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This year, the Halloween plan is a little different. Our daughter still wants to trick-or-treat with us, but our son has reached the Age of Mischief when he wants to run around with his friends, and my goal is for him to...well, just stay away from the eggs and/or toilet paper, or you are grounded forevermore, k? (He won't, he won't, but it's still going to be weird sending him off with his buddies, since I still remember him like...well, this.
I've been writing about emotional labor for years. When I was married, the load that I carried in my mind each and every minute of each and every day was legitimately intolerable - but guess what? Being a single mom is...well, it's not worse, exactly, because there's one fewer person whose needs I have to keep track of, but it's also not better. I still have to maintain a constant and ongoing list in my head consisting of approximately ten thousand tasks per child (and a few for me). And the pets. And the house. And the self-care (hahahahaha).
And! Did I mention I'm moving? I'm moving! (Yes, again, and we'll discuss; I'm going to be putting up before and afters that I think will be super fun.)
You know what moving is?
My dreams veer between acute realism and apocalyptic wastelands - an obvious, albeit depressing, metaphor for my perspective on life. Some nights, I dream that I'm in my own bedroom, eyes open in the dark, everything around me just as it should be...and then I glance upwards, and see a spider drifting down from the ceiling, legs extended towards my face.
Other nights, I'm walking down an office hallway when the building begins to crack, glass shattering in my face. I scurry down the side of a building to shelter beneath a support beam while the rest of the building comes down around me. Later, I find myself charged with shepherding a group of mystery children through the ruins of New York City.
Our OG baby has a sibling!
Pick up a copy of The Big Journal For Pregnant People here, or wherever books are sold. Happiest Mother's Day to all the moms and moms-to-be out there!
Look at baby me modeling!
For many years, I made a living, in part, by writing about products and integrating them into this website. These were literally called "integration posts," and they were what gave me the leeway to do the writing I loved, both here and elsewhere. But they weren't exactly a hardship - I always really enjoyed the challenge of being presented with a new product or brand, seeing how it worked in my life, and then creating a story around it.
It was also, honestly, just super fun to get to try out new stuff all the time, from makeup to washing machines to married-people dating services. Which is all to say that, of the bazillions of things that I've written about over the years, there are a few that may have started out as brand partnerships, but then quickly evolved from a novelty to a must-have - products that I ended up loving and religiously keeping stocked in my house, long after my formal relationships with the brands ended.
