baby books and writing through it
Do you ever start looking for one thing, only to discover something else, and then get totally sidetracked, and half an hour there’s shit strewn everywhere? Is that ADHD?
Last week I was looking for two yellow kiddie chairs I’d folded up and stored in a closet (they came with this yellow Formica kiddie table that I use as a nightstand). I found them and took them to a pop-up donation event, where a recent refugee mom was more than happy to take them for her kids.
In the process of looking for the chairs I opened some bins of my mother’s stuff. “Now that she’s been gone for more than five years,” I thought, “maybe it’s time to pare it down.” Phone and laptop → pile for electronics recycling. Scarves I’ll never wear → donation pile. Easy enough.
And then I opened the box with everything she saved from the first 21 years of my life. Grade school book reports. My schedule for summer camp. Every report card I ever got. A letter from my high school English teacher. I was completely overwhelmed.
My mother rarely told me she loved me. (My father didn’t either.) But as I’m looking at these piles of my personal history, I’m realizing she saved all this stuff for a reason. Maybe several reasons. To remind me of my childhood accomplishments, and maybe to say something like, “See? I was a good mother.”
I can’t articulate why I suddenly feel some urgency to start going through these things now. Other than I’m pretty sure she’d want me to. Like this is a homework assignment from beyond the grave.
But since I can’t look at these piles for more than 20 minutes at a time, I’ve decided the only way out is through. So for the next few weeks I’m gonna share some of the weird/surprising things I find, and use this space as... therapy? I’m hoping it will distract me from election-related news.
The Baby Book
It opens with my birth certificate and a family tree, a few pages of who visited me and my mom in the hospital, what flowers they sent, blah blah, and then this:
I guess that’s the bracelet my mother wore in the hospital, a lock of my hair, and a card announcing me as a tax exemption.
The next page has my daily schedule, and my mother sounds a little pissed off.
Feeding: “Every 4 hours at first — a very slow eater. Then cereal added, and only 4 feedings a day. Almost 4 months pass before I get a good night’s sleep.”
Sleeping: “Most of the time at first! A welcome event when she sleeps 11pm to 7am, and then so nice when she sleeps from 7pm to 7am, together with two long naps.”
She used to get so mad at teenage me when I slept 12+ hours on weekends. If she was here now, I’d be like, “You loved it when I was a baby!”
But the weirdest and most surprising page is my height and weight chart. Sure, track my baby development for a few years, but all the way through high school? WTF, Mom??
Or maybe this is my mother’s way of saying, “See? I told you you weren’t fat!”
Links
If you are also terrified of another Orange Cheeto presidency and want to do something, here’s a link for PA ballot chasing. This is through the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO. It is calling people who already requested mail-in ballots, finding out if they’ve sent them in yet, and if not begging them to hurry up. You sign up for a Zoom call where they train you quickly, and jump right in. I was so nervous. I got two people who were psyched for Harris, a bunch of “wrong number”s, and some answering machines. Gonna do it again tomorrow. (Mobilize dot US)
Incredible video of Ed Yong talking about what he went through personally while reporting on the pandemic for the Atlantic. It’s long but absolutely worth watching or at least listening to while you do something else. (Kottke)
“Even though I’ve turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions. I regret all the times I look, only to find there’s nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I’ve never met, explaining why I can’t speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel. I regret how every person who hits “reply all” to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up.” Ann Patchett regrets email. (NYT)
The salve of spin class: How a lonely man found connection on a bike. I loved this so much. (Longreads)
Bingo: “Malcolm Gladwell's bar for whether an idea is worth writing up in a mass market book is literally ‘I dunno, maybe this is something?’” (Culture)
Old but awesome personal essay about grief. (Vandebilt)
This tiny fashion designer! (TikTok)
SNL’s take on TikTok was hilarious and perfect. (Mashable)