One day in June, I sat before my huddle of monitors at work with four calendars: my daughter’s daycare calendar, my son’s pre-K calendar, the academic calendar of the college that employs my husband as faculty, and the administrative calendar of that same college which also employs me as staff. And I entered everything into the Google calendar that my husband and I share. Color-coded and everything! Who’s horny??
I was probably at the bottom of an enormous tankard of cold brew, bopping to a perfectly assembled Discover Weekly playlist (spotify i would die 4 u), and pumping my left knee up and down with rabbit-y intensity. I find data entry soothing so if I had to be at work, this was a pretty good time. But after I’d keyed in every idiosyncratic closure (i.e. the college is open on Labor Day but closed on Columbus Day, Jane’s daycare closes the Friday before Labor Day? as like a fun pregame situation? in addition to Labor Day itself, the elementary school where Desi will go for pre-K liberally peppers its weeks with early dismissals and teacher in-service days), my mood went into freefall. I felt my limbic system gather itself into a sustained existential shriek. I imagine the cold brew was only 15-20% responsible for the shriek.
How were we going to do this? How does anyone do this?
I mean, we are more equipped than most! The daycare, the school, the college, and our house exist within two square miles of each other! Both of us are able to flex our jobs pretty hard, and I flex my job the hardest of all! I dare someone to tell me to me to be seen at my desk more, to perform good-worker kabuki! But with the colorblock rainbow laid out before me on the calendar, it felt like so much.
From there we started to wheel and deal with our respective moms and also get some sitters locked down. We made it. Or, if we don’t die before Thursday when Desi finally starts pre-K, we’ll have made it. It was not pretty. Next summer will be its own new, horrible childcare puzzle box. Slide this piece here, flip this piece up, line these two dots, try to pull it apart. Hope you remember how it all goes back together in the end! Childcare/school and modern work culture are beyond invisible to each other, they are actively hostile. Lobbing grenades blindly over the ramparts like a game of Battleship, an acrimonious divorce where each party is trying to ruin the other party so hard that they lose the plot entirely. So crazy that no one has ever experienced this phenomenon before me, better be as loud as possible about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
August was an opera. August nearly killed me. There were some bright spots: I got to meet my friend Emily irl when her family was in D.C. for the summer and our babies played together. I stood in the river up to my thighs holding a beer next to a new friend who grabbed for Janie upon seeing me and held her for an hour, and who didn’t flinch when I said, in response to her question about my “dream job”, that I’m divorced from my own desires after supporting my husband’s academia\c pursuits for so long that I actually have no idea what my dream job is. (My dream job is some sort of co-op situation where I work two shifts a week doing community laundry or whatever and then use my universal basic income check to pursue my creative interests and someone else cares for my children from 9-……..6 every day, which is to say, my dream job is no job.)
I went to Orcas Island, Washington by myself to camp on a farm and watch one of my oldest friends get married. It was jacket weather in the Pacific Northwest, like it has been every time I’ve been there. I floated around the island like an air hockey puck, so free was I. Both my arms to myself, indulging in uninterrupted conversations with cherished friends, no diaper meter running or bedtime meter or boob meter really. I brought a hand pump and remembered to use it every other day, and expressed basically nothing, and was still able to nurse when I got home.
The trip was rich like the densest cake, the kind that almost hurts to eat. It was also one of longing. Like a jilted lover, Desi was etched on every surface. He would love this ferry ride. He would love that whale sculpture. He would love beach-combing with me right now. He would completely ruin this trip but he would love it. The appearance of any baby made me feel like an instant fraud, like I was complicit in a social lie if I didn’t march over to them and shout HELLO I TOO HAVE REPRODUCED RECENTLY. Instead, I just eyeballed babies everywhere I went like a hungry child-stealing witch.
Finally, I got to see my sister for the first time in six months. And I managed to throw a great fourth birthday party for Desi with minimal effort, effort being a particular foe of mine these days. He was buoyant with confidence after his party. He couldn’t stop talking about it. We had it at a park so that we didn’t have to host, we made mini quiches from frozen and served them with fruit skewers made with pre-cut fruit and bags of Pirate’s Booty, we had a cardboard carafe of Dunkin’ coffee for the adults. The weather was cool and sunny and all the kids, I’m told, took shockingly long naps that afternoon. I looked around at the crowd and thought, a year ago I did not know any of these people. Also I didn’t have to, like, decorate. I’m a genius, I thought. I was pretty buoyant with confidence, too, apparently.
But the lows were low. Me being gone to Orcas for five days immediately after Nick was gone at a conference for five days put a strain on things running well in our household. My father-in-law came to help with house projects but those projects, as they always do, revealed themselves to be more complex than anticipated. So everything was half-done, and covered in ancient wallpaper fiber dust, and Desi’s preschool ended on August 16. We faced three weeks without childcare for Desi, and one concurrent week without childcare for Jane. My parents came to care for Desi for a week, which was a gift, but of course, also its own basket of aches.
Finally, this past weekend, with less than a week left to go until our long national nightmare of childcare musical chairs was to end, all four of us got struck with...I guess you would call it...anal flu? Anal flu with vomiting features? And it happened while our much-anticipated house guests, my sister and brother-in-law, were here, trying to hang and have a good time and see their niece and nephew. It felt so bad that in my feverishness I wondered if I was actually in labor and had somehow gotten double pregnant while I was full-term with Jane and was now about to have a toilet baby. August is misogynist. August is the worst. August is not the answer. August is not healthy for children or other living things..
Desi has moved on from a dinosaur fixation to a marine animal fixation. This is welcome news for his ol’ ma because I was a ‘90s save the whales kid, and I basically still am, and you can’t save the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs already fuckin’ blew it. So yes, my child, my cherub, I would love to hear all of your facts about alive animals of the deep.
We learned in one of his books last week that seahorses can’t really swim. They have one tiny fin that can almost rudder them where they need to go, but other than that, they just get swept along with the water until they can manage to loop their little S-shaped bods around some well-rooted seaweed. I laughed out loud when I read this, and Desi was desperate to be let in on the joke. I couldn’t quite explain to him how hilarious it was that in 13 million years of evolution, my dudes never learned how to fucking swim. They were just getting blasted along on the current this whole time, assuming it would work out.
yr mate,
Evie
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