By Penny Wolfson
I’m cleaning Toby’s closet, a tangled space in the bedroom where he lived till he left to finish college. The room has violet walls, a chandelier with candelabra bulbs, and a Persian rug. On the walls hang a framed print from a Tin Tin book and a collage he made in the fourth grade, which he called “Sunset in Jail.”
I’m still referring to Toby as “he” some of the time which he says is OK, but two years ago, while we were walking on a local trail, he stopped and turned to me, all five-foot-ten of him, and said, Mom, I need to tell you something.
What could it be? Of my three children, Toby had always seemed to me the most known, transparent, accessible. In my world—as the mother of a physically disabled first son and a sometimes arms-length daughter—Toby was the one I depended on, the one who gave me undivided joy. So when he said, finally, “Mom, I’m 99 percent sure I’m a girl,” the shock was real and immediate. I felt blown away. My heart faltered, my world fell. Because I understood right then that the Toby I had known—or thought I’d known, the Toby I had helped to create, perhaps to invent—was gone.
No doubt it was a moment of liberation for him. But for me, it felt devastating. I had never suspected. I had simply thought of Toby as someone special, a gifted person who didn’t mind holding unpopular views. The fact that he played on the girls’ volleyball team in middle school and liked silk pajamas as a five-year-old did not clue me in. He had never mentioned he felt like a girl; he had never pleaded to wear female clothing; he had never had a doll. His best friend was a boy he’d known since toddlerhood. They spent all their time playing video games.
For months after the announcement, I hardly slept. I could barely write. Only blips, telegraphic phrases, burst out here and there, stingily. It seemed as though writing about it would make it so, and magically, not writing about it might make it not so. For a time I haltingly wrote fiction, as though I could see and express my thoughts only in the third person, where all my frightening fantasies—of amputation, transmogrification—could emerge without judgment. I avoided people I knew, barely able to say the words that now explained Toby, who was soon-to-be-Tobi.
For some time, I held on to the one percent Toby had said he wasn’t sure of. I thought he might change his mind. What had I done? What hadn’t I done? Wasn’t he too young to know what he wanted? These thoughts kept me up at night, filled me with furious anxiety all day.
And now I’m combing through his closet, sifting through the changes and the left-behinds, and I’m finding it sobering and sad. And illuminating. The closet—a boxy, walk-in affair—has been piled, every which way, with a jumble of stuff: video games jammed into milk cartons; toiletries, bins of Legos and matchbox cars; the shades we ordered but didn’t install because Toby wanted black-out curtains and these didn’t completely cover the light. (What was keeping him up at night? Why so hard to sleep with even a chink of light?)
Here in the closet are other costumes: men’s dress shirts, a Brooks Brothers hounds-tooth sports coat, two suits—one from Toby’s bar mitzvah, in tans and browns, with a flag of gleaming polyester for the pocket and a sleek charcoal-gray Dolce and Gabbana, with narrow trousers, bought for some high school dance. I still recall the pleasure I felt when he slipped on the tailored jacket and pants at the store. He seemed instantly beautiful, ready, I thought, with his gentle eyes and lanky build, to wow the girls. He seemed like the boyfriend I wished I had in high school.
On the bottom shelf I find the Seiko silk ties I had bought in a Madison Avenue shop for his twenty-first birthday; they are still, two years later, in their slip box, swathed in tissue paper, unopened, bearing their expensive price tags. I had sent them to Toby along with a whiskey-soaked cake to celebrate his coming of age. I saw him as I thought he was, an elegant young man for whom I could buy something expressly male. How wrong I was! Was this also the birthday for which we bought him a badger-bristle shaving brush with a dish of sandalwood soap, which I also now find now, lounging among the rejected toiletries?
In the closet I also find the newer costumes: the flowered, cotton dress, the high-heeled fabric booties, the teased and tangled wig Toby wore for a few weeks, now sitting atop a Styrofoam skull on the top shelf. There are shaping inserts for a bra “for enhanced cleavage” and a laser hair removal kit with instructions on how to “permanently disable the hair follicle.” Crammed into one corner are a bottle of strawberry-scent mist and a container of Summer’s Eve body powder, to sprinkle on your “lady places,” with a Cotton Breeze scent. When did that self arise? Where?
This is a bewildering, confused repository. But it’s the silk ties that pain me most. They were my fantasy of Toby, and they seem to lie there as stark reminders of all my love and error.
When Tobi meets us to see the play Hamilton, she is wearing a strange getup—a long-sleeved kelly-green sweater with puffed sleeves and piped edges, plus black tights. Thin tights, like pantyhose, not leggings. “When women wear that outfit they wear leggings, not tights,” I remark, and she says, “Well, people I know dress like this,” and I think maybe this is true on that live-and-let-live campus where she goes to school.
I ask about the Dolce and Gabbana suit, the one I bought for Toby as a man: Will you wear it again? And Tobi says well, possibly, now and then, and I wonder if she is still confused herself, not willing to completely cede an earlier life, those earlier costumes. She tells me she is still hanging out mostly with men, men who play video games night and day, and again, I wonder….
But I know Tobi does not wonder. She tells me so. There is a confidence in her choice for her future. And she is free in ways I never saw before—still with no partner, an ambitious career path that remains unsettled—but maybe now she sees the sunset from outside of jail.
I think of something I wrote soon after Toby revealed himself: our children are here to remind us of loss. And there is loss for me in Tobi’s revelation. But it’s only in the last few months that I have considered not only the ties that bound us together, but the ties that might have bound him, hand and foot, mind and body, to a self he rejected, which kept him from being who he was, and who she is. A self I may now be able to see more clearly.
Who cares, really, if the Seiko ties are ever worn? The ties that bind us, Toby and me, or Tobi and me, rather, are, after all, tighter and closer than gender, than any article of clothing could ever express. We are united by every nuance and joke and dinner and fight, by the embroidery of family history, by the similarity of our vision. We remain linked, as the old hymn says, by “the ties that bind/the fellowship of kindred minds,” by blood, by nature, by inheritance. And, irrevocably, by love.
Penny Wolfson is an award-winning essayist with three unusually special adult children whom she sometimes writes about.
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By Meredith Gordon Resnick
@MeredithResnick
I wanted to believe adopting older children would somehow make it easier to let them go. I was wrong.
I’m not going to lie: an empty nest was what I looked forward to ever since I became a mother. It’s what gave me the courage to have my girls in the first place—knowing someday they’d leave.
That’s a joke, of course.
But my fear of becoming a mother was not.
They were almost 11 and 14 when we got them and had been living in a detsky dom—Russian for children’s home—in St. Petersburg. This was before Russian adoption by Americans was outlawed. This was when the adoption process, unlike having a baby naturally, took less than three months. This was almost twenty years ago.
Friends and family never understood why we wanted to adopt a tween and a teen in the first place. Even now they shake their heads. Teenagers are tricky enough when you’ve known them intimately since birth. But traveling all the way to Russia to bring fully-formed people into our home? Let’s just say folks were confused. Now that both our children have moved out to begin their own lives, I can’t explain it either.
Before our adoption, pregnant friends rubbed their bellies and said: “The older they are the more problems you’ll have.” “You must feel desperate,” one said. “Do you think they’re even capable of loving you?”
Their audacity was a tremendous relief. In retelling the stories, these other mothers were the insensitive ones. I didn’t think those things they said but I struggled with something else: my unofficial yet painfully true version of why I wanted an older child, not a baby.
I looked down on other mothers, the way they became so engrossed in their children they couldn’t even talk on the phone. I wouldn’t be trapped, not like them, for 18-plus years. I mean, what if the kid never left? Ultimately, however, I was ashamed. Babies, with their hands the size of rose petals and toes like creamy pebbles were natural. My lack of maternal instinct was not.
When the girls first arrived, unable to speak English, they clung to me, particularly our younger one. At the supermarket, she wouldn’t let go. Even when the cereal was on the top shelf and I needed both hands, one to steady myself, the other to grab the box, she was attached—fingers slipped through mine, but more like a clamp. Under the bright lights I saw her knuckles were white. The ritual was that I peeled her delicate fingers away, we giggled, I’d get the cereal, and a moment later she was hooked into the bend of my elbow. Back then we pushed the basket together, our hands aligned, fingers touching, her smoky gray eyes searching for a mooring.
I remember thinking, would she ever let go? Clearly, my job was to teach her independence, so when the time came I knew she’d be able to.
But when the time came it felt like muscle being pulled from bone.
“At least you didn’t carry them,” someone told me. “You shouldn’t compare your situation with someone who gave birth.” Insensitive, maybe, but now I admit that because they were never in utero, or at least in my utero, I hoped it might be easier—for me.
Instead of having my belly scanned with an ultrasound, the first time I saw my kids was in an adoption newsletter. We had to rely on tests administered by a psychologist thousands of miles away to measure who they were.
No first-time mother really knows what to expect when starting her family, from how many diapers she will change in the first week to how to clean strained peas from silk. But I didn’t expect the back end, the launch of my children, to be more of a challenge than their arrival. They’ve moved out now; they are living beautiful lives. Our older daughter is 32, married with a daughter of her own, our younger one is almost 30. I’m 57. Meeting them seems like yesterday.
My heart wants time to stand still.
Before, when they’d run to the gym, or the store, I’d sit quietly alone, enjoying the freedom, the space. I’d smell their lingering perfume and pray they’d stay away longer, and wish, sometimes, they’d just leave. I’d had it with their music (too loud), their arguments (too long) and their convenient use of Russian when they didn’t want me to understand something (too often). Now that I see them less often, I try to fill the space they’ve left for me to tend, space that will always in my heart, belong to them.
Before we adopted our daughters I spent a lot of time thinking about their other mother—the one who gave them life. I tried to be philosophical. It was her decision to let go, but still, she gave them roots. I was going to give them wings. That’s what I told people, and it sounded so selfless and mature. But when it was time to let my daughters fly, sometimes, I didn’t want to give them anything of the sort. I’ll admit it. Sometimes I wanted to clip their wings, anything to keep them close to the nest, to me.
My husband and I are empty-nesters, have been so for a while. Sometimes, even still, when he’s at work the house feels like a tunnel I walk with no light at the end. Our girls are busy with their lives. I go to the supermarket alone again, like I did before they came, and only my hands push the basket. The light comes when I see my daughters, and jokingly I remind myself that this launching business is what motivated me to become a mom in the first place. That the time to say goodbye was always going to come—meaning, I wouldn’t be trapped, that I’d have time for myself. But hope shines for other reasons, too. As they are discovering the beauty within themselves as young women, and I, too, am rediscovering that which blossoms in me at middle age. I am learning to refocus on myself, to place myself at the front of the line. To model this for my daughters may be the most meaningful gift I can bestow.
Knowing that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Had someone told me how soon, or how little time I’d have, and how much it was going to hurt to go through this change, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. Had someone told me how painful this would be and how I’d never feel ready to let go, I might have wanted to adopt our daughters when they were even younger, so I’d at least have more days with them in the nest. I might have wanted to give birth.
At the very least, I’d have their baby pictures.
Meredith Gordon Resnick writes about health and mental health. Her essays have appeared in JAMA, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times and PsychologyToday.com.
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By Katherine Prince
The air was cold and septic in the medical office that May morning. I took a deep breath to calm my nerves. I sat alone in the waiting room chair, pretending to be absorbed in a magazine. A chirpy voice snapped me out of my futile attempt at inner-peace. “Are you ready, Mrs. Prince?”
“I’m, just, uh, a little nervous…and excited…and,” I stammered on as I pulled my medications out of my pharmacy bag. “I didn’t take the Valium yet, just like you said,” suddenly remembering I would be fully awake for this procedure.
Yes, I was ready. I had considered this decision for three years. I had done the research. Looked at pictures. Imagined about the worst. I had come to grips with the real consequences that would follow. What if I had terrible regrets after? Would my husband really still find me attractive, as he said he would? I had reminded myself of what really mattered. I was ready to be confident. I was ready to put forth the real me.
I was ready for my implants to come out.
I got them put in July of 2008. It was an exciting time for me. My boyfriend of four months was in the military, and on a deployment. We had planned for me to go visit him in Japan after a girls weekend I had in Palm Springs. I was looking forward to see him, and had a feeling he’d planned something special when he’d asked I go by his place to pick up his favorite pair of shoes. I was also thrilled to go to a new land—that was, to leave the Land of Flat Chested Girls and arrive at the Land of Normal Looking Girls.
I had long been insecure about the debt in my bra, and finally caved to the idea of plastic surgery when a flat-chested coworker had gotten her breasts enlarged a few months earlier. The surgery itself was expensive, a tidy sum of $6000, and it took no more than 45 minutes.
Perhaps it was from the anesthesia, or just the reality that my adolescent dream of having “real” boobs had actually come true, but I remember the days following the surgery as surreal. I was thrilled that going bra and bathing suit shopping would no longer be a “you don’t measure up” experience. I felt that my implants hid my “abnormality” of having small breasts.
I married my sailor boyfriend in 2010 and shortly after I returned to school to become a Holistic Health Practitioner/Massage Therapist. This is when I began to realize I would be paying for my surgery with more than cash.
As my fellow students and I practiced different types of massage, I became disappointed that I couldn’t relax completely when I was face down on the table. One time was during Thai massage class. Sometimes the practitioner uses her full bodyweight, and it is amazing. But there were times that my body would be resisting because I knew the full pressure of somebody on my upper back would make me feel like my implants were going to pop out. I couldn’t quite get to that coveted state of bliss because I was protecting the bags of salt water that lived in my chest, and that pissed me off. I was missing out, simply because of my implants.
Then things got even more complicated.
Shortly into my new career, I learned I was pregnant. Pregnancy and breastfeeding shed a new light on my breasts. It was an amazing experience being able to feed babies with my body, and I began to look at my breasts with a new fondness. I felt strangely feminine for the first time. It had less to do with size, but more that I was doing something uniquely female with them for the first time.
I didn’t have any issues breastfeeding, but like many women, my breasts became absolutely huge. For the first time in my life I wished they were smaller. As a fitness enthusiast, they became physically and emotionally cumbersome. I felt eyes on me when I would go for runs, which made me feel scared and angry. I felt like an object. While I knew it was not exactly the same, I somewhat sympathized with women who had had large chests all their lives.
But what bothered me most of all about having implants was the message I would be sending to my children, and to the young girls around me. I imagined my three daughters coming to me when they are in middle or high school, full of their own insecurities, and trying to explain to them that they are beautiful the way they are, all the while my fake boobs stared them down.
As I began to contemplate this daunting possibility of ridding myself of my perfect looking breasts, I realized that I was still the insecure Flat Chested Girl hiding behind her inconspicuous boobs. I came to grips with the fact that I had unresolved emotional pain regarding my breasts. I was still the little girl who didn’t know her self-worth. And I realized if I kept my new boobs, I was saying I needed them to be beautiful. They were like two toxic friends that had to go.
Six years after my surgery, I began to make a plan. I researched the reversal procedure, which I found was called “explant” surgery. I found a website called RealSelf where I could look at pictures, find doctors, and talk to people who had actually done it. One doctor I interviewed for the explant looked at me with pity, saying I would be extremely unhappy, and so would my husband. It was completely dehumanizing.
But I kept on searching for a doctor who would give me what I wanted, and finally I found one who specialized in breast reconstruction and mastectomies. I scheduled my surgery on a May morning in 2014. My husband told me before the surgery he thought I was pretty no matter what. The surgery cost $1000 and took about 30 minutes. And the satisfaction of making a really good choice this time around.
Now, four years after my explant surgery, I am so happy I did it. And my husband is happy because I am happy. My life is not completely free of my body-image struggles; my breasts somewhat resemble one-week-old balloons. I have considered getting my skin reconstructed from the damage the implants caused, but I am unsure. In total, I have four discreet scars that tell my implant story, but now I feel pleased when I look at them. They remind me of a personal hurdle I had to overcome on my journey to wholeness.
Katherine Prince is a freelance writer, illustrator, and editor. When she is not daydreaming about making movies, writing or reading, she can be found in Southern California exploring with her four kids, watching history documentaries and running.
Image: Fully Blossomed, Meg Spielman Peldo
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By Brianne DeRosa
@redroundorgreen
On the anniversary, I sent you a terrarium.
Almost as soon as I had done it, I second-guessed myself. Sending a terrarium was probably an incredibly stupid thing to do. Would the lilies have been better? What about the blue hydrangeas? Should I have sent food instead, or tea, or a card, or cried my tears for you into a little vial and sent them in the mail with the hope that you would understand?
But the polished black stones and the little waxy plants, starkly surviving in their glass dome, spoke to me. So I sent you a terrarium.
I sent the terrarium because it seemed exactly the opposite of everything that was in the funeral home on that evening nine years ago when I sat slumped in a tastefully mauve armchair, and the faces of our mutual friends were a gray that matched the colorless feeling in the pit of my stomach. Everything around us was soft and muted and pink, and we were dark and cold and flinty. Today you have stark and beautiful words carved into your arm in remembrance of David, deep and black, and I have sent you stark black stones in a bowl because there is nothing pink or floral about surviving your child’s suicide.
I recall you telling us once about the fear and wonder of raising him, how his brilliance refused to conform to expectations, and how after wrestling with the conflict of his beautiful otherness, you chose to simply stop and love him. You chose to just love him. You loved him.
You’ve never known, I think, what simplicity and wonder and power that revelation held for so many of us. We are parenting our own children and when the struggles arise, when we live the days when their own uniqueness and otherness are at odds with what the world expects of them—of us—we can remember you wrestling with this, wrestling with David, like Jacob wrestled Esau’s guardian angel. And we can remember that you chose love above all other things.
Love does not conquer all. We know. We see. But how much joy there was in loving him and refusing to try to change him, ah, we see that too.
I sent you a bowl of black stones because of the hardness of loving a child for exactly who he is. I imagine you throwing those stones in the faces of everyone who ever wanted David to be different, wanted you to make him different. I sent you a bowl of black stones because when you sent off the boat for his Viking funeral and you set it afire, when you took a class in blacksmithing and you forged a weapon out of flame and steel, I imagine that what grew for you was deep and hard and polished and cool. What sprang from those flames was refined, solidified, made with the permanence of stone birthed from upheaval.
What sprang from those flames was you, nine years after.
So today, my friend, I have sent you a terrarium, and I have written you these words to tell you that what is permanent—after David’s death—is your eternal fierce choice to live in unflinching, unyielding love.
Brianne K. DeRosa currently finds herself very much in the thick of parenting two intense pre-teen boys, and turns frequently to the wisdom of the mother friends who have gone before her. Sometimes their wisdom leaves her speechless; then again, sometimes she finds she suddenly has a lot to say. This essay is in honor of her friend Rebecca, who needs to know how much her unimaginable strength has inspired everyone who loves her.
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By Michael Gentry
@MSG_78
I was 10. I loved my cat. And I killed him.
Just a year earlier, my family packed up our Eastern Washington home and moved to a logging camp on Alaska’s panhandle. We left our house, our family and friends, and many modern-day comforts. The camp had a small school house which accommodated all grade levels—K through 12. I was the lone 5th grader, so friends were friends by default, not choice. About these friends, my dad used to say, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” I missed home. I missed my friends. Not only did I feel alone, but often, I was alone.
A family five trailers down from ours, the Millers, had a litter of kittens. Somehow, probably because my mother perceived a need, we ended up with one. He was a black, peke-faced puff ball. Though he was technically a family pet, he took immediately to me and me to him. He’d chase my shoelaces as I walked, cuddle on my lap, and coil up on the foot of my bed each night. Because of his resemblance to a gremlin, I named him Gizmo.
The schoolhouse was small enough to not have a cafeteria. So, my sisters and I walked back to our trailer each day for lunch. One day, we were seated around the small, oak table situated awkwardly in our small dining room. We ate and talked as my mom worked busily between the stove and sink behind us. I reclined back in the oak chair, holding the table tightly with white fingers. The wood legs slipped on the worn linoleum floor, slamming the chair to the ground. I climbed off the floor as my mother gasped, one hand covering her mouth, her eyes sick.
I gazed down to see Gizmo trapped beneath the wood slats of the chair back, like wooden prison bars. I yanked the chair off him, but he didn’t rise. He choked for air, pawing furiously at his head, trying to brush away the pain. Blood trickled from his nose as he shook tiny tremors.
Mom hurried us kids into the living room, then covered Gizmo with a dish cloth. I watched my mom back at the kitchen sink, bury her face deep into her hands. My sisters sat quietly, eyes wide. I watched the dish cloth painfully rise and fall, until it rose no more.
I cried for many days after that, mostly alone. For many years after, I lied. Whenever this dreadful event was brought up, I told my siblings that my shoelace was caught on the chair leg, and I was merely getting it free when the chair slipped. Though, each time I said this, I knew the real reason was that I was just being careless. I thought lying would ease the sting, but it didn’t.
That day I not only lost a good friend, I killed him.
I knew I needed to forgive myself. But, each time I tried, each time I raked myself over the coals real good, it didn’t help. Gizmo’s death stayed fresh through middle school and into junior high. I wasn’t drowning in my guilt, but I wasn’t able to move on from it either. I was still careless, and Gizmo was still dead.
Several years later, some time in high school, I stumbled upon some old photos of our time in Alaska. As I pulled a photo of Gizmo from the stack, I was momentarily sucked me back into the horror. My lungs began to fill up with the pain I had suffered. But then I exhaled, and it was gone. The guilt and pain were lifted; somehow I was freed.
I didn’t know if I deserved to feel this way, this absolution, or why I did. But, in that moment, I remembered Gizmo for the friend he was.
Time is an interesting thing. It is powerful. And the distance from that awful day provided new perspective. The years that separated me from the trauma allowed me to see it for what it truly was—an accident. In order to forgive myself, I needed to learn, and time made that possible. I needed to learn that careless acts can affect others, that lying doesn’t dull the pain. I needed to learn to move on.
Michael Gentry lives in rural Idaho with his family, which includes two spoiled Persian cats. He teaches writing classes at the local college and wrangles (raises) children after work.
Image: Catching Some Rays, Margie Lakeberg
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By Mary Janevic
For a period of time in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I watched I Dream of Jeannie reruns every afternoon in the empty time between school and supper. It was 24 minutes of zany fun, as ancient Middle Eastern lore met the U.S. space program. But I always felt a little deflated when the closing theme came on, since it meant that I had to wait an entire day for the next episode. Impatient, I fantasized about lounging on silky pillows, like the ones in Jeannie’s bottle-home, in front of a television that magically played one episode after another of my favorite shows.
Decades later, my wish came true, thanks to the modern sorcery of technology. On-demand viewing and an endless supply of content now allow us to summon exactly the entertainment we want, when we want it. My own kids happily binge-watch Fresh Off The Boat, just as I dreamt of doing with Jeannie.
Alas, technologies designed to make our lives more fun have a darker side, and no one knows this better than parents. The more kids can access precisely what they want on a screen, the more they stay tethered to their devices instead of doing something active or creative. And lately I’ve been thinking about a subtler drawback of our just-for-you world. My kids miss out on all the things that are not just for them.
Let me explain by going back to tweenage me after a Jeannie episode ended. Dinner wasn’t yet ready. I was comfortably sprawled in front of the TV, but all the shows I liked had ended. So I was stuck watching the 5 o’clock news. I learned about the Soviets in Afghanistan, whether the employment rate was up or down, and how our Detroit Tigers were doing.
Looking back, some of my more memorable discoveries as a child came about only because I didn’t have access to entertainment that I would have preferred.
Each summer we would spend a month with my grandparents on their Missouri farm. In those days, nobody toted their own music around with them, so my siblings and I blew the dust off my uncle’s teenage collection of 45s in the attic. We whiled away long afternoons listening to A and B sides of oldies that we eventually grew to love: the Beach Boys, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, The Royal Guardsman.
It was the same with reading material. When we would visit our great-aunts and uncles, my siblings and I didn’t have tablets to keep ourselves occupied while the adults chatted. So we would read whatever we could find. At Auntie Ann’s house, it was Catholic Digest (I always turned to the jokes first) and U.S. News & World Report. I looked forward to Sunday afternoons at Aunt Rose’s so that I could catch up on aliens, Hollywood stars, and their occasional intersection in the National Enquirer and Weekly World News.
And at home, I read Time magazine. The church bulletin. The Detroit News. Why? For the same reason I watched the news after Jeannie. Because these things—none of which were aimed at my demographic or tastes—were all that was on offer.
That is a situation my kids rarely find themselves in. No matter where they are, they can find what they want on YouTube, Apple Music, Netflix. They seldom watch, listen to, or read anything they didn’t select themselves—or that wasn’t suggested by an anxious-to-please algorithm.
Our cultural lives have become increasingly bespoke. Tech companies and content purveyors are finding ways to optimize our experiences (and their sales) through customization. Recommended for you. People also bought. People like you read. You might like. Often we do like. But these clever algorithms move us only incrementally from where we started.
As a child I discovered the odd and charming Bogwoppit by Ursula Moray Williams because it was next to Wilder on the library shelf, as in Laura Ingalls. Amazon would have recommended other old-fashioned, prairie-kid books, but Dewey’s content-blind system gave me British fantasy instead. I was hooked.
Electronic searching now takes us directly to what we seek, often with similar, AI-generated options appearing on the periphery. We are less likely to stumble across things that have nothing to do with what we are looking for. But randomness is powerful in its purposelessness. It’s nature throwing things up against a wall to see what sticks. It’s the force that propels evolution.
The trade-off of having what we want at our fingertips means less opportunity for serendipity, for necessity to give birth to invention. I work at a university, and we like to throw around words like interdisciplinary and cross-pollination, recognizing that something uniquely valuable comes from being exposed to unfamiliar perspectives. We might like being in our comfort zones, but we don’t learn much there.
Now our comfort zones follow us around everywhere. This is true for all of us, of course, but Gen Z kids are the first to grow up in such a highly curated world. It could be that the sheer volume of what kids can access these days more than makes up for this fact. My seventh-grader watched a North African rap video the other day for his French class. His older brother and I recently kept our eye on a grizzly cam in Alaska.
And it’s also possible that this lament is straight-up nostalgia on my part: a desire for my kids to experience the same flavor of discovery that I did as a child, anachronistic though it may be. Perhaps it is a longing for a world with fewer shiny things being waved at me; things I can’t turn away from because they are designed to appeal to me. Yet there is something about constantly being surrounded by our preferences that makes me uneasy, as a parent and as a person. Getting exactly what you want all the time sounds great. But as anyone who is familiar with genie stories knows, there’s always a catch.
Mary Janevic is a health researcher in Michigan. She loves to snuggle up with her three kids to binge-watch baking shows.
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By Anne Brinser Shelton
@LillenStudio
Long before I had the privilege of tip-toeing into a sleeping child’s room late at night and swapping out a tooth that had fallen out earlier in the day with shiny coins or a glitter-sprayed dollar bill, more than one been-there-done-that mom had imparted to me that eventually, no matter how sentimental your intentions, there comes a day when you stumble across a stash of your kids’ baby teeth, wonder what the heck you’re keeping them for and toss them out.
Naturally, I didn’t believe a word of it.
Yet half a dozen or so years—and presumably 40 visits from the Tooth Fairy, between my two daughters—later, the teeth, they are everywhere. Ziploc baggies holding individual incisors fall out of the kitchen cabinet when I reach for the first aid kit. Some are marked with the child’s name and date, some not. Similar baggies that never got properly stashed show up at the bottom of dresser drawers or old purses. Sometimes there aren’t even baggies.
My older daughter, now 12, once found a free-floating molar in the drawer of my old home office desk. She suspiciously asked me what it might be doing there. I changed the subject and whisked it away, tucking it into the cabinet with so many others.
The thing is that by the time the Tooth Fairy made her last flight to our house, she’d made her fair share of bloopers. She’d gotten off to a strong start, of course, as Tooth Fairies almost always do. In the early days, she set to work attaching coins to clever little notes, sometimes leaving a sprinkling of sparkling glitter near the windowsill, never missing a beat. But even the best Tooth Fairies wear down after a while.
There were nights she was distracted by the stress of her day job, nearly forgetting to show up until just before the alarm clock was set to go off the next morning, leaving little time to do more than make the swap and stow away her treasure in the nearest hiding spot to be properly catalogued later. There were nights she’d been sick or had maybe had a wee bit too much chardonnay. There were nights she took loans from the kids’ own piggy banks because she was short on cash (she paid those back, right?).
Then there was the one infamous night she forgot to show up at all, but then managed to pull a fast one—after the kid had already gone to school—that was convincing enough to seem as if the money had just been overlooked in the morning. Which is to say, it’s really no wonder she got behind on properly curating her collection.
And yet, when I’m fiddling around for a checkbook and come across baggies of individual baby teeth, I can’t yet bring myself to just get rid of them. Marie Kondo would ask me if they “spark joy.” And in a way, they kind of do—or they used to anyway.
In the 2012 animated movie Rise of the Guardians, part of what the Tooth Fairy is guarding when she collects lost baby teeth are memories. Each tooth, the narrative goes, contains early childhood memories from the time each tooth first sprouts in a baby’s mouth until it loosens and falls out. The kind of memories that most of us forget as we grow even just a little bit older. I rather like the idea of that.
And these teeth, in their individual Ziploc bags, they hold my memories, too—my memories of what it was like being a new mom, cloudy from sleep deprivation, concerned and confused about how to comfort my babies when they were cranky because their teeth were are coming in. My memories of giving them new foods to bite into, bites of birthday cake and bananas to mush between fresh molars. My memories of wrangling toddler toothbrushes into tiny mouths and first trips to the dentist. The surprising emotional pang when your big kid first loses a tooth and it hits you like a load of bricks that she’s not a baby anymore.
That’s what the Tooth Fairy has always been there for, right? To make a situation that might otherwise seem a little traumatic turn suddenly lighthearted (and lucrative!).
While I’ll accept that I’ve reached the point of “Why the heck am I keeping these things?”, it doesn’t seem quite right to just toss these lost teeth in the trash (no matter how much I thanked them, with all due respect to Ms. Kondo).
It seems there should be some sort of ritual. Like we should bury them in the garden with flower seeds. Or make wishes on them and cast them into the ocean or a fresh-flowing stream. Or we should bundle them into a little pouch attached to helium balloons and launch them into the sky one sunny day (surely the creepiest find of a lifetime for whomever should come across the deflated balloons in an empty field some later date).
I’ve known from the day I first held my sweet babies in my arms that parenting is largely about letting go, in hopefully small increments over many, many years. Now what I need to let go of is the Tooth Fairy—and her hoard, too. I just haven’t quite decided how.
Anne Brinser Shelton is a writer living in Columbia, South Carolina. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Unsweetened Magazine, South Carolina Living and more. Her white wine sangria is neighborhood-famous.
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As parenting writers (and editors), we are constantly asking ourselves: how do we walk the line between the freedom we should feel when writing about our own experiences as mothers and fathers, and the respect we need to afford our children and their privacy. By definition, this balance is fluid; our lives are ever-changing. Our kids get older, our relationships with them become more complex, and using their personal anecdotes as part of our own creative process is no longer as straightforward as it once was when they were babies, toddlers, or even in elementary school. We’ve been examining this question a lot lately over at Motherwell, with respect to our own writing (Randi is a new empty nester, Lauren is a newly single mother) as well as with the writers we have the pleasure to work with on a daily basis.
We talked to a handful of editors and writers who have had some of the most personal and/or professional experience with this subject and here is what they had to say.
Navigating the tension between a writer’s craft and her children’s privacy is an ongoing challenge. Has there been a single principle you’ve relied on to help guide you through this?
Lisa Belkin, who started the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, gave me this advice when I took over: a Google search on your children’s names should never yield anything you’ve written. I took that to heart and then some—not only do I not use their names (and rarely their genders), but if the heart of a question involves my child’s heart—some hurt, some sensitivity, some tender spot—then it’s off limits for personal writing, although those things can and often do inform the topics I choose to report on (an entirely different thing).
I made a different choice for our family than I did as an editor of others (in part because my role was already so very public). I’m grateful for parent-writers who are more open, especially when writing about helping a child handle common challenges (learning difficulties, friendship). Their experiences are often a gift to the rest of us, helping us to manage those same issues—and reminding us that we’re not alone. Sometimes I suggested edits on behalf of someone’s future easily embarrassed 14-year-old, sometimes I spoke directly to that 14-year-old to check in on a story, and once I rejected an otherwise excellent essay entirely on the grounds that no teenage boy needs to ever read in the archives of the New York Times that his mother once worried that his penis was too small. —KJ Dell’Antonia, former Motherlode editor and author of How to Be a Happier Parent
Do you ever feel constrained by your children’s opinions about which stories about them you can and cannot share?
Writing about my little kids I was always aware that, someday, they might read the words I wrote. However someday was a long way away, and the stories of their early lives were really more about me than them. (Aside from some potty training posts and pictures I’ve long deleted!) Now that the kids are tweens and teens, it’s a whole different ballgame. Their stories are no longer mine to tell, and they follow each and every word I post on social media in real time. I so miss the ease and innocence of those early days and struggle with my desire to share and relate to people without negatively impacting them. They are my top priority, though, and I let them decide how much and what they are comfortable with me sharing… I just wish they were more comfortable with an oversharing big-mouthed mother! —Jill Smokler, founder Scary Mommy and bestselling New York Times author.
What do you think your kids have learned from the fact that you write about them?
This has never been a struggle for me. Everything I write about parenting is inspired by an actual event or a conversation that I have had with my kids. And the truth is, I’m constantly writing about things that I would never share with their teachers or with other parents; those are the interesting topics. I try to take the embarrassing, confusing, and tense moments of our lives, and turn them into meaningful narratives that can help other people. The more personal or awkward the event is, the more likely I’ll end up showing my kids how I wrote about it. Why? Because I’m pretty sure that the most important thing I do, as a father, is teach my kids how to construct meaning from their own experiences. That involves showing them how to reframe painful, uncomfortable memories into narratives that can enable more confident, transparent, and authentic ways of living.
I want my kids to see how I’ve stripped the particular details from their stories—I want them to recognize that while what I’ve written no longer explicitly refers to the shameful moments of our family life, it still communicates the truth, transforming it into an honest lesson that can carry us into a more fulfilled future. —Jordan Shapiro, author of The New Childhood
Do you think it’s possible to write about parenthood without exposing too much of your kids’ lives? How does social media play into it?
I have four children, and have been blogging about motherhood for eight years. I also wrote a book about motherhood and my own recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. The question of privacy has never left my mind. When I wrote my memoir, I made sure to write only to the point that my story bumps up against others’, but not beyond. In other words, I can write what I saw, how I experienced our shared reality, but I do not get to jump into my kids’ minds, make assumptions about what drives and motivates them. That is their story, and none of my business.
Blog writing is a little different, and somewhat simpler. I have always believed it’s fine to write funny stories about my babies and toddlers. If one of my kids gets mad at me because I wrote a post about how they were a tiny dictator at age four, then we have much bigger problems. Namely, an utter lack of sense of humor. However, there comes a time when children quite clearly shift into their own fully autonomous beings, and at that point, I don’t think we have a right to blast their stories all over the internet. I don’t believe I have a right to speak about them publicly, permanently, in negative ways simply because it benefits me. With my teenagers, I ask before I post anything on social media.
I do think we can write about motherhood without articulating the details of our children’s lives. For example if a kid is mean to our child at school, we can write generally about how hard it is to deal with bullying, to know what to say to help, to not act on our desire to hunt down the bully’s parents. We can relate it to our own experience as a child. We can do all of this without betraying our kids’ privacy. It’s a bit of a challenge, but a great practice, and I have never felt particularly stifled by these boundaries. I respect them. They respect me. It’s so much more important to me than blog traffic. —Janelle Hanchett, creator of Renegade Mothering and author of I’m Just Happy to Be Here.
Do you show your kids you writing and/or seek their approval before your work is published?
I wrote a column at the New York Times called “The Parent-Teacher Conference,” about the intersection of education and parenting. My own younger son was, like all pre-teens, struggling with organizational and time management issues. Every time I tackled that topic, and used him as my foil, we discussed exactly what I’d be writing and how. He read each piece before it was published, and had veto rights over every part of the process, including the photograph on the column.
My first book, The Gift of Failure, also featured my two children, and again, they both had veto power. There were plenty of stories that did not make the final cut, as well as others that we agreed would never even make it into the first draft, and while it’s never easy to be the kids of “The Gift of Failure mom,” they were satisfied with how they were portrayed.
My new book is about preventing childhood addiction, an even more loaded topic than failure. I am an alcoholic in recovery, and I teach teenagers in addiction recovery, so my interest in writing this book is for my own children and for my students. It is inevitable that they will all make appearances in this new book, and I have had to navigate this territory with a great deal of care and attention to their privacy and with an eye to their trust in me. —Jessica Lahey, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.
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