For health reasons, I generally don’t get more than 5000 steps on average, not if I also want to get all my work done, be a present parent and partner, feed my family and tend to our dogs. The energy expenditure required to hit 10,000 steps a day simply isn’t worth it. Good to know that 10,000 steps baseline was totally not based on science.
The news just keeps making me sicker. This country is doing horrific, inhuman things.
I keep going back and forth on whether to take a cruise but knowing this makes me, at the very least, cross Princess and Carnival off our list: “Miami-based Carnival pleaded guilty Monday to six probation violations, including the dumping of plastic mixed with food waste in Bahamian waters. The company also admitted sending teams to visit ships before the inspections to fix any environmental compliance violations, falsifying training records and contacting the U.S. Coast Guard to try to redefine what would be a “major non-conformity” of their environmental compliance plan.…Carnival has had a long history of dumping plastic trash and oily discharge from its ships, with violations dating back to 1993.”
I haven’t seen Endgame yet, but I don’t mind spoilers myself so if you do, do NOT click this link. For those who don’t mind or have already seen it, Drea’s psychological analysis of the movie is worth reading.
The Same Story About My Mom: The other day, I was teaching a gender studies class — nine teenage girls all anxious to say the right thing, their desks in a circle — and my students and I were talking about mothers. We were talking about the impossible positions they are placed in, the ways in which they are our models; we were talking about what little space moms have to also need and also want.
…
There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with mother as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.
I wish relationships with mothers didn’t seem so fraught sometimes.
This is, oddly enough, how I think about parenting: what time remains to me to spend with JB (or our dogs). I wonder if this is a side effect of losing so many loved ones in our teens and 20s.
I find this sort of story on kinkeeping that ignores the parent to grandparent relationship to be rather exhausting: “Thus, you hear sorrowful tales like this one of a 72-year-old grandmother whose name I am not using to prevent further discord. She moved to Southern California last year to help her son and his wife with their new baby, her first grandchild. “I expected I’d be hands-on, babysitting in the evenings,” she told me.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Her daughter-in-law, whom she didn’t know well before her pregnancy, “did not want me to be close,” she said, and didn’t accept gifts and offers of help.”
One, I don’t know how it makes sense to uproot your life to be near a new grandchild if you haven’t developed any closeness with one of the new parents, and particularly the one you’re not related to. I don’t understand that presumption. I understand wanting to share this new stage of life, as a parent, but if I wasn’t close to the new grandparent, I think it would be equally presumptuous to assume they’d want to care for my new child. Two, birthing a child didn’t automatically make me want to be any closer to anyone who I hadn’t grown close to before the kid was born. I welcomed it when it happened organically, but basing it solely on the existence of the kid made as much sense to me as basing adult/mom friendships on the existence of kid friendships. It doesn’t work like that for me. I know it does for other people but why is there is automatic assumption that we’re to welcome everyone with open arms and zero discernment? Personally, in that DIL’s shoes, I’d have been quite wary of the new grandmother and her assumptions.
I adored APW long before I was thinking marriage and long after, so it piques my interest that Meg is going to do a vow renewal. That seems like it could be a lot of fun for the right people. Would that be a thing you’d enjoy doing? I wonder what interval of time would feel appropriate to do a renewal (for us, if we were ever into the idea).
I find it kind of annoying that JB used to eat eat zir veggies, and is now going through an “I don’t like it” phase. I should be glad that it took so long to kick in.
We tried being a one car family (involuntarily) and it’s just not realistic at this point of our lives with a kid and two dogs, so my enjoyment of the Bitches’ rant here had everything to do with their writing and nothing to do with my opinion.
Tami on dental health. I had never made the connection consciously but Mom was a diabetic who had serious dental problems (that I thought we had resolved) but she died young of heart issues. I have to wonder now if she would have gotten better if I had been better about making sure she had regular cleanings annually.
Now I have to start reading Laura Lippman, on the strength of this essay and feeling like I like the person she is here: “Motherhood is a story where I don’t control the ending.” On second thought, I don’t think I can hang with her thrillers. Possibly too much tension.
Similarly, I’ll never read anything by this author: Dean Klein. I can’t decide which combination of adjective sums him up: ridiculous pompous entitled?
Matt on the cases people make against charity. I definitely have a scarcity mindset and things like the unpredictability of the health insurance landscape (an example: the squeeze of high deductible high plans) or the high cost health care in general feed mine. But I still give, one way or another, to people who need help, to small creators, to causes we care about.
Nicole Cliffe’s told the funny version of her grandmother (CW: suicide, substance abuse, and sexual abuse) online but this is the serious version.
Men who behave like this at first look like any other men, thus I look at all of them askance until I KNOW I’m safe around them. I also think he should have been moved to the worst seat and arrested coming off the plane.
Don’t be a Natasha Tynes. I don’t get why people feel the need to police (particularly black women) people for doing necessary things like eating.
The politest (puppy) eviction
I saw this on reddit and I’ve watched it a minimum of 27 times and every single time it has only gotten better and exceeded my expectations pic.twitter.com/Y6xPMCtJ99
I relate so strongly to this letter about chronic mystery illness taking away one’s identity touchstone. I felt such loss when I had to accept that my illness had irrevocably, irretrievably, altered the course of my life. It still echoes sometimes when I remember everything that I hoped to do, or the things I would still love to do but cannot. I lost a huge measure of who I was – strong, unbreakable, defiant against any and all odds, brave and undaunted by challenges (at least on the outside!).
Lisa of The Traumatized Budget is a writer in her mid-50s facing down some pretty serious financial circumstances. I’m not convinced that formal financial literacy is the answer though. Anecdotally I’ve seen many friends grow up with frugal and financially capable parents and they just ignored every lesson in front of them. I’m not sure how one gets past that.
Wild Nights With Emily spends significant time with the person Smith now knows is responsible for mutilating Emily’s letters: Mabel Loomis Todd, a woman who was having an affair with Susan’s husband (and Emily’s brother), Austin. Despite never having met Emily face-to-face, Todd acquired the letters after Emily’s death via Austin and Emily’s sister, Lavinia, and set about removing Susan from them before publishing them. “When I showed this movie to the Emily Dickinson International Society last summer,” Olnek recalls, “the president of the board said, ‘What people need to understand is that when Emily Dickinson scholarship started, people didn’t know that Mabel was Austin’s mistress. They just thought she was the nice, young wife of a faculty member at Amherst College. They didn’t understand her stakes in spinning a certain kind of story about Emily.’
