Daycare-wide email we received this week:

Hi All,

We inherited a few crayfish quite a while back that were found in the grassy area. They have become “pets” for P1 & P2. They love their new home so much, they decided it would be the perfect place to raise a family… and so the population explosion began.

Our 2 quick questions are as follows:

Does anyone have a fish tank about 15–20 gallons that they are no longer using and be willing to donate to P2?

Who would LOVE to have a crayfish as a pet?

If you have an older tank or would like a low maintenance pet that doesn’t shed, please check in with the P2 team :-)

A little background material to share:

1. “Found in the grassy area.” Daycare is not near a creek. Last year some people on our street had a crawfish boil, like on the sidewalk. IT SEEMED AT THE TIME as if this shouldn’t be allowed. I’ve checked in on the crayfish at daycare for months and only this week put together that they must be escapees from the boil, meaning that they somehow crossed a street and got into the grass behind daycare.
2. It wasn’t “crayfish” multiple, it was crayfish one. For a long time there was one crayfish in the tank at daycare. The tank is in a counter in the bathroom that separates the two preschool classrooms from each other. I visited it once in awhile and one day I noticed that there was more than one. “You got more crayfish?” I asked Alice’s teacher Caitlin. She explained to me that the crayfish had spontaneously reproduced. They can do this apparently, so that’s miraculous and horrifying.
3. So for awhile there were some smaller crayfish in the tank.
4. I looked in on Monday and the big crayfish was holding just the head of one of the small crayfish in its claws. Not its big “main” pincher claws but its small underbody claws like oh, whatever this old thing just got stuck there after I finished eating it, like how Hugh constantly has Cheerios and bits of strawberries stuck to his legs.
5. Email sent out on Tuesday so I guess someone else had also felt compelled to act by Monday’s events. I love the wording of this email so much because there is no mention of the spontaneous reproduction or cannibalization or any of the other fucking disgusting things the crayfish are doing. It’s very “our crayfish are running out of room for their expanding family and are looking for a new home!”

I had a very, very brief twinge of “maybe we should take the crayfish they’ve been through so much.” It’s like that one goat that escapes from a slaughterhouse in the Bronx, runs through city streets becoming NYC’s sweetheart, and gets to retire to a farm upstate. But then I was like NO, NO, STOP. Instead I’ve just been thinking about them all week.

Then I wondered if I should tell the teachers “oh hey yeah we’re going to take them home” and instead put them into Fresh Pond in Cambridge, but I ran this by my boss (who is from Louisiana and has been mocking my spelling of “crayfish” on Slack — it’s supposed to be “crawfish,” according to him [yes, I’ve been talking about this to like everyone I know]) and he was like, “No! That’s how the Asian carp thing got started.” And it’s true we have no idea of the provenance of these crayfish, they are almost definitely not a native Cambridge species, since presumably someone ordered them online in the first place for the stupid boil that, as I said, never should have happened — but it did, and now the tender-hearted women, namely the wonderful wonderful preschool teachers, and also, guiltily and mostly in my head, me, are worrying about it, so doesn’t that sound familiar.

This is from my parenting email newsletter, I’ll Be Right Back, which comes out on (usually) Fridays. Subscribe here.

Crayfish photo by coniferconifer used under a Creative Commons license.

Yet another good reason we don’t have an Elf on the Shelf: He would catch me scowling and stressing through the Christmas season. (It’s funny there isn’t an Elf on the Shelf for parents, always waiting to catch you screaming at your kid over something minor or leaving your baby just lying there on the floor for way too long. “Funny” maybe isn’t the right word. I’m thinking of a Black Mirror parenting episode, perhaps, or I guess just maybe of the guilt that hovers over us all and doesn’t need to take a specific physical form because any to-do list can stand in for it.)

This December I’ve often felt like the stereotypical Harried Mom I thought I’d never be, in part because three-year-olds have a real knack for finding your breaking point and stomping on it. (Want to hear about the time that we went to look at a condo in Somerville and Alice, after a morning of terrible behavior, insisted she had to poop, but the house was totally staged and had no toilet paper so all I could find to wipe her with was literally a page from Architectural Digest from a carefully arranged stack of magazines, and she got pissed at me and started falling backward into the toilet because it didn’t have a kid seat on it and literally grabbed the roll of fat on my stomach to regain her balance?

But this story has got to be nearly as old as the, you know, real Christmas story; I’m not the first woman to find herself a little pissy at Christmas. I should know: My mother wrote a book about it. I Saw Mommy Kicking Santa Claus is no longer in print but you can get it as an ebook, and you should. A thing about my mom that I didn’t learn until I read this book: On Christmas morning, when she used to tell us she was going to church (for the third time in 24 hours, after singing in the choir at two Christmas services), she actually went for a solo drive on the back roads of rural Connecticut. “I spent the following hour just driving around, looking at people’s houses.”

The book came out in 2004, when I was a sophomore in college, and I remember reading this part then and being like FUCK, MOM, WHY WEREN’T YOU HOME CHERISHING YOUR TIME WITH US? Now…you know. (Kevin: “I feel like most of what you write about in your newsletter is how you want to be alone?”) The generation before us does not understand baby-led weaning, but they get the Christmas pressure. My mom’s friend Sarah Stuart, in her memoir Perfectly Miserable: “‘I know you hate doing all this,’ eleven-year-old Emily cries out — as I am panicking about a Christmas dinner for twenty-three, polishing silver bowls for chocolates and ironing the old linen napkins — ‘but I love it so much!’”

I mean, I don’t hate doing it all. It’s true, many of the individual tasks are quite burdensome. On the coldest day of the year we put the kids in matching lobster sweaters and raced them up the hill of Danehy Park in the beautiful light of the late afternoon to take the Christmas card picture. It was really extremely cold as we yanked off their jackets and got Alice to hold Hugh sitting on a freezing park bench and then I took a zillion pictures on my phone (justification for buying new iPhone back in July: “The camera really is better and it’s not like we hire a photographer to take the Christmas card picture so it’s basically cost-neutral!”) while Kevin went insane doing faces behind me. But we were both acting so nuts that the kids were kind of mystified into cooperating and we got a picture that was actually pretty good once I I photoshopped Hugh’s giant booger out of it.

The preschool potluck, where I carried over a hot pan of macaroni and cheese that my daughter wouldn’t eat, despite our zillion watchings of The Snowy Day on Amazon Prime (me weeping and worrying about Trump’s America). I told her this was “Peter’s grandma’s mac and cheese” and she still wouldn’t eat it. Instead, without me totally realizing it, she ate so many mini muffins, Oreo truffles, and cookies that she puked once we got home.

The realization that I meant to make five kinds of Christmas cookies but haven’t made any yet and instead just keep buying butter and throwing it in the freezer. The realization that I haven’t gotten my hair cut since before the baby was born, and he’s five months old now. The realization that, though it doesn’t really matter because he’s a baby, I forgot to get any presents for him — and so I took him to Target and spacily wandered the aisles for literally two hours throwing Christmas candy and “GUM Crayola Kids’ Flossers grape flavor” and other stocking stuff for his sister into the cart, while he alternated sleeping and looking around patiently, as is his wont. He is such a good baby, and still all he is getting for Christmas is a couple of teethers and a sweatshirt.

When I was little, Christmas Eve was absolutely the best night of the year, because somewhere in between me falling asleep and getting up in the morning, Santa would definitely come. “Best” isn’t exactly the right word for it — magic, though cheesy, is getting closer to the right idea. I remember waking up at four-ish in the morning one Christmas and lying in bed and thinking, happily and with amazement, “I don’t know when it was, but he’s been here by now.” There weren’t that many years when it was totally magic, but there were a few that must make up for the later Christmases of teenage mopeyness or millennial emptiness or, now, mom Scrooginess. And Alice is getting so close to that magic age now. (She’s not there yet: “Santa has very sharp claws,” she told us. But she’s getting there.)

Santa is us. (Ughh sorry maybe I shouldn’t have told you I thought you knew?) I’m determined to make that magic for my daughter, even if the actual process is gross, because if she can have a second of that happy disbelief on Christmas, then it was worth it. I’m not sure who the Christmas cards, mac and cheese, and cookies are for, though, since she doesn’t care about any of that. I guess maybe they’re for the Elf on the Shelf, Adult Edition.

My parenting email newsletter, I’ll Be Right Back, comes out on (usually) Fridays. Subscribe here.

“We all sing with the same voice, the same song, the same words,” she sang. She learned the song at school. I’m sure I’d heard her sing it at home before, but it hadn’t made me sick like this. That morning it was of those scenes in a horror movie: A sweet child’s voice, laid over the wreckage.

I felt worse on Wednesday than I have on any day in years and years, certainly worse than I have felt on any day since I had kids. It started on Tuesday night, of course. I’d voted early, so I didn’t get an “I voted” selfie with my kids. I had planned, instead, that after we found out Clinton was going to be our next president, I would take pictures of my sleeping kids and combine them into an Instagram post with the caption “Sleep well, guys, and I will too. #imwithher” (Oh the cravenness, and fate-tempting, of planning an Instagram post.) Instead, as it became more clear that he would win, I could not bear to go into my daughter’s room and gaze at her like some stricken figure of doom. And so I stayed out of her room. I went to bed and woke up every hour for five hours. I fed the baby when he woke up at 4:50. (I heard from other mothers who nursed in the night crying, who were unable to pump nearly as much as they had earlier in the day.) And then I got up.

We stumbled out into the sun to take the kids to daycare. Their heroic teachers did on Wednesday what I could not do: They held it together for the entire day. They didn’t have the option of losing it. One of them told me she went to the bathroom to cry once or twice; nonetheless, they guided the children through their day, with the results of the previous day’s classroom vote (animal crackers vs. graham crackers) taped on the wall. My female colleague and I watched Clinton’s concession speech in our office and cried. There had never been so many tears shed in that one office.

I felt, on Wednesday, like I couldn’t look Alice in the eye, out of shame and fear and, behind that, rage. The standard parts of our evening routine we did felt fraught with significance. I read her a book and the picture of a lush garden made me think about global warming. I wiped her butt and thought, “Trump has never done this.” I am confident that our president-elect has never wiped a kid’s butt or changed a baby’s diaper. Does that matter? It does to me. I’m sure Hillary has changed hundreds of diapers. I thought of Obama bending to let the little boy rub his head, Obama sitting on the floor with the baby, lying on the floor with the baby, participating in tummy time with the baby, blocking the sun from the baby’s face: Obama, in every picture I’ve ever seen of him with a child, simply exuding the sense that he is a good, involved father, that he has BEEN with little kids, that he KNOWS. And then I thought of Trump, as my daughter ran gaily around the apartment wearing no pants, and I wanted to vomit.

You know what? It is really not a good day when you see your three-year-old naked and the first thing you think of is the president-elect of the United States.

I want there to be a happy ending to this story, and I’m structuring this essay as if there will be, but of course I, like everyone, have no idea. If I am a white, straight woman feeling dread at the prospect of the Trump presidency, I can only imagine the magnitude of what people of color, Muslims, immigrants, LBGTQ people are feeling. There is wonder in gazing at your sleeping baby, but to do so in a week like this is to feel a horrible and sickening sense of powerlessness and, perhaps more terrifyingly, of power. Even though they don’t know it, these babies are relying on us to make decisions for them, not just about their presents but about their futures. (Hugh sleeps swaddled in what my mother-in-law has referred to as a “straitjacket.” He literally needs us to get him out of there.)

As parents, for the most part, we make these decisions as best we can; we do not abdicate this responsibility. (Horrified as I am that so many people voted for Trump, I am more appalled by the many, MANY people who didn’t vote at all.) The thing I’ve been reminding myself of, over and over, is that many of the people who voted for Trump ARE parents and, though I question many things about them, I don’t doubt that they love their children as much as I love mine. There were parents who, on Tuesday night as the election results came in, gazed at their sleeping children and felt as good and safe about a Trump presidency as I would have felt about a Clinton one, and then, on the way out of their kid’s room, stumbled on a toy. Yelled fuck and then shhh, laughed, woke up in the morning feeling bad from too much wine but still good, really good. That was supposed to be me, I’d pictured it so clearly, and yet here we were.

I’d unfollowed my only (I think) Trump-supporting Facebook friend during the campaign. She was my best friend for a long time when I was a kid, and though we’d fallen out of touch, we still like each other’s pictures of our kids. Since Trump won, though, I re-followed her and have checked her Facebook page several times. In the comments of a pro-Trump post, she mentioned the things she’d be doing with her kids over the next couple of days. Parent-teacher conferences, adopting kittens. Through it all, the parenting continues. Is this reassuring? Maybe. I guess. It isn’t much, but it’s the closest I’ve gotten to comfort in the past few days.

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

WHAT IF I TOLD YOU there was a way to buy high-end products for your baby at steep discounts, saving the planet while being incredibly brand-conscious at the same time?

This is not a beautiful dream. (I don’t have beautiful dreams anymore. Last night I dreamed that my children and I were on a sinking ship and I was filling out these special secret forms to get us off it, then realized I had somehow lost both of them somewhere on the boat.) It can be YOUR REALITY if you join some parenting Facebook groups that are devoted to reselling kids’ stuff.

I say “parenting” Facebook groups, but these groups are the domain of mothers and that is no surprise: I haven’t yet met a man who’s willing to drive 20 minutes across town at rush hour to pick up two pairs of Hanna Andersson size 90 leggings in excellent used condition for $3 each from someone’s porch, leave cash in mailbox. Women, meanwhile, will form a long virtual line for these items (“interested!” “backup!” “backup!” “backup!” “impossible backup!”) and will find a way to pick them up between daycare dropoff and work.

One of the most useful parts of my maternity leave has been figuring out how the various neighborhoods of Cambridge (where I live) and Somerville connect to each other and that is pretty much entirely due to my membership in these groups. In the early days Hugh and I were driving around town to pick up half-opened boxes of newborn diapers that other people’s babies had outgrown. When I became convinced he had reflux, we did the emergency pickup of a $15 Rock n Play.

There’s more. So, so much more. A BRICA Fold n’ Go travel bassinet, new in package, for $20. A Zipadee Zip, as seen on “Shark Tank,” for $10, bought in anticipation of future swaddle weaning; a Magic Merlin sleep suit, $15, purchased for same reason. In the meantime, for while we’re still swaddling, two Halo SleepSack Micro-Fleece Swaddles, size small for $3 each (these fuckers sell for like $20 on Amazon!) A Fisher-Price space saver swing, not even manufactured anymore but how because it’s so perfect, $15, from someone who’d carefully dissembled it and had it back in the original box with new C batteries. A baby beach tent for $5. It was all found on Facebook groups, all picked up from people’s porches or back steps, in plastic bags with my name written on them.

At some point, Kevin started noticing that I was buying all this stuff to put the baby in. So, so much stuff (all meant to CONTAIN the baby somewhere other than my arms, come to think of it). We were in the car one Saturday when I casually let drop that we would be stopping on the way home from Alice’s swimming lesson to pick up a Baby Bjorn Travel Crib Light. He pointed out that we already have a Pack ’n Play, at which point I scoffed. I bought the Baby Bjorn Travel Crib for $50; new, it retails for like $300, and everyone who has it RAVES about it and says it’s worth the cost — which, if true at $300, is certainly true at $50. Plus, the resale value, I told him. The resale value! Whereas I’ll probably be paying someone to take our Pack ’n Play away!

We then spent several minutes not speaking to each other. Every time I look at the Baby Bjorn Travel Crib Light sitting in the back of our car, where it’s been since we picked it up, I think about what a great deal I got.

I’ve sold things, too, you know. A lot of maternity clothes; an adorable and unique Japanese sweatshirt that Alice refused to wear; a Boden dress that never worked on me and that very well may never work on any human person’s body but sure has a cute pattern. I’ve given away a rice cooker, a baby monitor with a broken display, and some sample cans of not-our-brand formula. Every item I post on one of these groups is a tiny chance to be an entrepreneur, to display creativity, to think about what might entice someone else to buy something. I put together a “gender-neutral newborn bundle” of clothes Hugh had outgrown and listed it at $10, slyly mentioning that I’d “throw in” the plain white hospital onesies that were clogging my drawers if the buyer wanted them — and she did, and now the 18 plain white hospital onesies from two children are her problem, not mine.

As Cambridge-crunchy as these groups kind of are, they are not a Cambridge-only phenomenon; they also exist in New York City, where I used to live and where Alice was born, and presumably in a zillion other places. The “hot items” in each group vary somewhat, not surprisingly, providing a fascinating look into class and status symbols, but certain brands are popular in both places, with anything from Hanna Andersson, Keen, or Bogs leading the pack. Post that you’re giving away a few packs of outgrown Honest diapers for free and you will get 20 responses in under 5 minutes from women who spend $200 at Whole Foods each week.

The most-responded-to post I’ve ever seen, I think, was from a woman who had ordered a few pairs of Thinx period panties, and the company accidentally sent her the wrong size and told her to keep those ones and give them away. She posted that she had period underwear to give away free and the response was like a pack of hungry sharks had smelled blood. I was one of the sharks.

I love these groups. There are things to mock, certainly, like the fact that some poor sap thinks they have a chance in hell of getting $40 for a Jumperoo. (Pro tip: The larger the item, the less you’ll get for it. You can sell a Jumperoo for maybe $5; you can sell two used pairs of Hanna Andersson baby socks for $5.) Overall, though, they are perfection in part because they are so not Craigslist or eBay. (Craigslist can be pure tragedy; I once saw a post from a man selling off an entire nursery because their baby had died and he wanted to save his wife from thinking about the items. It was the 6-word Ernest Hemingway story brought to life in the modern day; it was the saddest thing I’ve seen on the Internet.) These groups are intimate; they are mothers selling, often, much-loved items that they want other people to love too, and if you post something cute, you will get not only offers for it but also simply comments on how cute it is, how bittersweet it is that kids grow up and out of these tiny adorable items, how difficult it can be to accept that at some point you have to clean out your closet.

By the way, we are done with the Rock n Play if you’d like to buy it. I’ll give you a really good price. Easy porch pick up in Cambridge.

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my new parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

This week, as I was experimentally stuffing myself into my pre-pregnancy skinny jeans, the thought that ran through my mind was “I wonder if I’ll fit into these by November 8.” That is because there are two main things that I think about these days: One is my baby and how he’s sleeping and eating, and the other is the election.

Anxiety must trickle down into breastmilk, right? I’m passing it on to my son, presumably, by reading election Twitter while I nurse him, so it’s a good thing he’s getting mostly formula (from a bottle held in one hand as I scroll an iPhone screen with the other). Ugh, actually, how much do you want to bet that optimal breastfeeding is affected by simultaneous screen usage: Surely someone’s found a way to make moms feel guilty about it by now? Dr. Sears advocates nursing only in a deprivation tank with no Wi-Fi, correct?

But there I sit in the rocking chair at 4:40 AM watching the political journalists I follow on Twitter lose their shit over whatever bad thing happened since I went to bed, or I read the Ivanka Trump Cosmo interview on childcare where she claims Hillary Clinton has never thought about this stuff, and I start to seethe. I look down at Hugh’s male-pattern-baldness head and I feel a surge of FUCK I don’t want you to even have to be a *white male baby* under a Trump presidency and I’m even more scared for everybody else who’s not as lucky as you.

Part of me keeps telling myself, “Just enjoy your baby while you can. He’s not going to be little forever.” But that’s the whole thing about parenting, right, that no matter how much you want to try to enjoy it in the moment (something that is actually often impossible anyway), there’s all this shit hovering around that you have to worry about, and, especially in the newborn days, a variety of anxiety hurdles that you have to wait to jump over before you can let your guard down a little. First vaccines at two months. Risk of SIDS goes down at six months.

With vaccines and SIDS, though, at least you as the parent have some control; you’re not that reliant on the actions of other people, as long as you live in a community that vaccinates. You get the damn vaccines and you put the baby to sleep in his back in a bare crib. Furthermore, you have statistics at hand that won’t change in your baby’s lifetime, much less by the day.

But as the time ticks down toward November 8, it feels as if there’s nothing to do but wait, anxiously. Give money, I guess. Go register voters in Pennsylvania (probably not happening for me this time around). But really, wait. Reading FiveThirtyEight in the wee hours is not a preventative measure.

I want it to be here faster so this is all over and I want it to be here slower because I don’t want my maternity leave to be over.

Sometimes I’m so totally worked up by the time I go back to bed that I can’t sleep. So I try to remind myself that there’s a woman out there who’s feeding her baby and looking at her phone and having a little 4 AM panic attack over the fact that Hillary Clinton might be our next president. Sometimes it calms me down a little bit, reminding myself over and over that there are people who love their children just as much as I do and who truly believe that Trump will be the best thing for them and who live in fear of a Clinton presidency. (Shout-out to my middle-school best friend who just posted a picture of her daughter riding a kiddie car with a Trump bumper sticker on it.) If I set myself and my children and our world completely apart from 50 percent or 44 percent or whatever it is now of our country, it’s too terrifying; I have to know that we at least have the love of our kids in common. That if we were drinking wine in my living room we could at least bond over bitching about toddlers.

But I realize the privilege that comes with being a white woman thinking about this possible commonality. Scraping for anything reassuring about a Trump presidency can still be a thought exercise for me in a way it is never can be for the groups that Trump and his supporters are attacking. The black mom, the Muslim mom, the undocumented immigrant mom. They, too, love their children as much as I do.

I do enjoy my baby and I do know he’s not going to be little forever and that is why I monitor the election from my phone in the middle of the night. I do it like I’m keeping watch.

Donate to Hillary Clinton’s campaign here.

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

In high school English, we read a book called The Things They Carried. I don’t remember much about it except for feeling as if we were getting away with something because it was such a quick read. Beyond that, I have an absolutely terrible memory for anything I’ve read and all I took from this one was the title, which now inspires this post, The Shit I Carried. (A quick check of Amazon tells me that this book is a series of meditations on the Vietnam War. Whoops! Now I feel like an asshole, not enough to rewrite this intro though.)

I am writing this with a grunting 10-pounder strapped to my chest. Also in there is the Wubba-Nub we call Bull-y. A Wubba-Nub is a pacifier with a little stuffed animal attached to it, in this case a bull. They cost $15. My best parenting score was a dog Wubba-Nub on a beach when Alice was a baby. I washed it before I gave it to her, but it was like finding $15 in the sand.

Our pediatrician was like, “But he doesn’t sleep with that, right?”

“No,” I answered immediately with the strange ease that comes with lying to a medical professional. (When I was still pregnant and getting a non-stress test, a nurse — the same one who whisper-sang Happy Birthday to me — asked if I remembered how many kicks I should be looking for during a kick count. “Yup!” I said. “Okay, how many?” she snapped back, and when I said “Uh…” she said, “I knew it! I could see it in in your eyes! You were like, ‘Uh-oh!’”

But yes, he sleeps with the Wubba-Nub, at least until he spits it out. Actually, while we’re talking about this. I’m using the Glow Baby app to Track The Baby and the following notification popped up.

So I clicked through and it turns out this thread is just…well, this:

When I think “Bad Mom” thread, I think “I had a glass of wine at 4!” not “My infant sleeps face down on a fluffy surface, you do you!” But I give him a Wubba-Nub while he sleeps so perhaps I’m not one to judge.

Diapers, wipes, bottles with four ounces of water in them, formula dispenser with 17.4 grams of formula measured into each compartment, spit rags, the New Yorker fiction issue from June (unread), a pacifier in a Glad salad dressing container, my “real” wallet, a smaller wallet with a couple credit cards in it (which I started using with the express purpose that it would be not-horrible to lose because it doesn’t have all my other wallet stuff in it, because I lose stuff ALL THE TIME now, it started when I became a mother, it was the biggest change in my personality and it’s alarming), my house keys, a separate car key (again, kept separate because I’m less likely to lose 2 sets of keys than one set), 4-packs of cheap crayons taken from restaurants, Post-Its to cover up the automatic flushers on toilets in public restrooms (my daughter is scared of them), a flattened Starburst I meant to use as a bribe, mangled bitten (by her) Chapsticks, a baby sock, spare underwear, sand-filled toddler socks, a squished Nutri-Grain bar (this summer I embraced granola bars as kid snacks, basically right after reading that article about how sugary and bad they are, I was like “this sounds convenient I’m just going to start buying them”), pouch caps, a folded “emergency” $20 that I will use for iced coffee, a pad (“Mommy, do you need this pad?”)

Our sleek metrosexual diaper bag is a constant disappointment. Earlier this week I caught myself thinking that there must be a new, more expensive diaper bag that would solve our problems. “I would even pay $300 for it,” I thought boldly. But what I need is a magic bag that restocks automatically and remembers my phone for me so that I don’t leave it on the counter of Rite-Aid again.

I started a Nuzzel newsletter of the stuff I’m reading (okay, clicking on) that I thought would be interesting to readers of I’ll Be Right Back — mostly parenting-related, some other, if you’d like to follow it.

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my new parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

I was 25 minutes early to my appointment to get an IUD, which was also my 6-week postpartum appointment. My OB was like “How is everything?” and I was like “WELL! Fine now but [goes into rant about how much harder the recovery was than I thought it would be]” and she was like “Yeah, childbirth, who knew?! So I see you’ve signed the consent form about the Mirena so go ahead and scootch down!”

It took two minutes and Hugh slept the whole time in his stroller. To recap: I got to an appointment not just on time but early, I got IUD’d and didn’t have to hold my baby while I did it, whereas Alice lost her shit at my 6-week appointment with her and I had to hold her while getting a pap smear. I believe this is what counts as a postpartum triumph and like generally an A+ day of maternity leave. Oh, and Hugh started smiling for real at 6 weeks to the day. The first thing he smiled at, at one in the morning, was the little cloth birdies hanging from his bouncy seat. But then later I got some smiles too. It is the best when babies don’t totally get how to smile yet and open their mouths really wide, like jack-o-lanterns. So my baby can smile.

But then yesterday was a quick succession of infuriating events (this will be the title of my hipster children’s book). There was the text from my husband at work beginning “You know what might be a good project?” He didn’t specify which one of us this project (making a Google Doc for something) was for, but as the person at home I exist under a cloud of defensiveness that I’m not “getting enough done.” (Besides of course the world’s most important work, but come on, I think we’ve all recognized the limits of that claim by now.)

I am showering and all, but the same drenched spit rag that is on the living room floor at 5 AM is still there 14 hours later despite my thinking approximately 1,000 times during the day, “I should put that in the laundry.” If my daughter were at home instead of in daycare our apartment would look like a Hoarders Xtreme episode and we’d just have to burn it all down at the end of my maternity leave.

Apparently “I have a project for you” is a not uncommon construction among husbands at work and wives at home. I ran this by a couple friends.

— “He says ‘I have a project for you…’ and I bust in with ‘Which I MAY or MAY NOT choose to accept!’ This happens monthly at least.”

— “You know what would be a good project for you today? Figure out how to turn the pilot light off.”

— “Projects” have included getting the cat’s toenails clipped, getting the car’s oil changed, getting the car inspected. It seems to be some kind of 1950s holdover couched in 2016 terms, plus car stuff is now apparently the wife’s responsibility.*

I also got a text from fucking Le Tote, the clothing rental company that I used for maternity stuff. It’s impossible to cancel this ****digital startup****’s service online; you have to call the company. Because making phone calls to companies is unacceptable to me, I simply put my account on hold for a couple months after the baby was born.

But the hold expired and my new, non-maternity Le Tote membership resumed and I got a text of the items that “we” “selected” “especially” for me.

There was this:

And this:

We see you had a baby 6 weeks ago! In that case, would you like us to match you with the ugliest shit we could possibly find? It’s not made by a real brand! So you’re nursing? Sorry, we don’t really have anything for that, but you could cut a couple boob holes in the ringmaster shirt and just pay us the retail price, or actually maybe you could roll down the…whatever that top part is of the Navajo maxi dress hiding your disgusting postpartum body? Either is fine with us!

I immediately fired off a typo-laden email that said something like “I have no time or place to wear this nonsense, cancel my account.” Within a couple hours I heard back from two separate customer service reps who thanked me for “reaching out!” and told me to call to cancel and that, when I call, I should make sure to have the email address associated with your account ready!”

Even more hateful than making a phone call is reciting an email address to somebody over the phone. I went online and put the membership on hold again and plan to keep doing this until the company goes under.

In the afternoon, Hugh and I went to return some library books and I decided to treat myself to a sandwich from the million-dollar bakery nearby, to turn this day around! I ordered something called “Bill’s Seoul Show” to go: “Grilled chicken breast, bacon, tarragon mayo, red leaf lettuce, tomato on corn bread.” They gave me a wrapped sandwich in a bag and when Hugh and I got home, I opened it to find a mess with FUCKING OLIVES on it and realized that I had received the “Souk Special”: “Tuna salad, harissa, tomato, cucumber, red onion, olive spread, red leaf lettuce on baguette,” the single sandwich on the menu that was most different from the one I had ordered. In the history of Hi Rise Bakery no one person has ever ordered both of those sandwiches and that is because one of them is delicious and one is an abomination.

I tried to tell myself to be an adult and eat it, since it cost $12 and we had no other ready-to-eat protein. I took a bite and then, spitefully, spit it into the garbage in the kitchen, alone. I am 32 years old. I wasn’t going to take the baby back out in the rain to walk 10 minutes to return a sandwich. Especially because, if I did, I would be returning a sandwich with a single bite out of it.

All of this is linked to a mild identity crisis, I think. There’s this feeling when you have a newborn that you’re not quite yourself. You’re similar, but a little worse: Fatter, weaker, dumber, snappier, more tired, somehow looking at your phone more if that’s possible because there are suddenly all these other hours during the night that you’re awake.

But after writing down all these complaints — for more complaints, subscribe to Emily Gould’s excellent new TinyLetter — I badly wanted to hold my baby, and like a cheating spouse crawling back into the marital bed, I took him out of the crib where he was sleeping and we took a long and sweaty couch nap.

*Kevin and I were in bed last night and I was like “You’re..in the newsletter this week. The ‘I have a project for you.’”

“I didn’t say it was FOR YOU.”

“Sorry, but that section has to stay in.”

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

This issue and probably the upcoming ones will be like me right now: Happy, scattered. I’m not completely capable of figuring out themes right now, too busy entering 8 poops a day into an iPhone app. Good thing I’m able to outsource some infant care to her.

So last week I talked about labor a little. Someone expressed surprise that I was on Pitocin for almost a day before getting an epidural, so I need to note that that was because I didn’t dilate for a long time, and by the time it started to really hurt I got a hefty dose of Nubain, a pretty great drug that allowed me to doze for several hours and not notice contractions too much.

Sometime around three in the morning, when the Nubain started to wear off, I pulled out my iPhone to listen to the labor playlist that Kevin had made me. My mom had asked me earlier that week if I had music to listen to while I was in labor. I said “Yeah, Kevin made me a playlist.” And she said, “Okay, but you might want to actually check what’s on it.” I reminded her about Spotify but I was really thinking, “Oh please, it will be fine. He’s been in labor before and surely knows what I’d want to listen to.”

Well, Mom, go to the head of the class because I turned on that playlist in the middle of the night with contractions three minutes apart and it largely consisted of Blue Album-era Weezer and a bunch of songs from a “Guilty Pleasures” playlist that our group of friends collectively made to rage at the 4th of July 5 years ago before anyone had kids. The playlist is included at the end of this email in case you want to use it when you’re in labor or when you’re drinking heavily outdoors.

(Love you Kevin, seeing you with our children is one of the purest pleasures I have had as an adult.)

Some surprise secret part of my brain was able to immediately conjure up the songs that I actually wanted to listen to. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star was a big one! My own playlist is also at the end of this email. In the end, we listened to none of them during the actual pushing part. I had an epidural by then and was thinking about the nurses and the doctors and how they might judge our musical selections. “You guys like ‘Undone — The Sweater Song’?”

So vaginal delivery vs. C-section, as I’ve now had one of each. Because the C-section with Alice was done so fast, there was no labor or pushing before it, so I really only had to recover from the incision, which is not at all the case with everyone who ends up with a C-section.

This time around, yes, it was amazing and horrifying to actually watch him come out of my body. Toward the very end, I pushed really hard and blood suddenly spurted out like someone throwing a tomato off a roof onto concrete. Earlier in the day I’d been gazing at the ceiling of the hospital room, noticed some brown spots up and thought, “Huh, I wonder if that’s blood.” Now my blood spots have joined those other spots, maybe for eternity! The nurse was like, “Don’t worry, don’t worry! It’s not from him, it’s just from you!” Oh, okay.

I ended up with what the OB described as a “strange” tear when she was stitching it up, absolutely the word you want to hear to describe an injury to your vagina. Recovering from this, versus recovering from the C-section — I’d describe the experiences as fairly similar, pain-wise, and with a C-section you get to have a normal vagina afterwards. With the C-section, I wasn’t supposed to lift things and so on, but when I went to get checked out two weeks after, my OB said cheerfully, “You can start working out again!” This time around, I’ve been working on pooping for 10 days.

I don’t want to get too heavily into birth injuries here, but there’s a really good Longest Shortest Time episode about it; Cosmopolitan recently had a great article about them; and Amy Tuteur has been writing about them on her site.

This is all to say: I loved my vaginal, epidural-ed birth, but if I’d been awake for my C-section with Alice, seeing the baby come out would have been just as amazing. (Also check out the Longest Shortest Time “gentle Cesarean”episode.) No matter how you have your kid, it’s your own personal birth story — but also, it’s your kid’s birth, and so it’s not your story alone, and that’s a bit of an easier way to think about it, I think.

Now! I asked readers last week for the funniest things that happened to them when they were giving birth, and the meanest things they said when they were in labor.

From Evie:

Funny/mean: the very! first! thing! I said after my baby was born was that he has his dad’s toenails. I had him at 41 weeks so he had extra long fingernails and toenails, and my husband, horrifyingly, has a reputation in our household for letting his toenails get too long.

Funny/mean: I had 24 hours of brutal yet unprogressive labor at home and showed up at the hospital the morning of his birth a shell of a human being. In the car, I told my husband that if they didn’t admit me that I needed him to kill me. Then I told the attending physician who was determining my labor progress that if she didn’t admit me, my husband was going to kill me. I can’t even access who that person was right now. When she raised her eyebrows and looked at Nick, my husband, I said, “No! I told him to! He doesn’t want to!”

From Jen:

I had had this horrible lingering cough for weeks at the end of my pregnancy. I was reduced to wearing legit bladder control pads like an elderly old woman because every time i coughed i would literally piss all over myself. During my induction, they went to straight cath me to empty my bladder, but when I started coughing, my nurse said, “Actually, if you keep doing that, i don’t think we’ll even need to cath you!” So I say there and coughed all the pee out of my bladder while nurse and nursing student sat down by my vag and watched, in what may have been my most classy moment of labor yet. Ahh, the things we go through to bring our babies into this world!

From Sandy:

I distinctly remember my husband popping a stick of gum into his mouth while I was having the worst contraction and gripping his arms, and it made me SO VERY MAD that he was casually doing this. All I said was, “STOP CHEWING THAT DAMN GUM.”

From Kate:

Funniest “scene” from my birth was probably my dad sitting in the corner cheering “go Kate” during the brief window where I was allowed to push. Not a high school softball game dad! (He wasn’t supposed to be there but I did want my mom there and didn’t know how to tell him to leave; after 24 hours of labor during which I contracted an infection, which led to the C-section, I did not have the energy to protest. But boy was it awkward to have him there, eyes glued to his iPad, cheering me on).

Musical Selections

A labor playlist made by a dude

A labor playlist made by a woman in labor

Both of these are collaborative. If you are a man, add to the top one. If you are a woman, add to the bottom one. We’ll see which one comes out better. Hillary Clinton will be the judge.

This is from I’ll Be Right Back, my parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

“Ramblings” was probably pretty unique and edgy the first time someone used it back in 2002 or whatever but branding your blog that way now seems like a good way to denote that what you are writing is not that important or is actually written by a crazy woman. You will never see a blog or a Medium post called “Ramblings of a Bernie Bro” or “Ramblings of an Early-Stage Investor.” Actually when I typed “ramblings” into Medium’s search box one of the first posts I found was called “Ramblings on One Way We Might Minimize the Negative Effects of Asynchronous, Text-Based Communication,” which seems about right.

My job lets you take some sick days leading up to your due date, so I did that this week. (My due date is Sunday.) On Monday I made a loaf of bread and tidied.

Tuesday, I decided, would be an “out” day, except that it was also Prime Day. I was up peeing at 3 AM ET on July 12 when Prime Day kicked off, checked my phone and immediately bought an Instant Pot via Amazon’s app for $69.99. I was one of 215,000 people to do so and probably one of a few hundred who bought it while sitting on the toilet. I spent the rest of the day in a frenzy of deal-monitoring. I discovered that an amazing cult white noise machine that never goes on sale was on sale and recommended it to many people on various social media channels as if it was a scoop that I had written. I bought blackout curtains for our bedroom windows. I realized how worried I am that the new baby is never going to sleep.

I walked to the library and picked up Emma Cline’s The Girls, the Charles Manson–inspired novel that reportedly got an advance of a couple million dollars. My own personal reading club this month is just debut female authors who got multi-million-dollar advances (this selection was preceded by Sweetbitter). I also checked out a copy of The Happiest Baby on the Block. The thing all three of these books have in common is that I read them anxiously and with little enjoyment.

I leafed through the June issue of Real Simple and became unduly irritated by the fact that their major organizing project this month was for an attorney-pediatrician couple in Larchmont who needed the many closets in their large beautiful house organized and could definitely have just paid someone to do it. The article included a photo of their 18-month-old (youngest of three) wearing a popped collar.

On Wednesday I had a doctor’s appointment where I learned that I was not dilated at all. I went to Costco and walked the aisles for probably 90 minutes and somehow spent $111. I ran into the same woman twice, first by the fruit, where we were both getting strawberries. She said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I keep getting in the way. I just can’t find a place to put my cart where it won’t bother anybody.” A few minutes later I was near, not that close to, her in the frozen foods aisle and she started apologizing for nothing again and said “I’m just having a very hard time navigating.” Costco was almost completely empty, in addition to already being a cavernous warehouse. I wondered what would happen if I got in her face and yelled STOP TAKING UP SO MUCH ROOM!

On Wednesday evening we met our new South African neighbors who have a boy Alice’s age and a younger boy and are very nice. We sat with them at a picnic table in the backyard of our housing complex and drank a little while the kids went insane over the fact that our attention was not 100% focused on them. I learned that South Africans refer to AC as “A-Con,” with a hard C.

Thursday was very hot and I lay in bed from 10 to 11 AM and then from 1:30 to 4 PM, having many strange short dreams and thinking about the laundry I should fold. I put on an actual dress and some makeup and earrings (Alice: “Mommy’s wearing rings! Mom, you’re wearing a pretty dress. Why are you wearing a dress?”) and went out to dinner with an old friend. We went to a perfect neighborhood restaurant in Beacon Hill where the food was all better than it needed to be for the price. I had told Alice I would bring her a treat and that she’d get it in the morning when she woke up. I went into a tiny fancy chocolate shop and bought her two chocolate-covered Nutter-Butters for $5, because it seemed like the most breakfast-y option they had.

I got home around 10 PM. It was still really hot and Alice was having trouble sleeping, so the two of us took a cool bath. In the tub she had so many questions for me that had been I guess burning in her brain while she lay in bed not sleeping. “I-I-I am your daughter and-and-and-and Nony is your daughter,” she said.

“Nony is my mommy and I am your mommy,” I said. “You are my daughter and I am Nony’s daughter.”

“And-and-and-and-and you are my daughter,” she said. “And Daddy is my granddaughter.”

It was kind of lovely and surreal. I wanted to say to her, “This is one of your last moments as an only child. Are you going to remember it?” but that seemed creepy. I hope she remembers it, though.

I’d be remiss if I did not get to Friday and mention that I wrote this from a coffee shop where I ordered iced coffee, a banana, and a raspberry muffin. When the counter guy gave it to me, he said, “Ze banana, and a raspberry muff-muff.”

This essay is from I’ll Be Right Back, my new parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.

We hung this 2004 Red Sox World Series commemorative Sports Illustrated cover in my daughter’s bedroom, over the changing table. (And now you see how I treat the art that my husband contributed to this relationship in our home. We’re trying to decide where to hang things up, and with all the stuff that I bought, I’m like, “Hmm, where should this go in our living room? By your desk, maybe? Or should we hang it right over our bed?” And with anything he contributed I’m like “I don’t know, this could go in the bathroom? Or I guess over the changing table? Anywhere people poop, basically, is fine.”)

Anyway, Alice was standing on the changing table looking at the cover for the first time, and she said, pretty immediately, pointing at Manny Ramirez, “CJ!” CJ, a four-year-old black boy, is our neighbor. Manny Ramirez is the only black person on that Sports Illustrated cover whose face is somewhat visible. Oh, and — surprise! — they really don’t look that much alike except they’re both black. I should note Alice does this all the time, points out people in her books who she thinks look like people she knows, and there is occasionally not a ton of resemblance beyond hair color.

But if I’d had any two-second delusion that toddlers don’t notice skin color, it was busted then, and again when she asked if the baby in my tummy would be “a brown baby.” Because the baby dolls in her all-white classroom are multicultural.

And then last week we went to this 4th of July thing in Concord, Massachusetts, home of Emerson and Thoreau, etc., and it was almost like this parody of what a 4th of July celebration should be, it was so — oh, it was filled with helpful police officers and firefighters who helped the white children spray a firehose or climb into a firetruck. There was a “tricycle, bicycle, and wheelchair parade” where children in red white and blue Hanna Andersson outfits rode balance bikes and scooters decorated with red white and blue streamers. There was a fucking pristine public bath house, far too nice to hang a Red Sox poster in. Outside, there were hand-washing stations with many many rolls of Bounty paper towels, just there to use. Some actual I believe maiden aunts were sitting next to us on the bleachers, eating hard-boiled eggs and mini whole-wheat pitas out of Ziploc bags. There was a husband-wife musician couple singing songs about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., over a very nice sound system, while white toddlers danced in front of them. And at least one of the gabled houses facing historic Emerson Field had #BlackLivesMatter and Bernie Sanders signs planted out front in the shade of 200-year-old elms.

This week, two separate police officers were caught on video murdering black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, in Minnesota and Louisiana. (Or those were, at least, the police killings of black people that were captured on smartphones this week.) Castile’s 4-year-old daughter was in the car when he was killed and can be heard on the video saying, “It’s okay, Mommy. I’m right here with you.”

One of the oft-touted benefits of email newsletters like mine is that they’re so intimate. You can talk to people directly. Often this means in practice that you can talk directly to people who are very, very similar to you. I am nearly positive that every person reading this today finds the ongoing police violence against black people in this country abhorrent. I also know (because I get an email each time someone subscribes, and I have this Gmail plugin that pulls up the LinkedIn profile, with picture, of each person who subscribes via an email address that they have connected to their LinkedIn profile) that 90 to 95 percent of people receiving the newsletter are white, and of course I also am white.

There’s an easy out when you write about parenthood. You can say it’s universal. I could maybe advance the argument that I can ignore race in I’ll Be Right Back because there are so many aspects of parenthood that are shared by all parents: The sleepless nights, the asshole toddlers, the feeding struggles. I could cover those topics into infinity and never touch on race at all and there would be no shame in that, surely, because this newsletter is about parenting, not race.

Except. My two-and-a-half year old already notices skin color and has already has figured out that most of the people who live near us are not black. I could do absolutely nothing with this, or I could diversify our book collection slightly and be done with it. That’s my privilege as a white parent. But it’s the wrong decision. It’s wrong even in the intimate world of TinyLetter, it’s wrong in the liberal Cambridge bubble — it’s just wrong, period.

This is the fourteenth issue of this newsletter, and I’m starting to see how many routes it could go down, and some of them are tempting and easy. I could go full-bore introspective “how can the art of writing exist alongside motherhood,” as many people have done well and some have done kinda badly and boringly. Last night, I was skimming Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. Cusk is an author I’ve loved in the past, but last night reading this book it felt like being trapped on a maiden aunt’s sleepy Concord screened-in porch for eternity: Maybe pleasant-ish and cozy for awhile but seriously, you’ve just got to get out. This is something Cusk grapples with herself in the book, and she writes:

Caring for her is like being responsible for the weather, or for the grass growing: my privileged relationship with time has changed, and though these tasks are not yet arduous they already constitute a sort of serfdom, a slavery, in that I am not free to go. It is a humbling change. It represents, too, a reckoning of my former freedom, my distance from duty. The harness of motherhood chafes my skin, and yet occasionally I find a predictable integrity in it too, a freedom of a different sort: from complexity and choice and from the reams of unscripted time upon which I used to write my days, bearing the burden of their authorship. It does not escape me that in this last sentiment I am walking over the grave of my sex. The state of motherhood speaks to my native fear of achievement. It is a demotion, a displacement, an opportunity to give up. I have the sense of history watching, from its club chair, my response to this demotion with some amusement. Will I give in, graciously, gratefully, handing back my life as something I had on loan? Or will I put up a fight?

This felt so wrong for this week and maybe just wrong for 2016 period. Can a book from 2003 seem dated? Because it does.

There’s also the fast-twitch listicle style irreverent parenting writing, which also applies to everybody sort of, and yet is still so generic it’s a different kind of pointless pablum, providing nothing except a one-second semi-reassuring reminder that “hey! we’re all the same, we’re all soooooo bad.” Except we aren’t.

So I don’t want to go down these paths as this gets farther along, even though it would be easy. I don’t want to be immune to the hard horrible stuff just because I could be, just because “it’s parenting.” I liked this yesterday:

Please, as I continue to grapple with this, I’d like to hear from you about what you’d like to see here. And if you would like to write something for a future issue, or if you have things to say about today’s that you would like me to include in a future issue, please let me know.

This essay is adapted from I’ll Be Right Back, my new parenting email newsletter that comes out on Fridays. Subscribe here.