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

It’s a terrible feeling to be mad at another woman for being thinner than you. It’s terrible because it stems from an involuntary, internalized patriarchal self-loathing that just gets projected outward. Then you loop around the self-loathing track once again because you can’t control this stupid reflexive jealousy. What fun!

I’ve been noticing in the last few years what I’d conservatively call an uptick in the number of women I’ve known who were married to men, had a kid or two, got divorced just as they were considered women of a certain age,* and upon reentering the dating world, suddenly realized they were, sometimes to their own great surprise, no longer interested

What I had forgotten, while wandering in my own night, was that Asher was on his own hero’s journey. And although our journeys were intertwined, paradoxically, this particular moment was about us separating. Deep down, in his three-year-old heroic soul, Asher’s terror wasn’t truly of the toilet. What was happening involved the bathroom, but underne

Shall we give ourselves permission to just let it all out for the next few minutes without guilt, and then we’ll go back to being our very best (dead one day) selves? LET’S DO IT.

And I just can’t get it out of my head that I learned so many times about wet dreams, and never about underwear sandwiches. It was clearly so important to the curriculum, and to pop culture at large, that boys be prepared for those exciting messy dreams; the remains of which are so frequently laundered away, without a word, by their mothers.

I didn’t think Asher was paying attention when I told him what encouragement meant. But he was. He is paying attention to everything now. Everything I think he will miss, he catches, including the things I wish he would miss, like me glancing at my phone when we’re playing cars, or me using one tone too snarky with Mike, or me in general struggling

But I DREAD telling my sweet little five-year-old, who still thinks people are really nice, all of the bad news. And I don’t even know it all. But I know at least what you know, which we can agree I’m sure is already too fucking much.

It’s a fine line between a woman wearing an adult onesie because she’s embarrassed about her body and a woman wearing an adult onesie because she’s so confident about her body she doesn’t need to not wear an adult onesie.