Past Is Prologue

Round tables are big in a way a long table never can be. Maybe it’s a Knights of the Round Table thing. No one can be at the head of a round table, so everyone sits equally around it. Maybe it’s the lazy Susan effect. Food on a round table is always within reach and so everyone is fed. Maybe it’s just how close you can scoot chairs together. Without any corners to get in the way, there’s always room for one more.

We’ve always wanted a big round table but new ones are difficult to find on a budget…

It took me a full decade to realize I was part of a multilevel marketing scheme. I should have seen the signs: the business model was unclear, my participation was so costly I fell into debt, and when I needed help meeting quotas, I was forced to rely on family members and recruit other women. It didn’t feel like multilevel marketing (MLM) at first; I never had to sit in an arena and listen to Rachel Hollis tell me to clean my face. I wasn’t selling “butter-soft leggings” or shilling Amway — I was a part of Motherhood in America.

…

I spent the first six months of the pandemic sure that help for mothers was on its way. Bills would be passed, systems would be reworked. Workplaces would shift to include caretaking within their cultures. A year of the country “staying home” would validate the work of stay-at-home mothers. As the fall brought more remote learning, we’d reconfigure school standards to keep children safe from virtual truancy and failing grades given over Zoom in the name of academic rigor. …

I read a lot as a kid. I didn’t speak out of turn. People liked me.

Sure, I never knew where my school worksheets were. I was rarely able to turn in my homework on time. And yes, my elementary school desk was always a disaster. I used to pull myself against it, flattening my stomach across it so my people couldn’t see inside of it. Paper, crayons, pencils, and books spilled out onto the floor. It was embarrassing.

I lost things I couldn’t remember picking up in the first place. I couldn’t keep track of time, yesterday’s moments fusing…

Did you know that some house spiders can live up to seven years?

I didn’t know.

Whenever I’ve seen a spider crawl across my wall, move the tips of its spindled legs out of my shower drain or scuttle beneath a cabinet I’ve….well, I’ve killed it. I mean, when my creature-loving daughter is in the room, I carefully catch them and put them outside. But when I am alone? When there are no witnesses? I am moved to murder.

I kill spiders, generally speaking, with one of two methods. The first is catch and kill. Best deployed in kitchens and…

My 9-year-old daughter is having a hard time. It’s the kind of hard time most kids have at her age, made worse by the pandemic. Sometimes people call her quirky. This makes her nervous. She wants to be normal. When I tell her there’s no such thing as “normal” she scoffs. She just wants to unobtrusively line up with the girlhood formulated by Disney tween sitcoms and the common consent of an apathetic society. When she’s at school, she bends her mind and spirit in half, frustrated that each corner of herself doesn’t meet the others. She’s pretending to no…

I used to depend on being right. I built myself upon the rock of my rightness! Hours were spent researching supporting claims for my collection of rights. I wrote so many words trying to help others understand my understanding. I was brimming with sureness, but it was the kind of fullness that drains. My certainty kept me from seeking. My proselytizing kept me from hearing good preaching. My abundance of absolutes left me spiritually and mentally impoverished. Empty and undone, I cast about for a new way to be. If knowing I was right didn’t sustain me, maybe it was…

A virus and violence converged to give the early weeks of 2021 a familiar feel. Terrorists stormed our most sacred spaces. The New York Times told us 400,000 people are dead from the pandemic. Thousands of troops stood outside (and slept inside) our most precious landmarks. It was all unprecedented. The new felt known because the real-life footage looked like scenes from the “End of America” movies I grew up watching in the 1990s.

The villains in those films varied: Sometimes they were from outer space; sometimes they were from Russia. But the fix was always the same — one…