There is not no punching

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The truce is always tentative.

It is the middle part of summer.  This is the part where I’m kind of bored and very anxious that summer is going by too fast.  My kids are good kids, but they have had enough of each other. There has been enough downtime and we’ve used up a lot of our great ideas for entertainment.  They can be alone for an ever tightening window of somewhere between ten minutes and thirty seconds before earnestly trying to kill each other. The games that make them want to kill each other are the games they love the best.  From upstairs, where I am definitely not sleeping anymore, thanks, it mostly sounds like everything is fine and then the big one is screaming at the little one. The little one is sneaky and I know better. They just don’t see the world the same way.

Wesley is my squish-hearted eight year old.  He is kind first if kind is possible. Wes is earnest and conscientious.  He organized a student group called “Litter Dominators” in the first grade and has been spearheading playground cleanups with his friends for more than a year.  He has requested that I stop signing him up for organized sports. Wes prefers guitar, theater and robotics at the moment.  

When he was a baby, strangers would pause in the grocery store and listen to him talk.  He has always loved language. His humor has always been wordy too. He is quick witted like his father and his on-the-fly puns have been making me genuinely laugh for a long time.  I just about fell off the dock when he dubbed the four-stepped swim later at the cottage a “good quadrilateral.” He rolled his eyes at me when I made him define quadrilateral.  I don’t know why I was surprised when he could.  

He came into the world overwhelmed by the sensory input of it all.  He still pulls a blanket over his head when he’s in the living room and prefers not to stack social engagements so that he has time to be alone.  Wes retires to his room for an hour every evening before bed and studiously divides his time between twenty minutes of guitar practice, twenty minutes of reading, and twenty minutes of free play where he may draw, write a story or imagine.  He usually plays his favorite podcast in the background. He was thrilled when we told him he could read until he felt tired because it was summer. He keeps checking to make sure that he isn’t up too late because his book is really good.  

With Wesley, gifts are easy because he loves things with his whole heart.  We had so many intense phases. Wesley has loved sea creatures, dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, pokemon, harry potter, greek and roman mythology and rocks.  Wes pours over the guidebooks to his Pokemon, skylanders and other anthologies and memorizes facts and battle stats. He likes to know everything there is to know.  His interest is sated by volume and obscurity. He sometimes absorbs information without digesting it. I will never forget the look on his preschool teacher’s face when he told her that Australopithecus (a very early human ancestor) mated face to face.  He had no idea what that meant, and I hope he’s not only kid whose parents were too late to consider the uncomfortable conversations necessitated by that part of our child’s voracious consumption of BBC nature programs. Wes strives for authenticity. When he was in preschool, his plastic animals were under the stewardship of a generic action figure “Super David Attenborough” and he always attempted a Brittsh accent.  He cannot squash the instinct to correct anyone who has used a term incorrectly. It’s the worst, but my husband would like you to know that he gets this from me.

Wes is into epic tales of good and evil.  He likes to go to the backyard and imagine these battles with his whole body.  He makes sound effects, bends, twists and darts. He often gets so excited by an idea that he runs out the door to go pretend it out right that second.  He likes elemental battles that work a bit like twelve dimensional rock paper scissors. He prides himself in knowing how it all works. He has started to invent his own board games.  

Cheaters and rule breakers offend him personally.  He likes the rules because he likes to know what to expect.   The rules are the bones of the world. They come first. The better you know the rules, the more fun the game.  Anyone out to skirt the rules is out for a bigger share of the pie than they deserve. As soon as the rules are broken, the offender is trying to take something from someone else and Wes will not have it.  An infractor’s awareness of the rules does little to mitigate the offence. The games he likes are complicated. It is easy to break the rules accidentally. Enter little brother and their bi-hourly screaming match about why Mac’s early Beyblade launch was “so not fair.”  Beyblades are Japanese battle tops and I hate them, how I hate them.

Malcolm is four and a half.  He came into the world uncomfortable.  He had a club foot and wore casts and braces.  He had a floppy windpipe that caused squeaky breathing. He produced a poor immune response to pneumococcal bacteria and was constantly battling infections.  He coughed and puked nightly for years. If you met this child during this time, you never would have known. It’s why it took such a long time to have his medical concerns appropriately addressed.  He was climbing the walls and charming the medical staff and he looked completely fine. He holds nothing for the back half. Malcolm will party until he cannot party anymore and what happens after that is not pretty.  

Malcolm is intense.  He once told me, “I think my face looks mean when I’m not thinking anything.”  Not many four-year olds are troubled by their own resting bitch face, but that’s Malcolm.  He’s aware. His interest is fleeting and unpredictable. Mac’s favorite toys have included a brown ball of string, a small stuffed dog, plastic lizards to be used exclusively in the bath, freebie orange sunglasses from a brewery, and an ever growing stash of plastic easter eggs. He likes to tie fake leashes to scary stuffed beasts.  I am never really sure what Malcolm will like, but Malcolm knows right away. Malcolm has never been into baby stuff. When he was little, I remarked often that he hated to be addressed in motherease. It annoyed him to be treated like a baby, even when he was a newborn. I was the only one screaming “duuuuuude.” across the playground to rebuke my toddler.  He has always known that farts are funny. He insists that I sunscreen his entire butt just to be safe. You never know when it might be out, and a red crack would be the worst.  

He was later to talk, and I often have the sense that Malcolm’s language is catching up to his thoughts.  When Malcolm imagines, he creates systems. “What if there was a dinosaur suit with a button inside that granted one wish?  I would push the button and wish for a ton more suits. Then I would get in the suits and make my wishes. The suit would have a stomach and it would roar and I  would use my human voice to tell people it was just a costume, unless I needed alone time and then I would roar and maybe you could come inside and sit in the stomach with me and you use your human legs to make the dinosaur legs work.” that’s what I remember from the drive to nature day camp this morning.  He is full of what if.  

If you give this child an inch, you will give him a mile and he will make sure you like doing it so he can see if he can get two miles next time.  He is exercising the boundaries partly out of curiosity about where they are. He respects a hard limit, but he will work until he reaches it. “But what about, but how come, but last time, but remember when, but before you said.”   He will come with proposals designed to negate your most obvious objections. “Can I drive this car outside if I wipe the wheels with this towel when I’m done so it’s clean?” Malcolm is a strategist. He is making a mental map of the rules of the universe, the REAL ones, and he is doing it by sonar.  He is pinging out behavior and tailoring his response to whatever he gets back.

My child that treasures the rules above all else has little patience for his brother who likes to figure out the rules by systematically nudging them.  I am incredibly lucky that the personalities and birth order are not reversed. There are plenty of peaceful moments. They amicably collaborate on occasion.  They are capable. Despite their efforts, their play is punctuated often by, “Wait, Ow! No, Mac! Not like that! We’re not doing that anymore!” Wesley makes rules and Mac challenges them.  Over and over again. Swords, robots, dinosaurs, whatever. Wesley explains the game, Mac corrupts it. Wes sets up a battle, Mac turns into a tornado. Usually there is more angry exclaiming than there is punching, but there is not no punching.  

If another child, any child, is entered into the equation, my children typically revert to kids I am mostly happy to claim in public.  It’s magical. But seeing friends means I have to put it on pants so it doesn’t always happen. I’m not really worried about the fighting.  I had a little sister. I like her much better now than I did when we were eight and five. I know it’s normal. I am sure I fall somewhere in the reasonable parameters of where I intervene and where I let them figure it out.  I’m mostly just fascinated. I know these kids better than I have ever known anyone. Watching them piss each other off in their own unique ways is its own twisted parenting joy. I will not pass up an opportunity to be entertained.  Or I will try not to. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t scream for some quiet on the daily. It’s really, super loud here. And we are all here. A lot. It’s July.

Niceness fatigue

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The only picture I have of this bridge is the one I took two summers ago when it was completely underwater. I think that’s kind of perfect.

I am a nice person. I come by it honestly.  My grandmother has significant Alzheimers, and one of the things people notice first is that she asks every few minutes if she can get you anything.  My mom is the nicest lady. She is the queen of bringing snacks and sharing. She once held my place in line at an outdoor concert she was not attending because I got lost on the way.  In the rain. She also packed me a picnic to eat at the show with chicken salad wraps and garden veggies. I was like, 31 at the time. My mom loves me and she is thinking about me. She is on my team and she makes sure I know it.  She drove two hours each way once a week for months to stay up all night with my sleepless infant. My mother shows love by showing up quietly and taking care of things. 

I am my mother’s daughter in this way, I think, or I am when I’m at my best.  I’m not perfect, and sometimes I’m a jerk, but in general, I try not to make problems for other people.  I always, always, returns my shopping cart, even in the pouring rain. Sometimes, nice is easy. I can smile at babies and hold doors open for other people all day long and it doesn’t wear me out.  There is a kind of nice, though, that makes me tired. There is a kind of nice that I wear like amour. It’s the kind of nice that isn’t helping me. There is a calculation involved in doing things that are objectively, inarguably helpful to galvinize against hypothetical criticism.  There is a persona of niceness to be preserved at the expense of my own comfort. There is a guilt in paying attention to myself when there are other people with needs around. There is some laundry to be done in my niceness.  

I once offered to murder my friend’s dying decade-old pet fish with a frying pan while she was on vacation because watching it get slowly eaten by its tankmates was stressing her family out. That asshole fish lived for another few months and she still reminds me of what a cold blooded killer I am.  For her, I am a fish murderer. Whatever she needs. Forever.  

But do-it-yourself pet euthanisa is probably not the number one choice most sane people would make under these circumstances.  Who in the world volunteers to blacken their soul in such a way? And who would ask for such violence on their behalf? No one did.  Me and my frying pan showed up uninvited. Have you met me? I’m a boss with a frying pan. BANG! Shhhhh! Harmony restored. Harmony is important to me because other people’s needs are constantly in my awareness.  There is a tickle that won’t go away. I have to check on people. It’s the way I’m wired.  

I don’t think very fast in real time social situations, so I am sometimes satisfying other people’s needs before I have had time to figure out what mine are.  It’s the default switch if I’m not paying attention. I am up and changing the poopy diaper while my husband gags, not because I love touching poop, but because there is poop, and the sooner there is not poop, the better for everyone. People tend to like me because they don’t like touching poop.  Who doesn’t want people to like them? After a while though, I notice the resentment more and more.

My husband, my mother, my sisters, they will tell you the resentment I’m talking about is not new.  I have long been unpredictably angry when a seemingly innocuous thing is put on my plate. Other people close to me have been treated to an inside view lately.  It’s not cute. My boring, chronic, still-not-fine-yet health problems are the kind that can be ignored and pushed through. For a while. It always hurts. Most of the time I could show up and smile, but every now and then something really angry and sharp would come leaking out.  It was an unexpected response from me. People looked at me like I bit them. Sometimes, I was so mad at them that I would have been happy to bite them. Leave me alone.  I’m tired. I am not going to edit your report.  I am not going to enter your data. I do not want to listen to this gossip.  Go away.  

I wanted it both ways.  I wanted people to believe that I was handling it.  I wanted my teams to run and my deadlines to be met and I wanted everyone to feel like I was still me.  The tools to support this facade were endless. I own three different kinds of luminizing concealer. One is literally called “Well Rested.”  I wanted to be seen as competent no matter what. I wanted to produce good work product because the children I serve deserve it. But more than anything, I wanted people to cut me a break.  I wanted them to see me furiously paddling under the surface and know that I was exerting twice the energy to do half as much. I wanted them to psychically understand that I needed help, but I did not want to ask for it.  Some people did and I am grateful to them. Some people didn’t and it hurt my feelings. Just because I’m all up in other people’s problems with a frying pan and zero invitation does not mean they are now obligated to show up at my door with their own heavy cookware.  I expect I am not done learning this lesson.

 I have some outlets for when I just can’t be nice anymore  You know, so I don’t bother people I care about with my rage. There is a one way bridge in my hometown that provides one of two routes home for me when the entire blessed city isn’t under construction.  A one-way bridge is treated like two-way four-way stop. East side gets a turn, then west side, back and forth. People are assholes on this bridge all the time. They gun it when they see you close so that they get to go first.  They zip through four cars the same direction when people wait on the other side. Transgressions occur when people don’t take turns and that means that whoever just cut in front of you is coming towards you and has to look you in the eye when they’re done doing you wrong.  

 I love to drive over this bridge.  I will go out of my way to go use it on a particularly bad day.  It’s been closed for a while and I miss it. If it is warm enough to have the windows down, I tell each offender, “take turns!”  It is concise and instructive. You are in the wrong.  Here is how I would like you to behave next time.  But the way I deliver my message varies drastically depending on my perception of your intent.   I will give kids and people who look confused my teacher face. If this is your first clue that your behavior was unacceptable, let’s not have any questions about it. You have broken the rules.  I only have a few seconds to make my point, and I have to make them count.  The more I think the driver is aware of the rules and breaking them on purpose, the less I rely on my eyebrows and shift my emphasis to my hands. 

I have a double checkpoint system to ensure that I am yelling at someone who deserves it.  I am turning my crankiness into a traffic lesson. It’s almost helpful, if you squint. Is that efficient in its ultimate service to the greater good or is it twisted to need to cloak my darkness so neatly?  It’s probably more of the latter. That’s why I’m talking about it. At the end of the day, I am very definitely still yelling at people because I’m upset about things that have nothing to do with them. I’m still hiding behind some weird shield weaponized niceness while I’m flipping people off, even if it took some bendy trips through logic to get there.

I am not offering this up as a humble brag.  It’s not a cop out to a job interview question.  I’m just too nice and helpful.  Poor me.  It’s a problem.  Many of the worst moments of my life may have gone differently if niceness had not been my first priority.  For me, awareness of this default switch has helped me make deliberate choices. I can change the settings if I’m paying attention.  It’s not easy. I am slowly learning how to get dressed without wrapping myself in niceness to the exclusion of other things.  A lot of my “nice” and “helpful” stuff is still my favorite stuff! I wouldn’t be recognizable without it. I will get it wrong on both ends of the spectrum while I try to recalibrate. I am not done over-helping and I am not done lashing out.  Of course I’m not. The bridge in town should be opening back up soon and I’m really looking forward to that day. I still need it.  

I’m working on it.

Get in the van!

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Actual therapy dinosaur’s eye view from Tracy’s van.

It was a Friday night and it was May in a double education household.  I had back surgery that February to address foot drop and back and nerve pain resulting from chronic problems that began when I was pregnant with my second son.  He is now four. After surgery, I woke up with a wicked gut infection that had been popping up for years. I knew I recognized the feeling, but I had never successfully been matched with a diagnosis. After a lot of consuming my calories through a straw because my insides hurt when I ate, I tested positive for small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) at the end of April which is an infection in the small intestine caused when too many of the wrong things start farting inside you.  I was on my second round of specialized antibiotics. I felt a little better than I had been feeling, but still like hot garbage. I was hurting, and I had been hurting for a long time.

I had just attended some doctors appointments that I was dreading and they had gone well.  I spent extra time considering what my ultimate goal was for each appointment, felt better able to advocate for myself and knew that I had been successful because I left with the outcomes I had outlined.  I was still feeling exhausted by the burden of that heavy cognitive task and pissed off that I was still felt like I was carrying the flag of my health independent of my doctors’ concerns. My head was swirling about what had been happening and what might happen next.  I had started therapy during my illness and had been encouraged to write.  

I’ve always been a writer, but I haven’t written much lately.  I haven’t had the time to devote to something that wasn’t useful.  If I wasn’t grocery shopping or writing psychoeducational reports, I was wasting my time.  There had to be a work product. I had laundry to do! There was not time for this weird cerebral part of me.  This is the part of me that drives my bus most of the time, but this is not the part of me that most people meet.   My favorite humor comes from describing something real exactly right. But real things don’t usually float to the surface of everyday conversation.  It’s not appropriate to smash your heart up against people who aren’t expecting it and it’s a scary thing to do when you aren’t sure how it will be received.   I was letting that thought keep most of what I was feeling beneath my awareness so I wasn’t bothering other people with it. I respected that they had their own things to do.  I saw how busy my friends were. I respected their laundry and I was overwhelmed by my own.

I hammered out a four page heart dump in about half an hour.  It was a frenetic collection of thoughts related to guilt, health, burnout, identity and boundaries.  I was talking about finding myself and filtering out the noise that caring deeply about the people around me can create.  I was talking about learning to check with myself. I was saying something to myself that I was just starting to understand.  This was the night I decided I should probably start a blog.

My friend Tracy sent a group text the next day.  She doesn’t check Facebook that often. It said, “Let’s leave the kids at home and go do something fun.”  She told me later she read my post and told her husband she had to go check on me because I said “nebulous” on the internet.  It was a lot of big words and big feelings. She was right. It seemed weirdly out of character. And that was my problem. Tracy is a good friend. My kids have given her kids the pukes while she pinch hit daycare for me.  She sent me a sympathy note once when my basement flooded and we had to move our worm farm to our dining room and this fact in particular was sending me over the edge. We very quietly leave each other little presents at work when things are tough.  But she didn’t know much about this wordy, nerdy, bleeding part of me.

I told her I would check, but I didn’t think we had plans.  I told her I needed to put on deodorant, and possibly some pants.  I offered to drive to her because I didn’t want her to have to take me home.  I was also worried about being stuck somewhere if I was tired and overwhelmed.  I was sweaty. I had no idea what my kids were going to have for dinner. She told me she was getting in her van to come get me.  It is hard to say no to Tracy. It’s usually not in your interest to. My husband ordered pizza, I hopped in the shower, changed my outfit twice and put on some “no makeup” makeup.”  

Tracy pulled up with her van.  Tracy has a van because she has four kids.  Her oldest is in first grade. Her youngest is one.  She loves people big and hard and she shows up for them.  She is gentle, but she is joyful. She is stubborn and she is committed to everything she thinks is important. When I tell her about the things that make me anxious, she shrugs at me.  “Or you could just not worry about it.” She often doesn’t. If Tracy is your speech therapist, you are about the become pulled into a ping pong game of communication driven by fun, but you are going to work.  She brought ice cream for my kids and we traded it for a quick exit. 

She pointed her car at Ashley’s house.  Ashley is one of the first people I called when I found myself stuck on a preschool toilet at the end of the work day a few days before my back surgery.  I knew she would probably still be in the building because Ashley gets her shit done, and I knew she would pick me up by my sweaty armpits and we could still be friends later.  

 Ashley’s love comes out of her eyeballs.  She sees hurt everywhere and it hurts her.  If she is your speech therapist, she will kick all the asses she sees in the space between you and your goals. 

Ashley came out of her house asking questions.  “Tracy!” She hissed with one or both of her diametrically opposed daughters hovering in the doorway behind her, bewildered, “What did you do?  Are we burying a body?” She was still going to get in the van.  

“Nope, just help me move some car seats!”  Tracy was moving hoards of plastic toys around in her cargo space.  Every traveling therapist who ever dropped a bucket of work dinosaurs all over the grocery store parking lot knows what her car looks like.  

“Okay,” Ashley started hauling the seats out of the back row and tossing them out.  “But where are we going?”  

“I don’t know, let’s go get Karen.  Text Karen and tell her we’re coming.” I texted her.  I was uncomfortable sitting in the front seat and watching them work, but I also knew they didn’t need my half broken ass to move boosters around.   I was glad for something productive to do. Karen checked on my identity first because I hadn’t reached out to her in a while and I don’t have a local area code on my cell phone because I’ve had the same number since the 8th grade.  Who is this?  But yes, let’s go.  She was in.

Karen retired quietly this year and announced it after the fact.  Karen loves Halloween and creepy things and isn’t afraid of what’s messy.  Karen is not here for your shit. Karen was my child’s therapist when he needed feeding intervention.  Her laugh is one of my favorites. I can always tell when Karen is in the therapy rooms because she is throwing a party for the child in front of her.  Karen threw a gender reveal party the following week for her third child, who is a trans man and a musical talent that has taken him to a prestigious residential high school for the arts.  My kids had an awesome time at this party. 

But my friend Karen needed her own party.  It became clear that this was Tracy’s plan. All you people need a party right now.  Get out of your heads, dummies, get into my van!  Here is your party!  She would never call us dummies, but our refusal to play when we were so obviously craving it was exasperating her.  It was the nicest kick in the ass I’ve ever had.  

Tracy started driving. “Hey, Karen lives over here, right?”  I knew that she did, but Ashley picked up on something faster than me.

“Tracy!  Do you not know where Karen lives?”  Ashley gives excellent eyebrow. Tracy shrugged and kept driving.  Ashley whipped out her phone to check the address on the event details for Karen’s son the following week.  We pulled into the vicinity and Ashley began to read it out loud.

“Wait!” Tracy held up her hand.   Ashley waited. “Which house do you think it is?  Let’s guess!” I peered down the road and worried we would drive by it on our pursuit of the most Karen house on the block.  

“Probably that one.”  Ashley picked the house with the truck in the driveway and nice flowers out front.  Ashley was right. Karen’s son was in the window. We giggled on her front walk and called for her to come out.  Karen put on her lipstick and explained that she had been in the garden all day. She was laughing, but she was doing what we had all done.  I am not ready!  Do you see what I’m wearing?  

“I told them I had to get ready fast because my friends were coming to get me.  The kid is not sure what is happening. He wasn’t sure if you were the right friends, he said you looked like high schoolers.  I made them something to eat, so they’re good.” Her kid is in high school, but we were all worried about the dinner vacuum our abrupt absence would leave.  

A text from my friend Christa came through while Karen was getting settled.  Christa has a one year old son and had finished enough of the evening bedtime routine to sneak out.  Tracy was planning to put that baby to bed herself if it had taken much longer. Christa has been chafing under the routine and solitude imposed by early parenting.  She needs to play. My friend Christa is loyal and consistent. She knows what she thinks, but she might revise her opinion if she loves you and you do something with which she disagrees.  If she is your school psychologist she will pour over your data and consider every angle she can think of to be sure your evaluation is done to professional standards and serves your interest.  

I went in for Christa by myself because she is my sister.  Her husband and baby met me in the living room. That kid. He’s the best.  These party time people made a party time baby. I love watching him light up when you turn your attention to him.  Christa emerged from the back of the house. My crazy eyes only half surprised her because she is very good at picking up a vibe and she had been watching the texts come through as the van filled up.

“I’m not sure what is going on and I didn’t know when you were coming, so I just started getting ready.”  She didn’t feel ready yet. Her husband felt our energy and it made him sad. He wanted a van too. The need for taking turns playing when they are a couple who plays together so magically has been hard for them.  But he loves Christa and he sent her on her way.  

We tried to find some more friends.  We sat in one friend’s driveway, but she wasn’t home.  A few friends had really good excuses and putting them in the van would have caused problems for their families.  We already knew for sure that some people were busy. We had some friends who we wanted to invite but weren’t sure how it would be received.  We couldn’t lose our momentum. Also, we felt like drinking.  

We decided to head to our tiny downtown strip.   We may or may not have had a beer in the parking lot.  Tracy had packed the bud light lime from the back of her fridge.  Also she brought goldfish. Karen’s picture of the hodgepodge cooler is one of my favorites from the night.  Our first choice bar wasn’t open. Even as we started walking, we weren’t sure where we would land.

We picked a bar by noticing it wasn’t too busy.  We sat down at a big long table and we ate and we drank and we laughed.  I didn’t look at my phone. We shared all the food and we picked out beers for each other.  We were a weird tribe who had never been assembled all in one place alone before, but we were having a hell of a party.

There have been a few other nights in my life like this.  These are the mythology type of nights people make movies about.  Ask my college friends about Classy/Trashy night. These nights happen when everyone agrees they are happening.  They are all in experiences.

My friend Tracy used her superpower when she put us in her van.  She saw needs, she met them in the kindest way she could and she maximized the fun.  There was a magic in her van that I didn’t know I needed. It was the feeling of doing my own hard thing near someone I liked who was doing their own, different hard thing. That was the missing piece of my blog.  That is when I was reminded of my old complaint about the laundry. 

I am feeling the urge to turn everything into a laundry metaphor.  The submission tab for this page is definitely going to be the laundry chute unless someone has a better idea.  There will be enough laundry similes without my forcing it. I don’t think I know what to do about Tracy’s van. I need it here, but there’s nothing analogous.  Tracy’s van is Tracy’s van. It’s in the parking lot, and I will come and put you in it, but it’s not a threat. It’s a party. It’s happening right now and I want you to come.  I know you’re not ready. I’m not ready either. Just get in the van!   


Welcome to my metaphorical laundromat!

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When my second child was two months old, I wrote: “When I write my autobiography, which is tentatively titled, There is Never Not Laundry, the Camille Henderson Story, I am thinking I will call this chapter, “When Will my Baby Grow Eyebrows and Other Things I Have Googled.”  I was saying, “There is a lot to do, and there always is. I am anxious about it and not sure what doing it right should feel like.”  I was talking about literal laundry and all of the other have-to stuff in life. At the time, I was saying, in my weirdo way, that I was feeling ill-equipped and frantic about superfluous things because life felt out of control. 

Reflecting on that time, that feels like a fair summary of the situation.The internet is great for this.  You can perform a quick search for things you dimly recall and then there are, just as you left them. I had infant who never slept, dear God, and a four-year-old.  I had just gone back to work full time. I only kind of remember these months. I remember the way my bones felt. When I needed a name for this blog, this little bubble from 2014 burst back into my awareness.  I love the idea that I was talking to myself from five years ago.   

I am a metaphor person.  I am a pattern person. I was talking about more than literal laundry. There was a reason I chose this as the title for my autobiography, even if it was off the cuff. Laundry stands in for something bigger because laundry is irresistibly universal.  There is a humanity in the chore of our literal laundry and the way we wash it. No one is upset about the fact of laundry. Most people respect the need to make time for it and understand how overwhelming ceaseless piles of laundry can be. It is a good idea for most people to learn to do their own, but we tend to do it the way we were taught and we may get results we like better if we’re willing to try something else.  Laundry needs to be done, and done consistently. If we did nothing but laundry we would be really unfun people. There are so many places to wear your clean clothes. That’s why we’re washing them!  

Everyone knows what is meant by figurative dirty laundry.   It is the stuff you aren’t supposed to talk about, but everyone experiences.  In this analogy there is an implication that we should not be making our human struggles public, but also an acknowledgement that everyone struggles.  But this is a metaphorical laundromat. These are the things I want to talk about.

I’d rather it not be all about me, though I will happily offer up my laundry.  I know I’m not the only one that has laundry to do and I want to have a good time while we do it together.  There’s a lot of downtime at the laundromat. Maybe we need a bar up in here too. Maybe we need some yoga classes and a lending library.  I don’t know yet. Let’s see what people bring if they show up! Maybe you want to hang out for a while before you truck in your laundry. Maybe you want to look in the window.  However you want to hang out at the laundromat is fine with me. I’m glad you’re here! Hi!  

Friends, write something!   I would love for you to share it with me here!  If I know you, in real life, on the internet, from a long time ago, I am inviting you to work through something at my laundromat. Writing is a powerful way to clarify thoughts for me and has been really helpful in convincing myself of the value of my opinion.  When I read me back to me, I make a lot of sense. I can be nice to that person because her brain is now outside of my brain.  

I cannot stop names from popping into my brain when I think of the people I know and the things they might want to talk about.  I know people who are handling some epic things. The laundry of life is endless. I have friends who know a lot about aging parents, balancing work and life, staying home with kids, chronic illness, sexuality, disability, drug addiction, mental health and so many other things I haven’t considered.  We all have relationship and identity issues big and small. We could all benefit from listening to ourselves about our own experiences and working through the things that get dirty so that they do not pile up. 

You pick your topic and your format.  I do not care what you write about. I may have you filed in my brain as someone who might want to talk about something I know about you.  If that’s not what you want to talk about, I would love to know what is. Write about what you are paying attention to. What are you noticing?  What do you wish you knew a long time ago? What’s been tough for you? What lights you up? What makes you angry and why? Where is your laundry piling up and what are you doing about it?  

The parameters I am laying out are the ones I am attempting in my own writing and I have put them there to keep me comfortable in my message and to protect people that I love from hearing criticism or defensiveness from me or anyone else where there really isn’t any. 

This is not an advice column.  There is no “you should” here. There is only: this is what is true for me.  I don’t know what other people should do. I’m not them. I love you, but I’m here to tell you, you don’t either.   We’re not picking through each other’s piles to decide how we would sort it or prescribe the right kind of washing regimen, but we can lend each other some supplies if it seems useful.  We are doing our own laundry.  

This is not the laundry olympics.  You don’t have to have the biggest pile of the dirtiest laundry to need to wash it, and if you have a metric fuckton of rank laundry, you are also in the right place.   We can all have a good time at the laundromat no matter what we have going on in the machine. The more I think about it, the more we are for sure going to need a bar.

There is also no apologizing.  One of the reasons I appreciate communicating in writing is that it takes me about four passes through my own writing to get rid of things that sound defensive.  I don’t catch it all. Share to your own level of comfort. You don’t have to air all of your dirty laundry. Explain yourself as completely as you would like, but don’t justify your perspective because you think someone else might not like it.  I will buy you a beer and we will talk back to the internet trolls or the jerks in town together and mostly offline, if ever we are so lucky to be graced with such an issue. I know this could be hard for me too. Maybe that’s one reason I don’t want to do it quite alone.  I am not tapping special friends on the forehead because I know this is not something everyone is going to want to do, right now or ever. I get that.  

Take your time!  One big struggle for me is trying to say four things at once.  I often have the experience that, “oh, this is THAT thought, but better.”  “These things are connected THIS way.” “Now I see I have to back up and talk about X before I can talk about Y.”   Ideas are exciting, and I miss connections when I go too fast! What keeps coming back around? Where is your laundry piling up? Take time and pay attention. 

I understand that it takes a while for word to get out about a new place, so I know that I may very well be doing some lonely laundry.  The vulnerability makes me want to puke, but the laundry needed done anyway. My metaphorical laundromat is for you if you think it is. It is not for you if you don’t.  I hope you will decide to hang out. I’d make it rain quarters, but I don’t think projectiles put out quite the welcoming vibe I’m hoping for. Welcome to There is Never Not Laundry!  I hope you will find something useful here.