JUNE ROUND-UP
Oh, my word, June whizzed right by! There was plenty of writing, teaching, swimming, running, baking, and reading. And guess what—we took a vacation! Actually, hold on—I promised myself I would no longer call family trips “vacations,” since there is very little resembling a vacation that transpires.
We went on a family trip! To Bear Lake! Bear Lake is a Utah treasure, a big turquoise lake that borders Utah and Idaho, and yet I’ve never been, not in all my thirty-something years of living here. It’s called the Caribbean of the Rockies, and for good reason, as we found out—the water is truly jewel-colored, perfectly chilly against the heat of the summer, and clear as can be.
It also has a shallow shoreline—the water is about shin-deep for a good hundred feet in, so my kids could wander and splash and wade.
We glamped and cooked s’mores over a campfire and stayed in a gorgeous house that overlooked the lake. We went into Minnetonka Cave and rented a surrey to bike around town and, because you are still who you are, even when you’re on a family trip, we snuggled on the couch and watched Eurovision for the millionth time.
It was the opposite of relaxing. For long stretches, it was the opposite of fun. But I am always happy to spend time with my people. My kids are getting huge. The older one has an attitude now! It’s wild.
June also means the Lehi Round-Up Days parade! This is my hometown parade, and I go back every year to watch it. People are serious about this parade, so much so that they park their folding chairs and blankets on Main Street to claim their spot two or three days beforehand. (It’s not a great parade! There’s nothing really special about it! It’s just the summer tradition, and the more years I attend, the harder it is to skip one.)
June came with some major spikes in anxiety again, and I’m never sure what’s causing it until after it goes away (ain’t that how it always goes, truly). So far, the pattern seems to be any kind of planned, scheduled activity or outing with my family where I can overstructure, overplot, and overthink—for years I’ve used those situations to make myself extremely busy and bury my anxiety in the business, but I’m not as easily distracted from the anxiety anymore. I’m aware that this is a technique I’ve used, and I can see myself pulling the strings. Instead of the busyness distracting me from my anxiety, it’s putting a spotlight on it. It’s magnifying it. It’s growing the anxiety like a mold.
So I guess I’ve got to find a new strategy for ignoring or burying my anxiety now, dammit!
REALLY DEEP THOUGHTS
All right. We’re going to a different place today. We’re talking babies. We’re talking planning for babies and planning NOT to have babies. We’re talking about some personal stuff.
I’d like to offer a content warning here for the following things: pregnancy, childbirth, fertility, motherhood, brief mention of assault. (If you’re someone currently struggling with infertility and/or planning your family to be how you want it to be, you have my thoughts and my heart.)
So I’ve been pregnant three times, and I planned for zero of them.
The first pregnancy was due to an assault, so, no, not planned.
The second pregnancy was not planned, either, and resulted in my eldest daughter. I was unmarried and unhappy and took the pregnancy and impending motherhood as a good reason to finally start stitching my life together. As a young single mother, I went to college, I cut ties with my previous relationship, and I learned how to be myself and not apologize for it. Oh, and I started writing seriously and launched a career telling stories.
That pregnancy was rough on multiple levels—physically, it was demanding. I’m short. I have a small torso. I don’t really breathe for the last six weeks of my pregnancies; the baby takes up all the room and my lungs feel compressed. I get nauseated right away—I was always able to tell I was pregnant before I even skipped a period. That sour bile, hot saliva taste in my mouth was a dead giveaway.
But my pregnancy with Fin was difficult emotionally, too. I was twenty-two, single, wrestling out of an incredibly harmful and painful abusive relationship, and the evidence of what I’d endured was, well, growing right out of my shirt.
Not to mention I’m in one of the most conservative states in America—people were very kind, very supportive, at least to my face, but my pregnancy was absolutely a wild departure from the cultural expectations of a bright young woman like myself.
Still, I did it. I chose to become a mother, I chose to do it at twenty-two, with this surprise opportunity, and after nearly twenty-four hours of active labor, I pushed out an eight and a half pound baby girl, and fell in love. With her.
And with parenthood… most of the time.
Fast forward six years. I’m in a healthy, delicious relationship with a man who has become Dad to our daughter, my writing career is up and running like a well-oiled machine with four books already under contract, and I’m engaged to said man. We’re planning a wedding for late February. My debut’s due to come out the following spring. Everyone’s settling into the new normal—
And then I go and get myself knocked up.
My fiancé and I had already talked about this. We’d talked about whether we wanted any more kids (him: yes, definitely; me, remembering pregnancy and the hell of that first year: yeah, probably). We’d talked about getting married in February, waiting a year, and then trying for the big double pink line.
So when I woke up one morning and promptly threw up in the kitchen sink, we talked it over.
Let’s do it, we both decided. The timing couldn’t be more whacky! But why not? The timing is never great for a baby, right?
(Answer: some times are worse than others.)
My pregnancy with Clementine was also rough. For the first four months, my palate and stomach would exclusively accept mashed potatoes, crusty bread, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, chocolate chip cookies, and the occasional greasy fried rice that would give me incredible heartburn. Baby didn’t like coffee, eggs, most vegetables, or apples, which are to this day of my staples.
As we moved into the second trimester, I had a brief respite from the nausea, just enough time to get married, honeymoon, and launch HOUR OF THE BEES before the third trimester came, and I watched my stomach distend to almost sci-fi proportions.
Remember how I can’t breathe during the ends of my pregnancies? Well, that was even worse this time around. No breathing, very little sleeping, a monstrous yeast infection that hung around for about eight weeks, horrific cystic acne, and it was neither comfortable to stand up or to sit down, so I just… switched back and forth between the two, counting down the days until it was time to pop.
Fin had been eleven days late. Typical first babies, I was told, and I had high hopes that Clementine would arrive with some courtesy.
But she was nine days late, and somehow I managed to labor for half a day and push her out without any medication or interventions, despite the fact that she came out weighing NINE AND A HALF POUNDS.
Childbirth, y’all.
My first year as a mother raising Fin was tough—I was alone, I was doing it for the first time, I was pretty young still, I absolutely had some undiagnosed anxiety that should have been addressed, and babies are just hard.
Clementine’s first year was hard, too, and that shocked me—I thought it would be easier this time around, because A) I had a marvelous partner who insisted on splitting childcare tasks with me, B) it was not my first time at the rodeo, and C) I was older and thus had wisdom to throw at this whole baby concept.
But Clementine’s first year was one of my darkest—she was a bigtime nurser, wanted to be attached to my body all the time (she literally slept with her mouth closed around my nipple in our bed), I was again highly anxious and couldn’t sleep when she was sleeping, and I was trying to keep shoveling coal into the engine of my career, determined not to be derailed by something as cliched as motherhood.
Plus, being a single mother was hard, yes, but after the kid went to bed, that was it. Magic time for me.
When Clementine went to bed, I’d turn around and there would be another kid who needed me! And a husband who expected to at least be acknowledged! A newborn and a child and a marriage to nurture! It was almost too much.
Things got better when I cold-turkey weaned Clementine at eighteen months. (It was physically tough on me—I had severe hormone shifts and hallucinated babies crying for a day or two, but it was the best thing I could have done for myself and my relationship with Clem.)
“Do not even talk to me about babies until after I’m done nursing,” had been my (extremely reasonable) rule.
Well, here we were. In 2018, we had a nine-year-old and a two-year-old, and before we could begin to have the “should we have more kids talk,” I preemptively came up with my caveats:
I wanted to wait until Clementine was in preschool, so I could enjoy a stretch of my life with both kids out of the house for a few hours every day before I had an infant to care for.
I wanted to either be able to afford my husband taking a sabbatical from work to help me for three to six months post-birth, OR I wanted to be able to afford a nanny or sitter or someone to add to the group. (So basically, I demanded that we have more money before I committed to another kid, because American culture is all about pretending to be pro-family while actually denying workers any kind of paid parental leave and punishing women for being women.)
I wanted to feel at home in my body again before I had another pregnancy. I’ll explain further: some months that meant I wanted to successfully reintegrate my running habits, some months that meant I wanted to be physically strong and flexible so I could withstand another gestation period, and some months it meant I straight-up wanted to lose weight before I got pregnant again, because I do not love my body all the time, and sometimes it’s easy to believe that getting skinny will solve all my problems.
I had these perfect conditions in mind, and my husband agreed. He had seen me mentally breakdown after Clementine was born, and he kind of likes his wife and didn’t want me to be that angry again.
I also hemorrhaged after Clementine and nearly required blood transfusions, and my childbirth team at the hospital didn’t really know why. Facing down the prospect of another nine pound baby and the possibility of another hemorrhage with barely a shrug from my midwife was constantly in the back of my mind during these conversations.
We’d talk seriously about a third baby after Clementine started preschool, we decided. And she did.
In February.
Of 2020.
She was in school for about three weeks before the shutdown happened. And for the rest of 2020, my husband and I dodged the topic of a third baby as we also dodged Covid.
We watched people online celebrate pregnancies, deliver babies into a pandemic, face uncertainty as vaccines rolled out and messages from the media failed to draw a line in the sand about what was safe and what was not.
My writing classes paid for my husband to stay home from work entirely, and I caught a glimpse of what it might be like to have a third baby and manage my writing with two parents at home to trade off the kid-wrangling.
My older kids grew up so much in 2020, and the four of us nestled in our quarantine for months and months made me more endeared to them than ever, and had me torn equally between the two prospects: adding one more bundle to the team, because I knew we could make room, or deciding I was done making babies in part because I didn’t want to risk dying and missing out on the family I’d already created.
A spontaneous conversation with my husband in February solidified that choice.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “and the pandemic has made me realize: I’m not sure I want to do it all again.”
My husband’s comments came after a little saunter down memory lane—recalling how our dear Clementine, born a horrific sleeper unless she could literally feel another human beside her in her bed, had miraculously turned several corners. Not only was she sleeping in her own bed in her own room and staying put through the whole night, she was also capable of falling asleep on her own now (a HUGE breakthrough for us, who had been trading off sitting in her dark room hissing, “Stop talking, Clementine! Go to sleep!” until she finally passed out mid-sentence).
“Remember how hard it was?” my husband continued. “Remember how stretched you were? Remember how unhappy you were?”
I could never forget.
I wouldn’t have used the word unhappy—those first two years of Clementine’s life were full of joy, tears, passion, triumph, stillness, and gratitude… But, yes, overall, I’d been unscrewed. Not myself.
Not as happy as I am now.
“What if we just… call it?” my husband said, and the weight of the last four years slid right off my shoulders.
Here’s the thing—I would have had one more baby if he’d wanted one.
After all, I’d experienced two pregnancies, two childbirths, two newborns, two first steps—but my husband met me when Fin was almost five. He’d only had one baby.
He loved snuggling Clementine, waltzing her around our apartment, setting her on top of his chest to nap, letting her squeeze his nose and squeal. He loved watching her scoot across the floor, splash water in her sink baths, get milk-drunk and suck on phantom pacifiers in her sleep.
I wanted to be able to give him one more baby, since he’d only experienced it once.
But as soon as he said he was ready to be done with the baby years, we both smiled at each other with a kind of clarity and honesty that we weren’t expecting.
“Yeah,” I said, remembering nights with four hours of sleep and offering deals with the devil if I could just get my baby to nap so I could catch my breath and the way the nurses rushed into my hospital room with bags full of blood. “I think I’m done, too. Let’s be done.”
We’d always talked about my husband getting a vasectomy when we were done.
Well, he made a phone call the next day.
He got snipped at the beginning of June.
(The urologist told him, as soon as he dropped his pants, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you have the most beautiful scrotum I’ve ever seen.” Brag.)
It’s done. We’re done.
And now I have some thoughts.
First, I never intended for motherhood to define my life the way it has.
In fact, I regularly recount how, at age twelve, I was very aware of how the doctrine of my family’s religion told me I would become a mother someday, and how it would be the highest honor and glory that I, as a woman, could achieve. At twelve, I sensed that I was being shuffled along a righteous pathway towards parenthood, so as to fold myself into gender expectations and stay away from such worldly things as vocations, liberation, or spinsterhood… and I resisted. I promised myself I’d never have children, or at least not until I’d “made it” as a novelist (whatever that means; I still don’t know).
So any time I felt frustrated with motherhood or resentful or stuck, I thought back to twelve-year-old me, fifteen-year-old me, even eighteen-year-old me, all of whom would have been FURIOUS to learn that I’d become a young mother and had not been able to, as I’d dreamed of doing, center my entire life around myself, my whims, my ambitions. By twelve-year-old me’s standards, I was failing just by being a mother, just by being a part of this world at all. Not… great for thirty-year-old me, trying to reconcile my desire to raise my family with my desire to still be me.
But now that the option of more children is off the table, I find that motherhood is much less my defining role and much more just a part of me, woven into the rest of the tapestry of my life. Maybe this has nothing to do with the child-bearing years ending. Maybe this has everything to do with the fact that my children are older now, and their care requires much less of the all-encompassing, hands-on, day-and-night demands that a newborn needs.
Either way, I can feel my motherhood integrating into my life, instead of the other way around, as it’s been for so many years. It’s fantastic. It’s allowing my children to know me as myself, instead of just as Mom, which is good, too.
My relationship with my body changed almost overnight, too. As soon as I accepted that I would not be carrying another baby, I was able to feel wholly my own again. Things that I’d refused to acknowledge—my feelings about my weight, my loose skin around my middle, my nose, teeth, tits, and feet, all of which changed significantly during both pregnancies and still feel unrecognizable to me—they were suddenly freed from the kind of holding cell I’d locked them into.
No need to think about what your body looks or feels like if you’re going to just house another baby in there soon. No need to put any work into feeling at home in your own skin if you’re just going to “ruin” it with another pregnancy.
The biggest shift is how I view my family—my husband and my daughters. So often during such dilemmas, we’re asked to think about potential children. We’re asked to look around the dinner table, ponder if there’s anyone missing.
Well, I’ve stopped thinking about future phantom children and how we might extend our dining table to include people who don’t exist. I’m thinking now about the people who do exist, who are right here across the table from me. I’m thinking about my future family—not who else we could bring into it, but what we’ll be able to do now that we know it’s the four of us.
I’m thinking about the travel. The movie nights. The brunches out. The school plays. The lazy Christmas break days in blanket forts. The afternoons where we all split up to do our own things and come back together to share a meal.
It’s weird, of course, to let go of something that you were so wary of. I would have relished a third child and taken such good care of it—I am a committed and good mother, after all, even on my worst days. I would have made room for that kiddo and woven them into our family plans. That kid would have been part of the team, same as the others.
But I’ve been holding onto the possibility of this third child for years now, and it hasn’t always felt like a happy possibility. It’s strange to let go of such a fear, such a worry, such potential for pain. I’ve not only defined myself by motherhood, but also by the costs of my motherhood.
I feel open and grateful and happy to belong to the family members who have me.
I’m so creative, I made two whole humans. And I have plenty leftover for myself.
COMING UP FOR ME
As I finish up the end of this revision of Circus Book (so close, guys, so close!), I’m looking forward to the next few things on my list—drafting a new middle grade, which is drawing on parts of my life that I haven’t explored yet (which means I am exhilarated and also nervous in the best way!), and extending the drafted content of a book proposal that miiiiiiiight have a few nibbles on the line. It’s non-fiction, it’s simultaneously out of my wheelhouse entirely and also the exact kind of project I always want to work on.
I’ve also got something a little different happening next week! I’m teaching a workshop for young writers (teenagers!) with Changing Hands Bookstore. (LINK HERE) We’ll be talking about how to mine story pieces and writing techniques from different genres, and how to write as yourself across any genre you decide to play with! It’s going to be lots of fun, lots of information, and as affirming and encouraging as I can make it. If you have any writers in your life who are the right age, send them over! I’d love to see them there.
TIDBITS
WHAT I’M WORKING ON
Writing! Always writing!
Circus book revisions, nearly done! Final touches on Gargoyle book (the cover, you guys, it’s SO GOOD), just about there!
A new middle grade, which I’ll draft by hand, coming up soon!
That non-fiction proposal, coming together slowly, in bits and pieces!
Besides writing?
We’re cleaning out our basement, making it much more friendly to those of us who want organized books and comfy reading nooks and board games on shelves. I have some work to do with my own impulse buying and self-soothing through acquiring *things* and will try hard to remember how much crap I am sorting through the next time I’m tempted to buy my way out of boredom or melancholy.
I also made a big bucket list for our summer as a family. The list included items like going for a hike! Making tin foil dinners over a campfire! Hitting up a farmer’s market! Trying new fruits! Drawing a chalk mural in our driveway!
And to be honest? I overplanned the tin foil dinner situation, got anxious when I realized we’d be driving in traffic home from the canyon, spiraled for about three hours trying to make a decision about whether to hunt down a charcoal grill at a local park and making it count… and finally, with my husband’s encouragement, I scrapped the whole thing.
No more summer bucket list. We’ll get snow cones when we feel like it, and if we don’t? There’s always next summer.
WHAT I’M READING
I read about fifteen books in June! Here’s some of my stand-out favorites:
Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
Culture Warlords by Talia Levin
The Season: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson
The 2000s Made Me Gay by Grace Perry
City of Secrets by Victoria Ying
Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake (illustrated by Jon Klassen)
33/13: Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry
When I’m deep in a revision hole, I tend to reach for lots of very niche non-fiction, so hence the eclectic list.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
Summer means Vampire Weekend for me! Their first two albums (Vampire Weekend and Contra) take me back to the summer of 2014, when I got emails from my agent letting me know there were multiple editors interested in my debut. When I got off the phone with my editor Kaylan for the first time, I danced around the house to Diplomat’s Son. When I drove to meet my future husband for coffee, I listened to Ottoman. Vampire Weekend is happy music for me.
We’re also listening to the Cruella soundtrack on repeat, lots of Creedance Clearwater Revival, the Sounds of Disneyland, and the Moonrise Kingdom soundtrack.
Also, this Steely Dan song on repeat, just because sometimes you need it.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Lots of whodunnits! My husband is on an Agatha Christie kick, and has devoured about ten of her novels this year. We started with Murder on the Orient Express, then rewatched Knives Out (a perfect movie), then watched A Simple Favor, then Gosford Park, and we’re hunting down the 1970s Death on the Nile so we can be utterly disappointed in it. It’s a fun genre, really, and my favorite movies in the category are the ones that are self-aware (Knives Out, Clue, Murder by Death).
We’re about to start the last season of Shrill, which is bittersweet. I have loved this show and found a lot to relate to in the writing. I’m sad that it’ll be over!
Ahhhh I loved this and resonated with SO much of it. When my husband and I met, we both serendipitously already had in our heads the absolute certainty that we wanted three kids (since we'd each grown up with two siblings). Then life happened...and we eventually decided to stop at two instead. For ourselves and our family and our personal circumstances, that was SO the right decision! I've genuinely never regretted it.