I'll Show Myself Out

My heart breaks. I feel so proud that I have raised a boy who believes this. And yet I also feel dread at the prospect of breaking the news to him that while some people are really nice, some people are just awful, evil turds.

One of the things that has continuously amazed me about my son is the paradox of how much he seems to love life versus how much he loathes so many of the basic things we must do to keep him alive.

Asher is a few months away from turning four, and for the last few years, I have been in the rather tubelike experience of motherhood. I am twenty pounds overweight, and I feel out of place in Los Angeles, in my marriage, in my house, in my own skin. Even though I’m home all the time, I rarely feel at home. I am a person fully in charge of a small

Before I had a kid I didn’t know how amazing sitting at a hotel bar alone would be.

“I think you should try making him a little book,” she said. She explained that for young kids, making a little book before an event or a change that breaks down “what’s going to happen” into simple, digestible chunks is a really useful tool.

Now when I get the homesick feeling, the only person who can come pick me up is me.

we’ve all just internalized that the word “mommy,” when used as an adjective, automatically diminishes whatever noun comes after it. I guarantee you if Ernest Hemingway were alive and writing an online column about his experience of being a father, no one would call it a “daddy blog.” We’d call it For Whom the Bell Fucking Tolls.

inside. No one wants to think that their mother, that all-forgiving source of limitless unconditional love, occasionally, in a fit of rage or boredom, met her limits. And yet, of course she did. No one wants to know that after your mother finally placed you in your crib, she walked out of the room and screamed into a blanket, or cried in the bathro

That night I eat a giant plate of pasta at the hotel bar for dinner and drink a martini and text with old friends. I sit on a couch in the lounge, half reading Mary Karr’s On Memoir and half watching people who are inexplicably younger than me living lives there is now no chance of me ever knowing except in this one little moment that I am watching