We were driving, and we were arguing — I can’t even remember about what. Probably about what music to play in the car; she has strong feelings about playlists, feelings that often run counter to my own. Whatever it was, she was being especially pissy about it and the discussion had escalated, and so I asked her to please, please dial it back a notch.

She was not interested in dialing it back a notch.

“MOMMY,” she said (and yes, she was using all caps), “I AM JUST SPEAKING MY MIND. LIKE YOU TELL ME TO.”

That was a smart play. I had taught her to speak her mind; she knew that I would concede this. Which I did: “that’s true,” I said, “but” — and here, I was obviously not paying close enough attention to my words — “there is a very big difference between speaking your mind and being an asshole.”

If there was ever a moment for a record scratch, this was it. Everyone in the car went silent.

Emilia spoke first. Again, in all caps.

“MOMMY.”

Long, ominous pause.

“MOMMY. YOU JUST CALLED ME AN ASSHOLE.”

Which, I had, I guess? Still, I protested. I babbled something parent-y about the difference between making a contrast or maybe a comparison and in any case NOTHING TO SEE HERE, I DID NOT CALL YOU AN ASSHOLE, IT JUST SOUNDED THAT WAY, PLEASE FORGET I SAID IT.

She was not having it.

“NO, Mommy. You called me an asshole.”

Oof.

We drove the rest of the way in silence. When we got home, she marched in the door, grabbed a Sharpie off the counter and went straight into the bathroom. A few minutes later, she emerged.

She had written, in the thick black Sharpie, the word ASSHOLE across her forehead — backwards, because she’d written it looking in the mirror, which gave it a special give-no-fucks flare. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “OKAY FINE, MOMMY. I’M AN ASSHOLE.”

If you’re guessing that a long, awkward silence followed, you are completely correct. It was not one of my prouder moments — or at least, it seemed to not be at the time.

The thing of it was, she was right. I had been raising her to speak her mind and to disagree and to stand up for herself, and as it happens, these are things that lead women and girls to get called all sorts of names that are akin to ASSHOLE. “Difficult.” “Bossy.” “Angry.” “Abrasive.” “Ambitious.” And I’d just reinforced the reality of that in my reaction to her: yes, speak your mind, but only in ways that don’t conflict with being a nice girl. There’s a difference, after all.

And therein resides the challenge.

Of course I want her to be fierce and outspoken and determined and bloody-minded and contrary. But I don’t want her to be an asshole, right?

Right?

Or do I?

I’ve told this story more than a few times now, sometimes on stages, sometimes in conference rooms, most recently in an abandoned mining town in Northern California to an audience of fiercely angry, brilliantly abrasive, wonderfully ambitious women. I’ve never written it down, until now, possibly because I’ve never wanted a written record of this act of what I think is truly bad parenting — which is part of what I want to unpack here. Why does this story still make me uncomfortable, even when I get so passionate about sharing it? Why have I sometimes smoothed the rough edges of the story, put a bright slick focus on the Lesson That I Learned? Most times that I’ve told this story, I’ve called it “How To Raise a Rebel.” I’ve made a very emphatic point about not wanting her to be, you know, an actual asshole. At this point in the story, I usually say something to the effect of, “look, of course, I don’t want her to be an ASSHOLE-asshole, but I do want to her to be all of those other things. I don’t want her to be an asshole, but I do want her to be rebellious. Outspoken. Bloody-minded. Contrary.”

I kinda hate that I’ve been doing that.

Because the thing is, I no longer think that there is — at least, in our culture and under the terms of our social norms for girls and women — any substantive difference between being those more socially-approved types of girl-powerful and being an asshole. Or rather, being thought of as an asshole, or being labelled as an asshole — or other ‘a’ words, like abrasive, or angry, or ambitious. To put it another way: I think that it is absolutely crucial to our survival in this world that we recognize that there is almost no difference between being powerful, as women and girls, and being called or thought of as whatever the female variant is of an asshole.

I mean, we just saw it happen on the political stage — again. Elizabeth Warren — probably the nicest human being on any of the debate stages, even when she was tearing Bloomberg another orifice — was called a snake, for god’s sake. She was called abrasive and ambitious, and it was super clear that those were not compliments. She was blamed for Sanders’ poor showings, because how dare she assert her right to compete? She was — like Hillary, and like many other women — deemed unlikeable, and unelectable.

But if Elizabeth Warren is an asshole, that is exactly what I want my daughter to be.

(And here I feel like I need to hedge, because of course I do; the social pressure is too much and I, too, am a girl.) I want to be very, very clear that wanting her to be an asshole is not equivalent to wanting her to be mean or thoughtless. Asshole may be entirely the wrong word — I’m using because it’s the word that came to me in that difficult moment, because it’s the word that my daughter claimed. I’m using it because it makes us — because it makes me — uncomfortable, and I think that that discomfort is important.

I think that we need to get comfortable with that discomfort. Because we need to be able to stand in that discomfort if we’re going to make space for girls — and for ourselves — to be uncomfortably determined, uncomfortably outspoken, uncomfortably difficult. If we’re going to own and exercise our power enough to change the world.

Because girls — and women — absolutely need to be willing to make others uncomfortable if they/we are going to have an impact in this world. If we’re going to stand any chance of changing it.

They need to be willing to write asshole on their foreheads backward and defy the powers-that-be to scrub it off. They need to be defiant, because they’re growing up in a system that is stacked against them. We need to be clear about this: it is stacked against them. It is stacked against us. Beyonce told us that girls run the world, but we don’t. We’d be paying ourselves better and installing female presidents if we did.

And we’re lying when we pretend otherwise, but lie we do. I’ve lied to myself a ton. And ultimately that’s where I got to when I started asking myself hard questions about what kind of powerful I wanted my daughter to be — the myths about female power, and how they influence us.

The Myth of the Even Playing Field

We tell girls that there are reliable pathways to their success. We tell them that if they follow the rules and do well and get good grades and play fair, they will have an equal chance at success as boys. Stay confident, work hard, do your best, we say, and you’ll succeed. Anything boys can accomplish, you can too.

But this isn’t true. We all know this. It’s right there in front of us. It’s there in the wage gap, the investment gap, the leadership gap, the opportunity gap, and all the gaps between what girls and women dream they can do and what they actually can achieve, given our fucked-up system. Those gaps are wide and they are deep (dramatically more so for girls and women of color) and they are real. The data on this is relentless; you’ve seen most of it cited a million times.

Women represent less than 6% of CEOs in the United States, we receive less than 3% of venture capital (women of color receive less than 1%), we earn only 79 cents to a man’s dollar (women of color earn only 61 cents). Globally, the gender wage gap isn’t expected to close for — wait for it — over 200 years. And all the research on the topic tells us that these gender gaps are systemic — they’re not aberrations or bugs in an otherwise functioning system, they’re features of that system. They persist due to pervasively gender-hostile work environments, negative stereotypes about women in leadership, and unconscious gender bias.

So when we suggest to girls that if they’re good enough and they work hard enough, they can do whatever they want, we’re lying. Because for most girls, being good — even being the best — simply isn’t enough. Ask Elizabeth Warren.

The Myth of the Nice Girl

The second myth is the myth of the nice girl — the culturally imposed ideal of femininity that emphasizes being nice, polite, cooperative and selfless. This isn’t exactly the sugar-and-spice niceness of old — we no longer expect girls to be meek and passive. But we do still expect girls to be polite, responsible and cooperative. (There are tons of great books on this: see Rachel Simmon’s The Curse of the Good Girl, for example, and Lyn Mikel Brown’s Girlfighting, which breaks down the toxic effects of the pressure to be nice.)

But mandating good behavior for girls is like slapping on a pair of ambition handcuffs. When we tell girls to be polite, we’re discouraging them from speaking their minds. When we impose on them the pressure to please, their authentic selves get shut down. It stops them from standing up for themselves. It inhibits their willingness to take risks and invite failure. It encourages them to value social approval over accomplishment.

When we say, be powerful, but only in ways that are neatly packaged within a framework of niceness, we are setting absurd limits on their power. Because it actually doesn’t fucking matter. They can be the nicest person in the room, but if they are also the smartest and the most determined and everyone else in the room is a guy (especially an old white one), they’re set up to lose.

The Myth of Likability

The third, closely related myth is the myth of likability. Girls are taught implicitly — and explicitly — to value cooperation over competition, and to value likability over accomplishment. Boys, however, learn early and often that competition and winning aren’t at odds with having friends, and that they don’t have to be likable to be succeed.

Think about our male cultural heroes. We celebrate anti-heroes like Iron Man and Deadpool and Batman. We admire Elon Musk and every white male unicorn founder in Silicon Valley, even if we don’t like them. Bernie Sanders’ rumpled un-likability is a big part of his appeal to his followers. He doesn’t give a fuck! Isn’t that awesome? Not liking these guys is, in fact, the point. We not only don’t care if they’re nice, we kind of prefer it if they aren’t — we love a good anti-hero, whether he’s on the screen or on the cover of Fortune magazine. Geniuses aren’t kind to babies and small animals and they don’t bake cookies. We never, ever say of a successful man that we wish that he smiled more.

In that way, we give boys (and men) cultural permission to be difficult and disagreeable— and suggest to them that if they’re smart, talented and ambitious enough (or sometimes, just ambitious), it can be an advantages to be an asshole. The world loves rakes, rebels and bad boys. Because, we think, it’s the rebels and the bad boys that produce greatness by being contrary and disruptive; it’s the asshole geniuses that build the companies and the institutions and the movements that shape our world (we’re actually wrong about this, but that’s another topic for another time). Rebel asshole geniuses don’t spend their time making nice and following rules. And they don’t give a damn what you think of them.

I want my daughter to not give a damn what people think of her. Not because there’s power in being an asshole for asshole’s sake, but because the core characteristic of being a true rebel is denying the standard definitions of power. She should get to decide what her power looks like. She should get to wield it in the manner that best serves her, and the world.

I don’t want her to choose being likable over following her dreams. I don’t want her to just break the glass ceiling — I want her to break new ground. I don’t want her to try to join the boys’ club — I want her to start her own. I want her to fuck shit up, in the best and most purposeful way.

And that requires giving her space and permission and opportunity to at least risk being an asshole.

The problem is, that’s really hard — I’m her super supportive, super feminist mom, and I called her an asshole. I should fucking know better. So this is hard work — but I do it. I try.

I’m working hard to stick by these rules — and to live by these rules, for myself:

1. To always remember that the game is stacked against her, and that it’s a hard game to break into, let alone change — and she needs me to be honest about that and to support her in taking that on. Because she can change it, but only by saying fuck the rules. I have to make it not only okay, but fully choice-worthy to do that.
2. To that end, I need to give her permission, space and opportunity to NOT be a ‘nice girl.’ I need to actively encourage her to speak her mind and to challenge ideas, even — perhaps especially — when it makes me uncomfortable. And I need to be in constant conversation with myself about that discomfort. I need to challenge myself on that shit first.
3. To always remind her — and every girl, woman, boy, human — that you can be a good person, a good human with a good heart, and still be tough and ambitious and determined and yes, disagreeable. Unicorns (the delightful magical kind, not the Silicon Valley kind) have horns, after all. The sharpest, pointiest part of unicorns is a big part of what makes them amazing. Without that stabby bit, they’re just a horse.

(Maybe that’s our alternative language — it’s not being an asshole, it’s being a sharp, stabby unicorn. Maybe one day, that will be our language. For now, I think, we still need to grapple with the reality of what it means for girls and women to be assholes, without dusting it in glitter and magic, as tempting as that is.)

So, Rule Number 4: to never forget that for anyone who has not had the freedom or opportunity to be the kind of asshole that I’ve described here, refusing to be afraid or ashamed of their asshole powers is itself powerful. Wildly powerful.

Imagine if we found our way to celebrating the underdog asshole, the asshole who uses her powers for good, the asshole with heart?

Imagine if more girls — if more kids, more women, more humans, more of any of us who have believed that they can’t or shouldn’t operate at full power, because it might be somehow shameful or unpleasant — what if we all, starting now, decided to just go for it? Started really, truly embracing ambition and risk-taking and disruption and disagreeability, in service of a better world? What if we decided to be assholes with heart?

What if we all took a page from Elizabeth Warren’s (and Kamala Harris’s and Stacey Abram’s and others’) book and decided to be fierce and tough and unapologetic and also really, actually, demonstrably good, all at once? What if more of us even just decided to support those who do.

What a wobble of the earth that would be.

So I was anxious – anxious beyond measure – about birth and new motherhood, which I perceived as a broadening and deepening of this experience. I didn’t fear it, exactly: I wanted the experience. Every fibre of my physical being strained toward this experience, and demanded that my mind follow – this, in itself, was disconcerting. The thing of it was, rather, that I doubted my ability to stay the course: how would I ever, ever find my way through this dense thicket, this overwhelming jungle, without maps, without books, without the compass of my intellect? How would I survive, if I had only the thrum of my senses to guide me?

I learned, of course. This education came with difficulty: I spent weeks, months, trying to beat back heavy, fear-dampened branches with dog-eared tomes of advice on navigating the brave new world of motherhood (tomes written, no less, by only the most theoretical of explorers, explorers – men – who had only scanned this landscape through spyglasses, safe on their ships, far from these strange shores), only to discover that while these might force the branches back for a moment, it would only be for a moment, before the branches would lash back and knock me off my feet.

I put the books away. I put the books away and set about listening to the thrum of my senses, and discovered, slowly, that doing what felt right kept me on the clearest course. I navigated my way (with no small assistance from others lost in the same wood, shouting encouragement and direction) through breastfeeding and swaddling and sleep and sleep and sleep and crying-it-out and the first signs of spiritedness, guided by my senses and by the gentle prodding of the sympathetic hands of fellow travelers. I found my way. And now, even when I lose my way, which I still do, I know to trust myself and the kindness of fellows in finding my way back. I know what to do.

The knowledge came, however, in more than the form of a sense of direction. I came to know the the unparalleled joy of allowing myself to embrace my biology, my physicality – and the unparalleled bliss that comes with bonding oneself with, binding oneself to, another creature, and having that creature be bound to you, so tightly, so deeply, that you are really are as one, one physical being, with one bonded heart and one bonded soul. We know something of this bond in love, in erotic love, but only ever fleetingly, in the sweet interstices of romantic companionship; we are never fully, physically bound to our other, no matter what we think Plato might have said, through Socrates, about our souls’ other halves – we are complete souls, we adult beings, and although our greatest happinesses come with allowing our souls to join hands with others, we never merge souls, not really.

Except, that is, when we have a baby. Then we know – if only for a moment, for one long, sweet moment – what it is to be more than one, to be one plus, to have split open and spilled out our blood and our viscera and our spirit and gathered it all back up again in our arms and held it, tight, pressed it to our chests, felt it throbbing and squirming and to have known, to know, what it is to hold one’s soul in one’s arms.

And then to have it pulled away. Because this is what is inevitable, this is what the books can’t tell you, this what no mother can escape: from the moment your child, your soul, is handed to you, whether that child has been pulled from your gut or yanked out from between your legs or flown from across the sea, whether your soul comes to you in gore or wrapped in white cotton sheets, your possession of it – of him, of her – is temporary. Mind-spinningly temporary. Every second, every heartbeat, that passes from the moment you clutch your second soul, your little soul, in your arms, takes that soul away from you. Every moment is a moment of growth, and every moment of growth loosens your grip. And you must keep holding, you must keep your arms outstretched, but you can’t, you mustn’t, fight to hold on.

This, then, is the art of motherhood, and it is not an art of the mind: to hold on and let go, at the same time.

We are constantly letting go: when they are pulled from our arms for the first time, when they stretch out their arms to someone else for the first time, when they first say no. When they first push themselves out of our arms, when they crawl, when they walk, little feet carrying them away. When they wean. When they wave bye-bye without shedding a tear. When they fall down and they hurt and turn to someone else for comfort. When they grow, when they live – with every step that they take they are moving away from us. And it is our task to navigate this ongoing, this infinite, this inevitable, this necessary separation with love and with grace.

But once you have learned to know with your body – to have reached far, far beyond carnal knowledge and the intoxicating wisdom of the flesh – to know, fully, what it is to be a body with a soul threaded, literally and figuratively, to its heart, a soul that can give birth to itself, take form, be held oh so tightly and then let go – once you have this knowledge, you are, truly, naked, vulnerable, exposed, open to untold hurts, to infinite pains, to the unshakeable awareness of loss. This is knowledge, and this knowledge thrills, and stings.

So it is that we mothers are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, holding tight to our fruit, pricking our heels on thorns.

—-

I wrote the above words 13 years ago, -ish. She was a baby then, just started toddling. She’s fourteen now, and I feel those sentiments even more keenly. It’s been years since she was fully attached to me (if she ever was; I have joked many times that she was born independent, yearning to be free), but I still feel every pull of the threads that connect us as she moves further away. Her absence is no longer a distant horizon, but something proximate, measurable in miles rather than light years. I can see the fence, the gate, the wall, the ramparts, whatever barriers I have imagined protect our now from our future. She’s approaching it — we’re approaching out — and we’re both counting our steps.

She’s excited, of course — she already knows what car she is going to buy (and how she’s going to afford it) when she hits sixteen; she is unabashed in proclaiming to me her desire for that freedom. (“I will be able to go WHEREVER I WANT,” she declares, feeling that freedom in anticipation. “Well, not exactly,” I say, “there will still be rules,” and then I pontificate upon laws concerning young drivers until she interrupts. “But still,” she says, “but still. I’ll be able to GO.”

And go she will. And go she does.

The departure is ongoing, as I anticipated years ago. They are always walking away; their destination is not back to us; they are not coming back into our bodies, into our hearts, they are always and ever walking away, toward a future that is theirs, not ours.

We count the steps, we count the days.

Just yesterday we were counting years. (The days are long but the years are short, they tell you. They are right. You just don’t believe it until the years have swept by you, so fast that you didn’t even see them go.) Now we count days.

It’s fine of course. “It’s fine,” you tell yourself as you look in the mirror, contemplating time. “It’s fine,” you tell someone on Instagram or Twitter or in the Starbucks line. “I love who she’s becoming! I wouldn’t go back.”

This is all true, but also very much not true. You would trade years of your life, you think, for another day with Baby Her. You wouldn’t necessarily want to go all the way back and do it again — you wouldn’t want to start over, dear god — but you definitely would like to be able to visit. To remember. Because the memories are fading, even with all the pictures. You can’t remember what it felt like. Not really.

And yet. Who she has become is extraordinary, amazing, a miracle but also not a miracle because you saw it coming from the first moments, how spectacular she’d be. And it is truly glorious to watch; you wouldn’t trade that, not for anything.

So you stand in that liminal space, between Garden/Not-Garden, imagining walls that simply might not be there at all, seeing all the light ahead (we do not think of the shadows when we are waxing emotional about Time) and knowing that it is all just forwardness, it is all just the bright energy of yes, and. You were never in a Garden at all, you realize. The fruit was always everywhere, for you, and now for her.

You watch her go, already tasting it.

Happy birthday, baby girl.

We talk about how that feels, in our hearts and in our bodies. We talk about how it looks. She tells me that she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror. I know, I say. Neither do I.

“But I really don’t,” she insists. “I look old. And the old person that I see in the mirror is not the person that I feel like inside.”

I try to not let that bother me, but it does. Not because I worry about the passing of time for my mother (although I do), but because I can feel the day coming for me, when I really, truly don’t recognize myself in the mirror, when my inside no longer feels attached to my outside.

I heard something similar the other weekend, at the Wisepause Lifestyle summit on midlife and menopause. One of the speakers was talking about her own mother, saying almost exactly the same thing. “She told me that she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror.” The whole room thrummed with recognition: we had all heard this. Or felt it.

We don’t talk enough about this, about how we do not go gently into that good night. We prefer to keep aging in the abstract, a hypothetical future bridge that we willingly and intentionally cross — someday, not now; someday far away — to arrive comfortably(ish) at the land of Old People. We treat it like a choice, not an inevitability; a decision we make, like getting on a flight, knowing where we’re supposed to land and who we’re supposed to be when we get there. We don’t imagine that we just wake up one day, having arrived at our future, unable to recognize ourselves.

Of course, for women, it’s a little more complicated. Our journey isn’t sudden. It’s hot and uncomfortable and seems to go on forever. But even then, I think that we don’t fully recognize it as a journey. We didn’t in puberty, either, which is what this is like, in a way. Our bodies transformed, seemingly suddenly, lurching ahead while our minds and spirits stayed moving at their own comfortable pace. And we thought, we are still the same.

But we weren’t, and we aren’t.

In that earlier transformation, we woke up to the realization that we were being seen — as women, as sexual objects (if we were lucky, as sexual subjects, sexual agents, in control of our own sexuality), as participants in a social space that might not see us or embrace us as we see ourselves. In the later-in-life transformation, we wake up to the experience of being or becoming invisible, to not being seen at all. In that earlier transformation, most of us stumble and lose confidence. In this later one, for many of us, that happens again.

I speak a lot about the confidence gap, or the dream gap — the chasm that opens sometime around puberty and that creates what feels like an insurmountable distance between what we dream of doing or being and our faith in our ability to achieve those dreams. I spoke about it last week at the Chairman Mom Flee, surrounded by a crowd of extraordinary, dream-achieving women, many of whom are in or around mid-life. And some of the conversation that came out of that yielded this truth: many of us face that dream gap again, decades later, even if we hurtled over it the first time. And this time, it’s in some ways more confusing than it was the first time around: in puberty, we had little point of reference for our own power; this time, we have lived our power, sometimes to extraordinary degrees. To start doubting it, even just a little bit, can feel radically destabilizing. To feel like we might be losing it — or to think that we stand to lose it, any of it — is scary. 

This isn’t just about aging, qua physical aging, although that is of course a core part of it. Things are changing: sometimes those are physical things (our energy is different, we feel hot when we don’t expect to, we don’t recognize ourselves in the mirror), sometimes those are spiritual things (we listen to the ticking of the clock, we grapple with our mortality, we wonder whether there is still time for more dreams.) All of them are confusing things, because we don’t have consistent, accessible, communal points of reference for them. At the Wisepause event, this was the common thread that ran through every conversation: how do we make sense of this? How do we live with it? How do we — can we — embrace it? (There was also this question: can we slow it? Maybe. The real question is, can we enjoy and appreciate it more? How do we enjoy and appreciate it more?) The answers, end of the day, mattered less than the fact that we were talking about it. There was a sense of palpable relief in the room. We’re talking about this.

This is always what matters most, in any and all periods of transition and transformation and in all the moments in between: that we talk about it. That we tell stories about it. Most importantly, that we build community around it.

Because it’s only in community that we disrupt — in the best possible way — the default experience of this transformation, this evolution, and embrace it. Together.

This post is made possible with support from AARP’s Disrupt Aging. All opinions are my own.

Header photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

So we made it, and it was fun, and the mask itself was actually kind of awesome (it did feel lovely on the skin and I swear it did seem to make our skin look better. At the least, it did provide a kind of glow, that I promise was not just turmeric stain.) So we played around with other DIY treatments (did you know that there’s about a thousand things that you can do with aloe vera?) and from there it was a slippery slope into the world of skincare chemistry. 

DIY remained part of it — I’ve made a few different variations on that turmeric mask since that first time — but it’s since become a much broader landscape of exploration. I’ve always loved skincare (browsing Sephora or even a Walgreens is a source of much peace and happiness for me) but the DIY point of entry — because you’re approaching whatever you’re making as a recipe — got me interested in actual formulations. I went from being a casual consumer of skincare to, I guess, a kind of hobbyist. 

And I found two things: 1) that it is actually really fun, in a productive-distraction kind of way, and 2) it has made a very noticeable impact on my skin *and* on my general wellbeing. Thinking about actives and emollients? I find that shit relaxing.

Anyway, there are about a million things that I could say about what has turned into a hybrid hobby/self-care practice, but for now I just wanted to share my favorite discoveries:

1.) Skincare routines are fun and effective. I fell down the rabbit hole of r/skincareaddiction at Reddit early on and through that space became a devoted convert to the Art of the Routine. Finding the routine or routines that work for you is like finding the ideal workout or writing schedule — you feel like you’ve conquered something and in the process made your life easier. 

I didn’t start with routine that I customized for myself — I was introduced to Y’our, who sent me a trial customized skincare system, which was an awesome point of entry to the world of skincare regimens. They develop a morning and evening routine for you, based on a personal skincare profile that they guide you through, and custom formulate the products based that profile. Then they send it all to you with clear explanations of the ingredients and of the routines to follow, morning and night — it’s a subscription model, and it makes developing a routine REALLY easy. Once I got it underway and learned more, I made my own adaptions and additions (I added a tretinoin step, for example), but it’s still my anchor. And the sunscreen that they customized for me is now 100% my holy grail sunscreen (see below.)

2.) Sunscreens don’t have to be a compromise or a chore. I’ve always been a pretty faithful sunscreen user, but a grudging one — so many of them clog pores, sting eyes, make make-up run, make your face feel greasy, leave a white cast. Y’our’s sunscreen was the first that I’ve used that is a genuine pleasure to use that I think actually makes my skin look better, in addition to protecting it. And no stinging eyes, no greasy feel, no white cast — it’s like a lovely day cream that goes on beautifully and makes my skin feel great. And because it’s a pleasure to use, I use it religiously. (It’s so important to use sunscreen religiously.)

The other sunscreen that I really like and keep as backup is CeraVe’s Facial Moisturizing Lotion (AM) with SPF. And I love Algenist’s Repairing Tint & Radiance Moisturizer SPF 30, which I layer over my Y’our sunscreen instead of foundation. 

3.) There’s no one-size-fits-all for acne! I still get occasional breakouts (peri-menopause is bullshit), but I dug into this one for Emilia. What I learned was that the effectiveness of any treatment for acne very much depends on the reason for the acne — is it, for example, hormonal or fungal? Fungal acne doesn’t respond as well to standard treatments — it DOES respond well to formulas designed to treat fungal skin issues, like sulfur (sulfur-based soap has been a game changer in our household) or — wait for it — Nizoral, which is an anti-fungal dandruff shampoo. I sometimes get hairline breakouts and a little application of Nizoral overnight can literally make them disappear.

We also love Mario Badescu’s Drying Lotion and The Ordinary’s salicylic acid as a spot treatment. Anyway, if you or your kid’s acne isn’t responding to other treatments, give a thought to what kind of acne it is and go from there.

4.) The most expensive skin treatments are not necessarily the best. Some of them are very good, but you’re mostly paying for marketing (you already knew this.) I’ve used Creme de la Mer, for example — and it’s lovely — but I’ve also found that classic Nivea (in the blue tin) does just as good a job around the eyes (with the bonus of having a bit of a highlight effect) and Vaseline is a great occlusive (traps moisture) and doesn’t cause breakouts. Rosehip oil is also very hydrating, can reduce the appearance of scars, and doesn’t cause breakouts. That sulfur soap that I mentioned above that was so effective on Emilia’s skin and lasts forever? It was $7.

5.) Homemade/DIY treatments really are super fun, and some of them are really effective. I went through a stage when I was around Emilia’s age of being obsessed with concocting my own beauty treatments (in part because my Catholic parents were leery of vanity and didn’t approve of spending a bunch of money on one’s appearance), so there’s admittedly a bit of indulging my inner child here, but still. Honey, yogurt, turmeric, grapeseed oil, coconut oil, lemon, cucumber — odds are that you’ve got the makings of some awesome skin and hair treatments right in your kitchen, and it’s just as fun to experiment with beauty recipes as it is with meal recipes (assuming you find the latter fun — I actually don’t so much, but I do love the former.)

Anyway, here’s that turmeric face mask recipe. I’m making one again tonight.

—-

Disclosures:

Y’our gifted me a three-month trial supply, but not a word said above is exaggerated. Their sunscreen formulation seriously changed my life.

Other links are affiliate (the Y’our links are not), through Amazon.

Header photo by ANDI WHISKEY on Unsplash

And as I’ve been out in the world talking about MY book and the topic of femininity — specifically, the topic of reframing feminine stereotypes as powerful — I’ve found myself saying to approximately a bajillion people, ‘oh, email me and I’ll send you a reading list.’ There is, as it goes, a reading list included in the book — I could not write a book and not have a running reading list going — but of course I have since expanded it many times over and sub-divided the expanded list into multiple sub-lists organized by sub-topic and by audience. Also, with every new person I speak to I think of a new suggestion based on their unique take on the subject so there are now also customized sub-groups and it’s basically a whole library now.

So I thought, why not just start sharing these and getting them at least partly out of my head and my Word files?

This particular list is inspired by Asha Dornfest, who asked me in an interview for her podcast what books or films I’d recommend for kids, based on the subject matter of The Feminine Revolution, which set me off on a mad, happy scramble through my brain-library. What resulted was a list of books for kids that I think do a great job of characterizing both female and male characters in ways that represent femininity really flexibly and adaptively — that is to say, that have complex characters of both genders, who challenge conventional stereotypes of femininity (and, for that matter, masculinity). The books on the list are all books, I think, that both girls and boys can find inspiration in — and see strength and assertiveness modeled in nuanced ways that invite them to see the power in their own complexity. Of course, I believe them all to be great stories for grown-ups to read as well; the best children’s stories, after all, are the ones are just great stories, full stop. The list below is a partial version of that longer list (lest this post be 20,ooo words), organized in no particular order. (Links in the titles if you cannot help but seek them out; Amazon links are affiliate, FYI.)

Behold, The Femininity in Fiction Reading List for the Young and the Young-at-Heart:

1. Little Women. I think that everyone should read this book. I think girls should read it; I think boys should read it; I think YOU should read it, if you haven’t already. It’s such a detailed picture of the dynamics of sisterhood, girlhood and womanhood, with a cast of female characters who collectively represent a really rich tapestry of feminine experience (the influence of Pilgrim’s Progress is only very thinly veiled — each character represents a feminine characteristic. Whether these are virtues or vices are up for debate; stay tuned for my Femininity in Literature reading group, which list is headlined by Little Women.) And it’s a work that really explores the dynamics of home and household — the traditional domain of the feminine — in a deeply nuanced way. It’s been subject to no small amount of feminist criticism, but I am (no surprise) of the school that this is a richly proto-feminist work, and a must-read — for boys and men as well as girls and women (Little Men is a topic for another day. Spoiler alert: it’s not essential reading.)
2. A Wrinkle In Time. Meg is one of the great heroines of contemporary kid lit, of course, but I include AWIT here for its characterization of the family relationships, especially that between Meg and her brother, Charles Wallace. It’s a relationship that is truly lovely, and the two characters really demonstrate the power of sensitivity, emotionality, and intuition, among other feminine-coded characteristics, both as individuals and as a pair. And, of course, the Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which, all of whom embody their own feminine powers in thrilling ways. There’s a beautiful graphic novel version if your kids prefer that (I am a firm believer that cultivating love of stories is more important than cultivating love of specific media for story delivery — novels are, after all, just another medium, and were once upon a time considered just as corruptive as screens, a topic for another day. Let your kids read stories in whatever form they prefer! Also, many graphic novels are brilliant works of art in their own right [there’s another list attached to this idea; I warned you.])
3. The Hunger Games Trilogy. We tend to think of Katniss as a badass, and she is (or becomes one), but she’s also vulnerable, and has to grapple with her very real fears, in a way that should ring true for most girls and boys. And she’s a deeply compassionate, even nurturing heroine — her love for her sister is a core part of the narrative (and who can forget her tenderness with Rue?) But Katniss, aside, there’s also Peeta — a teenage boy who is defined by his likability and his sensitivity, and who is saved more than once by Katniss, but is characterized no less powerfully for it. He’s a favorite male character of mine, because he’s just so unrelentingly lovely (except when he gets brainwashed into being bad). And he’s a BAKER.
4. Any Peanuts compilation. This may seem an odd recommendation, but hear me out: you will find no more diversely characterized group of kids in any other classic work of fiction. Lucy is the very embodiment of the ‘controlling’ feminine stereotype, but nonetheless represented in a wonderfully celebratory way (I aspired to Lucy’s self-assuredness); Linus and Schroeder and — of course — Charlie Brown are boy characters who are wonderfully nuanced and, arguably, deeply ‘feminine’ in the sense that they showcase characteristics that have historically been coded female (sensitivity, vulnerability, dreaminess, etc.) And Peppermint Patty is probably the first non-binary character in contemporary kid lit (yes, comics can be kid lit) and one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. (If you love Peppermint Patty, find a collection — like the one linked — that includes volumes published after 1966, which is when she was added to the gang. Yes, I know these things. #nerd)
5. His Dark Materials Trilogy (Philip Pullman). Hands-down one of my favorite fiction series, so I could give you a thousand reasons to read it (I could have said, ‘give it to your kids to read,’ but no. Read it yourself AND give it to your kids, if you haven’t already.) But I’m including it here for the characters. This is another tale in which traditional gender expectations for characters are subverted — Lyra, the heroine, is rebellious and spirited (and a brilliantly talented liar), while Will, her companion-in-adventure, is sensible, responsible, and deeply morally conscious. (And I always love a story with a great female villain.)
6. The First Rule of Punk (Celia Pérez). Because femininity isn’t about dresses and lipstick and tea parties — it’s about defining for yourself what your female or female-identified experience and identity are. Malú is the kind of girl I was (and still try to be), exercising her femininity through a rock-and-roll eccentricity that is, frankly, awesome.
7. Any work by Judy Blume. Duh. (I could do a whole reading group on Unpacking Femininity Through the Work of Judy Blume.) (Maybe I will sometime.)
8. Fairy tales! One of these days I will share my Fairy Tales For Feminists study guide (it’s tied to my next book, so you have to wait a bit), but for now I’ll say this: despite the prevailing opinion that fairy tales teach girls to be passive, most versions of these stories actually have very powerful pro-girl messages, even (especially) in their representation of so-called feminine stereotypes (one day I’ll also share my Princess TED Talks; Cinderella’s stacks up against the best of them.) And I’ll make note of my very favorite fairy tale: The Snow Queen (the story on which Frozen was very loosely based), because it’s a wonderful tale about a beautiful friendship between a girl and a boy — in which the girl saves the boy — and because contains one of my favorite lines in all of folklore: ‘“I can give her no greater power than she has already,” said the woman; “don’t you see how strong that is?”’ Gerda’s feminine power is all that she needs.
9. Oh, and special fairy tale mention for Neil Gaiman’s version of Hansel and Gretel (gorgeous illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti.) Any version is great, but his brings forward the old woman’s witchiness in a really interesting way, and connects it to Gretel’s discovery of her strength and cunning. It, like The Snow Queen, is at the very top of my Fairy Tales For Feminists reading list!
10. Additional special fairy tale mention for Grace Lin’s Where The Mountain Meets The Moon, which was inspired by Chinese fairy tales and has the most delightful young heroine, whose strength of character carries her through an amazing adventure.

As I said, this is only a partial list; the longer list also includes Anne of Green Gables (not just because I’m Canadian and obligated), the works of Beverly Cleary, the Nancy Drew series (with caveats), The Babysitters Club series, Persepolis, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (the whole trilogy is great, and yes, you should watch the Netflix movie), a smattering of mythology, one or two books of the Bible, and (with tongue only slightly in cheek) the Sweet Valley High series. Yes, you would want to be part of that reading group/book club. If I do one, I’ll invite you.

(And if you want the original, grown-up reading list from the book, well, you’ll need to get the book, or wait for me to publish more reading lists that draw from it. But I’d rather you buy the book, and of course, you’re going to want to read it anyway, so that you know what I’m on about with FEMININITY THIS and FEMININITY THAT. It’s on Amazon, and at a bookstore near you.)

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Sure, yes. But.

——–

Tomorrow, Jasper turns 11. It’s his birthday, and that’s lovely and I’m excited and there’ll be presents and cake and a party and all that, but all that I can think about today is death.

This is the calculus: life is precious, because of death. This is dark, I know; it happens that birthdays and deathdays run too close together for us this month, and so it’s hard to separate the two. Life, death; death, life. Painfully, terribly, beautifully inextricable.

We will, of course, celebrate Jasper’s birthday fully and happily tomorrow. We will do the usual things: sing songs, make wishes, blow out candles, eat cake.

Death will still be lurking. 

Death always is, of course. We just ignore him. We’d go mad if we didn’t, I think. We pretend that he’s not there, just waiting around the corner, because we have to, because life would be too hard if we walked into every room expecting to see him standing there.

This time last year our family walked into the room and he was there. We knew that he was going to be there, although it doesn’t necessarily make it easier when you are expecting his visit. It’s not like you tidy up for him, bake him cookies. You hope that he won’t turn up, or that he’ll at least be late.

This time, he wasn’t late.

He stayed a few days. There was a butterfly on the door for most of that time; that’s how they mark the spaces of dying, in some places, in the places where Death visits frequently enough that you don’t to get the rooms confused. He stayed a few days. Then he left, and he took Tanner with him.

That kind of memory stays hard with you, because it has to. You remember the times of dying just like you remember the times of birthing. Maybe not in exactly the same way — you almost certainly don’t mark them with cake and balloons (although perhaps we should?) — but still. These are deep, intimate memories. These are the memories that tether us to our mortality, and they grip us like hooks, or like thorns. They dig into the skin; they tug harder when you try to pull away. Which is why it’s better if you don’t pull away from them, I think. Best to live with them. Best to nest them within the same heartspaces that we reserve for other celebrations of life, or at least close to them. Life is precious.

——-

Life is precious.

I’m thinking about this as my son’s birthday approaches and my nephew’s deathday approaches and the following quote from the Alabama Governor keeps surfacing in my social feeds — “this legislation stands as a powerful testament to every Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God.”

This is what I’m thinking: that too many of us have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about when we talk about the quote-unquote preciousness of life.  

The conversation around abortion is not, for the most part, a conversation about birth or death or mortality. I’ll emphasize the qualification — for the most part, it is not a conversation about those things: there are many circumstances around which it absolutely is a matter of birth and death and the all-too-common intersections between the two. I have personally wrestled with it in the context of those things; I have known women who have confronted it in the most extreme contexts of those things. What I mean, rather, is that when we talk about laws restricting women’s rights to reproductive freedom — that is to say, to the right to the integrity of their bodies, the right to freedom from any entity, state or otherwise, dictating what they can do with their bodies, including the cells that cluster therein and form the potential (the potential) to become lives outside of those bodies  — we are usually not about talking life and death. We are not talking about the preciousness of life. We are talking about who controls women. We are talking about control, full stop.

It is not a conversation about life (“LIFE,” whispers Marvin the Paranoid Android. “Don’t talk to me about life”) because we have already agreed, as humans, that we will ever and always be wildly inconsistent about how we talk about — how we value — life in any and all of its forms. When we say, life is precious, we don’t know what we mean, beyond the immediate preciousness of the lives closest to ours. We cannot, for example, all agree that the lives of schoolchildren are worth more than the right to bear arms. We cannot all agree that life holds the same value for human beings of different colors or from different countries. We cannot all agree about what level of suffering is acceptable for a life of any form. We cannot all agree that the life of our planet is worth prioritizing over material comfort, over dollars, over political power.

Life. Don’t talk to me about life. Don’t talk to me about the preciousness of life, especially, because very, very few of us live in harmony with that principle.

It’s also not a conversation about death, because we’ve already agreed — per our agreements on life — that death is something unpleasant but outside of our control, except when we’re holding firm on the death penalty, or insisting upon our right to deliver death upon anyone who threatens us or trespasses upon our property. We tend to prefer that death happen offstage, in hospitals and hospices and execution rooms and abattoirs and in far off countries and in the atmosphere or very far out at sea in gyres of plastic and waste. We prefer to not know why there’s a butterfly on the door.

Life is messy and death is messy and both are beautiful but also terrible and so we don’t like to think too closely about either. We don’t, most of us, like to talk about what it would mean to live a truly good life or to have a truly good death and we certainly don’t pass laws pertaining to either. We pass laws in order to delegate and manage control. The laws that were just passed are entirely about control. Not about controlling life or controlling death — about controlling the bodies of women, and about controlling the bodies of girls.

We have not proven ourselves to be good collective stewards of the things that fall into (or, more often, that we take into) our control. We do not protect the most vulnerable among us. We do not protect our environment. Even when death storms the hallways of our children’s schools, when he creeps into our water, when he pervades the very air around us, we do not, most of us, act.

We are not good stewards; we know this. This is why we generally agree that certain things should not be collectively stewarded, should not be controlled by anyone but the individual – including, especially, our bodies. We should every single one of us be outraged that in even one corner of our world, a small group of men has designated themselves the stewards of women’s and and girls’ bodies.

We should every single one of us be outraged, and we should reject, in outrage, any point of discussion on this matter that contains the phrase, life is precious. Because in this context, it’s a lie, deliberately presented to obscure the fact that what is at stake is control over women’s bodies. If ‘life is precious’ were truly the governing principle for these lawmakers, they would be making very different laws. 

Life IS precious. The life of my son is precious to me. The life of my nephew was precious to me, and to his parents and his other family and his friends and especially to him. The weight of how precious life is, really, presses upon my heart this weekend in ways that are complicated and challenging and beautiful and painful and also, now, entangled in rage.

Don’t talk to me about life. If all life is precious to you, then strive to live in accordance with that principle, as fully and consistently as you can. If only some lives are precious to you, then admit that to be true — and it’s okay if it is true; true preciousness by definition has a narrow scope — and acknowledge that such limitedness defines its own appropriate boundaries of action. Celebrate life, love life, seize life. Embrace and support the living. Grieve and remember the dead.

Just stop the rhetoric. And keep it away from our bodies.

Photo by Sagar Patil on Unsplash

I don’t remember my mom being all that concerned about beauty or style when I was growing up. We were a religious family, and a pretty conservative one, in the small-c, suburban Canadian sense. She was a stay at home mom who dedicated herself passionately and whole-heartedly to the art and work of being a homemaker. She loved it, and she was good at it. 

And she looked the part. Sensible clothes, sensible shoes, sensible perm (it was the seventies/early eighties), the occasional splurge on Diorissimo perfume. Make-up, when she wore it, was very light (and entirely discouraged for my sister and myself when we hit our really teens. I have a distinct memory of swabbing Vaseline on my eyelashes to mimic the effect of mascara when I was 12, a trick that I probably learned from one of the many do-it-yourself beauty guides that I read – covertly, greedily — in the stacks of our local library.) Carol Brady was gaudy by comparison.

But that, it turned out, was just a phase. When I was in my late teens she and my dad separated, and then divorced; by the time I was fully into young adulthood, she had swallowed her heartbreak, chased it with some cocktails, and emerged transformed. She was done, she said at the time, with being boring. She was ready to shine. And shine she did: she discovered — and embraced — color and glitz and sparkle and flair. Life became one big opportunity to dress up and put on dancing shoes. Life became not just something to live, but to put on lipstick for. And it was going to always be that way. “I am never going to be boring again,” she would tell me. “I am never going to be a housewife again.” She bought the book When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple and quoted it endlessly. She didn’t see the point in waiting; she wasn’t old yet, but she was going to wear the fuck out of purple if she wanted to.

She did, and it was glorious.

She was, then, close to the age that I am now. I think about her transformation a lot, because it was a transformation. She discovered herself, and started over at an age when some women start settling in. I think about that when I think about whether I have settled in, or about what that might look like. I thought about it really hard not that long ago, when I was deliberating about whether or not to color my hair pink, not because pink hair isn’t something I would ordinarily do (I have done far weirder things to my appearance than pink hair), but because I worried that I was getting too old for it. I thought, what would my mom do?

My mom would, of course, have done anything that made her feel good about herself. For her, there were only two considerations in matters of style or beauty — does it make you look good, and does it make you feel good? — and with those considerations, the latter determines the former. What matters most is that it — pink hair, sequins, false eyelashes, Birkenstocks, whatever — makes you feel good, because without that you aren’t going to look good. 

So. I dyed my hair pink. I dyed my hair pink, and I love it.

I mentioned it to her on the phone the other day. We were talking about the indignities of aging — “I was shattered,” she told me, “when I had trouble finding my lips to put lipstick on” — and I laughed and laughed as she expressed her outrage at what time and gravity were doing to her body. I laughed, and commiserated. “I was so torn about dying my hair pink,” I said. “I worried that I was too old for it.” 

“Good for you,” she said. “I’m not that brave.”

That was a heart punch. She’s the one who made me that brave. If it even was the bravery that mattered.

I wasn’t sure that it was, and I said so. “It’s not a question of bravery,” I said. “It’s only a question of defining beauty however you want. It’s what makes you feel good.”

She laughed. “But those definitions don’t include disappearing lips, and a surplus of chin hair doesn’t make anyone feel good.” I laughed too, but my heart still hurt.

It turns out that, despite our bravado, the weight of cultural expectations about beauty can still press hard upon our spirits, and press harder the older that we get. It’s one thing to speak truth to the power of the beauty industrial complex and assert our own definitions of beauty; it’s quite another to feel supported in those definitions, in a world where women become invisible past a certain age. And we do become invisible, most of us, unless we are among the exceptional ones, the ones who have managed to stay at least close to the light of conventional standards of beauty, or who can afford their own lights.

I rambled on a bit about this, because that’s what I do, even with my mom. She stopped me. It’s more about color, she said. “On the inside I’m a rainbow. On the outside, I’m fog. Inside, a kaleidoscope; outside, grey.”

“Just a sec,” I said. “I’m actually writing that down.” I wrote down, kaleidoscope. I wrote it down because by sharing that word, she helped me get it. The thing that was hard, but also, the thing that revealed a way forward.

The word ‘kaleidoscope’ is an amalgam of three Ancient Greek words: kalos (that which is beautiful); eidos (form or shape), and skopeo (to look or examine). What’s characteristic about a kaleidoscope is that it disrupts the very perception of a beautiful form and reshapes it — and reshape it again and again — into something unexpected. Into something that itself disrupts what we think of, conventionally, as a symmetrical beautiful form.

The fog, of course, comes from the culture. It’s hard to fight it, it seems, with anything other than direct light. But my mom’s kaleidoscope is something different than light. It disrupts light. It uses light to break the fixed symmetry of conventional beauty and shatters it into infinite patterns of color and light. It’s her unique, unpredictable, amazing her-ness. And it just requires a twist of the lens.

We all have our kaleidoscopes. And we can all twist the lenses, and see our infinite patterns of beauty, our exploded symmetries, our boundless color, our limitless light.

Mom and I linked pinkies and (re)committed to doing that. To color and sparkle and glitter and all manner of reflected and refracted light. To our own definitions of age and beauty and style. To being ourselves.

We can all do that.

It doesn’t have to start with pink hair, but it could.

Pink hair, don’t care.

Thank you, Mom. For the bravery, and for the kaleidoscope.

Top image by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash 

Six days, I think. Maybe seven. I think that it started when Lily’s decline became obvious, when it became clear that we were going to have to say goodbye sooner than we thought. The day after Thanksgiving, when she stopped eating. When we started saying goodbye.

***

It’s not just about Lily, of course, although it would be alright if it was. She was a deeply embedded part of our lives for over 19 years, a lifetime. It shouldn’t matter that she had four legs instead of two, that she purred and mewed instead of speaking — she was family. We loved her. So we mourn her. I mourn her.

But I also mourn the end of that lifetime, not just the life. It spanned so many life changes; it contained so much living. Her life was a constant across moves and transitions and evolutions, and so her lifetime became a measure. A Lily-time. What share of my own lifetime does that measure represent? A quarter? Less? More?

Does it matter?

She was very old, in cat years, when she died. I looked it up — according to one site, she was the equivalent of 92 years old, in human years. I struggle to wrap my head around that. What are human years, anyway? Years are years. She was here for 19 of them, not 92. I knew her for 19 years, and no amount of Internet math is going to make that any longer than it really was. 19 years was a long time. 19 years was not long enough.

***

Tanner was also 19 when he died earlier this year, and that’s the other piece of this, the other source of the headache. I have not had time to really experience that grief, to acknowledge that pain. There were other things happening, distractions; I was checking messages from the wake (“I won’t be checking my phone,” I told my team. I did it anyway.) I was present when it mattered, I told myself; I was not thinking about work when I kissed his cold forehead, when I delivered the eulogy, when I hugged my sister as his coffin was lowered into the ground. I was there, in the moment. Mostly.

But there were other things happening, challenging things, and I couldn’t be present for that grief for very long. I couldn’t let the headache happen then. There wasn’t time. It wasn’t safe. Ambition’s a bitch who doesn’t give a fuck about your grief. Work was a priority, and work didn’t care. 

There wasn’t time; it wasn’t safe.

Now there’s time. Now it’s safe. And so another whole well of emotion rises, fills and overflows.

***

I call it a headache, and that’s what it is. The pressure behind the eyes, the ache behind the sinuses, spreading across to the ears, pounding dully, the hangover of tears that have already spilled and of tears that haven’t yet been shed. But the real source of the pain is heartache, of course. 

It’s pushed its way into my head because my head is where I live, my head is where everything happens, my head is where things are comfortable. 

Maybe the pain didn’t push its way into my head. Maybe I dragged it there.

I keep trying to push it back into my heart, where it belongs. In the meantime, I take Advil, and a CBD gummy. Maybe two.

***

What this is all about, really: it’s been a long hard year. A fucking rollercoaster. Extreme highs and extreme lows. Massive transitions. A lot of work on the soul. A lot of exercise of the heart.

The heart is a muscle, I’ve said before. If the soul is a muscle, it’s only a figurative one. I like this idea. The soul, like the heart, is there to be used. If you exercise those muscles, they’ll get sore. 

Mine are sore now. It’s understandable.

***

The night before she died, Lily could barely walk. She would stand, go a few steps, stumble, mew in irritation, then lay down where she was. We’d lift her and put her in one of her favorite spots, near one of us, always. Fetch some water or some food, offer it, squelch the discouragement when she denied it.

She could barely walk, but that night she made the rounds of everyone’s beds. She started with Kyle, who was keeping her by his side in Jasper’s room while Jasper and I huddled, emotional, in the master bed. Sometime in the night she got down from that bed and went to Emilia’s room, and in some manner or another clambered onto her bed, which is forgivingly low (“she was here for a long time, Mommy,” Emilia said, surprised. Lily never went onto her bed, or even into her room, which she considered the domain of the younger, usurper cats.) 

At some point, she made her way to the master bed, in which Jasper and I slept. It’s a big bed — we call it, literally, “the big bed” —and even strong human bodies have to lift themselves up onto it, because it’s high and soft, like a bed in a fairy tale. I don’t know when in the night it was that she came to us. I was dreaming, as it happened, of my dad; in my dream, he was at the foot of the bed, walking slowly and quietly as if approaching to kiss me goodnight while I slept, the way he sometimes did when I was child (I would lay very still, pretending to be asleep, because it somehow seemed important that I be asleep, that the moment be his, not mine.) He had his walking stick, in this dream; walking had been painful for him in his later years. I thought, in the fog of dreaming, it’s nice that Dad’s here. I was surprised at the walking stick. He didn’t have it in other dreams.

I woke because something was pushing on my leg. It was Lily, batting my leg with her paw. She was on the bed, somehow, and wanted to lay on my lap, but didn’t have the strength to get herself up onto my legs. I pulled myself up a bit and lifted her onto my lap and patted her, crooning something about love and goodnight and sweet dreams. Goodnight, sweet girl, sweet dreams.

I was drifting off to sleep when it occurred to me, how did she get up onto the bed? How could she have possibly gotten up onto the bed?

***

In the morning she couldn’t walk at all, not a single step. I said to Kyle, I don’t know how she got up onto the bed. He said that she must have clawed her way up, somehow, that it must have taken many attempts, but that she had to have to done it somehow.

I checked the mattress and bedding for claw marks, and didn’t find any.

She had to have done it somehow, Kyle said.

I think my dad lifted her up.

***

I have a book of readings of Rainer Maria Rilke, snippets of his work organized to correspond with days of the year. It was a gift, from whom I forget; that person will forgive me here, I hope. I open it to November 25, the day that Lily died; the entry is one of his poems. Enter Death (I):

We know nothing of this going.

It excludes us.

I turn the page to November 26, the day after. Enter Death (II):

When you died there broke across the stage,

Through the gash your leaving made,

A shaft of reality.

This is it, I think. This is why the headache, why the pain migrates to the head, leaving to the heart just a dull throb. Because we’re yanked from unknowing to knowing, because of the collision between those two states. We know nothing of death; we can’t. But it leaves a new kind of awareness in its wake. A brightly lit space, into which thoughts and feelings surge.

(Yes, I looked at other dates. From May 22nd, the day that Tanner died: 

Is it not time 

to free ourselves from the beloved

Even as we, trembling, endure the loving?

As the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension

So that released it travels farther.

For there is nowhere to remain.)

***

This, again, is what the headache is about. A surge, an overflow. A gash on the landscape that makes way for a flood.

***

Did you know: the most common cause of death in the desert is not dehydration, but drowning. The dry desert floor is a maze of open, welcoming paths for water; flash floods start somewhere far away and race through the dry gashes, the sandy washes and the dry riverbeds, catching wanderers unawares. I’ve seen these; they’re a dangerous miracle. One moment the land is dry, barren, the next it holds a raging river. Dry to wet; unknowing to knowing. Sudden, unexpected.

Flash floods are deadly; they change things in an instant. But, but. Things grow in the washes where the floods run, in the gashes their running makes. Life grows there. That’s where you find the green.

***

The more we love, the tenser the bow pulls, the further the arrow travels. The deeper the horizon, the wider the gash, the fuller the wash, the greener the desert.

The more we tremble, the more we ache, the fuller we live.

Is it not time

To free ourselves?

***

This is not just about a cat. It is all about a cat.

And a boy. 

And a work.

And a dream.

A year.

A life.

It is all about all of those things. It is all about everything.

But it also about a cat.

***

I came to the desert after Lily died because I had things to work through and words to write and feelings to feel. I came to the desert after Lily died because I could; I came because I couldn’t after Tanner died, because I couldn’t after dreams changed, after decisions were made. I came because Lily’s death created a gash on the landscape that let the floodwaters flow freely.

I came to the desert because I had a headache.

I came to the desert and walked down to the wash after a rain and waited. No flood came, but that’s okay.

I am standing on the banks of my own flood. 

It’s a good thing.

The heartache surges, the headache recedes.

It’s a good thing.

Writing the stories about the trials and tribulations of daily life is something different. It’s not that that that kind of writing doesn’t include opinion, or isn’t thoughtful (I’d argue that it’s actually extremely thoughtful, in the sense of being contemplative.) It’s more that it’s a kind of writing that is driven more by the pleasure of storytelling than by the desire to make a point (thank you, Nish, for giving me language for this.) It’s a kind of writing that I really only did for a short time, during my kids’ babyhoods and toddlerhoods.

It was a happy time.

I think that it was also my most radical time as a writer.  (And here I begin opining, pontificating. I can’t help myself.)

I think that it was my most radical time as a writer for the reasons that Alice Bradley said (a billion years ago) that ‘mommy blogging is a radical act.’ Telling public stories about the private lives of women is radical because for most of human history, it was never done. It’s radical because it dignifies and ennobles those lives. Because it says that art and craft and work of joy of those lives is worth sharing. The stories I wrote about struggling with breastfeeding or fighting postpartum depression; the diary-like posts about silly things my small, amazing offspring said or did; the random accounts of diaper mishaps in restaurant restrooms or that one time (or many times) I put unmatched shoes on because I’d been up all night with Jasper and couldn’t see straight. Those stories.

Those stories were radical, too, because I wasn’t writing them to be radical. I was writing them for survival. I can’t even say that I was writing them for happiness, because that isn’t quite right. I needed to write them. I wrote instead of watching TV or taking long hot baths or doing whatever it is that was or is supposed to count as quote-unquote ‘me time.’ And I read other radical stories — stories that were radical simply because they were true and unvarnished. Stories about boob pain and sleeplessness and the relentless onslaught of the Dora the Explorer theme song. Stories that weren’t, as the kids now say, ‘takes.’ Stories that didn’t have a point, not really, other than to just be stories. Stories that acquired dignity simply by being told.

Anyway. It may or may not matter whether it was, in fact, radical (it was.) It served me. It gave me something that I still can’t quite put my finger on. Community, purpose, validation, yes, yes, sure – all those things. But there was something else that I can’t quite describe. Meaning? Maybe it was that.

It probably doesn’t matter.

(Here is where I work very hard to stop this from becoming a ‘take.’)

It doesn’t matter. What matters is, I need it again.

—-

Here is some of my life right now:

• I am the co-founder of a start-up and am occupied with that approximately 10 days a week;
• I have a book coming out this November but still don’t quite believe that’s happening, despite having wrote the book (with an amazing co-author) in non-existent spare hours over just a few months;
• I don’t get enough sleep / don’t eat well enough / don’t get enough exercise (see the first two bullets);
• I have this whole pitch for a girl-centered TV show that gender-flips some folklore, that will otherwise become YA series one day, you totally want to read it;
• I am the primary breadwinner in my family, but don’t take a salary, so that’s awkward;
• Oh, I’m also (still) a mom;
• Life with a tween girl is some HARD SHIT;
• But is it really harder than anything else? (Debatable.)
• I have cats but I’m allergic to them, which basically sums up my approach to life;
• Did I say that I don’t get enough sleep?
• Partly because I lay awake at night, worrying about…
  • My business
  • Parenting a tween girl
  • Making ends meet
  • The state of the country
  • The state of my psyche
  • Whether I’m fulfilled. (Am I fulfilled? I’m living my dreams, right?)
  • (What does it mean to be fulfilled?)
  • (Is it a #privilegedpersonproblem to worry about being fulfilled?) (Yes, it is.)
  • Am I a good role model to my daughter?
  • Tween girls are hard, did I say that?
  • Pre-pubescent boys are less challenging, but is that sexist?
  • Am I sexist?!?!
  • I can’t be sexist, because I co-founded a DIGITAL PLATFORM FOR GIRLS and wrote a book about the power of WOMEN AND GIRLS and know a fuck of a lot about WOMEN AND GIRLS, so how can I be sexist?
  • (I am probably sexist, because The Patriarchy is everywhere, possibly even in my soul.)
  • Is Roblox bad? Is Logan Paul bad? (Yes.) Am I turning into my own mother? (Yes.)
  • Sharp Objects (the TV show, not the household hazard)
  • Death
  • Whether writing lists is a writing cop-out
  • Whether this post is good or bad (anticipating tonight’s sleep.)
  • Whether I will come back to this list tomorrow and add to it (I will.)
  • Etc.

I could go on. I am vast and I contain multitudes and I am experiencing accelerating aging because of tweens and entrepreneurship. Would I feel better if I wrote more, diary-style? Probably. I once thought of it as my therapy. Hell, it feels like therapy right now.

But I think I’m going to have to train myself a little. Train myself to opine less, reflect more. Do more inner monologuing and less outward monologuing. Live more in first draft (as Laura Mayes put it to me, eons ago) and less in third or fourth draft. Or galleys. Less presentation, more storytelling, more lived storytelling.

That’s a thing. I need to prove it to myself again.

We all worry about social media, and rightly so. There’s a ton of research out there that says that social platforms cause us a tremendous amount of anxiety, but we don’t need studies to tell us what we already know. Out there in the digital commons, we face tremendous pressure. To look good, to sound smart, to be popular. We compare our lives to others; we worry about missing out. We grapple with fake news and bad news and the toxic conversations that seem to bring out the worst in everybody. It’s a complicated space, to say the least; why wouldn’t we want to protect our children from it? Shouldn’t we keep our kids away from that space as long as we possibly can?

But here’s my answer: no.

Really. No.

Obviously, it’s a personal decision, and I totally understand why many parents would lean in the opposite direction. But I believe very firmly that it’s not just okay, but good – important, even – to guide our children into that space. And not because, as is frequently argued, kids want to go where they’re told they shouldn’t and will just seek it out themselves. Of course, that which is forbidden is always more tempting – but we shouldn’t invite kids into digital social spaces just because they’ll find their way there anyway. Many will, of course, but that’s not a good reason. There are lots of things I don’t let me kids do just because they persisting in wanting to.

Here’s why I think we need to bring our children (mindfully, purposefully) into digital social spaces as soon as we think they’re ready: because that’s where and how they’re going to learn how to navigate and make the most of those spaces. We should invite kids into those spaces – or rather, nurture and guide them in those spaces – because that’s where they learn how to become good citizens – and good people – in a digital world. The digital commons is THE commons now – it’s where we gather and connect, meet and debate, act and activate – for better or for worse. It’s where so much of public life takes place, like or not. It’s where politics takes place, like it or not. It’s our public sphere.

And to the extent that we want our children to be fluent and literate in the languages and norms and conventions of the public sphere, we need them to get comfortable there. We need them to learn good habits there. In the same way that we wouldn’t – most of us – shield our children from public life in real spaces, we shouldn’t shield them entirely from public life in digital spaces.

This is all the more true for those of us who want our children to be meaningfully empowered in the public sphere. If we want our children to be good citizens and good people – if we want them to do good things in that sphere – we need them to be familiar with it and to be comfortable with its platforms and its tools. We need them to know what good actions (and bad actions) look like. We need them to know, at a very basic level, what decent digital social behavior looks like – but more than that, we need them to know what good, positive, constructive digital action looks like, and what it involves. Maybe they’re not going to fight injustice right now – but maybe they are. Maybe they can. In any case, we need to make it possible for them to learn how to recognize and understand just action and good citizenship in the spaces where that manifests most frequently.

(There’s a broader conversation to be had, of course, about how early and to what degree we expose them to politics and injustice, and your point of view in that conversation will almost certainly inform your position on how early and to what degree you let your children even see into social spaces. Emilia is politically aware and active and so I’m more comfortable with her social activity – supervised, of course. Jasper is less so, for a variety of reasons, and so we’ve shielded him more. That has not, however, stopped him from speaking out on women’s rights, about which he has strong feelings. WE ARE ALL HUMAN.)

Of course, we need to keep them safe. Of course, we need to guide and protect them, in the same way we do in real public spaces. We don’t want to leave them on their own in those spaces, without support and direction. We do need to hold their hands, for a while at least. We need to teach them digital literacy the same way we teach social literacy and media literacy and every other kind of literacy.

Part of our original rationale for Maverick was rooted in exactly this need and this question: how do we make it possible for kids – girls especially – to be meaningfully empowered in the lived public spaces of our culture and our world? It’s simply not enough to tell them that they just need to be confident and strong, that they can do anything if they set their minds to it. That wasn’t true in a world without the Internet and it is, arguably, even less true in a world with the Internet, where all the hostilities and inequalities and unfairness of that world are on full 24-7 display. But what is true, I think (I believe, I KNOW), is that we can push beyond the talk and the messaging in this particular world: the Internet, for all of its awfulness, also holds tools and connections and opportunities and spaces in which we can make it possible for girls, and kids and young people generally, to come together and to act. To exercise the powers that they already have, and to use these spaces and the resources within them in ways that we can’t even imagine.

That’s what the students of Parkwood did. They did what they did because they knew how to use the tools of these spaces. That’s what other kids are doing every day, join different ways: speaking truth to political power or simply making their own media, which is another kind of speaking truth to power. What’s more powerful than seizing the means of your own media production? I said this of mom blogging almost a decade ago (and many times since), and it holds for what kids can do and are doing with new media tools now: this moment in human history is epochal – culture-changing – because for the first time in our history we have [more or less] democratic access to tools and platforms of public storytelling. We get to tell our own stories.

Our kids need to know how to do that, how to use those tools and platforms to tell their own stories. WE need them to know how to use those, because they’re the ones who are going to evolve those tools and platforms. They’re the ones who are going to figure out to use them to really change the world. To make their own futures. To make our futures.

That doesn’t mean tossing them into the wilds of Twitter to fend for themselves. As I said, we do need to guide and protect them and stand beside them in these spaces. We need to make spaces for them, spaces that are carved into the public sphere, but a little safer and more brightly lit, spaces that they can begin shaping for themselves. We did this quite literally with Maverick, which we created for this very purpose – in the absence of a bright safe garden in the commons, we built one ourselves. I’m not saying it’s the perfect solution – there is no perfect solution – but it’s a start. And like all good gardens or parks or well-used town squares, it will become what its community makes of it – and the core of this particular community is, and needs to be, young people. The ones who can and should feel empowered to make and shape and use that space – our shifting public sphere – for themselves. For the better.

For our better. For our better future, the one that needs to begin now.

(Obviously, I think that if you have young people and agree with me, you should check out Maverick. Or jump to what Common Sense Media said about Maverick. Or stick with this [I actually need this for myself.])