Everything Happened | vol. 162

Is this gratitude

I am grateful that sometimes when I come home and Nick is working on something in the house and I see him from behind, the cord of his bluetooth earbud things hanging around his neck looks like a leather cord necklace, something that might have a smooth stone or shell as its charm, and for a beat I consider the possibility that Nick has decided to experiment with being a Necklace Guy, and that idea is both horrifying and endearing, and the mystery of it all is exciting, that there are things about Nick that are unknown to me, despite having put in well over my 10,000 Malcolm Gladwell hours on this man, that we are all ultimately ciphers, even to those who knows us best

I am grateful that I don’t have to go to a music festival ever again if I don’t want to, which, it feels impossible that I would want to, even though I went to a lot in my 20s, and kept wondering why I wasn’t having more fun, and the reason was that having a bad reaction to psychedelics in a crowd while watching MGMT and needing to sit down, which then ushered in intrusive visions of my #1 death fear (getting trampled in a crowd crush) and then standing up again before realizing that no, I will have to be sitting down to survive this event, that that is not actually what a good time feels like. That maybe the reason I fantasize about about being at home reading whenever I’m at a concert is that I don’t usually find the live music experience satisfying, and that I don’t need to keep paying money to see if that’s still the case just because I’m afraid if I stop seeing bands I’ll just be an old lame mom, instead of a woman who knows herself and doesn’t have anything to prove. That maybe old people don’t become “lame”, they just stop kidding themselves.

I am grateful nonetheless that my best friend Sjanneke, my kids’ Uncle Sjan, has discovered that she loves Bonnaroo and wants me to go with her and that I will probably do it because I would pay $500 to spend three days with her at an Avis Car Rental stand in an airport, to be honest, because I fall easily under her influence and all you need to know about her is that when I’m around her I think it’s a good idea to eat an edible of brain-melting potency right before hosting a family graduation party and that when her therapist told her she was going to stop seeing clients at the office in Sjan’s neighborhood and only see clients at her office across town, Sjan talked the therapist into coming to her house for sessions.

I am grateful that when I Googled breast ptosis the other day that I discovered that my situation is not really that bad, maybe a “grade 1”, and that ultimately my breasts look the way I remember my mom’s looking when I was a kid, which were small and set low on her ribcage, which I thought were very womanly and nice. (I am grateful that my husband will read this newsletter and be trolled by having to think about his mother-in-law’s breasts as they relate to mine.) I am grateful to remember that when I was a flat-chested teenager, I envied the “inframammary fold” that my bustier friends had, which seemed to me such a sexy, adult feature. I am grateful to remember the apocryphal? “gypsy curse” of may you get everything you want multiple times per day. (I am grateful to remember that the Hungarian side of my family claims apocryphal? gypsy heritage and the priest wouldn’t baptize my grandmother until her birth name, which was deemed too gypsy, was changed.) I am grateful that the Evil Witches newsletter included an interview with two women, one of whom got a lift and augmentation and one of whom got a reduction, despite knowing I will never go under the knife for fear of Donda Westing myself, leaving my children motherless because I wanted cooler boobs, though never say never, I shouldn’t claim to know what will seem like a reasonable risk or expense to me ten years from now.

I am grateful that while pushing Jane home from downtown in the stroller on Saturday, I participated in an extended fantasy about what we would do if we went for a third kid and ended up having twins, which included converting our breezeway into an additional bedroom and full bath using a home equity line of credit, which is something I don’t actually understand but which my friends have done?, and maybe having my mom live with us for half a year, or getting an au pair like Kate and Thomas did, and that it would be a crazy first five years but perhaps ultimately there would be this self-contained gang? and Nick and I could sleep in while the older ones poured cereal and turned on the TV on Saturdays. I am grateful that my approach to anxiety is to come up with a worst-case scenario so detailed and fleshed out that I start to feel sad that the dreaded catastrophe probably won’t befall me after all. I’m grateful that when I shared this with Nick, he was like “why not convert the sunroom instead” instead of “you have a six-month-old baby and a three-year-old, what is wrong with you.”

I am grateful that my kids share a room now, and that I can stand in their doorway after they’re down for the night and see both of them sleeping at once, my raw, tender heart right there in perfect stereo.

I’m grateful for one perk of small town living being that I can easily be #1 in line at the library for a buzzy new release, and that after a few months of listening to audiobooks, which I still think of as “books on tape”, at work and while doing chores so I that could keep up with my Goodreads goal, to have gotten the new Taffy Akner-Brodesser book in paper form and to find it so engrossing that I wish I could use PTO to stay home and read it, which I haven’t felt about a book for a while. I am grateful to have learned that audiobooks don’t scratch the same itch that reading with my eyes does, and that it is not the primary way I like to “read” but a nice option if I have to do a punishing drive or my book club picks something I think is dumb.

I’m grateful for B.J. Novak’s children’s book, The Book With No Pictures, which I imagine all parents of the under-six set who read this are familiar with, but which I had not picked up or investigated because we already have so many kid books, though I hate most of ours. I’m grateful that the aforementioned Uncle Sjan sent this to Desi around the time that Jane was born, and that when I read through it myself first, I was dreading reading it to him because it involves a lot of voices and silliness and I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I also felt like it was too high-concept for my three-year-old, generally feeling like, “there’s no way this will work.” I’m grateful that the very first time I read it to him, he lost his damn mind with excitement, with the nonsense words, and the premise that the book is controlling the adult reading it. I’m grateful that the novelty of the book hasn’t worn off, that Desi was so proud to show it off to his nearly six-year-old cousin when he visited last week, and that they both could not fucking handle how h i l a r i o u s it was.

I’m grateful that last night Desi couldn’t settle down to sleep so I told him I would stay in his room with him for a bit, and I got on the floor on my stomach and read Fleishman Is In Trouble, and he said he was going to read, too. I’m thankful that he decided to read The Book With No Pictures, even though he can’t read. There are no pictures to cue him but he still is able to approximate most of the text, through memorization or just a recall for the shape the text takes up on the page, which amazes me. I’m tickled to hear him shifting between the two “characters” of Narrator being controlled by the text and Narrator breaking the fourth wall. I’m hearing him workshop his comedic timing and being meta and it’s so pure that I can’t focus on the book, the one I like so much I want to take PTO to read it, so I just stare at the page and listen to him without looking at him, because I don’t want him to feel observed or self-conscious. I think to myself that it’s not my job to preserve him from the world, that it’s my job to prepare him for the world, but that I still want to keep him under glass and never let the ugliness of life get its fingerprints on him.

I am grateful for the Tangle Teezer comb, which helps me comb out my hair, which (I blame hormones) used to be so slippery and textureless that it couldn’t hold a barrette, and now is prone to tangles from hell and stray-dog matting at the nape.

I am grateful to buy cold brew in a big jug at the grocery store even though it is against my religion to buy something premade that is, like, so easy and cheap to make myself, though if it was that easy, I’d just be doing it, wouldn’t I?

I am grateful for the ego boost, two months after it was published, to see that Edith Zimmerman wrote about an Instagram post of mine in the lede to a piece on The Cut about what people keep in their underwear drawer. I am grateful that I have a daughter named Jane and my friend Kate has a daughter named Edith and that we joked that our Edith and Jane could be co-editors of Hairpin 2.0 in 25 years, because digital media is healthy, sustainable, thriving and will definitely still be a thing.

I am grateful that I have found a way, a real way, not the way I have put forth here mostly to entertain you, to find a gratitude practice that feels healing and not self-gaslighting in the midst of one of the heavier depressie episodes I’ve experienced in a while.

I am grateful to be cursed with getting everything I want. I am grateful for Justin Wolfe for doing it first and showing me how. I am grateful for Fleabag which I am watching again, for Russian Doll, which I finally finished, and for Harry Nilsson and Love the band and love the noun. I’m grateful for the Love album on vinyl Nick gave me for Valentine’s Day one year, for us to be so old and married that I couldn’t even guess which year it was.

yr mate,
Evie
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