A Wide Open Road: On Dropping the Last Nap and Trying to Find My "Niche"

A few days ago -- after reading 15 books (one of which was Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester, one of my favorite childhood reads, read in its entirety. She barely cracked a yawn.), an entire sippy cup of milk, singing "The Wheels on the Bus" at least a hundred times, lots of tossing and turning while my daughter said with sleepy-ish frustration, "Mommy, I want to sleep" -- my daughter finally fell asleep around midnight, and I had to acknowledge the reality: she no longer needs a nap.

When I woke up the next morning, the frustration and upset I felt at the 2.5+ hour bedtime from the night before was fresh in my mind. I thought, with steely resolve, *Okay, fine. We're done with naps. Let's freakin' go.* That day, I had a play date with another mom at the library, and it took up most of the day, so our first no-nap day felt easy. Breezy. (Sort of. My husband took over for awhile in the afternoon so I could fall into a very deep hour-long sleep on the couch, where I dreamed about trying to buy tacos from a biker bar but got caught in some kind of biker gang war.)

I've been sending letters here on Substack for 3 months now. It feels like both a very long time and no time at all. When I first started here, I felt so frantic about defining what this newsletter would be "about" and I felt so undecided about what to name it. So I named it something that felt familiar to me and my blog writing (Friday Bites). It didn't feel quite right, but I went with it anyway. Trying to summarize what my newsletter would be about felt like trying to fold clean clothes while my toddler rolled around in them. But I came up with something, and decided to just...do it. Just write. I can always change things later.

So I started sending letters. It felt important to get out of my head and just start. Stop worrying that no one would subscribe or be interested or read. As I started feeling my way around the Notes section, I tried not to be intimidated by all the other brilliant and beautiful work I encountered. I tried not to get discouraged into silencing myself after reading a lot of Discourse about the state of "good" and "bad" Substack writing. When people started sharing their subscriber counts, I tried not to feel inconsequential and a failure because my subscriber numbers are not huge.

Instead of scrolling Notes and getting sucked into all the noise, I read newsletters from my inbox first thing in the morning, and I use the Notes feature to find new letters to read. When I write, I tell myself that I'm writing for me because I love it and I need to and whoever needs to hear what I'm saying will find me.

Even so, I've been trying to not feel like a mess because my writerly instincts are punching their way out of the little niche box I've been trying to contain them in. Content creator wisdom (which is actually very different from writer wisdom) tells us to find our niche, to specialize, to compartmentalize. To put a magnifying glass on one interest and ignore all the rest. (Much like academia and the MFA, but that's a discussion for another time.)

I just cannot do that. Trying to compartmentalize myself and my writing and my thoughts is like trying to put my beloved late cat in a cat carrier. She clawed, spit, kicked, hissed, dead-fished, ran away, hid -- did everything she could to keep us from putting her in that small, dark cage, so I held her on my lap on the car rides to and from the vet. Everything was less stressful and went more smoothly when we stopped trying to cram her in a box and just let her breathe and be free.

So we're in the middle of transitioning to no-nap days. There have been a couple days where my girl has asked for a nap at 3pm, and I've given it to her. (And yes, on those days, she's fallen asleep past 10:30pm. On those nights, I have only myself to blame.)

I haven't fully recognized the extent to which I've built our days around naptime. When she was doing 3 naps a day, it felt impossible to do any activity that felt longer than a couple hours. When she dropped to 2, it felt a little easier to plan activities and work meetings around them. When she dropped to 1, it felt like a heavy blanket got thrown off our days. We had more flexibility, could plan longer outings. Dropping to zero naps, though, feels like starting a marathon that I am absolutely unprepared to run.

Naptime has always been *my* time. When I worked for someone else, I sometimes used nap time to get things done, and I disliked it very much. When I quit my job, naptime became my respite. Sometimes it was the only time in the day I got to sit down and rest. Sometimes I napped, or read, or caught up on my trash tv. I've structured our days around Before Naptime and After Naptime.

Now, without a nap to break up the day, there is no Before and After. It's all just...Endless Time.

I wake up in the morning and see my day stretch out before me like I-80 from Salt Lake City to my hometown in northern Nevada -- an infinite straight-shot drive under a relentless sun, very few rest stops, and nothing but blinding salt flats to feast my eyes on for what feels like an eternity. I have no idea what to do with all this Time and Space and Light in our days.

What Substack has given me in the midst of the all-over-the-place-ness of toddler motherhood is structure and an outlet. I've set the publishing timeline for myself, and I'm very proud that I've stuck to it. Even though I have days where the only person I talk to is a nearly-3-year-old, my brain doesn't feel like goo anymore, and I suspect it's partly because I'm using it to write and string semi-coherent sentences together on a regular basis.

Writing letters here has reminded me that there are things that I'm excited to write about that are not necessarily related to the niche (grief and motherhood and food) I've put myself in.

And I've decided to say fuck it. I'm going to write about whatever I want here. Because this writing (I've started to call it my public-facing writing) fuels my other writing -- my poems, my more vulnerable essays. I've learned about what I feel comfortable sharing here, in real-time, and what feels better to work on in private by myself and with trusted readers (and my therapist) when it comes time for it.

With the days stretching out like a wagon ride on the Oregon Trail (for a visual, see: Meek's Crossing), I'm starting to feel out our new rhythms, suss out what we need for this new phase we're embarking on. It requires more storytimes at the library, more nature walks, more art time, more playground trips. It requires letting go of guilt around screen time, and it requires more structure for my toddler. Within the structure I make for her, I know I will begin to find time for myself again, the way I did during nap time. (I just have to remind myself, on days that feel like absolute chaotic failures, that I'm doing my best, we're figuring this out, everyone is fed and clean, and tomorrow will be a new day, a clean slate, an opportunity to try again.)

We're about a week into our no-nap life, and I'm starting to feel more comfortable with all the Space, Time, and Light my days are seeing. I don't feel in control of anything, and we still don't have a lot of structure, but I'm figuring out how to adapt. It doesn't feel so daunting anymore -- it's starting to feel more like possibility.

Somehow, my Substack life feels like it's getting more Space, Time, and Light, too. With a no-nap day, I suddenly feel free to write about whatever I want, whether it has to do with motherhood, grief, and food or not. I'm cooking up some fun projects that I'll probably launch in the new year, one to do with cakes and the other with music.

6 months ago, I couldn't have even conceived of feeling capable of planning a regular newsletter, and here I am, doing the damn thing. I'm my own boss, I get to write about whatever I want, name it whatever I want, and I get to choose the box I put myself in. And guess what -- the boxes are getting recycled, and I'm heading out onto the open road.

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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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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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