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I cycled off to work this morning through woodsmoke and acid green leaf-fall, counting the pumpkins on porches, and thought my goodness, my son is getting the suburban-hippie American Halloween childhood I never thought I’d get to give him in his life. And I thought, oh, for the first time I can see why people don’t live in big cities. Here he could grow up weird and safe.

I read a book this week that I think will get some buzz in 2016, when it comes out. Can I say the title? The title, anyway, is Not Working, and it is FAB.U.LOUS. It has got me thinking a lot about working. I mean, I have a kid now so I think a LOT more about working than I did before. I do less working, but consider it more. We are in Ithaca again, and this morning I rode my bike to the gym, ran a brisk 5K and did my work emails. There weren't too many of them and I know I have given myself more childcare than I need to work on the books I’m working on. I have given myself this childcare so that I can...do something else.

No, let’s be real here. I am paying someone to watch my son so that I can write. So that I can write what the hell I like, and not feel like writing is impossible. But somehow, when I have this childcare, I do my work-work and then, in the breathable hours, I pay bills and online browse baby winter clothes and bike to CVS and google ‘Ithaca baby activities’ and bite my nails and start essays about breastfeeding then stop them because I remember the essay this one poet-mom I know wrote about how her baby didn’t sleep and also somehow Hemingway which was terrible on several easy-to-see levels. I don’t really want to write essays on breastfeeding. I want to write a novel. I want to maybe finish this novel, then write another one.

So this novel Not Working is quite freeing really because it is clear that there is a lot if incremental internalised torpor that women deal with when it comes to work, and it’s just very funny and correct about what a mess we can allow ourselves to get into when in fact we could be taking ourselves seriously and not googling ‘vegetarian lasagna recipe’ all the damn time, NOTE TO SELF.

Bomb

They found an unexploded Nazi bomb on our street this week. The police knocked on our door just as I was settling down to half an hour of Call the Midwife while the baby finished his nap. Ten minutes later the baby and I were trundling around Bethnal Green with an overnight bag and a football, not quite understanding what had happened. In the photographs the bomb looks like huge old crustacean or a massive fossilised slug, lying in a hole in the dirt of a dug-up basement. Soldiers are crouched round it, peering down.

“They’re finding them a lot at the moment” said the 12-year old policeman setting up a cordon on Old Bethnal Green Road. “It’s because everyone’s building up. Building up, you’ve got to dig down, you see. So lots of bombs appearing.”

Down the street a photographer was kneeling to take an action-angle shot of a static fire-engine. “Unexploded World War 2 bomb!” called a traffic-officer, stopping a man in a van. “You’re joking my arsehole.” Said the man, looking slightly excited.

I keep thinking about how the bomb got there. Ours is one of the few streets in this neighbourhood that wasn’t bashed to pieces during the blitz – the houses are still standing, which means the bomb must have bashed through the roof of the building and through all the floors, right down to the basement, then stayed there unnoticed. Or perhaps noticed, ignored, then forgotten for 70 years, until the (rumoured to be) flash new owner decided to gut the place this summer to make room for his vintage car collection. Gossip like that happens on a street like ours. What a way to introduce yourself to the neighbours.

BLITZ SPIRIT REIGNITED IN THE EAST END said the newspapers, alongside pictures of annoyed looking pensioners drinking bottled water in a school lobby. We wandered to the park and it was true, I did talk to more strangers than usual. Mostly though, I was just alerted to which of our neighbours are on twitter.

I wonder about the builders on their normal day, hitting metal with metal and stopping in confusion, slowing down, uncovering the slug-bomb handful by handful. Do London builders know a Nazi bomb when they see one? Was there a moment when they felt their curiosity quicken to fear, or did they think, puh, another bomb?

If it had gone off when we were all evacuated, spraying blitz-era debris for 200 metres in every direction, would there have been a moment at the epicentre of the explosion where it was actually 1941 again? Of course not. But…a little bit, perhaps?

Back at work! Or, at least back at work a bit. “It is better for your child” said my boss, over lunch, “to have a mother who takes herself seriously.” I had been angsting about leaving the baby. I never thought I would be that kind of a mother, but I am. When the sitter arrives I fuss around, pointing out again and again where his sippy cup is, where his socks are, that he likes to chew on carrots, which book he’s particularly into that day. I think the sitter thinks I am sweet but crazy.

I think the sitter also thinks I am very lucky, to be able to fuss around like that anyway. I have had a full maternity leave - 9 months, paid, and still I am angsting. It was just the right amount of time for me, I think. I am lucky to have had it, and to have a boss who encourages me to come back to work, and to have a boss who cares at all how it feels.

And work; god, working is so good.

newyorker

Today’s ruling completes the work of the Windsor decision, which was followed by decisions that brought marriage to thirty-seven states, and of countless small struggles and conversations and commitments. And it is, too, an epilogue to scenes from the AIDS crisis, when partners who were legal strangers were shut out of hospital rooms. With this decision, there’s a different destiny. People like going to weddings, because they know what they mean, and for the chance to witness happiness. And five judges are enough to plan a wedding party.

Amy Davidson, writing on the Supreme Court’s decision that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right.

Read the full story on newyorker.com.

(via newyorker)

I had a panic attack yesterday; the first since I was 25. I was eating an Earl Grey and raspberry preserves muffin in the park with my baby and suddenly my vision, my hearing, my stomach: all of it was wrong. Not my first rodeo, but scarier when you are in sole charge of the baby. I called my husband and he came home.

I went for a run and found a therapist to see. “Wiggle your body.” She said. “I can’t.” I said, making movements like the shyest kid in a disco. “Shake your hands then.” She said.

Later, she told me to name five red things in the room. To name five things I could hear. To name five things I could feel – not emotionally, but on my skin. To sigh. These were very helpful things, and I did them all again today.

The weirdos are out in Ithaca again. The blossom too. Did you know this town is a place runaway kids come in the summer? Like the Haight, but...grimmer, I guess. I don’t mean anything bad by that. Bulbs outside the sagging old houses in Fall Creek, the water now clear of snowmelt, the trees speckled with colour at last, painted signs at the market; it’s lovely to see the town again, emerging from the dark. Like all college towns, it’s better when the students are gone. Our neighbour said the runaway kids call to him on the streets. “Like they think I’m the Man” he said. “I’m a rock musician. I’m not the Man.”

I have been reading end-of-the-world novels and playing with the baby outside. The baby can clap his hands together. We’re going back to London in two weeks. The kids can have this town for the summer. It’s the best time of year for Ithaca, I’ll say that.

I miss England today. I’ve missed it for the past month or so. I miss the smell of lilacs in London on a rainy day. I miss my mum’s marmalade, I miss daffodils and musty pubs and woodsmoke coming from the barges when I run along the canal path. I walked miles along the canal when I was pregnant, from Islington to Hackney and back, hoping to keep the baby healthy and then at the end, hoping to get the baby out. I miss reading on Sundays in England, with teacakes and real, milky tea. I miss knowing what to read! I miss C in the bookshop telling me that the new Elena Ferrante is in, about a Persephone book I ought to try, about this big new novel from here or there that she actually quite likes. I am going home soon and will not have to miss any more of those things, but in the meantime I miss them all greatly.

I said I never would, but I literally can't help it. We went to the Bahamas and this happened and it's the best.

My baby ate French Toast today. A friend of a friend from London is in Ithaca for a weekend and we went to brunch and when I turned around she gave my baby French toast and he closed his little fists around it and shoved in in his mouth and grinned. And suddenly I could breathe again.

Parenting in America is insane. The anxiety is like thick tar: people compare notes, strategies, milestones, possible calamities, allergies, trauma, hazards, and size. Newborns are so close to death always that I understand that, the post-partum, 4th trimester overwhelming, screaming terror-love (I felt it, oh Jesus, fucking give my tiny baby back) but now my baby is nearly 7 months old and I miss my English friends more and more every day.

French Toast! It didn’t kill him. Neither will not pureeing every damn thing he eats (or any of it!), sleep-training him, giving him canned beans, citrus fruit, putting him in a forward-facing buggy, letting him try almond flour, vaccinating him, leaving him with a babysitter, carrying him in a sling or letting his dad feed him meals. The baby is Ok! The baby is fun! The baby can learn things and we can both enjoy ourselves and we will survive most of it even if our behaviour is not the result of reading a million studies and carefully calibrating the least-risky option.

Not all of it has to be optimum for the baby to have a good time and be happy. I need to write this on my fucking heart.

I cried on the side of the street today because of the snow and the cold and the closed nail place and the general impossibility of everything. It is appalling how self-indulgent that crying was. There are times when I walk home with the baby and think, we are all well, and not broke, and our beloved baby is healthy and happy, and we are the luckiest people ever to have lived. And there are times when I feel like my entire life is an act of devotion to my husband and son, and always will be. I know the reality is somewhere in the middle of this. What I need is some space to write again. The babysitter is 19 and I am still working on leaving the baby with her for more than an hour, and an hour is not long enough to do more than congratulate myself for having done it. The other day I opened the novel and read the first few pages, which was enough for me to think "There is so much work to be done on this" and also "It might be worth it." But also, it probably won't be, and what on earth.

Write anything, quick, quick, write anything. This is the first time since my baby was born that, with a moment to myself, I have opened a word document instead of turned on the TV or scrolled through twitter. Infants make zombies out of you – they said, it, and I believed them, and it was true.

My son was born 4 months ago. Birth trauma lasts at least 6 weeks. Or it did for me. At least. Maybe it is still here; I certainly haven’t put it behind me. In the second week, my husband and I went and sat in the park. It was a sunny day and people were eating salads on their lunch breaks. Girls in summer dresses and new sandals perched on the grass, chatting to each other. My husband was jubilant, emotional, listing the records he would play for our baby, the books he would read to him, the places we would go.

I could barely walk.

The sun burned through a hole in my leggings, and through the hole I could see the pad I was wearing that covered my stiches. My hair was matted, my skin dry. I put my hand between my face and my baby’s face and let my tears fall onto my knees. I looked at the girls in their dresses and thought, “I wish I was at work, and not here.”

They don’t say that, do they? That for a moment you will wish you could undo what you’ve done. The love is enormous, maybe too much to handle, and the responsibility is too much.

It takes three months to recover from the shock, I think. To look at the wreckage. To make a cosy den in the hull of the downed aircraft, and from there begin to explore the beautiful island. Or, that is how it felt for me. And now - now I think write anything, quick quick write anything and I will never take anything for granted again.

LOL. I guess it's the £10 queue for Hamlet tickets then. I was honestly there at 9:59. Dammit.

I have say somewhere, that I finished work to go on maternity leave today by closing a cookbook deal for an author I believe in more than I can say with exactly the right publisher and I feel a tiny bit like boom.

Over the Black Line

"That's it, you're over the black line" said the nurse, and I didn't even notice that we were until she said it.

You can never go back into the Special Care Baby Unit after you cross the black line, said my brother, as he made his way to the car carrying his 2 week old daughter in her new carseat. "This is your Prince William moment" I said, and the carseat clicked in easily and I knew he'd been practising.

It's probably always extraordinary to watch your little brother parent, to watch him drive carefully for the first time in his life, to watch him prepare to take his daughter home. It's something extra, though, when the baby is born 6 weeks early, all of a sudden, on her mum's last day at work. Lily Winifred Anne, 4 tiny pounds at birth. She spent her first two and a half weeks in the SCBU, and so did my brother and his wife. And the first time I saw him with her, I could't believe it. The gentle affection, the care, the joy of it all. Now they've taken her home and this is the beginning day of the rest of Lily's life, and they get to parent her every day in their house, and there is nothing, nothing more extraordinary than that. Than crossing the black line, out into the light world, out into the first day.

We had an American cousin staying with us last night. She's pre-med and a member of [redacted] sorority at [redacted] California college so she spent dinner telling us all about Greek Life. "I could tell you some weird shit" she said, conspiratorially. She wore a lot of sportswear. I really enjoyed it! Though I also kept trying to shoehorn Feminism in there, slightly annoyingly, I suspect. Aaanyway,after this girl's semester abroad, in which her mind was kind of blown by Life That Was Not Greek, she made a conscious decision never to say anything bad about her body in her sorority. Apparently this is an outrageous act of political anarchy, akin to literally setting off a bomb in the girl's bathroom. She reported the following conversation:

Sorority Sister: OMG, I'm so fat, it's obscene. Ugh, look at me, so gross.

American Cousin: I don't think I look fat, I think I look great.

Sorority Sister: I'm obsessed with you.

I think the thing I love the most

is that Broad City took the implied 'Morgan fucks her brother' joke to the bridge. But that is among many, many things. A little piece of magic, is that TV show. Are you watching it already? Watch it already!

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