In Between

Here’s something obvious: transitions are difficult. Here’s something that’s been less obvious to me until recently: I am terrible at dealing with them. Other people, I notice, are okay to talk about their in-betweens, their messier moments, their reorganization projects and bad hair days and photos from middle school. Sharing helps. I think that’s the logic. I, on the other hand, go radio silent. I grit my teeth and tell myself that I’ll get through it, and I will talk about it on the other side—when I can do so gracefully, when something has been learned, accomplished.

If I could describe pregnancy in one word, it would be exactly that: transition. Everything that was once static changes constantly now. My body, our home. I no longer recognize my own belly button. Rearranging our furniture, bringing in new things, purging old things, has become a weekly ritual. In small apartments, there is little room for extraneous items. If, one year ago, someone had told me that I’d be selling my own desk to make way for a dresser filled almost entirely with onesies, bibs, and tiny headbands, I’d have thought them certifiable—how can onesies (the smallest of which look like they belong on a doll) take up an entire dresser?! Yet, here we are.

When I need stability, I turn to the kitchen. My appetite has always been a grounding force, unwavering, intuitive. Now enter pregnancy with its dietary restrictions, its food poisoning fears, its obsession with weight gain as if you’re a prize pig at the county fair. Everyone gets an opinion on what and how you should eat. What to Expect When You’re Expecting recommends that pregnant women get multiple servings each of 12 (count them) different food groups daily. One of which it patronizingly labels “yellow foods” instead of something helpful like “foods containing beta carotene.” Meanwhile, the doctor (with the help of the CDC) provides you with a long list of what you should not eat. Foods to fear, though they wouldn’t put it that way.

Risk, it turns out, is the common denominator for so many of my favorite foods. Oysters, cured meats, raw and smoked fish, funky cheese. The list goes on. I despise an overworked ingredient. I spent half my life thinking I didn’t like eggs until I tried one poached. I was twelve. We went out to brunch, celebrating something I can’t remember now. I ordered a stack of potato blinis and smoked salmon with a poached egg on top (still kind of my ideal brunch situation). I sliced the egg down the middle with my fork, popping the bright-yellow yolk which dripped languorously down the sides of the stack. Instant love. Runny yolks have this way of wrapping themselves around the other ingredients on your plate, enhancing them with this fatty, sumptuous gloss. I never understood why, with that knowledge, one would ever eat an egg hard boiled.

As you might imagine, reader, it’s not without a bit of shame that I now ask waiters for my yolks to be cooked through, my burgers to be medium. I also ask questions about pasteurization and the type of milk used to make certain cheeses (us pregnant ladies also cannot have sheep or goat’s milk unless cooked at high temperatures). I ask quietly. Sometimes I use air quotes. Anything to distance myself from the nearly unrecognizable orders I’m placing these days. Generally, I consider myself to be a fairly timid person. For isntance, I won’t ride a roller coaster unless it’s very, very small and probably designed for kids under 12. Being a fearless eater, I suppose, has been a point of pride I’ve lost these past months.

None of this is to say I’m not grateful, or excited. I do realize how lucky I am to be pregnant and that the hardest parts of this pregnancy so far have been nuanced and mostly centered around food snobbery. It’s just to say that I’ve not felt exactly at home in my own skin these days. And I have no takeaway, no lesson to share from this experience that has so far been both magical and disorienting, that has made me feel both more connected to and at odds with my own body. My point, I suppose, is that sometimes one has to report back from the mess, the in-between. And so this is my attempt to do just that.

Not a Highlight Reel: 2018

I’m not interested in sharing a highlights reel this time. There are always highlights, magic to be found even in the most prosaic of moments. Eating well, for instance, is a guaranteed way to find the sacred in the mundane more often. But roses don’t separate from their thorns as easily as I once thought. I’m finding that I talk about the good things and the painful, difficult things in one breath these days. I need them both to explain who I am right now, to give context to one another.

Since the end of 2017, I’ve lost three people who were very dear to me. A dear friend, my aunt, passed away this September. A big and painful surprise. She taught me to seek beauty wherever I could find it. Through her eyes, I learned to appreciate art and dance and New York itself. Despite the stereotype that small children have no patience for shows or museums or nice food, she and my uncle exposed me to all of it, trusted that I had the capacity to take it all in.

My grandpa passed away last October followed by my grandmother in February. They lived long lives. Alzheimers, in a sense, had already claimed my grandma years before that. But her death signified an end to their story that felt hopelessly and painfully final.

At my grandma’s funeral, I looked at old photographs of her and my grandpa in their tennis whites, their tanned skin glowing orange in the Kodachrome cast. They were younger than us at that point, already with two kids, happy. They lived fully, immersed in the things they’d worked hard to enjoy: their house, children, lots of tennis, good friends.

Despite stereotypes of the Great Generation, they never pushed their path to success on us, never called us soft or entitled or extravagant for wanting what we want: adventure, spontaneity, creativity, wonder. We want to walk out our door everyday and feel interested in the world, awake. It’s the kind of life that lacks concrete milestones like theirs did.

Yet, they were open to it, in awe of our imagination even. In the last few weeks of his life, my grandpa called me from his hospital bed to tell me that he wasn’t worried about Adam or me, that we’d find our way and that he wishes for us that we’ll continue to seek more and different experiences of the world, which he thinks must be a very good approach to life (if not very different from his own).

Loss offers perspective. So does travel. We didn’t get the idea to move to New York from my aunt’s or my grandparents’ passing or from the two weeks we spent in Italy in May, but all of it restored our sense of urgency. My grandparents lived their values. My aunt, too. I know they slept well at night and that they left this world knowing they built their lives with integrity.

One life. That’s what we’re given. So why not throw away the arbitrary checklist: house in the suburbs, practical car, high-end furniture with annoying cleaning instructions. It belonged to someone else, anyway (the list, not the furniture—so we’re clear). Could we jump into another city, another life in which we could continue the adventure, regain our sense of wonder? We already knew the answer.

I’m writing to you now from my apartment in Upper Manhattan. It feels like home. For the first time in over a year, I’m sleeping well. It brings me a comforting sense of continuity knowing that my grandparents lived and played tennis just across the water from us, in Queens, and that the brownstones they grew up in are just a train ride away, in Park Slope. We’re living alongside their memory. But most of all, we’re living how they wanted us to live: according to our values. And that feels like the biggest highlight of all.

This Week / Vague To-Do Lists + American Flag Socks

Hello, friends. We made it to the weekend! I am trying to trick myself into feeling those Saturday feels, even though I am staring up a mountain of a to-do list. Everything I need to accomplish this weekend is both monumental and vague at the same time. “Downsize life.” “Pack furniture.” “Figure out health insurance scenario.” Tonight, I will be figuring out a tequila scenario because I need to give my brain a rest from the logistics of this whole renting-out-our-house-and-bouncing-to-New-York thing.

We all need to give our brains a rest, from worrying about our own lives, from worrying about our collective future. I got the notice of Kavanaugh’s confirmation in Home Depot, while discussing sod cutters with a guy whose ankles and calves were tattooed with American-flag “socks.” All I could think was, I do not identify with anything that is happening here. But here are some things I bought and watched and read this week that I very much DO identify with, including these sunflowers from the farmer’s market which are now in a vase on my dining table.

1. PURCHASED. I cannot resist a luxurious faux fur moment, and the color is gooood.
   

2. “For to permit yourself to do only that which you are good at is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.” Much needed permission to NOT pursue excellence in everything we do.
   

3. Currently watching this series which explores trauma, mental health, and isolation. It’s strange and uncanny and I am here for it. Jonah Hill is excellent in it. But Emma Stone is double excellent, per usual.
   

4. What #MeToo has accomplished in one year.
   

5. LOL Banksy stumps us all, again.
   

6. Simple, yet packs a punch: the best delicata squash recipe.
   

7. Remembering an old favorite because it’s decorative gourd season.
   
   

Life, Lately / Homecoming

This time last week, I was drinking my coffee on a bench in Domino Park, watching the blue-green East River lap the foundation of the Williamsburg Bridge and fully crying in public (and making a failed-but-concentrated attempt to stop myself). I did what I came to New York to do: find an apartment. We received the email the night before: “You’re approved!” And I simultaneously felt a tingly oh-my-god-what-have-we-done?! type of shock and also something else. Homecoming. That wave of warmth and relief and clarity that signals you’re in exactly the right place at the right time.

It keeps sneaking up on me, that feeling of home, of rightness. Probably because I spend so much of my time seeking it, trying to perfect every little facet of my life and often failing (as we do), that it’s impossible to notice. I remember feeling it when I met Adam and sometimes in college around two or three in the morning, when I’d stayed up all night to write an essay. Now it’s happening all the time. On Sunday afternoon, waiting for the L Train, sweating from the heat of the station, avoiding the mystery liquid dripping from a beam overhead. Tuesday night, reading in bed, listening to the air conditioning rattle.

It strikes me that I’ve felt most at home within myself when I’ve ventured the furthest from what I know, often based on nothing but intuition. Starting a freelance business, moving to a strange city for a boy, writing about things that make me uncomfortable, culinary school, all the plane tickets I’ve ever bought. This must be what it takes, to peel back all the layers of what we think we are (or what other people have said we are) and find what’s true.

The light changed, the morning before I left New York, from cool white to warm caramel. I’m not entirely sure, being a born and bred Angeleno, but I think that means it’s fall. To me, fall is its own kind of homecoming, a release from the slight madness of summer heat. I feel that clarity and I see into the future, for the first time in a long time. I know it will be fleeting. I’ll continue to hunger, to not settle. But for now, I’m enjoying these moments—even as I play the role of crazy lady, choking down tears on a park bench.