Recently, I ran out out of my Zoloft prescription. In my scramble to get it refilled, I found myself contemplating my digital storage crisis.

My Google Drive has been at 94% storage for the past three months. There is a little red bar at the top of my email account, warning me that soon I won’t be able to receive any emails at all.

I think it might be nice to no longer receive thirty to forty spam messages a day, but email is still the preferred communication method of the publishing industry, so I can’t give up on it altogether.

My iCloud has not had any space for at least five years. I don’t know where my iCloud is, or how to access it, or if it has anything important on it.

I don’t even know what an iCloud is. The “cloud” part of the name feels deceptive—how can something as ethereal and light as a cloud be full? And if it is full, doesn’t that mean my data is about to pour down on me, a storm of photos and text messages bursting from my iCumulonimbus? Will my phone explode? Maybe exploding phones would solve the phone addiction crisis.

(Maybe, the obliteration of my phone would cure my anxiety and depression.)

My phone often refuses to open certain apps because it says I’ve run out of storage. It prompts me to delete large files, such as the 572 videos of my children I’ve sent to my mom this year, videos that are also stored on my phone and in Google Photos.

Instead, I delete an app I downloaded one time to get a discounted smoothie. The discount didn’t work, so the app has been living on my phone rent free for a year.

I know I need to delete more. I need to comb through the thousands of photos and videos and move them to a different storage system, not a (soft) Cloud but a (hard) Drive, something that can hold all the bytes.

If my husband had a dollar for every time he’s explained the various bytes to me, he would need more bytes to store his digital dollars, because I don’t carry around that kind of cash.

He will read this and tell me that is not how bytes or dollars work. But I’ve also seen his personal email inbox. There are over a thousand unread emails on it. You do not get to claim superior digital hygiene, Babe.

Every time I go to delete the photos of my children taking up my space, I get a little sad. It feels like deleting part of their childhood. I think about the two or three home videos my parents had, how magical it was to see myself and my brothers on a grainy VHS tape doing normal things like splashing in puddles and falling asleep at the dinner table.

Then I think I’ve fallen into a postmodern trap—this outrageous urge to record record record, share share share. As if living in the moment isn’t enough. I think that maybe taking so many photos and videos is just a faulty attempt to be present, to hold on to these fleeting moments when it is the fleeting nature of life that makes it so precious. Putting my phone down is probably a better way to remember my kids than holding a screen to their face.

Then I think I’m being melodramatic. It’s really okay to take photos of my kids—what else will I look at after they are in bed? I’ve never regretted a photo of their smiling faces.

(This oscillation between self-doubt and self-judgement may also have something to do with my anxiety.)

There is no moral element to running out of digital storage. I know this. But sometimes I feel like one of those people on those documentaries about hoarders, just lying in the clutter of my megabytes and kilobytes, just wallowing in my unfinished Google docs and large attachments.

Sometimes, I feel like my phone and my laptop are just junk drawers, the error messages like potato-mashers that jam the drawers and remind me I should really clean them out by now.

I’m overly attached to some of my attachments—to the seven drafts of my novel that may one day help me prove I didn’t use any AI to write it, to the videos of my sons Joseph and I obsessively watch before bed.

But the real reason my storage is constantly running out is my lack of motivation. Clearing up space is just so boring. More than boring, it feels existentially useless.

Why sort through years and years of data, plopping it into the data trash bin, emptying the trash bin (Yes, I want to delete my data trash!), only to have to do it all over again next year, when my data storage inevitably runs out once more?

I have bought extra storage, but like buying a bigger house, the solution is only temporary. There is always more stuff with which to fill the space.

I think about my ancestors, who may have battled scarlet fever and struggled to grow their own food and washed all their clothes in a running river and yet never faced the overwhelming ennui of cleaning up data storage.

I grew up in the country. I know what it’s like to clean a stall reeking of horse manure. And yet I would rather muck a stall than sit at my desk highlighting little check boxes to send into digital oblivion.

I don’t think I was meant to clean up digital storage. Humans did not evolve to drag and drop documents into an avatar of a trashcan, no matter how satisfying the little trash audio is.

We did not evolve to stare at screens all day, and yet here I am, writing on a screen, sending more data to your email inbox to clog your storage.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this tirade against my shrinking data storage is really just a metaphor for the ways in which modern existence and motherhood have filled up all my brain space. My mental storage is at capacity.

When I read “your storage is running low,” all I can think is that our clean underwear, fresh fruit, shoes that fit properly, toilet paper, and laundry detergent are all also running low.

Which brings me back to the Zoloft prescription.

The doctor who had prescribed it for years had stopped practicing, and by the time I realized my current doctor wouldn’t fill it, I was already going through withdrawal symptoms. Nothing severe, just dizziness that felt like my brain was getting zapped with electricity every time I turned my head too quickly. I called them brain glitches, because my brain felt like a phone or laptop glitching out when it runs low on battery or storage.

I’ve been using this medication, off and on, for nearly eight years to keep my sanity from running out. And now I’ve stopped. No longer in crisis or newly postpartum, I was thinking of getting off the medication anyways.

But I’m worried that my sanity might indeed run out, especially when the tears keep arriving with alarming speed over trivial things—like a Taylor Swift song or a Paw Patrol movie.

I am afraid that I will not be able to contain my own feelings. Will the depression and anxiety return like blinking notifications, warning me that I am running out of space?

This capacity to feel—or rather, to hold inside me the multiplicity of feelings that a day to day existence demands—is always on the edge of running out.

Is it possible for a mind and a body (like an iCloud or a Drive) to simply refuse to accept any more input?

In an effort to forestall these questions about my own sanity and mortality, I guess I’ll try to clean up my digital storage.

After all, there’s nothing like deleting old videos to keep at bay thoughts of decay and the voracious passage of time.

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PS. What aspect of modern existence do you find exhausting even as it purports to make your life easier? Tell me in the comments and we can laugh-cry together. I truly believe laugh-crying is the best medicine.

My sons are learning how to draw castles at school.

My eight-year-old shows me how he does it—battlements and stonework and a moat boasting a hungry alligator. I compliment him on the whorls in the bark of a tree.

On the flip side of the paper, my sweet oldest child draws the dungeon. There is a man behind bars with a ball and chain around his ankle.

And then this child, the one who used to cry when his dad sneezed a little too loudly, draws a series of executions. One person is being fed to the alligator. Another is decapitated.

“Oh,” I say, keeping my voice neutral. “That’s kind of scary.”

“It’s the king’s laws,” he tells me. “I’m just drawing it.”

I stare at the exed-out eyes of the decapitated prisoner. I remember how I myself used to imagine grim stories of death and gore when I was his age. How I, in fact, still imagine such stories.

And yet I must suppress my anxiety. Or, perhaps, my nostalgia. My Christopher Robin of a son enjoys drawing displays of violent death?

I ask him where he has learned of such deaths, pointing to the beheaded man.

“Oh, I read it in a saint book,” he says.

I am relieved. Surely, these drawings are just his attempt to process the death of John the Baptist.

But then he tells me that, lately, he likes to pretend to be the bad guy. He shows me how the shape of his raised pointer finger and thumb is like that of a gun, a revelation I’ve long known was coming, and yet I still rue its arrival.

When I ask Joseph if we should be concerned about these death drawings and bad guy leanings, he assures me that it is just normal boy stuff.

I am never entirely sure what “normal boy stuff” involves.

When my six-year-old attacks a pile of ants, kicking the mound across a church patio, I think that is pretty normal boy stuff. But when he says with glee, “They worked so hard on it!” thereby declaring his own triumph, I’m a little concerned.

When his two-year-old brother immediately imitates him, kicking the remaining granules of dirt, I am more concerned with brushing ants out of toddler shoes than with giving the six-year-old a lecture on animal cruelty.

The same six-year-old is highly sensitive to any form of criticism. When Joseph takes a serious tone, my middle child explodes with rage, quickly followed by tears, screaming, “You do not have to talk to me in that serious voice!”

I think he is lucky to have a father who almost never raises his voice, who is willing to apologize for hurting such big and sensitive feelings.

I’ve read somewhere that boys are actually more sensitive than girls. Or maybe it was that boys and girls are the same amount of sensitive but we tend to downplay boys’ emotions while catering to girls.’

Having only sons, I have no real way to gauge this theory. From observations of friends with daughters, it would seem that sensitivity is a highly subjective term, based as much in gender as it is in personality, age, family dynamic, sugar consumption, phases of the moon, etc. etc.

I have been told that boys are actually easier to raise than girls. Girls are more emotional teenagers. I am always skeptical of this assessment, because I’m worried it just means the emotions of teenage boys are getting overlooked.1

I do agree with the assessment that boys are (on average) more physical than girls. Not more athletic, not less verbal, not less emotive. Just more physical.

The broken springs in my sitting chairs, the constant reminders that couches are for sitting and not climbing, the frequent wrestling matches that devolve into slapping matches, the giant trenches carved into the backyard—the “girl” moms I know do not seem to deal with these to the same degree. Even my own mother, who had two sons, is often surprised by the volume and activity of my house. I was the middle child, and I do believe my female-ness leant my brothers a level of…separation(?) that just doesn’t exist in my house.

I’m not worried about violence in my sons. Not really. I know they are normal children testing the limits of their bodies and the world and their parents’ sanity.

More than anything, I am sad for the way their childish acts are often tainted, in my mind, by the real cruelties of the world. By violence and violations, disproportionately masculine.

These are topics I’d much rather avoid, but that a two-minute scroll brings to my feed news of school shootings and assaults and the improprieties of men at all levels of power. As a mother, I cannot simply ignore the realities of the world in which my sons will someday be men.

But as a mother of boys, I am tired, so tired, of the reminder to “raise better men.” As I’ve seen women point out in recent months, it is unfair—though unsurprising—that the sins of men are getting blamed on their mothers.

Of course I want to raise better men. I have an obligation to teach my sons how to live out their masculinity virtuously. Thankfully, I have a spouse who embraces an equal or even greater share of this obligation.

But I am troubled by a subtle implication in much of the admonition around raising boys: that the real problem is in the fact that they are boys. That the root of evil is in their masculinity rather than in a system of beliefs—and sins—that has distorted masculinity into something harmful to both women and men.

I don’t actually want to write an essay on masculinity. The novel I’m hoping to publish deals in part with masculinity and violence, and I find fiction a more interesting way to explore these topics.

What I want is to raise my sons without suspicion of their masculinity. I want to look upon their “boyness” with curiosity rather than fear.

I don’t always understand their urges to catapult off furniture, or turn every object into a weapon, or to spend five hours constructing a villain’s lair out of Legos.

But I can search for their human motives before I judge.

When the six-year-old floods the sink of the pumpkin patch restroom, I can stop myself from worrying he’s a selfish troublemaker; I can remind myself he’s still learning impulse control.

I can say, “I know you thought that was silly, but you need to think about how your choices can hurt other people.” I can hold off on further lecturing, because I can see the shame building in him, and that’s not the memory I want him to take home.

When my eight-year-old shows me his somewhat dark sketches, I can kindly ask, “Why do you like drawing those?”

“I don’t know,” my son replies. “I just do. It’s very strange.”

I can see in his desire to share these drawings a desire to share his heart, to ask me if I can tolerate these morbid imaginings. I can recognize the human (not just the masculine) inclination to contemplate mortality and the darker sides of humanity.

I can say, “I sometimes find those scary things kind of interesting too.”

I can see him nod and keep on drawing, and hope that he is assured that we are all just humans, trying to understand our own hearts and the hearts of those we love.

PS. Thank you for reading! I love to hear your thoughts on topics like these and am always thankful for the comment, like, or share.

Seven years ago, we pulled into the driveway of a 1950s house with beige siding and beige brick and beige garage doors, so heavy in appearance I imagine Fezzik the Giant would have had a hard time throwing them open.

“No,” I said, before we even got out of the car with our nine-month-old.

“Let’s give it a chance,” Joseph said.

As our realtor led us through the beige interior, I could see how Joseph, baby in the crook of his arm, was holding back his excitement. Not so much for the interior design choices, but for the bones of the house—three bedrooms, a decent-sized yard, an upstairs living space that gave the house a square-footage greater than anything we’d looked at so far. Never mind that the upstairs color-palette had been poured out of a 1970s ad, complete with green carpet and maroon walls.

And though it looked nothing like the first home I’d imagined, I let myself imagine it. Joseph doesn’t ask for much, and there was something endearing in the way he looked at this house. Maybe, it reminded me a little of how my parents had once looked at thirty acres of overgrown fields, nothing but a blue Morton barn as a possible shelter. They’d imagined a home and made it a reality, the potential they hoped in becoming a key part of my childhood.

It also helped that our lovely realtor mentioned there was such a thing as paint.

I had one stipulation for buying the house.

“You have to promise that we’ll make it perfect,” I said.

An outrageous promise, Joseph kept it, ensuring most of the renovations (like the paint job and the new garage doors) were completed before we moved in.

Seven years later, I can’t imagine a different home, and not just because we locked in that pre-Covid interest rate. We’ve made this fixer-upper ours.

Well, actually, I can imagine a different home. Arguably, I’m constantly imagining all the ways to make this home different. A new paint color for the guest bath. A new backyard patio. A new entryway layout. A new rug for the playroom.

Sometimes, Joseph will say, “I like our house. I don’t think it needs anything else.”

And I will say, “You promised me we would make it perfect.”

Joseph will say, “It is perfect enough!” And then he will help me paint the laundry room.

At this point, it is no longer a matter of bringing our home’s aesthetic into the current decade. It is sometimes about practicality—like rearranging the living room for a better flow. More often than not, it is because I get tired of a given space, its lack of charm burgeoning into a source of anxiety. I obsess over the details of its completion until I can take the beloved “after” photo, its triumphant comparison to the “before” photo representing the full scope of my accomplishment.

Some might read this as “Bored stay-at-home mom needs something to do.”

There might be some validity in that assessment.

Joseph and I joke that I only have a house project if I don’t have an ongoing writing project. Sometimes, for the sake of our budget and his honey-do list, Joseph begs me to have a writing project. Maybe, I only notice my home’s shortcomings when I’m not actively fixing fictional problems of my own creation.

But recent events have put this theory into question.

I was undertaking a rather drastic revision of my novel, based on some promising editor feedback. It involved taking the book apart and changing the point of view, meaning it should have been enough work to keep me distracted from home-reno projects for at least a few weeks.

For the first time ever, I was scheming house projects alongside plot points. Thankfully, I had the sense to pour most of my focus into my novel, but I couldn’t understand why painting the laundry room pink, or redesigning the entryway, or redecorating the stairway, became such important background tasks.

Perhaps it was the timing of it—end of summer, kids bouncing off the walls in a way that made me want to remove literal walls, heat index so alarming it made our air conditioned home feel like a sacred, fragile temple amid a melting world.

A lot of parents go a little crazy in August; painting a wall is a pretty healthy outlet.

Perhaps it was more existential in nature—looming threat of AI obliterating humanity, potential power grid failures, the serious illnesses of close friends and family.

A woman putting her house in order is a pretty tried and true method for staving off the crisis of mortality.

Perhaps, more than anything, it had to do with the writing project itself. I’ve rewritten this novel at least five times. In part, it is a novel about a house that is falling apart as four women try to stave off decay, and the decay of their own sisterhood. In rewriting the point of view, I was forcing myself to see parts and characters that had become overly familiar through a different perspective.

To revise a novel is something like undertaking a home renovation project: just as you renovate to uncover the best version of a room, you revise to find the best version of a story. Just as the bones of a house must be sturdy in order for the renovation to work, so too the bones of the story—its underlying premise—must be solid for a revision to work.1

Always before, I thought my writing brain and my homemaker brain were two very separate parts, but that notion may have come from my old but stubborn idea that “writer me” and “mother/wife/person with a life me” needed to be kept separate. As they inform one another, they need not be divided. And, according to experience, often can’t be.

Still, it did seem easier when my brain could save house projects for when I’m not actively writing. With this book revision, there was (and is) yet another layer. As many of my friends and family know, I’ve been pursuing traditional publication for nearly eight years. With this novel in particular, I have had so many “almost” moments, when achieving my goal felt heartbreakingly close. Revising it again is yet another gamble, for there is no guarantee an editor will fall in love enough to publish it.

And so I find myself asking that question writers and artists often ask: what’s the point? Why work so hard when there may be no concrete reward—no “after” photo to prove my accomplishment?

I have asked myself if the house projects are just my grasping attempts to control an outcome. To see my efforts as more than futile. At least, with a home project, I only need to please myself (and maybe Joseph) not an entire industry.

When I was telling some friends this theory, they offered a more optimistic take. They said the simultaneous projects were proof that my creativity was flowing.

And so, if I were to read myself as generously as they do, I would argue that a home renovation project, like a story revision, is an act of hope.

Yes, my home has gone through many renovations and repairs. It is quirky and imperfect, despite my attempts at perfection. But I also love it, and I love it in part because of the work we’ve poured into it, because we’ve made it our own. To find new ways to make it beautiful, and better, is to keep hoping in its potential.

When it comes to my novel, I’m thankful to all those (like you) who keep hoping with me.

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Without a moment’s hesitation, he answers no.

“I just mean, I used to think if I could go back, I’d wait a few more years,” I say. “Only with the promise that we could have the same exact kids we have now.”

Joseph reminds me that we did wait a few years, dating for nearly four before a year-long engagement, and waiting two years into marriage to have our first baby. I argue that getting married at 23 is relatively early compared to the average age for marriage in the U.S.

But Joseph says that having children when we did gave greater meaning to our lives, even if it sabotaged the easy pace of our twenties. We wouldn’t be the people we are today, if not for the eight years of sacrifice and joy gifted to us by our sons.

I know he is right, but sometimes, I wonder if waiting would have made me a better mother. Statistically, mothers in their early twenties have a higher risk for postpartum depression and anxiety, a diagnosis I battled hardest with my first two sons.

If I had waited, perhaps I would have pursued therapy before becoming a mother of two, learning the coping mechanisms to stop the spiraling thoughts of postpartum.

Perhaps I would have felt more comfortable in my own identity before adding the bewildering identity of motherhood to my psyche.

Perhaps I would have known better how to silence the anxiety that kept me from sleeping when baby slept.

Perhaps I would not have resented all the loss of self motherhood entailed because I would have had more years in which to live as a self without a human who needed her for everything.

Perhaps Joseph and I would have worked out a precise system of housework that could withstand all manner of sleep deprivation, financial strain, and toddler mess-making.

Perhaps I would have had more time to become a better writer before pregnancy and breastfeeding stole a portion of my brain cells.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

I have, many times, countered these what-ifs with assertions about how motherhood itself prompted and continues to prompt my healing as a person, my efficiency in housework, my inspiration as an author.

Questions about regret are, in the end, somewhat pointless, unanswerable, for we cannot go back. We live the one life we choose.

What I’m really asking my husband, as we sit sunburned on a beach in Cancun, is whether or not he likes this life we have chosen. And it is easy for us both to say yes that night, as we sip wine and eat perfectly cooked steak. If all of our choices have led us to this exact moment, then of course the answer is yes.

But we will return to reality soon enough, to a Texas summer that is too hot, to a house that is always in need of some repair, to children who need to be fed and disciplined and held constantly, to work and toil. We will remember that our bodies are imperfect and aging moment by moment.

For questions about regret are, fundamentally, questions about mortality. They are about the unstoppable trajectory of time, how every moment and every choice draws us further along a diminishing path, to a vanishing point from which there is no return.

If your twenties are the time in your life of pure possibility, your thirties are a subtle shifting of perspective. The path ahead is still, God willing, much longer than the path behind, and yet there is a past, one you cannot backtrack. Your thirties are when you are just old enough to feel the truth of youth’s passing, jaded or wise enough to recognize there are choices you can never undo.

My mom used to speak of small regrets—men she dated and jobs she had and friends she lost—stories that she sometimes used as parables for choices not to make. And yet, the stories were always to me part of the marvelous tapestry of who my mother was; there wasn’t a choice in her past I found regrettable, for they had all given me this specific woman, a mother I would not trade for anything.

I can only hope my children might feel the same way: that the young, imperfect mother they got was the one mother they wanted.

They are, after all, the exact children I wanted, which is why I cannot regret having them when I did: to have waited would have given me different children. While I’m sure I would have loved them just as much, we all have a particular bias for the people we already love.

Likewise, I can imagine all manner of turns our life may have taken over the last ten years—a life with more money or a house with a newer plumbing system or a body that’s enjoyed slightly fewer carbs. A life where my books are best-sellers, or where my career has taken me into different spheres entirely. A life without suicidal thoughts or miscarriages or obscene hospital bills.

I don’t believe I would trade this one for anything, which is itself a grace, the grace to choose to find the good even in the hardest moments. It is a grace to embrace the self who exists across all of life’s changes.

One evening, when we are back from our indulgent vacation from reality, our eight-year-old muses, “Sometimes, I think about life and I’m just like, ‘impossible.’”

I am tired and thinking about dinner, but I ask, “What do you mean?”

With his hands, he makes a timeline. “Just, here I am and here’s the future and here’s the past and it’s just impossible! I’m like, ‘I wonder what I’m going to be when I grow up’ and I think about something and I’m just like, ‘Impossible!’”

I smile, containing a giggle, because I understand what he is trying to express. That life is, all of it, unknown. That we are tiny specks upon the rushing timeline of the universe. That it is utterly strange how every adult was once a scrunchy infant, a bumbling toddler, a lanky middle schooler.

What a miracle that we somehow maintain, through all of life’s choices and tragedies, the same self, the same I of our first, stumbling utterances. What a gift we get any choice at all in our life’s trajectory. How wondrously impossible the mere act of living, from one moment to the next.

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Did he ask litanies of questions—

Why does the wind blow

And how is bread made

and how much longer

till we get to the temple—

wearying his parents for answers

he already had, so they might

know his love in the way

he sought the cadence of their voices.

Did he sometimes forget

his own body, leaping

on furniture, snapping

branches as he climbed too high,

hugging his mother too fiercely,

half-barreling her over

in his need, still, to be held

in his transforming limbs.

How thin was the line between

his cleverness and his silliness—

Did he smile with pride every time

his father laughed, well pleased

with a joke he thought up on the spot.

Caught between a baby

and a boy, did he cause his mother

to ponder who he had been and who

he would be, to find, in the quiet moments,

reason to marvel that he was,

for a few more hidden years,

hers still to hold.

Content Warning: This essay discusses miscarriage and grief

They say you should write the story that keeps coming back to you, the one you keep putting off, the one that seems too hard to put into words.

But, lately, the one that seems too hard to write is also the one that’s the most personal, the one that almost feels self-indulgent to write. Do I write it only for my own catharsis, and if so, do any of you really need to read it? I’ve written about the purpose of vulnerability. I’ve written about family planning and loss and grief. But before, I’ve always felt that I had something to share beyond my own need for expression. I can’t say if that’s true this time.

Mixed up in this sharing is my own constant wrestling with the purpose of art. Why do I write, and why do I feel that others need to read these words?

I’ll start with a story, because you deserve more than my rambling questions. It’s a story you know, one you’ve heard—or maybe even lived—times before.

A woman looks down at a second pink line on a pregnancy test and thinks of all the ways this wasn’t in her plans.

A woman and her husband grieve over how much they didn’t want this. Not right now. Maybe not ever. They question God’s plan against their human error, counting days and charting signs for how this even happened.

Four kids. Four when three sometimes felt like too much. Another baby when they were just emerging from the last baby stage. Perhaps it is selfish or short-sighted, but they liked their family of five as it was.

But in the anger and the grief, they do not even realize the hope already taking seed. A Christmas baby. A little sibling to join their crew of wild boys. (Maybe a little sister, the one the two big boys have always longed for.) A buddy for the youngest, a pair of two and two.

They know despite the shock and the strain of it, this is a gift, one they are privileged to be able to accept.

Within a week of the positive test, the nausea begins, intense and unending, bringing with it the question of how they will survive this period. She keeps thinking of the depression and anxiety of every postpartum, a darkness that seems to swallow her down every time, no matter the sweetness of a new baby. She asks God how she can possibly do it again.

They survive off the meals that show up on their doorstep, the daily texts of encouragement, the playdates that whisk the children away for a few hours, the generosity of friends that feels like more than they even deserve. Raising a child takes a village, sometimes before that child even has a heartbeat.

When they tell their sons, the joy is contagious. Every night, their sons pray that this baby will survive.

It is that prayer, in the end, that breaks their hearts. When the ultrasound tech apologizes. When, despite the nausea and despite all the things they were already trying to do right (the supplements and the medications and the tedious scheduling of appointments), the little prayer stopped growing.

You know this story. You know that despite all the ways they didn’t want this, the loss is a grief indescribable. Confusion wrapped in anger wrapped in guilty relief wrapped in longing wrapped in all the questions of what might have been.

Slowly, painfully, the nausea dwindles. She celebrates, bleakly, the first day in over a month that she hasn’t thrown up. They wait weeks for the bleeding to start. The exhaustion lingers, even as the cramping starts, until chills and kidney pain prompts the ER visit. And an entire day of tests sends them back home, a dead baby still inside her, because it wasn’t deemed enough of an emergency to end their anguished waiting.

When they finally schedule a D&C, it is because the waiting seems to be warping the grief, preventing any sense of closure.

And here’s where I fear the self-indulgence. Here’s where I fear you will read all this as my long request for pity. That’s not why I’m writing.

I am writing because it feels like the only honest thing to do. I’ve written this newsletter for over two years, sharing personal essays about motherhood, marriage, writing, and life. I don’t think I can go on writing about those things without telling this story, for it has marked me indelibly.

No matter how common miscarriage, no matter how early it occurs, it is a loss. Grief need not make sense to be grief. An imperfect love is still love.

And so I think that is why I feel compelled to write this—because I have the tendency to downplay my own grief, because I know there are others who have lived this grief, because how can I write personal essays without at least acknowledging this loss that has shaped me as a person?

I cannot find in this a meaning that is concise or relatable, a currency to exchange for the time you’ve given up to read this essay. If the purpose of the personal essay as a form of art is to impart such meaning, then perhaps this is a failed essay.

Nonetheless, I have always felt that what I have to offer in these essays is less some neat message and more some stumblingly articulated truth that might, in the way of truth and grace, find some better purpose in another person’s heart.

And so I will finish the story I started, telling the truth as best I can.

When they tell their children that the baby is no longer growing, that they now have another sibling in heaven, the older boys are disappointed, but they don’t yet have the words to express their sadness. They ask questions—why is Mama still sick, why did the baby stop growing, was it a boy or a girl—and their parents do their best to answer in ways that are simple but honest. And in the days that follow, it is their children who speak with a straightforward and unflinching honesty: pointing to the sky, saying there is one more person in their family listening always from heaven. There is a strange and painful comfort in the way they will not forget a sibling they never knew.

(Looking at her children, she will see in their maturing faces the infant faces she once spent hours studying. She will think of everything that had to go right for this child to exist in front of her, the million cell divisions and chemical phenomena that had to occur before she even heard his heartbeat for the first time. She will think that her children truly are miracles, and so is every person who breathes.)

In the end, the miscarriage starts naturally, before the scheduled D&C. Through it, despite the fear and the pain, she keeps thinking that her body deserves a reverence even for this loss, that it understood how to hold on and how to let go. She thinks that a woman’s body is not just a vessel for life but also for death; there is something sacred in this, something she doesn’t know if she will ever be able to put into words.

When she thinks of heaven, she thinks now of the moment she will meet this baby, and she hopes the time it takes will feel like nothing to her lost child, and that better arms will hold them until she does.

One night, she expresses a fear she can scarcely speak through tears. The fear that her love was never enough.

“He or she won’t know, will they? They’ll never know that we didn’t want them? They’ll only know happiness?”

“They will only know happiness,” her husband promises.

It is more—or rather, it is different—than what they can promise their living children and one another.

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I have this tendency to seek solitude when I’m sad.

I don’t think it’s a particularly unique tendency. Withdrawing for a good cry can be quite cathartic, and sometimes it is better not to let my loved ones take the brunt of my bad attitude.

But when I’m really down, I tend to spiral into “I’ll never be good enough what’s the point I should give up on existence” territory.

Again, this depressive terrain might be typical geography for a melancholic writer, but the danger is in how all-consuming these thoughts can become when I don’t share them.

It could just be that I’m an introvert who prefers to keep her feelings to herself. It could be that I learned from an early age that suppressing my feelings helped keep my environment more peaceful. It could be that sometimes I don’t really know how I feel until I’ve sat with my feelings for a long time.

But lately, when I’ve found myself avoiding my husband and friends so I can stew in my sadness, I’ve thought of two pieces of advice I received from two very different sources.

Since this is a Substack about writing (among other things), I’ll start first with the advice I once received in a creative writing workshop. The workshop was led by Stewart O’Nan in Dublin, Ireland and it was as amazing as it sounds—walks in St. Stephen’s Green, dinner at quaint pubs, talking about stories with other talented writers.

I had brought excerpts from my novel in progress, which turned into the novel that helped me secure my current agent. The feedback I received from my cohort and from Stewart was absolutely integral to the book, but there is one piece of advice that has remained with me across projects. Stewart repeated it often over the course of the week: A scene with only one character lacks narrative tension.

If you’re a writer, you may be familiar with writing this kind of scene, one in which your character is being self-reflective or in which you’re doing some heavy exposition. I often find that these are scenes that I love to write because it lets me be lyrical and prosy and all-around well, self-reflective. But these are also usually the scenes that I end up needing to revise drastically, shrinking them down to keep the story moving.

In a one-on-one session with Stewart, he pointed out a scene in which I had allowed my two main characters to become separated, and then let them have plot-altering revelations while alone.

“We don’t want to read a scene of a character by themselves,” he reminded me. The revelations needed to feel earned, and one of the ways to create this pay-off is to have them happen through character interactions, through moral choices that affect other characters.

His advice helped me completely rework the scene and some of the major plot-points in the novel. As I’ve written other stories, I’ve kept his advice in mind. There are always moments in which a character finds herself alone, but the key is to keep those passages moving through her relationships with the characters off the page.

Of course, there are plenty of published books that contain scenes with only one character. But unless the writer is really phenomenal, those are usually the scenes I find slowest.1

Yes, you may be thinking, excellent writing advice, but what exactly does narrative tension have to do with depressive episodes? Usually, when you’re sad, you want less tension, not more.

To explain how I think this writing advice applies to life, I’ll share the other advice I once received in a very different setting. While it was spiritual advice from a priest, I believe it has bearing beyond a religious context. Fr. Thomas Esposito also happens to be an author, but he wasn’t giving writing advice per se.

I was sharing some of my struggles with motherhood, relationships, being human etc. when he said something that surprised me.

“Isolation is never the path to salvation.”

It honestly took me a moment to understand what he meant, probably because as a mother of small children I rarely find myself “isolated.” There is always someone trying to open the bathroom door or asking if they can have a snack.

Also, didn’t a lot of saints live pretty solitary lives, as contemplatives or actual hermits??

I wanted to say something like, “Some isolation would reallllyyy help my salvation right now, Father.”

He agreed that yes, sometimes it is good to take some time alone with God. But he clarified that the danger is in purposefully withdrawing from those God has placed in our lives as companions on the path to holiness—my spouse, my children, the friends and family who reach out with genuine care.

I believe our lives, like the stories we read, have direction, a purpose and an end. But willful isolation can swerve us from that proper direction, just as a scene in which a character is alone can lack the necessary momentum to achieve a story arc.

A good story reflects life, and in good stories, characters need community. They need the tension of others who push them beyond themselves.

Is it any wonder that we also need one another?

In Genesis, when God creates Eve, He does so because, “It is not good for man to be alone.” You can look at this as a storytelling insight just as much as a spiritual axiom. Adam needs a little tension in his life.

Joking aside, I will note that sometimes the goodness of community in the midst of sadness is not in fact to pull you out of that sadness. Sometimes, the purpose of letting someone into your grief is so that they might grieve with you, that they might see you at your lowest and show you that you are still lovable, that nothing that you feel is too much, and neither is it too small to warrant your pain.

In isolation, I have sometimes begun to believe that my pain was simultaneously hideous and obsolete, a thing all-encompassing and impossible for anyone—even God—to handle, even as I let myself think that I was being pathetic: there were so many worse things happening in the world than my little struggle.

But then a friend has asked to hear everything I feel, and nothing I said made her flinch, nothing I expressed made her think less of me.

Then my husband has held me as I cried, until the last tear fell, and even then he did not let go.

And I could believe again the one thing that makes any sadness more bearable: that I am not alone.

A few weeks after my first son was born, his pediatrician told me I needed to cut dairy out of my diet because my son had green poop. Her exact words were, “He definitely has a dairy allergy. You need to cut dairy. Most moms do anyways while breastfeeding.”

As a new mom with the beginnings of postpartum depression, I heard only an accusation in her confidence. If I was a good mom, I thought, I would have known this. I could have saved my son from the gassiness and the spit-up.

I cut dairy, to minimal improvement, but I carried the guilt for my incompetence for months, even after the spitting-up stopped and I added dairy back in.

Having now had three children, I know that there isn’t a way to determine a child’s sensitivity to milk simply by looking at his diaper. As a lactation consultant informed me with my second son, green in a diaper can mean any number of things, including a food sensitivity, but you have to selectively remove things from your diet to know what is actually causing the issue. Dairy just so happens to be one of the more common irritants.

This preamble is not about a pediatrician who said the wrong thing. It’s about my own obsessive need for external validation.

When I became a mother, I sought that validation in a hundred ways—from his doctors, of course, but also in the brand of car seat we purchased, in the organic baby food I selected, in the shape of the pacifier I let him use. I sought it in people’s expressions when he would scream in church, in my own mother’s assessment of how cute he looked in an outfit, in the number of likes a photo I posted garnered, though I was ever-conscious of becoming the mom who only shared photos of her baby online. Every time he suffered, I believed I had failed: his newborn fussiness, his poor latch, the first time he caught a cold. When he didn’t sleep through the night for his first nine months of life, I was certain it was because I was doing something wrong.

When I say I was certain of my failure, what I mean is that this feeling lived in my subconscious, a barely distinguishable yet piercingly loud voice that spoke to me at night when I could not sleep. When I say I sought validation from others, I mean I tried constantly to rid myself of my feelings of inadequacy.

It is only in retrospect that I can see all of it for what it was—anxiety, depression, the aching need to hear from some higher authority that I wasn’t ruining my son.

Because my journey as a mother has unfolded alongside my career as a writer, I have come to see parallels in these paths. In my writing, too, I have often sought proof that I was good enough.

As a straight A student, the first years after college presented a new challenge when it came to my writing: no longer did I have incontrovertible proof, in the form of a professor’s praise, that each piece was good enough. As I began submitting to literary journals, enduring rejection after rejection, I wondered if I was delusional for pursuing creative writing. Perhaps I was only good at academic writing, even though my heart lay in the creative sphere.

Thankfully, I was determined to make my delusion a reality, and went to grad school in creative writing. Slowly, in fits and starts, I began to see work published, mostly in small journals no one read, but each acceptance gave me new confidence.

When I had an essay accepted by one of the bigger literary magazines, I was thrilled. It was a piece about trying to publish a novel traditionally, about the ups and downs I had experienced, about learning to persevere despite serious disappointment. The fact that it had been accepted so quickly seemed again like a sign that my writing was worth the effort.

And then it was published, and the responses to the essay were utterly ambiguous. I received personal notes from readers who found the piece poignant, who thanked me for my vulnerability, who shared similar experiences. My editor at the magazine told me the piece was receiving a high amount of online traffic. But the piece also garnered a slew of comments, some of them taking offense to the internal logic of the essay, others pointing out how poorly written it was, still others attacking me personally.

Those negative comments stung, and the pain might have lingered longer had I not remembered the one thing I’m continually trying to learn: there are some things in life for which “good and bad” are highly subjective. Art is one of those things. Motherhood might be too.

Three children, therapy, time, and many rejections have not cured me completely of my desire for objective proof that I am good enough in these avenues. I have simply learned to recognize the spiral of thoughts, to tune in to the need beneath the desires.

Allow me to illustrate the need, simple as it is, with one last story.

Over spring break, I take my sons on a nature walk. I am a good mom, because I create sheets of “nature bingo” with images of all the things we might see on our walk. I print these out so my sons can check off their discoveries as we go. I am a bad mom, because my middle child decides as soon as we get to the trail head that he will not go for a walk, but I make him do so anyways, bribing him with snacks until he’s willing to let his little brother sit in the stroller again. I am a good mom, because I let them wander off the paved trail into the woods, help them spot bugs and birds and interesting sticks. I am a good mom, because I space the snacks out to keep them entertained.

I am a bad mom, because on the way back to the car, I don’t buckle my toddler into the stroller. I am a good mom, because I ask one of my sons if he needs me to slow down so he can keep up. I am a bad mom, because I don’t stop the other son from flipping the stroller brake mid-stride at the exact moment the toddler stands up in his seat. I am a bad mom because my toddler flies head first out of the stroller into the pavement.

Between the blood and the screams and the strangers who pass us without a second glance, I call my husband, who says he will leave work immediately and meet us at the urgent care. And then, because I’m too afraid to drive to an urgent care, I call 911.

When the paramedics arrive, my toddler screams even more loudly as we go inside the ambulance. After a few checks, the EMT, a man with a thick mustache and a southern accent, says that there isn’t a need to go the ER.

“It’s just an abrasion,” he says.

“Okay, so just keep an eye on him?” I ask.

He makes eye contact, shaking his head kindly, clearly reading my need for reassurance from someone who has authority to give it. With precise pronunciation, he says, “He is okay.”

And it is like permission to breathe, to forgive myself for the stroller buckles and the clumsy kids and maybe even for every injury my kids have ever received. I almost start crying there in the ambulance, because there are times when words themselves are like grace, another person’s voice a channel for God’s comforts.

Later, as the bump on my toddler’s head begins to scab over, I think of those words, think of how often I have longed to hear some version of them in every endeavor of my life. To know that things will be okay despite all the ways I’m not enough.

“Everything will be okay,” is a phrase my husband repeats to me frequently, seeing in my spiral of anxiety the intensity of my love for our family.

I will never be a perfect mother. My writing will never be polished enough to preclude criticism. And yet, knowing that, I can’t stop seeking external validation. But perhaps this isn’t a failure. After all, I do not mother in isolation. To say I do not need outside opinions is to falsely claim that I don’t need anyone to help me raise my children. In the same way, to be a writer is to seek readers, to type these words in the isolation of my home in the hope that they might reach someone else.

It is only human to seek validation, for we weren’t created to serve ourselves.

But it is wisdom to choose whose validation is worth heeding. And when we are kind to ourselves, we might see that it is love that often prompts the seeking.

Last year, I finished a draft of my 4th adult novel. The Uprooting of Alabaster Belle is a road trip novel that uses magical and speculative elements to explore trauma, grief, motherhood, and girlhood. It’s still with beta-readers, but I’m absolutely thrilled with how it’s shaping up. I’ll share more about my publishing journey soon.

HOWEVER. This novel has made one of my obsessions a little undeniable.

For the fourth time, I have written a novel in which a mother abandons her child or children. In my first novel, the mother’s abandonment was the main plot point. In each of my next novels, the abandonment has either been part of a character’s backstory or a plot point that becomes significant later on in the book.

As I wrote Uprooting, I had to ask myself, do I have a problem? If all my books one day get published, will people start to wonder if I have some deep mother-wound I’ve never worked through in therapy?

I was not abandoned by my mother. In fact, I have a great mom who plays a very active roll in my life and the lives of my children. She likes to ask all the time if I’ve made her into a character in my novels, which would be weird, considering all the mothers in my books are “bad” moms. (You may not want to be in my books, Mom.)

I’ve reconciled myself to the reality that I’m just going to keep coming back to the same themes in my writing. Most authors do. But I decided I wanted to take a closer look at this particular theme. There are a few possible reasons why I keep returning to it.

Reason #1: I’m a Child of the 90s

Just about every movie my brothers and I watched as kids featured a lovable protagonist who was also an orphan. Maybe my brain was just completely rewired by this scene in The Land Before Time when Little Foot’s mom dies tragically in the rain.

Not to mention that pretty much every Disney princess is motherless, half of them with evil step mothers who want them dead. Maybe I’ve just intuited that motherless characters are instantly more sympathetic.

Reason #2: I’m Writing My Fears

Perhaps because of the media I consumed in the 90s and early aughts, I was destined to fear losing my own mother. As a child, I had this repeated dream in which my mom was driving me somewhere in our Aerostar van. From the backseat, I kept a careful eye on her black bob, watching the strands of hair flicker on either side of the headrest. And then, all at once, my mom disappeared. The van kept going, me in the backseat, the fear and devastation eventually ripping me from sleep.

I don’t think I’m exactly special in this fear. Most kids fear losing their parents. However, I do think this fear has grown out of a history of grief and trauma.

My mother’s childhood as a Mexican immigrant was fraught with difficulties—poverty, abuse, and family dysfunction. I’ve written before about my Tita, my mother’s mother, and the trauma she endured throughout her life. I don’t want to pass blame upon anyone, for pain grows out of pain, and people who are hurt hurt others. I simply want to note that there were many times in my childhood when I marveled that my own mother could be such a good mother, given what she had experienced. While she was not abandoned, I imagine there were times she felt so; within my extended family, there were also incidents of abandonment.

While I feared my mother dying, I never consciously feared my mother abandoning us. But I think I may have subconsciously feared a reality in which my mother chose to leave us, because of her past or because of the difficulties of our family life (like most families, ours was not perfect). Interestingly, I did not begin to write out this fear until I myself was beginning to think of motherhood.

Reason #3: I’m Processing My Anxieties as a Mother

I wrote my first adult novel before I had children, but it is a novel about motherhood, specifically about a daughter who must come to terms with her mother’s abandonment as she herself becomes a mother. In my first drafts, I tended toward depicting motherhood in a somewhat static, even saccharine way. After my son was born, my understanding of motherhood became much more fraught. Repeated drafts of the novel were my attempts to reckon with this new identity. As I dealt with postpartum depression and anxiety, I realized how the line between what makes a “good” mother and a “bad” mother is indefinite, blurry, built upon unfair societal expectations and my own assumptions.

In the first few months of my son’s life, while sleep came fleetingly, I had a recurring dream that I forgot my son at home while I went out. I’d suddenly look at the clock and realize I’d been gone for hours; throughout the rest of the dream, I tried to get back to my son as I imagined his unanswered wails in a dark room.

Competing with this anxiety was the waking, unspeakable fear that I was not fit to be a mother. In my darkest moments, I imagined my son would be better off without me.

While I blame hormones and lack of sleep for much of this anxiety, I also think it grew out of my assumptions about what it means to be a good mom. It took me years of therapy to realize that my feelings of inadequacy were actually signs that I was a good mom who only wanted the best for her baby.

With each novel that I’ve written, I’ve returned to these feelings and insecurities, using them to inform the way I write the mothers in my stories. In fact, I don’t even know if I would call the mothers in my novels “bad” mothers. I think they are simply women who don’t have the resources I do to combat the exhaustion, self-doubt, and generational fears. In writing their stories, I am processing my anxieties about my own inadequacies.

In therapy, I learned to speak the thoughts that scare me the most, to follow their logical outcome in order to reduce their power. Writing has always been a means of this kind of healing.

Despite all these reasons, I’m not sure if I can explain why I keep writing about abandoned children, about mothers who choose destruction over (or for) their children, and families that must come to terms with a history of trauma. Perhaps I return to the same issues again and again because I haven’t finished exploring all its many facets. I am not just writing what I know, but also writing in order to know.

What’s more, stories are more than their themes and tropes. Above all, stories are about characters, the more richly imagined, the better the story. When I write, I spend less time thinking, “I want this to be a story about motherhood, family, trauma etc.” and more time thinking about what specific desires my characters are pursuing, and all the things that get in their way.

After the pay wall, a craft exercise on character backstory and desires.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy essays on the intersection of parenthood and writing, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Distracted Writer.

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Go run and play (It’s good to see you!). Take turns on the slide (They’ve gotten so big!). Snacks are for later (And how are you?). Watch out for your brother. (I know what you mean.) I see you up there! You are so brave! (I’m doing okay. Things have been hard, you know, with my brother.) What a cool stick! No, not in the mouth. (And your dad’s doing better?) Yes, just one snack for now. Please share with our friends. (I’m trying gluten free, but who knows if it’ll help). Yes, I’ll push you on the swing. (It was a great trip! But it was hard coming back. It always is, isn’t it?). That’s as high as I can push. Pump your legs, back and forth, back and forth. (And that thing with your AC, did you get it fixed? And how is work and how was the weather (And how is it I can’t seem to say everything I wanted to tell you?)) Okay you hide, I’ll seek in a minute. (His grandmother passed, we knew it was coming (and yet it still felt too soon.)) Ready or not. (I’m so sorry to hear that. I’ll be praying (I mean it. It never feels like enough, these words, but they are my whole heart.)) Here I come. (Oh that’s a good idea! We’re trying to save up! It’s always one more thing, isn’t it?). Found you! (I need your opinion.) Uh oh! You’re okay! Here let me kiss it. (What was I saying?) Just five more minutes. (Should I paint the walls green or blue?) Go down the slide one more time! (This has been lovely. It was good to catch up (well, as much as we could. It was good to see your face and hear your voice)). Please find your water bottle and your shoes and your brother. (We’ll do it again. (Yes, next time we’ll figure it all out. Next time we’ll say everything we needed to say.)) Let’s get to the car. Please hold my hand. Tell our friends bye. (Take care! (I’ll remember it later, what I was trying to say all along, which is simply: I love you. I see you. You are so brave). Yes, let’s talk soon!). Did you have so much fun with our friends?

The number on the scale is a number I’ve arbitrarily decided is too high.

Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with the number. There can’t be, because numbers are just numbers. This is what I would tell you if you told me you didn’t like your weight. But I don’t tell myself this. I tell myself maybe the jeans I’m wearing added a few pounds, or maybe it’s water weight, or maybe the scale reads high. Doctors’ offices are known for their scales that make women feel bad about themselves, even doctors’ offices specifically centered on women’s health.1

When I tell my husband, Joseph, about how much I dislike the number, he shrugs and says, “You could have just gained more muscle,” which is a really sweet thing to say because he knows I’ve been working out more. But I’ve subconsciously bought into the idea that working out must equal losing weight, even when I tell myself I’m doing it to feel healthier. I do feel healthier, except that the number is too high compared to the numbers I used to see on the scale, before three children and my thirties.

The nurse makes no comment about my weight, and neither does my new doctor. Instead, we discuss my impossibly irregular cycles, which I’ve struggled with since I was a teenager.

“Just so you don’t feel weird,” she says, “These sound like pretty normal symptoms for someone with PCOS.”

I was diagnosed with PCOS ten years ago, but outside trying to conceive my first and third sons, I never invested that much into curing myself or fixing my cycles; instead, I’ve simply raged against their inconsistencies off and on for my entire life, sometimes thinking I’ve gone insane, other times worrying I’ve “accidentally” become pregnant.

Finally, after a recent cycle that lasted 64 days, I reached a breaking point. My body was clearly malfunctioning and needed intervention.

The frustration was built on my recent endeavors to do everything “right.” I was still taking all the supplements my midwife had recommended after the birth of my last child. I’d done pelvic floor therapy after his birth and had been working out consistently for almost two years. I also had healthy sleep habits, healthy eating habits, and tried to have healthy lifestyle habits. I make my own sourdough. Recently, I’ve even given up gluten, that much-maligned food group for its inflammatory qualities.

When the doctor told me I had “normal” symptoms for my disease, I know she meant she was hopeful to find a solution. What I heard was, “This sounds like a pretty boring way to be broken.”

Let me explain. Or, actually, if you’re a woman reading this, maybe I don’t have to explain. Maybe you understand what it’s like to rage against your body for not following the rhythms it’s meant to follow. Maybe you know what it’s like to look at yourself in the mirror and grieve the ways your body no longer fits (or never has) into the standards the world sets for women. Maybe you logically denounce all those standards—thinness and hourglass shapes and smooth skin and not aging, but if you must age, make some effort to hide it but please become invisible past a certain age—and yet they still echo in your mind day in and day out. It’s not your mother’s fault, for she tried to instill you with a confidence in your own body she never had for her own. Despite her efforts, despite the truths you whisper to yourself when your old jeans don’t fit (“I’ve born three children. I do not owe the world a moment of regret for the way my body’s changed”), you still find yourself at war. At war with the migraines that overtake you out of the blue, responding to nothing but copious painkillers and sleep. At war with the length of your skirt, for perhaps you’re too old to wear things like this now. At war with the moods that taint every interaction during your luteal phase, when your husband can’t say good morning without annoying you. At war with the blood that soaks through pad after pad, and the cramps, the pain, the exhaustion that tell you all the ways you’re still not healthy enough, because if you were, wouldn’t this all be easier? You’ve been told all your life that this is what it is to be a woman, an existence at once broken and utterly common.

But this is not an essay about body image. It’s not even an essay about women’s healthcare or the impossible standards set for women.

It’s an essay about existing in a body I’m not sure if I’ve ever learned to love. I’ve learned to care for it, yes, but it was a care born first out of the nurturing of children. I watched what I ate and how I moved so that that the child in my womb could have the best start. I’ve been proud of it, when it bore each of my children, and in my twenties when it was fit and thin with hardly any effort at all. I’ve let my husband love it, have continually sought his compliments; but have I ever believed them, really and truly? I once told him he only thought my body was beautiful because he loved me, as if my body were something separate from me, not an essential part of who he loved.

Cerebral as I sometimes am, I often forget my body. When I’m reading a book or writing a story, I sit like some kind of troll hunched into a tree hollow, my back warped and legs entwined. I return to reality blinking and squinting, my neck throbbing, tongue parched from mouth breathing, bladder begging to be emptied.

And yet some of my favorite stories—ones that I’ve written—are about embodiment. They are about the strangeness and wonder of existing in a body, especially a female body. Many of my stories have grown out of the most visceral experiences of my own body—my first period, giving birth, breastfeeding, hiking a mountain and feeling my own smallness against the expanse of the sky.

I am deeply aware that my body is more than just a vessel, that it is all of me and all of me in it.

So why do I war against it?

For Christmas, Joseph got me a monthly massage membership, almost as if he’s aware of the ongoing war between my body and my mind. At a recent massage, I was stunned at the effort it took for me to quiet my mind just enough to actually relax and enjoy the experience of simply being in my body, at rest. It took almost the entire 50 minutes to completely relax.

The next day, as I was thinking of my prodigal cycles and the next treatments the doctor prescribed, a thought floated to the front of my mind: “How good of my body to try to tell me it needs attention.”

I was startled by the thought, at once comforted by it—in all my years of missed periods and mood swings, I had never once thought that the very brokenness could be good, as a message from my body precisely because my body was good. As if my body loved me before I even loved it.

I don’t think it was coincidence that this revelation arrived so soon after a concentrated effort to stop the war between my mind and my body. If only I could get a massage everyday.

But I have ample experience listening to my body. I would not have survived pregnancy and birth and postpartum without learning to heed my body’s various signs. The early years of motherhood are intrinsically about interpreting the signs of your child’s body—the number of diapers and the hours between feeds and the sounds of a cry. To be a mother is to watch as the body you grew inside you changes day by day, slipping more and more beyond your control. It is both painful and exhilarating, the bittersweet ache of being needed less and less. Everyday, it becomes harder to imagine how my oldest child—almost eight—was ever the little baby who wouldn’t let me put him down. It is only occasionally, now, that he will do something—stub his toe, or cry over a lost stuffy—his maturity melting into need, that I will think, “You are still the same you.”

Perhaps this is really an essay about expectations, the way they so often reveal themselves by contrast. I expect my son to be more mature precisely when he can’t be. I expect my body to send clearer signals precisely when the unclear messages are its only means of communication. I expect the world to stop having impossible standards for women precisely because I have bought into those expectations. I expect God to answer my prayers while holding so tightly to my own plans, I fail to see how His might be better.

All of this has prompted me to think of a church in Rome that is home to a Capuchin crypt, a series of chapels decorated entirely of the bones of dead monks. On our recent trip to Italy, Joseph and I visited it, walking the narrow hallway beside the chapels and marveling at the bones sculpted into candelabras and altars, skulls piled into columns, pelvic bones stacked into arches, and ribs arranged into floral mosaics. Over 4,000 monks are laid to rest in these startling chapels; I don’t know if I can call it beautiful, for it is eerie to imagine the monks who unburied their brothers’ bones to construct the chapels. Even as a Catholic, I sometimes find Catholicism a bit weird when it comes to bodies and death. But the reverence the chapels demand, a tribute not only to sacred art but to the sacredness even of the human body, cannot be denied.

I found myself contemplating my own body, its mortality, certainly, but also its utter strangeness—how is it that I am built of the same porous and brittle bones as those long-dead Capuchins, my skull and my ribs and my spine the secret, eerie frame upon which I move through the world? My skeleton, holding aloft my weight even when I’ve arbitrarily decided it’s too high. My ribcage, protecting my heart and my lungs as I breathe in, and breathe out, moment by moment.

Couldn’t I find for my own body the same reverence the crypt evoked? Sacred even when common, even when broken.

Likely, I can’t, not all at once, not consistently. I can only try, and try to be gentle with myself every time I fail to meet that expectation.

PS. I’ve been thinking about this essay for awhile, but this lovely piece by Katherine Mansfield helped me flesh out some of these thoughts!

first drafts

you can't be a hot mom if you were never hot

My hair is a bird’s nest, my clothes polka dotted in pureed vegetables. I sport designer bags beneath my eyes and recently, I’ve begun wearing Peanut Butter Eau De Parfum. There is nothing sexy about me, I think, glancing at my reflection as I brush my teeth halfway through another day at home. Then again, there never was…

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8 months ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Katherine Mansfield

A “cento” is a style of poem that uses only words, rearranged, from another text. In this cento (which I wrote for a creative writing class years ago), I used a page out of my favorite children’s book (included below). The poem is in memory of the time I bought and had filled with helium a 36-inch balloon for my oldest son’s first birthday. I didn’t actually realize just how massive a 36-inch balloon is. I stuffed it into the trunk of my small SUV and drove home, a little concerned about how it would fit in our one bedroom apartment but excited to see my son’s reaction to it. But when I opened the trunk, baby on my hip, I didn’t realize the string had broken. The part I grabbed onto was no longer tethered to the balloon, which quickly mounted to the sky, blown in the rather gusty May day. It didn’t help that a couple of teenagers, driving by, laughed at my catastrophe. My son pointed at the blue orb quickly disappearing into the atmosphere and shouted with glee, “Ball!”

This poem, written shortly afterwards, was my attempt as a relatively new mother to grieve and make light of an otherwise disappointing upheaval of my best laid plans. (Preparing for such upheavals is perhaps one of the main lessons motherhood has taught me in the last eight years.) I hope you enjoy it!

On Losing Your 36-inch First Birthday Balloon on a Windy Day:

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You exist somewhere between hope and dread.

Somewhere between want and fear.

You are chosen and unchosen, the accidents we will claim with love.

And also with regret and anger and the half-laughing, half-crying phrase, “What were we thinking?”

You are ours and never ours, potential only, though we have named you a dozen times or more, with the first name my finger traces in the baby-name book, with the name your dad joked about in an Irish park, with a name I repeat under my breath to know the sound of it, fearing and hoping I’ll someday have to say it aloud.

You have followed me since the very first time, through every cycle that made no sense, through every night-sweat and rage-clean and crying-session that might have been explained in a dozen different ways, but you were the only answer that could change everything. I have worried over you, asking myself if this drink or this medication or this activity meant I was a bad mother, even though you did not even exist.

You have existed, once, in a faint pink line in an Airbnb bathroom, the test I packed because I counted the days until I could hope in you. You were the secret we harbored as we said goodbye to family and drove home, your brothers asleep in the backseat. On that car ride, I told you I would love you forever, even if you didn’t make it. And you were the cramping and the blood, appearing so soon after that line I wondered if I even had a right to mourn you, to promise the kind of love I had promised. I have questioned if you were even there, if the line was only my imagination and my hope, a kind of greed when I already had two happy, healthy children.

You would have cancelled the existence of the little brother who came after you.

You were my daughter, and I named you. Every night, your dad’s arms around me, we pray to the saint we named you after.

You are my daughter every time, for despite all my love for your brothers, I cannot help the desire that lingers still in my heart. To have a girl. To dress you in hair bows and lilac dresses, to give your brothers the sister they’ve prayed for, to watch you grow into a woman.

It is a desire I don’t want, for I want to be happy with what I have. I will not choose you simply to fulfill my desires. Yet every time my heart whispers, But she could be yours.

And since you are only my imagination, then you can exist to be mine, the forever-imagined ideal of what a daughter is.

You are my other sons too, of course, the additions to my brood of wild and wondrous and cuddly little men. You are just as cute as they are. You will grow to be a man who looks like his dad, who carries my DNA and a piece of my heart with him wherever he goes. You exist at every age simultaneously—an infant in my arms and a child in a T-ball uniform, a teenager learning to drive and a man falling in love, a father and a grandfather learning again how to love. All at once. Only in your imagined potential can I love every version of you simultaneously.

If you come to be, then you will be a piece of our family we did not know we were missing.

But, these days, I do not think there is anything missing. You are an interruption to our carefully laid plans—an incision straight to our bank account and our dreams and our nights full of sleep.

How do I tell you this? Most days, I do not want you. But if you came—by our human error, by our love gone too far, by our changed minds, by the hand of God —then we would choose you, but you would break us in the process. You would break me with every week of your gestation. You would break our family, the way your brothers broke us, piece by piece, until we were something new entirely.

You are the one who brings forth the ugliest side of me, selfish and clinging to all the ways I want my life to be. Angry at my body. At your dad for carrying less of the burden than I do. At God for giving me more than I could handle.

You can’t blame me for fearing the anger, the destruction. You can’t blame me for avoiding you or delaying you or deciding against you altogether.

They say we will regret the children we decide not to have, but I could not choose all of you, even if I wanted. You are too numerous, too precarious, too impossibly spaced. Besides, regret is too fleeting a thing on which to base my life choices. I might regret the children I do have—when they are screaming, when I am tired, when our mutual humanness shows me all the easier ways I could be spending my time. If I choose you, I might regret all the ways your needs take me away from theirs.

The regret is not the point. The point is the choice to love that which I have right now.

And you do not exist, not right now. I am sorry if you never do. There is a part of me that wants to believe that heaven might be filled with your souls even still. What if a mother’s imagination and fear and love could be things strong enough to change the faces of eternity?

Every time you do not come, every time we decide against you, there is relief, like blood, flowing from me. But there is, too, an almost-grief, for you are a gift not given, an entire life not lived, a future I will ponder long after my body stops giving us the option of you.

In the end, you are only love, imperfect and infinite.

PS. This piece has been on my mind, in an unconscious way, for years. As you might imagine, I’ve been afraid to write it and share it because of its personal nature, and the vulnerable nature of the topic. I can only write out of my own experience, and in doing so hope it might resonate with others experiencing similar feelings. I am fully aware of how blessed I am to have the option of more children, and trust readers will understand this is not an invitation to tell me whether or not I should choose to do so. That said, I love reading your thoughts in the comments! Thank you for reading!

There is a Shumard Oak in our backyard that drops its leaves

In early January. We live in Texas,

Which is to say, the cold comes late

—if at all—

And the light that falls, how to describe it: like a piece of the sky,

like honey melting in golden chamomile

We drink when the sore throats

And the runny noses and the raspy coughs

Replace the holiday warmth, sickness of the body

To mimic a kind of sadness in the soul,

The celebrations, and the whole year with them, gone.

But for the light, and for the leaves.

For it is cold enough for the Shumard, its lobed and pinnate vestments,

To let tumble, brittle and brown,

To the ground. Every year, I ask myself:

How many leaves can one tree hold?

They cover the yard, the swing set, the cracked green slide

My children are outgrowing.

I rake the leaves into a pile, and listen

To their crunch, to the crisp, clapping glee of kids,

Squealing, scattering, descending,

Yet again, into the camouflage of crushed leaves.

It is the warmth of the light despite the cold

The joy, not of something ending

But of something renewed.

For January, despite all its frightening newness,

Has granted me again this light

This earth beneath a rake,

This dirt beneath my finger nails,

These puzzle piece shapes of broken leaves

In my child’s hands, opened, letting fly

And fall again,

A piece of the sky.

Thank you for reading! I don’t consider myself a poet, but I hope you enjoyed this attempt.

I hope this email doesn’t find you.

I hope you are lost, on purpose, somewhere by the sea, atop a mountain, in a moss-hushed forest where sunlight stretches down in dancing columns, turning the earth a green you’ve never seen.

I hope every sentence in the book you are reading flows like a stream into the next. I hope every chapter feels not long enough, like you have every right to say, “just one more.” I hope your heart feels bigger after the last page, as if every character has taught you, again, what it means to love.

I hope you fall in love. With a bowl of soup, a piece of cake, a slice of bread golden with butter. I hope you laugh like you haven’t in years with a friend who loves the sound of it, who put on lipstick and her favorite dress just so she could hear it and see the freckles that crinkle on your nose.

I hope you are drinking a warm drink in the cold or a cold one in the sunshine. I hope you are having so much fun, you forget to take any pictures, you forget your phone in another room, you forget that time has ever made you feel guilty for existing without counting its seconds. I hope your hands are holding someone else’s.

I hope you feel the goodness of the very breath in your lungs, the warmth as you inhale, the relief as you exhale. I hope, for just this moment, the world simply lets you be without asking anything more of you.

If it finds you at all, I hope this email finds you well.

With love,

Alexa

PS. If you enjoyed this piece, can you please share it with a friend?

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The name’s Newman.

You’ve probably never heard of me, but I’m the New Year’s Bunny.

Or, at least I was.

You’ve heard of the Easter Bunny, right? Of course you have. Everyone’s heard of him.

You see, the Easter Bunny’s real name is Edward. I would know because I’m his brother.

His little brother.

I come from a pretty big family. My parents taught us all to work hard and strive for success. Well, Edward took “success” to a whole new level. He worked real hard and got elected Easter Bunny for Life.

To bunnies, becoming the Easter Bunny is basically as important as becoming the President of the United States. Or the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Or the Queen of England. It’s about as successful as a Bunny can be.

So, yeah, Edward is kind of a big deal in the family. He brings delicious candy and sparkly eggs to all the good little boys and girls at Easter time. To top it off, he also gave all my other brothers and sisters jobs at the Easter factory.

Now, don’t get me wrong. He offered me a job too. It’s just that I don’t really care for candy all too much—gets stuck in my front teeth. And the glitter from painting eggs stays in your fur for weeks.

No, I wanted to do something different, to make a real difference. So, I got to thinking about all the holidays. Easter’s got the Bunny. Christmas has Santa. St. Patrick’s Day has that leprechaun guy. And they all bring some sort of gift—candy or toys or luck.

But what does New Year’s have? A bunch of people staying up way past their bedtimes and counting? I decided the world needed a change. I mean, it’s the new YEAR for crying out loud. The beginning, a fresh start, a turning point, when people make resolutions. You know, plans to change for the better.

Kids decide to keep their room clean or to wake up on time or to get good grades or to travel the world. They want to become the best versions of themselves.

But, the thing is, most people give up or forget about their resolutions after a couple months. By the time Easter rolls around, their room’s a mess, they’re failing school, they’re stuck in the same old town. How’s a bunch of candy going to help them get their lives together?

So, I thought I could bring people something they really need on New Year’s. Something way better than candy…

Gumption.

Gumption is that special ingredient that makes you decide to do something and stick with it. It’s like courage mixed with determination with a dash of cleverness. It’s what makes a bunny—or, well, anyone—a success.

And where do you find gumption?

In my special carrot cake, of course.

I’ve been eating my special carrot cake for years, and I know it’s where I got my gumption because it’s what gave me the idea to be the New Year’s Bunny. It’s what gave me the determination to make it happen.

So, the day before the day before the New Year, I set to work whipping up batch upon batch of my special carrot cake. The sweet, carroty aroma filled my rabbit hole, and when I took a little bite, I knew this stuff had more gumption in it than any batch I’d ever made before. I could feel the gumption-y energy rushing through my little paws. I frosted the cakes and added a carrot on top for good luck (and appearances). And on New Year’s Eve, I put them all carefully in my great big carrot cake sack and set out to deliver them to all the boys and girls making resolutions.

But, you see, I made one fatal mistake. I’d forgotten that Santa and the Easter Bunny and even that leprechaun guy tend to work while everyone is asleep. But people don’t go to bed on New Year’s Eve.

No, people stay up late, really late. In fact, most people stay up until the stroke of midnight. They shout “Happy New Year!” really loudly, with confetti and streamers and music! They dance and celebrate and set off giant explosions from rooftops!

And if you’re not expecting all that commotion as you carry a heavy bag of carrot cake up the side of a building, it can be pretty startling. Terrifying, even.

I lost my balance, toppling off that thin, slippery windowsill, twisting and kicking and flailing as carrot cakes flew from my bag. We landed right in the gutter, a big kerplop into the sad, brown, melty Christmas snow.

So, there I was, a soggy bunny with what was left of my soggy carrot cakes, and all of my gumption flowing downstream. The New Year’s Bunny. Was I a joke or what? How could I ever face my family again?

“Pssst!!” came a sneaky voice.

“What? Who’s there?” I raised both ears high and tried to put on my bravest face.

“Pssst, over here,” the voice said again. “In the trashcan.”

Two yellow eyes peered at me above the rim of a dumpster. I had the instinct to scoot on out of there, but then the rest of him emerged. Sure, he looked a bit rough around the edges, even for a raccoon, but he didn’t seem like the type to hurt an innocent bunny.

“Oh. Hi. I didn’t see you there,” I said.

“Hi. I’m Phil,” he said. “Phil of New Dumpstershire.”

“I’m Newman,” I replied. “Of…of…the New Year.”

“Newman of the New Year? That’s catchy.”

“You really think so?” I asked, trying to keep my whiskers from twitching with eagerness. But Phil just shrugged, and then pointed at the mounds of cake and frosting behind me.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you’re not going to eat that cake.”

“Oh, this? I mean, you can have it if you want.”

“YASSSS!” shouted Phil, and he landed with a sticky plop in the pile of cake. “Mmmm delicious. Did you make it?” he asked, licking his fingers.

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure all the gumption’s washed away,” I sighed. I stared up at the house I’d fallen from, where you could see people dancing and shouting and already forgetting their resolutions.

“All the what?”

“The gumption…You know, courage, determination, cleverness. The stuff of success…”

I turned back as Phil laughed, his frosting-coated teeth bared wide with amusement.

“Why are you laughing??” I demanded.

“Because you don’t get gump…gump—whatever you call it—from a cake.”

I blinked at Phil. “Well, where do you get it from?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not something that gets washed out or thrown out. At least, I’ve never seen any in these trashcans or in this drain. Pretty sure it’s something you already have in you.”

My pink nose tickled, the way it did when it sensed something interesting. “Huh,” I said. “I’d never thought of it that way.”

“Well, sure. Take me for instance,” began Phil, strolling back toward his trashcan. “I’m known as a pretty successful raccoon in these parts—I’ve got a reputation for finding the best trashcan burgers and dumpster milkshakes this side of the interstate. And nobody came along and gave me my success. I got here because I just kept trying.”

“But didn’t people help you sometimes?” I asked, crossing my front paws.

Phil thought for a minute. “I guess they did. My cousin Stan’s got a nose for French fries.”

“See! Everyone needs help sometimes.”

“Well, of course!” Phil laughed. “But I just don’t think carrot cake is the answer. Don’t get me wrong: it was delicious.” And with a loud burp, Phil disappeared back into his trashcan.

So maybe people don’t need gumption cake on New Year’s. If only there were easier ways to package words of encouragement or helping paws. But I have a whole year to figure it out, and I know I’ve got the gumption to make it happen.

THE END

Happy New Year! Thank you for reading and subscribing!

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Their favorite way to love is through snuggles that turn violent. The seven-year-old is big enough to tackle me now, and the five-year-old comes to my rescue, latching on to his brother to drag him away. The one-year-old giggles, gleefully, as I roll him in circles on the grass.

From the rooftop, Joseph watches us as he installs Christmas lights before the first true blast of winter befalls us. He takes a picture of our chaos in the yard and I think it’s cute that these are the photos he finds worth capturing—not the ones where I look put together and posed, but the messy silliness, workout attire and grass in my hair. Our children ecstatic at the triumph of wrestling me to the ground.

Earlier this morning, as I sipped tea not yet cold and we made a plan for the weekend—Christmas lights, a caroling party with good friends, cookies—I told Joseph I was happy. So happy. It wasn’t just that I was excited for the weekend. I was speaking of a contentment I often struggle to come by—a sense of peace, that all was well and would be well. The tight place in my chest where anxiety usually resides had loosened, opening a space to allow me to feel the joy I might otherwise intellectualize.

I am always aware of my blessings. But to feel their goodness is another thing entirely.

In the driveway as Joseph climbs down from the roof, I tell him it looks wonderful. I am struck by how simple it is: he hung some lights and now it is beautiful. My brothers and I joke that Christmas decorations in our childhood home were often marred by family fights that made twinkling lights and evergreen boughs feel less than magical. I can’t hold it against our parents, for behind their mistakes I know there were larger wounds they shielded us from. But I sometimes find it hard to express how relieved I am that an extension cord or a crooked Christmas tree does not spiral into marital discord, ruining an entire day for us and our children.

At this moment, all is good, and I remind myself that the goodness does not necessitate some rising action, some calamity that will sabotage my joy. Who can say if it’s trauma or a storyteller’s brain that forebodes disaster.

Joseph and I have just returned from a trip to Rome, entrusting our children to the care of grandparents while we were gone. In the days leading up to our flight, I imagined everything that could possibly go wrong: the kids getting sick, missing our flight connection, a world catastrophe that closed down every airport. On the flight over—after, indeed, a delay and a reroute—I imagined a gas leak killing my mother-in-law and my children in their sleep, a car accident taking my mother and all my children, or a plane crash leaving our children orphans. I imagined every possible bad thing because I was holding so tightly to the hope of a restorative trip and a joyful homecoming. A small part of my brain thought by imagining the worst it might protect me, though it was a logic more primal than rational.

But besides a few hiccups—arguing with an airline attendant in Madrid to print our boarding passes—the trip was everything and more than we hoped it would be. Childless for seven days, it was like we were kids again, in love and unburdened, marveling at every beautiful thing.

Returned home, I find it that much easier to appreciate my children, to marvel at their wonder at the season and relish in their aggressive affection. And after a full Saturday—the lights hung and carols sung around a fire—I’m still marveling at my own happiness when, washing my hair, I finger over a bruise at the base of my ear. I don’t remember hitting myself, and when I describe it to Joseph, his concern makes me nervous. A few years ago, he suffered a bout of shingles that started with the same kind of pain in the same spot.

By morning, the pain is radiating down my neck, not in a debilitating way, but enough to make me begin spiraling. I think of Christmas plans derailed, of skin that turns to scaly blisters that leave me incapable of finishing holiday preparations, let alone caring for a very needy toddler. And after a week in Italy, there are quite a few preparations I need to accomplish (shopping and baking and decorations).

I can’t help the thought, seeded at the first touch of pain, growing now into a conviction: here is the calamity my previous happiness forebode.

I keep recalling the scene in Finding Nemo, when the anxious clown fish sees a glowing light and says, “I’m feeling happy, which is a big deal for someone like me,” only to find himself face to face with a monstrous anglerfish, the blissful light its treacherous lure.

Under all my anxiety lurks a sense of guilt: shingles is often a stress-induced illness. Despite how wonderful our trip to Europe, I can’t deny the stress of the separation from my children and the long travel days. I can only think: this is your fault.

When the Telehealth doctor says he can’t prescribe anything unless there’s a rash, I feel doubly stupid, like a hypochondriac seeking attention.

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” says Joseph. Then, holding me close, he assures me it isn’t my fault, that we’ll be okay. “I’ll take care of you.”

There’s a silliness in his tone, masking a deeper sincerity—he knows me, knows exactly where my train of thought was headed, knows that, deep down, all I really want is for someone to tell me it’s going to be okay.

For despite the chaos of the season, it is peace we are seeking as we prepare for the Christmas holiday. The sparkling lights and serene nativity sets, the togetherness of gift-giving and the aroma of cookies baking: it is all in an attempt to hold on to a feeling of wellbeing.

How strange that the moral of a story where everything goes wrong—a child conceived out of wedlock, a birth in a stable, a king born amid poverty—is peace. Whether you believe in its truth or not, you must admit the poetry of the story and how well it speaks to the human heart. Suffering need not contradict joy. Messiness need not detract from redemption. Goodness enters in the midst of pain and chaos and transforms it.

I don’t have shingles. I’ve been taking an arsenal of supplements, gifted by a friend whose husband recently recovered from the illness. I’ve been trying to rest, trying not to worry about every little detail of the holiday. I’ve been contemplating the Christmas story, how it promises joy in the midst of things going wrong.

I have been seeing how sometimes the things that go wrong can bring into focus my blessings just as well as the things that go right. On our trip to Europe, I found myself contemplating the blessings of my faith, of a loving husband, of children to love, of a supportive community keeping our home and family safe. The prospect of illness did not detract from those things. And those are the things—not a perfect, Pinterest-inspired Christmas tree, not six dozen cookies baked, not overflowing stockings—that form the pillars of true peace and joy.

Whether your holidays meet your every expectation or whether they reflect the chaos of that first Christmas, I hope you experience a sense of peace and joy.

Love,

Alexa

PS. If you still have some last minute shopping on your list, I’m offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions until the end of the year!

When I started listening to Christmas music this year, my seven-year-old was aghast. “Really? It’s not even December!”

When I started humming Holly Jolly Christmas at the dinner table the other night, he looked at my cynically and said, “See what happens when you listen to Christmas music? It gets stuck in your head.”

He is his father’s son.

You would think my early festiveness would correlate with an early completion of holiday shopping. To which I answer, how silly. It wouldn’t be Christmas without a steady stream of Amazon packages on our doorstep right up until December 25th.

If, like me, you did not finish all your Christmas shopping over Black Friday Month1, here is an extremely niche gift list for the weird writer in your life. Likely, if you subscribe to my newsletter, I am the weird writer in your life, which is convenient, seeing as I can only really vouch that I would appreciate (most of) these gifts.

Yet Another Pretty Journal

Yes, writers have too many journals already. Yes, you will still make the writer in your life infinitely happy with a new, beautiful journal. The thing is, sometimes we need multiple journals because we’re working on multiple projects at the same time. Sometimes, we need a new journal because we need new inspiration and we’re just not getting it from the spiral notebook we bought at Target. This one from Papier allows you to monogram their initials!

Writer-Themed Tote Bag

When I go write in a coffee shop, I can’t just bring a laptop bag and my wallet. I need a bag with give, capable of holding not only my laptop but also my notebooks, the various books I’m reading simultaneously, and a little snack to sneak because I’m not buying the over-priced coffeeshop croissant. Basically, I need a bag that can hold all my wistful ambitions while advertising to my fellow coffeeshop denizens that I Am A Writer.

In all seriousness though, I would bet a lot of coffee money that the writer in your life would appreciate any amount of writer-themed swag off Etsy. This is just one that I found, though I’d be pretty devastated if my typewriter started growing vegetation.

Typewriter or Typewriter Keyboard

Speaking of typewriters, if the writer in your life does not yet own one, let me be the one to tell you: they want a typewriter. They want the satisfying clink of keys. They want the nostalgia vibes of a time when getting paid $20 for a story could actually put food on the table for a week. They want to get distracted staring out the window rather than staring at a screen.

When I was in college, my boyfriend (now husband) bought and fixed up a 1950s Underwood Typewriter. It is still one of the most romantic gifts he has ever given me.2 That being said, it’s not the easiest to actually write with. There are plenty of modern typewriters on the market, as well as wireless typewriter keyboards to make writing on a computer a little more fun.

Waterproof Notebook

I’ve been seeing ads for these all over social media, which just means the algorithm knows me too well. Do you know how many times I’ve solved a plot issue in the shower? Only to have to repeat it to myself over and over again so I don’t forget it before I wash my hair. It’s happened enough times that I’m thinking of buying this for myself if it doesn’t end up in my stocking this year.

Books on Craft

I find the nebulous time between December 25th and January 2nd, as I float through life full of dairy and cookies, to be an excellent occasion for reading books that spark creativity. A few books I’ve enjoyed (or had recommended):

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story by John Yorke

The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

For a full list of books I recommend, visit my Bookshop.org page.

Rooms of Their Own: Where Great Writers Write

We purchased this book for my brother-in-law, who is a screenwriter, last year and I really almost kept it for myself. Full of beautiful illustrations and inspirational quotes from an array of authors, this is a really unique book for any writer’s collection, and it doubles as the perfect coffee table decor.

NovelTea Tins

I have a confession to make: I actually hate coffee. I really should have been born in Britain for how much I prefer tea. I will drink tea no matter the season, and I’m always looking for new and exciting flavors. When I came across NovelTea Tins, a company with tea tins designed with the original art of great books, I was actually jealous I hadn’t come up with the idea. Their name is even a pun! Anyways, the overlap of bookish nerds and tea nerds is clearly a viable market, so you can’t go wrong buying the writer in your life a tea tin with the original Dune cover.

Subscriptions

Remember that joke about writers getting paid the same amount for a story today as Jo March earned in the 1860s? Writing is not exactly a lucrative business for most of us, which means we can’t subscribe to as many journals and newsletters as we might like to (thereby supporting the careers of other writers). You can easily look up the top literary journals and masterclasses for writers, so I thought I’d recommend a few Substacks about writing I really enjoy.

SubMakk

Rebecca Makkai's Substack: mostly writing and books! but also Zillow, true crime, etymology, food, general inanity

By Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai, besides being a finalist for Pulitzer Prize, is an expert on craft while. She’s also hilarious.

I met Diana at a writing workshop a few years ago and she’s a lovely person in addition to being an incredible writer. Paid subscribes enjoy complimentary quarterly workshops!

Submission Sunday

Eight curated literary submission opportunities every other Sunday for all genres.

By Chris Daley

Full of super helpful links to journals, residencies, and grants accepting submissions, Chris takes a lot of the hassle out of the submission process.

Free Babysitting

If your weird writer friend is also a parent, pray for their children. Or, actually, offer to take their children to the park so they can have an hour or two to write in silence. Everyone will be a little more sane afterwards and maybe they’ll even put you in the acknowledgements of their future book!

In all seriousness, I’m always beyond grateful to the friends and family members who entertain my children so I can use words to create little weirdos with relatable trauma (coincidentally helping me not turn my children into little weirdos with trauma.)

Glass Jar to Hold Tears, Literary Matches to Burn Bad Ideas, Revenge Mugs

You may think I’m joking. I am only mostly joking. There’s a big difference between mostly joking and all joking.3

Sometimes, we melancholic writers need a little humor to help us through the plot headaches, the rejection letters, and the stories that go nowhere. These bookish matches are totally adorable and would work just as well lighting a cozy candle as burning a bad first draft.

And every writer daydreams about immortalizing the downfall of their enemies in literature.

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Thanks for reading! Off to get more Christmas music stuck in my head.

Love,

Alexa

Patch was going to Europe. He had the Europe money in his backpack and he when he got to Europe he would put it in the Bank of Europe. He’d planned it all out the moment he found the paper money on Dad’s desk. It had a big number 5 on it, which meant it was $500! Dad had said once that the paper money was worth 100 of the coin money.

There weren’t any cars on the street as Patch walked across it. Patch had made sure of it because he pressed the button that made a little glowing man show up on the sign across the street. That meant no cars could come and smash him dead. The dragons on Patch’s rain boots lit up like sparklers as he sloshed in the puddles. He was glad he’d worn his rain boots. Mama always said he couldn’t splash in puddles without them.

He had also brought Pig, a flashlight, his three favorite rocks, a butter knife, and The Wind in the Willows, the soft copy. He couldn’t read, but he could still look at the pictures and remember the story and eventually he would learn how to read it too. Sam knew how to read now, because Sam was six and a half. It wasn’t fair that Sam was bigger and that he would always be bigger, especially because Sam did not eat as much burgers as Patch did. But Sam was not as brave as Patch was. Patch was brave enough to cross the street all by himself and to go to Europe.

As soon as Patch got to the other sidewalk, a super loud truck drove by, and Patch put his hands over his ears. It was a pretty cool truck—blue with light-up wheels!—and Patch watched it turn at the stoplight. It wasn’t fair that that guy had such a cool truck while Patch and his family did not. That guy was probably Mean and Nasty. When Patch got big, he would get a truck that big. Or he would get one even bigger. He would get a whole house that could drive. Or he would get a whole skyscraper with wheels and buttons!

Patch made it to the park and climbed up the red slide and stood at the very top, with his legs spread out wide for balance. The sky was gray and the clouds were lumpy but it still stung Patch’s eyes to look up too long. There weren’t any planes in the sky right now, and Patch knew you had to go on a long plane ride to get to Europe. Mama and Dad had gone there on a long plane ride while he and Sam stayed with Grandpa and Nana. That was before baby Victoria had popped out of Mama’s belly. Mama and Dad had shown Patch and Sam pictures of Europe—castles and statues and really big trains. They told them that someday they could also go to Europe, but Patch had been waiting a really long time and they had never gone.

Patch slid down the slide. He found a bench and sat down because his feet were tired. He took out Pig, who was a little squished, but Pig was always a little squished, especially his nose and his ears. Pig’s eyes were also scratched up and he had a hole under his chin that Mama said she would sew up but she hadn’t yet. Twirling his fingers through Pig’s curly tail, Patch stuck the middle fingers of his other hand into his mouth and sucked on them. It made him feel braver, but also sleepy, and his tummy hurt a little bit.

He was probably hungry. He wished he had could have packed some fruit snacks in his backpack too, but they were on the top shelf of the pantry. Mama had said he could have one if he didn’t go in her room while she was lying down with baby Victoria. He had waited and waited for Mama to come out of the room but she never did, so that’s when he decided he would go to Europe with the Europe money. Maybe they would have fruit snacks there.

As he was sitting there, a man walked up to the swing set. There was no one else at the park, and the man sat down on one swing, which Patch thought was funny, because the man was big and he made the swing look so small. The man pushed off the ground and started swinging so high that the chains made a loud squeak and then a thud every time the man came back down. The man was wearing fuzzy shoes like slippers but they showed his toes.

Patch got down from the bench and started digging through the mulch with the end of his butter knife. He wondered if he could dig to the other side of the world, but Sam said you’d have to dig through lava to get there. Patch wished Sam were here and he wondered if it was time to go pick up Sam from school yet.

Whenever Sam got in the car from school, Patch always stuck his legs out so Sam would have to climb over him to get to his seat. Sam would always shove his legs and tell him to move. Patch didn’t know why it was so hard to have a Calm Body when Sam got home. Mama always said that Sam needed space and Patch knew it was because Sam had been with other people all day, but Patch wasn’t other people.

He didn’t like it when Sam and Mama and Dad told him they needed space. They were always saying that baby Victoria needed space and that Mama had a big booboo in her tummy from baby Victoria popping out of it. Mama couldn’t do anything now except always be holding baby Victoria. That was why Patch was going to Europe all by himself.

The man on the swing had slowed down now and he looked over at Patch and waved. Patch waved back. The man smiled and his eyes got smaller. Patch really wanted to swing, so he left his things and walked over.

“Hi,” said Patch.

“Hi,” said the big man. He had a mustache and a beard but his head was mostly bald. His t-shirt was purple and had a picture of a wolf on it. “What’s your name?” the man asked.

“Peter Augustine,” said Patch. “But my nickname is Patch.”

“Where’s your mom?”

Patch pointed in the direction of his neighborhood. “Where’s your mom?”

“She’s at work,” said the big man. “She works at Kroger.”

“My dad’s at work,” he said. “He works in an office with computers.”

“My dad lives far away.”

Patch pulled himself into the swing next to the man. The swing was too high off the ground for him to get it started on his own, even though Patch knew how to swing all by himself.

“Want a push?” asked the big man.

Patch nodded.

The big man leaned over and gave Patch a giant push. Not even Dad gave pushes that big, and Patch felt a little scared, especially when the swing wobbled side to side because it was going so fast. The big man laughed and gave him another push.

“That’s too high,” said Patch, but the big man kept laughing and pushing him higher and higher.

“Stop!” said Patch. “Stop!”

The big man yanked on the chain of the swing, which jerked Patch to the side and slowed him down. Patch tried to hold on but the chains slipped out of his hands and he fell out of the swing, landing on his hands and knees in the mulch. It hurt his palms and his heart was beating like a drum and he wanted to cry but he would not let the crying come out in front of the big man.

“Oopsie!” said the big man, who also got down in the mulch. He reached over and started tickling Patch under his arms. “Tickle fight!” he said.

Patch flipped onto his back, using his boots to scoot himself away from the man, even though more mulch poured into them and poked his legs. He bumped into the pole of the swing set and he didn’t like this, he didn’t like this man, he didn’t like the shape of his hands, how they felt soft and squishy on his arms, he didn’t like the man’s big smile and he didn’t like that Mama and Sam and Dad weren’t here, he wanted them to come right now, he should go back home but he remembered how far he had walked and now home was so far away, maybe even farther away than Europe and he didn’t want to go to Europe anymore, he wanted to grow up and be a dad before he went to Europe all by himself, he was so mad and maybe this man was Mean and Patch shouted, “I need space!”

The man stopped tickling him and sat back on his legs. Now, the man seemed smaller, maybe not that much bigger than Sam. He was breathing loudly and still smiling but when Patch wiped his face with his arm, the man stopped smiling.

“I’m sorry. I was just having fun.”

Before baby Victoria came, whenever they went somewhere, Mama would tell Patch and Sam to remember the rules. Have a Calm Body and Use Kind Words and the last thing: Have Fun!

But this wasn’t fun. Candy was fun. Patch wanted to go home and have his fruit snacks.

“Are you okay?” asked the man.

Patch nodded. He stood up and walked back to the bench, where he put his butter knife into his backpack, zipped it closed, and put it on. He hugged Pig and twirled the curly tail through his fingers.

“Do you want to come to my house?” the big man asked as he walked over to Patch.

Patch thought about this. He did not want to go to this man’s house, but a grownup had never asked him to come to their house before. It was strange, and Patch wondered if maybe this man was big but wasn’t really a grownup.

“I have Mario Kart and Zelda.”

Patch didn’t know who Mario Cart and Zelda were.

“I’m really good at Mario Kart. And I have a new game called Europa.”

Patch lifted his head in surprise. “You have a game about Europe? I have Europe money.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out the soft paper money, with the picture of a castle on one side. “Dad said you can only use it in Europe. So I was going to put it in the Bank of Europe. Do you know where it is?”

The big man stared at the money for a long time. When he reached out for it, Patch pulled it back. He saw again how big and squishy the man’s hands were and he was afraid the man might try to tickle him again or even take his money. He remembered one time Dad had given money to a man on the side of the road who didn’t have a home. But this man said he had a home.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I could look it up. I’m good at looking stuff up.”

Patch always liked it when Dad looked stuff up on his phone, because then he would let Patch and Sam watch a video about it, like the time he looked up how tires were made. Patch and Sam would sit next to Dad on the couch, but Patch didn’t want to sit next to this man on his couch, because then maybe Patch wouldn’t know how to get back to his own house from there.

“I have to go now,” said Patch.

“Want me to go with you?”

“No. I know how to get home all by myself.”

As Patch ran away, the big man shouted bye but Patch didn’t slow down, Pig under his arm and his backpack slapping against his bottom.

He was almost to the stoplight when a van stopped right next to him.

“Patch!” he heard someone scream, and it didn’t sound like anyone he knew but then Mama jumped out and ran around the front of the van and Patch realized it was their van with the little scratch on the sliding door.

Mama wasn’t even wearing any shoes.

“Ohmygod, Patch.”

She knelt down on the sidewalk and when she hugged him she squished him so tightly it hurt his whole body. Baby Victoria was crying inside the van and Mama wouldn’t stop squeezing him.

“What were you doing, Patch? You can’t just leave the house…”

“You’re hurting my arm!”

“Are you okay?”

Patch started to cry and Mama picked him up. She took off his backpack and opened the van door and placed him in his car seat. He kept crying as she strapped him in, and baby Victoria was crying so loudly it made him even angrier. He kicked his legs and put his hands over his ears and he could not have a Calm Body he would never have a Calm Body again.

When Mama got into her seat, she sat there for a long time, and then she put her head on the steering wheel. Her hair was sticking up out of the top of a big twist on top of her head. Mama picked up the phone and put it to her ear. Patch couldn’t hear what she said but he wanted to know who she was calling, but she didn’t talk for very long. She dropped the phone into the little cupholder and rubbed both her eyes with her fingertips. Finally, she started driving, and baby Victoria stopped crying and Patch found Pig’s curly tail again and stuck his fingers in his mouth.

As they drove, Mama talked to Patch. She said things like Safe and Strangers and So Scared and Lost Forever. She said something about Dad and Calling the Police and asked lots of times if That Made Sense.

“But Mama you knowed where I was.”

“I didn’t know where you were, Patch. I thought somebody took you.”

“But you found me.”

“Yes, thank God,” said Mama.

Patch was tired, and his fingers felt so good in his mouth, even though they tasted a little like the mulch on the playground had smelled.

After a while, Mama stopped talking. They were almost to Sam’s school.

“Mama?”

“What?”

“Can we go to Europe someday?”

“Sure, buddy, someday.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, Patch.”

“Can I have a fruit snack when we get home?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you said I could have one after quiet time!”

“Yes, but you ran away from home! That was not a good choice!”

They were waiting behind the other cars in front of Sam’s school. Baby Victoria started to cry. Her cry sounded like lots of needles poking Patch.

“But I didn’t know I couldn’t have a fruit snack.”

Mama rested her head on the steering wheel again and because Patch was worried she would crash into the car in front of her, he let out a loud sound, like a pterodactyl shrieking.

“Patch, for the love of God, please!”

Patch’s eyes stung and his chest hurt and his whole body felt hot. Mama was Mean and she wasn’t supposed to be Mean. “That was too loud,” he said. “Say sorry!”

“Patch, you were being too loud! You need to say sorry for running away. Where were you even going?”

Patch wanted to tell her that he was going to Europe, but he didn’t want her to take away the Europe money he’d found on Dad’s desk. He didn’t want her to be angry at him. He wanted her to be angry at the big man for pushing him too hard and for tickling him. He wanted her to say sorry for always cuddling baby Victoria instead of him. He liked baby Victoria and he even sort of liked the big man, but there were some things about them he didn’t like. It made Patch very confused.

“I’m sorry,” said Mama. “Patch, sweetie, Mama’s sorry. Okay?” She stretched her neck up and looked at him through the mirror. He could only see her eyes as she stared at him. “Are you okay?”

Patch sniffed and rubbed his nose. He stuck his fingers back in his mouth and nodded. A few minutes later, they pulled up to the front of the carline. Sam got in through the sliding door. Patch almost put his feet on the chair in front of him to block Sam’s way. But he decided to give Sam space.

Thank you for reading! This story was an exercise in writing in the point of view of a character who is (unknowingly) unreliable. Specifically, I wanted to write a story in the point of view of a little boy because I have a little boy whose point of view is sometimes completely baffling to me. Many of his opinions were inspired by my now five-year-old.

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Often, after I publish a personal essay or a piece of fiction, readers reach out to me to thank me for being vulnerable. I’m always very touched by this reaction (actually, I joke that my love language is just people reading and complimenting my writing). I wonder if such a compliment is fully merited. And lately, I’ve wondered why “being vulnerable” is something we find praiseworthy.

Here is the dictionary definition of vulnerable: able to be easily physically or mentally hurt, influenced, or attacked.

This definition makes me think of a baby bird, chirping desperately for its mother, a predator lurking nearby.

But when people thank me for being vulnerable, I know they are not thanking me for weakness. There is a difference between powerlessness and choosing to drop your guard. Indeed, when we thank someone for their vulnerability, we are often thanking them for a kind of strength: the strength of honesty, of an openness in the name of truth. We are thanking them for their courage.

I think this is why I sometimes question how worthy I am of the compliment. I don’t often feel brave when I write; I feel compelled to put my thoughts into words. It feels less like a virtue exercised and more like a necessity met. I write because I need to speak some truth I can no longer suppress.

I believe most artists would explain their art in a similar way—a kind of unburdening, some deep human need revealed in the striving for beauty.

This is not to say that art—the act of writing itself—is easy. The work I am most proud of (not always but often the work most complimented) is usually the work that demanded the most from me, each sentence a painstaking unraveling.

So perhaps this is part of what we compliment when we thank someone’s vulnerability: Not just their bravery but the effort it entailed, the emotional (and sometimes physical) toll.

Sometimes, I fear our culture commends vulnerability too much. On social media, people post videos of themselves crying over heartbreaks and humiliations, sharing their intimate grief with strangers across the world. There is a kind of exhibitionist nature to this vulnerability, the artifice of it never entirely escapable. I can’t help imagining how the person filming themselves had to take the time to set up the camera while they were crying, and then had to expend the effort to edit the video before posting it. What is presented as raw human emotion is actually a curated bid for attention.

As a writer using a social media platform to share her thoughts, perhaps I don’t have the right to criticize curated bids for attention. Part of what makes anything on social media “vulnerable” is the openness to interpretation. When we share something online, we are leaving ourselves exposed to criticism and misunderstanding. We share in an attempt for connection, but I cannot be entirely convinced that a screen provides true connection anymore than it allows virtuous vulnerability.

I am attempting to define a vulnerability that is virtuous. In the face of artificial intelligence encroaching upon every part of our lives, human vulnerability seems the touchstone of art, the thing that perhaps allows us to define it as such. A computer or a robot can never be vulnerable in the way that commands our respect, that moves us because we see in it the best and worst of ourselves.

So perhaps this is what we mean when we compliment vulnerability in art: an honesty that is personal but not self-serving, striving instead for some universal truth that can only be achieved when one person drops her defenses, revealing her humanness, her brokenness alongside her strengths. When another person can see himself in the revelation, it then becomes a mirror for the whole of humanity.

A virtuous vulnerability, then, both entails and enables compassion.

Brené Brown defines vulnerability in a similar way, seeing it as the benchmark of human connection. While vulnerability leaves us open to criticism, heartbreak, shame, and pain, it is also the only thing that can truly allow us to experience fulfillment, love, and joy. This TED talk is fourteen years old, but it’s still incredibly timely.

In the novel Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout, Tyler Caskey is a widowed minister struggling to lead his parish in the midst of his personal grief. As the novel unfolds, his congregation begins to doubt his abilities as a minister, with small-town rumors growing out of anger and distrust. Toward the end of the novel, having become aware of the gossip, Tyler writes a sermon to castigate his congregation for their “infantile grandiosity.” Full of anger, he rises to the pulpit to preach, only to find himself unable to speak. Rather, seeing the well-known faces of the churchgoers, his anger gives way to his grief and, before his entire congregation, he begins to weep. The narrator describes it with a straightforward tenderness: “He did not hide his face; it did not occur to him to do so.”

And it is this honest display of grief, this vulnerability that he could no longer contain, that ultimately moves his parishioners. Describing one of the instigators of the gossip, the novel reads, “The minute she had seen Tyler Caskey begin to weep, she understood without words forming inside her that her angry thoughts and assumptions about his character had simply not been true.”

At first, Tyler is ashamed of his outburst and believes he should resign, but the novel beautifully reveals how it is precisely his vulnerability that not only prompts the compassion of the town but also allows him to grieve properly, to become a better minister, to rediscover joy.

The novel is a wonder in that the vulnerability of these fictional characters urges us to look more closely at ourselves, to discover compassion for the real people (flawed as they are) around us. The novel is a work of art in the truest sense.

Sometimes, I get nervous about sharing my writing. When someone in the “real world” tells me they read my Substack, I’m always a little bit in shock. I tell them thank you, and I really do mean it. Not just because of the vulnerability writing entails, but also because there is a kind of vulnerability in reading. You are giving me your time and attention, an almost miraculous gift in our fast-paced age of warred-upon attention spans. In the five minutes it’s taken you to read this, you have lent me your thoughts, which is to say yourself. You’ve let down your guard enough to take in my meandering attempts at meaning-making.

I couldn’t be more grateful.