“Pockets are the best!” I heard a daughter exclaim to her mother in a coffee shop, awaiting their drinks. In proof, she lifted her hands in her dress’s pockets, a sudden parachute. Despite once being the primary gatherers, women were, until rather recently, pocketless out in the world.

Some have suggested women’s clothing lacked pockets to give a slim figure, but the hoop skirt could’ve held dozens unseen. The more likely theory is that pockets were necessary to bring and collect things out in the world: women’s clothing didn’t need pockets so long as they didn’t go out into the world. And in the house, or within the boundaries of the house, they had aprons. To imagine oneself beyond the domestic sphere, then, was to imagine oneself with pockets.

Thankfully, feminists have been masterful imaginers. While Simone de Beauvoir was writing about women’s oppression in The Second Sex, Claire McCardell was designing women’s clothing for maximum movement. And with pockets. It’s been 80 years since McCardell introduced pockets to women’s fashion, but still a dress or skirt with pockets is something to be acknowledged, just as I witnessed in the coffee shop last week. What woman hasn’t been prone to that delighted proclamation “and it has pockets!”

40 years on, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is also one to celebrate. Le Guin’s essay is based on Elizabeth Fisher’s Women’s Creation in which Fisher suggested that the first cultural device was likely not the spear or dagger or hammer or arrow but a container to hold a mass of items. We are creators of containers—nets of hair or reeds, baskets, boxes, even our homes are containers of us with tinier, nested containers within. And we are, all of us, sloshing around organs and sinew and blood, more container than blade. Yet objects of story which are essential anchors of story—spear, knife, missile, gun—are so often another kind of tool. Not gathering tools, killing tools.

While gathering satisfied 65-85% of diets, hunting took center stage in story, so the gatherers—the protectors of home—were told the stories, not of the stories. Their bags and baskets played little role in the heroic romp. “So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it,” lamented Le Guin. She urged us to interrogate the story whose central concern is conflict, the kind of plot that is urgently “starting here going straight there and THOK!”—hits its target as all thrown spears exist to do.

“Plot the conflicts,” I might've been told in my schooling, I might’ve told my own students for many years. What a reduction: all the nutritious broth evaporates. Increasingly, I find myself wondering, what if the central concern isn’t conflict? And certainly not the easy conflict of heroes and villains and single triumph or single despair?

Last month, I spent five days at Totleigh Barton, the Arvon Foundation’s writers retreat in South West England. Alongside 15 other writers, I read and discussed texts set in nature, each provocations for our own writing. We read Kathleen Jamie, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Giggs, David James Duncan, Helen Macdonald, each of them gatherers of observations, their writing steeped in that slow broth—rich in descriptions of the natural world, letting heroes (if they even are heroes) be the animal world or landscape, each text a refusal of fast, sharp accusation and incident.

Each day after workshopping, I filled my pockets with a book, a pen, an apple off the tree, and with towel under my arm, walked to the river, making room along the way for a herd of cows constantly rearranging itself on the Devon landscape.

The nice thing about pockets, like many body parts, is you usually have more than one. The right pocket for a right-handed person may be the first to hold the day’s treasures: phone, keys, feather, a passed note. But it will soon fill and the left pocket will be necessary. Treasures in the afternoon may be just as good if not better than treasures in the morning. I left the river each afternoon with something more pocketed: pebbles, a stem of meadowsweet, a buttercup.

For my friend Phoebe’s 30th birthday, I pulled out a jacket from my wardrobe that I knew she liked. The major flaw in its design was its lack of pockets. No McCardell myself, I roughly stitched scraps of fabric in as pockets, one for each of her decades. And in each pocket, I put a pebble and a finger-knit keychain from my son.

I share Le Guin’s aversion to too much hero, and I suppose this wariness is part of why I want to write about friendship. It’s not the relationship of supreme conflict nor is it, usually, a relationship in which bill-paying and rent discussions must take place, rather it’s a relationship in which time is elastic, less condensed to minutes of to do’s and needs; it’s a liberated space, one free for gathering: ideas, ways of being, memories, hopes. A place to put my hands and my fears. In friendships, there always seems another pocket to fill and good stuff to fill it with.

Certain friendships become another kind of pocket, too. Berger defines it simply: “A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement."1 He is writing here of resistance. In his memoir about making a home in England, Michael Malay, an Indonesian Australian, writes of this resistance in his memoir: “Pockets are forming—and these pockets are challenging the dominant stories of our time: extraction, consumerism, profit, growth.” And he notes that “the pocket-makers of yesterday, whose efforts may continue to support us in ways we cannot see [...] shelter us, providing us with much-needed sustenance and courage [...] They are havens from the world as well as places from which we might re-engage with that world.”2

Le Guin is a lesson from the past; reassuring me when I read, “there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over.”

Friendship is a lesson for today. It reminds me of pockets I didn’t know I had. A reminder of reserves: those baskets of berries I picked last week, the canning of which will get me through the winter. Friendship isn't about constant forward progress: it’s filled with digressions. How much of friendship is lived in conversations about mutual memories, in periods of silence followed by picking back up again? Pockets empty and pockets fill. There’s honesty in friendship’s refusal to be linear, its refusal to be a sharp point headed for a specific target, not a business partnership, not the demand of a happily-ever-after, not the project of co-parenting, not a child’s need to live up to his parent’s expectation. It's, perhaps, the most anti-capitalist relationship one can have.

What I was trying to say to Phoebe with those pockets sewn in was let’s share this world, you and I, which is so much more than bills and conflict, share stories not just of what is but what might be.

Many thanks to our brilliant Arvon writing tutors, authors Helen Jukes and Miriam Darlington. And to Antonia, Becky, Emma, Faye, Holly, Judith, Lalu, Lottie, Patricia, Paula, Pen, Ruth, and Si, each a pocket of inspiration. And to my friend Stephan, for sending me Le Guin’s essay this summer, an essay I haven’t been able to shake.

From our classroom, sticky with conversations about consent and state-sanctioned rape, you hang a right then an immediate left, walk straight past the principal’s office, and it’s the flat grey door directly on your left.

This semester, the girls’ bathroom has come up a lot in my gender in literature elective. In Atwood’s novel, the bathroom at Jezebel’s Club, a black market brothel for the privileged architects of Gilead, is like a velvet underground. The whole club is illicit, Christian extremist “commanders” flaunting the laws of their own making by smoking stogies, swigging cocktails, and fucking non-wives, but as in most patriarchies, the joke is somewhat on them: the women’s restroom is where the real secrets are swapped.

in communion

In listening to my students, I realize how much I’ve forgotten about the girls’ bathroom. Not forgotten the fact of it: my students ask to go to the bathroom and most of the time I’m certain there’s another girl on the other side of the wall, maybe even an entire flock of friends, invisible to me and waiting for her.

No, I’d forgotten the mercury answer of it. The whale song from stall to stall. The imperfect perfection of a collective space where a girl can hole up in a stall, door locked, hear the comforting sniffles of another in the next stall over, each catharting and collecting herself before returning to the fray. Naomi reminds me, “we see our own experiences mirrored there, in the girls’ bathroom.” And in our novel, this is a moment of release, where our protagonist at last sees her best friend again, where she gets to hear the whole of her story: “I still can’t believe it’s her. I touch her arm again. Then I begin to cry.”

When Iona writes, “I voyaged to the bathroom, to cry. And there was another girl doing the exact same thing. I could hear her whimpers. She could hear mine,” I’m struck by the word “voyaged” and how the public girls’ bathroom is a sanctuary, a confessional, an island unto itself that we navigate our hulls towards because the seas are angry, taunting, at times tormenting. It makes me think about the heroine’s journey, how that journey is about the internal, dropping into the well of oneself and facing the beasts—all the beasts from a hero’s journey—but from the inside and then instead of fighting the beasts, learning the beasts, accepting them, even letting go of some of the beasts within. How girlhood prepares us to navigate with such dexterity, how the bathroom helped.

And sometimes the voyage requires multiple sailors. This is no single-hero narrative. We must go in numbers.

This collective voyage extends beyond the walls, of course. When I was a 22-year-old backpacker camping on Fraser Island, a girl escorted me into the bush in order to guard my exposed squatting bum against lurking dingos. We stumbled back to camp singing loudly, slinging our trowels in defense and joy.

Sometimes it’s the solitude we need most. The bathroom provides that, too. Sherine wrote,

“In some ways, this is monastic, my being here, my retreat. And I’m here because I came to cry, and I come to cry so often. I’ve closed the seat with my legs tucked. I feel like a starling on a wire, small and perched. I’m careful to be still; I once set off the automatic flusher and startled myself. I think about the hands that have pushed these doors, the women like me who have relished the blowdryer -- I’ve learned it is loud, that it swathes sniffles."

the demand of silent bodies

Being a mother of boys, I’ve been shocked at the liberal acceptance of bodily noises, even in public spaces. There is no horror of a burp or a fart, indifference to the minor offense of a gurgling stomach.

One of the great paradoxes of being female is that the world demands more privacy of our bodies (the prime reason for period poverty), but of course our bodies demand we notice them: the “wild geography” of girls, as poet Dominique Christina calls it. The bathroom has this wilderness about it: the watering hole come to in times of need or respite. I’m not anthropomorphizing my girlhood so much as suggesting a body with an internal clock is perhaps a necessary reminder of all our bodies, our animal natures. In other words, a chiming reminder of being human.

And of course the third aspect in the paradoxical trifecta of having a female body is that while the world demands a contained politeness to our bodies despite our bodies’ need to shed the internal out, our bodies are also appraised constantly

. Made public even in their private politeness. The bathroom is stepping away from the day’s performance, away from the searching gaze. A chance to slide off the wig, wipe off the make up, acknowledge the self underneath all the armor. When Atwood’s protagonist enters the bathroom at Jezebel’s for the first time, she observes, “This is like backstage: greasepaint, smoke, the materials of illusion.” Here, in the girls’ bathroom, a body might have an unscripted monologue.

the friction

But it’s a place not just of sanctuary. It can wound. “When I read the scrawls left on the walls of the girl’s bathroom, I know I am lucky,” writes Sherine. Here the inked and scratched walls elicit the competing feelings of betrayal and self-importance. Are those my initials? I’ve wondered at a scratched “AM is a whore.” Likely not me, they’re common enough initials, but whether the message is positive or negative, what a thrill to think the small self leaves impression enough to warrant such effort defacing a powder-coated steel door. The teenager’s launching of 1000 ships.

I’m sure I contributed at some point to the carved and inked palimpsest of loves and hates and envies, my professed love for Mark P—- in blue ink long outlasting my actual love for Mark P—-.

“We don’t have much time left,” the protagonist whispers to Moira, “tell me everything.”

It’s sometimes in this whispered gossip, not just in the written confessions and revenge, that the bathroom wounds. In grade school, snacks started disappearing from my lunchbox. In front of the bathroom sinks, when Alison told me she thought S— was the culprit, I didn’t agree but stayed quiet, listening to her theory. From a far stall, S— emerged then, impossibly, like an apparition, a goddess we had wronged horribly. I hadn’t defended her. Then and now, that moment has been my lesson in silence’s culpability. We learn the best and worst of ourselves within those tiled walls.

Besides the carvings, the inkings, the whispers, there’s also today the reminder of violence done or anticipated to be done to our bodies: “Walls graffitied with club promotions and ‘Ask for Angela’ posters. You don’t know if these posters should make you feel safer or fearfuller,” writes Iona.

But I’m interested in how the friction of a place—its potential to offer respite or revelation, betrayal or warning—turns up the dial, makes us alert to our lives. I’m glad now for that friction. My friend calls these “inoculations for the big stuff to come.” The classroom, too, is supposed to be a safe place for ideas and experimentation and risk, and in its riskiness it sometimes wounds. But we read hard things, dangerous things to innoculate ourselves when the harder things come, and they will come, they always do.

who belongs

We’re going backwards now, my students and I, reading A Room of One’s Own, but perhaps forwards, too. 100 years ago, Virginia Woolf was arguing for women to have a room of their own, money of their own in order to write. It would take another 50 years after she wrote these lectures—until 1975— for women in the UK to legally open their own bank accounts without a man underwriting it. Shortly after women could have their own accounts, Atwood wrote about women losing them in her 1984 dystopian novel, and she wrote about the need for a collective space as women were assessed, divided into rigid categories with specific functions. Jezebel’s bathroom is the one place of reunion. The protagonist, new to the club, asks her long lost friend if it’s bugged. Moira responds, “I can’t imagine they’d care about anything we have to say.” And so they share everything.

These bodily spaces of collective grief and joy and relief and fear are necessarily exclusionary. Not just of boys, but of me, too. I’ve aged out. It’s a place I no longer belong. I won’t intrude. I want to be their choice not their circumstance. Because they have each other. And there is something so magnificent about these girls weeping, breathing, recovering next to one another filled with events and nonevents and responses to those events and nonevents that they understand on a level I’ve forgotten. My age has developed an immunity that isn’t helpful there, maybe helpful later, after the bathroom’s event, but not there. There warrants an intensity and vulnerable rigor that I envy for its gong of presence.

So much of my self developed in a girls’ bathroom where privacy is given a primacy, and where betrayal is sometimes enacted, more often grieved. I’m grateful for all the girls who were in there with me, the ones I knew, and the ones I only heard between muffled sobs in the next stall over. All of their wild bodies and the spaces that made a home for our wildness.

It’s a lesson in outlets, in resilience. An understanding that emotion is rigor, takes strength, as my student Gus says subversively, “feeling is the best form of intellectualizing.” One of my students asked, with no small amount of justified despair and rage and irony, “If a girl cries in a bathroom stall, alone, and emerges without a trace—no tear-streaked cheeks, no swollen eyes—did she cry at all?”

And I want to say to her, “yes, she cried, and because she cried, she survived.”

But we see each other so clearly, he and I, recognize the emotional extremes unwarranted by circumstance more than any of our other housemates. Last month, I bought a blanket for a friend as a housewarming gift. It was in our trunk, and while we were driving home, one of my other kids pulled it out of its packaging and wrapped himself up in it. Finding him thus cocooned, I was enraged, immediately catastrophizing: seeing in one incident an example of everything. They take and destroy everything I care about! I can’t even be a generous friend! The cocooner was shocked, if indignant. But not his older brother: “Mom, isn’t this kind of an overreaction?” Gus asked sincerely as I lurched from the car into the house, unspooling blanket under my arm. 

My youngest child was born just a week shy of my 41st birthday. I stopped nursing when I turned 43 and didn’t realize for some time that I’d gone almost immediately into perimenopause. The first change I can point to was driving on the highway at dusk two years ago. I panicked. All my children were in the backseat, and I couldn’t read the signs ahead of me. My vision had gone completely fuzzy. When I saw an optometrist later that week, he said my eyes were fine, no change to my vision, must be in my head. As insulting as it is to hear “it’s in your head” from a medical professional, it turns out he was right. It was in my head: production of rhodopsin, the retina pigment that helps with night vision, drops significantly with perimenopause. 

When I finally did figure out what was going on with me, it all felt terrifically unfair. After a decade of pregnancy, birth, and nursing, to be at odds again with my body: I thought we’d have some time, she and I, to just be. Puberty also feels grossly unfair, partly because it’s an embodied rebellion, partly because no one on the outside fully appreciates the upheaval an adolescent is contending with on the inside. One of the fears I had in adolescence and now in menopause is that the body—my body—-doesn’t fit the landscape: there is something monumental brewing on the inside and it’s impossible that life as we know it—city, school, neighborhood, living room—can contain it.

Outside the home, a body must constantly oblige its surroundings (stay upright, keep your distance, cover your mouth, get your finger out of your nose), but when you’re feeling windswept by hormonal changes, carved out like a cave, it’s hard to meet those obligations. Gus’s sleep patterns don’t meet the demands of middle school; mine don’t meet the demands of modern civilization. He’s reading until midnight, and forced up before the sun. I’m asleep by 10 then awake with a night sweat, and spinning from 2AM until my alarm. We’re both exhausted and often close to screaming (me) or shutting down (him).

While his hypothalamus is gleefully producing testosterone, my estrogen is too low to respond to my hypothalamus’s demands. When you’re low on estrogen, the hypothalamus sends increasingly frantic signals (LH and FSH) to get the ovaries to release eggs. But when the eggs are in shorter supply, the brain’s messages have little effect. And when it goes unanswered, the brain goes a little nuts—like that obsessive ex whose calls you didn’t return.

Revenge gets ugly here. With estrogen not texting back, the brain can’t even figure out how to regulate body temperature. There is not a place in the human body untouched by sex hormones. Estrogen receptors are at every place in your body, which is why the bones, muscles, fat, senses, metabolism, memory, mind all take a hit. And why, at ANY point in the month, you can go from fine to extreme rage or despair or find yourself suddenly soaking wet. And forget the body’s sleep and wake cycles: perimenopausal women are part nocturnal, like barn owls. Depression, loss of executive function (ADHD-like symptoms), brain fog, severe fatigue—1 in 5 women will leave their jobs as a result of perimenopause. 

For the last two years, I‘ve been nagging all the women who’ve been through it about this ride. Gathering anecdotes, details, advice. Many of them tell me the same facts, but I nod like it’s a revelation. I want them to keep talking.

While I’m rounding up women like a sheep dog, Gus and most adolescent boys are far more alone in their changes. (Not unlike my grandmother’s approach to menopause.) They don’t have a cadre of older boys to turn to as resources. Instead, they rely on cringey health classes and parents. Which means sleepy, ragey, or dopey, I need to be present and talking and—most of all—listening. 

In her essay “The Blue of Distance”, Rebecca Solnit describes a family at the Grand Canyon, where the adults scan the vista, feeling the majesty in its vastness; but the children are crawling around in the dust, enthralled by pine cones, feathers, and sparkly sandstone. Standing at the same point, one is delighted by the small, the other is delighted by the big, neither quite understanding the other’s delight. Solnit explains that “the blue distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.” If a child is lucky, their first major loss will be themselves—their child selves. When I walk up to Gus’s room on the third floor, I can see it in his hands, as he half-heartedly puts together and takes apart legos, trying to get back the excitement he once had connecting and dismantling small things. The slowness with which he retrieves another block from the bin, the gaze to some unseen spot in the room, the hunched shoulders, all speak of grief. He is grieving the end of his childhood. 

I remember this feeling of trying to rekindle some joy I’d once had making houses for my dolls and stuffed animals. I thought if I could put my body through the motion of nestling two sets of folded socks together to make a couch for Barbie, I might find again the attention, contentment, and deep satisfaction. Instead, I was both bored and mourning. 

The sudden blueness of adolescence is upon my eldest: a world beyond feathers and rocks that feels vast and alienating. I can see—I can feel—his disorientation from seeing things so close, to suddenly seeing things so far. And for me, coming out of caring for babies, where the immediate details dominate, where survival is contingent on parental myopia, and launching into hormonal upheaval, I, too, feel my current blue period is sudden and unexpected. 

At the end of her essay, Solnit describes the perspective from an airplane: “From miles up in the sky, the land looks like a map of itself, but without any of the points of reference that make maps make sense.” Being on a plane is disorienting; it’s not how we were designed as a species—to see things aerially. Hormone crashes have felt, to me, like this same disorientation. It’s that moment of surreality on the plane when everyone around you is drinking from plastic wine bottles, watching movies or doing sudoku, and everything appears normal, but you’re at the window, forehead pressed against the cold plexiglass thinking “what the fuck? I’m in a tin can, jetting across a continent. I AM NOT A BIRD.”

This summer, both Gus and I found some relief, some reflections on the outside of what was going on in the inside. Right after school let out in June, we went to see Inside Out 2. The emotions of childhood are kicked out of the main character Riley’s control center because the more complex emotions of adolescence have invaded. In their fight to get back to save Riley from her anxiety, standing at the base of a mountain of discarded memories, Disgust asks Joy: “So. What do we do now?” Joy looks down and says, “I don’t know…maybe this is what happens when you grow up, you feel less joy.” It’s the suckerpunch moment of the movie, for its truth, but also because we know it’s only a half-truth; there’s a turn coming. Riley needs to make it over this threshold of hormonal upheaval.

As we shuffled out of the theater, Gus wrapped his arms around my waist, put his head on my shoulder. My son saw himself, entirely, in the movie. And best of all: it’s a kid’s movie, so while it provides the mirror to those interior complexities, it’s not an insistence to give up childhood. And right now, childhood is something he doesn’t want to leave behind, not totally, not yet. Half of him is fighting back to it, upstream, like Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger in Riley’s interior landscape. 

But you can only cup the water of who you were for so long.

Late this summer, when he was reading about magical swords but also about what happened in Bosnia, I took Gus to California to visit his godparents. While we were hiking the redwoods, he explained to me a couple of his fears. Thinking about the size and expansion of the universe, he said, can bring him to tears some nights. And the question of what happens beyond metacognition makes him sweat. Puberty and menopause transcend the family dilemma at the Grand Canyon because the Grand Canyon is suddenly made small. We’re intergalactic, people. 

On Sunday afternoons this autumn, Gus and I have felt even more despair than the usual Sunday dread. I think since our bodies are also in transition, the transitional day of the week—from weekend to weekdays, from home to school—feels like a double-assault. On the Sundays we can convince each other to do so, we’ve gone walking in the park across the street. This last decade, they’ve let the grasses go wild in many of London’s parks, and this park is situated on a hill, where, when the weather obliges, we get dramatic sunsets. Sometimes, the sky offers perspective to the small futilities and loss of self we each feel standing amidst the grasses. Not the disorienting perspective of looking down from a plane, but the reorienting perspective of looking up together, at the clouds. And at the deepening blue. 

Besides the women in my life who’ve been through it/are going through it, a few of my favorite resources are here:

• Zoe has done a ground-breaking food study on effects on menopause. Davina McCall talks about that and a fascinating cluster study about symptoms on this podcast. Her book Menopausing: The Positive Roadmap to Your Second Spring blends personal experience with research. (The UK is ahead of the US in menopause research and discussion, perhaps because they’ve had a few post-menopausal women in charge already.)

• Dr. Mary Claire Haver talks the science and symptoms of menopause on Huberman Lab (I also recommend following her—she’s got a new book out, The New Menopause)

• Eve by Cat Bohannon (menopause is a chapter, but this book looks at all aspects of female anatomy and explains why women’s bodies have not been studied, and why research for 50% of the human population  is still like a black hole. Just to give you a sense of how new all this work is on something that’s been going on for millennia: “perimenopause” shows up here in Substack as a misspelling.)

• And of course: All Fours by Miranda July, about what happens when we choose desire over obligation and so so so very much more. I loved this discussion between July and Esther Perel.

• HRT (which deserves an essay of its own)

• Puberty books have been around for a lot longer, but I did find this conversation between Ezra Klein and Richard Reeves (“The Men—and Boys—Are Not Alright”) really interesting as I approach the shifting landscape of masculinity with my students and my sons.

I’d love more suggestions for listening/reading/consuming: please drop them in the comments if you have them. The more knowledge, the more sharing, the easier this transition is.

I’ve always been a lingerer, staying in relationships longer than is healthy or reasonable. In college, I dated a guy almost a year longer than I should have. To the world, he was usually hot-headed or indifferent, but I had access to a part of him that no one else knew. It felt like walking around with moonlight in my pocket sometimes, this secret side of him reserved for me—a side that had only come about because of me, I silently relished. And this dichotomy of him kept me coming back.

On weekends there was always a choice: leave Saturday night’s party with him, sneak into the campus art gallery, quote pretentious stuff we’d read back and forth, have sex. Or, stay at the party with our friends and wait for him to explode. The detonators ranged: someone stepped on his foot, someone spilled a drink on me, I’d been dancing with another guy. 

With me alone, he cried, about his raging father, his own rage and insecurities. He wanted me to be an extension of himself, and for a while, I obliged. Letting him fill me with reverence or vitriol, so this other side of himself could emerge. As one favors the dominant hand or limb, his dependency on me to give him a part of himself grew. And as he filled me, his pedestal for me grew.  We tacitly agreed to this shared fantasy: I was to be his transformation. I was to be the one to help him shed this external persona and facilitate an introduction between this gentler guy and the world. It wasn’t just a shared belief, it was the romance of us.

It did not end well. 

The relationship bled out. I didn’t leave when the injury was clear: partly out of fear of him losing all sense of that better self he was with me: my own sympathy born of arrogance. And partly to avoid the TNT that I knew would be our ending. Which indeed it was. I ended it like a coward, when I was moving overseas, putting an ocean of buffer between us. Surely protection enough? But ocean be damned, he arrived unexpectedly and uninvited on Spanish soil first to convince me, then to rage, then to insult, then to dissolve. Once it was final, my answering machine became the vessel for his emotions. Nine months of pleading and abusive voicemails followed, enough time to make a life. 

Today, the memory of that relationship is like a bell tolling. Who I was in it makes me cringe, but why I was in it makes my skin crawl. That perverse dance with violence. I was skating it, harnessing it. And being adjacent to that violence, I was both its beneficiary and the demigod who believed she could eventually stop it. The only feeling I can compare today to that allure of being in violence’s heat at age 20, is vertigo. That tantalizing desire to jump, the knowledge that you can probably control your body not to jump, and the but what if! of it. 

Now that I’ve spent a career studying story, I know I was primed for this relationship. Not just this one, but many others that were less extreme but followed a pattern of being the transformer, seeking out the person who wanted a vessel to fill with the parts of them they didn’t know where else to place or to name. We are what we consume over time: our predilections, fantasies, desires more tied up in the narratives we’ve encountered than any of us would like to admit.

Beauty and the Beast has always felt a little Stockholm Syndrome-y to me, but it’s more than just that. It’s also a fiction of transformation. That one person’s love can transform another person. Beauty’s beast of burden is being the Beast’s only one. Why do we love the idea of not only finding another’s inner beauty, but being the only one to find it? Why should it be a struggle to see the goodness? Isn’t someone hiding their goodness kind of a red flag? This is a story of being duped into the romance of transformation.

There are counter narratives, yes, but there’s a deep romance to the transformation story, the ultimate kind of love story. They’re classics: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, all the Death and the Maiden mythologies: from Persephone to Twilight. They’re books I love like Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

A transformation romance in story can be distilled down to three desires: 

1. The desire to collar an inherent violence or cruelty or indifference for the forces of good.

2. The desire to open a person to their emotions. 

3. The desire to be the one. 

To collar, to open, to be: these verbs don’t even make sense together. There’s contradiction at the very heart of this story’s desire.

In “Man Child”, an essay about raising her son, Audre Lorde writes about the origins of beasts, how and why they are often passed from parent to partner: 

“Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.”

Here Lorde offers us the happily-ever-after afterparty: the life-long burden of trying to change a beast by actually incapacitating them. Being everything to a person means doing the work of transformation for them so they are “trapped in dependency and fear” while you are trapped in emotional exhaustion, feeling for two.

Beauty and the Beast both lose in their story’s aftermath.

This romance paradigm is not singular to a man playing the role of beast (Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew about a headstrong woman who needs “taming” offers a counter example), but the stakes seem higher when it is. The enchanted Beast, the brooding Heathcliff, vampiric Edward Cullen, and Hades himself could each crush or claw or eat the object of their affection, and at some point, are tempted to do so. But love for her keeps them from their baser instincts. In realistic fiction, it’s often social and financial cachet: Darcy has the economic power to undo not just Elizabeth Bennet but her entire family. It’s a desire, in this sense, to see power reguided, to see feral virility charmed into gentle docility. 

So much has changed for my students socially, technologically, academically from my ‘90s adolescence, but this particular narrative still renders them starry-eyed. Even the most self-aware among them crave a transformation, crave being the one to change or the one to be changed.

Spoiler alert, I want to tell my students: Mr. Darcy doesn’t age well! He’s far less attractive, far more exhausting in middle age. By middle age, most of us have transformed, slowly, based on our own choices, our own work, our own experiences. No one I know is looking to transform a partner anymore. And the ones who did look are in the process of leaving them now, or they’ve already left. 

What does the beast look like in middle age? He looks like someone with few friends. Someone with few spaces other than you to share her emotions. Someone who will never need a therapist because they have you.

There’s a practicality in age, when true romance becomes more about the person who can articulate feelings, regulate emotions, talk to friends, wash the dishes, cook a meal. Short and long-term relationships are filled with small shifts, changes, encouragements, but those aren’t the things of story, they’re not the crises we crave in a novel or a movie. If we’re lucky, life’s plot line is filled with subtlety instead. So do we need to untangle ourselves from the myths of transformation, or just tell truer stories?

As I’m writing this essay, I’m reading Sarah J. Maas’s series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, partly because my students have nagged me, partly because it’s the season of blushing lovers, and mainly because Culture Study told me to. It’s not my usual genre (part of reading the ACOTAR series is, I’ve come to learn, disclaiming it). It’s fairy porn with a little bit of feminism. In it, Maas cleverly evades the beast trope but keeps the romantic likeness. She’s created a love interest who play-acts as a beast to the greater world, but he’s known as a good guy by his other public: his friends and his city. Fantasy often precedes us, and perhaps this fantasy faerie fiction is redefining romance for us. 

Or perhaps it’s only the first-person experience of the beast that allows us to see the romance beyond the beast.

A big thank you to all the friends in conversation that led to this essay, to fellow Write of Passage writers and for the initial encouragement, and to Dara Songye, , and Samantha Law for their critical, loving feedback

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I’m on the hunt. Scouring my files for body parts. 

Last autumn, I had an uncomfortable moment with a man I knew only online. We’d worked together, he’d edited and championed my writing, I’d read his essays weekly, a growing fan. I was on the tube in early October when his latest essay popped up on my phone. I clicked and read and bit the side of my thumb in discomfort. This man, who draws regularly on Rumi and Seneca, his time in the Navy, fatherhood, was writing about his body. And it felt strange. And I couldn’t make sense of the strangeness. I read about the body all the time; in fact, I don’t think I’ve written a personal essay that doesn’t include a body part or me thinking about my body. His essay opened: “For as long as I can remember, the highpoint of my health goals was to look good naked.” 

Maybe it’s that I don’t read men’s health articles? I was meeting the limits of my male canon? 

I hit like, hesitated over the comments’ box, clicked my phone off and slipped it back in my pocket. Did I like the essay? 

I’ve talked to men about their bodies—colleagues, friends, brothers, sons, my husband—and I see men’s and boys’ bodies in various states of nakedness every day. And, yes, I’ve read a handful of literary men writing about their own bodies, but, as I thought about it in the days that followed, I realized they are few, and usually in poetry. And I’ve been trained well to know the speaker isn’t always the poet: so how much is this actually a man talking about his body after all?

I’ve come across many male writers writing about other men’s bodies—Montaigne writes generally of thumbs; Ta Nehisi Coates names the body over the 40 times as he talks about the danger of being a black male body in America in Between the World and Me; David Foster Wallace speaks universally and singularly about bodies of the average man and the superman Roger Federer in his essay “Roger Federer As Religious Experience”. And in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, Wallace entered the “Best Legs” competition, a very brief and ironic nod to his own “gams’ shapeliness”.

But I know men are thinking not just of the universal, but about their singular bodies all the time. Where is the documentation of these feelings about calves and collar bones? We talk about manspreading in physical shared spaces, but in prose, I can’t find a man’s reflections on his own legs.

Am I stumbling into a silent taboo? Men not writing about their own bodies? Even as the personal writing of women is chock full of their own body parts, most men remain by and large disembodied minds on the page.

I dug deeper. Turned to history—literary history and my own. In order to complete my honors program in undergrad, I was assigned to read the British Romantics and American Transcendentalists, sent a list of twenty books, from Melville’s Moby Dick to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound to read and prepare in the summer before senior year. In September, I sat before a panel of English professors, all men but my thesis advisor—a PhD in Victorian lit who asked her students to call her “Lisa”.

When I emerged from the panel and watched the men recede down the hallway, Lisa grabbed my arm. “You stood your ground, it was great, don’t worry: you don’t have to love Walt Whitman just because every one of those men in there worships him.”

Her voice was full of disdain, but also praise, and  I’ve always been dazzled by praise. It wasn’t until later, in my apartment, that I realized I didn’t hate Whitman, in fact he’d been one of my favorites of the eleven men and one woman I’d read all summer. I realized it was just my inability to talk coherently or with any real substance that she’d taken my silence as blowing them off. I’d been nervous as hell, not recalcitrant.

Here’s what I love about Whitman: he writes about his body the way Michelangelo sculpted the body. With reverence and interest and compulsion. Which is to say, he acknowledges his body. And I’m so glad men read and delight in him, too. In his poem, “The Body”, Whitman begins:

That I am is of my body, and what identity I am, I owe to my body,

Of all that I have had, I have had nothing except through my body,

And what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

What belongs to me, that it does not yet spread in the spread of the universe, I owe to my body—

I comprehend no better life than the life of my body.

The word “body’ comes up 35 times, and seven of them are “my body”: that must be some kind of record. Thank god for Whitman.

I asked two of my male friends, two of the most prolific readers I know, for thoughts about this absence: is this a pattern, or is it a limitation of my reading? They also came up almost empty-handed, almost all of them reflections on athletic feats and a bit of poetry. It seems poets more than essayists make the impossibility of decoupling our physical experience and sensations from our ideas a part of their art. 

There’s a lineage of women writers naming their parts in prose, especially beginning in the 20th century. And I began to wonder if the question is really what compels writers to write about their bodies? And further, is writing publicly about one’s own body a luxury? Or a necessity? 

Are marginalized people more likely to write about their bodies? Does something about having your contours made obvious to you by others make you want to write about them? The few male writers I’ve encountered writing about their own bodies, gay and/or black, would suggest that may be the case.

We theorized—my friend Stephan wondered if Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” gave license and reason to some writers to focus the pen on the body? And perhaps more evidence of a compulsion to write about one’s own body when confronted with illness, injury, transformations: Whitman addresses his experience with injuries in the Civil War in “The Wound-Dresser”. Distress to the body, also, would certainly make sense for why women write more about their own bodies: our bodies are in monthly transition until post-menopause; it’s hard not to pay attention to them.

In a Zoom conversation with a man I’d just met, I was talking about my obsession to understand this absence: “Why aren’t men writing about their own bodies?” He answered, kindly, with a question, “Why do you care?”

The question stopped me. Why do I care that I can’t find many male writers writing about their bodies outside of athletics? 

Why is it in absentia? What might it look like if men’s parts were in their stories? What does it mean to avoid looking at and discussing the body?

And, really, why do I care? 

Maybe because I have four boys with four distinct body types. Maybe because my husband photographs our youngest son’s fingers everyday on the way to nursery and I understand part of what he loves about them is that they’re long like his dead father’s fingers. And I want someone writing about his own fingers that remind his father of his father’s.

Maybe because teenage boys are laughed at for mewing in classes, and they’re obviously thinking about their bodies all the time, and they’re feeling insecurities around body changes and body permanence, and I want them to read a diverse body of men writing varied and interesting things about their own male bodies. Just as we have a diverse range of women writers discussing their bodies in literature.

Maybe because one in three people struggling with eating disorders is male, but there is even more taboo in seeking help for it when you’re male.

Maybe because not writing about the physical body feels snobbish, a refusal to put the blue collar worker of a body  aside the cerebral on the white page. 

Maybe because a friend searched “men writing about their own bodies” when I spoke of my surprise, and what came up were links to men writing about women’s bodies, but when I searched “women writing about their own bodies”, links popped up about a range of ways women have approached and used their bodies in writing.

Maybe because I’ve spent 27 years reading and studying literary patterns, and I like a question without a clear answer. 

Maybe because I think through men writing vulnerably about their bodies, more male readers will see all bodies as something to be respected. 

Last week, I was in a brainstorming session with another man online. He was trying to get to what he wanted to write about, and in order to do so, he was walking me through his timeline. Then he mentioned his height: “I couldn’t fit in. And I was tall, too, and asked to do things I didn’t know how to do.”

“Yes, that’s it!” I shouted at him. “Talk more about your tall body, not fitting in, being asked to do things because the size of your body betrayed your ability! I want to read it!”

In a class discussion recently, one of my teenage students was bemoaning the phrase she hears most often from the boys in her life: “I want to get big.” She laughed and said, that’s like me saying, “I want to get small.” It’s weird, a nonspecific adjective to describe a hope, a wish, and an insecurity. Psychologists, health classes have agreed we need to use anatomical terms when talking about the body. Talking about the body more, not less, is healthy. So why isn’t there more first-person literature about what boys’ bodies can be and can feel like?

Yesterday, I put it to the other experts. Before class began, I asked my boys in 10th grade English, “do you or would you write about your body?” And the room exploded. 

“My knees! I hate my knees!”

“No way my big Greek nose is making its way into my writing.”

“We can’t show body insecurities—we’d get wrecked.”

I’d phrased the question badly, and needed to rephrase: “I don’t mean the sole subject is your body, and it doesn’t have to be parts you’re uncomfortable with. It could be celebratory or totally neutral.”

One of my boys shouted, “I’ve written about my hand holding the pen!”1 

One of my girls chimed in, “historically, women’s bodies have been written about by men, and there’s vulnerability in having your body in front of the camera or an essay. I think part of women writing about their bodies is an act of reclaiming their own bodies.”

And then, as the classroom settled back to our usual noise levels and civil discourse, voices no longer layered on other voices, one of my boys asked, “by just being spectators of other bodies, are we not putting our skin in the game?” 

We’d taken a turn, together, to curiosity. 

We ended with a bit of writing—not to share, just for them: what are the body parts you could write about? What are the parts you can’t write about?

When we finished, one of my boys said, “can I just say one more thing? I think it’s kinda about empathy—if you can’t humanize yourself, you’re not gonna humanize someone else.”

And then: “where can we have more conversations like this?”

In her final autobiographical works, Virginia Woolf wrote about the challenge of writing nonbeing into her work. Being is the stuff of action and causality; nonbeing is the mundane, the circular conversations, the naps, going to the bathroom, most daily needs and rituals of the body. The irony of course is a body is a being, there’s nothing more being than the body, alive in all its hangnails, bleeds, gurgles, breaks, excretions, floppy sloppiness. I’m greedy with the need to encounter conversations about one’s body on the page, in the most mundane of ways, in the ways Woolf would describe as nonbeing. And after weeks of conversation, I know I’m not alone.

One of my favorite comments from a rough draft of this essay was from a guy in my writing group: “When I was like 11 and some of the kids had really started puberty I remember how obsessed I was with growing hair. Going so far as to use mascara down there. I never wanted anything more than I wanted pubes. I think so much of the male body is about what it can produce. And we learn that young.” There is something so specific and so universal about this focus on pubic hair—it’s an image that smacks of adolescence, that slow time when we all want to hurry up and become. 

In the last two years, the gender in literature class I teach has skewed dramatically toward girl-identifying students. And by dramatic, I mean I have had two boys in the class in two years. But this year, 16- and 17-year-old boys have come to talk to me about the class, telling me it’s their first choice for their senior year. And I want to be ready.

When their bodies are in the classroom, I want their bodies in the curriculum. Andrew McMillan’s collection of poetry will be there, as will Latham’s essay from October. Because I know the strangeness I felt was about coming upon new territory: a straight man speaking openly about his body on the page, not just in poetry, but in prose. To write about one’s own body publicly, to name the awkwardness and magic of the vehicle that transports us, is maybe, as my students taught me, also an act of courage, compassion, relief. 

A sincere thank you to the many boys and men I spoke to while writing this essay, from ages 10 to 75. And to Latham Turner who made me wonder at the strangeness of a man’s own body on the page in his beautiful essay, and consented to my request to write about it so enthusiastically. Thank you to for taking the time to read, respond, and provide new insights on a rough draft of this essay. And to my reading friends for always handling my questions, quests, requests seriously and compassionately.

So many told me if they were to pick up the pen, what they would want to write about their own bodies and what they hope to never write or read about their own bodies. And I’ve asked many of them the question I’d like to ask all of you: what would it mean to you to read men’s reflections of their bodies on the page?

If you have in mind memoir, autobiography, personal essays by male writers exalting, defying, naming, rejecting, loving, confronting, putting their bodies on the page, as the subject or just a side piece, please share. And who knows? Maybe my future students will be their own examples.

March is women’s history month, in which we dig to find, in private archives, examples of women who have changed and helped society, atoning for the eons of history devalued in textbooks and all the ways in which women have not participated in public life, invention, and art.

And when you’re a woman who thinks of this loss, regularly, it’s hard not to look at human history, woman’s place in human history as a cyanotype of what might’ve been. The fading outline of 50% of the human population, story-less and blue with regret. What might’ve been had their presence been felt in public spaces? The possibility of a different history and therefore a different present is always there, niggling. 

But women were always there, influencing and supporting great men, they say. Yes, some of their faint outlines are visible in how they supported those textbooked men, silently, behind closed doors, a light etch of their being in the palimpsest of their husband’s, brother’s, father’s, son’s work and the stories of that work. But helping others is only one part of realizing one’s own potential.

We know the problem is double of course: women were neither leading characters in the stories of adventure, agency, and impact, and nor were they the chroniclers of those stories.  

While March is a celebration of women’s history, in all its pencil sketches, June is a celebration of women’s present, at least it feels so here in London. Created in 1996, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded in mid-June each year. The shortlist nominees are often also up for Booker prizes. And while the Booker Prize evening attracts all genders, the Women’s Prize is a sea of women. Man is like a crested ibis, a rare and arresting sight in Bedford Square Gardens.

Over the course of the Women’s Prize night, I feel equal amounts of joy at being in such a female space in the heart of London under fairy lights and a June moon, and utter frustration at the apparent lack of male interest in books authored by women. Even without the men, the Women’s Fiction Prize shortlist reading feels like such a promise to our barren history of women’s achievements and stories. And yet, there are some alarming statistics emerging here in the UK when it comes to women writers.

Of all non-fiction reviews in national newspapers, only 26% addressed books by female writers and only 35% of nonfiction prizes have gone to women over the last decade. The gender pay gap for writers has increased from 33 to 36% in the last five years, female non-fiction authors’ earnings falling by 17%. 

It’s not just editors and reviewers overlooking women, perhaps more egregiously, readers ignore them too. Kate Mosse, the founding director of the Women’s Prize, shared at a recent event1: “Just 19% of men said they had ever read a book by a woman in a survey last year.” While women are regularly (still) reading men. To give you more of a sense of recent numbers: the 10 bestselling women authors have 19% male readers and 81% female readers, whereas the 10 bestselling men authors have 55% male readers and 45% female readers.2 And the most-read-by-men female author goes by initials, not a typically feminine name. It seems we’re still holding onto the idea that men write for all and women write for women.

And while women are allowed in academic libraries today which were a century ago femina-non-grata, the struggle to be recognized as experts is ongoing. So it’s no real surprise that women’s nonfiction writing would continue to be absent from our private libraries. But this year, for the first time, in an attempt to call attention to and right these inequities, a Women’s Prize for Nonfiction will also be awarded. (The long list for the women’s nonfiction prize was announced this week.)

If I’m honest, I am prone to seeking signs and interpreting patterns, which one might argue is a factor of conspiracy, a need for religion, or a desperate desire to find my gender in history and in the future. “And yet” is one of those signs; it feels to me like a particular kind of code. I associate it with female authors writing to their female readers.

Of course “and yet” is not singular to women writers: Czeslaw Milosz begins a poem “And yet the books will be there on the shelves”; Hemingway chronicles Brett’s anticipation of the night to come in The Sun Also Rises with “and yet”; Orwell describes the double-think of Winston with “and yet”; Tolkien gives the forbidden treasure’s allure an “and yet”. 

And yet, I read this combination of contrasting conjunctions as female. In its adverb form, “yet” emphasizes that we expect something will happen soon. “We haven’t closed the pay gap yet.” It is a small but mighty word pregnant with expectation. It’s similarly laden in its conjunction form. Of all the FANBOYS conjunctions (to use the handy acronym for “for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so”), yet is the most emotionally complex. Unlike its supposed synonym “but”, yet is filled with emotions: expectation, wonderment, hope, guilt, mystery. Consider the following sentences: 

We knew they had stories, but we did nothing.

We knew they had stories, yet we did nothing.

The but is concrete, decisive, unemotional. It is what it is; we are what we are; boys will be boys; you get the idea. But “yet” is filled with consternation, regret, recrimination. Why and how didn’t we do anything about it?

Aside “and”, yet becomes more slippery. It negates the and, in a way, unless it's read as an adverb (think: and still) instead of a conjunction (and but). In “and yet”, yet proves itself a shape-shifter, not only playing the line of conjunction and adverb but also bringing the emotion to and’s abundance. There’s a grammatical wrongness about these two bedfellows, “and yet”: they’re an idiomatic rule breaker, a conjunction set of opposites attract, the quickest of oxymorons. And it’s a pleasure pulse when I come across them while reading. Like a spell.

The contradiction in its terms feels like a wink, an acknowledgment of the contradictions extant in living, especially as a woman. Those strange contradictory demands and labels: sexless mother, fragile bitch, passive heroine, selfish giver, simple mystery, conniving idiot.

And the cognitive dissonance of the words matches the cognitive dissonance of being a woman—at any time, yes—but perhaps especially so in the aftermath of Me Too and the duringmath of Andrew Tate et al misogyny. One step forward, two steps back. 

And while the double conjunction that contradicts disguises itself as a throat clear at a sentence’s beginning or midpoint, I read it as a subtle nod to my kind: this one’s for you, ladies, read the subtext. “And yet” is a hinge, a shoulder, like our month of March, a month of shitty gray but also daffodils laughing, promises of better times ahead. A sly smile saying “I’m going to open the door and show you what is and what might be.” When I read it, I feel suddenly in a heavy brocaded room, some dirty wonderful truth about to be dealt to my ears. “And yet” is a gift.

I’ve been gathering and yets—they say I come by gathering biologically—cataloguing them, as I read them. And here, in this month of women’s history, are women writers chronicling the women before them in their quest for equality, their lessons distilled to their and yets. 

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft pens a tribute to the first female historian in English, Catharine Macaulay, and simultaneously a censure of her society’s treatment of intelligent women: 

The very word respect brings Mrs. Macaulay to my remembrance. The woman of the greatest abilities, undoubtedly, that this country has ever produced. And yet this woman has been suffered to die without sufficient respect being paid to her memory.

That “and yet” seethes with frustration: even the most knowledgeable among us tossed aside. Wollstonecraft herself suffered an early death in 1797 after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley. The doctor tending her did so with bacteria-smeared, unwashed hands. That same year, Sojourner Truth was born (her exact birthdate undocumented). In her most famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” in which she acknowledges the double axes thrown her way, the abolitionist describes sexism in its simplest terms, as a repeated lack of generosity: “Man is so selfish that he has got women’s rights and his own too, and yet he won’t give women their rights. He keeps them all to himself.” I can hear Truth’s shock and fury, and I imagine a pause between her ”and” and her “yet”, that final alveolar t sharp with tongue tip and spit.

Among my favorite “and yet’s”, are two from Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1913 “Freedom or Death” speech. When she addressed the Connecticut crowd, the arsonist suffragettes were at their height, one had thrown herself to her death under a horse at the Epsom Derby: “I dare say, in the minds of many of you - you will perhaps forgive me this personal touch - that I do not look either very like a soldier or very like a convict, and yet I am both.”

Here is an invitation. That “and yet I am both” speaks to me now, 111 years later: the impossibility of being more than a narrow convention, something wide and unexpected, a thunderclap and a river. Later in the speech, Pankhurst honors and laments another woman her senior: 

It was thirty years ago in England that a splendid woman named Josephine Butler fought to establish an equal moral code for both sexes. She fought all her life; she was stoned; she was hooted; her meetings were broken up; her life was made absolutely dangerous; and yet that woman persisted and she secured the repeal of certain laws relating to prostitution which disgraced the statute books of our country. In those days the doctors were against her; practically everybody was against her.

We’ll recognize that “and yet”, too, eerily transformed with its more formal cousin in 2017, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rebuked Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech during the debate over Jeff Sessions’s nomination for Attorney General: “Nevertheless, she persisted.” Gifting so many of us a moment to laugh, to point to the irony, to sell a t-shirt.

Virginia Woolf was a year old when Truth died, painfully ill and cared for by two of her daughters in her final years. (Frederick Douglass offered her eulogy.) And, like Pankhurst, Woolf delivered her own treatise on feminism to a group of women the year after Pankhurst’s final campaign for Parliament was rejected because of the scandal of Pankhurst’s daughter Sylvia having a child out of wedlock. Pankhurst died that same year.

Woolf starts the entire lecture with “But you may say,” as if recognizing we’ve always been in debate, women’s very beings in public spaces a defiance of what is acceptable. In chapter four, she chronicles the great female British novelists and the constant interruptions women endure in their work because it is never considered as serious as a man’s work. The chapter’s list of women is short compared to a previous chapter’s description of the British Library’s yawning stacks of male writers. 

The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them [...]  And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman? 

There are so many promises in this essay from Woolf to her female audience about their future. And here, in this “and yet”, is one of them: she will continue to go back to those shelves, again and again and again, looking for women’s expertise. Looking to accompany Milosz’s “And yet the books will be there on the shelves.” Woolf also quotes a line from Life and Letters, a literary magazine of her day: “female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex”. And this belief, I suppose, is the reason for the lack of male turnout at the Women’s Prize readings each year. But perhaps I’m misinterpreting their absence as indifference. I’d like to be proven wrong.  

Analysis of Zora Neale Hurston is chock full of “and yets” because everything she did and was was at odds with what had been deemed possible before she did it and was it. Mary Helen Washington compares Hurston’s circumstances to those of Woolf’s: two women, one Black and one white, on either side of the pond, breaking all the rules of the novelists that came before them:

And yet, she did work. In poverty and ill health, dogged by an undeserved scandal, and without the support of any academic or intellectual community, Zora Neale Hurston worked as writer and scholar for thirty years. She worked without the freedom and peace, without the time to contemplate, that Virginia Woolf insisted were essential for any woman to write. She worked consistently without the necessary five hundred pounds a year, without a room of her own with lock and key. Indeed, she worked most of the time without a door of her own on which to put a lock. What she left us is only a fraction of what she might have accomplished. We should be grateful for the work she did.

Hurston died, alone and penniless, and was buried in an unmarked grave, a far worse death than Wollstonecraft lamented for Catharine Macaulay. Years later, after trekking through Florida to find and mark and honor Hurston’s grave, Alice Walker documented “Looking for Zora” in her collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. In it, she introduces her theory of womanism, acknowledging where the first waves of feminism excluded and discriminated against women of color. Walker offers a tenacious “and yet” in the collection’s title essay: “To be an artist and a black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it; and yet, artists we will be.” Again, that promise in a future tense.

Anne Sexton was born the year Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own” and Hurston wrote “How to Be Colored Me”, a jaunty celebration of Hurston’s race and womanhood. A decade before her own suicide, Sexton wrote “Wanting to Die”, a poem for a friend who wanted to understand Sexton’s suicidal feelings:

Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Sexton personifies death, not only as a she, but as a bruised she, a sad Bone of a she, and yet even as death is sadness, she is also waiting, tenderly so, for Sexton, offering her relief from the prison of her body. Sexton’s poetry is filled with images of what it is to be a creative woman in a patriarchal world, the ongoing fight of it. And Kate Baer seems to speak to Sexton, half a century on, in her own poem “And Yet” which concludes: 

It is depressing to know a war is coming.

Worse to know the war will always be in you.

Little cauldron, little tender loon.

Take comfort in your bold heart

where hope and fear are mingling.

My female students speak of this hope and fear and boldness when they write about the heroic feat of getting home in the dark alone with their almost-woman bodies.

Even in their failings, the women writers before me and the students in front of me astound me with their triumphs in the face of all that death-in-life and life-in-death. And I wonder at the tenderness I feel for them, and how that tenderness, that so often womanly tenderness, might reshape history and reassure a future. 

There’s not triumph in “and yet”, but there’s acknowledgment, there’s hope, there’s tenacity and there’s momentary survival in those monosyllables. No one survives beyond the present moment, as soon as we enter tomorrow, it is now.  It is now, in March, that we dig to uncover and remember, as Walker did Hurston, Wollstonecraft did Macaulay, Pankhurst did Butler, Woolf did Austen, Eliot, Brontë, Brontë, and Brontë. And it is June that we celebrate now, the women writers of today, so that in tomorrow, when we are gone, our children will hear not just “girls can do anything boys can do”, but also “boys can do anything girls can do.” So they will know women in history not in deficit, but in tender and bold abundance.

My 45-year-old self is so much a betrayal of what my 20-year-old self believed and desired for my body. I can almost see the sneer. But I’m secure in my competencies, my sturdiness, all the fucks I don’t give that I gave then about my physicality: thighs rubbing, cellulite puckering, thick thumbs, wonky hairline, crooked nose, thin lips, blue under eyes.

Yet my attention to ankles has remained. They are my fetish and my shame.

There’s a shared understanding between my mom and me. She is my biggest supporter, reluctant to criticize me about anything, but we have a euphemistic mother-daughter lexicon when shopping for shoes. “That strap cuts at a bad angle;” “the color draws the eye too much;” “maybe unpractical in London’s rain?”  It’s almost always the shoe’s fault.

As mouthy daughters do, I call her on many things, but in a shoe store, I nod, give my silent assent, sign my name to our tacit agreement that yes, it is certainly some fault of the shoe or designer that my thick ankles are not made thinner in these shoes.

Boots have become my bag, out of vanity.

I was 11 when I learned my ankles were unflattering. Starting middle school, my two closest friends were twins, Kelly and Kara. They were the youngest of five, all of their names starting with K, and they weren’t so much beautiful as terrifically healthy. Sporty, crafty, outdoorsy, never procrastinating, their cellar walls lined with jars and cans for the end of the world. If there was a nuclear holocaust or a rapture, this was the family that would last. And if they’d been poets too, I would’ve called it in and died there at age 11.

We were playing Oregon’s Trail in their study after school the day Kelly pulled out a drawing of a woman’s body, a grayscale outline. “These are the way women’s legs should look,” she told me. The legs touched ever so lightly at the inner thighs, then the knees, then the calves, then the ankles. 

The computer screen blinked, a tombstone “Here Lies Stephanie, she should have known better” signaling the end of our game, and Kelly stood up, pulled up her shorts to her crotch, and beamed. Her legs were the drawing’s legs, but her thighs didn’t quite kiss.

“Show me yours,” she demanded. I stood up, understanding mine wouldn’t match the picture because her thin smile told me they wouldn’t. 

My ankles, then and now, were built for old fashioned nurse shoes, Katherine Mansfield ankles. Sturdy, like a tree with two trunks. There is no tapering. No hourglass shape to my Achilles tendon. My feet look like they’ve been crudely pushed onto the bottom of my legs by a child potter instead of sculpted, like Kelly’s were. 

Ever since that afternoon, I’ve noticed ankles, hungrily. As I lunged into warrior one in a yoga class and looked ahead, I fell in love with the way a colleague’s ankles tapered into her heels. Last weekend, I licked my lips at Indira Varma’s ankles when she walked out in her nightgown as Lady Macbeth. I notice ankles. Always. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen your ankles. I’m sorry. 

My husband has wonderful ankles; I envy them daily, crossed on the coffee table in front of us as we settle into a movie. They fit together so snugly, like long lovers sunbathing. And I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge considering this years ago as I thought about our prospective progeny.

The human body has about 350 joints, and the ankle joint is the intersection of three bones: the tibia, fibula and talus; their gathering point in diagram looks a bit like where Algeria meets Niger meets Libya on the map. Even though it’s one of the body’s primary joints, the ankle is notoriously unstable—25,000 people per day are spraining their ankles—but perhaps not as weak as my weakness for them. I don’t want to admit what I’d give up for a nice pair.

In the 1800s, the ankle was considered provocative, the subject of Victorian pornography. And in the 1930s, the UK held “pretty ankle” competitions, Kelly and I in her den on that spring afternoon, but at a larger scale. The women’s bodies and faces were concealed so the judge (a man) might not be distracted from the delicate lines of their ankles. 

Even as I want to distance myself from my ankles, I can’t help but join a conversation about ankles. And even as I don’t want to pay attention to them, there they are, preceding me into the room. In the time of ankle competitions, ankle was verbified, used as slang in the entertainment industry to describe “walking out on something or someone.” But even as I ankle, my ankles are with me. The inescapable thickness of them.

I read A.S. Byatt’s short story “Medusa’s Ankles” because ankles were in the title. The subject of the story is Susannah, a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her stage of life and her discontent in a salon, where she repeatedly subjects herself to a stylist (Lucian) who talks more than he listens, bemoaning his predicament between wife and mistress. 

In Lucian’s subtext, there’s a plea for Susannah to substantiate his right to leave his wife for his mistress—as if it’s not also a rejection of Susannah. As if a scorned middle-aged woman is not a hall of mirrors in which all women see the reflection of their own rejection. Their own possibility of being made the gorgon.

There are scissors everywhere in the story, often carelessly close to Susannah’s face as her hairdresser gesticulates. Chekov’s gun waiting to stab. In her final visit to the salon, when Susannah asks Lucian what he will decide, he tells her the deciding factor is his wife’s “fat ankles.” They disgust him so he will risk it all and leave her.  

At this remark—not the scissors—Susannah assumes her monster self, in her maroon smock she rages and breaks everything she can: dryers and basins and brushes. The sound system. The strangest and eeriest part of the story is the hairdresser’s response. Lucian remains calm, becomes understanding, patronizingly so. Even as he’s created the reasons for her fury, even as Susannah destroys his newly-renovated salon, even as his employees cower, he is indifferent to her destruction, just as he has been to the pleas of his wife, his daughter. It’s as if Susannah behaving monstrously was the consent he needed.

Beyond the title, Byatt never mentions Medusa, but like the scissors, she’s everywhere in the narrative. Medusa was cursed after Neptune ravaged/raped her in Minerva’s Temple (depending on whose story you read). And in revenge for defiling her temple, Minerva transformed Medusa’s luxurious hair into snakes, thus the beautiful maiden became the monster.

Medusa is nothing if not a myth of women’s shame about what is none of their doing.

The tragedy of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Assia Wevill is a 1960s story of two women embodying both Medusa and Minerva, each of them victim and perpetrator. Hughes got his mistress, Wevill, pregnant while Plath was at home, isolated in her cave with their one- and four-year-old children. Shortly before she committed suicide, Plath listened to the broadcast of her husband’s play, “The Difficulties of the Bridegroom,” the latter half of which details an obsessive desire for and attention to the mistress’s body, a play that filled Plath with shame and further socially isolated her. 

In a letter, Plath expressed her devastation but also her shock at Hughes’s choice in mistress, noting Wevill’s “thick ankles” in her criticism. Indeed, even after Plath’s death, her long shadow remained to haunt Wevill. Assia was tortured by Plath’s suicide, blamed for it, so much so that she took her own life and her daughter’s life by the same means Plath had, dragging a bed into the kitchen, smashing up sleeping pills, turning on the gas. 

Hughes, like Neptune before him, remained relatively unscathed but for several feminist critics.

The story of the two poets and the translator smacks of Greek tragedy, and yet, years after reading about it—I feel gross even saying this—I remember the pleasure it brought me to know a thick-ankled woman’s body could be rhapsodized in a play. 

Writing of ankles, I’d be remiss not to talk about Achilles. Even as I’m sure his ankles had the beautiful long lines my husband’s have. The sea nymph Thetis dipped her son into the River Styx to protect his mortal body from death. But a mother can’t dip a baby in a river without holding on, and where she grasped him, by his ankle, she doomed him. At the Trojan War’s end, after nine years of proving himself Greek’s greatest warrior, Achilles was struck by an arrow in his ankle. An arrow shot not by a great fighter, but by the playboy, the dallier, the impulsive reason for the mess of that war: Paris. 

The Achilles tendon, mine, is almost not there. Sometimes I wonder if an arrow were shot in, would I have enough extra bulge to survive? Achilles might’ve benefited from a pair of trunks like mine. 

Now that I’ve reached middle-age, I’m thinking a lot about resilience and midpoints. There’s a vantage point to being in the middle of things, your past an equal distance away to (hopefully) your future. The experiences of what was readily applied to what is and will be. I have let go of so much vanity, so many insecurities of my physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual self, and still I hold onto this obsession with ankles. Why?

My hatred for my ankles was born out of jealousy and comparison. Kelly and I; Sylvia and Assia; Minerva and Medusa. 

But there’s also this: in all the myriad myths about Medusa, there is not one documentation of her killing a fellow woman. Men turned to stone at her gaze, goddesses cursed her and ensured her decapitation, but she never exacted revenge or fury on a mortal woman. Terrified as I was by her serpent hair and isolation, this is a part of her mythology I never paid attention to as a child. Today I am charmed by the vulnerable; the part of us not dipped, not gilded by immortality; the parts exposed to the world and to arrows; the parts we wish weren’t ours. In my 40s, my friendships have deepened as I’ve been in awe of my friends’ abilities, accomplishments, qualities—qualities, accomplishments, abilities I would’ve been enchanted by but also jealous of ten, twenty years ago. By baring myself, naming my Achilles heels, letting out my serpent hair, I’ve been liberated to love the women in my life in a way I didn’t know before. And in return, I feel loved more than I’ve ever felt loved. In “Medusa’s Ankles,” Susannah refused middle age. I am delighting in it. 

It is just that Achilles heel—my ankles—that still rankle, still remind me of envy and vanity and how often women are pitted against women, girls against girls, made again and again both the villain and the victim of the story. 

And maybe, really, my ankles are a pesky and necessary reminder: a reminder of how far the rest of me has come.

In mid-February 2003, people in 600 cities worldwide protested the invasion of Iraq, NASA was still making sense of the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion, Dolly the cloned sheep was euthanized because of lung disease, and the man I thought I might marry broke up with me. 

My friends convinced me to come to a party on Valentine’s night to distract myself from my grief and to give themselves a break from my obsessive dialogue. But most distractions from heartbreak end up just pushing further on the bruise: couples you thought would never make it, offering you condolences; reminders of him in clothes, on walls, in drinks; the general joy in others.

Around midnight, I left to walk home alone, both boots on, the anti-Cinderella. It was cold, sleeting when I crossed the Duke Ellington Memorial Bridge from Adams Morgan to Woodley Park. In the daytime, you can hear the zoo animals’ calls drifting up, but on this night it was the shush of tires on wet concrete and my sniffling.

I was just shy of 25 and hopeful that the headlights caught my tears. The biting cold felt strangely like romance itself, and I wanted to share my sadness with strangers. Which, I think, is  the first step out of heartbreak. And the best part of heartbreak.

Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher talks about two stages of heartbreak: the protest stage and the resignation stage. The protest stage is filled with drama, obsession, strategizing, trying to see what went wrong and trying to win the lover back, get back to status quo. This is when embarrassing texts, phone calls, stalking the ex’s haunts happen. This is where I called up all our mutual friends who were women in order for them to align with me, not my ex, for fear he might date one of them. (Later that year one of them became my new housemate, being safely ensconced under the same roof, where I knew betrayal couldn’t happen, brought me machiavellian relief.) 

During the protest stage, our dopamine and norepinephrine receptors fire unremittingly in the brain and we allow ourselves to participate in thoughts and actions that pre-breakup would’ve made us ashamed. We are at once electrified and obsessed. Shame goes out the door as do the acceptable ways of being.

This is where creativity can be born. 

The travel memoir as we know it today was born out of this phase of heartbreak. Despite the cautions of friends and family, Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to Paris during the French Revolution. She wrote, observed, and fell in love with American adventurer and diplomatic representative Gilbert Imlay. He cared enough to get her pregnant, but after their child was born, he left Mary for an actress. Wollstonecraft was desperate to win him back, and jumped at an outlandish opportunity to do so.

Pursuing his business interests while attempting diplomacy, Gilbert had purchased trunks of French silver when prices plummeted in the revolution. But the ship of silver sent back to America had been pirated and last seen headed to Scandinavian waters.

And so, Mary, with her newborn and her postpartum depression, set off to Scandinavia on a treasure hunt to find Gilbert’s family flatware. 

She never recovered the silver—it was a wild goose hunt of course—but the treasure she returned with was the world’s first travel divorce memoir: a series of letters chronicling customs, landscape, and desperate desire published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It was groundbreaking for her day and ultimately led her to her husband and a man much more her intellectual equal: William Godwin. About her book, Godwin wrote: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book."

It was a book of beauty, not just for its depiction of the external snowy wilderness, but for its depiction of the internal swells of desire, and shameful desperation.

Another artist well acquainted with heartbreak, Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Jilted”: 

Tonight the caustic wind, love,

Gossips late and soon,

And I wear the wry-faced pucker of

The sour lemon moon.

Is this a direct address to a beloved or is “love” the caustic wind? Her words are slippery, like our feelings in the midst of heartbreak. And in their slipperiness, their lack of concreteness, they become unrigid and full of possibility as they form themselves anew.

When we are jilted, the familiar is ripped out, and new ways of seeing force themselves upon us. And there’s a recklessness for creative minds, a nothing-to-lose quality that denies the restraints once asked of them. We talk about breaking down the walls of heartache, but sometimes heartache is the thing that breaks down the walls, the calcified rituals and expectations we place on ourselves. 

In the days following Valentine's Day, I signed up for hip hop classes, enrolled in a free Italian program I’d found advertised on the Metro, attended a drawing class with my mother, and volunteered at Studio Theatre for free improv workshops. I was desperate to fill time and attention, but also to express what felt inexpressible with my tools at hand.

The comfort of a relationship creates a certain amount of inertia. In contentment, in comfort, there may be a desire to change or adapt, but there’s rarely a need. 

Heartbreak lends itself to need. And need bears fruit once conceived. 

Sharon Olds’ husband left her after 30 years of marriage. A confessional poet, she promised her children she wouldn’t publish any poetry about it for at least a decade. 12 years later, out came Stags Leap. That collection, primal in its depiction of heartbreak and needs and including—not to be too punny—some of the world’s most staggering metaphors, won her the TS Eliot and the Pulitzer Prizes that year.

Perhaps a better word for the post-resignation phase of heartbreak, is heartcrack. Leonard Cohen sings in “Anthem”: 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

Ejected from the den of the loved, I saw all kinds of things I’d missed, hidden in shadows in my relationship passivity. And in a world suddenly bright and abrasive, I realized I had to change to prevail. I wallowed and then filled my nights: besides the classes and workshops, I learned  to speed read because I couldn’t process anything at the lingering pace I normally read— at the end of every paragraph, I was in a memory of him, an obsessive wondering of who he might date next, or an excoriation of myself. 

Today, I am a lackluster drawer and a mediocre dancer and remember five phrases in Italian, but the will to jump out of myself did slowly, painstakingly bring me to a new path and so a new self, reassembled from that time of break. I left my job at an online travel magazine that was going nowhere (none of Mary Wollstonecraft’s lessons in vulnerability were allowed in the copy I was writing of gear reviews and hikes), and entered one of the world’s most vulnerable places: the writing classroom.

In “Pain I Did Not” from Stag’s Leap, Olds recounts what she felt she had to do in the aftermath of her husband’s leaving: 

I think he had come, in private, to

feel he was dying, with me, and if

he had what it took to rip his way out, with his

teeth, then he could be born.  And so he went

into another world – this

world, where I do not see or hear him –

and my job is to eat the whole car

of my anger, part by part, some parts

ground down to steel-dust.

In heartbreak, we eat cars we’d never need to eat from the comfort of a lover’s embrace. We find ourselves in freefall, yes, but also with a fleet of Ford Galaxies inside our belly. And there is a strange kind of nourishment in eating the engine. Even without our consent, it can drive us to create newness.

The final line of Olds’ collection is perhaps the most simple and the most generous in heartbreak history: “I freed him, he freed me.” 

Happy Valentine’s to all the heartbroken. Make new, my friends.

A thank you to my friend, Eve Ellis, who introduced me to Stag’s Leap and so much more. Eve’s debut pamphlet is out soon, and I hope many of you get to relish in her beauty and brilliance.

Nothing makes me feel farther from home than election season. Expat status offers a remove, lonely and arrogant, and if I’m not careful, I begin to feel like a minor god, or Nick Carraway, watching political parties eat themselves, watching gunshots in other people’s pools. 

It borders on irresponsible, being a long-term expat. It’s easy to roll eyes, wring hands, feel pity for the over-commercialed and under-insured. Strip sentences of any personal pronouns.

We moved to London for two years, a decade ago. The first few years here, I listened loyally to my former local NPR station, WAMU, a nostalgic umbilical cord running through the radio waves and over the Atlantic’s waves from Mother DC. A colleague, also an American but fully replanted on British soil long before I arrived, told me NPR just felt so parochial. And I thought, “what a snob.” But at some point—I can’t put my finger on the moment—I stopped listening to NPR and turned to the BBC and Channel 4 for my listening interest.

During election season, though, I plug back in. The BBC’s soundbites never satiate my need for Iowa, New Hampshire, Super Tuesday details. 

And as I listen, even in my interest, I feel that remove from my Americanness. But I’m not British, either. At most, maybe I’m a Londoner. More -er than -an or -ish, I fill in qualities of each country, wishing one could borrow the best from the other. I suppose this would be the danger for me of polyamory, wanting to cobble together the best qualities, becoming acutely aware of the flaws of one while in bed with the other. An assembled utopia that would likely become Frankenstein’s monster.

I know nationality isn’t pick-a-mix and straddling isn’t sustainable, but it’s hard not to imagine the bothness, its possibility.

***

The first time I moved away from America, I was seven and the country was deep in its ‘80s local news horrors:  poisoned Halloween candy; the lurking strangulation risk of a Fisher Price xylophone cord. Parents were pulling their children away from watching TV dinners warm in the microwave, the escalating panic of a nuclear holocaust wrapping its tentacles around America’s suburban fears. 

But my parents moved us across ocean and continent to a Cold War embassy that had been bombarded with 2.5 gigahertz microwaves, which is more like being inside a microwave than waiting outside it for your popcorn to pop. Until I was pregnant 12 years ago, the joke in my family was: how many extra digits will your children have?

All the small 7 o’clock terrors broadcast in America did little to dispel what the country looked like in relief of the Soviet Union. Arriving in Moscow, I looked back at America as a time and place lush with glitter, tan skin, knotty pine basements, people throwing McDonald's wrappers out the half open car windows with a casual wrist flick. A place of color and warmth and verve next to Moscow’s monochromatic cold gray. 

When we returned for summer visits, I wanted to wrap myself in everything American. Even at age nine, I could smell my own sallowness. The supermarket cereal aisle left me paralyzed in its possibility. But when we moved back to the United States in 1989, I started to feel a lack where I had once seen abundance and tried to shed my perceived Americanness: I gave up fast food for years; rejected any affinity for sports teams; never got cable television; despised the notion of the pledge of allegiance; refused even to play Monopoly. I untethered from place.

It’s the same pattern in adulthood. Our first week home in the U.S. for summer break, parking spots are plentiful, fellow walkers are friendly, Target is Mecca, everything feels built for my enjoyment. But by week three, the ease of life takes a menacing shape. The commercial intent behind everything; the wariness I feel in big spaces, checking out disgruntled people like a skittish horse; the fear of one of us getting sick, knowing what travel insurance won’t cover. Even the cereal aisle feels like a diabetic deception.

And the obsession we Americans have with flags starts to feel a little in my face.

While I missed America in Moscow, the Soviet Union taught me a wariness toward patriotism. More than a wariness, it planted a fear in me. And the root of the fear lived across the street from my bedroom window on the western end of the U.S. Embassy. 

The entire embassy compound was a fortress, surrounded by a 10-foot brick wall and beyond the wall was a barren field and across from the field was a park and in the center of the park was a statue of a boy.

All paths in Park Presnenskiy seemed to lead to Pavlik Morozov, its axis. And I couldn’t resist seeking him out. The terror his story invoked was an electric bolt, from throat to pelvis. 

Pavlik, the subject of countless poems, songs, stories, even an opera, was a model patriot. His martyrdom, the gold bar standard for generations of children who followed. His school became a shrine to which field trips of students made pilgrimage. I stood under that statue, looking up at Pavlik in gold leaf, shoulders thrown back, jacket open, cap tipped backward, brows furrowed, and I shivered. 

When he was 13, Pavlik, from a rural village in central Russia north of Kazakhstan, had overheard his father talking about forged documents he was selling to anti-soviets. Pavlik reported his father to the local authorities who sentenced his father to labor camp for a decade. A sentence that was soon changed to the death penalty. 

Pavlik’s family was devastated and enraged. The story goes that later that year, Pavlik’s grandparents, uncle, and younger brother snuck up on Pavlik while he was picking berries and stabbed him to death amidst the blackberry bushes. 

Pavlik’s family was rounded up and shot by firing squad.

The levels of disloyalty, the sequential horrors, celebrated in gold leaf, haunted me. At each stage, it felt impossible, impossibly wrong, to love a country more than a father, to kill a child in angry retribution, to celebrate the cause of a family’s slaughter. What kind of country inspired this in her people?

Only since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has it emerged that Pavlik’s story is myth. Pavlik was reborn yet again: revealed by scholars to be a young hooligan who smoked cigarettes and at age 12 was still in the first grade. Documents indicate now that Pavlik’s mother, angry at her husband for abandoning her and their children, coerced her son to inform authorities that his father had sold some illicit documents for travel. 

And as for the berry bushes and the stabbing, there was a bloody knife discovered in a house. But as this was 1932, the time of Stalin’s collectivization of farms when millions of farmers subsequently died and the legal process was a fickle breeze, there was no real investigation. 

The massive concrete letters erected in memoriam outside of Pavlik’s collective farm were crumbling within ten years of the fall of communism. And the only surviving photograph of the real Pavlik shows a malnourished child in a heap of other children, a far cry from the terrifying health and vigor embodied  in the statue outside the embassy. 

Pavlik’s story takes up an inordinate amount of my childhood mental space—like the Bermuda Triangle and the girls’ bathroom. And this week, reading ’s newsletter from January 27, I was reminded of Pavlik again. She writes of Lincoln’s Lyseum speech, nothing of this year’s election or even America today, until the last line. But it’s there throughout her piece, and I fear Pavlik’s shadow is there, too.

“Lincoln saw trouble coming,” she writes, “but not from a foreign power, as other countries feared. The destruction of the United States, he warned, could come only from within. ‘If destruction be our lot,’ he said, ‘we must ourselves be its author and finisher.’”

And the next line Richardson quotes of Lincoln’s speech, a sluice of cold water: “‘As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’”

Lincoln’s fears grew in response to men acting “on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence.” 

The Soviet Union hobbled on, 60 years after Pavlik’s early death, until its implosion. But how can any country that puts loyalty to a madman before one’s own wellbeing, survive?

It’s a different route to betrayal, a different kind of killing. But both are rooted in strong men and a form of national suicide. The story of Pavlik’s family, a family killing themselves in rage and fear; the story of America, shooting itself apart from within. Citizens choosing to dismiss 91 criminal counts against a man, even as his rhetoric has stopped acknowledging them. Others marinating in a stay-rich shortsightedness that refuses to consider their grandchildren’s survival, in what’s left of the berry bushes.

Certainly loyalty’s dimensions are more complicated in adulthood, but distance makes a view simpler, and my view across the pond is closer than it’s ever been to my childhood view. 

From my bedroom window in the American Embassy, I could see fireworks almost weekly. Fireworks were the USSR’s form of flags. They were loud, bright, spectacular. Distracting. But I’d never choose their pyrotechnic spectacle over the people beneath them. Later in his speech, Lincoln reassured the crowd, “I know the American People are much attached to their Government;—I know they would suffer much for its sake;—I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another.”

And, watching the fireworks of this election from afar, I wonder if my distance is my betrayal. 

My holiday season was bookended with mysterious events. The episode of early December had nothing to do with me, but the occasion of mid-January is a mystery of my own making, one I still haven’t reconciled. 

But I like to think both have to do with where human fallibility meets human magic.

In early December, I was getting ready for work in my bedroom. And as the screams of breakfast discontent rose from the floor below, I turned up a news podcast. Even the global BBC can’t resist a juicy local story: in Milford Haven, Wales, a neighborhood had been evacuated for a garden ornament. 

The ornament was older than the residents of the neighborhood. 100 years ago, a man selling lemonade from a cart had found it on the beach, lugged it home and plunked it in his front yard, like a garden gnome. Painted a cheerful tomato-soup red to match the window trim, for a century it sat amidst pots and windmills. Mrs. Edwards, the current homeowner, regularly banged her garden trowel on its top to loosen the dirt when digging. 

Last week, the ornament was revealed to be an undetonated 64-pound naval projectile. "We didn't sleep a wink all night. It knocked us for six," said Mr Edwards.

But committed to their years with the object, he explained further: "I told the bomb disposal unit 'we're not leaving the house, we're staying here. If it goes up, we're going to go up with it.’"

Even after the ornament was determined to be a bomb, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards refused its lethality, like those optical illusion straight lines that appear diagonal, even once you’ve been shown they’re straight lines. The brain refuses the proof.

I’ve always delighted in optical illusions. Where my brain sees something that doesn’t actually exist feels more like a form of magic than a betrayal. And listening to the Edwards’ story, I was reminded of my own shock at an object revealed, how even after revelation it felt impossible that one thing could be actually another thing. 

When I was a sophomore in high school, we were itinerant, our house under construction, living in rentals, motels, inns. I spent a good amount of time staying with friends. One afternoon at a friend’s kitchen table, I’d finished my biology homework and bored, flipped through to the back of the textbook. And I gasped. There on the page: an object straight out of my childhood, so memorable I could smell it on the page. I had used this object, pulled out of its pink case, countless times as an oxygen mask: running around the upstairs pretending there was a fire we had to escape, playing the role of firefighter and victim, taking deep breaths. And there it was, a photo on page two of chapter 24, “rubber dome placed at the upper end of the vagina, may be used along with spermicides.” A contraceptive diaphragm. 

My first reaction was that the textbook must have gotten it wrong. Because how could I have been so wrong? My bomb was my mother’s diaphragm. 

I am the only one in my family who believes this memory, the rest refuse its possibility. But, dear reader, the shock this image of a diaphragm sent through my 15-year-old body, the visceral memory of texture, scent, color is not one my imagination could create.

Or could I?

There are times when something seems so outlandish (an active bomb as ornament, a diaphragm as toy oxygen mask) that we can’t believe its reality. But there is also the pesky blending of historical truth and narrative truth in memory.

We treat things as certain, but they’re our perceptions of things and we are nothing if not uncertain (that dress is white with gold stripes unless it’s blue with black stripes! My husband’s Laurel will always be my Yanni). We trust the tangible, the infallibility of the object because we trust our senses. Just as we indulgently trust our own memories. 

In 1997, neurologist Oliver Sacks was assembling a book about memory, Uncle Tungsten, and in it, telling his own story of bombs that landed in his neighborhood in World War II.

In the first story, Sacks is seven and creeping in his pajamas with the rest of his neighbors as softly as possible away from a thousand-pound unexploded bomb dropped in the garden next to his. The blackout is in effect, and they use torches dimmed with red crepe paper to guide them away from possible obliteration.  

In the second story, a thermite bomb lands in his back garden and he watches his father and brothers ladle buckets of water from a stirrup pump on the “terrible, white-hot heat [...] hissing and sputtering.”

After Uncle Tungsten was published, Sacks’s brother Michael approached him with alarming news. Sacks and Michael had been away at boarding school, safe in the countryside, and had been told the story in a letter from their older brother. “You never saw it. You weren’t there.” 

Sacks, enchanted by the letter, had made the memory his own.

Plagiarizing others’ experiences in our memory and story-telling is called “cryptomnesia.” As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her memoir, memory “is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.” We all do it, unwittingly co-opting the experiences of others, writing them onto ourselves.

When talking about memory’s fallibility, my friend recounted a story her father told about a walk he took in the woods. He stopped at a sound, a sound that got larger and stranger. Sounds that convinced him it must be a bear. And then, the bushes shivering, a large man stepped out onto the path, his torso dressed in jars of blueberries. A blueberry picker. 

From across the fire, my friend’s older sister and mother yelled at him: “You weren’t there!”

How many experiences does any one person believe he participated in without ever realizing “you weren’t there”?

When Sacks interrogated both his bomb memories, he realized, in a marvelous footnote in a later book “I am struck by the way in which I could visualize the garden scene from different angles, whereas the street scene is always ‘seen’ through the eyes of the frightened seven-year-old I was in 1940.” So in imagining, strangely, he was gifted perspective.

We are marvelous creators. And that is what I’m trying to determine about the mystery of this past weekend: how much of it is my own creation? Can we anticipate something so much that we remember it, even if it didn’t happen?

My holiday season ends with a party my husband and I host for the English department (if you imagine Netflix’s “The Chair,” you’re not far off). The party’s theme “Give It Away” requires everyone bring a wrapped gift they received this season that they’re eager to get rid of: a Bruce Springsteen LP, a tie-dye kit, a bottle of moonshine, a ceramic tray with mirrored bottom, Tucker Carlson’s autobiography. There’s a fire in the backyard and we write down the sins and the mistakes of the past year to burn and the night ends with a re-gift white elephant, where sometimes one’s trash does indeed become another’s treasure.

A week prior to the party, my colleagues and I were discussing fox penises in the office. This time of year, you can hear shrieks of pain at night all over London. Our first winter in London, I felt sure someone was being murdered on my street. But it turns out it was just female foxes yowling in pain during mating season because the male fox’s penis is barbed, ensuring the female can’t run away before his semen is released.

But in this conversation, we were talking about the baculum—or penis bone—which brought us to the question of why most mammals have them but humans don’t. 

It turns out we did—well 50% of us did. Shortly after our evolutionary break with chimpanzees, when monogamy started to become a thing for our species, the baculum disappeared in humans. Some scholars believe Genesis may include the story of how human man lost his baculum

In an etiological myth that looks for answers to our origins, it would make sense. Why was man created? To care for God’s garden. Why were animals created? To keep man company. Why was woman created? Because the animals were lacking in some respects, for man. Why doesn’t man have a penis bone anymore? Because he gave it to a woman who was then created. The rare example of the male of a species doing the work of creation. Like seahorses.

In many ways, it makes more sense than the rib—none of which are missing in the typical man’s skeleton, they’re even and equal to woman’s. The first appearance of “rib” appeared in the 3rd century BCE in a Setuagint (Greek) translation of Hebrew’s tsela‘. But tsela‘ appears 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, in a variety of contexts: as an ark, an altar, a side-chamber, a mountain branch—what each iteration shares is the idea of something lateral to the main structure. An appendage if you will.

Could Adam’s rib really be man’s baculum? The world’s version of the Edwards’ missile and my mother’s diaphragm? 

As I was planning for our party, this felt like the ultimate “Give It Away.” The baculum would have to make an appearance. 

So I began plotting. Amazon doesn’t sell bacula, but Etsy does, with a whole host of options: racoon baculum, otter baculum, fox baculum. But the soonest delivery was two weeks. I tracked down a friend who has a coyote baculum, but she left it at her mother’s house years ago. A surrogate baculum would have to do. That very day, the cafeteria was serving chicken. I put a clean drumstick on my desk to dry, but it was gone the next morning. Roast chicken for dinner then. 

My plan: hide a baculum-esque bone in the cake, like a king’s cake. The person who found the baculum in their piece would have a year of abundance. Have your cake and eat it too sort of thing.

On the day of the party I cleaved the chicken bone to proper size (2 inches), boiled it, picked out the marrow with a skewer, boiled again, sanded into shape. If you find this weird or grotesque, I won’t try to disabuse you, just know that for a couple days last week, this became of the utmost importance to me. 

Once the crust of the cheesecake had set, I have a distinct memory of setting the bone as a radial into the cheese cake, between layers of pouring, so it would come out in a single piece.

95,000 years ago, man lost his baculum, and again on 20th January, 2024, we lost the baculum. Not a single piece had the bone in it. Colleagues and partners scraped their plates, some Googled whether the combination of lemon and dairy could dissolve a bone in a few hours of chilling. 

The baculum was gone.

My friend Phoebe still read to us from the opening page of Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain:

“SATURDAY.—I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing.”

In the days that have followed, I’ve wondered: could I have forgotten to put the baculum in the cake? In all my excitement and anticipation, did I create a memory of something I intended to do, but never did? We talk of making memories, is that what I did? Did I manufacture a precise memory? The words Phoebe read, Eve’s words by Twain, have come back to me: “It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing.” But in my case: it could be, of course that it did not happen, even though I was noticing. 

As we look back on memories, things give our memories substance. It’s what creative writing programs tell young writers to do: get things in there, their corporeal presences are the anchors of a story. But things are more illusory than their tangibility promises. And memories are just stories we tell ourselves over and over again, where fiction and fact are sifted so finely it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other. 

As a species, we’re slow, our vision running 100 milliseconds behind the real world; it’s only through guesswork and assumption that we’re able to hit a ball, kill a mosquito. Our perception is a constant act of imagination. And because of it, even in the things that seem infallible—a clear memory, an object—we are fools, making bombs into gnomes, diaphragms into oxygen masks, bacula into ribs, safety into danger, and danger into safety—the highest order magicians of our own existence. 

But I must have put the chicken-bone-as-baculum into the cake. Where else could it be?

On Christmas afternoon, I lost the family pet. We had friends visiting from America and had just returned from a walk in the park together; I was straightening, readying ingredients, resolving arguments, with a yellow bird on my head. Our cockatiel Charlie often perches there, it gives her some height and distance from the chaos of my kids, a lifting off point for flight around our house. When I slid the glass doors open and stepped out into the garden with a child’s muddy scooter, I forgot she was with me. And when I threw the scooter into the shed, the jerk of my arm, the sound of the clatter, they happened so in tandem I don’t know which, scared her. And I felt my mistake before I saw it: lift off. 

Bewildered, I watched her fly over the gardens of our neighbors, farther and farther, heard her panicked call and then it and she were gone, subsumed by the traffic and other bird calls. And finally I called for her, throwing my voice to her, a hopeful net, a futile reach.

My husband heard my alarm first. When he learned what had happened, I could feel his unspoken frustration and anger. I am clumsy with things, and sometimes people, too. 

As the two of us and our four kids were combing the neighborhood, my six-year-old Nicholas asked, “would it be worse to lose me or lose Charlie—I mean who would you miss more?” And of course I had considered that calculation almost immediately: thank god it’s the bird, not a child.  

Loss reminds me of loss. The loss of a pet foreshadowing more serious losses, a simulacrum of that feeling of disbelief, that I could have something or someone and then nothing or no one so quickly. A bird on the head, a bird in the air, open sky, then nothing. Pet loss so often comes from a careless choice or a lazy choice. But so does person loss.

When my youngest son fell off my shoulders he was only just over a year old. I was alone on a French hillside where we’d spent the afternoon exploring ruins. My husband had run ahead to get the car, my mother had taken my two eldest, and my father had gone down with the bags. I was left with the two youngest, each refusing to walk any farther. I’d hoisted Evander on my shoulders, then reached to pick up Nicholas, and, as I straightened up, I took my arm off Evander’s leg to stop Nicholas from slipping. 

As Evander spun down, I spun around to see him, face down and still on the ground. He was dead. He looked dead. I thought he was dead. I couldn’t speak, but I scrabbled at his body, and rolled him over. His eyes were wide open, and his face was saturated in blood. Too much to make sense of the source of it. I shrieked, the loudest I’ve ever shrieked, loud enough for whoever was near and far to hear. I held him up and his blood was a torrent, his body sliding in my wet hands.

By the time we found a hospital in the French countryside, my hair, neck, shirt, pants were caked in his rusty blood. They refused to use anesthesia for babies, so my mother and I had to hold him down as they made the nine stitches inside and outside his mouth. I watched his body writhe in pain and then passed out on top of him halfway through his operation. A doctor wheeled me out in the hall where I was forced to remain lying down, listening to his screams. He’ll bear the facial scar for life; I’ll bear the memory for life.

Directly after each event— the baby on the shoulders, the bird on the head—my memory suggested there was a breath of a second when I’d had a choice, a split second awareness of the dangers inherent. Like time’s version of the Pauli exclusion principle of two things never touching, within that space I’d had a moment when I considered not doing what I was about to do. I don’t know if this awareness is retrospective, but in the immediate memory of the event, it felt like I had gambled, like I wanted to see how the universe would respond to my risk. Like I had placed bets with lives.

These accidents always seem to be on the backs of banner days: the first half is magical and then tragedy ensues, as if the world is righting a happiness ratio. We spent the final hour of daylight on Christmas looking for Charlie, calling and whistling up and down the street, the children’s grief like dominos: by the time the keening got to my youngest, it was hard to distinguish real feeling from histrionics. No one had an appetite for Christmas dinner, and Nicholas got a migraine. In lieu of dessert, he and I sat in the dark on the floor of the bathroom as he shrieked in pain asking for it to stop, reminding me not to say it’s going to be okay: “it’s not okay!” Instead I whispered again and again, “I am here, I am with you, I am here” and it felt like atonement, the beginning of ablution for losing his pet, for ruining Christmas. 

We canceled our plans to travel with our visiting friends the next day, and instead hunted for Charlie. My husband went on his own, up through the nearest urban center, the direction I thought I saw her fly. I took the kids to the park across the street; we walked and played a cockatiel flock call on YouTube, my second son marching ahead in his high tops with the speaker on his head like a young John Cusack in Say Anything, pleading for his girl to emerge. 

In a pine tree across the field, I thought I saw a glint of yellow. We ran to it, until I realized it had been a trick of the sun on a pinecone. My oldest stood in the needles, under those tall trees, silently crying. He’s almost a teenager but it’s hard for me not to see the infant in his running nose. And I wondered at the chances of finding one specific bird. Is it fair to build a narrative of hope I no longer believe in?

My last gross miscalculation with a pet was in third grade: Teddy, a hamster that my brother, a friend and I were playing hide-and-seek with in the backyard. A crow swooped down to the plant where one of us had just hidden Teddy, and I watched in horror as the crow flapped off, my new pet wriggling in its talons. 

Losing a pet as a child is devastating; losing a pet as a parent is juggling three swords: your kids’ emotions (balancing the importance of crying and the need for distraction); your own emotions; your understanding of the hard world your pampered pet has just entered and their likely pain because of it, then modifying that narrative for your children. 

Right after Charlie flew away, in my initial disbelief, I’d said too much to my eldest, mentioned how unlikely it seemed to me that a bird, bred in captivity, could make it, with the cold, the foxes, the crows, outdoor cats looking for murder. 

Cockatiels are ground feeders, but we knew she’d be panicked and more likely perched, so we looked up, all of us, a band of five calling her name, whistling, singing, looking for yellow. Many birds were easy to dismiss, for color, for size, but they caught my attention anyway. I’ve developed a mild interest in birds, because I’m over forty. Pigeons hunched everywhere like fat detectives; magpies in their love pairs, crackling to each other like dried noses; seagulls elbowing through the sky up from the Thames; coal tits chittering in their silly black war helmets, protecting their hedges at all costs. The sinister luxury of a crow flap. The gang of ring-necked parakeets, their tail feathers like green knives in the sky. 

Once I asked my oldest son, who was taking a digital art class, to make me a photo of a branch of these green bullies in Santa hats. The only naturalized parrot in the UK, they’re a shock to see in London for the first time: like green travelers from a faraway land. But they’re immigrants like us, their origin unclear but full of legend. The most common theory is they were pets released ​​in the mid-twentieth century when a nation-wide fad of parrot import was followed by a nation-wide fear of parrot fever. Household pets were released to fend for themselves in a radically new climate. 

You have to respect them, these parrots transported across the globe, who not only made it but thrived. The last official roost count, in 2012, recorded 32,000 parakeets in London, but in the decade we’ve lived here, their populations have swollen. We used to have to go south of the river to see flocks of them, now they’re everywhere: on our walk to school, in all our local parks, in our back garden bullying out the other birds, even the squirrels, at the feeder. 

They’re talking parrots, known for being able to learn long sentences, and every now and then, you’ll get an inane phrase from a tree or the sky. 

As a child, my recurring dreams always had to do with flying. Sometimes falling, sometimes lifting off, but always in some kind of bodily flight. When I was five, I visited a neighbor who had a side-hustle as a birthday clown, to ask her to teach me the magic for flying. In middle age, this interest in flying has returned, and tempered by reality and science, it’s transformed into an interest in birds.

Crows are the brilliant minds but lutino cockatiels are the golden retrievers of the bird world: they’re friendly, attached to people, have a yellow crest like a punk mohawk but rosy cheeks like a child who’s gotten into its mother’s make up drawer. They are delightfully absurd and usually attach themselves to one person. In our case, it’s my husband. He can whistle to her and she’ll come, hawk-like to hand. 

The closest my husband has gotten to leaving me was when we got our bird. Before I brought Charlie home, I’d been researching birds for a while, and had settled on the cockatiel. At the end of the school year, one showed up, on the head of a student, in a yearbook spread about students and their pets. When I asked her about cockatiels as pets, she revealed her mother was insistent she get rid of her bird when she went to college the following year. Enter us. For over a year, I conferred with this student and her mother about adopting their cockatiel. 

Except I never consulted my husband because during that time he was with his dying father. I picked Charlie the cockatiel up four days after my father-in-law’s memorial service.

My husband likes order, cleanliness. Had we the money and time, I’d like the chaos of a menagerie. I meet his minimalism with my maximalism. He has a keen sense of hearing, and I’ve never heard well: a bird’s squawks and shrieks are little addition to the swells of four boys in a house, for me. Charlie chirps when we come home or leave the house, like a dog. And after we all left the house each morning, only my work-from-home husband and Charlie remained. Resistant roommates. 

And then, a week in, she became his companion, a being to sit with in his lonely grief. He insists now that she be out of her cage, free, flying around our house all day, even as he’s scrubbing bird shit from the baseboards. 

There are two ways people rescue pet cockatiels: you see where they alight and coax them down after their fear subsides, or someone must find them on the last day of their survival when they’re so depleted they seek out strangers and don’t fly, they find someone willing to help before a predator gets them.

In the days after losing Charlie, between Christmas and New Years, I joined eight online bird groups, hoping someone would report a sighting of her. People shared, my post but also their stories. An African grey parrot, also named Charlie, disappeared for three months, and just as his family gave up hope, he was found, miles from home. I became deeply invested in the story of another missing pair of cockatiels who flew away the same day as Charlie. One woman online updated me each time she went out looking for our bird.

On the fourth day of Christmas—the day of calling birds—we got a ding. Someone forwarded a vet office’s post to me. The vet was in Enfield, 11 miles north of us. Unlikely, but the grey markings on the bird’s feathers in the photo looked identical to Charlie’s. This bird had been found wandering the parking lot of a Waitrose grocery store, looking exhausted and unable to fly. 

We got up early and drove to Enfield to see if that bird was our bird, holding our breath as we passed over the north circular highway, wondering how a bird in captivity would make it that far, where she might alight on her way. What a wild thing a bird is.

The moment they brought the cage in, it was clear. She paced her bar, chirping. Half her tail feathers had been bitten off, her face scratched, but she whistled back a few bars of The Addams Family theme song to my husband and made a juddering flight directly to his chest. And then, to my relief, my head. 

She’s lucky, the vet said. The fact that she flies free in our house meant stronger wings, better survival instincts.

These stories of delivering a lost pet home to one’s children are rare, I know. And I am filled with relief. But also, when we go out, and I instinctively look to the trees to watch for flashes of yellow even as I know ours has already been found, I’m reminded that there’s something wonderful about looking up. There’s something wonderful about seeing something go free and wondering at its journey.

My husband said I looked stunned, standing out in the back garden after Charlie left. And it’s true, I was full of wonder as I watched my bird lift off, fly higher than she’d ever flown, despite so many certain dangers; to watch her not look back, up and up and up.

Thank you to the marvelous trio, , for the thoughtful feedback on this essay. A few days before Charlie flew away, a friend told me the story of finding an injured hedgehog on the side of the road. She insisted she and her mother take the hedgehog to a vet, 45 minutes away. As we were looking for Charlie, I thought about that story, that friend, how much I hoped Charlie would find someone like her when she was ready to come down from the sky. Thank you to the anonymous person who stopped in the midst of their grocery shopping and whatever else they had going that day to rescue our bird.

Kids,

Mama was not kissing Santa Claus because Santa Claus does not exist. Perhaps what you saw was your mama explaining to a man who is your dada who those gifts were for. It might’ve been the fourth time your mama told the man who is your dada about those gifts that she bought in between work and picking up your little brother from nursery. She might have looked like she was kissing the man who is your dada but it was shouty hissing because your mama is tired and done. She’s the only one who’s been checking your list twice, thrice, whatever the word is for four times. 

Someday, kids, your mama will show you the magic of her spreadsheets.

For now, all your mama wants for Christmas is for the man who is your dada to listen the first time when she explains which gifts are for whom and from whom. That and a solo holiday in a monastery. 

On the first, second, fifth, sixth, seventh, tenth, twelfth days of Christmas season, your mama searched for stocking stuffers, including her own to keep up this ruse that a man comes to your house with nice things he’s made for everyone in your house, even your mama. It would be poor taste for this imaginary man not to bring for her, too. So the Nivea glow sheet face mask and Victorian cardstock and fuzzy socks, those were her purchases. She bought them and wrapped them herself for herself.

The 12 days of Christmas which has doubled to 24 and now involves an elf wandering the house at night, is also, you guessed it: your mama. Elves don’t put themselves in cute positions. And when the man who is your dada whispers to your mama in the morning “did you move the elf?” it is his way of feeling responsible and being a part of your Christmas magic, too.

There’s more. I’m sorry. Vixen and Blitzen are not reindeer. They’re your mama’s friends who chose not to have children and look really awake when they come over to play. Sometimes they slip your mama a little time-consuming puzzle to gift you kids later because they are very kind, more like Rudolph really because on foggy nights, they definitely guide your mama’s sleigh.

On the night you leave out cookies for the man who does not exist and carrots for the magical reindeer who do not exist, it’s cute when the man who is your dada takes bites out of the cookies your mama made—with your help—and then a big horsey bite out of the carrot, pretending to be the magical reindeer. (The man who is your dada is not the magical reindeer either but this is his big Christmas moment.)

While you will soon learn, kids, that the ideal woman is a mother and a virgin, a virgin mother—which was impossible until recent science—your mama is not a virgin though she is a mother. Despite the fact that she is not a virgin, she would also like a silent night. Or at least one more hour of heavenly peace than last year.

You should know that the man who is your dada is a 21st century man dada who made the cut to procreate because he is kind, secure, and he cooks. But let’s be clear: your Father Christmas is, and always was, your Mother Christmas. The magic is your mama.

Friends, I leave this here should you also like to try it this holiday season. Charles Dickens’s punch recipe:

“Peel into a very common basin (which may be broken in case of accident, without damage to the owner’s peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double handful of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass of good old brandy—if it be not a large claret glass, say two. Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. Let it burn three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again.”

Right after intermission, still smacking our lips on Dairy Milk chocolate, we watched the Grand High Witch perform her bedroom moment. “This is for all the parents in the crowd,” she cooed. I sat up; my children remained hunched, chins resting on forearms, peering down from our balcony seats at the stage. The Grand High Witch’s song “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” chronicles the freedoms parents might relish were their darlings simply to disappear. Sleeping in. Going out. Pursuing hobbies. Eating a plate of food without the interruption of picking fingers. Realizing potential. Her arms are expansive, robed in purple metallics; she is alone and she is majestic: the physical manifestation for all of us adults, looking up from the stalls and down from the balcony, hungry with the promise. 

Imagining them all—all my pretty ones—just gone, a sob burped out of me. For the relief of it.

Roald Dahl’s stories are filled with terrifying adults, magnificently drawn even in their crudeness—the Witches, the Twits, Trunchbull, the Aunts—and while they’re fantastical, the truth at the center of his stories is that a child’s relationship with adults is ever precarious. A child understands just how little power he has.

My second-grade teacher, Mr. Snyder, introduced me to Roald Dahl’s The Witches during post-recess reading circle. We sat on the rug, and he sat above us, on a wooden chair with a cushion, and read for 30 minutes. My favorite part of each day. I was new to the school, new to the country that year and these stories were my escape.

As he read, I knew I’d never make a Dahl hero: I wasn’t an orphan, I wasn’t an abused genius, I wasn’t stoic, and I wasn’t really all that sweet. Sophie, Matilda, Danny, Charlie: I liked them, but I never saw myself in them. The closest I could get to a Roald Dahl protagonist was finding myself an antagonist. 

Which I did. Mr. Snyder, the teacher who delivered the scary stories, became the scary adult in my life, my Ms. Trunchbull. Unlike Trunchbull who threw children out windows, sent them to “the chokey”, flung darts at their photos, Mr. Snyder didn’t hate children. His disdain felt particular to me. There was no one thing he did, I could just sense his contempt for me from the beginning, scolding me more than others, casting me disapproving looks, sending me to the principal’s office. I was bossy, had a wretched haircut (the result of my mother’s rage against lice—my forgiveness is still in process), glow-in-the-dark Reebok hightops that I flaunted. I wanted to be in the center of the conflict. And where there was none, I was obliged to create it. 

His antagonism lent me a mantle: I was an imperfect heroine, inspiring a recess game of “dodge the pancake” with the pancakes he’d made us; I purloined a sequins tank top from my mother’s closet, threw it on in the girls’ bathroom, and nipples out, strutted into the classroom, refusing to change; I rallied kids to stage a revolt during a math lesson. I was highly annoying and felt entirely justified.  

I wasn’t good and I wasn’t interested in being good. I wanted to be loved for more than goodness, I wanted to be loved in spite of my badness. 

In 2020, I came back to Dahl for the first time since childhood as the pandemic raged and the ‘70s admission of mom rage came roaring back like bell bottoms. I was coursing through the Roald Dahl collection with my then seven-and five-years olds, feeling grateful that as the world fell apart around us, I was not filled with rage or fear or anxiety. With a newborn in the house, I was tired, yes, but I was spending time in nature, doing creative projects with my kids, recognizing the possibilities that this cocoon of time offered our new family of six. I was a little smug. Now, I am entering my third pass through Dahl’s oeuvre: with my youngest two. And this time has been a lesson for my own antagonism. 

Here’s the thing: I’ve been avoiding this essay. The nowness of it hurts.

In Boy, Dahl mentions the shape all adults take to children “as giants.” I’m reminded of it when my children’s small hands point to Quentin Blake’s illustrations, on the pages of the book I hold in my own giant ones. But there is also the funhouse mirror of parenthood. I’m both shrunk by the task and made large by it.

My first decade of parenting, the most regular compliment I’d get was “you’re so patient,” which never felt like much of a compliment until I stopped receiving it. In this last year, patience has left me. It took longer for the rage of 2020 to find me, but in the last year, it has increasingly filled me. Most often, it boils out on the morning commute to school or just before bedtime. Transitions of course. And it frequently has a target: my third, my most stubborn, my most demanding.

Earlier this year, I had a recurring fantasy of Nicholas, sulkily driving his toe into the ground with each step, being kidnapped. I imagined the hassle of paperwork followed by relief. Minna Dubin, author of the viral mom-rage essay republished in April 2020, revealed her mantra in rage is: “don’t touch him don’t touch him don’t touch him.” In September, I walked a half block ahead of my five-year-old, letting him navigate two suburban street crossings without me, so I could mutter “fuck you fuck you fuck you.” I was breaking maternal law, I knew, but also saving my child from myself.

Some days, in order to get to school on time, I pull him, my hand around his forearm, to our Tube stop, drag him really, and he trots, not to keep up with me, but to keep from falling. 

There’s his stubbornness, his need for constant stimulation, but that’s not where my rage was born. Nicholas’s own rage found a target in his younger brother, and repeatedly trying to protect my youngest from him, mine grew. Lately, I protect one young child from harm by harming my other, the source of his harm. And as Nicholas is learning to regulate his emotions, I’m learning new hormone levels in perimenopause. Our rage has filled the Venn diagram of us.

Nicholas’s feelings, too big for his body, pump into mine, inflating me. I am a storybook villain, absurd in my rage, minimized and made large by my venom, bloating even as I am made smaller by this singular emotion that controls me. I am boiling water, Ursula emerging, a genie’s release. 

The rage is spilling out and onto my other children, too. My youngest demanded a different cup, a different milk than the one I’d just given him, and I delivered it back again, but this time, I slammed it on the table in front of him, the cork pop of melamine on wood. The milk slopping out hung in the air momentarily like a magic trick, a puddle spilling upward. And I knew, even as I made it, the spill would cause my fastidious child to cry.

There’s the more frequent yanking of sweaters over heads, enraged hands enacting care, collar catching at the crown of their heads, and the continued forcing, their hair flopping back and forth, like diving ducks. It’s absurd, almost funny, as most brutality is.

Looking back at my moments of rage is like looking at photo stills. The memory is precise and filled with contour. The hangover of it—acid reflux—has found me.

Last month, getting ready for the airport, two days from his sixth birthday, Nicholas refused to dress himself. And counter to what all my experience in standoffs with a willful child has taught me, I insisted he do it himself. He didn’t. For 20 minutes, he refused. We were going to miss our flight so I did it for him, roughly, and then my husband took over. Standing in the cold, all my children were climbing in or next to the car, crying, and my arms were flapping in my long black coat like a human bat. My words threatening, about their ingratitude, their impossible lack of generosity and maturity.

Later, I climbed to the back of the airport bus where my eldest sat alone and away from our emotions, to apologize. He was wooden and a cold fear touched me: was this the moment I lost him? A true oldest child, he had borne witness to my rage, obliged my threats and name-calling by accommodating my demands, the only one of them to do so, and his face was closed to me. I am not the mom I was even a year ago, and he’s old enough to know it. I put my arm around his shoulders, they stiffened, but he let me stay there, didn’t shrug me off. And I breathed out.

Even as it feels bad, it feels good. To feel so deeply and purely one thing, the cacophony fades, pretense fades, and I surrender to it, fall into the emotion, unrecognizable, even to myself. That surrender is a form of relief.

This rage comes from a place of need, but it’s also an indulgence. 

We get dopamine from rage; in the past, it’s secured survival. With dopamine on our side, we won the competition for resources. And while it was once believed we were hard-wired toward or against rage, neuroscientists now see there’s more plasticity to it. Because of repeated exposure, for example, we might become more aggressive and rageful in response to experiences. Stress is the natural reaction to stressful cues in our environment, like a shrieking child who won’t stop. 

Nicholas has always been precocious, “twice exceptional” as they say, more Matilda than the rest of us. A few years ago, I told a good friend over a bottle of wine that I was proud to be his mom, because of how clever he is. That still haunts me, that somehow my brag was the reason for all the challenges we’ve had since, his truculence, our twinned rage, how powerless I feel, how powerless he is. I have begun to gravitate toward other parents with challenging children. When a friend told my husband and me that he tore the head off a doll and yelled at it, to keep himself from the object of his fury (his own child), I felt giddy in my recognition.

My husband, once the less patient of the two of us, was the one to figure out the pattern to Nicholas’s rages. They last 30 minutes. Sometimes Ben sets a timer to help himself cope with our son. And if we hold Nicholas, even at the risk of our own body, he will show his thanks in his affection directly afterward. He collapses into the person who stuck it out with him, repeats how much he loves them.

It wasn’t until Ben named Nicholas’s pattern that I began to consider the pattern of my own rage.  The heat, the engorgement, the bile, the monoemotion. And then the deluge of counter feelings: deep affection, guilt, regret, protection. There’s a dangerously addictive quality to penitence, and I don’t want to fall deeper into the habit.

Somehow, I have to remember that I’m the one with a developed prefrontal cortex in this relationship. The maternal instinct must override the reactive aggression. 

******

My older children and I are reading Wicked right now. Every morning, I recount the previous night’s chapter to Nicholas on our walk to school. It’s one of the tricks to getting him out of the house these days: the promise of a story. It’s helped. From the first chapter and the description of her exceptionally pointy teeth, Nicholas saw himself in Elphaba. Nicholas, too, has strangely pointy teeth. The marks of which we have all borne on our limbs.

He sees himself in the antihero, the one tasked with controlling insuppressable emotion. As with most toddlers, Elsa was the first love of his life. And like Elsa, like all of us, Nicholas wants to be loved for more than goodness, he wants to be loved in spite of his anger. 

Some early mornings, more often than his three brothers do, Nicholas patters in looking for company. He ropes an arm around my neck, threads fingers through my hair; I cup his body to my chest and stomach, his breath hot, cloying and comforting, against the nape of my neck. His inhale deep and private, his exhale bright and gushing, a furious spring, almost unbearable in its vulnerability. But our bodies make a sort of infinity, a promise not to leave, a promise of forgiveness even when it all feels impossible.

“Flight or invisibility?” asked The New York Times op-ed writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, surveying my students and me pressed around the table, on her 2019 visit to London. 

“Flight,” I replied without thought. I was deeply pregnant with my fourth child, my body increasingly leaden and bound to the earth, an anchor becoming an anvil lodged. But I’ve always chosen the superpower of flight. There’s a loneliness to each superpower as there’s a loneliness to the superheroes that wield them, always living clandestinely, usually a double-life even loved ones don’t know or understand. Coming off as common-place, but performing necessary feats unbeknownst to all around them. 

The loneliness of flight is a solitude—being above it all, seeing below, a fuller picture. The only company, the wind, the rush almost unbearable. But where flight speaks to solitude, invisibility speaks to deep loneliness—to be among and unseen, to be ignored, to be not even missed, because were you ever really there? Can something unseen have matter? Can it matter?

I’ve been thinking about the invisible lately because in a decade, maybe two, I won’t have flight, but I will have invisibility.

Friends, aunts, my mom, contestants on The Golden Bachelor have all said it: “I’m invisible.” There’s no self-pity in their tones, it’s just a statement of fact.

A very long-standing fact.

Akiko Busch describes the phenomenon as: “The invisible woman might be the actor no longer offered roles after her 40th birthday, the 50-year-old woman who can’t land a job interview, or the widow who finds her dinner invitations declining with the absence of her husband. She is the woman who finds that she is no longer the object of the male gaze—youth faded, childbearing years behind her, social value diminished.”

Are they really invisible? Some of my recent experiences point to yes, but am I complicit? For the last two weeks, I’ve been observing my own line of vision. I take the Tube to and from work every day, a feast for observation of the masses. Where do my eyes linger? What do my eyes avoid? I realize this study elides all steps of the scientific process. And yet, when I exit the train car, I have a harder time noting the details of older women. Without training myself to do so, I’m not paying much attention to them. Even as they present a snapshot of my future, I’m oblivious. I have made them irrelevant. 

My mother was a model; she spent much time in the male gaze; I spent much of my childhood scowling at men gaping at my mother, and at the same time, looking at photos of her, wondering why I wasn’t as beautiful as she was. But my favorite photograph of her was taken recently. She is 73 in it, her cape thrown around her shoulders, her hand on her hip, her hair shining silver, her body looming large and dominating the horizon, as I sit on the beach below her and photograph her unawares. Her mouth is opening, in speech. As her estrogen has dwindled, since menopause and her hysterectomy, my mom has been franker. She is still loving, devoted, generous, but there is an honesty, too, in her words about what she needs. What she wants.  And not everyone approves.

After gatherings with younger people, she and I have both discussed the way my peers’ eyes glide over her. I’ve watched her—this dynamic, extraordinary woman—go invisible to others before my eyes. A trick of light and age. She hasn’t opted for Botox, but she’s said she understands it as more than a desire for youth and beauty. Injecting snake venom also means prolonging your relevance in the world. A quick magic trick that helps in the moment but I fear sets us back further from where we must go if we’re going to celebrate women aging, benefit from what they have to teach us. 

The British author Victoria Smith explores this diminishment in her book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women: “You are still an object; you’ve just changed in status from painting or sculpture, to say, hat stand.” Most of human history has not been fond of or kind to the older woman. A hat stand is comparatively gentle. 

What the M-word tells us:

As the perimenopausal symptoms roll in—hot flashes, headaches, night sweats, distraction—I am just beginning to understand the effects of this invisibility. Everyone wants to talk about your pregnancy; no one wants to speak about your menopause. There’s a long tradition of saying by not saying this something that 50% of the population will experience. When my mother was starting perimenopause, she reached out to her elders. Knowing my grandmother’s sense of modesty, she waited until my grandma and her sister were together, and they’d each had a martini. Their response was shocking. Not because they refused to talk about it and their symptoms, but because these two sisters, self-proclaimed best friends, never more than an hour’s drive from each other all their lives, had never, ever talked about it with each other. 

The condemnation of older women shows up in the scant medical knowledge we have of menopause. Scientists still don’t know the best way to treat menopause symptoms. “We know more about male baldness,” a friend reminded me the other night. What we do have are women who have been through it. 15% of our population at any one time knows something of it firsthand. We just need to see and hear them first.

At a reading last weekend at London’s Southbank Centre, a presenter walked out on stage in a fire-engine red jumpsuit. In her summary of the author’s new novel, she turned to the author: “I think this character is going through menopause, and as a 50-year-old woman, I’m really interested in this.”

If you look at the frequency-of-use word chart, Google Ngram, “Menopause” rose in texts only as the boomer generation arrived to it, in 2000. Before that? Almost non-existent. And before 1852? Absolutely non-existent. It’s recent enough that to hear what was once invisible named on stage, gives a jolt. 

How the Hag is born 

The invisibility of older women springs from a number of sources. There are the artificial currencies of youth and beauty, of course, but the past has also shown us that a visible older woman has a target on her back. (We mothers, preoccupied by our children, are safest. Have always been deemed safest. The least likely disrupters.) Older women—especially unattached older women—have been pitied, but pity is almost always born of fear. And so, the pitiful old woman becomes the wicked old witch. 

One needs only look at the statistics of the witch trials to understand the antipathy toward a woman in and beyond menopause (especially a woman who does not go gentle into that good night and disappear, especially a woman involved in medicine and healing with knowledge of the natural world). Two-thirds of those killed were women of menopausal age or older. Deemed, by their society, irrelevant. And somehow, paradoxically, in that irrelevancy: dangerous. The visible were made to disappear.

The lesson? For older women, silence and invisibility have long been a means to survival. This is ancient history, yes, but ancient history has a funny way of still stinking. We’ve all seen the legacy of those trials: the headlines about older women politicians, women in public spaces labeled “Hag”.

Like most self-involved people, I oftentimes become acutely aware of injustice only when it spills itself all over my shirt. It’s only because the invisible are women I’ve known since they were visible, only because I’ve hit perimenopause and the writing is on the wall for me, too, that I am recognizing my participation in this magic trick. Make the woman disappear!

The real magic

There is no body that changes more than a woman’s body. As we are talking about essential 21st-century skills like grit and resilience, this is something worth noting. Before her body has even stopped growing, a girl is cycling, shedding every 28 days. For the average woman, these changes will occur 450 times, and within that span, many—not all—will get pregnant and their bodies will withstand producing 45% more blood, swelling, aching, bulging, vomiting, leaking, forgetting, burning, to grow a new member of our species. And then, while a man slowly loses testosterone over a 20 year period, a woman will have all of that chemical shift compounded and so intensified within four years. Superhero stuff.

It’s time, I know, to travel to Hagdom. 

All the women I work with have been listening to BBC’s podcast, Witch. Of these women: one has two black cats and is named Eve, another burns herbs, another went through menopause before 30, and another isn’t sure she ever wants to have children. So they all have a bit of the witch about them. (I have a long, pointy, crooked nose, sufficiently witch-like.)

I’m late to the seance, and only started listening to the podcast as they are finishing it. In investigating the history of the word witch and its implications, the podcast’s topics are dizzying: women’s health, how the change in land rights affected the witch trials, invisibility, paganism, catholicism, fairytales, our relationship with nature, and the overlap of science and magic. It’s brilliant and heroic. The writing, by India Rakusen, is exquisite. 

Like the women killed for witchcraft, the old witches of story are always filled with knowledge and agency, and our stories have chosen to see danger in their knowledge and agency. We don’t know what to do with the ambiguity of a woman who has lost what we value most about womanhood: childbearing, care-taking, youthful appearance, docility, and then who simultaneously refuses invisibility. So we witchify. Make the witches examples of what not to be in old age.

Witch’s eighth episode, “Hag,” begins in Fife, where Macbeth ordered the slaughter of Macduff’s entire family because of the paranoia born of the witches’ warning. Macbeth’s withered witches foretell of his success and the ramifications of his too-much ambition. Had he heeded their advice, lives would’ve been saved. And while he is the tragic hero, they are the antagonists.

In Slavic culture, Baba Yaga lives in the forest on the outskirts of society, communing with wildlife and testing moral character in humans. She is old and indifferent to what people think of her. In some stories, she is ferocious and ugly, an eater of children; in other stories, she helps the hero or knight on his quest and then disappears again into the forest, or up into the sky in her mortar with pestle.

In West African tradition, Obayifo is a shape-shifter who flies by night, looking for prey. In Ashanti Twi, oba means "child" and yi means “to remove”, quite literally, “to remove a child”. It’s not a far leap to the demonization of a female body that won’t produce a child. 

In Celtic tradition, we have Cailleach, Gaelic for “old hag”. She has shaped mountains, valleys, but is also a “storm hag” who brings about certain destruction. And cold weather. (Which we happen to need right now.)

Is it time to rebrand the old witch? Wicked did it with the young witch. 

Witches, superheroes. They share capes, flight, knowledge the rest of society doesn’t see. It seems not so hard, just an act of reenvisioning, to make the old witch a superhero. 

My mother’s generation demanded medical care and research, uttered the word “menopause” aloud in conversations behind closed doors, mine declares it on stage, naming the thing only alluded to on the page. As a society, we are acknowledging the long-held judgments, silences; the once invisible, the once decried are being written about as complex characters.

There’s an opportunity here, for women have only relatively recently been the written voice of their own history. The story of the old woman is in the process of a makeover. Early feminists like Virginia Woolf whiffed the potential, insisting that if a novel is to stay novel, the old woman in the corner of every drawing room of every page must be allowed her complexity. “[Mrs. Brown] is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.” 

Perhaps the fears around menopause are because of the magic in it, the metamorphosis a woman’s body, her very chemistry undergo. Sharon Blackie suggests a magic in post-menopausal women at the end of episode 8 of Witch, 

“Folktales and fairytales help us reimagine ourselves [...] We need new ways of imagining what an older woman can be in this culture. That isn’t ridicule, that isn’t irrelevant, that isn’t silenced. Because let’s face it, we are fertile creatures for a relatively short amount of time and by the time menopause comes around, most of us, if we’re lucky, have got at least another 30 years to live. What are we going to do with it? And I see menopause as a kind of alchemical process in which everything that is superfluous is burnt away, and we are left with the core, with the essence of who we are.”

Imagine if we can look in the mirror and not see crows feet with dread but as a life filled with enjoyment, not see age spots with dread but as years out of doors, not see jowls but a mouth with stories to tell? To be inspired by women’s age? To be inspired by the incredible feat that is a woman’s body from babyhood through old age? It begins with valuing the voices of women several steps ahead of us. Treating them like they’re ahead of us, not behind us as Ruth Handler suggests at the end of Barbie. “We mothers stand still so that our daughters can look back and see how far they've come.” 

No, no, no. Let them be ahead and visible to us. So that one day we might say—

Call us Hags, watch us fly.

Sincerest thanks this week to Karena de Souza, a couple steps ahead and so full of knowledge, I want to bask in her light. To Miche Priest and Henri James, who encouraged this essay and urged me to make the ending one to remember and who, most importantly, are a part of this endeavor to put women on stages, and use their own stories for a better future for all. To Nicolas Marescaux for taking a look at a really ugly first draft and appreciating what I was trying to do. To Chris Coffman, for reminding me to tell a story and not lose my place in it. To Hannah for writing me a found poem in a recent moment of fury over this; to Phoebe for always seeing the through line even when no one else can; to Eve for bringing into my life this podcast, constant literary gifts, her genius; to Natalie and Becky for the conversations about why women are fundamentally built for change. To the women a few steps ahead of me who have shown me how to be a woman and how to live. And to my mom, for all the advice and feedback, chatting with me on the phone as I distractedly shuttled a child to a sleepover, and then the next day as I sat in a hotel bar waiting for another child at a birthday party, where strangely the wall behind me was mirrored glass with Mrs. Dalloway’s opening pages etched into it; opening pages in which she alludes to menopause, without explicitly naming it, and a book that ends with a moment of utter joy as 52-year-old Clarissa looks across the street and into the window at an older woman wrapping up her day. It felt a bit like the late nights 30 years ago, when we’d pour over my handwritten pages making corrections. Then I’d read aloud, and you’d type all my words out on that IBM PS/1, mom, finding their coherence. Thank you.

I came of age in the 90s so I feel most alive when everything around me has the promise of death to it. Autumn is Reality Bites writ real. My favorite season. 

Soggy walks, wet leaves, the smell of the earth refusing our concrete, like a swell of wave in the air, demanding our senses pay attention. The embarrassment of yellow ginkgo trees, a flash of color before we cut to the dark, the cold, the dead. One final dalliance before the year leaves us forever.  

The original emo poet, John Keats, made the last work of his career an ode to autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

But my children have stripped October of its poetry.

Keats’ “soft-dying day” isn’t soft at all when you have four young boys and the sky is dark by four. Because there is nowhere to go but here and so here becomes a nightmare of popcorn in the couch, claustrophobia, screentime negotiations, fashioning slingshots out of every household item we own. And added to our numbers: the mice have invaded from the park across the street. They are eating our couch because there’s popcorn in our couch. Sunday family meetings have yet to happen on an October Sunday. In October, there is no sign of the positive discipline weekend workshop my husband and I did four years ago.

By now, we should be in routine. The transition between summer free-for-all and school’s free-for-none is over, and yet we’re still dealing with how to pack our bags, how to remember our homework, our lunch, our violin—three of my four children are barely using a fork. All the foods our youngest approved of in September are comida-non-grata now and the menu options have narrowed to a nutritional tundra including peanut butter, crustless bread, and frozen (not thawed!) peas. 

Then there’s of course the month’s looming hell-raiser: Halloween. I used to rejoice in pumpkin picking, costumery, gourds on the table, leaf crowns. Now I’m either ordering future landfill or claiming I’ll make the costumes myself in time that doesn’t actually exist which means ordering future landfill but late and so spending money on rush orders on whatever’s still in stock. And I’ll let you guess what gourds have become. It is the cryingest of holidays. Our tears would feed a river on this day. 

I can’t even be maudlin and melancholy myself because my children fill up all the space with their whinging. And here’s the worst: I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

Last night at dinner, the noise level of four hangry boys wanting to talk about their day’s highlights and woes built to a crescendo; a pet bird whistling The Addams Family theme song whirled around our heads; I looked at my husband across the table and WS Graham’s poem opener “Gently disintegrate me” floated before me. 

There is a terrific entropy happening in myself and in us.

Capture System

And I realize that is what October has become: instead of watching the natural world shut down, I am chronicling our own deterioration through our inability to create systems. Imagine the leaf on a stream, its edges curling like a boat’s hull or a beetle dying, that’s us. I’d say we’re zen in our refusal of systems, but we’re battered and we’re gasping for air. 

In a conversation with my online writing group last week, we were discussing how we capture and organize observations, ideas, notes, readings, so that we can use them later in our writing. “What is your note capture system?” asked the facilitator. The flood begins: Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Raindrop & Pocket. The chat aflame and my blood pressure rising. It’s anxiety-inducing to consider the systems I don’t have in place. 

In a breakout room, Raksha asks, “what if I don’t have time to develop systems?”  

“My kids are alive, that is my capture system,” I tell Raksha and Rob.

And I look to my bookshelf for help.

Memory

Once upon a time, I’d pick up any book that had the word “Autumn” in its title. The season was that irresistible to me. Above me on the shelf, Ali Smith’s novel Autumn begins: “That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have always will, it’s in their nature.” 

Six years ago today, my husband and I went to a reading by Karl Ove Knausgaard of his book, also titled Autumn. It is the first in his Season quartet and it chronicles quotidian life for his yet-to-be born fourth child. The book includes meditations on rubber boots, badgers, lice, plastic bags. I was nine months pregnant with our third child and that year was perhaps the last time I really loved autumn. 

Since then, my husband and I have gifted the rest of Knausgaard’s quartet back and forth: we simultaneously gifted each other Winter, he gave Spring, and I gave Summer. 

As I pull Autumn off my shelf today, relics of the past spill out. 

A postcard of David Hockney’s Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica that reads: “B, remember our ride down the Pacific Coast Highway  in the muscle car and you in your muscle shirt? -A” 

A card from my husband in 2017. It is Valentine’s Day and we are apparently in Morocco. As he is writing, I am sleeping with our first born who must be five as his father is writing this. In the card, in my sleep, he tells me about a cat that broke into our riad and left chicken scraps all over the floor. “In spite of it, I can’t think of a better partner for these (Mis)adventures than you.” 

Who stuffed these in here? Me? Him? A child of ours?

There’s an inscription, too, from a friend: “To Alissa and Ben, Your decision to bring a third child into the world gives me hope as I envision children parented by people like you. Love, Robyn, Autumn 2017”

We are at the point in our marriage and the point in our lives when it becomes clear nothing is a trajectory. And to promise it will be is disappointment. 

People too, I realize, don’t move in upward arcs. Last night I had a dream we were gathered for Christmas, a flock of birds rose up and my dad walked down to the river at the back of the house—some house. A shark jumped out of a freshwater river and consumed the top half of him. I was the only one to run to him. No tears came, but my face looked like Edvard Munch’s Scream.

Simultaneously, my husband had a dream we were performing in an immersive all day theater experience. All our friends had been invited. We moved field to field, and I was annoyed at his lack of enthusiasm.

There are very clear lines I can draw from these dreams to our lives—they are more than analogies—but I’ll resist the dream analysis. Just know this: we don’t usually share dreams, but October is weird. And when we climb out of bed, stiff with cold and the sameness, we must know each other again, get things squared so all else doesn’t fall apart. Because things are falling apart, they always do.

Reconciled

A student reads to us aloud: “they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things.” At school this week, I’m discussing with my students the reconciliation between the two protagonists in E.M. Forster’s Howards End. After a series of hurts, misunderstandings, bad choices, the two sisters find themselves together, surveying their old things and rooting in their shared memories. Their banter takes on a familiar patter, like spring rain. And the passage snags at me.

In autumn, trees begin to go dormant, with the cooler weather and shorter days, they slow production of the hormone auxin, putting a strain on the bond between branch and leaf. Eventually, the bond becomes so weak, the leaf will blow away. And as trees stop growing, their energy moves from their leaves to refocus on their roots. 

There are many passages dog-eared in our copy of Autumn, and one points me to a string of sentences a former self must’ve known I’d need today: “Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it.”

And so, I book a date for this Sunday. We’ll see Teju Cole read this time, he and I. The roots of this family. 

A big thank you to for seeing the sequence, for insisting I should write about life in October and for the early conversation.