Motherhood, Horror, and Me : Processing How Motherhood Has Changed My Relationship to the Genre

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Me, circa 1988, modeling my clown makeup.

I am, and have always been, a horror girlie through and through. I was recently stopped by a community access television team on the street to answer questions about movies -- unprompted, all of my answers were about horror films. Some of my favorite books growing up were the Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark series, and R.L. Stine's Fear Street series. When I was pregnant, I not-so-secretly hoped that my daughter would be born on Halloween so that we could have Halloween birthday parties forever.

My first horror movie memory is a scene from Friday the 13th, though I couldn’t tell you which one. All I remember is that hockey-masked Jason is chasing a young woman through the woods. She screams as she runs through the trees, and Jason ambles along after her, his long strides somehow closing the distance between them. 

That’s all I remember. I must have been maybe 4 or 5 when I saw this. It must have been on in the background at my mom’s friend’s house during a party. Even though I was so young (too young), I wasn’t terrified or scared. I was too young to know what was going on or to be worried about death.

I can't imagine showing something like this to my own child at so young an age. Now that I have my own kid, my relationship to horror has changed in unexpected ways.

Now, what I'm about to tell you will sound wild. Like, really, extremely out there. If you don't have a kid or have the same values as me, this might be a horror story in its own right, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

From the time my kid was about 6 to 9 months old, she slept just fine in her crib, in her own room. She slept through the night every night, and everyone got great sleep. As soon as she hit the 9-month mark, she began waking up instantaneously upon hitting her crib mattress. Sometimes, she would open her eyes mid-transfer and refuse to go back to sleep unless I picked her up. Sometimes, I'd be able to put her down and sneak out, only to have to return 5 minutes later when she woke up and realized she was no longer being held. My husband, M, would try to settle her, and she would only cry harder and louder. The only way my kid would go to sleep and stay asleep was to be held. By me.

And so, I started getting ready for bed when she did, which meant I was holding my child for hours in our nursing chair, reading a book or watching Gilmore Girls on my phone, until I was ready to go to bed — so I was essentially changing into my PJs, brushing my teeth, and going to bed with my kid around 8pm. I didn't get to watch tv or enjoy precious alone time with my husband. Sometimes, we would swap places so I got a break -- she would always stir or wake up during a transfer, though, and M would have to hold her tight and shhh her back to sleep. We were like two lone, exhausted ships passing in the night, tossing a small, infuriating but wholly beloved package back and forth. It was another lonely time.

A friend, who has raised her own children, suggested that I hold her while I watched tv or movies in the living room with M, instead of going to bed when she fell asleep. We tried it out one night -- and it worked. It turns out our Velcro kid is a heavy sleeper (except when she's being put down?!), and we were able to once again spend time together and watch our shows and movies. Of course, we had a tiny sleeping third wheel, and we had to whisper everything to each other, but we were able to return to a somewhat normal routine (...while holding a sleeping child).

In this new phase of life, I was able to begin watching horror again (again, while holding a sleeping baby/toddler). It felt like stumbling out of a dark cave (a la The Descent) into the light. I had no idea where I was or what new horror movies had come out. I didn't even know what I was in the mood to watch most of the time.

We started out light with My Best Friend's Exorcism (Disappointing! The book by Grady Hendrix is and will always be better! Please read it!). I kept falling asleep during Teen Wolf (1985). I finally watched and loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). And then we waded out a little farther into the horror waters with Hellraiser (1987). And then we dove into the deep end with Barbarian (loved it) and The Black Phone.

The Black Phone stars Ethan Hawke as a truly terrifying man who kidnaps children, keeps them captive in his basement and eventually kills them. (I’m getting the creeps just seeing the thumbnail of the trailer above.) It's worth a watch, but not more than one. As a mother, actively holding her sleeping child while watching a child in a film be terrorized, this film was bone-chilling. Of course, I wanted our protagonist to make it out alive and I felt a deep sorrow for all the dead children and their parents. Most surprisingly though, the largest thought in my mind was: this serial killer was a baby once. He had a mother and a father, and he was a small, innocent child at one time. What happened to him?

Yes, yes, I know, he's not real, he's a character in a horror film. But I've found that this sentiment has traveled with me to most other human interactions in life. Even my girl, Britney Spears, talks in her memoir about this _seeing_ of other humans after becoming a mother. I listened to the audiobook (highly recommend!) so I wasn’t able to underline the things she wrote that were profound (which were many!), so I'm paraphrasing. She says something about how she looks at everyone, even those who have fucked her over, and thinks about how they used to be a baby.

There's something about how this way of seeing people unlocks a deep compassion for others, a way into understanding who they are and why they are the way they are. It’s not a path to excusing bad behavior, but understanding it. For me, this has become a form of radical empathy, providing a foundation for setting firm and loving boundaries with the people in my life.

The other thing I've discovered about horror films when I watch them in this way (while holding a sleeping angel) is how the body physically reacts to the terror on the screen -- the jump scares, the eerieness, tension.

When I was learning how to breastfeed, I learned that relaxing my body helped my baby relax, which helped her nurse better. Breathing deeply helped my fussy baby calm down. The same applies to the contact nap -- my relaxed body leads to a sleeping baby. A tense body might mean baby has a harder time getting comfortable and falling asleep, or they might wake up more easily. (This is all just my personal experience, not a science!)

So watching a horror movie -- especially one with jump scares The Nun and The Nun 2, I'm looking at you) -- shed a light on all the ways horror is a bodily experience. I can't remember what we were watching, but there was a jump scare and I somehow had enough control over my body (which, remember, was holding a sleeping baby) to NOT jump. Instead of jumping, though, I felt every hair on my body stand on end. It’s how I imagine it feels like to realize you’re being watched by a creature in the dark woods.

While watching the first Orphan film, I found myself holding my breath because I was so worried about the children. I had to keep taking deep breaths, and at one point, I turned to my husband and whispered, "Are these kids going to be okay?" I remember he looked at me and said grimly, "I don't know."

And of course, there are the jump scares where I actually jumped and/or whisper-shouted, "Oh shit!" Miraculously, my kid stirred but did not wake up a single time after one of these incidents.

I have expanded my definition of horror and spooky, which has expanded what I love. Paradoxically, what has also changed is that I now have limits on it -- what I know I can enjoy and when.

I’ve discovered that I have a distinction between comfort horror (i.e. The Lost Boys (1987), Fright Night (1985), The Crow (1994)), horror that I love that truly scares me (i.e. The Taking of Deborah Logan, The Ritual, Pontypool), and the horror that is out to get me in real life (meaning it is scary enough to keep me creeped out after the film is long over) (i.e. Evil Dead Rise, Barbarian, Hereditary). Entire months can go by where I don't watch a single horror film because I just don't have the stomach for any of it. Daily parenthood shreds my nerves enough some days.

Something else that’s new is my renewed enthusiasm for horror literature. While spending hours nap trapped, I came to read and love so much horror lit. The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte, both by Isabel Cañas. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth. Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. Mister Magic by Kiersten White. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. I could go on for awhile.

My definition of spooky has come to include murder mysteries, noir, and some thrillers. I'm talking about Tana French novels, and Sherlock (starring the dream team of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman), and things like Glass Onion and Knives Out, Only Murders in the Building, and the Poirot murder mystery movies (like A Haunting in Venice).

I appreciate a well-built spooky atmosphere, an uneasy ambience, characters that feel untrustworthy but you're not sure why, the feeling that something is not quite right but you can't put your finger on it (see: the Midnight Mass limited series on Netflix for a master class in what I'm talking about).

These days, I am able to transfer my sleeping toddler to a sleep surface (our bed), so I am learning what it feels like to enjoy horror -- and also regular films! -- with the wholeness of my body again without trying to suppress my body's reactions, or whisper my shocked profanities.

September means that Spooky Season is officially here. This year, my husband and I have decided that our Spooktember film list will be comprised mostly of our favorites, rather than trying to watch every horror film we haven't seen yet that is on the streaming platforms we have access to. We'll be watching what I consider comfort horror -- The Crow (1994), Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1985), the entire Phantasm series, The Ritual, and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)are a few of the titles on our list.

I've prematurely asked my toddler, who has no sense of time or seasons, what she wants to be for Halloween and how she feels about going trick-or-treating. She doesn't quite "get" Halloween yet, but I hope she eventually comes to love it the way I do. I'm unsure what movies I'd feel comfortable introducing to her and and at what age. We'll figure it out when and if the time comes. Right now, she's an Xmas girlie. If she never shares my enthusiasm for the spooky, that's okay. I have room in my life to enjoy the extra sparkle of lights on the tree, wrapping presents, the warming comfort of butter rum shortbread cookies, the punchy spice of gingerbread, and the chilly terror of Krampus (2015).

P.S. Now that I’ve finished this letter, I’m finding I have so much more to say about the intersection of motherhood and horror, so this is very likely the first of a few letters about it. Stay tuned.

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The Sophomore Slump : Some incomplete notes on gardening, surviving vs thriving, and the pressure to "do it all" all of the time

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I have longed to have my own garden for a very long time. I have many Pinterest boards dedicated to planning out container gardens, gardens for small spaces, indoor gardens, tiny back porch gardens. On the back porch of my townhouse, I tried to grow a strawberry plant (bought from the farmer's market), which eventually withered away and died. A coworker gave me little ornamental pepper and basil plants that I managed to keep alive for a season before they died. Someone once bought me an orchid that was supposed to be foolproof to keep alive -- it died. A friend gave me a clipping of a succulent that didn't make it very long.

Though I kept killing things (or rather, letting them die), I still dreamed of having my own garden.

My mother had the greenest thumb I've ever seen. She could make anything grow. She could bring a plant on the brink of death back to life. At least it felt that way to me. Growing up, there were cacti growing on the kitchen window sill (before everyone called them 'succulents') and tropical plants growing in the east-facing dining room and the west-facing living room. Spider plants, mother-in-law's tongue, aloe, bamboo, money plants, jade plants, a Norfolk pine that served as our Christmas tree for at least a decade and then some. I have memories of her watering each plant with her long-neck watering can, needing to refill it several times during each watering session.

Outside, her high desert garden flourished. She converted an old pig sty that had been built on our property long before we'd moved there into a garden. Pumpkins and squash growing in the stalls, long rows of snap peas (I can still hear the tiny snip and crunch from pinching each snap pea off its stem). I remember delighting in beets, freshly dug out of the ground, their deep purple and sweet earthiness. After awhile, my parents expanded the garden so my mother could grow rows and rows of corn.

On top of that, my mother grew dozens, if not hundreds, of irises all along the foundation of the house. The front yard had a verdant flower bed and the backyard had what I remember to be a small pollinator garden.

I'm not sure I ever went out with my mother to tend the garden. I do remember what feels like whole days where my brothers and I were left to our own devices inside the house while my mom worked in the garden. This is where I learned to make lunch for myself and my brothers -- hot dogs, ramen, cans of soup, sandwiches. I used to eat spoonfuls of sweet corn right from the can.

Knowing what I know now about having a kid, though, maybe my mom just wanted to do something by herself for once.

Last year, I started my first raised bed garden. For the entire year prior, I planned the supplies I needed and what I wanted to grow. I bought seeds and starts from the company I remember my parents buying their seeds from. After Mother's Day weekend, my husband helped me fill the bed with raised bed garden soil, and I put in my tomato, basil, chives, mint, and lemon verbena starts. I sowed zucchini, yellow squash, watermelon radish, peas, cucumber and swiss chard seeds.

Despite all this planning, I remain a "chaos gardener," which I thought was just a term I'd made up for myself. Turns out it's an entire Facebook community of people.

I underestimate the amount of space each plant will take up in my garden bed. I had no idea zucchini and yellow squash plants grew so large, so that first year, eight to ten squash plants grew, crowded together and bursting out of my garden bed. No matter what I did, the radishes never grew. The swiss chard seedlings never grew past the microgreen stage.

What a chaos garden looks like.

The two cherry tomato plants I had grew all through the summer, right up until the first frost. I had little weird shaped cucumbers that tasted, shockingly, like cucumbers. I had basil and chives and mint for days. I had a surplus of zucchini and yellow squash, enough to give away and enough to try out a plethora of interesting recipes beyond zucchini bread.

Summer squash pizza, recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Honestly so good. Worth all the squeezing.

That summer, we went through long stretches of heat advisories and no rain. Squash bugs came for my squash plants, but zucchini continued to grow prolifically, somehow. (Don't ask me, I have no idea.) I was diligent about watering the garden nearly every day. Every morning when I watered the garden, most of the time with my daughter on my hip or standing next to me holding onto my pant leg, I talked to the plants and my mother. I asked the swiss chard what they needed, I asked my mom why these radishes weren't growing ("I read that radishes are supposed to be easy to grow! What the hell is going on with these?"). I marveled at finding new zucchini every other day, and my kid loved pulling tomatoes off the plants, ripe or not, and biting into them. ("Juicy!")

Whenever I brought in a harvest of those little tomatoes, I thought of one of the meals I made for my mother in the last months of her life. She, too, was growing a few tomato plants like mine, in flower pots in the backyard. Even as her health began to fail, her green thumb persisted. Her tomato plants were heavy with yellow, red, and orange fruits. One afternoon, I made her a caprese-ish salad with her tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, olive oil, salt, and pepper. "This is good," she said. "Something different."

A version of “Mom’s caprese salad,” made last summer with the tomatoes from my first chaos garden.

This year, my garden looks much different. I'm calling this year The Sophomore Slump. My zucchini and yellow squash plants have produced nothing but limp blossoms. I planted strawberry crowns and they are sending out runners. I have a couple sage plants, grown from seed. I have Italian parsley and chives for days. I have small basil plants growing from seed -- by frost, they may be big enough for me to harvest enough for a batch of pesto, maybe. The marigolds are growing beautifully and starting to bloom now -- right on schedule. I have a couple dill plants in a flowerpot on our back step that are growing tall. The lettuce is, startlingly, growing enough for me to use for tacos.

The Sophomore Slump Garden.

The garden doesn't have the bounty that it did last year. Maybe I needed to use more plant food and compost. Maybe I need to water more often. Maybe it's simply the heat -- I've read in some gardening groups that others have had similar issues with their zucchini this season. Maybe I just need to talk to the plants more.

Swiss chard seedlings, in limbo.

I do admit that I've spent less time and attention on my garden this summer than last. I've made plans to do black-eyed susan starts to plant in the front yard and haven't done it. I made mental notes to chelsea chop the native goldenrods and asters that have popped up in my backyard, and forgotten to do it (they are now taller than me). I've made plans to clear out an area of creeping charlie and sow bee balm and blanketflower in its place. Have I done it? Nope. I haven't even been able to do my regular poison ivy patrols.

My kid is an actual toddler with very real wants and needs and expresses them clearly (sometimes with words, a lot of times with tears and collapsing on the floor with them (we joke sometimes that she's got Italian footballer blood in her (we can say that because she does))). The struggle to find a balance between doing toddler-centered activities and my own is real. Sometimes, the toddler stuff wins out. A lot of times it does.

(Sure, could I involve my kid in some of these garden chores that have languished on my to-do list? I could try! The only item on that garden list that she might be even remotely interested in right now is pulling weeds. She also really wants to help me hand pull poison ivy, which...of course, she does.)

I've been trying to slow down this summer, which means consciously not trying to do *everything* every day. It means spending more time playing with my kid and filling her connection cup and leaving the bread making for another day. It means allowing myself to make the same meals again and again so I can use that time and creative energy to write instead. Sometimes, it means allowing myself to play Stardew Valley for awhile on my Switch during my "me" time rather than be "productive."

In doing this, I've come to the realization that my plate was piled with too much. The expectations I have for myself as a mother, a writer, and just a human being trying to save her sanity are far too high. I see now that there isn't room on my plate for everything. There are weeks where cooking and baking projects take priority over writing, and that's okay. There are weeks where my writing takes precedence over a baking project or squeezing in more time to read a book. There are weeks where vegging out and playing Stardew or watching Sherlock or Vanderpump Rules are all I have the energy for. There are weeks where my kid and I will spend lots of time outside and there will be weeks where we don't. There are weeks where the laundry gets done and there are weeks where the pile of laundry will remain unfolded in the crib. There's a balance, and it changes all the time. There are things that will get done, and there are things that will not.

It's also meant that because I've made writing a priority this summer, the garden gets less of my attention. I try not to feel guilty, like things are just falling off my plate without rhyme or reason. I remind myself that I'm actually pausing, looking at what's on my plate, and deciding what I want to keep today and what I want to save for later. I'm also deciding that some of what's on my plate doesn't actually need to be there at all.

I think back to my mom coming inside, finally, after hours of work in the garden, her big sun hat tied around her chin, her long-sleeved shirts and gloves to protect her skin. I wonder about what was on my mom's plate then, what were her tradeoffs. Time spent inside doing house chores for time out in the garden? Putting work into the garden out of economic necessity so we could have food to eat later? Letting my brothers and I take care of ourselves so she could get some peace and quiet in the garden?

The thing about gardening and growing plants is that it's an investment -- of time, energy, economic and material resources, patience. It takes time to see what will become of all your work. There is a lot of time to course correct, and sometimes course correcting means waiting for the next growing season to apply a new technique or new knowledge. Sometimes course correcting can mean ripping out a bunch of plants and starting all over again.

There are ebbs and flows to all of it. This year, my mental health and my writing are my top priority, rather than the garden. Next year, maybe the garden will flourish again with two years of gardening experience under my belt. Maybe this is just the year of...slowing down and figuring everything out. Life has been a bit of chaos since having a kid. Maybe this is just the season to say, "Time out -- stop. Let's rearrange everything and figure this out."

This year's lone zucchini.

Maybe I shouldn't think of this year as my garden's The Sophomore Slump. Just because it isn't bursting at the seams doesn't mean it's any less successful. In fact, now that I think of it -- I haven't let a single plant die this summer. The radishes never went anywhere, but everything else I've planted this season has remained alive. I have dill, chives, parsley, and sage to snip fresh for meals, I have beautiful flowering black-eyed susans, buddleia, lavender, salvia, and marigolds in the garden and the flower beds. I have a cute picture of my kid standing next to the peony I planted the first autumn we moved into this house. Just yesterday, I looked at my squash plants and found one small zucchini growing strong.

I've come a long way for a girl who used to let every plant she touched die. When I wasn't looking, I became someone who keeps things alive. I'm glad I've stopped for a minute to meet her.

The most important thing I’ve kept alive.

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Nothing Lasts Forever: On Sleep, 3am Googling, and Trusting Your Gut

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I come to the keyboard today feeling like a fresh new human. Yes, I got 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night and I feel incredible. I feel coherent. My body isn't screaming at me to lie down. I feel like I could do a LOT of shit right now.

When you are a caregiver for a tiny human, sleep rules your life, whether you want it to or not. It becomes an obsession, unwittingly and unwillingly (for me, anyway). Timing naps and wake windows, wondering whether it's okay for your child to be able to sleep only while touching you, wondering what you're doing wrong when the baby wakes up immediately upon being set down in the bassinet. Crying in the kitchen at 4:30am while your coffee brews because you are so. fucking. tired. Fighting off murderous rage by repeating to yourself: "She's not GIVING me a hard time, she's HAVING a hard time" when your toddler wakes up in the middle of the night, tossing and turning and sitting up and asking for milk and then lying down again (repeat for two hours).

After a good stretch of sleeping through the night, my child began waking up at weird times in the night/early morning and nursing nearly nonstop until the sun rose. One morning she woke up at 4:30am, another at 2:30am. I spent the rest of the night, in a half-awake/half-asleep state as she nursed, fell asleep, woke up, cried for milk, nursed, fell asleep, cried for milk, etc. It's a special kind of torture to be allowed to fall only halfway asleep for hours at a time.

Now, I'm making it sound like this lasted for weeks. It happened only two nights -- Tuesday and Wednesday. It was enough to feel like I had been awake for a hundred years. Time slows down when you're sleep-deprived and you've been pushed out of bed at 7am by a toddler shouting, "Get UP, mama! Get UP!" I feel like I'm just trying to make it to nap time so I, too, can maybe close my eyes. I've started to get headaches when I haven't gotten enough sleep (22-year-old night-owl me would be extremely weirded out by this), and I've started trying to practice "good sleep hygiene" so that even when I've had a bad night, I don't collapse into a heap.

Wednesday night was the worst night. 1.5 hours (maybe) of uninterrupted sleep. 5 hours of being half-asleep. I woke up with a whisper of a migraine. As my toddler ran off to "read her books" and I changed into my daytime sweatpants, I repeated a couple things to myself.

1. Stay cool. Remember, she can't help it. She's a toddler. She's not giving me a hard time. She's having a hard time. She doesn't know what's going on either. She's also not sleeping well.

2. This will not last forever. She will sleep again, and so will I.

When I was an extremely sleep-deprived fresh new parent, I did a lot of internet searching for anything about infant sleep, and also, was it normal for my 3-week-old to be attached to my boobs for hours and hours on end? (Yes, it is, and it's called cluster feeding. No one told me about it, so thanks to the NewParents of Reddit!)

I couldn’t ask any of my friends about these things because none of my friends have babies, and I couldn’t ask my mom — the one person I wanted to ask the most — because she’s no longer on this earthly plane. It was an extremely lonely and isolating time. I sent desperate prayers into the universe for my mom to visit me in a dream (as if I slept deeply and long enough to dream in that era of life) so she could give me advice and tell me what she did with me. The one thing she did tell me when she was alive was that baby-me was a terrible sleeper and cried all the time, so I was certain she would have something useful or comforting to tell me.

Instead, I had to rely on myself. And the internet.

Lots of people claim to be experts on baby sleep, and many of the people who claim to be experts make a lot of money off making sleep-deprived parents feel terrible about "creating bad habits" with their babies. When you're desperate to do the "right thing" for your kid and when you feel like your arms are going to fall off from rocking your child to sleep, you just want someone to tell you what to do. And there are a lot of people who will tell you what to do, especially if you pay them money.

For me, there was a lot of advice that made me feel like I was fucking up my kid by doing certain things. Feeding her to sleep (even though it's biologically normal to do that -- literally, when you nurse, hormones are released that make baby and caregiver sleepy). Holding her while she slept. Co-sleeping/bedsharing safely. All of it was, according to 'experts,' laying the foundation for "bad habits" that would ensure my child would never be able to sleep on her own and that she would be sleeping in our bed until she left for college. I read things that told me not to make eye contact with my baby in the middle of the night because it was too stimulating and would keep her up all night. I made jokes with my husband about it ("Don't look her in the eye!"), but one night, after rocking her for what felt like hours and avoiding eye contact with her because it might be too stimulating and keep her awake (even though she was already awake!!), I thought, Wait, what the fuck? I shouldn't make eye contact with my baby? This tiny being who has been living inside my body and has no idea what the fuck is going on out here? I should treat her like a creepy stranger on the street? What???

So I looked down at my sweet girl's face and *gasp* made eye contact. I stroked her eyebrows, her chin, her cute little unibrow. I kissed her on the forehead and held her close. Her eyelids grew heavy almost instantly, and she fell asleep.

From then on, I knew that I had to trust my gut when it came to how to care for my kid. I'd never been a parent before, but I knew how to be a human and I knew how to care for another human being. Caring for another human being simply requires empathy and a recognition that the person you are caring for is another human -- no matter how small, how young, how old, how mobile, how healthy, how sick. They are a human, and they should be treated with respect and dignity.

Because babies can only communicate by crying (and sometimes mysterious hand gestures that are supposed to signal that they're hungry), we forget that they are humans. They have minds, they can and do process the world, what’s going on around them, and how people respond to them. They have mental health. They are biologically wired to connect to their caregivers so they can survive. They are wired to tell us that they need something by crying. Crying is, in fact, our very first form of communication. Crying is always a message, an ask for connection — whether you're a baby, a toddler, or a full-grown adult.

(Also, their little brains are still forming! Their little brains will be forming until they're 25 years old! When they're so young, all they know is the comfort of the womb! And now they're out in this cold, bright, weird world, and they just want something familiar and comforting -- their caregivers! They can't do things their brains aren't developed enough to do (like sleep through the night by themselves! or regulate their emotions! or “self-soothe.” Many adults can't even do these things and *their* brains ARE fully developed (yikes!)!).)

My kid is now 2 and a half years old, and we're here. Bedsharing, nursing to sleep, contact napping, following our guts. We have more good nights than bad, but when the nights are bad, they feel really terrible. The terrible nights feel like they go on forever, but the reality is: it all changes. The tough times pass. From birth to now, we have lived through so much change. I know that one day, she will want to sleep in her own bed, and I'll be so happy and so sad and so proud at the same time.

I try to remind myself of this when I am about to lose my shit. I am not always successful at not losing my shit. Yesterday, after the worst night, I did several things to survive the day:

  • drank a lot of water

  • spent time in the sunshine

  • ate a high protein breakfast (scrambled eggs with ricotta)

  • did some yoga for energy (always with Adriene)

  • did a meditation for inner peace (again, with Adriene!)

  • threw together some whole wheat raspberry scones in a normal amount of time and popped them in the oven before my kid got home from swim lessons

  • napped while my kid napped

  • breathed a LOT

I have to remind myself, though, that even though yesterday felt like a good day despite the exhaustion, I don't have it all figured out. I, actually, never will, because every day is different. And that's okay. It's okay to take the day as it comes. To take a few minutes to close my eyes, imagine my mother’s voice and what she might say to me. Listen to my body and heart and spirit so I can do what I can to take care of myself so I can take care of my kid. What worked yesterday may not work on the next hard day.

Everything changes, nothing lasts forever.

But I did have everything figured out yesterday, though, and I will take that win.

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The Truth About Making Food With A Toddler

When I first found out I was pregnant, I went hard into parenting research mode. I tried to find pregnancy and parenting websites and forums that didn't make me feel like I was joining a weird tradwife club or like I was going to damn my baby to a lifetime of developmental delays if I had coffee or even *clutches pearls* a glass of wine while pregnant. If I saw the word "hubby" written even one time anywhere, I immediately closed the window and moved on to something else.

Soon enough, the algorithm began to flood my social media feeds with parenting and pregnancy content. There are so many fucking opinions out there on what pregnant people should and should not be doing with their bodies, and there are even more opinions on what you should be doing once that infant exits the pregnant body. Lots of fearmongering and finger-wagging about screen time, sleep, routines of all stripes, tummy time, wake windows, feeding schedules, breastfeeding versus formula feeding, etc. etc. etc. I won't step both feet onto my soapbox here, but I'll say that patriarchy and capitalism have done a great job of making parents feel like they a-cannot trust themselves and their instincts when it comes to their own children, and b-are fucking up their infants/kids all of the time. In the midst of all this, I remember reading one article that implored parents to "let" their toddlers "help" them around the house. Sure, the article's author wrote, it might take longer, but the benefits of having your cutie pie help you plant your garden or bake a cake will win out in the long-run. Something about them feeling like part of a team, they'll be more likely to do their chores when they're older, something about them getting good grades when they get to school-age, etc. etc.

I remember looking out into my brand new backyard, imagining my thriving garden, and thinking, What kind of monster *wouldn't* let their toddler *help* them do stuff??? Why would you care about doing a thing slowly if the trade-off is getting to have your little cutie by your side dropping seeds into holes in the ground or watching them whisk up some wet ingredients in a bowl?

Taken shortly before the wet ingredients got sloshed all over the counter.

Fast forward two years to me and my cutie pie in our kitchen on any weekend morning. Let's say we're making waffles, something fairly simple. She's standing in her little Montessori "Discovery Tower" or whatever they're calling it these days, and she's got her cutie pie-sized whisk, and she whisking the shit out of the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. Everything is covered in a fine layer of white stuff. And by everything, I mean *everything* -- the table, her stool, the splash mat underneath her stool, the floor, her feet, her pajamas, her face.

While she's doing this, I'm staring into the middle distance, trying to appear present but also thinking: I may have to replace these dry ingredients with an approximation of what she's flung all over the place (do we think it's a quarter cup of stuff? It might be. Would it destroy the recipe if I was wrong? There's only one way to find out, I guess.)

Okay, so technically this is a pic of the chaos of making dinner, but same rules apply.

This scene would extremely cute if it had not taken us 35 minutes to simply put all the dry ingredients into a bowl. We haven't even measured our wet ingredients yet. We've been up since 8 am, it is now 9:30am, and Mama (that's me) is very hungry.

On a good day (by "good day," I mean my cutie pie has allowed me to sleep enough to not feel sleep-deprived (which could be anywhere from 3 hours to 6 hours, uninterrupted), my patience has not been tested to its breaking point yet, and I'm feeling pretty que sera sera about my kid making a gigantic mess in the kitchen), I can feel whimsical. I can enjoy the fun my sweet girl is having with the whisk and trying out all the different ways she can fling flour across the room. I can take a deep breath, sip my coffee, and let go and let god. We'll clean this all up later, it'll be just fine.

On a not-so-great day (and by "not-so-great day," I mean my cutie pie has been asking for "mommy milk" all night, which means I'm sleep deprived and touched out, my patience ran out at 3am, and there is not enough coffee in the world to make me feel more awake or alive), I sip my coffee and tell her repeatedly: keep the flour in the bowl please, it's mommy's turn to mix now, okay, we'll count to five and then it'll be mommy's turn, wow, you're doing so great, sweetheart, okay, it's mommy's turn, keep it in the bowl please. Repeat all morning.

Either way, our waffles will be done by 10:30am or even 11am. And that's assuming she even wants to help me cook. There are mornings when she doesn't want anything to do with cooking, and she doesn't want me to have anything to do with it either. Instead, she shouts about wanting to play puzzles (with me), freeze tag (with me) or with her doctor bag (with me). Whatever it is she wants to do, it must. be. with. me.

Then, there are other mornings when she's perfectly content to sit in her room, "reading" her books by herself for what feels like a weirdly long amount of time. These are the mornings when I can whip up a Dutch baby or waffles in no time (which is to say, a regular amount of time), and then I can sit and read my own book with my own coffee while it cooks.

Posted up on a stool and read through 3/4 of this collection while making breakfast and my kid “read” through 25 Pete the Cat books.

It seems like cooking or baking with a toddler is exceedingly cute and also exceedingly a pain in the ass. It is both at the same time, no matter what my mood. No matter how messy the kitchen gets or how exasperated I become, it's always worth it to me at the end. Yes, it gives my kid a sense of accomplishment that she helped make breakfast. Yes, my kid's face lights up when she realizes that Bobby Flay/Molly Yeh/The Pioneer Woman/Daniel Tiger is mixing stuff in a bowl exactly the way she does. Yes, my kid now goes on and on about how, when we cook/bake together, we're a team. That is all 1000% percent worth it to me.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is: I've stopped paying attention to Instagram mom influencer accounts and their immaculate kitchens and their children who are doing everything perfectly and also not getting any flour on their clothes or anywhere else and everyone appears to be having the best time and making SO many memories. They’re making the journey look easy, when in reality, the journey is very messy and not always that fun. (In fact, it’s very rarely fun.)

What I am actually, really, trying to say is: I've learned that the key to making food with a toddler is to know my limits and adjust my expectations accordingly. In fact, it helps immensely to have zero expectations. If I can just banish the thought from my mind that my toddler is here to actually help me work toward the end goal (a meal), then I'll be okay when all she does is make a massive mess for me to clean up later. Also, I've learned it's okay if there are some days I'd rather just make the food on my own rather than have my kid "help" me. That's okay, too. Every household chore does not have to be a learning opportunity.

When I think about making food with and/or for my toddler, what's most important to me instead is that she have memories of Dutch Baby Saturdays, or the smell of something good and tasty always cooking or baking. She'll eventually learn how to dump a half teaspoon of salt into a bowl without flinging it three feet away from its target. She's only 2.5 years old -- we have plenty of time.

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Welcome to Friday Bites! (A Reorientation)

Yes, it’s true — Friday Bites has moved to Substack! As always, I’m feeling it out as I go. If you’re a regular reader, you might want to hop over to Substack and subscribe to Friday Bites there so you can get future Friday Bite adventures in your inbox. For now, all content is free and I’m planning on posting both there and here, so you can get your fix either way. Thank you for coming on this journey with me, and here’s to the next phase of Friday Bites!

In 2016, I began blogging about my adventures in cooking and baking. I wasn’t good at either of them, but I was determined to practice, to try making all kinds of dishes — anything from a basic chicken soup to chai-spiced cinnamon rolls to my mom’s empanadas. I wanted to chronicle the journey that food-making was taking me on. It felt significant. 

Fast forward to 2024. We’re surviving through a pandemic, uprisings against state violence, insurrections, corrupt presidencies. People who can get pregnant are losing our right to privacy and our access to healthcare. We’re surviving astronomical prices at the grocery store. We’re protesting against our tax dollars being used for genocide. It turns out plastic can't actually be recycled, and climate change is very, very real. Amidst all this, I’m surviving losing my mother to lung cancer. I’m surviving becoming a mother without my mother. I’m surviving (barely) becoming an at-home mom to my 2-year-old-daughter. 

Have you ever tried to feed a toddler? Mine asks for “a pinch of sprinkles” for breakfast most days, and tries to pivot to “a pinch of chocolate chips” if she can’t have the former. Food making has become something I do on autopilot these days. I’m frequently on the hunt for dishes that include at least one nutritious food I’m certain my child will eat, don’t include a ton of ingredients or a lot of prep, and take less than 60 minutes to make. I don’t take the time to enjoy the aromas and the sounds of cooking dinner anymore. My food journey seems to wandered off into the weeds, as has my writing. 

The process of becoming a mother is called matrescence. It’s a word I’d never heard of until I got pregnant. Something we don’t talk about often enough is this process, and how painful and uncomfortable and devastating and confusing and depressing it is. We also don’t talk about how LONG this process is. Did you know that a person’s brain is actually physically altered by the mere act of becoming a parent? You quite literally become a different person. Do you know what else physically alters the brain? Grief. I've been trying to imagine all the changing my brain has done between losing my mother, growing a human inside me, giving birth, and becoming a mother. Even though I had my daughter two and a half years ago, it still feels like I don't know who I am anymore some days.

On the days I look into my closet and wonder who wore these clothes and when and where she wore them, and then wonder if she will ever come back, I find myself returning to my first loves, the things that bring me joy, connection, a sense of rootedness: writing, cooking, baking, music, books.

So here I am -- here we are -- returning to the basics. This will be a newsletter about food, mostly. But most of the time, I can't write about food without writing about my mom or my kid. Which means I'll also be writing about grief, and motherhood, and daughterhood. And sometimes I’ll be really excited about the books I’m reading, the shows I’m watching, the music I’m listening to, so I’ll be writing about those things too.

I guess I need some kind of succinct elevator pitch for this thing, so let's try: a newsletter about food, pop culture, grief, moms, and daughters. Which sounds heavy, but I promise there will be lightness. And there will be playlists that you can dance to while you cook your own food in your own kitchens. I will aim to publish this newsletter every two weeks, on Fridays. You don't need to be a mom or have kids or be a daughter to enjoy this newsletter. You just need to be a human, and maybe you need to like food and have a good sense of humor.

(Also, this is not going to be a recipe type of newsletter. However, I will always tell you where I got the recipe for whatever I'm cooking. But if it's a recipe that's been passed down to me by my mom or something, then you're just shit out of luck (happy Googling).)

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. I’m excited to see where this new iteration of Friday Bites takes us.