forgive me, distant wars

lately i have been trying not to answer questions with my phone. what's the name of the actress who plays the friend in you've got mail? it will come to me in time. there is no joy in imdb. lately, i mean, i have been trying to look up. the world does not need any more tweets. the world does need me to teach my child to say good morning not only to his teachers, but to the woman who cleans the apartment building that we walk by on the way to school. to wait patiently in slow lines. to vote. to be a part of a community, even when it's inconvenient. to know that the inconvenience is the point of community. last month, the woman who checked me in for my mri complimented my nails. they look like a flag, but i can't remember which one. we guessed, but came no closer. the next week, a coworker came into my office to ask for a favor, and on her way out she said, almost as an afterthought: your nails look like the croatian flag. it was perfect. i'm not saying that we'll all be saved by chitchat and patience, but i do certainly think they'll help.

earlier this month i was doing a Big Run when i hurt my foot so badly that i had to quit at mile 15 and limp slowly out of central park and onto the train. i wasn't worried; my coach (lauren) and my physical therapist (real, his name is nicholas) and my podiatrist (jasmine, who i feel connected to on a spiritual level) all said i would be fine. but then it didn't get better, and it still hasn't gotten totally better, and in the meantime i have been the grumpiest person at the playground or on the 4 train or even in my home, where i am competing with a three year old (a famously grumpy category of person).

but then last night i got a MRI, and by the time i got home they had uploaded 200 inscrutable images of the inside of my left foot and ankle, and looking at them i started to cry thinking about how much i had asked of that little tangled mess of muscle and ligament and blood vessel. how often i have crossed brooklyn in the wrong shoes. how many times i have pushed a napping child in a stroller for hours. the two marathons, and the three training cycles. those are my actual muscles in there, and they're strong but they're not perfect. and more than i need to cross the finish line in central park at sunset, i need to walk around for the rest of my life.

anyway --

having a three year old bangs. i was having a tough day so i asked if he wanted to climb into bed early and watch bluey and read unlimited books and he said yes. now i genuinely feel better. wild shit.

it's important to know that even when i come on tumblr dot com to post about having a hard time i am posting from my brooklyn brownstone where i lead a charmed little life. you know? yesterday i was feeling nervous because the plumber wasn't able to entirely fix the boiler before it was due to get sharp and cold overnight, and yet when we woke up this morning the radiators were chugging away merrily, still connected to the thermostat via whatever setting the last tenants had left as their cozy legacy. things, as they often do for me, simply worked themselves out. i am not quite foolish enough to assume this much luck will last for my entire life, but my god will i appreciate it while it's mine.

(30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21)

at 31, i got into press-on nails the way that most women chop off their hair to feel, for just a moment, in control, and now i can't type as quickly, so i probably should have just gone with the haircut. at 31 i actually did not get any haircuts at all. i took a solidcore class and went back for another. i read enough romance novels to bring the cost per use of my kindle unlimited subscription down substantially. i cooked more and saw my friends less that i could have ever imagined. i moved into a home where i wake up with the cool brooklyn air coming in through the window.

at 31, i did not feel intellectually stimulated. i did not have one ounce of creative energy. what i mostly felt was tired, in ways familiar and ways new. i ran my second marathon and trained for my third. i was a fun employee and a varied friend and a pretty good wife and family member, but above all i was a tremendous parent to a person who was two and then three. there are times in my life -- many of them catalogued above -- when that would have sounded flimsy or wasteful, and maybe it is. you'll have to check in at 41.

there's a lullaby that pete wentz (!) wrote for his son the year that barack obama won his first presidential election. i was sixteen and sad all the time, and i would lay on the bed by the window in my second floor dorm room in the middle of a rural illinois winter and listen to it until i felt brave enough to meet robbie for dinner in the too-bright cafeteria. now i lay on the beautiful rainbow rug in my own son's bedroom, late into the night when we should both be asleep, and i sing that lullaby while he waves his hands up and down, showing me how he exercises. life is hard and not as long as it should be, and we share our oddly-shaped kitchen with a mouse who lives along the back wall, and there is always a plumber who needs to be called back or a thread of worry to follow until it knots or disappears. but the things that bother me on too-long, too-full days -- the edge piece of a dinosaur-pun puzzle under foot, the wet child-sized rainboots left in the doorway, the long-untouched drafts of romance novels, my sore knees as i'm summoned up the stairs one more time by that small, floating voice from th room with the rainbow rug -- those would all have been miracles to that tall, sad child in the twin bed by the window.

my beautiful wife took my beautiful son to visit her parents for the weekend so that i could be the kind of alone that my current life rarely allows for. i went for a long run at sunset and ended up many miles from home but in no rush to return. i got high and drank a kombucha in the bath. i slept in.

and then they came home on a cool early fall afternoon, the sun shining on the steps where i was waiting for them, and i — you’ll be shocked to learn — cried.

this too shall pass / the pendulum swings both ways, but: when i told my therapist how well i’m doing right now, we both cried.

this weekend i lay on the floor while the toddler played, the tinny sound of hakuna matata coming from my phone, and wordlessly did some little pilates movements. you exercisin? he asked, and slid down onto his back beside me. like this? he asked, and he imitated me perfectly with his legs that used to be so small i could cup them both in my hand. we lay there together, strengthening our cores and laughing in the morning midwestern light, while the twin notes of love and fear hummed inside of me: i feel so lucky to know him, and so afraid for the inevitable day that he does not want -- more than anything in the world -- to be wherever i am. but that's the trick of parenthood; he will go further and further away, if i do my job right, and i will always partially exist here on the hardwood floor, feeling his soft arm flush against mine. just as i am always a little bit in that cold, bright corner of the NICU, watching him breathe.

nine years ago i got kissed and it was the beginning of the rest of my life. if i heard someone else say this i would roll my eyes, but it's true, for me, that the last nine years have unfurled like a rug running down a warm, light hallway. being loved in this way is a superpower: i am buoyed in all things by the knowledge that i can always return home and be kissed on the cheek. this was, i'll be honest, a hard year. we still haven't paid our june taxes. we are neither of us writing enough, sleeping enough, resting enough. something always needs to be picked up, dropped off, repurchased, rescheduled. but her company remains a comfort and a pleasure. her opinion the one i want most. her hair soft beneath my arm when she sleeps on my chest while i read a book late into the night, the light low enough that she won't wake.

now that i'm becoming mentally normal again it's a LITTLE funny that both lily and i cried so hard at the broadway show about the american suffrage movement that we had to like. take a break. like she had to leave the room and i had to put my whole face into lauren's shirt until the lights went low enough that i thought no one would be able to see me. just two people doing really well, actually!

every few years i go-- and this is a technical term -- fucking crazy and make it lauren's problem. if anything the fact that i do this and she still hasn't ever changed the locks while i'm at work should be enough to convince me that she loves me more than any beautiful genius has ever loved a tall anxious idiot, but alas. still, she lays on my shoulder and we watch tiktoks together in the bedroom we haven't unpacked. still, she says do you like this tablecloth? like normalcy isn't the most thoughtful gift she could give me. you're like a second generation immigrant, my mother texts me when i tell her about this, but from crazy town. it's a potent combination, genuine desperation and having the sort of brain that occasionally tries to destroy my life from within. hard to tell what, though, is worse: going crazy or knowing, now that i can breathe and eat and think before i speak, that i have to sit down on my therapist's couch and tell her what i did.

please know that i did not make it two days between moving into my new house and getting locked out. how did you get back in? thank you so much for asking! i pitched myself over the railing and through the open window just as a man was climbing up the steps to ring my doorbell, then had to go around and open the door for him with chalky windowsill dust along my knees.

my new year's resolution was to spend more time alone with my kid. i meant the coffee shop on sundays before his swimming lesson, i meant the b45 back from trader joe's. instead we've been spending long weekends together, broken up only by arguments about whether it's naptime or not and calls from lauren on the other side of the country. on saturday i lost the debate about naptime -- his argument was, frankly, stronger and more well-reasoned -- and we trekked out to the playground, where i thought he might do laps of his favorite equipment, but instead he climbed onto the bench beside me, and we shared a bottle of cold water in the hot sun, quiet except for when he'd tell me it was my turn and hold it up to my lips, his soft arms high above his head. most of talking to a toddler is performance for his benefit: i, after all, already know what most of the things i see are called and why that person might not have waited for the light to change before crossing the street and whether the moon is still up in the sky even if we can't see it. but this shared, comfortable silence was something else, something shocking and lovely and new and terrifying. i didn't ruin it by asking what he was thinking, but i wanted to more than anything.

i have spent four months talking to my mortgage broker every single week. hello norman, i say on mondays, let's talk about my loan again. i understand it but i am afraid of it. it is the single biggest promise i have made to anyone who i do not also kiss. this morning, less than one week after closing, i got a call from the bank. well, i thought to myself, this is it. i did not understand the loan. they are going to take back my home. i deserve this for making such a comically large promise.

turns out it was just an automated call to say "hi :') we're your bank :') we love you :') welcome to your loan :')"