Most were left on the go, from an airport, packing up to leave some place, or getting ready to head out the door. Every single one, without fail, includes a callback to whatever I was doing in my life: a trip we were taking, Middle’s college visits, my own graduate coursework. Always with specificity and care: “I checked the calendar and I think Jeff and the kids got back from Colorado yesterday, I’d love to hear all about it.” Calling my mother to rehash a trip I didn’t even go on, likely for an hour, sums up a top-tier Kari-Mom conversation agenda.

There were occasional updates on her treatments, delivered before or after visits to “barcalounger beach,” her affectionate name for Abramson Cancer Center. One was her asking me about something that she mumbled in another language. Then she said “Where’s my Portuguese when you need it?”

To my knowledge I was not engaging in anything in 2017-2018 that necessitated the use of Portuguese (a language neither she, nor I, spoke).

Eight years ago, when I first lost her, I was desperate to save the really monumental stuff: the letter she wrote me for my confirmation with her reflections on love and religion or meaningful books with personal inscriptions. I thought about those stories of people who lose loved ones and get collections of videos made in advance for certain moments in time and wondered… why couldn’t my mother have bought some stationery and planned ahead a little bit? She had nearly a decade of stage IV cancer to do it.

Despite being so great with words, she more often modeled her love and advice and approach in actions. At the time, I completely forgot about the importance of the little “just checking” messages because I took them for granted — especially when I was lucky enough to receive so many. Now, for the minutes I do play them, I get to hear her voice, hear her call me “sweetie” and tell me she loves me, and am reminded just how thoughtful she was about me, my life, and whatever was happening in it.

Next week will mark eight years without her, and I’ve always made that the day I allocate for sadness. This year, however, I’ve been less focused on that anniversary than on this huge milestone birthday that we’re not celebrating (or certainly not doing so as we would have with her). She was a birthday person, but claimed to hate attention — an affliction about which I know very little. I’m confident she would have somehow had multiple parties while still making sure we were all talking about my father turning 80 several weeks later. My father, meanwhile, has been calling himself 80 since he was 78, so his birthday seems less eventful than the one she’s not here to celebrate.

I’ve watched my own grief transition from wishing and wondering what she might say or what she might think, to just accepting and appreciating signs wherever they appear. Earlier stressful moments with the kids made me wish I could call her and ask her how to handle moody teenagers: do you ignore them and let them be moody or try and talk it through, and if you opt to talk, what do you say, especially when they say they don’t know why they’re moody? She would have had great answers for this and would have reminded me what a pleasant teenager I was, especially when hormones took over but I hadn’t started antidepressants. At some point, I realized I had internalized as much as I possibly could and simply put on my Mom-colored glasses through which to view the world. When experiencing “la vie en Mom,” I know that there are no accidents, only experiences open to interpretation.

A few months ago, at a dinner party, a friend introduced me to someone and asked her to share the story of her engagement, which included actual fireworks sent from her dead mom. In response, I felt compelled to tell her about the time my mom came to me in the form of a fox that I saw outside the window. We only spoke for a few minutes, but in that time we found our moms had almost the same name, both lived in Mexico City at the same time, and her mother’s birthday was the day that my mother died. Both of our mothers told us we wouldn’t forget them and found ways to reappear (although arguably fireworks are more fun and flashy than a potentially rabid animal in the backyard, but beggars, choosers… maybe my mom heard the story and will step up her game in the future?)

I’ve always known there was a Dead Moms Club (thanks to both Kate Spencer’s book and my amazing friend who sent me an autographed copy right after my mom passed), but the club has so many different subsets. Mine is made up of those of us who loved our mothers dearly, still get messages from them, and more often than not still make decisions with their approval/verdict in mind. We may find it hard to listen to our friends complain about their moms (even when those moms are being terribly annoying) but do our best to empathize and not say “aren’t you so lucky to have someone alive and doing passive-aggressive things or criticizing your parenting or ruining your holidays?” It’s not the same because our respective mothers, if they did any of those things, did so in a way that we remember as charming.

The anger and resentment are gone. I remember when Queen Elizabeth died and, outside of my continued obsession with the monarchy owning all the swans in the UK, I mainly thought: fuck you, Charles, for still having a mom at 73. But, then again, probably not ideal for Charles to live an extra three or four decades with a mom who liked his creepy brother more.

King Charles is definitely not in my Dead Moms Club sub-club since part of the rule for membership is having a mom who didn’t play favorites even if you joke and say the favorite isn’t you. I still haven’t deleted my mom from my list of favorites in my phone contacts because, even if I can’t call her, she’s still one of my favorites.

In life, she managed to both ground and uplift everyone around her at the same time. Now that she’s gone, her memories and her stories let me connect with strangers in ways I didn’t expect and with a more spiritual side I didn’t know I had. I get little moments with my brothers, nieces, and nephews where I see bits of her in them — if not always in appearance then in intense chess matches, one claiming to have “the gift of gab,” and a love of baths after a bad day. And her memory has helped me see myself differently when I realize that part of my constant desire to give advice and help comes from her, even if she brought warmth where I bring sarcasm.

When I spoke with my brothers on her birthday, after my voicemail message replay, one of them said “we hear so often about people who fill your cup and people who drain your cup and Mom was a cup filler.”

When she was alive, her own cup was full of coffee in the morning and Chardonnay after 5 PM, and while she never spilled either of those valuable beverages, she often told us “my cup runneth over.” It did.

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As I understood it, a rain check started as the term for an actual baseball ticket stub for a rained-out game and then migrated into stores for things that are out of stock. Colloquially, “take a rain check” means delaying plans — which puts the delay in the hands of the person doing the delaying, when the entire concept came out of circumstances that are beyond anyone’s control.

While we came to New England for a September vacation to avoid the tourists, we did realize we’d be avoiding some of the more reliable and arguably better summer weather. Instead of sunshine, all of last week we were told to expect a nor’easter of sizable proportions. Jeff was actually unfamiliar with that term (he knew “rain check” though), and I guess growing up in Michigan doesn’t give you cause to learn about irrelevant weather patterns. And then, the storm came in full force on Friday, staying through the weekend.

I have a major fascination with storms and extreme weather — especially hurricanes and tornadoes. I just love any time Anderson Cooper is sent somewhere to report in a windbreaker while wind or water pummels his handsome face. There’s something about knowing that we can do whatever we want as humans, but the weather doesn’t care and can assert control whenever.

Normally, I’m watching this weather from many states away so I don’t experience the panic of running around and swapping screens for storm windows, bringing outside furniture in, and charging everything that can be charged and then some. We changed dinner plans from anything that needed the oven to pasta, tacos, and anything else we could make on the stovetop for fear that a power outage would last longer than an hour or two.

Since we’re at my dad’s house, I dutifully called him to track down candles, candleholders, and matches. This pained me to do because any time I call and ask him whether he has something hiding in a cupboard somewhere, it gives him one more reason to defend his hoarder status.

This storm didn’t get a name, but we were warned of incredibly high winds, constant rain, and all the inconveniences that come with those things. The Coast Guard said to “seek safe harbor,” and my weather app at one point had five active alerts: a gale warning, a coastal flood advisory, a high surf advisory, a high wind warning, and a small craft advisory. Not owning a small craft or planning on swimming, we were only mildly concerned about some of these.

Except, nothing really happened.

I mean, the rain came and the wind was over 50 mph with gusts over 60 mph. Harbormaster Sheila Lucey’s official quote on it all was: “[The storm] may not be remembered for how strong it was, but rather the duration of the wind and rain, which stretched over 72 hours.”

We drove down Saturday morning to look at the surf. The waves were enormous, but you could barely hear them crash over the whistle of the wind. Since we never lost power, the greatest inconvenience for several days was taking the dogs out and begging them to be quick. Pepper, who, for all her 14 years of life, has always hated even a single drop of water, suddenly wanted to play Gene Kelly and tap-dance in the rain.

Given just how hard it was to contain two geriatric ten-pound dogs in storm conditions, Jeff and I decided to divide and conquer. We each took one dog and tried to get it to be the efficient one while distracting it from the confusing wind (in Sam’s case) or the apparently appetizing rabbit poop (in both their cases). We ended up standing eight feet away from each other, trying to communicate, but between the rain and wind and the hoods up on our jackets and the feedback from the rain and wind on my hearing aids, neither of us could hear a word. I started to understand why boat captains are always using radios in major storms.

At one point, I did say that if one of them got loose and ran off, I would just let them go and let nature take its course. Fortunately, again, with all the aforementioned sounds, neither dog heard me.

I feel terrible for the 34 couples who had weddings scheduled for the island last weekend, and all of their guests who were trying to get here only for boats to be canceled starting on Wednesday. For all the buildup, the only casualties we experienced were two chipped nails from dealing with the storm windows, my love for the dogs, and one planned dinner with family friends. After four rounds of texts to figure out dinner plans that could work for everyone, we finally decided to cancel. I did not grieve.

Sometimes weather is the forcing mechanism for things to happen and not happen. A storm is an excuse for the best activity there is: reading under a blanket while all of the craziness stays outside your own walls. There’s an ease that comes with canceling plans when you don’t have to say “actually, I don’t want to see you” but rather can blame everything outside your control while maintaining the position that if circumstances were different you’d love to go.

My favorite needleminder reads “Lover of Canceled Plans,” but truthfully, I love canceled plans most when I don’t have to take the heat that comes with canceling. This storm gave me the original kind of rain check — the kind nobody has to ask for — and I’m in no hurry to cash it in.

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Any car trip over four hours, or where at least one meal needs to be accounted for, heads into international waters territory — not physical water, but more the same lawlessness that drove Scientology to buy a boat and establish itself out on the open sea where no one could really intervene.

Ordinary rules no longer apply, but there are road trip statutes: the driver is in charge and has veto power over music, route, and all stops. There are established patterns from childhood that have to be accounted for: we were allowed one fifteen-minute stop on a road trip over four hours. The dog, who always came along, had to be walked and given water in that same timeframe, so bathroom coordination among all parties was critical.

We actually had a binder where my parents logged the timing of various past drives. Two outlier trips required multiple asterisks because two stops had been made, and I think my dad is still bitter (but will find out after he reads this).

We have taken many traditions from my family growing up, like RB sandwiches (always on kaiser rolls) as well as a special rally cry my mother invented for departures, which involved a short preamble from her and then all of us screaming “Pigs for [wherever we were going]!!!!!” I fully adopted it in my own family regardless of destination. However, we have adapted the laws around pit stops to allow for two since Jeff and I both believe in the importance of hydration.

On the sea, the crew all have rank, and in the car there’s a very clear and established hierarchy: driver, then front seat passenger, then backseat windows, then lowly middle seat or third row. I essentially went from being the youngest child, wedged into the third row of the van next to the dog kennel, to being an only child with full backseat control once my brothers left for college. Now, I’m sitting pretty with a permanent reservation for the front passenger seat and its inherited responsibilities of distributing snacks and enforcing GPS adherence. In our car, we never trade off driving duties unless Jeff is at death’s door, and even then he’d think about it, because being driven anywhere by me is pretty much his nightmare. And I’m a horrible passenger to boot.

I’m not an unsafe driver, but I’m an unconfident one, which is not reassuring to passengers. In the passenger seat, however, I have confidence in spades. From that position, I offer such helpful tips as “careful, careful” and “everyone else is braking” and then when the situation calls for it, do a full fake brake myself, slamming my right foot down on no pedal at all, gripping the door handle and doing a swift and aggressive inhale. My understanding is that the highly alert response to any possible danger is genetic since both my mother and her mother were big fake brakers.

When we went to buy our car at the dealership, we intended to get a smaller model SUV but I got in the one a size up and fell in love with the setup for the front passenger since it had a grip bar for the left hand that was part of the center console. In times of panic (which happen multiple times an hour), I would be able to securely brace, holding both sides — the dream. When a friend bought the same model vehicle, she texted me the day she got her car to say “you must be so pumped to have an extra place to grip.”

I am.

Based on my past tales of control issues, you may think the clench, “careful,” and frequent repetition of hot tips I learned in driver’s ed in 1999 mean I want to be in charge. I don’t. Through pure muscle memory, and perhaps some generational trauma, my body is attempting to assert jurisdiction I know I don’t have or deserve.

I would love to not be this way since I know it’s profoundly annoying and, on a trip with particularly bad traffic, it tends to make Jeff snap: “I am being careful, will you just stop?” Alas, I cannot. Those words of warning come out of me as unconsciously as correcting someone’s pronunciation of croissant.

All of these laws, however, apply only to life in the car. Last week, those six and a half hours were all done just to get us to a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride. Boarding a new mode of transportation (even in your existing vehicle) brings new rules and new hierarchies. I already knew the open waters were different from the Sea Org.

Not that the Scientologists were thinking about anyone’s comfort. When you’ve signed a billion-year contract with the only possible benefits being a distant chance of meeting Tom Cruise or a less distant one of getting name-checked by Leah Remini in a future tell-all, logic and motion sickness are clearly not your top priorities.

On the ferry, I was no longer second in command; I was just a woman trying to get two sedated elderly poodles up a staircase that they’re scared of while various doodles and retrievers barked at them from below. I wanted to read my book but my noise-canceling headphones that do just fine with the roar of an airplane somehow couldn’t block the sounds of the guy next to us watching YouTube music videos and ads at top volume. I would have moved but I was trapped by sleeping dogs and I knew I was supposed to let them lie.

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I’d both forgotten these existed and that I made them in the first place. But reading them back now, even after a little gentle teasing from Jeff, I didn’t cringe. I was impressed with my past self and absolutely still stand by the itineraries.

With a 15-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 6-year-old, there were genuine logistics to run. It always started with a basic request: Jeff would say something like, “Can you take Oldest to the party while I pick up Youngest from softball?” As soon as he asked, I thought, oh, we need to map this shit out. So I did.

Take Saturday dinner, October 12, 2013. I did not provide one option for a main course but five, each with its own recipe link: “Chicken meatballs & Marcella’s tomato sauce w/ pasta,” “Lemon chicken & croutons,” “Roast pork w/ apples,” “Pork chops w/ bacon/cheese grits?” and “New try on shredded pork?” When every meal you cook feels like a focus group evaluating your fitness as a future parental figure, you have to be prepared. I think this was also in the six-month window when we were negotiating with one kid who only ate meat and no pasta, one who preferred pasta but no cheese, and a third who would happily eat everything but had multiple food allergies.

Four separate times in that same document, in four empty activity slots, I typed “WTF are we doing?” Organizing my panic under the appropriate section header each time.

One activity block reads, in full: “Puzzle.” You might think that means we do a puzzle as a family, but I don’t puzzle well with others so I think that was me blocking off the time and making it clear that no one else was invited. And, on its own line: “Karen makes cake.” Interestingly, that came with no recipe link, and it wasn’t a holiday weekend, so I am still wondering what cake I made.

As a girl, I loved a clipboard: instant authority, control, and practicality. When I thought seriously about a career where I could operate clipboard-in-hand, I narrowed it down to cruise director and stage manager. Unfortunately, I do better on dry land and, while black is definitely my color, I can’t speak in a low voice, so both were eliminated.

People called me uptight. But every time someone tried to prove it, they described things I actually like about myself: needing a plan, being risk-averse, having (light... maybe) control issues. Being the soon-to-be stepmom puts pressure on even the tiniest of things: I hate sci-fi movies and Jeff and the kids love them. If I reject movie time, am I rejecting the family? If I watch but complain the whole time and ruin it for everybody else, is it further grounds for criticism? Jeff’s still mad that I “ruined” his 17th rewatch of “Blade Runner” by asking too many questions and then falling asleep.

Planning isn’t just about control; it’s about air cover.

Partial custody while we were still just dating meant every other weekend I was auditioning in front of a panel of judges who showed disappointment on their faces but never said what was on their minds. I didn’t have the history, and in so many ways we had little in common. But I think I thought that if I tried hard enough, I could remove some friction from the little time we had together… if not for them, then for me. Sartre said hell is other people, but I’d say hell is other people at 7:30, starving, no reservation, going “I don’t know… what do you want to do?” “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

Very rarely does my own planning surprise me, but every once in a while, I see an artifact from 20- or 30-something Karen and think, “Wow, maybe she could have loosened up a little.” I didn’t think that when I saw these. I thought, “Wow, she needed a better event planning template.”

I haven’t changed; our extended family Christmas planning already has a run of show document using the same template I borrowed years ago from Tony and Craig, the best corporate event planners you’ve ever seen. Obviously, only fully confirmed items sit under the header that reads “Run of Show - Committed” while action items are in red. I won’t be packing a clipboard, but I always bring my clipboard energy.

I know some members of my family roll their eyes and some will never open the document (and instead just text me to ask what’s next). Maybe they’d all think I was more fun if I could “go with the flow.”

It doesn’t matter — they all know none of them will go hungry.

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But “normal,” it turns out, isn’t a measurement so much as a point of view — the one you were issued at birth, in the house you were raised in, by the people who happened to be yelling in it.

In our family of five, we had open communication, family dinners together, healthy teasing (because, “you only tease someone you love”), a lot of family singalongs, and in general, a high level of function and mostly liking each other. Most of the craziest family examples lived outside our home but their visits and stories helped validate the “normal” label we’d applied. Many of our “least normal” moments were driven or instigated by extended family members, so in my mother’s defense, abnormal came to visit but didn’t necessarily live under our roof. Except, of course, for the stretch when it moved in.

When my mother took her annual extended work trip, my dad’s mom came to stay with us since I was in fifth grade and my dad worked long hours. Presumably, the idea was that I would bond with Nana and my father would experience less stress knowing I was being well cared for. Except that Nana and I both have strong personalities and we argued all of the time.

This is my Substack and she’s dead so this is likely biased, but my memory is that I was always both correct and reasonable (as one expects from a fifth grader). We had a range of fights but the most memorable was the one that started with me explaining that we preferred Charmin toilet paper to single-ply and her saying “I guess you don’t need me” and driving away, leaving me to walk home from the grocery store by myself, Charmin in hand.

There was eavesdropping on phone calls when my dad checked in on me and one time when I baked a tray of brownies and Nana ate most of them when I was at school. When I asked where the brownies were, she tried to tell me I didn’t remember how many we’d eaten the night before. There are select topics where I have a mind like a steel trap: moments of extreme mortification, early seasons of Real Housewives, and inventorying food that I like and am excited to consume. To retaliate, but also to assert myself, I hid the remote control from Nana when I went to school the next morning so she had to get up to change the channel. I’m sure I spent that whole day with a satisfied smirk on my face knowing that I’d won that particular battle. I don’t remember too many things beyond my dad not seeing any level of stress reduction and Nana not returning to babysit in the future.

Overall, most of our mode was out loud: we had “tough” conversations, we convened a rehash as soon as everyone else left the party to talk about it, and generally feedback or thoughts were shared pretty directly. Like when my mother told me the day before my wedding that it was too bad I hadn’t done Invisalign two years beforehand so I spent most of my wedding hoping no one could see my offensive lower teeth.

But when you get married you have a new family and I went from my mostly normal family to whatever Jeff’s is — both extended and with the kids. The family rule seemed to be: no one said the thing. Silently ignoring the elephant in the room and never asking any questions was the norm, which I found… so weird.

While I adjusted to different foods and Midwestern passive aggression and someone crying and literally everyone ignoring it instead of asking what was wrong, I kept calling my mother for her advice, not realizing that neither one of us could translate a totally different culture or dynamic. Once there was an email that went around for a holiday meal plan and people were asked to sign up to bring a salad or apps or dessert or sides and the first cousin who replied just said “I’ll bring the rolls.” Horrified that anyone would get directions from a host on what to bring and not follow them, I forwarded to Jeff with “what’s wrong with him?” Jeff didn’t get it so I forwarded to my mother and she immediately called me to discuss and attempt to make sense of it together.

It took me so many years though to realize that both Jeff and I have had major cultural adjustments to what is considered normal in our respective families. Jeff, the man who doesn’t sing, has to participate in a Christmas hootenanny, sing an off-key “Happy Birthday” via FaceTime for every single member of my family (also he didn’t know what a key was), and line up Christmas morning to sing “Deck the Halls” while slow-jogging to the tree. And I, the person who is allergic to awkward silence, married into a family where that’s the native language.

Jeff grew up on Log Cabin poured over pancakes. I grew up on real maple syrup from the farm of my dad’s best friend from college, poured over H.R.M.’s Favorite Waffles, a recipe I’d committed to memory. There was a Food Network segment a few years ago where they did a blind taste test of pure vs. imitation maple syrup and found that people who had pure maple syrup growing up could accurately taste the difference while those who grew up on Mrs. Butterworth and friends thought imitation maple syrup was the real stuff. I locked this into my memory as an actual scientific study and not just Richard Blais at a grocery store, but I could only find studies showing that Americans overwhelmingly prefer fake maple syrup and nothing formal that supports the Food Network segment. Maybe no one wants to invest money in research that serves purely to reinforce common sense? We each taste our own childhood and call it the truth.

We’ve since signed a treaty between the audible and the silent. I turned Jeff into a great rehasher; he taught me to occasionally let a thing go unsaid (best handled by me excusing myself from the room to avoid temptation). And I’m the one who buys the syrup so there’s no concern there. All of which feels very… normal, or at least my mother would think so.

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I’d love to share such beautiful music with the man I love but, sadly, I married a Radiohead fan and someone who has a playlist called “Party Mix” that could only be appropriate if the party in question was an emo funeral.

When you say you love Bruce Springsteen and your partner responds, “Me too — my favorite album is Nebraska,” the difference in taste is made clear very quickly. I should have known from that “Party Mix” that he’d never come to the party the way I’d hoped. But early on, I was too much of an optimist.

We don’t go to that many concerts given my 9:30 PM bedtime so I assumed the fact that we were going to see Darius Rucker, a.k.a. Hootie, at all meant Jeff would appropriately come to that party. I even gave him a pass when Darius started with various country songs that Jeff didn’t know and didn’t care about… fine. But when we realized we were going to revisit Cracked Rear View in all its glory, I assumed Jeff would channel the enthusiasm we all had in 1995 and pep up. I kept elbowing and shout-whispering “isn’t this amazing???” and got a soft “yeah” in return. I yanked him up during “Hold My Hand” and tried to force some clapping along with the crowd but settled for a half-hearted sway that, in retrospect, may not have been of his own will but rather just me shoving my whole side into him and his body absorbing the hit and bouncing back.

So there we were, at an outdoor concert with a cold beer in hand and “Only Wanna Be with You” playing live, and the man I married couldn’t tap a single toe. I’m not asking him to be a fan; I’m expecting him to be a human.

What I thought at the time might be a situational issue has turned out to be a far bigger crisis of core values: the delta between our respective levels of enthusiasm is massive. Jeff can be an Eeyore (his mother, as every good mother should, said “I’ve never known anyone who is less of an Eeyore,” but that’s such a lie that even Jeff, in a sad Eeyore tone, had to admit it was false), but most of the time, let’s be real, he’s Owl. Whereas I’m straight up Rabbit with a Tigger rising. I bring all caps and heavy punctuation and, dare I say, a flair for the dramatic to most things and Jeff prefers the all-lowercase, single-word response. Most often, he’s “ok,” sometimes he’s “awesome,” and I’m always annoyed with the exchange.

For example, I share an article link to something I’m excited about.

He replies “oh fun.”

I say “Great punctuation there.”

He says “lol”

Me: “Next time I share something with you, find some fucking enthusiasm please!”

Him: ok

In October, my favorite Irish comedian/human being, Joanne McNally, just happens to be coming to Philadelphia for three nights. To me, this is a sign from the heavens and something that I am actually open to staying up until 10 PM (or even 10:30!!!) for. I tell Jeff and he says he’s not sure he wants to go because he may not be able to understand her accent. You can see how it netted out:

The tickets have been purchased, and I have to live for weeks with the guilt of knowing that I’m bringing a dud audience member to Joanne’s show. And in my eyes (and those of my mother) there’s nothing worse than being a dud.

The thing is, Jeff is capable of enthusiasm. He actually has an alter-ego: Jeff 2000. Fueled by whiskey and red wine, Jeff 2000 is so joyous and fun he walks the actual line of annoying (please note: Jeff 3000 is the version that’s crossed the line into annoying and I hate). Jeff 2000 shows up, plays darts suspiciously well, and will actually do a tiny bit of karaoke (he can only sing Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” but that could be way worse).

Jeff 2000 has crazy piercing eyes that are like anthropomorphized exclamation points and he talks a little faster and in a higher register than any other version of Jeff. I first met this version when Jeff brought me to his alleged “book club” that I joined and couldn’t tell you a single book that was ever read, or even assigned. It was such an incredible contrast to someone I thought just lived on a spectrum between thoughtful/sweet and total grump — like a whole other dimension, like when I took multivariable calculus and discovered there were shapes and planes that existed that I couldn’t even fathom. Jeff 2000, like a hyperbolic paraboloid, exists in the reality of the world, but not in my personal reality of things I can understand, conjure, produce, or predict.

This past Sunday was our anniversary — of both the day we met and our wedding — and regular Jeff, who I truly love, showed up at dinner. And, exactly as advertised, his brief but perfectly worded card for me was punctuated: two periods and a lone comma.

When my mother met Jeff, she pulled me into the bathroom in the middle of dinner and said “I like him a lot, do you like him?” I said “of course” and she responded: “Then I hope you like him exactly as he is, because at his age, you can’t change him.” I actually did change some surface-level things: he wears better clothes, watches Love Island, and gets up earlier.

So she must have been warning me about the toe taps.

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I left my “traditional” job a year ago this week: it was a bad fit for a host of reasons and I have no regrets. While I initially thought I’d take a little time, write a little more, and go back into corporate, I started to think more and more seriously about going out on my own.

Some things made the decision easier: I interviewed for several jobs that sounded terrible! One where, over the course of three interviews, I realized I was being hired to lay off 40% of a team and then “boost morale.” One where they contacted me with no job description and made me deliver a presentation with minimal context while I had Covid because it would be “too hard to reschedule” (no clue what I said because when I hung up, I realized I had a fever of 102.7 and spent the next two days in bed). One where I realized it was definitely not the right job for me about 5 minutes into the interview and then after 15 minutes, we lost power in a storm which I took as an actual sign from God to move on.

Those experiences were more than enough to give me the perspective I needed. And truthfully, building my own thing carried instant appeal: if one of my biggest complaints in past environments had been working for or with challenging and/or incompetent people, I was about to exclusively work for and with the best and most competent person I knew: myself.

But over time, I’ve learned that even I am annoying.

This may not come as a surprise to some of the friends and family members and former colleagues who read this, but I was shocked.

If I represent 100% of my employee base, then 100% of my organization likes to overschedule me, doesn’t maintain clear boundaries after hours, and never wants to do the work that I hate to do. Worse, I can’t delegate that hated work to anyone else because I am the only person to both assign and execute the work. It’s like being in a group project where you are simultaneously the organizer, the overachiever, and the dud who doesn’t contribute.

I’ve always gotten a lot of joy from working with others, which is maybe why I’m still surprised that, for all the control I have over my work and my schedule, so much of what I need to do runs through people who aren’t me. There’s a lot of “oh I have to introduce you to Gretchen,” and then I email but after two or three follow-ups, I just move on, and I never meet Gretchen, and maybe that doesn’t matter, but maybe it would have been helpful. I’ll never know.

Or someone will say “let’s connect next week” and then I send times because I know I’m more flexible, but then they don’t reply. I’m constantly walking the line between being persistent and annoying, feeling like the former on my most empowered days and like the latter on all the days I’m full of doubt and googling “positive affirmations for when people ignore you” and reading the first handful out loud like a doctor prescribed them.

The other side is being proud of work, or needing to workshop, or wanting to celebrate. I’m the only person with all the context on my business so trying to share with others requires a lot of background that often sends me down rabbit holes of frustration and annoyance. I spent six weeks completely rebuilding the methodology and the documentation of a large part of my work and I ultimately created a 50-page operating manual that I’m so proud of. And that milestone that would have been a major KPI in a past department and gotten listed as a monthly or quarterly “highlight” just goes in my personal journal as a “win.”

While I operate as a company of one, poor Jeff has been conscripted to be the unpaid intern in my LLC with such exciting responsibilities as looking at everything I write or make and telling me it’s amazing and then having to say “no it really is” when I accuse him of lying just to make me feel good.

In established corporate roles, I was able to assess progress and success by looking externally. Now I have to look internally for indicators that I made the right call. I do find them every single week but they’re far less dramatic. The same goes for celebrating: I may not have a Slack channel to post an update to but when I was able to tell Jeff about the client I was so excited to close, we decided it was time to pop champagne I’d been saving for an undefined “big win.”

The toast doesn’t fix it all. I can pick the good champagne flutes, but by the third sip I realized that there’s one job I can’t fill nor can I outsource. I can make Jeff toast the win (he’s happy to, although, to be fair, he’s just happy to toast anything) and I can make him read a 50-page operating manual. But I can’t vent to Jeff about my annoying coworkers anymore because that’s just me (although, again to be fair, he probably has his fair share of complaints about me).

Signs make it easier to gauge whether you’re making the right choice: a power outage in a bad interview, a well-timed lightning strike, some piece of biblical stage direction confirming I’d chosen right. More often, it’s the little things: champagne flutes I “borrowed” from my parents a decade ago, work moving forward, a poodle snoring in what should be my seat. And it’s a treat to toast my favorite coworker — the one who does everything the way I would do it, will never let me down on the group project, and is getting a little less annoying every day I work with her.

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I just learned from a friend living in Germany about their kindergarten graduation ceremony where kids jump out of a window while everyone sings a happy German song. Apparently it’s a ground-floor window and they jump onto a mat (which is, ironically, considered safe for German kindergartners but was considered quite dangerous when it happened on my eighth-grade field trip and we swapped ground-floor motel rooms). There’s also a more adventurous variation where teachers grab kids’ limbs and swing them out the door, throwing them onto a mat.

I love the concept metaphorically and literally, but also in contrast to whatever is going on with American graduations, which, I think we need to all agree, have gotten both longer and worse. Having never been to a German kindergarten, I have never seen a Fenstersprung. I know nothing about it beyond one friend’s secondhand account that was roughly: a song, an open window, kids jumping out of one thing and into whatever’s next. Yet I have already decided it beats every graduation I’ve ever sat through, which says way less about the window than it does about the sticky folding chair I was sitting in.

A graduation is a big production with two real jobs: letting a community honor students’ achievements and letting those students celebrate and grieve the end of a meaningful shared experience. I have attended many for brothers, kids, and beloved family members. And I have yet to attend one that, for all its effort, achieved either — let alone both. Is what’s missing some light stunt work in the form of a window jump?

After the drama of parking and tickets and getting there early to “save” seats, assuming you’re situated and have a chance to look at the program, the first words you see are: “out of respect to all of the graduates, please hold your applause until everyone’s name has been called.” This is reiterated once or twice early on in the ceremony, and yet, once Aaron Adams’ name is read, his family erupts with all the joy and passion of people who are so proud of their kid, so happy to be done with tuition payments, and so grateful they can easily go to the bathroom or get a snack thanks to the ease of an early-in-the-alphabet last name.

But guess what? The next two families don’t hear their kids’ names at all since the Adams family is still cheering.

Some larger schools have given up on alphabetical order and your kid just hands a slip of paper to someone on the way up and the administrator in charge of keeping some level of order inevitably butchers the pronunciation. Although, since every other family is trying to outdo the Adams family, you can’t even hear it. Usually, there’s a level of competition in volume that goes through the Ss, but once you’ve gotten through all the Smiths and Stevensons, people really run out of steam and the Ts through Zs experience a smaller crowd that’s over it. (If that sounds like the bitterness of a T through Z, it’s by design: my maiden name started with a U and even I was over it by the time they got to me).

I’m a rule follower and there’s nothing I hate more than a rule that is both unenforceable and a buzzkill. Some families tone it down (I was able to get my dad to leave the cowbells behind for my high school graduation although I occasionally regret that), but for the most part, very few people are willing to risk their kid being the one who crosses the stage to silence. How bizarre that the institution doubles down on the most offensive kind of rule: one that criminalizes joy and doesn’t even work.

I could understand if all that individual joy is suppressed in service of a meaningful collective experience.

Except that’s not the case either.

I don’t remember the outside speaker for my high school graduation at all and I only remember the class speaker because it was me. My top memory of my graduation from college was the hot weather forcing us to unzip our black sun-absorbing robes and I didn’t have enough sunscreen on underneath and ended up with a “pearl burn” from my necklace. I know Thomas Friedman spoke eloquently about world peace or something.

Oldest’s high school commencement speaker spent the entire time celebrating the school’s girls’ basketball team for making the state semi-finals — an important achievement that was probably more relevant at one of the fifteen athletic assemblies and ceremonies scheduled throughout the year.

Often, when you look at the program, it requires a decoder ring to understand what kid won what honor and how that is manifested in the tassels and flair they’re accessorizing their $120 rented gown with. Ironically, 99% of people traveled in to celebrate the kid, whose moment lasts 0.25 seconds and can’t be heard or seen particularly well.

The best graduation speaker I’ve heard was Yo-Yo Ma, who “spoke” at my brother’s college graduation. He walked up to the microphone, said he’d asked all of his friends and not one of them could remember their own graduation speaker, so he figured we’d rather hear him play than listen to him talk. Then he played Bach for 20 minutes.

Yo-Yo has an edge because I practically know Bach’s cello suites by heart, but I mostly remember it being unseasonably chilly in Massachusetts in June, me wearing a fleece, and for those 20 minutes, I wasn’t thinking about being cold or when the ceremony would be over.

Add it up. The speakers, the flown-in celebrity, the questionable sound system, the hours, and the money are supposed to honor the kid and the class and mark the magnitude of what they just accomplished. Instead it just fills the time and drains the room of the one feeling it was built to create, when something more memorable could be achieved with so much less: a window and a mat, a man and a cello.

We are, of course, going the other way. We now hand out tiny caps and gowns after preschool, kindergarten, fifth grade, or really every ordinary year a kid manages to survive. The participation trophy has morphed into a survival milestone, except that when every year is proclaimed a milestone, none of them really are. Youngest graduated from college this past May and didn’t want to walk, so she didn’t, and I didn’t fight her on it since it was the right call for her. But I’d be lying if I said some small, stubborn part of me didn’t want the folding chair and the bad PA system and her name read out loud, just once.

Here’s what I actually want, sitting in whatever room has been selected for both its capacity and its poor air circulation: I want every kid there to be seen and celebrated; I want them and their families to have one moment they’ll keep.

And then I want to leave.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Which is why I keep coming back to the window: the moment worth keeping is the one where everybody finally admits that the shared thing is over, and a decent send-off should let you feel that ending for one honest second.

And I think it would be more fun — and, dare I say, a little cathartic — for everyone involved to watch a row of teachers grab each kid by the arms and legs, swing once, and pitch them out the door onto the mat.

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Like many of my generation, I was profoundly influenced by 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save The Earth. We became “leak detectives” to save water, cut the rings that came on soda to save the turtles, and learned that proper recycling required checking the number on the bottom of every plastic container. Today, we have a trash bin, a recycling bin, and faith that sorting magic is happening somewhere downstream.

The only time when recycling gets more complicated is when we go to Nantucket. Since it’s an incredibly beautiful resort destination and I’m freeloading on housing, I have minimal complaints; 30 miles out to sea,1 proper waste management genuinely matters. At the dump, we have to get everything in the right disposal unit (non-recyclable/non-compostable trash, compostable trash, glass, plastic, aluminum, and cardboard), all while navigating the people enforcing proper disposal and tourists who are confused and seagulls who love trash in general and all the smells of public waste. While it’s not my favorite activity, I will say that nothing makes you more aware of your own waste and makes you rethink consumerist habits like a visit to the dump.

We keep five clearly designated bins/bags in the kitchen and sort when we throw things out (aligned with the One-Touch Rule of time management). When we’re there, Jeff and I swing by the dump twice a week, it takes under five minutes each time, and then we go to my favorite bakery. Maybe it’s simply the Pavlovian response I’ve trained in myself, but I don’t mind the dump at all and the ham and cheese croissant on the other side is always worth it.

Last week, when we went out to lunch and my dad announced his car would be headed to the dump after lunch, I knew there’d be no croissant reward and voluntold Jeff to ride with him.

Except that when we were leaving, Jeff wasn’t feeling well and asked if I’d switch spots. I said sure, because I’m a good person and I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

I hopped in the car and my father said “I’m surprised you switched since I don’t recall you ever volunteering to go to the dump before.” I reminded him that many things about me had changed since I was 19 and got out of the car thinking I’d take the bottles or the cans or something.

It was upon arriving at the dump eight minutes later that I discovered, to my surprise, confusion, and displeasure, that my father didn’t believe in pre-sorting the trash and had led others in my family to also think that sorting trash was some kind of Herculean feat — one my chore-averse and easily confused adult children somehow manage every single vacation. I was handed a bag with everything mixed together and told that the “best way” to handle things was just to walk individual pieces to their larger disposal bins.

First of all, no.

Second of all, ew.

I wrapped up sorting my bag quickly, didn’t offer to help with others, and ran to the car for a wet wipe. While I Purell-ed myself, I watched my father tilt at windblown tissues and empty food containers with all the conviction of Don Quixote. One gust of wind had exposed a flaw in his “best way.”

In the car, on the way home, and once home, I tried to make my father, man of science, understand that I was right. But he doubled down and kept arguing — which I should have expected because I got much of my stubbornness from him.

Except that this time, I wasn’t trying to explain to him why it was a double standard that in the ninth grade, my brother got to go see Guns N’ Roses with friends while I needed a chaperone to go to Lilith Fair. This time, I was definitively right.

In Cheaper by the Dozen, the children are horrified when their father uses their own tonsillectomies as an excuse for a time-and-motion study but perhaps I could do something similar: labeled bins, dotted travel path, a heat map of wasted motion. Or even a full step count map with sorting at home vs. sorting at the dump clearly defined and delineated.

None of that would matter because he wouldn’t read it. I’ve been cast as the spoiled kid who didn’t want to go to the dump in the first place (admittedly not that far off from the truth) and is just complaining. I know I’m someone who cares deeply about doing things the right way and is incredibly triggered by anyone arguing otherwise.

So I reminded myself: my father is a lovely and generous man, 99.99% of germs on my hands had been killed by the folks at GOJO Industries, and, most importantly, I wasn’t the one chasing trash around a parking lot.

But then Jeff told me the other car stopped for ice cream while I had trash hands.

And I hated everyone all over again.

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Except that’s never it and suddenly two to three days before said child returns, we learn that they have no bed sheets because they set last year’s on fire or “have no idea” what even happened to their towels or rug or lamp. Shoes that I had said looked like they were on their last wear in May, and I’d been assured that was the style, need to be replaced urgently.

And so once again, we find ourselves at the mercy of Prime shipping or stuck at a shoe store with a child with weirdly sized feet and very particular taste (always a recipe for a pleasant and efficient trip). Whether a real phobia or one grounded in the neuroses of my mother, I was trained that you ALWAYS wash new clothes or sheets or towels before wear/use because you never know what germs are on them from the manufacturer or store or shipping. And even though “please wash these sheets” is said the minute new sheets are procured, I find myself, without fail, on the night before a departure either washing the sheets myself or having an existential crisis over whether I’m a bad parent for letting my kid get some kind of skin infection as the fallout from poor hygiene.

This year was always going to be different: for the first time in exactly 10 years, we are not sending a kid off to college. We’ve closed that chapter physically, metaphorically, and financially.

Instead, in a couple of weeks, Youngest will be heading off on a new adventure: a residential volunteer program on a farm that could not be a better match. This program comes with a number of requirements similar to the college return, though — including multiple doctor/dentist visits and forms that need to be signed off on, a TB test that I will not mock since reading John Green’s book Everything Is Tuberculosis, and an all-new packing list full of what’s needed for life on a farm.

Having learned from past mistakes, I started my nagging early — like as soon as I was made aware of the forms and appointments I said “Okay, you need to call and get appointments early, you never know how long the wait is.” And the response I got was absolutely insane: “Yeah, I already did.”

Shocked, but I knew I still had a purpose.

“Okay, don’t forget to put all appointments on the family calendar so we know when we have to take you.”

“Yeah, I did.”

Shocked and awed.

“Great, and we’ll have to look at your packing list and figure out where you need to go since I don’t know anything about farm equipment.”

“Yeah, I’m making a list of what I need and what store has it and doing some research on farm boots.”

What. Was. Actually. Happening?

So naturally, since that point, I have had “Youngest farm supply shopping — where?” and “Make sure Youngest submits all forms by 8/3 deadline” on my list for the occasional nudge. I know my role, I know my responsibilities (I’ve held them since I married into this blended family) and I’m the holder of all the open tabs for the family. Historically, Middle and Youngest have needed A LOT of reminders to do things, and even with those reminders, we still have an under 50% success rate on making needed appointments and getting ahead of deadlines.

Shopping trips are always where it falls apart due to the challenge of finding anything that works taste-wise with anything that fits properly — shoes tend to be the Moby Dick of every list because somehow the women in Jeff’s family all inherited very tiny feet, something I, at 5’9” with giant boat feet, can’t begin to understand.

Youngest did do the research and discovered a store called “Boot Barn,” an establishment that I’ve never had a need to visit before and likely never will again. And then she coordinated with Jeff to take her, so I was once again unnecessary. Last week, they went and bought everything she needed. Jeff is convinced I would actually really love Boot Barn for all my country-western needs (sadly with the Cowboy Carter tour behind us, I’m not sure when that’ll come up again, but good to know).

Basically everything is off the list. The doctor’s office owes Youngest one thing, but that’s on them. We texted yesterday morning to remind her that everything was due and that she might want to send early and let them know about the delay on some forms, and we were told she’d already called the doctor to pester them AND already submitted all the forms with the suggested caveat.

I want so desperately to be proud or grateful or relieved. Months ago I was panicked there’d be no plan and I would be using a crowbar to remove this kid from my house. And today I’m literally useless. All my pending items on the list crossed off and no new ones to add at this moment.

Even her sheets are washed and ready to go. And as for washing farm gear… I don’t even know how to do it. Do my mom’s rules about packaged sheets from random factories apply to work boots from Boot Barn? When I brought that up, I found out Boot Barn had already given detailed boot care and cleaning instructions, and Youngest was all over that too. The neurosis my mother handed me has spent thirty-some years looking for a place to land, and it finally lands on a kid who doesn’t need it; the clerk at Boot Barn knows more about farm boots than I picked up in all my Little House on the Prairie rereads.

Which, of course, has prompted only one thought in my mind: has she been playing us the whole time? Why did so many other activities require so much project management and/or hovering (or just didn’t happen at all)? Was weaponized incompetence the MO all these years? And now that she’s really excited to get going, have all those hidden industrious skills finally surfaced?

Maybe she just wants the life waiting for her on the other side of all that paperwork.

So now my list has one remaining item: “determine whether Youngest’s entire adolescence was a ruse.”

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Watching

I have discovered nothing more delightful on television than “The Other Bennet Sister” which is on Britbox. I know, I know, you don’t want another subscription and, frankly, neither do I, but you can watch the whole thing in the free trial week and you’ll be so grateful. The premise is that Mary Bennet, depressing middle sister and mediocre pianist / vocalist from “Pride and Prejudice,” goes to London to become a governess. Somehow, this show manages to respect Jane Austen and bring so much humor and humanity to the spinoff I didn’t know I needed. It is a fabulous comedy and rewarding drama. No word on a second season, but they are going to do a Christmas special and what a gift that will be.

Post World Cup, I was looking for my inspirational sports content and ChatGPT pointed me to “All or Nothing: Arsenal” (on Prime) which takes us behind the scenes while Mikel Arteta, the manager of Arsenal, works to rebuild the team in the 2021-2022 season. It’s an incredible view of inspiring leadership in action: I don’t think it’s possible to watch and not fall in love with Arteta (although I suppose non-Arsenal fans will find a way). Here’s one of his locker room talks and it’s not even in my top two:

On the list of things I’ve told Jeff are an absolute “no go” for me to watch are talking animals, spaceships, and anything over two hours and 20 minutes (and that extra 20 minutes past the two hour mark is me being incredibly generous). So I am shocking myself at recommending either of these next two movies and also apologize to Christopher Nolan for the company he’s keeping.

First, “The Sheep Detectives:” essentially a shepherd is murdered and his flock (voiced by the likes of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston and Sir Patrick Stewart) help solve the crime but I can’t stress enough how much better it is than it needed to be. The premise has “solid airplane movie” written all over it but the execution is beyond charming.

Next, “The Odyssey.” I almost didn’t go see it since I didn’t realize it was three hours. And I get it, it’s a long trip, needs a long movie, but I still think it could have been cut to two and a half. And then I almost didn’t get out of the car when I realized Jeff was hoping I’d stay awake for a three-hour movie in an all-Pepsi theater. However, the movie was exceptional. The acting was superb with such standout performances from John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, and Robert Pattinson that they almost overshadowed just how incredible Matt Damon was. I really was blown away and even without Coke Zero stayed both awake and captivated the whole time. I truly don’t know how it could have been better (unless it had been cut to even, like, two hours and 40 minutes).

I debated including this at all since I really think, talking sheep aside, I mostly shared high-quality cultural pieces but the YouTube algorithm recently introduced me to Trip Hazard, a dog dancer who has performed at Crufts and on “Britain’s Got Talent” and I think sandwiching “The Odyssey” between talking sheep and a dog dancing to Mary Poppins seems on brand for me. Please note: there’s a world of Trip Hazard performances that await you — I was particularly impressed with his Aladdin routine where he rubbed the lamp with his paws to make the genie appear.

Listening To

For the last two months, I basically only listen to one podcast: “My Therapist Ghosted Me” which features Irish comedian (and former “Taskmaster” contestant) Joanne McNally and Irish TV presenter/general celebrity, Vogue Williams, shoot the shit twice a week. I don’t even know how to describe it beyond saying it’s just a genuinely great hang. Warning: tough listen if you struggle with Irish accents — and Jeff made me play it at 0.9x just to keep up. Incidentally, Joanne is coming to Philly to do stand-up at the end of October and Jeff, even on my birthday, will not agree to go with me because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to understand her. If you’re keeping score, that means that I will see a three-hour movie without Coke Zero for Jeff but he will not listen to an amazing comedian I love for 90 minutes with booze for me.

Reading

David Sedaris came out with a new book, “The Land and Its People,” which I adored (comme toujours) but it also meant we were treated to his press tour including this NYT article going behind the scenes on his art collection. We also listened to Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel “Villa Coco” as an audiobook and loved it for a drive. Fun fact: the audiobook narrator, Edoardo Ballerini, also voices some sleep stories in the Calm app so it’s a very soothing read and he does a great job with accents. The book is about a recent college graduate / archivist who takes a job for a year working for an unspecified Baronessa at a villa in Italy and everyone is a character who could have their own book. The story is quick and clever and a great escapist summer read.

Two other articles of note to help us all better understand Gen Z. First, “The New Yorker” covered “Love Island” and did a fantastic job of making it sound like something worth your time (although this season has ultimately been kind of meh in both the US and UK). I just appreciate any time there’s a highbrow/lowbrow culture (reminds me of the glory days of the NY Mag Approval Matrix).

The NYT had this, ultimately depressing, article about Gen Z and their collective lack of ambition. To be clear, it’s not so much a Gen Z hit piece as a meditation on how thoughts on work have changed. One thing that stood out to me and Jeff: “Eight out of 10 students who graduated from high school in 2022 don’t expect work to be an important part of their life, nor for their job to be particularly interesting.”

Making

Most of what I’m making of late is driven by forty-something protein goals and whatever comes in our CSA box (hello beets and zucchini!). We continue to get home run after home run out of Molly Baz’s recipe club (which, at this point, is far and away the best recipe subscription I pay for) but would call out the Green Bolognese and Chicken Piccata as mega-winners. You may not think you want bolognese in the summer but this one is minty and oddly kind of light? And you may not think you need another piccata recipe at all but this was the best we’ve made with cherry tomatoes and chile peppers.

I think we’re officially out of green garlic season, but definitely bookmark this Green Garlic Toast for next spring. I would also highly recommend using up your zucchini with Smitten Kitchen’s Zucchini Butter Pasta (which I serve with garlicky breadcrumbs and roasted cherry tomatoes stolen from a cavatelli I had at The Proprietors a few years ago).

Using and Loving

Added this section because I figured I’d share some of my favorite things in general that have no other home but I need to evangelize. First, Snipd is an AI podcast app my brother recommended and it’s so fabulous. While it’s fine to use to just listen to two Irish women talk about random UK scandals, it’s best deployed when listening to lengthy podcasts where you want the takeaways but not to listen to Tim Ferriss for three hours (time you could spend watching “The Odyssey!”) The app both lets you snip and transcribes key bits and pulls out what others have transcribed for you to save and share. It also has a “DJ” feature that will skip through a long episode and just play the most important parts and provide some context or bridging in between allowing you to get 20 minutes of meaty content out of a 90-minute show.

Perhaps a little too squarely in the stereotypical elder millennial consumer target camp but the Republic of Tea’s Dubai Chocolate tea is a treat. Steep for seven minutes and add a little sugar and a splash of half-and-half and it’s the most delightful and calming and indulgent end to your day.

Lastly, Rachael introduced me to the Town AI assistant and I initially thought: I don’t need another tool, this looks overpriced and the fact that it gives you an actual character/assistant to work with is weird. But, I was wrong. It’s the best AI assistant I’ve worked with. The routines it suggests, the responses it drafts, the meeting briefs it prepares (all automatically) are amazing. And instead of using one of the boring preset assistants, I had it create Bechamel for me – the poodle with a clipboard.

I know, I know, we don’t need more AI tools but genuinely the quality and responsiveness of this is making a huge difference especially when Claude is starting to wear on me as seen in Claude’s recent working status:

I end this trip around the sun so grateful that you are reading this and have liked / subscribed / commented / been interested in my cascading failures.

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So when our oldest was sharing some of the options available on a dating app in Portland, I found myself repeatedly saying “I’m asking from a place of curiosity and not judgment.” Because, what else does one say in response to a picture of an individual wearing a jester’s hat and playing a recorder that they proactively shared with people to find a romantic partner (or multiple in this new polyamorous world?) However, there’s a piece that I don’t say out loud: at home, the not-judging gets announced. Everywhere else, it doesn’t.

With a “Ted Lasso” rewatch underway in advance of season four coming out next month, I was reminded by Ted that Walt Whitman said “be curious, not judgmental.” Although, diligent and dedicated Substacker that I am, I did google to confirm the quote and learned that Walt Whitman never said that. Thank goodness I asked.

I am, by nature, incredibly curious. I am, in fact, far more curious than judgmental because I truly want to know everything. Last year I went on a whole deep dive to confirm what the name of my color of L.L. Bean Deluxe backpack used in 1997 was. When my friends were split between forest and spruce, I contacted L.L. Bean directly. The answer was spruce and I legitimately think I would have lost sleep had I not known the truth.

Arguably, being curious is why I’m good at my job: most of the time, asking questions forces someone to reconsider their approach without needing to say “the way you’re currently doing this is terrible.”

In my personal life, I announce the lack of judgment. I say it out loud, to my kids, to Jeff, to whoever’s in the room: I’m not judging, I’m just asking. The announcement is the point since I want credit for my considerable restraint.

In my professional life, I do the opposite. Recently a client and I had been circling the same thing for weeks — I kept trying to ask the questions that would get us there, and we kept sidestepping it. Then I landed the knockout punch: “is it possible you were doing this job purely for the money and trying to justify staying there with other rationale?” The answer: yes.

I never announced any of it. I said nothing, let my face go neutral, and asked the question anyway — because the second a client can tell I’m judging, they defend instead of answer. That’s the whole strategy: conceal the judgment, on purpose, the same way I’d conceal a hand of cards. It’s the same move as talking to my kids, just minus the disclaimer.

At home, though, I don’t remotely have that level of restraint. My mother’s phrase I repeat most often is “look with your eyes and not your mouth” — which started as her answer to “where’s my [insert random object/form/pair of glasses here]?” but by the time I was raising my own kids, it had grown into shorthand for “try it yourself before you outsource the effort to me.” So much for being far more curious than judgmental; it turns out that only holds when the curiosity is mine. The second someone else is the curious one, I skip the question and go straight to the ruling.

Like when Jeff and I were out and a kid at home texted us: “which light switch turns on the outside light?” Clearly flipping all three switches on/off would have answered that question way faster than a text would have, but we were still seen as such authorities that it was asked. That was an example of someone being curious and me offering nothing but judgment in return. I texted back: “God helps those who help themselves.”

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I am so many things but sloppy and unprofessional, I am not. I’m the one who gets gold stars and thrives on praise and has, occasionally, been criticized for being so professional it can seem “cold” or “harsh” or whatever business-appropriate word is used instead of “bitchy.”

I already knew I was working for a micromanager but bullet-gate pushed me over the edge. Fortunately, I already had a fair amount of experience ceding control and not getting positive feedback since I’ve been a stepmom for over a decade — when someone tells you KFC has better mashed potatoes even though you are confident whoever is heating them up couldn’t tell a rustic mash from a pomme purée, you get a reality check quickly.

At work, the stakes can vary — sure, it’s just bullets and your self-esteem one day, but the next it’s being told the only time someone can meet is on a Sunday at 2 PM. Or that the only way a meeting can be handled is by doing a day trip to Dallas: three people, eleven hours of travel each, close to three thousand dollars, for a one-hour meeting that a tech failure forced remote anyway.

My husband’s ex ran all the same plays. We once needed a critical form signed, and she kept changing the terms: first it was adjusting custody weekends, then buying another kid a hamster to “make them feel better,” then just outright cash. Which — as I’m writing this — I realize is less “shifting standards” than extortion, but you get the gist.

Jeff’s ex loved to play these games and ultimately everyone suffered for it: holding out on agreeing to a vacation when she had no alternate plans or refusing to sign forms or make things official with the Friend of the Court. We once advanced her alimony/child support outside of the computer system as a favor and she agreed in writing to let them know and then refused to do so for so long that the state placed a hold that prevented Jeff from getting a passport (which prevented us from taking a real honeymoon). I don’t think she knew about the passport repercussions but I do think she took some pleasure in inconveniencing us.

I’ve always preferred to sit in the driver’s seat, and the constant loss of control both at work and at home wears me down. But if I’m truly honest, part of the pattern is me. I’m the one who, the second I’m dealing with a controlling person, starts auditioning for approval — still convinced there’s something I can do to finally earn my clearly deserved gold star.

I’ve turned to my own small acts of resistance. Not to change the micromanagers and narcissists and controlling people in my life — I’ve mostly accepted I can’t — but to stop competing for approval that was never coming. And today, on Bastille Day, I’m celebrating my own quiet revolution.

I can leave the bullets exactly as they were.

I can adjust my availability on work platforms so I can’t be reached outside of business hours.

I can ask about the extortion hamster often just to realize the kid didn’t even want a hamster and is now stuck with one.

Honestly, I can buy my own gold stars.

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It’s kind of fascinating that while the standard dog names have stayed relatively constant and cut from a similar cloth (largely because simple names are easy for most dogs to learn — except, of course, my dog Sam who still doesn’t know his name at 12), human names have evolved dramatically as parents seek more unique names to set their kids apart. If you really want the full range, I highly recommend the tragedeigh subreddit where people share the most bizarre name choices. For example, someone shared a text thread with a friend who said she was naming her son Equador and didn’t know about Ecuador the country, she just thought “it fits the vibe.”

Our names carry weight which I, as someone named Karen, think about often. Most of the time I think about how a name could invite teasing or mockery — but names that are adjectives or carry real meaning are doing something different. Those names arrive with a promise. We might assume someone named Grace has some grace or see a Valor as brave. We extend Sincere the benefit of the doubt before he opens his mouth.

We absolutely should not.

This season of “Love Island USA” is wrapping up soon and, to be fair, it hasn’t lived up to the bar set by “Love Island UK” and, specifically, Lorenzo (a.k.a. the blend of JFK, Jr and Carlos Sainz, Jr I didn’t know I needed on this planet). However, watching 23-year-olds wearing bikinis all day and explaining where New Hampshire is to people somehow makes summer feel like summer. Early on, we were treated to the coupling of Melanie and Sincere who bonded over being Eagles fans and “being family oriented” and Rita’s water ice.

Sincere established himself as one of the core guys in the villa, had a brotherly relationship with a couple of the girls, and told us that “acts of service” was his love language and it’s important to him to be “vulnerable.” He spoke about being raised by a single mother and grandmother and being the oldest of five children and he seemed… sincere.

I’ll spare the play-by-play but his actions were anything but that and when he had the opportunity to flirt with other women, he did. Using the same moves, he taught other women their names in sign language and used the same pet names and absolutely led every woman he sat with to think he was still “exploring,” while telling Melanie she was special. He had most of the villa fooled but then everyone sat in uncomfortable silence while production made them watch footage of him being so insincere. Everyone was shocked, but his name had been doing his PR for him with others extending the benefit of the doubt for something he hadn’t earned.

If I sound bitter, as someone named Karen, I am. Sincere gets to start every exchange with a point on the scoreboard and I start in the hole. Most of the time, I’m confident my side part bob I’ve been sporting since 2nd grade and self-deprecating sense of humor deflects the “Karen” label, but on the occasion when I do have an issue, I question the best way to handle to avoid the “entitled white woman demanding to speak to the manager” vibe. Naturally, I regularly regret not doubling down on Kari as a nickname.

Recently, we had a special family dinner planned. We were on vacation and had three days together as just the five of us (something that hasn’t happened in years) and wanted to toast both Jeff for Father’s Day and Youngest for graduating college. We booked a reservation at the most expensive restaurant in a very expensive place where you take a boat ride and it’s very special and kind of magical and while you’re paying way too much for all of it, it’s almost always worth it. I’ve had a chance to go every other year or so and celebrate some big milestones and have always taken the boat ride back at sunset with a smile on my face.

This time, however, the boat ride was canceled due to weather. Not a problem, no one wanted to be on a boat in the rain. I confirmed twice that they’d be able to accommodate a vegan, only to arrive and learn the waiter had no knowledge of the request and repeatedly confused vegan and vegetarian. We asked for tap water but ended up forced into $15 bottled water, which we drank quickly because we went an entire course with empty glasses and no one asking if we needed anything to drink.

Some kind of leak sprang near the door that we were seated next to and rain started pouring down. It was bad enough that two different restaurant employees came by to take pictures of the leak and only one noticed it was splashing on me and into my purse so I had to put a coat on and dry my wallet with my napkin. That one said “I hope you’re not getting wet,” and I replied “actually I am” and then he just walked away and never came back.

I ended the evening wet and pretty disappointed that we had wasted $1000. When the Resy feedback form came, I shared the experience and said I assumed if they didn’t know how to accommodate a vegan meal they would have told me so when I checked and that overall the evening felt like we were inconveniencing them and not like we had a reservation for a special celebration.

No reply. Which I suppose was consistent with the experience we had in person.

Unlike Sincere, I start most exchanges on my back foot. I experience it here on Substack where the minute someone doesn’t like something I write the comments go “and of course your name’s Karen.” I can’t fix or change a cultural movement.

I’m behind on Love Island so I’m not sure how Sincere is faring, but I’m sure he’s continuing to be “vulnerable” and “take accountability” and if he does leave with a relationship, it will last as long as his influencer brand deals do. And in a few years, he’ll once again be able to coast on his name for his reputation and not his behavior over six filmed weeks in Fiji.

Meanwhile, I will continue to debate whether I speak up at all. The Resy form going into the void isn’t really an oversight. “Karen complained” is cheaper and easier to swallow than “we’re sorry.”

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Yesterday while playing with our kids, there was a moment when Middle should have frozen me — I was winning by the most and there was no point in freezing anyone else — and he chose to freeze his dad.

When asked why, he had no real answer, but I realized it’s because I’m the scary one. Jeff is the nice one and the familiar one and their real dad and I’m the intimidating one whether it’s said or not.

I don’t remember when I was first called intimidating. I know a friend’s babysitter mentioned it (and my friend decided to tell me) when I was in 8th or 9th grade but I’m sure it came up earlier. It absolutely came up in high school where, courtesy of going to an all-girls’ school, I was rejected for the winter formal by one boy from the boys’ school for being both tall AND intimidating. It’s certainly come up in several workplaces.

Occasionally, people choose other words or descriptors that are intimidating-coded. Most often “intense” but sometimes “tightly wound.” The combo of being tall, having a “severe” face (per my mother, who also told me when I wore my hair back I looked like a “scary German real estate agent” – one of many times my mother introduced a comparison to something I doubted she’d ever encountered personally). A work mentor told me to wear navy over black and knits over suits to try and seem more approachable. Finding out in my late 20s I have some natural curl in my hair was a gift: curly-haired me is way less intimidating than severe-German-real-estate-agent me.

The thing is that describing someone as “intimidating,” is never actually describing them, it’s describing someone else’s experience of them but delivering it as a problem they need to fix or a character flaw. It’s a projection that’s dressed up as an observation. It tells you nothing about the person being described and everything about the person doing the describing. “Too tall” is the tell since height is not a personality trait; tall people take up more visual space and visual space can be a proxy for overall presence.

I’ve had “intimidating” be used as an attempted compliment — as in “you’re so smart and assertive, it’s very intimidating to people.” The word gets deployed at women specifically in contexts where the same behavior in a man would get labeled “confident” or “direct.”

It’s come up enough I wonder whether it’s innate or changeable at all; should I be trying to be less “intimidating?” I know I can’t be all the time; I certainly can’t imagine surviving as a day camp counselor if the children were fleeing from my presence. So it must be situational, which then begs the question: why is the burden on me to carry? Why do I have to change who I am, what I wear, how I do my hair, to make someone else feel differently?

My thumb actually stopped scrolling on Instagram when I came across an inspirational quote graphic that read “Am I intimidating or are you intimidated?” This quote was shared with no attribution and then when I tried to find an originator, I came up dry but did appreciate the Gemini summary at the top of the page saying “As an AI, I am incapable of feeling intimidated. My primary job is to process information and assist you.”

I saw thousands of women loving it and sharing it with various emojis like 💯 and 🙌 . As cheesy as it was, I felt something shift. Thirty-plus years of other people’s discomfort, and it had never once occurred to me that it wasn’t mine to manage.

Maybe it’s theirs to carry. Maybe the question was never about me at all.

Going back to Flip 7, Middle chose to freeze his father because freezing me carried more risk. I won that game.

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“Do you use your mouth a lot?” the dentist asked.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Like would you say you talk more than most people?”

“Without a doubt.” As I’m saying this, I’m realizing the dentist’s office is really one of the very few places where I talk very little but no one else who has met me more than once would even need to ask.

Gum graft recovery supposedly involved 48 hours of no talking, and 3-6 weeks of modified diet with a focus on soft foods. Both of these are actual torture for me since so much of life revolves around food, cooking, and eating, with a strong textural preference for “crunchy” over “denture-safe.” The result was weeks of me complaining nonstop (mostly to Jeff but also anyone who asked how I was). I found myself negotiating with ChatGPT trying to sell it on why I could put crushed Gavottes on top of my ice cream provided I directed to the back of my mouth to chew only for ChatGPT to say “don’t let a wafer cookie be the thing that complicates a smooth recovery.”

That’s actually the thing with lightweight medical drama: you find yourself negotiating what’s possible because nothing’s going to kill you, it’s just going to be annoying, costly in terms of money, costly in terms of time, potentially costly in terms of dignity.

As someone who probably was made for the Victorian era in terms of health and fortitude, I faint easily. I’ve fainted getting a pedicure, during and after multiple meals, on an airplane, at a conference, out of surprise when I fell down the stairs, while just sitting waiting for a work call to start, and getting my blood drawn. When you have “the common faints” (the actual term an actual cardiologist who is not related to me used), there is no treatment or workaround. The official medical guidance from the same cardiologist was “if you think you’re going to faint, sit down.” Just an annoyance.

There are some tricks: I can use vagal syncope as justification for a heavy hand with salt. I can calm down before any blood draw by repeating out loud “I am a grown up and this is just a needle” (something I have done now for well over a decade and not fainted once since starting). Again, if any medical “condition” is managed by reciting a mantra or sitting down, I’m not in any kind of delusional state about the severity, but when life already has enough basic stressors, one more thing is just one thing too many.

Not to mention, knowing nothing is that serious yourself doesn’t change the impact on those around you. A former coworker/dear friend, Rachel, has now been with me TWICE when I’ve fainted at dinner and she’s the one holding ice on my neck and making sure I get home and explaining to people there’s no need to call an ambulance. Last week when I fainted at a restaurant, I’m doubled over and green while instructing Jeff “make sure they know I’m not drunk, just a loser.” As mostly non-serious as my common faints are, it’s still scary to pass out in a public place.

I know how this sounds. My mother managed stage IV cancer for nine years, so I’m not confused about where soft food and fainting at dinner rank against actual disease. But knowing the ranking doesn’t change what it feels like when you’re already stretched thin and one more thing lands on the pile. My mother, of all people, would have gotten that. She’d have called fainting at a restaurant mortifying and meant it, without it costing her anything to also be the one with the real diagnosis.

Ten days before Thanksgiving last year, I threw my back out putting a laundry basket on the ground — because that’s just what life is like in your 40s — and was immediately in a panic. Thanksgiving is my Super Bowl (see above re: food, cooking, and eating) and now I couldn’t really cook. I found myself super committed to rehabbing with just that one goal in mind: what did I need to do to make sure I’d be able to make my 16-separate-recipe / four-days-to-prepare meal? All the annoyance while lying on my back with my legs at a 90-degree angle had a single goal: I wasn’t rehabbing to reduce pain but rather to improve oven access.

Great news: I made it. Sixteen recipes, four days, a back that still complained about it but did the job anyway, and the ability to ask Jeff for help during peak oven traffic time. That’s the thing about inconveniences: they have edges. You can see the other side of them, which is its own kind of permission to be annoyed and dramatic on the way there. I’d like to think nobody at that table knew what it took to get the turkey out of the oven, except that since I talk so much that it’s led to gum recession, I was certainly not quiet on this topic.

While I’m sure I was supposed to learn a powerful lesson about gratitude for mobility and health when I have it, I mostly learned when/how to put a laundry basket down safely.

I’m still a baby about pain. I still talk myself through blood draws like a hostage negotiator working my own case. But I’ve stopped thinking of the narrating and the doing as two different things. The narrating might just be how I do it.

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For decades, I’ve been worried about rats in plumbing. Rats who are smart enough and wily enough to live in sewers and crawl up pipes. Rats with blueprints of modern housing who’ve figured out the infrastructure and decided to use it against us. My husband thinks this is insane and does the same condescending laugh when I bring up rats in toilets that he does when I confuse “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” or Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard (the latter largely for comedic effect and not because I truly thought “Stairway to Heaven” and “Pour Some Sugar On Me” came from the same minds — although full disclosure, I did just google “did Led Zeppelin write Stairway to Heaven?” to be sure).

He is wrong to laugh, and I am regularly able to produce articles from reputable sources (as well as the “Daily Mail”) confirming that this is not only possible but has happened to real people who also did not deserve it. My friend’s plumber confirmed: under the correct circumstances (specifically a crack in the sewer line plus heavy rain plus the absence or dislodgment of a backflow valve), then it absolutely can happen.

The thing about rats, though, is that some people love them. On purpose and by choice. Rat people are a whole category — people who looked at the full menu of domesticated animals and said, actually, I’ll have the rat. I get the logic, sort of. Rats are smart, demonstrably smart, in ways that other common pets are not. When Youngest was lobbying for a pet some years ago, the rat was her opening offer, citing their intelligence as the primary argument. I did not find this as persuasive as the shorter lifespan but I understood the case.

Ferret people are a related genus. If you know someone who owns a ferret, you already know this, because they’ve told you. Ferret ownership is not a private matter, it’s a visible and/or vocal personality trait. I don’t fully understand ferret people either, but I have a grudging respect for anyone who has identified what they want and committed to it, as well as deep personal empathy for anyone (human or otherwise) with a long torso.

The thing that bothers me is not the rat people or the ferret people. It’s the rest of us who have spent decades assigning animals jobs they never agreed to, and then acting surprised when they fail to perform (there’s a tangent to be made about my kids and chores here too but I promised myself I’d stay on topic today).

The goldfish teaches early responsibility and low level home decor. The hamster teaches the circle of life as well as an understanding that nocturnal activity from those around you negatively impacts sleep. I have learned a lot of life lessons about betta fish — seven of which lasted a combined total of three years when I was in my 30s and who are now forbidden in our home by Jeff who had to play Dr. Kevorkian more than once to a $4 fish with dropsy. And the hermit crab, at least in southeastern Pennsylvania in the late eighties and early nineties, was the starter pet. Starter for what, exactly, was never clear.

A hermit crab is not a pet. A hermit crab is a dinosaur bug that smells bad and has minimal needs. It does not bond with you. It does not respond to its name. It doesn’t even have the brain structure to understand language. It will not comfort you when you’re sad or learn to do anything on command.1 Apparently over time they may recognize your shape and smell which is theoretically better than nothing but not by much.

If you take it out of its little cage, it will crawl on your hand and you will spend the entire time hoping it doesn’t pinch you, which is the complete opposite of what a pet is supposed to make you feel. The only genuinely fun part of hermit crab ownership was picking out the different shells — because theoretically it would move to a bigger one as it grew — and choosing the color of the gravel.

And yet, I brought my hermit crab(s) on family trips. And I had enough friends with hermit crabs for us to stage races of our “pets” that didn’t know any commands. I remember a group of us gathering with our hermit crabs at an elementary school friend Emily’s house to have some kind of hermit crab “derby” in Emily’s garden shed. Only for Emily’s mom to come in and step on one of them. I don’t know if it was mine or Emily’s. It doesn’t matter and it says a lot that I can’t remember. That hermit crab came to battle and lost the war.

I’ve been thinking about whether this was specific to our generation or whether it’s still happening — whether somewhere out there a parent is currently buying a hermit crab at a pet shop and telling themselves it’s educational. My suspicion is that millennials mostly got this out of our systems and then overcorrected dramatically. We went from $0.99 hermit crabs that died mysteriously and taught us nothing to spending four figures on orthopedic dog beds and specialty grooming and silk-lined dog sweaters to reduce matting. We didn’t stop using animals as delivery systems for our emotional needs. We just moved to bigger, nicer shells.

Perhaps the rodent people are, in retrospect, the most honest pet owners. They’re not pretending to be learning a lesson or craving emotional support. They wanted rats and they got rats. And, frankly, they’re probably more upset about rats drowning in toilets than I am. As someone who has a toy poodle currently medicated for anxiety, and suffers from light paranoia, I’m definitely not sleeping better at night.

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It did not go well. I was terrible. At one point, I hit a ball into another family’s bay (which the set up is literally designed to make near impossible), and then the low point was when Jeff offered some unsolicited and wildly original tips like “keep your eye on the ball” and “relax.” My attitude directly correlated to the final scores and when we left, Middle said something like “that would have been more fun if you’d been having a good time, Karen.”

Yes, it would have.

That’s the thing about sports: I am not good at them and yet, I still care when I lose. And it translates outside of the rare times I have dabbled in athleticism. I am not able to be a casual sports fan because if I care a little, I care SO MUCH.

All of this came back in my mind recently with the 20th anniversary of “Friday Night Lights” and while I’m eternally grateful to the show for teaching me more about football than I ever learned from my high school friend’s instructional powerpoint, and the world is eternally grateful for the introduction of Tim Riggins, I do think it got me way too invested in the story lines in sports. My assumption was that any high drama/high stakes moment would end in, if not a happy way, then a way that served a larger narrative: that my investment of time and loyalty in any team would be rewarded.

While I was never really a local sports fan — and distinctly remember going to an Eagles-Giants game with that same high school friend where it was so cold that I started mentally rooting for the Giants so that there wouldn’t be a tie because I wanted to go home — I never felt that way about the Dillon Panthers or other on-screen athletes. I remember the Titans, I know there’s no crying in baseball, and I learned tall girls can find love in basketball and with their hot next door neighbors.

Once we leave scripted scenarios, if I have any opinion on the sport/team/player, it’s just too much. When a game gets close, I have to turn it off. Jeff claims that’s when everyone else starts watching and is what defines a “good game,” but I literally can’t handle it. I get stressed, I end up online looking for spoilers but it’s live so that’s not even possible. Those little tickers that show the statistical chances of winning in real time aren’t helpful when it’s close and I’m having panic attacks.

I think real sports fans have made peace with some level of suffering and casual fans don’t care enough to suffer… and I’m in a purgatory that’s entirely the result of my own psychosis. I am invested, I need resolution, and often I don’t like that resolution.

Netflix and HBO’s commitment to sports docuseries has made this so much worse because suddenly I do get a bunch of narrative that helps me invest. “Drive to Survive” got me all in on F1 and I fell for Toto Wolff and Lewis Hamilton and was introduced to an actual live villain in Christian Horner (a.k.a. Mr. Ginger Spice). Then suddenly, I’m trying to keep up with the 2021 World Championships while doing a remote holiday baking class and am getting physically ill realizing that Max Verstappen was going to win. I never made those raspberry pinwheel cookies again because of the PTSD.

A year or two later, a friend suggested I do an F1 Fantasy League with her and I had to drop out after three races: I could lose the Fantasy League and stick with Lewis or I could bet on Red Bull and do well points wise. Neither was a fate I could consider: but is that fandom or just obsessive loyalty to a constructed narrative?

The cycling equivalent of “Drive to Survive” got me obsessed with the Tour de France but then all of these riders are overcoming multiple broken bones and punctured lungs and maybe still doping. It’s incredibly impressive but I can’t handle that much stress when I should just be enjoying the scenic French countryside and not even knowing who Wout Van Aert is and being upset about whether he was robbed of a stage win.

I fell in love with this (beautifully written) essay about Caitlin Clark and it totally got me into women’s college basketball and the WNBA (although it didn’t take much since Monica Wright-McCall paved the way). Unfortunately, now every game she plays is a referendum on whether she’s living up to the hype or disappointing everyone, and there’s a verdict attached outside of the score based on how she acts or what clips are taken out of context. She’s either proving something or failing to prove something and the noise has added a layer of complexity and competition on top of everything else.

I’m going to skip over Olympic figure skating for the most part since I already covered that in depth and it’s not relevant for 3.8 more years but just as I’m waiting for a heroic win in Ice Dance for Chock and Bates, I find out the French judge literally rigged it and I’m sitting there, in real time, knowing everything I know and having no place to take my anger. Sitting: correct and alone. I didn’t just lose that day, I was ROBBED and no amount of context-setting with Jeff ever got him to a place of fully understanding my feelings.

Although, obviously, I didn’t lose. Because I was just watching… which is exactly the issue: I am not a sports person. I am just an intense and competitive person seeking an outlet.

We are about a week away from the start of the World Cup where I will, comme toujours, root for France. The US men’s team isn’t going anywhere and I am obviously the kind of person who will correct you on your pronunciation of crêpe — where that kind of person is a college French major — so it’s a natural fit.

Unfortunately, I only pay attention to men’s soccer once every four years so just as I’m checking back in on Kylian Mbappé, I’m learning that he’s recovering from injury, that recovery went slower than expected because the team MRIed the wrong leg(?), he might not be as good, he’s causing discord on Real Madrid, and it’s just exhausting and the World Cup hasn’t even started. Yet, intensity addict that I am, I’m down the rabbit hole trying to make sure I know what’s up for his first game on June 16.

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It may surprise you to learn there is no epic content calendar for this little Substack (especially those who worked with me in past roles where I was MILITANT about calendaring), but rather there are ideas that have been percolating and I write what I think is appropriate for the moment, relevant to others, and what I can bring some energy to type.

All of which is to say: I can’t write about my family right now, but I can share the tension I feel in this moment, and maybe that’s actually more universal?

In my childhood home, there was a framed print of some birds, plants, and the words: “Wings to fly and roots to come home to.” This absolutely set the tone in our family and, minus my mother not being a huge fan of sleep away camp or boarding school, I think my brothers and I all felt we were encouraged to go on adventures and knew we were always welcome back home.

That dynamic is so different in a stepfamily, especially since I didn’t get to plant from seed and instead arrived in time for some departures from the nest. Our family’s roots formed under different conditions, in a transplanted pot, if you will. (I will note that I am not a plant person and this metaphor is already pushing me past my comfort zone, but I’m committed to it now.)

I’ve done my best to tend roots in different soil, at different growth stages — which is not criticism, it’s just reality. It’s a structural gap that can’t be recreated. And because of when I arrived, I’ve been more visible in encouraging flying, which may have given my kids the impression that I lack range. I’m the pusher: schools, programs, advice, follow-ups on job applications that turn out to have never been submitted. Just like Tina Fey’s character in “Mean Girls” — and obviously, like that character, not as a drug dealer.

With all three kids in different parts of their 20s, and different parts of the country, we’re now navigating very different dynamics too. Youngest graduated from college last week and is seeking something to do with a little less energy and urgency than I’d like to see. Right now, she absolutely thinks all I care about is her flying away. But the truth is I just want her to have a place to go, a little orientation, a migration destination, if you will. Once she knows where she’s going, I’d like to make sure she feels her roots more strongly.

Oldest is in the middle of a big life transition with changes on many fronts ahead and getting updates over text and from hundreds of miles away is heartbreaking. She was pushed to fly a little farther than she might have been ready when she was younger and now all we really want is to have her home, feeling restored in those roots.

One of the quiet sadnesses I carry is that my kids have no frame of reference for what strong roots feel like. Their original family — their natural baseline — was damaged before I arrived, or perhaps was never quite seeded properly in the first place. They can’t measure what we have against a healthy version of what came before; neither the looseness they feel nor the one I feel is imagined. We’re all just doing our best with a transplanted pot and hoping the roots take.

Last month at a memorial in my hometown, I found myself standing in a room full of people who had known and loved me and my family for decades. I realized I was looking at my own roots — the visible, deep kind — and felt simultaneously lucky and bereft on behalf of my kids, who have never had a room like that to stand in. That’s not something I can change at this point. It’s something I tend around.

Fixer that I am, accepting how little I can control at this point is a tough pill to swallow. The bonds: can they still deepen once everyone’s left the nest, or is that a lost cause? How do you tell one kid to come home while telling another it’s time to go? And the one that keeps me up at night: how do you keep things moving when you’re the only one pushing, when getting your husband to push the tiniest bit requires hours1 of conversation you don’t always have energy for?

The poster made everything sound easy: wings and roots, birds and plants, very clean. What “home” means in a stepfamily — especially with adult children, especially when you’re the one who arrived late and has been playing catch-up ever since — is not clean. It’s complicated and ongoing and occasionally exhausting and hopefully worth it, even when I’m not sure the people I’m doing it for know that’s what’s happening.

I can’t control when they come home or when they leave. I was never going to control where their wings took them. But the roots we’ve planted together are real, and they’re the only ones my kids have. That has to be enough; not because it’s a satisfying conclusion but because there is no alternative for any of us.

Next month all three of them are coming home for Father’s Day. For the first time in a couple of years, it’ll just be the five of us. We offered the invitation with no guilting, no feet dragging, no pushback and everyone genuinely wants to be there.

The roots held.

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My friend had heard about a Matisse exhibition happening between the Met and the Frick (it closes Friday but if you can go before then, you should!) and while we waited in line, I continued catching her up on our high school reunion. Suddenly the 60 or 70ish year old woman in front of us in line turns around and goes “Baldwin? In Bryn Mawr? I went there!”

I transferred to Baldwin for eight grade and high school for a host of reasons, some academic and some personal, but I never once regretted it. I regret losing touch with some of the friends I left behind — years of passive updates on social media have made me think I had a lot in common with them beyond sitting at the same lunch table for slightly nerdy girls in 7th grade. I certainly regretted the hours I spent on the school bus — although my dad did note that that school bus was really the only ROI he got on his school taxes so he was glad I got some use out of it.

To be clear, it was more than “some” use, my most conservative calculator estimates came to 1500+ hours over five years.

I truly felt it was worth it. I had wonderful teachers, I made great friends, and I had opportunities for leadership and participation I never had prior. My ninth grade English teacher was the first person who told me I could write (after having solidified my standing as a mathlete in my other school) and pushed me to enter contests and improve my skills.

So, last weekend, with the chance to return after 25 years, you’d think I would have done so with great enthusiasm.

I had enthusiasm for certain parts: driving through the gates and seeing the weeping cherry trees line the path pulls on all my nostalgia strings. Seeing the main building which was designed by Frank Furness in 1890 to be a railroad hotel makes me so happy (please don’t let “The Gilded Age” make you think that all great architects of the era were building Beaux Arts mansions and show some respect to a more industrial Victorian Gothic vibe). Noticing the many facility improvements that have happened in the intervening years is lightly disorienting while still comforting that things are being well cared for.

I actually wear my class ring on days I need to buckle down. Our school motto was disce verum laborem or “learn true labor.” Doesn’t that sound really motivating for a bunch of privileged teenage girls? On hard days, something about the weight of that ring on my finger serves as a reminder that is helpful to see when I’m typing and feel when I’m madly gesticulating. And the green on my finger when I take it off is also a motivator to work harder to continue to afford better jewelry.

I am a believer in what that place did for me and I think often about who I would have been if I’d stayed at my public school, where I was being bullied, and just plodded through. But I also know I was a strong presence at Baldwin: confident both by nature and affirmed by leadership positions. I’ve had to sit with the possibility that some people experienced me as something harder than that (someone last week said “I’m not sure if you bullied me or if I was just scared of everyone”). The school gives you that, too: the confidence to take up space, and then eventually the reckoning with how much space you were taking.

I am such a believer that I stayed involved after graduating in various alumnae positions which was very fulfilling until it stopped. Most of it was the result of being in charge of organizing regional events during Covid (Zoom happy hours are not my love language) and a lot of it was the result of not feeling appreciated for volunteer efforts that took up tremendous amounts of time that could have been spent elsewhere. Always one with a dramatic flair (perhaps cultivated in my star turn as Helga Queen of the Trolls in our middle school play “East of the Sun, West of the Moon?”), I actually vowed to never volunteer anywhere again. Helga doesn’t put up with shit.

All of which is to say: I walked into that reunion carrying something more complicated than pure nostalgia. And I was the weird one in the room, because everyone else was carrying 25-year-old baggage and mine is five years old. So there I was, listening to people work through dynamics from 1999, and I kept thinking: surely we’re past the Head of Middle School taking away all of our privileges for bad behavior on the 8th grade field trip?

Here’s the thing I’ve been turning over since: we’re not past it, and that’s not actually irrational. What we’re operating on isn’t history but rather, equity.

History is just time: the years, traditions, shared experiences, and the simple fact of having been in the same place at the same time. Relational equity is what you built with it — the showing up, the being counted on, the trust that accumulates quietly without anyone making a thing of it. They’re not the same, even if people confuse them constantly.

My best friend from high school has built so much equity with me over 25 years that her runway is essentially unlimited (not that she’d ever test it). And my relationship with the school itself was the inversion: decades of history, real love, and then a few years that drained the account faster than I’d built it.

The reunion room was full of people whose equity ledgers had frozen in place the last time they were in that Frank Furness building. I extended warmth instinctively to the people I’d been close to. I was still a little guarded around the ones who’d made me feel small. Not because of anything that happened last weekend, but because of what was already on the books.

And then there was the friend I hadn’t been close to in years. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to see her at our old stomping grounds with so many memories. It was easier than I expected — not because enough time had passed, but because enough equity had. The falling out made a withdrawal but it didn’t close the account. We picked up the way you can only pick up with someone when there’s still something there to draw on.

That moment is what made the next one hit differently. I sat in our old cafeteria — at the perimenopause table, inexplicably located in the section with no working ceiling fans, although don’t worry I got the windows open — and realized I was sitting in judgment of my peers for not being over their grievances with the school, while I was quietly nursing one of my own. They couldn’t let go of what the school couldn’t give them as teenagers. I couldn’t let go of some bumpiness during Covid with a person who didn’t even work there anymore.

The hypocrisy landed hard enough that I vowed to reengage. We’re not given too many chances to give back to the places that shaped us. I don’t want to miss that one.