I was looking at Nick’s face yesterday in the car and was slapped with the knowledge that he must have clocked at least as many hours looking at my face as I have his. Chilling! I have a dumb, soothing belief that people only register me obliquely, in a forgiving squint, and that no one has memorized my face from immersion. This helps me nurse the cherished personal fiction that I look basically the same whether I’m wearing makeup or not, or that I never look tired or dehydrated or bloated, that I only ever look like myself.
Last night, I took a shower to get out of washing my face? I expend so much energy avoiding things, just like I used to spend so much time tracking down a friend’s math homework to copy that I could have just done the assignment myself five times over. I know my appearance is improved by a full face but I get into depressive periods where deleting the chore of evening makeup removal from my life is an act of self-compassion, so I go weeks without wearing it.
An old man approached me in the thrift store with my kids on Saturday and started talking to me about them. This is an occupational hazard of having small children in public, that strangers will take you hostage to subject you to a verbal slideshow of their own experience raising small children, which in the hundred years since they did it, has become painted in gold leaf.
Most of the time, I obviously hate this. No one is out to tell me I’m doing a good job, which, how would they know anyway, they just want to flatten my experience by telling me how fast it goes. Don’t you think I know? I watched a 25-second video of my son sucking a phantom nipple in his sleep on a loop for ten minutes last week. It feels like exactly four years ago, and it was, but four years isn’t a long time to me anymore.
This encounter felt different. The man took an interest in my children as they were, not as living, farting symbols of the babies he once held. He said he reckoned Janie might turn out to be a redhead. What he was observing was the weird orange cast given to her bald head by persistent cradle cap, but I didn’t correct him. “Or she’ll be blonde like big brother. Although,” he said, turning to me, “your hair does have some auburn to it!”
I nearly cry. When was the last time I was observed by a strange man with such frankness and there was nothing gross about it? I must miss having grandparents. After a certain age, there are just no old people that love you anymore. Your parents become the old people who love you, and that’s if you’re lucky.
While I was on maternity leave this winter, I became obsessed with this YouTuber whose vlog beat is, I guess, frugal living and productivity. She is Mormon, has six kids younger than 10, wears false eyelashes as part of her elaborate daily makeup routine, and thinks that individual choices are the answer to systemic problems. Just guessing on that last one.
I found her while searching YouTube for videos about varicose vein remediation; my second pregnancy left my thighs bulging with squiggles of dud veins and I wanted to know how much it sucked (and how much it cost) to fix it. I learned about her vein treatment and then kept clicking until I knew everything. She and her husband got themselves out of $20,000 of debt in 13 months (that was ten years ago) and now they lives in an 8,000 square foot home (“frugal”) in Utah.
She makes her living selling productivity and personal finance e-books and video courses in addition to making weekly videos for her thousands of acolytes. What shocked me more than having six babies all intentionally spaced 18 months apart (with twins on the way), or what a utility bill for a literal mansion must look like, is that she confessed to using a wet microfiber cloth to make faux vacuum lines on her upholstery as part of her daily housekeeping regimen.
What I took in was a religion built on Getting Things Done. She wiped down her bathroom with a Clorox wipe as she brushed her teeth, she did her makeup as she viewed the update videos she has her remote team send via Marco Polo instead of emailing her. What is the end goal of all this productivity, I wondered? Supposedly it’s to reclaim more personal and family time but I’ve always been suspicious of hyperproductivity as a means to boosting idle time. It’s like how purity culture treats sex as dirty but one day you’re supposed to get married and reboot your whole brain to love sex with your spouse??
It seems more likely that the goal is to claw back time for even more productivity, hustling, optimizing, forever and ever in a spiral until you die, rich and accomplished and Optimal. It certainly has made it possible for this vlogger to have more and more children, each child fitting neatly into her Established System, a continuous improvement process refined with each birth. Toyota’s lean manufacturing except for babies and resource-hoarding.
Somehow she’s not a hate-watch and she’s definitely not an aspirational-watch; she’s a voyeuristic in-between place. I would sit semi-reclined under my softly snoring newborn and use my j-school skills to find her voter registration information, her property records, the real estate listing photos for her house and on and on. As someone who is always trying to do fewer things, I was fascinated by someone obsessed with doing more things. I felt something I recognized as a flicker of envy. My lifestyle could not be less “lean” and while part of me is greedy for more children because all the love in the world will never be enough for the keening void inside me, my main obstacle to having them, even more than, duh, MONEY, is a belief that I’m too disorganized and idle to pull it off.
Sunday night, we stopped at IKEA on our way back from D.C. and had the same experience we always have at IKEA. We got the two items we came for, and sped through the showroom trying to beat our children to their meltdown, and considered how since a trip to IKEA is an occasional thing, and we really should buy a bunch more things, but that would require so much forethought and strategy in the form of measurements, and a car without carseats in the back, and thus childcare, and more things that are occurring to me so rapidfire right now that I will not bother to list them all. We will probably only ever buy a few plastic bin things at IKEA and another plant to kill, and shrug at the inefficiency of it all as we suck down $1 lingonberry icees on our way out.
When we got home from IKEA and the kids were in bed, I was up to my evening bullshit, a.k.a. trying to hold a plank while laughing a.k.a. doing a workout video on silent on my phone while watching Jenny Slate’s new special on the TV. I looked over at Nick trying to assemble the new lamp for the kid’s room. Constructing the lamp appeared to be an origami nightmare, and watching Nick carefully build it, tucking the little flags of plastic into the right slots, when I knew he had lectures to prepare for the next day, flooded me with so much love that I had to bail on my plank.
The expression on his face, and the way it made me feel, transported me through time to our old apartment. I was hugely pregnant with Desi and I caught Nick sitting before a mountain of cloth diapers we’d been gifted from a friend, tenderly snapping inserts into diaper covers. His laptop was set up to show him videos about cloth diaper use. Before that, the diapers had been stashed in a bag in the corner. We had been ignoring them because they were evidence of another deep, murky channel of our shared parental novicehood. But here was something being handled.
His lamp-constructing concentration face provided that same rush of relief, the relief that proximity to him has always brought me. I hope that seeing my face does that for him, or anyone, even a little bit.
yr mate,
Evie
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I got some new subscribers this week, so I thought I’d reintroduce myself before you end up on some old tumblr of mine (horrifying) trying to figure out what my whole deal is.
-my name rhymes with ‘heavy’
-I have been emailing run-on sentences like the ones above in newsletter format since late 2013(!!), first on TinyLetter and now on Substack
-I’m happiest riding my bike or doing karaoke, neither of which I get to do as much as I’d like anymore
-I’m a native Ohioan (with short stops in other places) who relocated from Columbus last year to the Eastern Shore of Maryland for my husband’s job
-I have a four-year-old son and a ten-month-old daughter.
-I’ve worked in nonprofit marketing, as an environmental communications officer, software developer, and am currently in UX and content strategy but find it all pretty embarrassing except for the part where they pay me
-I am trying to shitpost on Twitter less (ha) but I am @ohevie
-On Instagram I’m @eviemetal though it is 100% photos of my children
-Sometimes people reply to the newsletter and are like “I don’t even know if I can reply to this” and the answer is YES YOU CAN and I ALWAYS LOVE IT
-I don’t have a subscription-based newsletter and I never will but I encourage people to leave a tip if they feel fancy and the mood strikes them