Red, white, and bleary-eyed

Quick hits: Page-turners, parenting setbacks, and Congressional catastrophes

I’m keeping things short and sweet today in light of the holiday weekend. We’ll be attending a charming neighborhood bike parade and grilling veggie burgers with a few friends. Whether or not you’re in a patriotic mood, I hope you have something summery to look forward to! Below, a smorgasbord of updates and recommendations for your long weekend perusal.

photo by Melanie Hughes

A depressing follow-up

Last week I lamented some of the unnecessary hassles built into parenting life: the camp forms, the complex spirit day dress codes, etc. For the most part, the cognitive burden imposed by these annoyances is unintentional, an unfortunate side effect of inefficient and fragmented, but largely well-meaning, systems. The cognitive burden built into the budget bill that just passed the Senate is intentional AF. Much of the cost saving is projected to come from making it more difficult to access government benefits. Republican lawmakers can claim not to be taking resources away from anyone, even as they impose dozens of new requirements that the most organized among us would struggle to comply with. Suffice to say, this is the opposite of progress.

What if we just made parenting...easier?

Books I delayed bedtime for

Bedtime is a BIG DEAL for me these days. With a 3-month-old whose sleep schedule is, euphemistically, erratic (see below…), I need to be asleep early to have any shot at being reasonably rested by morning. But my bedtime resolution was tested this month by two books:

Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People. An incredibly juicy memoir of the author’s time working for Facebook, written in a very dry tone that somehow only underscores the holy-shit-they-did-what of it all. My favorite part was a scathing peek at the Lean In launch era. Let’s just say, Sheryl Sandberg does not come across well.

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere. I’ve been mixed on her previous work. Really enjoyed Malibu Rising, couldn’t get through Carrie Soto is Back. But when some readers I trust raved about Atmosphere, I gave it a go. It’s a queer love story set in 1980s NASA that hits the sweet spot of both literary and page-turner-y.

Hot takes that made me think

IMO, the best hot takes are those you don’t fully agree with but that a) force you to consider sides of an issue you hadn’t previously pondered, and/or b) push you to clarify your own position by figuring out exactly where you disagree with the author. Two pieces that met those criteria for me this month:

Cindy DiTiberio on the cruelty of couples’ therapy. I’m pretty pro-therapy, so I initially found this piece jarring. But the broader question she raises – how should couples’ therapists acknowledge and account for the structural inequalities built into heterosexual marriage? – is spot-on and has continued to tumble around in my brain in a generative way.

Ivana Greco on the gender wage gap. I’ve been making an effort to seek out moderately conservative perspectives on gender and family issues—not the MAGA folks, but people who seem to be acting in good faith and who I can imagine having a productive dialogue with. Ivana Greco fits this bill, from what I can tell, and her latest post, which posits that the gender wage gap won’t be solved for college-educated couples, productively provoked me. I disagree with the implicit assumption that it needs to be women who pick up the slack at home while their male partners work big jobs. But some of her points about the incompatibility between “greedy” professions and hanging out with your kids seems spot-on – though we disagree again about what to do about this fact.

Small parenting win

For most of my daughter’s life, she has refused to sleep anywhere but in someone’s arms. As you can imagine, this complicates things. We’d adapted: turns out there are a lot of things that seem impossible to do with one hand or with an infant strapped to your chest that are actually only really hard. Then a couple weeks ago, we hired a babysitter who didn’t realize the extent of Kira’s bassinet aversion and just…put her down in one anyway. Turns out, she can sleep in a bassinet! I’ve been luxuriating ever since in the occasional use of my hands and baby-free meal with my husband. Turns out the old adage that ‘insanity means trying the same thing twice and expecting different results’ really does not apply to small children.

…and defeat

I wrote the above on Monday; since then sleep has gone downhill. She’s back to waking up four times a night and seems to be unilaterally moving her wakeup time earlier and earlier. Is this a blip or the beginning of another bassinet boycott? Only time will tell.

Exciting book update

I’m doing a book tour! If you live in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Philly, Princeton, or Boston, I’ll be coming your way this Fall, joined by some very special guests. Much more to come on this once the details are nailed down.

In the meantime, have you preordered your copy? Keep your receipt! I’ve got a thank you in the works…