes-- telling me for the first time, about how Melby died on impact, while Donald was taken to the hospital along with my mom and dad. She says, stoically, quietly, how she remembers wishing, despite how obscene it felt for a mother to feel such a thing, that Donald would die, too, because Melby was his best friend, his idol, and she couldn't bear the thought of him living without her. They were a pair.

This story lives eternally in my chest as a tight knot of both love and grief, a pretzel of conflicting emotion, its own judgement of Solomon.

Forty years later, minus two months, after the accident, I gave birth to my daughter, my own Melby. I asked my parents across the kitchen table one August afternoon if it would be okay if my boyfriend and I named our hypothetical baby, Melby, if it were a girl. They said, yes; we all cried; and, into my hand, my dad pushed a stack of crisp two dollar bills he'd just gotten from the bank, exiting the room and saying, with both humor and an aching heart, "I can't take this shit."

Of course, it was a girl. Of course, she was Melby.

I can't say yet exactly why I wanted to name her Melby, except I always did. I don't know if it's honor or remembrance or rebirth or penance or grief. Maybe that is part of why I need to tell this story, to figure it out. But it was her name before she was even an almost. And it is her. Melby is Melby. Not that my Melby is an incarnation of past Melby. But my Melby could be named nothing else in the entire world.

Nic looks at her often, so full of admiration, of unconditional love, and declares that she is just Melby. No other name would do. And he is right.

Sometimes I think about if I had ended up with someone else, if they would have chosen the name too, accepted it. It's impossible to imagine all the variables at this point, but something about Nic and his certainty, too, from the get go, that it was the right name, assures me that he, too, is the right person. He understands. All the pieces are aligned.

There is much more to say. And truthfully, it feels terrifying to leave this sitting here. But for now, my own Melby, the now Melby, is chirping at me from her crib. First she will ask for shoes and then she will ask for breh-fest. I will kiss her cheeks; she will withdraw reluctantly until she has eaten for the day, and I will laugh, telling her I love her, sometimes smelling her neck and pretending she is stinky. "Pee-you!" she will say, familiar with our silly routine.

I have spent a long time acting unsure, but, with her, I know.

I know what I have to do. I know what I have to say. I know what story I have to tell. I always did.

The baby grand piano had two small picture frames nestled in its lip and an almost weary, toothy smile that stretched open into our living room-- its presence, in retrospect, somewhat grandiose for the modestly-sized room that otherwise only contained seating and a TV that, as a far as I was concerned, only ran TGIF.

I played piano for years, never well.

Our teacher, Mrs. Reisig, had one long, wiry hair that leapt either out of her chin or eyebrow-- which I can't remember-- but I do recall obsessively watching it and imagining ways in which I could create an element of surprise and extract it from her face without her noticing. My sister and I were incredulous about that hair; at what age did you stop noticing parts of your face?

I remember thinking she was very, very old, a perspective developed out of having actually no perspective or life experience at all, at maybe just 10 years old,  but I'm sure I'd be horrified to learn now that she was likely in her late 30s or something, an age in dangerous proximity to my own, which reminds me I should start to check for rogue hairs on my face.

She only charged $6 for a lesson. The price, even in the mid 90s, was outrageously low; she did it, I remember my mom saying, because she loved it. What there was to love about a stubby-fingered child stabbing out Für Elise without an iota finesse, I cannot imagine, except to joyfully recognize that there is a place and skill and passion for each person and I am simply glad I do not have to inhabit them all.

At home, I would practice diligently, as I did all things. I did them so they were done, so I could check the box, but I feel quite sure I never loved it, and, if anyone was truly listening, they heard that in the music, because music does not lie about love. But it seemed the right thing to do, maybe simply because it's what I was doing.

My mom, I think, loved the piano, even though she was maybe no better at it than me. She had a series of songs she knew by heart, which she'd play regularly, usually one in immediate succession to the other as if they were one long song. I sometimes think of that now when I put my daughter to bed at night, singing her a collection of lullabies, one right after the next. Just as the spaces between words are only imagined, perceived by the listener dependent on their understanding of the language, the transition between songs is only perceptible if one knows the songs as individuals. An 18 month old surely does not; she must think I drone on in one endless song each night-- a medley of quiet hymns that will end up embedded as a musical lump in the deepest parts of her brain. I hope the hidden memory is a good one.

I could not summon a single song my mother played now, but if I heard them, my body would know in the way that sounds, like smells, can send you whirling back to an exact moment in a long forgotten time. The moment, most often, was one particularly quick, almost frantic song-- or at least that was how she played it-- that incited me and my brother and sister to run in circles around the ottoman in that front room, chasing each other gleefully.

Some years later, the grand piano transformed into an upright. With so many bodies in one house, we needed the space, but the pictures on the piano stayed. They were two small frames, not more than 2 inches tall each, made of brushed gold with felt-covered backing, a vestige of a time when things were made to last instead of thinly masquerading as the item they purported to be before they joined the piles of trash that are so much of the rest of our lives. The pictures were of a boy and a girl, and I remember thinking, specifically, for maybe too long, that the girl was a woman. I now know she was only 7, but something about her seemed composed, graceful in a way that I was certainly not, and likely never will be. She had a perfectly-formed brown bowl cut and wore a navy blue dress with a sharply-pressed white collar. She smiled, but demurely, her lips closed. All the physical traits are actually irrelevant, though they paint a picture. What matters is that her eyes looked self-possessed. They looked present, in the way surely only a woman could be.

I don't remember when I learned she was my sister. It seems like I always knew, and yet I didn't. It was never a secret-- there was never some big reveal of information-- and, yet it was also not something we sat down and talked about explicitly. So for however long, until I put the pieces together, she was a woman sitting on the ledge of this piano and that piano, which I played regularly, but not very well. And in that way, she was a part of my everyday without even really noticing, a fixture, an undercurrent, in my daily experience, just as she is now, every time I say my daughter’s name.

does this happen to anyone else?