Bedtime has been even more of a struggle recently, particularly with getting Arlo, five and one-third years old, to prepare for reading and then settle down enough to fall asleep. Getting him to take off his clothing, go to the bathroom, and put on clean clothes (by choice, he sleeps in the outfit he’ll wear the next day, and I’m completely fine with this because it saves time in the morning AND laundry *win-win*). I’ve been trying different methods to help him through this process, and one night I said I’d tell him a story while he got ready if he worked steadily until he was ready to brush teeth. The idea came to me spontaneously, so I had neither plot line nor characters in mind, but I started with “Once upon a time, there was a spider” as a hook because my child truly loves bugs and spiders, especially spiders. (He wants a tarantula pet for Christmas. Send help.)

“Once upon a time, there was a spider. She was a young spider and had just discovered her ability to make webs, which she found to be a delightful pastime. She scouted for a while and found a perfect spot between two branches of a sturdy tree for her to practice weaving. She worked all day to perfect her web–tightening here, strengthening there, adjusting left and right, until she’d spun the most intricate, elaborate, magnificent web she could imagine. Very happy with her work, she settled herself in the middle of it, tucked all eight of her tired legs up under her, and took a nap. A few minutes later, she awoke to find her web being jostled roughly back and forth. She felt like she was on a trampoline!” (Every other sentence or so I had to pause to give Arlo reminders, so this story was by no means uninterrupted.) “Well, she looked around to see what had caused this motion in her web and was surprised to see a praying mantis lodged in the lacework. She hurried over to him, and he greeted her with a smile. ‘Well, hello, there!’ he said. ‘Isn’t this a mighty fine canopy we’re sitting on? I mean, it’s just a beautiful piece of art! I wonder who wove this incredible creation!’ The spider cocked her head at him and said, ‘Oh, well, thank you! I wove this web myself.’ The praying mantis clapped his hands over his mandibles. ‘You don’t say! YOU are the artist behind this creation?! My, I am impressed. I can tell you put a lot of energy into making this! Might I also compliment you on those strong, nimble legs of yours? And you have so MANY of them! Why, you just look so different from me, different from anything I’ve ever seen, and I think that’s just exquisite! What are you, do you mind my asking?’

“Well, the spider had never encountered such a genteel fellow, and she was touched by his friendly kindness. She replied, ‘Aren’t you generous! I’m a spider. Have you never seen a spider before?’ The praying mantis clasped his front legs, wiggled his antennae, and said, ‘I most certainly have not, but you are remarkable indeed! I am very glad to have met you and seen this amazing thing you call a web. What do you do with this web? Or is it simply a decoration?’ The spider shifted uneasily. ‘This web is for catching insects,’ she responded. ‘Oh,’ said the praying mantis, ‘isn’t that wonderful! A work of art that attracts attention in a most unique way! And it really works, because I am an insect! Why is your target audience the insect world, might I ask?’ The spider wrung at least half of her hands. ‘Well, it’s because…it’s because spiders eat insects. We catch our meals in our webs,’ she said sadly. ‘Oh my goodness,’ was the mantis’s reply. ‘It’s even more magical an invention than I thought! It’s not just a bit of art that attracts an audience; it also puts food on the artist’s table! Well, I never. I can’t believe I was able to meet something as miraculous as a spider during my lifetime. What a special day this is!’

“The spider was thoroughly dumbfounded. After about a minute, she went over to the praying mantis, who was still admiring the web and remarking on its many virtues, and began unmaking the threads in which he was entangled, extricating his legs. ‘You know,’ she said, as she was finishing up, ‘I’m not really very hungry today. I don’t need a snack as big as you are, anyway. Why don’t you come back and visit sometime?’ The praying mantis tipped an imaginary hat and said, ‘Why, thank you! I’ve had such a nice visit, and I’d like that very much. I’ll be back on Sunday!’ and he flew off. The spider went back to finish her nap.”

To be clear, this story took three nights to finish, and when it was finally over, Arlo said, “And then what?” I said, “Then an aphid came to visit. I’ll tell you the next part tomorrow.” But Arlo kept on. “Yeah! And the aphid was really nice too, so she didn’t eat him either! And all the bugs are nice, so she lets them all go!” At this point, I felt pretty accomplished. He’d gotten ready for bed more quickly, and I’d told him a story about the benefits of kindness, appreciating diversity, praising hard work, and the value of art. And then it happened. He looked at me, concerned, and asked, “But then what will the spider eat?”

Oh. Right. It didn’t take a deep-dive Google search to verify that your garden-variety spider’s sole source of sustenance is, indeed, a single ingredient: insect. What on earth had I just done? Had I told a story celebrating martyrdom the same way The Giving Tree, a book I despise, does so egregiously? Or did I just invent an arachnid with an eating disorder? Maybe she will only eat mosquitos. But mosquitos aren’t THAT bad; I mean, they’re trying to live the only way they know how, and just because humans don’t like them doesn’t mean I should sanction mosquito genocide or countenance entomological racism of any kind. Maybe just the baddest baddies would be her victims. But how dastardly would an insect have to be for her to quench her hunger? I mean, it would take some pretty epic evildoings to enforce a death sentence on a bug, and even then why should the poor, beneficent spider be fed only on unsavory characters? I don’t think I want to tell a story to my kids about an insect mafioso’s life of crime and subsequent execution anyway.

Oh, dear. If this is what happens when I improvise a new bedtime strategy, I’ll never go off-script again.

This is from my dad. Isn’t he cool?

The other day, I decided to record the number of times Arlo used the word “Mommy” as a noun in direct address. I did this for the ninety-minute period following school pickup, making a tally every time I heard him say it, but I’m pretty sure I missed a few. This is the piece of paper I used, and the number of tallies is thirteen sets of five. Arlo said “Mommy” at least 65 times in an hour and a half. Thank you and good night.

Summerly’s bed is pushed up against a wall directly beneath a bank of windows spanning its entire length, from pillows to footboard. We always used to close her curtains to prevent sunlight from keeping her awake or rousing her too early, but in the fall she started wanting to sleep with the curtains open so she could see the stars. On the night of Halloween, however, that Blue Moon was so big and bright and shining directly through her window that she opted to close her curtains to sleep, asking me as I drew them against the lunar glare, “Can it hurt your eyes to look at the moon?”

I explained that the moon doesn’t produce any light of its own, that the brightness we see is merely a reflection of sunlight that bounces off its surface, making it visible to us, and that because the moon isn’t the actual source of the light, it’s not bright enough to hurt our eyes like the sun. It was late, so I pretty much left the explanation at that for the moment, but as I blew her a kiss, wished her happy dreams, and closed the door, I had a thought that I’m surprised hadn’t occurred to me before then.

In this country, at least, we generally associate the sun with the masculine and the moon with the feminine. We’re taught about the Greek god of the sun, Helios, and goddess of the moon, Selene. We have the Latin words for sun (sol, solis, masculine) and moon (luna, lunae, feminine), and plenty of derivative English vocabulary. We have the association of the lunar cycle with menstruation. The English words “sun” and “son” are homophones, which I realize is a coincidence, but it’s still something. Recently I read the myth of Chang’e, the Chinese goddess of the moon, to the kids so they could put into context the storyline of the movie “Over the Moon”. In some cultures, there are different associations regarding celestial bodies and gender, but I’d be surprised if many people living in this country would ascribe masculinity to the moon or femininity to the sun. Think about Jupiter, too: it’s named for the god of the sky, and its moons are named for his lovers, which were almost exclusively female. All of his conquests, revolving around him, caught in his gravitational grip.

Meanwhile our moon produces no light of its own, borrowing its glow from a more powerful body, one with the most gravity of all, and can only show Earth its luminescent full face about a dozen times a year, the rest of the time only sparing us crescent or gibbous glimpses, gifts of partial exposure to the sun. The rest of the time the moon is veiled in visual obscurity, its image only accessible to the naked eye by virtue of how much the sun affords light unto it. The moon can only claim secondary energy; it owes its outline to the sun.

Is claiming masculinity for the sun and bestowing femininity upon the moon an intentional overture on behalf of a patriarchy so ancient and entrenched that it embeds in our language, our folklore, manifesting itself in ways both egregious and so subtle that we don’t even think to notice? Is this a symptom of a societal disease root-bound in a mass of money and power, a sun so strong it juggles the entire solar system in ceaseless circles around it and bequeaths budgeted light on loan, only in controlled allowances?

No, my child, the light of the moon won’t hurt your eyes. It’s harmless because the light isn’t its own; that power is only a reflection. It’s just putting a shine on. But the moon is a ball of rock, and we need not associate ourselves with far-flung inanimate matter, capable neither of creating nor supporting life, which are skills that we happen to be biologically programmed to favor. There’s a whole lot of power there, maybe the most power there is, and it comes from within. That light is ours because we generate it in and of ourselves. We don’t need to see ourselves as illuminated by anything other than the light we create and emanate. Look at the moon, baby, and remember: that’s one beautiful ball of rock. But we are women. We are radiant. And we will not be eclipsed.

Recently my dear friend Kate sent me a recipe for Pumpkin Taco Soup in the slow cooker, and I was pleased to see that I had every ingredient already in house; all I had to do was take chicken out of the freezer and pull things off the counter and the pantry shelves. A few days later I asked my sister-in-law for her Black Bean Brownie Muffin recipe, and once again felt glad when I realized that everything I’d need to fulfill that muffin tin was already inside of my home.

My first feeling was one of relief and comfort: nothing would need to be added to the grocery list, nothing would need to be purchased, and nothing would need to be carried into the house to create this meal for my family. I’d prepared for the possibility of these recipes by keeping plenty of a lot on hand. I could create wholesome, protein-rich, hearty food to nourish my people (bonus: I can even share with my Pod Squad member who is gluten-free!). How wonderful it was to already have in my possession the hardware for assembling this dinner! How satisfying to already own within my equipment the tools necessary to put it together! What a feeling it is to have one’s needs met before they even really become needs.

There is implicit privilege in going through day-to-day life with stocked shelves. A full larder is something too few people on this planet can claim. The fact that this was my second thought pronounces that privilege. These thoughts struck and stuck. They’re still there.

Another thought also occurred that transposed this idea from within the home to within a human. This is what we’re all doing here, day in and day out; we don’t know what we’re preparing for, but we’re doing the best to be ready for it. We’re shopping every experience, everything we read, everything we hear, and sampling from things we already know or think we know, to collect the best stock of supplies for facing whatever life is going to present us with (I promise I tried writing both that sentence and the penultimate clause in the previous sentence to avoid ending with a preposition, but it didn’t go so well). We don’t know what’s going to come next, but we’re bound and determined to take every measure necessary to gather those things–both concrete and immaterial–that might help us later.

For example: you find a snappy blue blazer a size too big for your son at a consignment store. Your sister has been dating the same guy for a few years, so you’ve been thinking they might get engaged soon. It’s a really good deal for the price, and those things are EXPENSIVE at full retail. So you buy it and hang it in his closet in case there’s a wedding next year. Or a funeral. Or something else fancy that you haven’t even considered yet. You never know, right? You’re front-loading that feeling of relief when an invitation arrives to find you already prepared! You’re putting stock in your future sense of comfort, of knowing, literally, “I’ve got this.”

Another example: you’re a parent, and raising kids is hard. You don’t know how the next phase of their lives will present, so you read. You talk and you listen. You watch other parents. You learn and you learn and you learn, cherry-picking what knowledge might serve you next time a child is in the midst of a tantrum or asks if “hell” is a bad word or still won’t eat solid food at eight months old or tells you that a kid at school says that evolution isn’t real or still wets the bed at the age of ten. This process usually begins when your first child is on the way and you find yourself with the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting in your hands.

A final example: you’re always searching for ways to improve your ability to react to things. You’re panning everything in life for those little flecks of gold that you can slip into your psychological pocket, touchstones to center you when faced with challenges. You know these gold flecks when you encounter them; sometimes it’s a sentence that resonates (“negative energy transfers from one person to another like cold air blows through an open door”); sometimes it’s an idea (“the way you react to things other people say tells you something about yourself”); sometimes it’s an example set by another (“when you spilled your cup of coffee all over your grandmother’s plush white carpet, she just laughed”); sometimes it’s a reminder (“the child is just seeing how far she can push before you lose your temper, so it’s important that you don’t”). It’s these gold flecks that buoy us through those moments when an unwelcome emotion raises its hand to slap us upside the head. The flecks steady us, give us breath, help us take that emotion’s raised hand and bring it to our lips.

Whether we’re doing it consciously or not, we are in a constant process of stocking the shelves of our ability to handle whatever recipe life hands us and demands we make. No one has all of the ingredients for every recipe, nor does anyone have all of the ingredients for some recipes all the time. Sometimes a person runs out of eggs the same way she’d run out of patience; sometimes we don’t have enough soy sauce for the amount of pork we’re told to cook just as our confidence might run thin when faced with an onerous task. Some people, for a variety of reasons, have more pantry items than others, and some people have more inventory of certain items at any given moment. I imagine the Dalai Llama has several jam-packed cellars full, whereas an abuse victim in foster care might have more dust on his shelves than cans. Can you imagine how it would be to experience this world with an unlimited supply of every ingredient one could possibly need, no matter what page of what cookbook the universe could slap on your countertop of life? Maybe that’s what divinity is.

This is a page from The Bug Book by Edward Gorey. The story is about a bunch of bug cousins who are happy and carefree until this new bug (the one in the illustration above) arrives, breaks up their parties, and waylays them whenever they go visiting. The cousins conspire to solve the problem by rolling a rock off a cliff to crush the big bad bug, which they successfully do. The story ends with them slipping the remains into an envelope, addressing it “To whom it may concern”, and propping it up against the fatal stone. That’s it. Then they throw a party.

Edward Gorey, if you’re somehow in charge of the universe in your postmortem form, I just know you’re the scriptwriter for 2020 and those bugs finally mailed that envelope.

You guys, I left the house by myself for an hour on a weekend to exchange goods with my brother (I swapped salsa and jam for a quart of the most incredible Chicken Toddy…yes, my brother made a thing called Chicken Toddy because he’s a bloody genius). This is the text I received on my way home.

You know that story about the woman with a green ribbon around her neck? In case your childhood wasn’t haunted by it as mine was, here’s the basic plot: a girl named Jenny always wears a green ribbon around her neck. She meets a boy named Alfred, and they become friendly. He asks her about the green ribbon, but she says he has to wait to find out why she always wears it. Years later they end up getting married, but still she withholds the reason behind the ribbon. Finally, as an old, sick woman lying in bed, Jenny tells Alfred that’s she’s ready to share her secret with him, saying that if he unties the ribbon he’ll see why she couldn’t reveal the truth earlier. And guess what? Her head falls off. Right off her body and onto the floor by the bedside.

As a child, I remember reading that story and being completely petrified (there’s actually a Buzzfeed article devoted to this topic, so I’m definitely not alone with these feelings about a horror story clothed in a children’s book binding). There is just so much about the story that’s disturbing. Well, somehow that same book of stories from my childhood turned up among our Halloween collection, and Arlo chose it for bedtime on a night when Brian was reading. It looks innocuous enough; the first words on the front cover are “An I Can Read Book”, and it carries on its back the badge of “An ALA Notable Children’s Book” for “Ages 4 to 8”. Brian hadn’t ever read this story collection before, and I didn’t remember that the green ribbon one was among them, so on we went with it. He even dimmed the lights for effect as suggested by this foreword:

Later that night, Summerly (who’s eight) came downstairs for her “mommy time” and I intuited that something was off. When she told me about feeling afraid after hearing the green ribbon story, I immediately remembered my feelings about it and told her it had scared me too. Then she ran to the basement for something she’d left there, and when she walked back down the hall I saw that usually fearless child get so spooked (by a shadowy balloon on the floor) that I could tell the effect on her was pretty significant. We discussed it some more, and eventually Liam (who’s ten) came down to tell us that he was afraid too. (Arlo, by the way, who’s five, seemed entirely unfazed.)

I’m all for having my kids learn hard lessons and discuss topics that might be uncomfortable. I want them to feel all the feelings so we can unpackage them and turn them over and over, inspecting every angle, until we understand them as best we can. I want my kids to be exposed to the realities of life, as age-appropriate, and reality too frequently comes with fear riding on its shoulders and waving a flag. Although I didn’t think that this particular story was a piece that did anything to improve the complicated puzzle of growing up at this point in their lives, the damage was already done. After we’d talked it to a point that felt right, I told them I knew exactly what to do, and I have two cultural references to support and guide this decision. In The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food, what does Mama Bear do with the Sugar Balls and the Choco-Chums to help put them out of her family members’ minds? She puts them in the freezer. What does Joey from “Friends” do with the copy of The Shining that scares him when he’s reading it and the copy of Little Women that makes him feel so sad? Into the freezer they go. We’re not going to deny or hide from unpleasant feelings, but it makes perfect sense to me to put the the concrete cause of them on ice while we think and talk about them, to put some distance between the mind and the root of its unrest. Chill what chills, then warm up the gears of thought and discussion. Use some freezer space; make some mental space.

We’re living in a pandemic. Donald Trump is up for reelection. The world is broken in so many ways: racially, socially, environmentally, educationally, economically, to name a few. There is so much to fear, and we can’t hunt down the causes and stash them all in a deep freezer while we fix every problem afflicting humankind. But we can put a scary story, one that is definitely fictitious, on the other side of the freezer door while we work on empowering ourselves to treat our fear with enough respect that it won’t consume or immobilize our minds.

Now, allow me to rewrite that foreword from the book:

“Some people like scary stories because they enjoy feeling excited by grotesque or macabre ideas. Some people don’t. Even if there is no real danger, fiction can make people feel afraid, and that’s ok. Sometimes the most unfavorable time to read scary stories is at night or in the dark, because fear tends to amplify under those conditions. I’d suggest, if you are under the age of 18, that you go directly to the freezer, place this book inside, and choose another book. Hell, help yourself to a frozen treat while you’re down there to enjoy while you read a lovely Halloween book (I’m recommending Birdie’s Happiest Halloween and The Biggest Pumpkin Ever). Just don’t forget to brush your teeth again before bed, and everyone will have a good time.”

I recently reworked a poem I wrote ten years ago, one that’s based on a true story from our time living in rural Connecticut, where Liam was born. One day when he was a few months old, I was in a local market to pick up a few things I didn’t really need, but it gave me an outing, which I did need. I’m sure cheese wasn’t on my list that day, but if you’re wondering whether or not I bought the Parmesan anyway, you’d better believe I did.

Gift for a New Mother

A hard freeze New England
morning, baby woven against
my chest and local grocery music
tuned to uptempo trebling,
found a boy maybe fifteen (braces,
letter jacket, voice plenty deep)
standing before the open chest of cheeses.
Next to him his mother,
silver-shot hard carefully cut,
wore her son’s long arm flung
casually across the Fair Isle
pattern of her sweater’s shoulder.

They stood many minutes
considering the options arrayed
in the case, fluorescent lit, bejeweled
with tidy parcels of geometric dairy,
his elbow the whole time comfortably
crooked around the narrow of her neck.

I parked my cart to watch near
the terraced shelves of eggs,
infant son tucked up warm
heartbeat to heartbeat,
while they turned wheels and wedges
over in their hands, comparing
price, perhaps, or merit.

He was so confident, so natural,
so sure, as she shrugged against
the loose-limbed bulk of his body
full of bone and blood and promise,
the aura of familiarity surrounding
them so potent it could almost carry color.

Not sure which words to use,
I walked just to the edge of their energy,
unfolded one hand toward them
with the other against my baby’s spine
inside his sling and chose these:
“This is what I want for us.”
And the boy who was almost not a boy
anymore, arm still draped
across the wishbone of his mother’s shoulder,
looked down at me, smiled, and placed
in my upturned palm the prism
of Parmesan he had been holding.

“You can have it,” he said.

And I,
I took the cheese and thanked him
though I’m almost certain
he didn’t understand
everything I was thanking him for.