It started this morning before we got out the door, when my baby ran up the stairs and said he wouldn’t go to school. “Why?” I said. He’s not a baby anymore. “Did something bad happen yesterday?” I called up to him. I had to ask, though he’s always been stoic about his wounds. “Did that Hudson kid do something?” I pushed, “Was it Teacher Joy?” In my tone, I could tell, impatience edged out concern. I did the thing where you take a deep breath. “Come on banana, I have to get to work. I have a deadline,” I said, and coaxed him down with the promise that he could wear his Crocs today, socksless, though there was likely to be rain.
News radio blared when I started the engine. I jammed off the power button before Eli could hear it, though I wasn’t as certain as Greta was that we should keep him blindered from the world’s toxicity. I took the difficult corner on Carlton instead of going around the block and sped up through the yellow on Duke. Eli didn’t notice. We went over the new arriving-at-school routines he’d learned and mastered—the shoe taking-off, the jacket hanging-up, and what’s next? Then I wash my hands! What was that if not a buy-in? But as soon as he hung up his jacket he hooked his arms around my legs and asked me to stay forever. “I’ll read you one book,” I said, thinking, a short book. A book with a beginning, middle, and clear, conclusive end. I chose a cute-looking board book about owl babies—who, it turned out, woke up in the middle of the night to discover that their mother had abandoned them. The babies spent the story so plaintive and panicked it hardly mattered that the mother returned in the final scene, back from night-hunting for the family’s food. Before he could ask for another I took Eli’s hand and encouraged him toward the benign-seeming kids jumping around pretending to be frogs on the green rug. I jumped with them a few times, put my tongue out for flies, caught my frog in a hug and said “Goodbye kid, I love you.” I didn’t mean for it to be a trick. I thought it would be better to leave while he was doing something he seemed to be enjoying, but I had to use force to separate his body from mine and hand him to Teacher Joy, who I could hear telling him that his mom had to go to work and that it was okay to feel sad at the leaving of someone you loved so much.
In the driver’s seat I breathed. Then I peeled out of the preschool parking lot and into the parking lot of the industrial ceramics factory next door, where I pulled into a free spot and kept the engine running. The way Teacher Joy said “mom” made me feel as if I’d left the house in a costume without knowing it, that stomach-slide of misrecognition. Not the way she said it but the way it sounded, when she or anyone said it who wasn’t Eli or Greta or me. I’d chosen the name for what I thought of as a jaunty, soft-butch quality, but in anyone else’s mouth it sounded no different from what the teacher called the yoga-pantsed straight moms who breezily smooched their kids and left, no problem. I hoped Eli knew who she was talking about. I typically texted Greta after drop-off to let her know how it had gone, but I couldn’t get myself to press send on the row of broken-heart emojis I tapped onto the screen. Drop-off was my job just as, when we’d finally caved, I’d been in charge of sleep training because when Eli cried it doesn’t feel as if a part of my body was being torn out of me.
On the radio Amy Goodman evenly announced the Department of the Interior’s decimation of two national monuments in Utah. I drove uphill on Flavel and down 52nd and parked my car around the corner from my usual café. The café was my office, or “office,” I was never sure which. What did it mean to have to go to work when my job, by fluke and design, was my own to do whenever? I beep-locked my car. I did have a deadline, for a new money-work client—a chain of workout gyms where customers had their muscles gently electrocuted by a special suit with electrodes sewn into the lining. My task was to brainstorm a list of names for this garment, but it wasn’t due until 5, and wasn’t likely to take more than an hour. That meant that, theoretically, I had the morning free to work on the writing that was my own, that existed outside of any discernible relationship to money or deadlines. It meant I should have let my kid stay home.
The coffee I bought was the rent for my office. Though I saw the baristas nearly every day, we kept our relationship purely transactional: order, payment, drink. There was often remarkably good music playing over the café sound system, from Wire to Witch to Fred Neil, but the one time I’d commended the ginger-bearded barista on his selection he’d replied with a vague nod that suggested I had “mom” scrawled all over me. This morning, I got my Americano from the counter, poured milk to the rim-line, made it back to my table with just a few drops spilled on the saucer. I tracked the coffee’s path from mouth to throat and downward, waiting hopefully for the shift of gravity to my lower gut, the eventual pressure and ballooning. Before becoming a parent I drank coffee mainly for its laxative effects, but now I was lucky if it loosed my gut at all. I rallied all my focus and intention and typed a sentence into the document in front of me, a short story based on a show my old band had played in Kassel, Germany, in the early 2000s. During a pre-show dinner at the squat that was hosting us, a cranky punk tried to hold us accountable for Bush’s stupidity and the war in Iraq. “Bush is not a man, Bin Laden is a man,” he kept saying, as we tried to ignore him and force down the grey squatter stew. I pushed my chair back and headed for my favorite of the café’s two single-stall bathrooms. On the toilet, I took out my phone. The preschool’s blog still showed yesterday’s photos. In an effort to get my gut to relax, I thumbed through photos of my friends performing their lives. A writer acquaintance I hadn’t known was pregnant had posted a photo of herself, in her beautiful book-filled living room, with an eight-month belly. The feeling the photo sparked in me was like vindication but more tender, a spit of Schadenfraude. I shifted on the seat. A photo of a kidless friend at an art opening. A photo of breakfast. A knock on the door and I jumped up, shoved the phone in my pocket, flushed the empty bowl.
Back at my table I re-read the sentence I’d written and deleted it. It lacked ominousness, urgency. In the past, I’d often written sentences and deleted and rewritten them on a quest to drill deep into the caverns of syntax, to mine elusive veins of diction and sound. Then, my ideal practice had been to put as little time as possible between waking up and sitting down to write—I thought of my just-awake brain as more open and malleable, not yet plaqued up by the dirt of the day. Now my kid wakes up before dawn. At first I’d put faith in the myth I’d picked up on, while Greta was pregnant, that artist-parents could swiftly learn to maximize efficiency within their newfound time constraints. I don’t know where I’d heard it—on a radio interview, in a blog post, everywhere. A switch would flick, they said, but none of them said where to find it.
The Kassel story was hitting a wall, so I minimized the window and opened Today’s Problems, a document I’d started in the fall when I was stuck on another story. Its purpose was to enumerate each day’s confoundments, both public and personal. I used it to record the most egregious or resonant of the headlines I heard on the morning radio, along with my local detritus. On 12/5, for example, I had listed the latest police exoneration, and the possibilities both that the president might further alienate Palestine by naming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and that Eli might have ringworm. The list was meant to be a repository for brain build-up and a practice in keeping my domestic challenges in perspective, bringing me closer to global catastrophe in order to remind myself that these were all My Problems, even if some took place across the globe and others on the surface of my 3-year-old’s skin.
A text message came through. “Hey!” Teacher Joy wrote. “I know it was a tricky drop-off this morning. Wanted to let you know Eli’s doing just fine.” I wrote back immediately—“Oh great!”—and then wished I had waited. Now Teacher Joy would know that I hadn’t truly needed to rush off. She’d decide, reasonably, that I was uncaring, monstrous. It was just as I’d feared during sleep training, when I’d stood outside Eli’s door and intoned loving platitudes into the fury of his cries, sending near-constant texts to Greta who was walking the weird mall until he quieted. The fact that I could do it meant I was what: callous? brutal? calm and strong? At the counter a dad held his daughter’s pink scooter and ordered her a croissant while she settled at their table with her crayons. Had he been in charge of sleep training? As he walked over with their order I felt everyone in the café affectively reach out their hands to high-five him for his selflessness.
I wrote again to Teacher Joy: “Thanks so much for letting me know!” I had to write again, despite what she’d think of me, to show that I appreciated the updates and extra attention, because of what had happened at Wild Carrot, Eli’s old preschool. We’d explained most of it in our intake interview: Eli had come home from his first day with a circular pink rash on his back we thought was ringworm, we’d called the doctor and gotten the cream, we’d applied it and waited, and the marks didn’t go away. Three days later we got a midday call from his teacher telling us she’d caught a kid biting him. It was only after the call that we could make out the teethmarks along each circles’ edge. We’d made it really clear to Teacher Joy and the director of the new preschool that we hadn’t been upset with the kid who’d bitten Eli, repeatedly, without anyone noticing—we understood that kids bit, we had friends whose kids bit, Eli could at some point become a biter—but at the teachers who, for two days, had seen nothing, had let us go to the doctor and get the cream, and at the old school’s director who hadn’t been sufficiently empathic or appalled.
What we didn’t tell Teacher Joy was about how I had tried to convince Greta that we should give the school another chance—we’d heard such great things, it had a social justice mission and was bikeable from our house, it would be impossible to find a new place midyear, plus our deposit? Eli didn’t really seem traumatized, I argued, though as I said it I remembered how chilling it had been, after picking him up that third day, to hear his baby-whisper, when I asked how he felt about the biting: I don’t want to talk about it.
A few tables away, the dad and his daughter had settled in and were drawing: she fist-clutching crayon strokes, he pulling from a pile of thin-tipped implements to etch comics in hand-drawn boxes. The pink scooter tucked neatly under the table, out of everyone’s way. I tilted my laptop screen away from them and googled “artist parent advice,” bracing myself for a dozen hits telling me to just flick a switch. Near the bottom of the page was a link to a book from the early ’90s: A Question of Balance: Artists and Writers on Motherhood. Though I didn’t exactly consider myself a “mother,” I went to the page and clicked “Look inside!” The opening paragraph explained that while the popular imagination could conceive of the solitary male artist immersed in his work and the mother in the kitchen surrounded by children, the artist-mother had no available trope to step into—obvious enough, even for the ’90s. This book meant to show how real artist-mothers made it work. I skimmed forward to an interview with Rita Dove. She shared that she and her husband alternated childcare in four-hour shifts. In the next section, Alison Saar explained that she did business and drawing from home and made her sculptures at a studio walking-distance away. Alicia Ostriker wrote on the bus. There was something remarkably grounding about these logistics, these seemingly functional plans.
I took a swallow of cold coffee. It was hard, the mothers said, but they did it. They figured it out. Maybe their ability to transcend overwhelm and fatigue had something to do with their having given birth, I assumed, to their kids, some corollary of oxytocin, or labor trauma, a well-deserved prize. Most of the time I forgot Eli and I weren’t biologically related. I brought up Today’s Problems and wrote the date and what I remembered of the day’s disastrous headlines. I went back to my browser and did an image search of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, which had been “shrunk,” Amy Goodman had said, as if they’d been put on the wrong dryer setting. The red rock formations were so vast and smooth. In another tab I opened the new preschool’s blog and found some photos of Circle Time. There was the tip of Eli’s rainbow Croc, just making it into the corner of the frame. It was hard not to feel that Teacher Joy was punishing me. The dad with the daughter looked over to see what she was drawing. “Cool allosaurus,” he said. She had some plastic dinosaur figurines arrayed in front of her, and as she reached for a crayon one fell to the floor. The ginger-bearded barista, who’d been wiping down tables, picked it up. “What are you guys up to later?” he said. “I think we’re going to go hike Powell Butte,” the dad said. “Sweet,” said the barista, “I’ve been meaning to get out there.” I hovered the arrow over the Add to Cart button for A Question of Balance, though I hated buying books on Amazon. I wanted the book’s decades-old earnestness, its commitment to blueprints.
A few feet away, the barista leaned over to look at the cool dad’s drawing. “Sick shading,” he said. I made myself stick to my screen. Under “Customers Also Viewed” was a novel my therapist had recommended when I’d described my trouble with writing. I clicked through to the first page, where the artist-mother-narrator pushed her kid on a swing in a Brooklyn playground, a little too violently, seething already with ambivalence about motherhood, mourning her lost art career, roiling with resentment toward her husband who, helpful or awful, was always categorically more free. Had my therapist really thought I’d find any trace of myself in the narrator’s pointedly heterosexual role-subverting reveals, her neatly binarized rage? Plus she seemed like an awful mother. The book had been a bestseller, won some awards, and here was a question I could never ask: If a “mom” like me wrote an artist vs. parent story, would they get any prizes, or sympathy? Would anyone celebrate me?
I clicked back to the Grand Staircase photos and found a photo of a cavern pocked with rows of tiny holes some special species of finch laid their eggs in. The uniform, proliferating holes felt like a rash inside my skin. It had been comforting to learn, a few years back, that there was a name for my aversion—trypophobia, fear of holes. I clicked away, clicked back. When we’d thought the bites were ringworm and needed to look up internet photos to confirm, I’d had to brace myself, but I’d done it. This was something I’d brought up after our meeting with the director of Wild Carrot, at which Greta had railed and I’d waffled. Greta had let loose on me in the car: “Is this about you wanting him in school so you can have time for your fucking writing?” In the meeting I’d sat helplessly, with no available trope to reach for—the nurturing mother, the righteous mother, the aggressive dad, the dad who abdicated, lovingly, whatever you think, hon. “I did feel like a part of my body was being torn when I saw those marks,” I said. “I think I knew it wasn’t ringworm all along.”
The Slits came on over the sound system. I drained my water and got up to get another. “Love The Slits,” I said. “My old band actually opened for Ari Up, the singer, one time.” The barista flicked his eyes up from the pint glass he was drying. “I’m trying to write about this one tour,” I said. “Not the one where we played with her,” I said. The barista gave me what had to be his most cringe-induced smile. “I don’t really know them,” he said. “It’s the algorithm.” He stepped away to help a customer and I took myself back to Seattle, where Ari-Up sang-rapped along to a boombox and exclaimed “I pooped him out me pussy!” about her dreadlocked young son asleep in the dressing room. At my computer I opened a new blank doc and tried to translate the memory into potent or meaningful language. I deleted what I’d written and typed, in all caps, BEARS EARS, GRAND STAIRCASE ESCALANTE. The images they evoked were too beautiful to be slashed and plundered, yet in writing them down—in not being able to get them out of my head, in thinking of them as music—I wasn’t doing anything to reconcile the music of the words with what was happening to them, or what was happening to them—the desecration of fossil beds and burial grounds, the breaking of treaties—with the fact that I was doing nothing to stop it. I typed and the words on the screen grew to four sentences, shrank to two, then three, two, none. I reloaded the photo blog: nothing new. I opened a new document and wrote NAMES FOR SUIT? and under it free-associated a preliminary list: VoltSkin? WaveShirt? Pulse? I should have been pulling Eli out of school to take him hiking before there was nowhere left to go. I took a sip of coffee.
One thing that relieves me greatly, that has never caused me stress or fear, is that my kid does not have a problem with pooping. I pay a lot of attention to his regularity, to the extent that Greta fears I’ll give him a complex. I want to explain—this is me, protecting him. My phone tremored in my pocket, Greta wanting to know how drop-off had gone. My guilt was peristaltic. I pushed back my chair. The door to my favorite bathroom was fully closed in the way that I knew meant it was occupied and locked. The other bathroom was also in use, the ginger-bearded barista conspicuously missing from the counter. I pressed myself up against the wall that bridged the two locked bathrooms and texted: “Drop-off was not great” and a crying face emoji. I wrote, “He looks okay on the blog?” I wrote, “I have really not been shitting well,” though in truth the word “shit” affected a boldness I didn’t feel. There was no better word.
The door to my less-favored bathroom opened and the dad and daughter came out, the daughter crumpling a paper towel, the dad wiping his hands on his jeans. He gave me a fake-guilty “you caught me” look, as if I wasn’t also a parent who did this—gave my kid a paper towel but eschewed one myself so as not to “waste” two. “Don’t you have a kid at Wild Carrot?” he said. I was almost certain I’d never seen him before, but most men have faces I can forgive myself for forgetting. His kid was older than mine, she must have been in a different class, but my eyes went to her pointy baby teeth. “It didn’t work out for us,” I said. “Too bad,” the dad said, “where are you guys at now?” I told him, and before he could ask me why we’d left I made a discretely urgent movement with my hands to indicate that I was ready to get into the bathroom. I locked the door. If he was still there when I came out I’d go tell him what had happened and say we’d found a better fit closer to our house, with less of a feral sensibility. I’d say I’d been relentless in my advocacy. I did my best to settle in on the toilet, despite the draft from the air vent and the creepy shower stall in the corner piled with cleaning supplies and overstock. It was impossible to see the shower and not imagine someone using it, putting their bare feet on the footprint-crusted floor, soaking the supplies. I finished and flushed and went to the sink to wash my hands. On the sink’s far edge was an orange plastic dinosaur. It was the kind I thought of as a stegosaurus, but I remembered hearing that all the old names were wrong now. What I recalled about this dinosaur was that it had plates and spikes but was basically toothless, more-or-less kind. I ran it under the water to rinse the soap-gunk from its feet. I tore off a paper towel that I would use to dry it when I put it in my pocket. Here it is.