how do i live
without you? with you? with it all? with this? without "making progress"
***Forgot to say this in the voiceover but hi this is nsfw or little ears unless you’re down with them starting to tell you to do the “motherfucking dishes,” in which case, go on girl.
Just a reminder that I sometimes write these over the course of days or weeks, so sometimes the timelines are wonky, if you are a person who knows me irl, or if I write about a newsy item and it’s outdated or just old news. I feel the need to clarify about this for some reason, since my “newly minted 6yo” was newly minted back at the beginning of February. Time flies when everyone has the flu and such, ok? Ok.
My newly minted 6yo is sick, for the 3rd time in 10 days. That’s 3 separate illnesses and/or fevers, in a span of less than 1.5 weeks. Cool. Meanwhile, I still am supposedly giving web development retainer hours to two clients weekly, and handling a-la-cart requests from a handful of others, plus maintenance for a dozen-ish hosting clients, plus also caring for a toddler in part-time preschool and also my elder hound who now requires different medications and supplements 4 times daily. Also laundry??? And dishes. Always so many motherfucking dishes to do.
That terrible run-on sentence is my current gripe. I did the whole complain-y bit here (featuring new mural wall pic!), and now, a few weeks later, I was hoping I’d be in a different mental space, if not a different progress-making space. ALAS. No space has been exchanged for my previous space, except perhaps that now my space feels even more cramped with disappointment, frustration, and also now I’ll probably get the flu before I even have the chance to publish this. Update: I did get sick but not with the flu, thankfully.
Welcome to my Ted Talk, in which I will pontificate about the horrors that parents experience on a daily and weekly basis. In this essay, I will…complain more about lack of systems, lack of help, guilt of privilege. In this essay, I will bemoan the choices I have made with regard to my children’s care and in terms of money spent and for what. In this essay, I will battle my guilt over lack of progress, lack of [monetary] household contribution, lack of traditional success, lack of accomplishment, lack of goal-achieving. In this essay, I will battle my guilt over how none of that really matters for me because of my [white cis man] husband’s job, which allows me to even have the time to bemoan anything from the comfort of my newly mural-ed office.
In this essay, I will struggle mentally through the back and forth of the unpaid yet extremely important motherhood labor I do daily, with the guilt of how things are “not that bad,” and how they “could be worse,” and how there are starving mothers in Gaza with no way to feed their children, and maybe the best: what if I make a gratitude list??? What if I begin a gratitude PRACTICE?! Daily?!??
Through all of this, progress still demands to be seen. Made. Progress is like, hi I’m here even when you can’t see me or want me. Like the fairies that live in the large oak in my neighbor’s yard. There, thriving, but invisible. Or out running errands, as C typically surmises. He knows we all have errands, no matter what’s happening.
So. Progress looks like: I started reading a book, my first non-fiction since before Thanksgiving, my first physical book since mid-2024, called The Success Myth by one of my favorite substack authors. I am only like .5 pages in, but so far I feel proud that I even opened it! I found a bookmark even! Which shows an optimism for returning to the book to continue reading!
More progress: I didn’t finish my portfolio website but I did redesign it and love the direction a lot more than the last iteration. I’m excited about it, when I allow myself to think about how someday, maybe, I can finish it and deploy it so it’s not just a fun little storage-waster on my macbook, one stray toddler stomp away from being lost forever because my computer just notified me it’s been 503 days since my last backup. [If you are a client reading this, first of all, please go away, and secondly, your shit is stored elsewhere very securely and very far away from errant toddler feet and their consequences.]
I very quickly am derailed though, because - “I allow myself to think about how maybe, someday, I can finish it…” quickly goes through my brain’s snark machine and comes out looking more like: yeah right, prob never will finish it, because next week another kid will have the flu and then after that YOU will have the flu and then obviously MP will have the flu and by then the first kid will have it again and then it’ll be May and you’ll be busy with end-of-school dress-up days or whatever other bullshit and HOW DO ANY WOMEN EVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING!? Anything, that is, other than the care and keeping and dressing-up-as-a-cactus-or-whatever-the-fuck of our precious children?!!?!?!??!
Not sure that’s a snark machine as much as it’s what my therapist calls “generalized anxiety” as evidenced by this very obvious example of “global mislabeling” and “catastrophizing.” If you suffer from these things, you may be entitled to compensation in the form of tiny little pills! If you get on the wait list now, you may be able to see a specialist before the end of Q2!
Anyway, then boom, I’m incensed. I’m insecure. I’m confident I have a problem. I’m sure it’s me, it’s my lack, it’s my fault, it’s my laziness! A word I swore I would stop using about myself back in 2019. Rest is real and needed and putting things off isn’t lazy, it’s…a symptom of something, or something like that. It’s depression, it’s anxiety, it’s complacence. It’s comfort! It’s “things are shitty now but what if, when I try harder, it’s worse!??!” Better to know the shit than embark blindly into the great unknown shit! Status quo is known and comfortable, even if we don’t like it.
But that bitch, my inner voice who doesn’t have a name but needs one desperately for the sake of a more interesting narrative, insists that it’s my fault. It’s ME. Are we still quoting Taytay on this one? It’s me? Hi? I don’t really care for her music so I’m gonna stop. [please don’t come at me, I don’t need to feel insecure about anything else, mmk?]
Cheese and crackers what the fuck was I even talking about.
I think Progress’s very close relative, a cousin perhaps, is MOMENTUM. Momentum is around, visiting us all at different times. She pops in and out like your very hip childless aunt who loves you to pieces but can’t stick around too long because she’s meeting other child-free friends (and that one couple who home-schools their kids while living in the mountains of Peru) in Barcelona (”barthelona,” obviously) for someone’s 40th birthday bash. You love her, she loves you. But again, she’s busy. So you really have to take advantage of the time when she’s around. Pack in all your favorite things: progress, list making, list-item check-marking, improvements, house projects? Closet cleaning! Resume updating? Catching up + making plans with friends you haven’t spoken to in a while, because see previous paragraphs about the flu and etcetera excuses????
Then she departs, usually abruptly. Like, she’s not sure how many days she’s staying but then suddenly OPE! It’s time to head to BARTHELONA, ADIOS DAAHHHLING!
Then you get left with one of her sisters, or idk maybe another cousin? Burnout, Sickness, Doubt, Listlessness and her twin Meaninglessness. All coincidentally part of the exclusive club called Depression, being visited by these bitches does not mean you’re IN that club, but you’re adjacent to it, and regardless, it’s tough to walk out of that building once they wheel you in on the very comfortable bed you’ve been hiding in ever since Auntie Momentum left you in a cloud of Chanel No. 5. Or was that hope you were smelling?
A thing I have yet to master is: taking advantage of when I am feeling particularly motivated, taking advantage of the times when I can FEEL momentum, coursing through my veins perhaps like a finance bro and his evening cocaine dose. Continuing to do things in small bites when I see that I am making progress and thus know that I have some momentum, and then not derailing completely when I feel like my momentum has left me stranded with a ticket to neither Barthelona NOR where ever it might be that would allow me to embrace “slow and steady wins the race” and etc. similar girl-gotta-chill mantras.
For now, I’ve built an in-progress app called Boardroom Bingo, launched in a week, at a time when I have 87 other very important things on my to-do list that I wrote down last time Autie Momo was around. No one asked, but it was the most pressing thing I did this week! Link.
I made a stick-and-pom-pom mobile for the boys’ rooms, because it was fun, and because crafting stuff is sometimes fun with kids, and because C asked me to spray paint a stick, and then we had this spray painted stick laying around, and I had to figure out a way to keep him from turning it into a weapon. Creativity: flexed. Progress: made. Momentum? CONTINUED.
I’ve refined the design of my portfolio site and even started coding it! Progress has been bestowed upon me! Auntie Momo doing me right!
I’ve made some choices and changes to my business which have needed to happen for a long time, and I am (wait for it) progressing through all the feelings it’s giving me. And in this progression, I progress. Along. Further. Closer, to something.
Now, I just wait for Auntie Momo to decide she’s got enough of me for now, and abandons my guest room in the middle of the night. But I think part of this is acceptance? Maybe? Like, I’m doing things now, but when I reach the next pause, I will listen and maybe shame myself less, maybe feel less guilty. Because - my therapist keeps telling me - you are not your accomplishments. I am not my accomplishments! WE ARE NOT OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS.
mmk? K.
loveyoubyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Love the look of your site already!