When you’re born with a uterus, there are things no one tells you.

We don’t talk much about uteruses in public, unless they’re behaving as intended—and even then, only a narrow scope of uterus talk is approved for polite conversation. Pregnancy? Yes, as long as you’re not annoying about it. Cramps and periods? No one wants to hear about that shit. Your hysterectomy? Maybe, but only because it means you won’t be complaining about your uterus problems anymore. And after a few days, buck up and shut up about it.

And that is precisely why, when my uterus forgot its manners, I knew I was surely the only person in the world suffering from such a defect. If you’ve ever felt like this, or if next month or next year or 10 years from now you have a similar experience, this story is for you.

Possibly as importantly, if you don’t have a uterus but know someone who does, this story is also for you. The shit we uterus-bearers go through is wild. The more we talk about and understand the very real, debilitating, and even at times life-threatening invisible suffering people are going through all around us, the better off we will all be.

This is a long story, and I’m not shortening it. It’s graphic at times, and I’m not posting a content warning. These stories are complex and important, and they need to be read and shared. So, when you’re finished reading, I hope you’ll share—without an asterisk. I hope you’ll also consider leaving a comment to share your story.

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My last normal menstrual period was on July 4th. I remember it because my cramps were so bad I thought I’d puke while I walked my town’s parade route, carrying one end of a banner proclaiming love and support for our LGBTQ+ community members while my daughter held the other end. I remember because a fellow walker was also on Day 1 of her period and, edgy and progressive as we are, we felt comfortable talking about how we’d both forgotten our morning dose of ibuprofen and our uteruses were bathing us in misery.

I am blessed with a period that is predictable and quantifiable. I’ve been tracking it since my ten-year-old was born and using a menstrual cup for almost that long. I know when to expect it and what shape it will take. I know I’ll need to pair period underwear with my cup and take hourly bathroom trips for the first day and night, and that 800mg of Advil when I wake up and before I go to sleep is the only way to take the edge off the nauseating cramps. And on July 31st, I knew my period was late.

I wasn’t—am not—pregnant. I feel the need to say this, though I’ve made it clear since before my youngest was born that I was finished with the childbearing portion of my life. Still, it’s the first question people ask.

However, much like the days when I was trying to (or trying not to) get pregnant, each time I went to the bathroom I’d examine the toilet paper and try to read some invisible tea leaves. A couple of times, the tissue came away pink. But there was no cramping, no real blood. No period in sight.

The first clot passed on the day we started driving to South Carolina. After having given birth three times, I knew what a blood clot was. But I wasn’t used to seeing them on some random day in August, more than three years after my last child had been born. It was weird. But perhaps weirder is that nothing else came of it. One weird day, followed by two weeks of nothing.

I’m familiar with the idea of menopause from an intellectual standpoint. I even know a little about perimenopause, thanks to a friend who shares all the wild shit her body goes through so the rest of us are prepared when it comes for us. But you don’t just wake up one day with a missing period, not after years of atomic-clock accuracy.

How long does one go before seeing a doctor in this kind of situation? I wondered. What kind of doctor should I even see? A gynecologist is the obvious choice, but I’m a big fan of my primary care doctor and enjoy seeing them as a first stop when I have no clue what’s happening.

While I was considering which kind of waitlist to get on (because there would certainly be a waitlist), the bleeding started. But this was not your standard period. The clots had returned with a fascinating and terrifying force. Every time I emptied my cup, one would splash into the toilet bowl. I collected one on toilet paper—nickel-sized or bigger—and took a picture, thinking this might be something my doctor would want to see if I ended up getting there.

I had a theory, of course, just like anyone with an undergraduate understanding of the human body might concoct: My period had been blocked somehow by a clot (Where had it come from? That was anyone’s guess.) and now the clot and the period were all coming out.

But after five days of bleeding and clotting, I decided that even if my theory was right, I probably should check with someone who actually went to school for this kind of thing. My first stop was the women’s health clinic I went to for my last pregnancy. The next available appointment (I checked thrice) was November 16. It wasn’t even September yet.

I next checked with my primary care’s office, just to rule out the possibility that my uterus was trying to murder me from the inside as I waited for the gyno. “Can you come at 3:00 today?” they asked. I’d rather not, I thought. It was a Friday. I wanted to hang with my family and eat trashy takeout. But I went. It had been five days of bleeding, both longer and weirder than any period I’d ever had.

My doctor suspected I’d just skipped ovulation the previous month. She summarized the hormone cycles I learned about when I wrote my novel (How’s that for full circle?), and it totally made sense. The lining of the uterus gets pretty thick when that happens, which could explain the clots. She also told me, after reading my blood work, that I was anemic and commanded me to take an iron supplement. “And if the bleeding continues, we’re going to want you to see gyn.”

The next day, we left for Canada. I’d get some iron when I got back, no big deal.

But, man, I was tired. I went around with the family—took walks, ate meals, drove up Mont Royal and climbed several flights of stairs to see the view. When bedtime came, though, I was toast. I stopped at a pharmacy on the way to pick up food one afternoon, thinking it couldn’t hurt to grab some iron there. It turns out that, in Canada, you must speak with a pharmacist, open an account, and show blood tests in order to get what, in the US, is just lining the supplement aisle in ten different colors. “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just wait until I get back to the US.”

The first night we were back in the US, I couldn’t sleep. Right there, anyone who knows me would identify a problem. I might get up before the robins, but I can sleep literally anywhere. Insomnia is not something that afflicts me. The second night, I realized the issue: My legs felt like there were bugs crawling inside them.

I’ve had restless legs before—usually they tickle in the evenings while I’m watching TV and then I forget about them when it’s bedtime. But this was persistent and very uncomfortable. What caused it, though? I wasn’t sure. So I consulted my pocket doctor, and you’ll never guess the very first cause.

Low iron.

I brought up the graphs from my medical chart. Low, indeed. These had been taken nearly a week ago, and the blood was still flowing. I picked up some iron and started supplementing. Around that time, my “period” finally ended. It had lasted nine days.

Unfortunately the hiatus didn’t last half that long. Four days later, the flow started again, and four days after that I was on the phone with the women’s health office begging for an appointment. By now I was scared. What causes someone to bleed for this long? I was also not particularly pleasant to be around. Hormones have never affected me much—I was a very pleasant pregnant person, and I don’t get moody in response to my monthly hormonal cycles. But losing blood for this long with no explanation had put me in a pretty bad space. Anytime one of my kids complained about not having the right brand of fruit snacks or not being properly coddled by one of their teachers, I wanted to yell, “I’ve been bleeding from the vagina for 2 weeks, so don’t complain to me about shit!”

The office was able to get me in the next day, and as the appointment approached, my concern for my health was joined by another kind of anxiety. What if this doctor just shrugged and said, “Sometimes this kind of thing happens”? After 41 years of life, I am accustomed to this nonchalance from medical professionals—both in my personal experience and from hearing stories of others. Women are often not taken seriously, particularly with respect to reproductive health issues. Cramps aren’t a legitimate complaint, even when they have us doubled over trying not to yurk into the gutter. Pain, even during medical procedures, is to be tolerated because “there aren’t many nerve endings in your cervix, anyway.” Bleeding—well, that’s just what your uterus does, right?

To top it off, I realized when I completed my online check-in that the doctor was a man. Later I realized that he was a very young man—the first doctor I’ve had that appears to be a considerable number of years my junior. I shook his hand when he introduced himself, but I had to check the dread that was building up.

Okay, so the doctor was lovely. He listened and shared my concerns. He was quirky and personable and enjoyed answering nerdy uterus questions—it was like talking to a doctor version of myself, and that was comforting. He scheduled an ultrasound, after which he told me he’d need to do a procedure called a hysteroscopy to look inside and confirm the findings. We could chat about a medication to stop the bleeding if it continued. And boy did it continue.

After bleeding for 25 out of 29 days, after waking up twice in the middle of the night with an overflowing cup and blood-soaked sheets, for two nights in a row, I was feeling pretty awful. I kept calling, trying to get an earlier appointment—at two different practices!—and nothing was budging. So I did the only thing you can do when you’re losing blood each day and none of the people who are supposed to be able to help you are available.

I went to the emergency room.

“What brings you in today?” they asked.

“I’ve been bleeding for a month.”

Even as bad as I was feeling, a part of me insisted I was being ridiculous. I had to go in and act like it was a big deal—to me it felt like a big deal—though I default to polite if deadpan humor even in my worst moments. “You need to cry,” said one of my friends. “Doctors don’t take stoic women seriously.”

I will never resist an opportunity to characterize emergency rooms as the seventh circle of hell. This one, though, at noon on a Friday afternoon, actually wasn’t that bad. My doctor happened to be at the hospital with three laboring patients, and he stopped by and chatted with me, prescribed me some progesterone to stop the bleeding, and even got my procedure scheduled for the following Tuesday. The hospital took more blood and repeated the ultrasound as my blood leaked out of my body and soaked the sheets.

My iron was great. My blood counts, however, were not. All signs pointed to anemia, not surprisingly more profound than it had been three weeks earlier. “No wonder you feel like shit,” said the nurse, and that might have been the most validating thing I’ve ever heard until she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’m not supposed to say this as a nurse, but this same exact thing happened to me.”

According to the PA, I was right on the border of needing a blood transfusion.

What is it about this world that makes women believe they need to be at death’s door in order to warrant any medical attention at all? Don’t answer that.

The procedure happened 10 days ago. I was terrified I would have to do it without anesthesia, as with other women’s health procedures I’ve had to endure. But, no—I was blissfully asleep while the guy who removes uteruses with robots on Wednesdays looked up into mine and then removed the tissue that was causing me such trouble. He answered my questions before and after and, while I’m not convinced this is the end of my worries, I’m grateful for the temporary reprieve and thrilled to have such access to my health information (No cancer or hyperplasia!) and my doctor. This should be the default, by the way; instead it’s a unicorn miracle that most people (including me at most other times in my life) don’t get to experience.

I’m going to publish this story, and 99% of the people I know are going to say, “Wow, I had no idea this was going on!” Meanwhile, of the few people I spoke with about my situation, nearly every single one had gone through something similar—some for far longer—or knew someone who had. That’s because we know not to talk about our uteruses and also because, to be frank, shit needs to get done whether or not we have blood streaming from our netherregions.

For this entire time, I have been going to work, doing my various at-home jobs, going to events, doing cohort work for my news publication, parenting my children, going to archery practice, going to the gym, and all the other things I need to do to keep my family and professional worlds functioning. No one would have known how miserable I was, even as I was on the brink of needing someone else’s blood to replace the stuff I’d lost, because lady bits aren’t to be spoken of.

And that’s why we need to be talking about these things. My uterus is now public domain, for the benefit of society at large. Feel free to share your story, too. Comments are always open.

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She starts coughing a half-hour after lunch. Maybe it’s just a cough, I think (hope, pray) at first. As if pretending nothing’s wrong has ever worked before.

She’s sitting on my lap, bouncing and babbling, when she starts up. It always begins like this, like a tickle in her throat that she hasn’t yet learned to scratch. But then it just keeps going. Coughing and coughing and coughing, and all of a sudden the dress I planned on wearing to work is covered in the chunks of chicken soup she was picking off the tray of her high chair 30 minutes ago.

I take a deep breath and let it out. I thought we were past this.

By the time I’ve sprayed us both off in the shower, put a fresh onesie and diaper on her and a new, less-flattering dress on myself, and wiped the disinfectant off the leather couch, Janet is knocking on the door. I put down the cardboard cylinder I’m inspecting and welcome her in with a tight smile.

My daughter doesn’t want me to leave. But then, she never wants me to leave. That’s why I quit my full-time job instead of going back when she was four months old. Now she’s almost a year, and these four hours twice a week are the only moments I have to be an adult, a professional, someone outside of this lonely little dyad we’ve formed.

Janet sits cross-legged on the living room floor and opens her bag to reveal the colorful balls and blocks she’s brought. I pantomime to her, “Go for a walk if she starts crying,” and, “Call me if anything at all happens,” and, “She will probably fall asleep in the stroller,” and somehow Janet understands it all. My eyes well with my gratitude for her and the crippling helplessness that has become my constant companion.

I want to say goodbye, to squeeze her and kiss her, but I know if she sees me leave she’ll start to cry, and crying leads to coughing, and coughing leads to puking, and I can’t miss another day of work, and so I just slip quietly out the front door and let the tears splatter on the pavement as I walk to my car.

“Corn,” I say later that night, after another round of puking—this time after she’d fallen asleep for the night—another spray in the shower, a new outfit, fresh sheets. Even as I speak, my ears strain. Over the last six weeks, they’ve been trained to hear the faintest hint of a cough from the other side of the house.

My husband turns to me and raises his eyebrows.

“I think it’s corn,” I repeat. “I think she’s allergic to corn.”

Food diaries have been useless. After she started solids, all the “first foods” we got at the store had so many ingredients it was impossible to isolate a single one that was causing her problems. But today, I think I figured it out. She was okay for a few days, and then this morning I gave her something new: veggie puffs.

“Look,” I say, grabbing the cylindrical container from the counter. “The first ingredient is corn meal.”

We cut the corn-based products out of her diet. The days and weeks stretch, and she gets better.

At our next GI appointment, the doctor offers a possible diagnosis: eosinophilic esophagitis. It’s an allergic attack, in response to certain foods (which differ by person), on the tube that carries food from the throat down to the stomach. It’s a lifelong condition, but it can be controlled with diet.

We spend the next few months avoiding corn. We buy more organic foods, more whole foods. Fewer ingredients. And she seems fine.

Until she doesn’t.

The coughing comes back first, and for a while I am able to convince myself it’s just a cold coming on. But then she pukes one night as she’s falling asleep and my veins run cold. Not this again. She’s been fine for months. What changed?

“Oh, my God,” my husband says after we’ve gotten her back down. He stops scrolling and hands me the iPad. On it is a list that takes up the entire screen. Dextrose, it reads. Maltodextrin. Xanthan Gum, Corn Syrup, Citric Acid.

“What is this?”

“A list of all the ingredients that are derived from corn.”

My heart might explode right here in my chest. I stand on shaky legs and go to the cabinet where we keep the snacks. There isn’t a single one that’s free of all of these ingredients. “The doctor did say some people are reactive to derivatives, too,” my husband says.

My world shrinks to a pinprick. While we thought we’d been doing the right thing, we’ve been slowly poisoning our child.

She coughs on the way home from preschool the next day and comes home covered in puke. I clean her and I hold her and I stroke her back. She cries, and I cry, and we settle down to watch a movie.

Or she does, anyway. I hammer on my keyboard furiously, posting on the Facebook group for corn allergies, combing through posts, researching what people with this allergy actually eat. “I make my own yogurt from a corn-free starter,” one says. “My child can only eat one brand of single-source oats,” says another. “I grind my own flour,” says a third.

“This one lady grinds her own flour!” my husband yells from the next room. Seems I’m not the only one researching.

We find recipes. We spend $400 at Whole Foods, buying ingredients but also pre-made foods that are definitely safe, like peanut butter made with only peanuts and rice cakes with only rice as an ingredient (though the Corn people tell us, and our experience will later confirm, there’s never a guarantee) because we need something we can feed our child today. We order a flour mill. We spend the next two days in a desperate haze of prepping and cooking and hoping that the things we bought will be edible to her and also not make her sick.

And slowly, over more months and weeks, we settle. We grind flour and make bread on the weekends. We make fruit pops and cheese crackers and banana chips and spend more time in the kitchen than anyone who doesn’t work in one. For birthday parties, we make ice cream and cupcakes and bring homemade pizza so she doesn’t have to be the only kid who doesn’t get to participate. I get pretty good at cake decorating.

We come to realize how much of our social life revolves around food. How little thought most people put into making sure to include options for kids with allergies. How impossible it would be to do this for our child even if they tried. How difficult vacations are when you can’t eat at a restaurant.

We learn the safe brands of convenience food so she can have the occasional treat and we can have the occasional break, but mostly we make everything that goes into her mouth.

“I don’t know how you do all this,” my friend, Lisa, says one day some years later. Kiddo is in second grade by now, and I’m standing in the kitchen straining yogurt while the fruit strips bake in the oven.

I shrug. What choice do we have? “You get used to it.” It’s the honest truth when I say, “It doesn’t even bother me anymore.”

Later that year we take kiddo for a followup and find she’s having silent symptoms. My world tilts once again. All the work we’ve been putting in for all these years, and it’s not enough. Either she’s more sensitive to corn than we thought, or there’s something else she’s reacting to.

At the thought of trying to piece it all together again, my fists tighten and my throat closes up.

“There’s a medication we offer,” the doctor says, “if an elimination diet seems too overwhelming.”

Overwhelming doesn’t begin to describe it. But with the doctor’s understanding words, the panic recedes. For seven years, every time we thought things were better, we were proven wrong. Now, for the first time, there is something we can do to be sure our baby is safe. We don’t have to do anything right now; we can just give her a safe medication and she will be better. I almost collapse with the relief.

Nearly five years pass without an episode, and our ears never stop pricking when a child coughs in the middle of the night. But, over time, another new normal settles over us—one where we find orange oral syringes scattered all over the house and develop a relationship with our local compounding pharmacy. We follow the research foundation and contribute to keep the work going.

We transition from asking to answering questions in the online groups. We form relationships with other parents struggling to understand and live with their child’s chronic illness, offering whatever resources we can to pull them out of the hole of desperation and not knowing, that familiar impossible-to-escape chasm with its slick, vertical walls, and onto level ground, into a place where they feel supported and like the world isn’t on the brink of shattering.

Our daughter turned twelve a couple of weeks ago, and going back to this time in our lives still fills my chest with the same despair. There is no greater terror than knowing something is wrong with your baby and not knowing what it is or how to fix it, especially when food is the cause. Add to that the general uselessness of her pediatrician at the time and the underreaction from the other people in our lives (*shrug* “Sometimes kids just puke.”), and we felt so irredeemably lost.

Last year, a new treatment graduated out of clinical trials, and now that she’s old enough she’s going to transition away from her steroidal medication and onto this monoclonal treatment which has 150 of her doctor’s patients in complete remission. She still avoids some foods, but in reality she could eat whatever she wants and not get sick from it. After so many years of restriction, none of us quite know what to do with that freedom.

You know that saying about we only get as much as we are able to handle in life? I think it’s the other way around. We get what we get, and we figure out a way to handle it. And everyone around us is doing the same. And sometimes the only thing we can do is help each other—and ourselves—get to the point where what once seemed impossible becomes mundane.

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Nothing feels quite like being right. Especially when someone doubts you, and especially when that someone is your partner.

It is this smug validation I am anticipating as I ride the airport shuttle back to Terminal C.

I’ll admit, the situation that led me here isn’t the most shining example of my adeptness at, well, anything. But in the end, I am going to be right, and we are going on vacation, and nothing exists in my little corner of the world except for these two facts.

We arrived at the gate with plenty of time. Most of our recent airport experiences have involved close calls, and it’s usually (read: always) my fault. But today, I was ready to prove that, as a Very Adult Person, I am capable of getting my family to the airport in plenty of time to perform our collective pre-flight rituals—snack-getting, breakfast-eating, a trip or five to the bathroom—before boarding at a leisurely pace and settling comfortably in our seats.

Breakfast sandwiches had been consumed. Snacks were tucked away into backpacks. Everyone had peed, some of us twice. I’d even raced (read: chased) my youngest up and down the ramp that separates the top and bottom parts of Terminal C about six times. And now we were hanging out at the gate, watching the trucks crawl around the tarmac, a mesmerizing colony of ants each doing their part.

I should check to be sure we have some shows downloaded, I thought, for when we get the kiddo buckled into his car seat.

The moment I thought the words, my heart leapt up and then bottomed out. I looked around, knowing full well what I’d see—or, rather, what I wouldn’t.

I had left the seat in the car. Over in economy parking, which made so much sense at the time—it saved money, was a quick jaunt away by shuttle, and allowed for my husband to do a trial run of getting all the kids into the airport by himself in preparation for another trip later this year—but which now warped time and space in all directions.

“Again?” my husband said when I told him. I was already digging my car keys out of my backpack. (I have lost or forgotten my car keys an embarrassing number of times—by a tree in San Francisco, down a storm drain, and, once, inside a port-a-potty—and this was not the time for a repeat performance.)

“It’s not that bad,” I said. Not like last time, when we’d left it in the rental car and my husband had to go all the way to the rental area and have staff track down the car to retrieve it. He’d been running to catch the plane and I’d yelled at him to slow down. “There’s plenty of time!” I’d called to him, though we were the last passengers in the departure lounge.

“Can’t we just rent one when we get there?” he asked. (This is also what everyone else asked when I retold this story. The answer is no. We are raising a very slippery ninja baby who can and will unbuckle airplane buckles, squirm under your legs, and run up to the cockpit to check out the control panel before you realize he’s gone.)

“I’ll go get it.”

“The doors close at 10:35.”

I checked my watch and shrug. “It’s only 9:43.” And then I was gone, leaving his doubts unspoken but well understood.

There was a shuttle waiting when I got out to the curb. See? This would be easy peasy.

But then the big blue bus started pulling away. I waved my arms, hoping he’d stop. He did, mimicking my gesticulation and laughing. He’d only been pulling into the proper pickup spot. I mumbled a joke, but he wasn’t impressed. “Do you go to the economy lot?” I asked.

He shook his head. “That’s Route 88.” He said something else I didn’t understand, and I was embarrassed and in too much of a rush to ask him to repeat himself. I stepped back to let him depart and scanned each bus that came in for the number 88. After about five minutes I asked a 22-Bus driver where the economy shuttle was, and he said, “Those are only downstairs at arrivals.”

Son of a … I’d just wasted precious time standing in the wrong place, like the idiot I am.

My husband texted: Plane’s not even here yet.

Thank goodness.

Then, two minutes later, Now it’s here. Great—so was the bus. I was watching the clock, but I wasn’t worried. I still had time to get back, and anyway the plane seemed to be running late.

It couldn’t have taken three minutes for me to exit the shuttle and get back with the seat. The same bus that had brought me back to the parking lot was still there, waiting.

And here I am, sitting on that bus with an arm draped over the car seat and a satisfied smile on my face, texting with a couple of friends about what an idiot I am, ha ha ha.

I walk as quickly as I can to the bathroom. My bladder is about to explode, and I don’t know if I can wait for 10,000 feet.

They just called group D, he texts as the toilet flushes behind me.

Wow, that sure was fast.

Cut in front of people if you have to, he texts as I stand in the security line. But there are only a handful of people in front of me, and my stuff is already behind theirs on the conveyor belt.

The stopped conveyor belt.

You need to get here.

The conveyor belt isn’t moving. There’s nothing I can do. Can you please just go tell them I’m right around the corner?

I’m through the metal detector, but it’s agonizing seconds before my phone and the car seat appear through the fringe of the x-ray machine.

My watch starts vibrating and I mutter an obscenity under my breath. What does he think calling me is going to accomplish? “They’re going to close the doors,” he says when I answer.

“But I’m right here,” I say. “I’m just waiting for the—There!” I yell, reaching into where I know I’m not supposed to reach. I grab the car seat and take off at a run. “I’m coming!” I say into my wrist. There’s no way they’d close the doors over a few seconds, especially with him standing there and telling them I was just seconds away.

I think about the nice folks in Kansas City who hadn’t rushed me at all, who had waited patiently as my husband ran toward us and smiled as they took our boarding passes.

These people, it turns out, are not those people.

These people are the kind of people who, when faced with a family of five, one of whose members they can see running at full tilt toward them from 200 feet away, will still make the call to close the aircraft doors. They are the kind of people who will ignore you when you ask questions and effectively strand your entire party for days for…what? 30 seconds?

The plane takes off early.

The girls cry. The boy wanders around, trying to make off with every lollipop at the candy store while, in parallel, the husband calls the airline to try and get us rebooked (The next flight isn’t for two days.) and I start looking at other airlines, all of whose flights are sold out.

At the verge of tears, I leave to get the car and pick everybody up. This must be a dream, or some kind of mistake. I was so sure I had plenty of time. Not only was I wrong, but my wrongness has cost us the vacation we’ve been looking forward to all summer.

My husband will try to console me later, but the whole thing is squarely my fault. I forgot the car seat. I waited in the wrong place for the bus. I stopped to pee. I wasn’t in enough of a rush to begin with.

I refuse to let this failure defeat me, I think to myself as I board the shuttle for the fourth time today. I will not go home for two days and wait around, not after care plans have already been drawn up and executed for the dog and the chickens. Not when a very nice hotel with a very nice oceanfront view is waiting for us.

I call my husband on my way to the car. “I’ll pick you all up in a minute,” I say. “Get ready for a long ride.”

We cancel the first night at the hotel near the airport, cancel the car rental, and take our time driving down the coast, landing in Myrtle Beach at more or less the same time we would have if we’d flown into Charleston and driven here the next day.

The drive is not nearly as bad as I expected. When we planned this trip, we considered driving somewhere but felt constrained by the length of the trip. The baby would certainly cause us trouble on such a long ride. But, to our surprise, he really didn’t. Yeah, he was sick of the car seat after so many hours sitting in it. But so were the rest of us. And through torrential downpours, sunsets that looked like endtimes, and everything in between, he did well—and the older kids were great at trading off to keep him entertained.

Missing the flight was bullshit. I’m still angry, both at myself and at the gate agent. But at least I’ll never worry about a long car ride with my littlest kiddo again, not while his sisters are there to keep him company.

I’ll just add that one to the tally of Things Nicci Was Wrong About. Clearly that list isn’t getting any shorter.

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We’re not really a beach family.

I grew up in landlocked country, realizing only in retrospect how suffocating those great expanses of land can feel. The undulating farmland, the flat roads with no exits and a house every couple of miles—today those features remind me of home, promise a quiet that is separate from my hectic life.

But back then, all that silence made me anxious.

I saw the ocean once. I was seven years old and we had taken a family trip to Disney World. There’s no ocean anywhere near Disney World, but if you’re visiting Florida from the Midwest, you can’t not go to the beach. By the time we’d completed the two-hour drive to Clearwater, my neck was sore from stretching it to look out the front window of the car, desperate to catch a glimpse of what I’d only seen in movies.

I couldn’t wait to get there and, though I was going back to freaking Disney World, I didn’t want to leave. No length of time could have been enough. I had fallen in love with the sea, and I knew it would be another lifetime or more until I would return.

We went to the lake a couple of times a year. I dipped my toes in Lake Michigan once. But even the Great Lake, with all its ocean vibes, couldn’t give me the same chills I get from the open sea.

There is something about standing at the shoreline as the waves lap at my toes, knowing that this is the end of the road. Something about letting the waves bob me up and down in the water like a cork. Something about looking down to see fish swimming past my ankles. Something in the salt and the breeze and the sun and the clouds and the swishing of the waves rushing into my ears. I could melt into it all.

As constraining as this natural boundary is, being close to it somehow makes me feel more boundless. Yet, in the 23 years that I’ve spent living on one coast or another, how many times have I visited the shore next door? I could count them up without even taking my shoes off.

In California, my roommates would invite me to Pacifica or Carmel, or even Coyote Point, just on the other side of the highway. Nah, I’d say. I have work to do. And here? The place I live with my family and my work and my commitments that never end? Hundreds of miles of shoreline not an hour from my doorstep and I never, ever go there.

I tried figuring out my reasons for being such a landlubber earlier this year, and the closest I got was, “Going to the beach is a pain in the ass.” Which, yeah. It can be, especially with kids—and the smaller they are, the harder it is. You need all the gear. Snacks. Drinks. Floaties. Toys. Towels. Shade. Sunscreen. You have to get there early, because the best beaches are impossible to get into after 9am. You have to pay for parking, and who has that kind of cash or knows their ATM PIN? By the time you get there, it’s basically naptime—for the little ones but also for you. And all the sand in all the places, basically until next year.

But this summer is so damn hot. My house is under construction. The pool we usually go to isn’t available. The town has a wading pool for residents, but there’s no shade—and it’s shallow, so the big kids don’t want to go there.

So, maybe it’s a pain in the ass, but I’m desperate.

This summer, we are beach people. On the hottest of the mornings (which are far too frequent this year), when there’s no rain in the forecast, I round up whatever humans are around, pack up the car, and head to wherever sounds good. Sometimes, if we’ve got a schedule to keep, it’s a pond or a reservoir. There are plenty of those in our little corner of New England.

But, when time is no object, we head toward where the salt sprays my hair and the gulls fight in the surf for uneaten clams, where the waves challenge my balance and I can look to forever without seeing more than a sailboat sliding across the horizon.

I watch the life cycle of the waves as they swell and break, adding and subtracting and stretching outward as the tide comes in, and then travel back in ripples that shape the sand into its own ephemeral waveform.

I hold my children by the hand and we tiptoe in, but only to my knees. Because we all love the ocean, but none of us knows her well enough to trust her.

I curl my toes into the sand, but the retreating surf slips it out of even my firmest grasp before a new wave crashes into my shins.

I heard once that the push of the wind helps trees grow strong and tall, and without that resistance they would flop over like wet noodles. I feel like falling over like a wet noodle. My feet hurt, and my knees are all shredded inside, and this ankle is giving me trouble, too. Every day there’s something new with this not-that-old body of mine. But standing here, looking toward tomorrow, I wonder. Can the waves do for me what the wind does for the trees? If I stand here long enough, will my toes root into the sand? Can the push and pull of the water soothe more than my soul and my senses, can it heal my flesh and bones?

If you need me I’ll be here, testing that theory. Here, where if nothing else the cool salt water on my skin can separate me for awhile from the small but persistent pains of living. Here in the place that both holds me in and sets me free.

Read More From Nicci

I think he’s asleep. Not that it makes a difference, because he’s sitting on my lap and any movement of mine—to pee, to eat, to grab my computer so I can make something productive out of yet another hijacked work day—would send him into a fit of sick-rage that would be both pitiful and counterproductive and probably end in me getting puked on.

So, instead, I sit cockeyed on the couch, neck twisted at an unnatural angle so I can see around his tiny body, and tap out a news article on my phone using only my left thumb. The earbud in my right ear does its best to compete with Moana, but I keep having to rewind the recording so I can process what I’m supposed to be reporting on. The process takes me three times as long as it would on an ordinary day, but really, what else am I doing?

I had just settled in to work for the day—Tuesday of the first five-day workweek I’ve had in over a year. The shades were open, and the sun shone onto my desk, providing my succulents with some of what they need to keep themselves going. I was reviewing the day’s news article, which I should have published hours before. My morning smoothie and coffee sat full at my right hand on fabric coasters whose printed sayings use the F word liberally.

As I set my hands to the keyboard, my husband stomped down the hall and into the laundry room, yelling that same word.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

He was already halfway back down the hall. “The baby’s* throwing up.”

And here I’ve been ever since, sitting on the couch in the light-starved basement in front of our only TV, remote control at my right hand, watching him out of the corner of my eye. I never got to drink my smoothie.

Every half-hour or so, his face turns green and his belly starts rolling, and I reach down to grab the bowl we use when this kind of thing happens. I support his back and speak in soft tones: “It’s okay, Baby. Mama’s here.” And after, I clean him up and clean the bowl up and clean myself up and settle back in. He leans against me, or climbs on my lap, and we cycle through toddler content and and sip apple juice until his belly starts rolling again.

I feel fine, but he’s sucked me into the sickland time warp nonetheless. I send my team a Slack message to let them know I’m useless today and try catching up on some small but neglected to-do items, ones I can accomplish with just one eye and my left thumb.

Mostly, though, I just sit here and rage.

When my first child was born, I was given a rope with a flag in the middle. Mama-me, who had taken over my entire identity by then, grabbed up the rope and coiled it at her feet, leaving just the barest end sticking out.

My biggest trouble when my girls were younger was getting them to sleep at the right times, keeping the house neat, and being sure we were all fed. I didn’t have a job to lament not getting done. (Never mind that that’s only because my child was so needy I couldn’t return to work.) The pull toward Mama was strong—and that was fine, in those hazy days when I couldn’t put my daughter down to take a shower, or take a poop, or take a phone call.

Back then, I didn’t even realize there was a rope. But as my kids started getting older and I tiptoed (quietly, in the hopes they wouldn’t notice) back into my career, Autonomous-me noticed that loose end and started to pull.

My identity has been engaged in this battle ever since, yanking the flag nearer to one side or the other depending on the season, the age of my children, and what I’m trying to do in my life outside of parenting. But let me tell you, Autonomy has to work a thousand times harder just to keep Mama from yoinking the whole rope onto her side and sending Autonomy to sleep with the fishes. Why does it have to be this hard? I want to be a good mom to my kids, and I want to do the non-Mama things I that bring me pleasure and intellectual stimulation.

But I’m tired, and days like this, I can sense the flag lurching toward Mama, just as clearly as I feel the rope slipping through Autonomy’s white-knuckled grasp.

Days like this, I think to myself that things would be much easier if I just hung up my ambitions for a while, ignored for a decade or two my desire to exist as a separate person from my children.

As Moana’s credits end and Stinky and Dirty start singing about sno-cones, I think of the essay I started two weeks ago and have been trying to finish ever since. About the novel I haven’t touched in nearly a month. About the ads I’m supposed to create each week and the promotion I’m supposed to be doing to sell copies of the book I’ve already published. About the classes I have paid for and not watched. About the workout I promised myself. I think about the piled-up dishes and the full inboxes and the overflowing Safari tabs and the dirty bathrooms, none of which get the attention they need.

Because someone is always calling for Mama.

My inner turmoil would stop cold if I just gave it a rest. If I just stopped trying to work, trying to write, trying to exercise, trying to move forward in the non-Mama areas of my life. Maybe I should accept that now isn’t the right time.

But life is too short, and there’s a lot I want to do. And all of that non-Mama stuff gives me some of what I need to keep myself going.

I stretch to see the slit of light coming in through the basement’s sole window. There will be more light tomorrow, I remind myself, more of the non-Mama things.

For today, then, with Autonomy watching from the corner of one eye, Mama takes over.

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*Yes, we’re aware a 3-year-old is not technically a baby. But as language goes, he will likely always be called “the baby” because he is our last and I can’t not see him as the teensy little squish I gave birth to in this very room, even as he grows into a real human capable of logic and independent thought.

Man, I used to have so many opinions about parenting.

Even at a very young age, I would think, “I’d never let my kid do X,” or, “That kid needs a smack on the bottom.” My head was full of all the things parents and children are supposed to do and, despite having no children, I was most certainly a superior parent to the rest of them.

This is the point at which I might say, “And then I had kids and everything changed!”

But no. Even after I had kids, I was righteously superior to other parents who did things differently from me. We’ve all heard of the Mommy Wars at this point, but 12 years ago, when I had my first child, I hadn’t yet. I didn’t realize I was a pawn in a larger scheme to create a rift between two groups that should be first to jump to each other’s support: moms and other moms.

We all go through this shared trauma, flailing about while trying to figure out who our kid is, who we are as humans now that we have kids, and how to (at minimum) not screw them up entirely and (best-case scenario) raise them as a self-assured, independent, empathetic, productive member of a global society.

And we have no idea how to do it.

But we sure think we do! And, worse yet, we think we’re supposed to know. As if, upon giving birth, a manual is downloaded into our brain, and all we need to do is follow it.

Natural childbirth or scheduled induction with epidural? Breastmilk or formula? Cry-it-out or cosleep? Babywearing or stroller? Diapers or elimination communication? We spend months—years!—before our children are born answering these questions for ourselves and ginning up our justifications. We become so committed to our “side” that we often don’t realize there are no sides. None of these questions needs to have a binary answer; they all exist on a continuum, and there’s not a single answer that works for every child and family.

And then, of course, there are those questions that you never knew you needed to have answered, like “How do I grieve a loss when my children constantly need me to be present with them?” and “How do I navigate my children’s learning disability/food allergy/chronic illness/mental illness?” and many more. The answers to these questions change as the children grow older, and they’re never correct or sufficient because we moms are always in survival mode. And that manual? It doesn’t exist.

The cruel joke is entirely on us. Despite our best intentions, regardless of how superior we felt before we had children, and irrespective of our meticulous anxiety planning, kids will always usurp our plans with their own.

Case in point: Aruba, 2023.

It was time to go home. Nobody wanted to go home. It was my children’s first international trip, and my almost-three-year-old son had chosen that very weekend to enter a stage where he doesn’t like to change activities. Didn’t want to go to the beach. Didn’t want to leave the beach for the ostrich farm. Didn’t want to leave the ostrich farm for ice cream. Didn’t want to leave the ice cream place for the lighthouse. Didn’t want to leave the lighthouse to go back to the hotel, which is the first place he didn’t want to leave.

Now we had left the hotel for good, and what had seemed on Thursday like a half-day excursion away from the airport, on Tuesday ended up taking about 12 minutes in reverse.

The battles started before we even got inside the airport. “I don’t wan’ go in the stroller!” said the kid. Threats. Counting to three. Twice. Finally, a buckled seatbelt so he couldn’t slide out under the snack tray.

Inside the airport was a long line. I don’t even know what the line was for. Customs? Immigration? Some other word I don’t know because I rarely travel outside the country? All I know is that the line was long and full of Americans who, like us, would rather just abandon our lives back home and set up on the beach until the end of our days.

Americans who had no desire to listen to the rabid screams of a petulant toddler.

I know this particular toddler quite well, and he’s not usually petulant or rabid. He certainly had never screamed like this before. But those people in line didn’t know that, and I was desperate to do all the things (including the bad parent things) to entice him to quiet down. Because if he kept screaming, surely they’d know I was a bad parent.

“Snacks?”

“No.”

“Want me to hold you?”

“No.”

“Here. Have some juice.”

“I DON’ WAN’ JUICE! I WAN’ GET DOWN FROM HERE!”

“Well, bud, that’s not going to happen.”

“I DON’ WAN’ GO ON THE AIRPLANE,” he said.

I chuckled, and so did a few of the people around us. “No one else wants to go home either,” I said.

You can’t tell a kid in that situation to stfu. I mean, you can, but they won’t listen. Physical intimidation might have worked. But with all that talk about bottom smacking before I had kids, I’ve never raised a hand to them. He was escalated, and I couldn’t figure out why, but I needed him to ease up. As much as I kept my voice level and acted like his screams weren’t boring a hole from the top of my head down through my body, they definitely were. I started to shut down and disassociate, staring at the wall and silently begging the line to move faster.

And then, you won’t believe what the woman next to us did.

She knelt right down next to my son and started talking to him. “Hey bud,” she said. He turned his head away, but she kept talking. “Did you see flamingos while you were here in Aruba?”

I made eye contact with her. “Oh!” I said in that kindergarten-teacher voice I use when I’m talking to other adults but we want the little kids to listen. “No, we didn’t see any flamingos! We saw ostriches and peacocks. I didn’t even know they had flamingos here!”

“Oh, yes,” she said, still kneeling. “I have some pictures. Wanna see?”

My son slowly swiveled his head back in her direction. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to her phone. “Is that a flamingo?” he said slowly.

They spent the next ten minutes swiping through bird photos on her phone and talking about the “circle beach” (Baby Beach, which was his favorite spot on all the island). By the time we reached the front of the line, he was de-escalated and had made a new friend.

I won’t pretend the rest of the trip was easy (We definitely had to football carry him onto the airplane), but that moment reminded me that moms don’t have to be in constant competition with one another. We can work to support each other—and in fact that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. That saying about it taking a village is true. And anyone can be the village. That day, airport lady was a part of mine.

Last week, we were out at a restaurant at a time reserved for the very old and the very young. We were seated in the back room, and the only other guests back there were another family at the next table over. My son doesn’t fit in a high chair anymore, so we had him sitting in a regular chair. The little boy next to us, just a few months younger but half his size, wasn’t thrilled.

Mom tried all the things (including saying, “Stop screaming like that!”), but the kiddo whined and screamed and after 30 seconds, she took him for a walk around the courtyard outside the restaurant. This whole scene repeated itself a few times. I didn’t want to ask, but I was hoping she wasn’t taking him outside for our benefit. I’m at the age and stage of parenting that, if it’s not my kid, I don’t even hear it.

My kid was antsy, too, and he knows that at this place they have a window where you can watch the pizza chef as she makes the pizzas and slides them into the brick oven. So he stood and watched for a minute, and she gave him some dough he could take back to our table and play with.

The other little boy was back in his high chair, deftly employing the Toddler Food Refusal superpower, and after a minute I could hear him escalate again. I didn’t have to look at Mom’s face to know she looked like I did at the airport. She wanted to eat her dinner. She wanted her kid to just shut up and eat, or color, or play with the toy truck they’d brought for him. He wouldn’t do any of those things.

I went over and knelt next to her, just as she was about to stand up and take him for yet another walk. “Do you think he’ll play with some of this dough?” I asked, pointing to my kid’s uncooked pizza crust.

She blinked. “What?” she asked. She looked like she was expecting me to say something a lot less polite. I repeated myself, and she said, “Oh. Maybe!”

I grabbed a chunk from my son’s plate and showed it to the little boy. I rolled it up, flattened it, stretched it out, and rolled it up again. “Wanna try?” I asked.

He turned his head away from me. “It’s okay, bud, I’ll just leave this here,” I said.

We chatted with the parents a little, and we all finished eating around the same time. The boys ran around on the courtyard before we all went our separate ways. “Mom,” said my daughter. “You were that lady’s airport mom.”

I smiled. I hadn’t thought of that incident in months. “I guess you’re right,” I told her. “And you just gave me the topic for next week’s essay.”

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I got pregnant with my son when my daughters were 6 and 8 and I wasn’t expecting to parent anything younger than that, ever again.

I’d spent years of my life being pregnant, breastfeeding, sleeping inconsistently, and feeling like I needed to be on and fully charged at all hours. Now, my body and attention were my own again. The girls were in school, I’d been writing full-time for a year, and the idea of having my autonomy stripped back again terrified me. Every once in a while between August of 2019 and March of 2020, I would break out in a cold sweat wondering how I would ever handle it.

Then the world saw my fear and raised me some uncertainty, anguish, and isolation.

Three weeks before my due date, lockdown began. A week after that, my father-in-law died unexpectedly. My house was under construction, the four of us (and our dog) living in two rooms in the basement. And human contact was inaccessible to any of us.

It was a scary, lonely time. Our little part of the world was filled not with the joyful squeals of the girls playing together or watching the contortions of their sibling inside my belly, but with alternating yelling as we all got on each other’s nerves, silence as we staked out our individual corners and tried to shut the others out, and sounds from the television as we played movies to drown out the deep anger and melancholy that had descended over us.

And then there was the crying. After dark, when the lights were out and the chapter from their book had been read and there was nothing else to think of but the emptiness that had come unbidden into our lives, together or alone, we would cry.

After the baby came, things stayed hard for what felt like a really long time. Remote school for the older kids, feeding problems with the little one, estate stuff for my husband, and, of course, no help from the outside.

But, as with all horrible things, intolerably infinite in the moment yet fleeting in retrospect, the terror and pain subsided. When construction ended and we could spread out a little, we settled into a kind of peace—one that, after an adulthood full of moving from one thing to another with no rest or respite, I didn’t know could exist. In my pre-pandemic mind, we were setting alarms and leaving time for nursing before we had to pile into the car, working around baby sleeps to get to gymnastics practice and school drop-off. But the beauty of the pandemic was that we all just got to coexist. And it was the littlest who set the tone for the rest of us.

We would crowd around him as he made goofy faces, cooed along with my singing, (confirmation that Mama is, indeed, star material), and wrestled with the binky. One daughter sewed him a shirt. The other found a little doll’s hat to put on his head. The dog was very curious. My husband was gifted a bittersweet spot of joy to hold onto, even as he struggled to let his father go.

This little boy—the kid who none of us ever expected to meet—provided a tether for us all during the hardest time in our lives.

And, though times are easier, he just keeps on keepin’ on.

I wrote six months ago about how, after 18 months of speech therapy, he was able to tell me when some random “person” “hurt” him. He’s now graduated from speech and he’s got plenty to say. “I wan’ go outSIDE!” is one of his favorites, as is, “Can I sit right next to you?”

The way he says, “Oh, I love you, too, Mama,” and kisses whatever surface he can reach on my body, is enough to melt my heart. But lately he’s been saying something that breaks my brain a little.

“Are you happy?”

It’s the first thing he says when he sees us—when the first pink rays of sun peek in through the blinds, or when the screen door slams behind the girls after school, or when I emerge for a seltzer and an açaí bowl after working at my desk for hours. “Oh, hi!” He says. “Are you happy?”

It should be an easy question to answer. And maybe the default answer, when a three-year-old asks you if you’re happy, can just be yes. But my first instinct is always to sift through the swirling mess of preoccupations and distractions and see what’s left. What am I? How am I, really?

In any given moment, I’m stressed out, busy, worried, irritated, achy, and anxious—and those are just the surface feelings that came through my fingertips when I started typing this sentence. I can get in touch with those feelings in an instant. They’re right there with all the things I have to do, all the things I’m procrastinating doing, all the things I should do but won’t, and all the things I want to do but can’t. But happy doesn’t often come to mind.

For as long as I can remember, life has been a never-ending series of things just waiting to get done. And now that I work in a creative profession with very fluid boundaries, there is always something more to do, something more to know, something I’m missing that is the key to unlocking success (whatever that means).

So, when my son wakes up in the morning, I’m in the middle of something. And when I walk in the door from an appointment, I’m on my way to my desk to work on something. And when I wake him up at 2:00 from his nap, I’ve just finished doing one thing and have another waiting for me.

“Hi, Mama. Are you happy?” he’ll ask, tucking his little hands under my arms and burying his face in my neck against the brightness outside his bedroom door.

And in that moment, between all those imaginary things and the very real embrace of my son’s arms, what else could I be? I am still all those other things. But, inhaling the sweet scent of his head and feeling his warm, red cheek up against mine, I’m happy, too.

“Yeah, buddy. I’m happy,” I say. “It’s a good thing you asked, because I forgot for a second. Are you happy?”

He doesn’t hesitate like I do. He squeezes his body into mine and says, “I sure am happy, Mama.”

And I could stand there like that until the end of time.

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“Mom, can you not?” my daughter says.

“Not what?” We’re picking our way through Aisle 7, looking down endless rows of pasta sauce. I pick up the Newman’s tomato basil and turn it slowly in my hand, trying to look through it. Nope. Too chunky.

“Can you stop singing?” she says through clenched teeth, as if my Gwen Stefani impression is causing her actual pain. At nine, she’s ahead of her time on the everything-my-mom-does-is-cringe axis.

“Honey,” I say. “I enjoy singing. It is one of my few pleasures. Some people even appreciate my singing. Pat Monahan once told me I have an incredible voice.”

“Yeah, yeah. The old guy from that band no one but you has ever heard of. I know, Mom.”

I frown at the Classico. “People might not have heard of them, but they’d recognize their music if they heard it,” I mutter. “How am I supposed to tell if a sauce is smooth without opening it?” She doesn’t answer, and I find my voice rising involuntarily to fill the silence. “…all pretty and petite, so don’t let me have any riiiiiights!”

“Moooooom.”

“Listen. These lyrics should be speaking to you, too, young feminist. Do you understand what she’s singing about?”

“No. I can’t hear her over you.”

I scowl and grab another glass jar. I don’t recognize the brand, but the word “smooth” is actually printed on the label, so I trust it will be adequate for the four picky palates I have to feed when we get home. Into the cart it goes. “O-oh, am I making myself clear?”

She walks away.

I’d say I can’t help myself, or that I’m just doing it to embarrass my kid, but neither of those are entirely true. It’s true that singing is a compulsion for me, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t sing. I was raised in a home where we belted out the lyrics along with the cassette tape, whether it was Wilson Phillips or Aerosmith or Randy Travis—and whether we knew the lyrics or not.

But the real reason I sing is that I have always dreamed that one day, the right person will hear my voice and say, “I just have to sign her.”

I’m not a singer singer. I’ve never been trained outside of two years of middle-school choir and an ad-hoc lunchtime chorus I formed with two of my friends freshman year where we sang Jewel songs at the top of our lungs in the ELA classroom. But for most of my childhood I was certain I would be a professional singer.

There were enough stories when I was growing up of people being discovered at the most random places that I started believing it was a possibility for me. The advent of American Idol did nothing to tamp down my confidence, and though I never auditioned (and am now FAR too old), I did start signing at karaoke nights around the Bay Area in 2004, and I took it very seriously.

Any public place is a potential discovery ground. An agent or record executive could be at the next booth at the restaurant, at dive bar karaoke, in the next aisle at the grocery store, or boarding the elevator on the way to the office/hotel lobby/attraction I’m visiting. And how are they going to know what a wonderful singer I am without a live demo? I sound just like her, can you hear it?! And do you hear how I can harmonize? Most people here can’t harmonize like I can.

At the 95th row at a concert, I belt it out louder than the lead singer, thinking maybe—just maybe—they’ll pick out the one angelic-and-definitely-on-key voice in the crowd and stop everything, aiming the spotlight at me and beckoning for me to join them on stage.

At 40, too fat, too busy, and too involved with my family and other work obligations to have commercial appeal as a pop icon, I know these dreams are unrealistic. And as an adult with life experience and a peek into fame culture thanks to Behind the Music, TMZ, and the rest of media, I can’t think of a good reason I’d want it anyway.

But clearly, these habits have died pretty hard, and even when I want to stop singing along—even when my fourth-grader is begging me to—the lyrics to familiar songs just hook me in and pull me along.

I’m writing this Note in a coffee shop, and already I’ve had to stop myself from singing along with five different songs. It helps that I know most of the people here and, while they might enjoy my singing in a different context, I’m pretty sure none of them are record execs.

So, that’s my embarrassing truth. I do most of my singing in the shower and the car these days. Though it’s been hard to let go of the idea that the right person will discover me by my singing voice, I have just shifted that dream to my writing voice. Agents and publishing execs are everywhere, after all.

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I can’t be the only one. The comments section opens…NOW! Some prompts to get you started:

• What came up for you as you read this? Can you relate?

• What’s your secret dream that no one knows about (until now!)?

• What’s an embarrassing thing you do around your kids that they just have to live with because you’re the boss?

• Are you an agent or publishing person? (lol jk I think I’ve submitted to all of you at this point)

• Have you read When We Were Mothers yet? Should I keep my day job or keep doing this writing thing? (jk this is my day job but I really do want to know how people are finding the book!)

When we left off last Wednesday, I’d just had a frustrating and exhilarating first date with a dude from the internet…and his friend. (No, not like that. Get your mind out of the gutter.)

Lots of you sent me DMs and texts and even left comments right here about that essay. (And about High Fidelity, which is now on my rewatch list because clearly I missed something the first time around.)

And, of course, the suitor had his thoughts to share. My favorite parts were where he called me “really fucking smart” and said I was “even more beautiful in person,” but we’ll get to those. Here are his reflections on how our courtship began:

I was an early adopter of the internet because I worked technical support at a local ISP as a teenager. Before the advent of real dating sites the only place you could meet girls online were chat rooms and AOL Instant Messenger. Once digital cameras became more common, sites like Hot or Not were created where you could actually see a picture of someone before you started talking to them. It may seem ridiculous now, but back then it was revolutionary. These sites didn’t even have built-in messaging, you’d just post a picture and your instant messaging handle where random internet people could contact you.

My friends and I would often stumble onto a new site, tell each other about it, and make a hobby of scrolling through looking for girls to chat up. The newest website for this was FTJ and the gimmick was you post a single picture and others rate you on a scale of 1 to 10. I didn’t even have a profile at the time, but I was scrolling through and a unique picture of a girl with her dog popped up. Her picture was tastefully done in black and white, unlike most other photos on the site, and man was she gorgeous. I looked up her AIM username and plotted my approach.

She was holding a dog in her picture, so I figured that was the best place to start. I had my mom take a picture of me with our dog, a chocolate lab puppy who we had gotten a few months earlier. I dressed in my best blue t-shirt, flat-front khakis, and some shiny Doc Martens for maximum handsomeness. This picture would surely make her fall madly in love with me.

After exchanging hellos the first thing I told her was how sad I was because I might have to get rid of my dog. The story was an exaggeration for sure. The dog was a bit too rambunctious for my parents, but I knew any talk of getting rid of her was an idle threat. We started talking more, and I quickly realized this girl was really fucking smart. A smart, beautiful blonde who likes dogs—what more could I want? I started laying on the charm pretty thick over the next few weeks.

Chatting online was naturally up my alley because it didn’t involve all those pesky in -person interactions and real-time responses. I found it much easier to be charming and witty over chat when I had a few extra seconds while typing to formulate what I was going to say.

Author’s note: he is plenty charming and witty in person, too. 😉 More from him next time.

Back then, typing messages to someone rather than picking up the phone and meeting in person was revolutionary. It opened up the world to people who weren’t in your direct sphere of influence, who you wouldn’t run into at school or work or the grocery store.

Did the internet end up making for too many choices, too much information, too many words coming at you all the time? Maybe. Probably. Definitely yes. But without it, the chances I’d have met this one were basically zero. So, for me, in that time and place, I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

Now, back to the story.

“Oh, no,” I said.

My heart was in my throat and my cheeks surely matched the red of the university building placards lining the street. We walked all the way up to where his car was parked, as if it had simply been covered in an invisibility cloak and he could remove it and be on his way. But by the time we got there I knew, and a look at the sign sticking up out of the sidewalk confirmed it. Though our date had started on Tuesday, it was now Wednesday. And Wednesday was street cleaning.

Every first and third Wednesday of the month, street cleaning happened between the hours of 12 midnight and 6:00 AM. Did they ever actually clean the streets? I didn’t know. But I was 1000% certain that when someone loses their car on the first date, there’s unlikely to be a second one.

I led the guys back to my house, muttering (and sometimes yelling) obscenities. What were you supposed to do when something like this happened? Was this guy going to get his car back? How were he and his friend going to get home? I probably sounded like a complete crackpot to these dudes and anyone else within earshot, but I was well and truly embarrassed and felt guilty for having inconvenienced them.

I was worried he would have to call his parents to come pick him up (so embarrassing and also far away and also very late), but one of my roommates happened to be home and he let me borrow his car. I have no idea how I figured out where to go, much less how I made it over there, because GPS didn’t exist back then and Mapquest printouts were a struggle to get right.

But perhaps the worst part happened when we arrived. The guy behind the counter, clearly nonplussed with—nay, reveling in—our situation, asked for something like $200. Two hundred dollars! To bring a car to a big parking lot and leave it there for a half-hour!

I was a nineteen-year-old college student working at CVS. $200 was a lot of money to me. But what I didn’t know, or maybe I did but hadn’t quite internalized it, was that this guy had been laid off from his job for months and there was a very real chance his checking account wouldn’t have enough in it to cover the debit. When the charge went through, he was relieved (he tells me in retrospect). But all I felt was disappointed and embarrassed. There was no way I’d ever see him again.

So, naturally, I set a very pouty away message on Instant Messenger. I can’t remember what it said, but it was mopey enough to compel him to IM me as soon as he got home. “Why are you sad?”

I bumbled through an explanation about feeling guilty about the car and the money, and do you know what he did?

At 3:00 in the morning, he offered to come back, evidence he wasn’t mad about the car, or the money, and that he really did want to see me again despite my certainty that this whole thing was over before it had even begun.

And, of course, I let him.

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I never know where to end a story like this. Clearly, 20 years, 4 homes, 3 kids, and 2 dogs later, there’s more to it. But this seemed like a sweet ending point.

It feels important to say here that Friend was a groomsman at our wedding, and that we do at least 50% of our talking in person now, though we do revert back to our roots and talk online a good deal of the time.

Oh—and one more thing that didn’t make it into the essay itself: Meeting him back on my doorstep at whatever ungodly hour it was when he finally made it back, hugging him and breathing in his smell, was like coming home. And it still is.

This essay is the second of two response/reflections based on Alex Dobrenko`'s recent series of posts about how he and his wife came to be. You can read the first one here—and I hope you did, before reading this one!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments! Would you have peaced out after your car disappeared? Do you have any funny/romantic/weird date stories? Tell me true!

We met online at a time when, according to common knowledge, the only people hanging out online were perverts and axe murderers.

But, hey, I was also hanging out online, so that couldn’t be true for everybody.

The site doesn’t exist anymore, and I’m not sure what compelled me to join it in the first place, but here was the schtick: You post a single profile photo, and people rate you 1-10 solely based on how you look. It was a terrible site. I have no idea what my rating was, or if I ever even got one, because it was quickly obvious the only people getting close to a 10 were actual models or mostly naked women. Which, fine, if that’s your thing. It wasn’t mine. Case in point: This was my profile photo:

I did meet a few people from the site, though—guys who would instant message me and strike up a chat.

He was one of those guys. I talked to him for a few weeks—first online, and then on the phone—before I agreed to meet with him in person. His friends vetted me over the phone, a fact I found weirdly sweet and protective. And, after a month, we agreed to meet in person.

We’d be leaving straight from my job for a concert at Paradise Rock Club right up the street. I really gussied myself up for the event in a versatile outfit consisting of my best pair of JNCO jeans, topped with a boxy blue men’s t-shirt 2 sizes too big for me. Probably also some Vans knock-offs on my feet.

All shift, as I stocked shelves and counted out change, I fought to keep down the butterflies. The guy was cute. And, on top of that, he seemed sweet and well-adjusted. The hum in my chest intensified every time the automatic doors slid open, and disappointment tingled my extremities when it wasn’t him. What if he didn’t come? I mean, why would he, really? I was just some girl on the internet. Nothing special.

But then, just as I was tamping down the nerves for the five-hundredth time, there he was. He was even cuter in person. I couldn’t believe my luck! When he walked through the door and around to the front of the customer service counter, though, I was met with a surprise.

He had brought a friend.

“Is it okay if he tags along?” he said.

Friend interjected, in a very Boston accent, “I want to make sure you’re going to do right by my friend here.”

Sure, it was weird. And, based on some—okay, all—of my previous experiences, some might say I wasn’t a terribly good judge of character. But I was a new woman now, making better decisions. They were both totally normal young men, and I knew them both not just from the internet but also from the telephone. They definitely were not perverts or axe murderers. And they’d come all this way. Might as well have a good time.

“I parked over there,” the guy said as we left, gesturing to an 80something Ford parked a ways down the street. “Is that cool?”

“Should be fine,” I said. I hadn’t ever driven a car in the city; in three years at an urban university with adequate enough train service, I hadn’t needed one. But it was too late for the meters to be running, and I guessed it was just a park-the-car-and-come-back-for-it-later situation.

I hadn’t realized the concert was 21 and over. Sadly, though we were close in age, the guys were above that threshold and I, below. The bouncer turned me away at the door and my sails deflated. I couldn’t help my age, and he had known it from the beginning, but that didn’t stop me from flushing with embarrassment.

But he wasn’t fazed. “Oh, well,” he shrugged. “Dinner?”

I was so focused on the concert I hadn’t thought about dinner, but there was a Chinese restaurant next door, and so the three of us ended up there instead. Afterward, I suggested we all go back to my place. (You can relax. I feel you tensing up, but this isn’t that kind of story.)

I had a bunch of roommates back then, but none of them were home, and so the three of us hung out in my living room and watched one of the two movies on our shelf: High Fidelity. At this point, 21 years later, the only thing I remember about the film is that we hated it. All three of us. By halfway through, we were just having our own conversation, throwing out a jab at the movie every now and again because, for some reason, we let it run in the background.

Then the movie was over, and it was one in the morning, and the only logical thing was for the guys to go home and for me go to to bed.

I walked them out to the main street, and then up to where they’d parked, but as we approached I began sensing something was wrong.

“Um,” he said.

We had walked for three blocks at that point, and—

“Where’s your car?” asked Friend.

—there wasn’t a single car parked on this side of the street.

“Oh, no,” I said.

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To Be Continued next week! This essay is a response/reflection based on 's recent series of posts about how he and his wife came to be. This inspired me to write down the story that's been in my head (and of course my heart) for 21 years now. But, truly, it is too long for one essay. So, while I hadn't intended to copy Alex's three-act format wholesale, I might end up doing so. Hope you enjoy (and that you stick around for next week)!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments! What do you think is going to happen next? How were you feeling as you read this? Do you have any funny/romantic/weird date stories? Tell me!

P.S. Here’s that post from Alex.

Both Are True

The meet-cute (a rom com, act one)

Before we get into today’s essay (which critics are calling a “wow”), I’ve got some fun news. For the last twelve years or so I’ve been using a little known ‘social networking’ platform called Instagram. I don’t expect most of you to know what it is - but trust you me it’s a good time…

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3 years ago · 50 likes · 78 comments · Alex Dobrenko`

I wake up to the sound of Angela retching. “You okay?” I mumble, but she’s already flung the covers onto my side of the bed and closed half the distance to the bathroom.

She stops and straightens. When she turns to me, her eyes are clear. “Actually, yeah,” she says, “I am now. What on earth was that?”

“You tell me,” I say. “I’m not the one yurking in bed.”

The strum of my alarm sounds from my mobile, and a wave of nausea runs through my body when I tap the screen to turn it off. Why is the sound designed to soothe me awake suddenly giving me the spins?

I jerk away and sit up, feeling better the instant my hand is back in my lap. The wrinkles around Angela’s eyes disappear as recognition settles on her face.

“Oh, shit,” she says.

“What?” I say. Make it make sense, I silently plead.

“It started,” she says, which is probably the one thing that could panic me even more.

“What started?”

“The Electronics Detachment Plan,” she says. “Remember? The program that dude was talking about on the news last week? I can’t believe they actually did it.”

“What the hell are you—”

“Oh, that’s right,” she says. “You were working late. You probably didn’t hear the story.” 

“What was it?” I ask, “And what does it have to do with my mobile?”

“I don’t know, Astor. Some guy on the radio talking about how the health monitoring implants were going to take a ‘more active role in our physical and mental wellness.’ Honestly, would it be such a bad thing to take a break from our devices?”

The implants are only supposed to passively monitor data. “How can they even–” I say, reaching over to look up the story on my mobile. Before my fingertips touch the front glass, my body rolls in on itself. I yank my hand back and swing my feet onto the floor, standing up. “So we just can’t use our mobiles anymore?” I demand. A hollow panic begins to settle in my chest. 

Angela shrugs. Of course she’s not upset. She could lose hers for a week and it wouldn't bother her. If I did that, it’d take me another week to catch up on everything I missed. “All I heard is that the Council wants us to ‘curb our reliance on technology.’”

I raise my face toward the corner of the room where the speaker is mounted. “Rob,” I say.

“Yes, Astor?” the house AI says, infuriatingly pleasant as always.

“Why does using my mobile make me want to puke?”

There’s a pause, as if even the robot doesn’t want to deliver this news. “Your household has been selected for the Electronics Detachment Plan. Attempts to use electronic devices will result in discomfort.”

I turn back to Ángels. What the fuck? The initial withdrawal period is the worst, Rob says. We’ll start to feel better after the first few days, and after a week we’ll be allotted short windows of time and some activities to “develop a healthier relationship with technology.”

“This is bullshit,” I say. “I’m not some irresponsible teenager who can’t control my screen time.”

“Your electronics time averages 13 hours, 41 minutes per day,” says Rob.

That can’t be right. “I have to use screens for my job.”

“On average, thirty-seven percent of your time is spent on work-related tasks.” Can a robot smirk? Because this one sounds awfully self-satisfied.

“Participants have experienced greater productivity at work and enhanced satisfaction at home,” says Rob.

“I can’t do my job without a computer,” I say. “How am I supposed to even get to work?” Was that client meeting at 10:00? 10:30? I reach out to check my calendar and the churn in my gut reminds me of yet another thing I can’t do without my mobile.

“Your appointments for this week have been rescheduled,” says Rob, “to give you time to acclimate.” 

I scowl at the useless collection of electronics one last time and squeeze past the oversized cardboard box in the doorway. The top flap stands at attention, shouting NURSERY WOMB in my direction. I flick it down without looking back. 

The unease in my chest gets worse when we sit down to eat. Any other morning, I’d be catching up on email. Today, I’m face to face with a partner who hates me.

The only thing louder than my chewing is Angela’s. And she keeps looking at me, like if she just stares hard enough she’ll be able to decipher me. Eating together didn’t used to be this stressful.

“No devices for a week,” Angela finally says.

I stare into my oatmeal.

“We might actually have to talk to each other.”

I take a deep breath and level my eyes at her. “Talk about what, Angela?”

Angela glances down the hall and then back at me. I can’t see the box from here, but it might as well be sitting on the table between us.

“Not this again,” I say. “What more is there to say?”

The anger doesn’t look right on her. When she raises her voice, I flinch a little. “Oh, I don’t know, Astor. Maybe you could start with why, of all nights, you needed to work late on the night we were going to start our family? And then you can move on to what you expect me to do with the embryo cartridge sitting in our freezer like a bag of frozen tater tots.”

What can I say? That I never wanted a kid and only let her talk me into it because I can’t imagine my life without her? That I drove around alone for hours that night to avoid confessing I couldn’t stomach the idea of being a mom?

I reach for my mobile, but my fingers come up empty. I talk or I leave. Either way, my relationship with technology isn’t the only one at stake now.

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