Tiny bit of housekeeping. First, if all goes according to plan, this is the last Evil Witches you will receive via Substack. I’m sick of the baggage. Your next issue should look very much the same but come via Ghost.

I chose Ghost as the new platform for two main reasons: 1.) Unlike Substack, they don’t take any part of the fees the paid subscribers pay, and, more importantly, on your end, you shouldn’t notice any real difference if all goes according to plan. Witches like , and all have made the move and had positive things to say.

You shouldn’t have to do any kind of new logging-in process to see it once you get your first Ghostly Witches. If you have a paid subscription here, it will carry over. You will be able to comment like before. But I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you notice you’re not getting issues, and perhaps they go to spam.

To answer your possible questions, a.) I did this under my own steam (Ghost did not approach me or offer me anything) and b.) I won’t be offended if you still refer to Evil Witches as “a Substack” much the same way I don’t care when my kids’ classmates call me “Mrs. [My husband’s last name.]”

Some advice on moving with kids

A few weeks ago, I asked for tips from witches who have experienced moving with little kids on behalf of friend of the newsletter . Here was some of the advice witches shared!

From Amelia Granger:

We recently moved from London (England) where my two kids were born and lived the earlier part of their lives, to the US - first to Portland, Maine, where my family is, and then a few months later down to Jersey City, NJ, when my husband and I found jobs in NYC. My youngest was two, and my older one was six through most of that moving odyssey.

• Don’t be shy about asking parents in the playground for all their local recommendations for kids’ stuff: You could Google daycares, school, swim lessons and all of that stuff, but it’s no substitute for word of mouth. I would start chatting with other moms/dads at the playground and ask for their opinions on local activities, summer day camps, etc. When I said I was new in town, people were excited to tell me all the dirt.

• Kids get excited about new bedroom stuff: I told my older son he could get the bunk beds with a slide once we moved to Jersey. He was incredibly excited about that, and it helped distract him from the pain of being uprooted again. We ended up finding one on FB Marketplace that was for sale in our new building, so we got to meet a neighbor with kids as an added bonus!

• Sending letters and cards to friends back home can be a fun way to stay in touch and let kids talk about the people they miss - we just had my younger son do drawings (scribbles?) which we mailed to his friends, daycare, etc.

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Replying as someone who just went through a cross-country move (California to Rhode Island with a 3.5 and 1-year-old) in April 2025!

• Get rid of AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. Any call for “does anyone have xyz” on a Facebook Moms group or Buy Nothing group? Do it. If you have the time/bandwidth to do a resale for cash, sure, but the most important thing is to get it GONE. (Is it emotionally difficult to see your beloved double stroller roll away from you? Yes! Did it need to go across the country? No!)

• Contact daycares, schools, and pediatricians as soon as you have a moving date. My husband flew out solo ahead of time to tour the daycare/schools I had started talking to six months prior (as in, I reached out September 2024 for an April 2025 move date, he visited in January 2025). We were pulled off the pediatrician waitlist in April because I had called in February.

• We planned our move to be after we had finished our 2024 taxes; since I had a baby in 2024, I didn’t want to mess around with having California mail my short-term disability/parental leave tax paperwork to another state. We finished our taxes in March and literally flew out a few weeks later.

• I went with a big national moving company and used their referral for a car moving service; everything was very professional and handled well, including some accidental damage at move-out (they took full responsibility, documented it for us, and paid out the damage once we got our deposit-return statement from property management). It was expensive but it was worth it.

• Also, our car moving company allowed us to leave the Good (Expensive) Car Seats in the car at no extra charge, so we only had to take our airplane/travel car seats on the flight.

• Since we had an hour-ish drive from the airport to our new home, we did a direct afternoon/evening flight and made sure to book an airport hotel (with a shuttle!) ahead of time so we could crash instead of trying to haul the kids onto the last leg at night. Our flight was delayed, and so we arrived much later than we anticipated; our airport hotel was dealing with a lot of people with vouchers due to delays/canceled flights, but because we had a reservation, we sailed right in. They also had a pack & play waiting for us (call ahead if you need one), so we didn’t have to deal with setting it up.

• Related to the “get rid of it” — if you can, order and ship stuff ahead of time. We moved in with my MIL, so she was able to receive (and open/set up) Amazon packages for us. I ordered the exact same diaper pail, exact same Baby Bjorn potty, bathroom step stool, etc., so they were ready when we arrived.
  

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We moved from Hawaii to Massachusetts when my son was 4, and my twins were 1. While I have mostly blacked out on the details during that time, perhaps out of PTSD (just kidding kind of). A few things I remember:

1. Clearly mark a few boxes of day-to-day essentials that you can open up right away when you get to your destination, so you can get a semblance of a routine while you take your time unpacking the rest. A box with a couple pans/pots/dishes/utensils, a couple boxes with clothes (warm weather clothes for you! We did an opposite climate switch and I realized when we reached the mainland none of my kids owned socks) and bedding, a box with a few favorite toys.

2. We rented an Airbnb for our last week in Hawaii just so we didn’t have to be immersed in the chaos 24/7. My twins had a nanny at the time so she stayed there with the kids while we could really drill down and pack without distraction. Packing and trying to find stuff while you are also packing it up is miserable enough! Maybe get one as you are unpacking, too?

3. My new job paid for the relocation, so we had the movers pack all the dishware for a small upgrade fee. Again, totally worth it, and they actually recommend it as the moving company doesn’t want to be responsible for breaking your stuff if you did a shitty job wrapping it all up

4. If you know where you are living when you get to your destination, label your boxes by the room they go in and just put them in that room as you unload - helpful for both movers and/or you if you are doing it yourself

5. I don’t know if you are driving, and my kids were too young for it at the time, but we did a lot of driving this summer, and these road trip scavenger hunt cards (rec’d by Busy Toddler) are really fun.

6. As you unpack in your new home, hold on to some of those really big boxes - they make awesome forts/houses/stuffy homes, etc., to distract the kids while you get settled.

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We moved from the Boston area to Pittsburgh, PA, at the start of January 2020 (what a tiiiiiiime, but of course we didn’t know that), with a 3-year-old, 5-month-old, and 2 cats. Privilege alert: this was an employer-funded move.

Choices we made that I would 100% advise:

• Offload as much mental load as possible. The employer that paid for our move gave us the choice to go through their contracted movers or to just give us the equivalent in cash. I’m pretty sure we would have come out $5k+ ahead if we just took the cash, but having all the decisions already made was a huge help.

• If you can swing it, full-service / packing-service moving.

• Divide and conquer. I took the kids and my sister and got on a plane -> hotel in New City; my partner stayed behind to oversee the movers. They wrapped, packed, and labeled everything. AMAZING. (Then he drove to New City with the cats, over two days.) An advance party in New City let us run around and stock up on all the first-day essentials (toilet paper, hand soap), drop off paperwork at new schools, and have a bit of a Hotel Room Adventure.

• Bringing an extra adult was AMAZING. My sister didn’t yet have kids, and she was very happy to come with me and be Fun Aunt M. for three days until my partner caught up with us.

• New City Buy Nothing group let us borrow some temporary needs until our household goods arrived; turns out lots of people have spare pack n plays, folding tables, booster seats, etc.

Books about moving that we read in the lead-up:

- the Daniel Tiger one (it’s fine).

- Big Ernie’s New Home - about a cat who is freaked out by a move with his human family, and the ~5yo human is explaining to the cat what is going on and how things are different but also the same.

(The other thing about that move that is not actually shareable advice is that we could not find a baby daycare spot, so we hired a nanny with the idea that she’d take care of the baby through summer, and we’d put the now-1-year-old in daycare that fall. Turns out hiring a nanny in January of 2020 was extremely fortuitous, since by April of 2020 it was basically impossible, and she ended up working for us all through the pandemic and for a good while afterward. I have never felt so much like I dodged a bullet!)

End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Special shout-out if you were one of the original readers of this newsletter when it was first on Wix. All the archives will still remain, d

Also, just a reminder if you like Evil Witches, please also check out the parenting podcast I co-host called “Not Right Now” which is very witchy even though it also involves a dad, my cohost . As a reminder, if you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you get extra pod content—just email me if you want to be added to the list.

You can still reply to this email if you have questions, feedback, etc. Issues I’m working on still include the long-awaited Witches who Lift issue, more feedback from our grand survey, the Puke Bracket, plus I want to have a few conversations with you all about kid birthday party policies/tales and from where you horny ladies are getting your smut.

More to come!

One witchy thing

A every text from my kid:

If you’re like me and have a bunch of exciting “I Survived” narratives at home covering everything from D-Day to the Destruction to Pompeii to the Great Molasses Flood [P.S. it’s wild to see 9/11 compared to ‘old timey’ disasters like the Dust Bowl] you will enjoy this guest post from Joy Engel, a tea enthusiast from the coast of Maine. She is currently surviving a child who refuses to wear socks in the winter and the Disaster of 2026.

I Survived: For Parents

A new line of non-historical historical fiction for parents in these, the dark times.

My eldest child has a new hyperfixation: The I Survived series.

Through these books, he’s learned about kids who made it through hurricanes, Nazis, and the American Civil War. Historical fiction! Not at all connected to current events!

Which is why I’m thrilled to announce my new, parent-exclusive series of non-historical historical fiction. I Survived, For Parents!

Initial titles include:

I Survived: the 2nd Night Home from the Hospital.

Now with bonus content on how to schedule your husband’s vasectomy.

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I Survived: Forcing my 7-year-old to shower.

But I did have to explain away the screams to our neighbors.

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I Survived: a Three-Birthday-Party Sunday.

Now with step-by-step instructions on how to make your own sensory deprivation tank!

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I Survived: my Son’s Full-Volume Imagine Dragons Phase.

How is this every single elementary school boy’s favorite band?

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I Survived: The Annual Vaccine Appointment.

Bonus Q&A chapter will help you determine if your eight-year-old is a secret anti-vaxxer.

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I Survived: Turning My Child’s Palate Expander.

Finger scars not included.

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I Survived: 22 Hot Flashes in a Single Day (Perimenopause Edition).

One woman’s heroic journey into embracing HRT.

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I Survived: The Full Family Vacation Norovirus of 2021, 2022 and 2023 – a Three-Part Series!

Sequel Coming Soon: I Survived The Full Family Exorcism I Paid an Etsy Witch to Do Before the Vacation of 2024 Because HOW Can One Family Puke So Much On So Many Vacations Unless We’ve Been Hexxed.

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I Survived: My Husband Getting Really Into CrossFit.

Includes a glossary of helpful terms like “Murph” and “WOD”

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I Survived: My 27th Viewing of K-Pop Demon Hunters.

I did seal the Honmoon. Thank you for noticing.

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I Survived: 15 Elementary School Spirit Days During the 12 School Days of December.

How are ‘Flannel Day’ and ‘Plaid Day’ different? I ask this sincerely.
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I (Barely) Survived: Reading the Who Would Win, Ultimate Insect Rumble?

A deep dive into the digestive processes of beetles. Now with 10 times the Latin!

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I Survived: My Six-Year-Old Correcting My Pronunciation of The Scientific Name for 10 Different Bugs.

Mortus Momus

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I Survived: My Children’s First Lockdown (American Edition).

Recommended reading in *checks notes* zero other countries.

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I Survived: Watching My Son Finally Realize The Answer to His Math Homework Was 67.

Can be referenced with the early oughts version: Chicken Soup for the Embarrassed Soul, My teacher wrote ‘69’ on the white board.

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I Survived: My Husband Eating Two Pieces of Cheesecake Without Remembering To Take Lactaid (Jewish Edition).

Includes tips on how to sneak probiotics in your grandmother’s kugel recipe!

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I Survived: Transitioning my Four-Year-Old’s Wardrobe Into Seasonally Appropriate Clothing.

Includes a forward from my 62-year-old childless neighbor, “What if you just MADE her wear a coat?”

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I Survived: 7 Weeks of Kindergarten Soccer (But Not The 8th. A Ghost Wrote This).

Hell is just 12 parents yelling “Emma! The Ball! Move Your Feet!”

Praise for the Series:

“This woman is clearly the Back Seat Butler on every family trip and it shows.”
— American Association of Exhausted People

“I read this! Well, I think I read this. Maybe I watched a TikTok about it while I was nursing the baby?”
— Parenting Monthly

“Seems like she took too much Tylenol when she was pregnant.”
— RonnieK on Goodreads

I Survived: Having a meager baby

This is Claire again:

Read more

My 10-year-old woke us up at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, having thrown up down the stairs.1 Just when you think you’ve seen it all.

In a weird way, that morning I was glad to have his whimperings to tend to because it forced me to walk away from the footage, dissection, dissemination and discussion of state-sanctioned murder. There is a fine line between being informed and hurting yourself by getting sucked into the swamp of sadness/pit of rage.

So how do we hang on to sanity? Today I’m dipping back into the survey I sent out late last year, asking witches what hobbies or habits they cling to for their mental health.

A lot of you said reading, yoga, pilates, listening to podcasts/audiobooks, tennis, running/walking, gardening, knitting, writing, meeting up with friends, therapy and weight training. Related, in a week or a few, I’m going to send out an issue on the topic of Witches who Lift. Also: a lot of you all are on Peloton! Here’s a witchy Peloton chat so you can find each other/exchange faves/find deals on used bikes if you want.

See some further answers below from your fellow readers for sanity-saving ideas and to get inspiration from some of the punk rock shit your fellow witches get up to.

What is a hobby, project, or exercise routine that helps strengthen your tenuous hold on mental health?

Horses, horses, horses, dogs, pilates, weightlifting, and coffee

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Finding and acquiring home decor on Facebook marketplace. Most recently a five foot long wooden pencil that I am painting to look like a Dixon Ticonderoga (the best of all pencils)

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I run between 15-30 miles a week. I watch restoration videos on YouTube (old lawnmowers, watches, you name it!) with the sound off while listening to Sufjan Stevens on vinyl.

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I go to Rumble boxing 1-2 times a week and its dark and loud so i can get made and yell and no one notices.

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Weekly review/planning on Mondays

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weekly donation runs to the recycling center and thrift store; clearing out all the physical junk and emotional junk I’ve carted around for 20+ years

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Pickleball - it reminds me my body works

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long evening walk with spouse every night while the weather holds; stretching youtube video; when my nephews physically climb on me (3 and 7)

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I ride my bike outdoors for about 2 hours most Saturday mornings. It’s the best

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Dance Dance Party Party—all women 1 hr of dancing in the dark.

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Writing (which also hurts my tenuous hold on mental health sometimes?)

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Physical therapy. Keeping my janky body in better working condition helps the mental health. I am in fact mad about it.

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Marathon training. I run so many miles that I feel both crazy and less crazy

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Bike bus - one morning a week I bike with my kid to school along with a bunch of other families

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spending occasional time doing watercolor paintings!

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My book club with other witchy moms

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Walking outside in nature, yelling at other drivers on the road (although arguably this may not be helping with my mental health)

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Spending time outdoors, which includes exercise (walking the dog), yardwork (manual labor is GREAT for mental health), and just sitting there. Also, HRT.

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going to concerts and paying for good seats

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Local group exercise class at 6:15 on Wednesday mornings. It’s usually just 4-5 women who have kids and work and make jokes and groan the whole time. But it’s fun!

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Trampolining, which I refuse to call rebounding, because I like how it makes me feel like a child and am not trying to change that

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My weekly adult ballet class and gardening.

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Taking an etching class.

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regular yoga with the Down Dog app, taking walks, hanging out by a fire, playing videogames or tabletop games

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Audiobooks. I can be somewhere else while cleaning poop out of underwear for the thousandth time.

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My participation on our town’s school board!

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I lift weights at a small women’s gym 2x a week and love it. I love being told what to do for two hours a week and not having to make any choices (after deciding to show up), and I love sweating and getting strong.

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Spinning and baking desserts. They cancel each other out, health-wise, but it does wonders for my mood to have that routine.

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puzzles. I do 3x codewords while disassociating in front of the tv every night

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Paper books read alongside my kids, putting the phone down, or PSYCH using it to actually call someone (which then tricks me into unconsciously doing an hour of housework while we catch up and then looking around after like “Who did this?”)

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Insight Timer meditation app

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Swimming and erging on a rowing machine in my basement

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Cross-stitch right now. I’m really enjoying subversive cross-stitch for bite-sized projects.

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spending time with childless friends

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meditation on Waking Up app, HIT / barre workout on grokker, knitting, reading, playing violin, singing with my family

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Gym. Specifically, classes with a community of people who know me as me, not from my work or parenting

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playing drums

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Growing dahlias, silent reading, baths

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playing basketball with local moms. non-competitively. I started 1.5 years ago on a whim and now my self regulation hinges on it. plus I made new friends and see them twice a week.

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ogling jewelry

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I help decorate parade floats for the rose bowl parade

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Voice lessons - I’m SO bad, but making myself try something totally new and challenging feels good and I need this

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group exercise—I do pilates, barre, spinning, and weight lifting at a woman-owned studio in my town that I can walk to. the walking (no phone! I never take it with me to the gym) is a key part of it. morning workouts also used to get me out of the morning routine at home with my kids but my husband’s work schedule changed, so now I’m tagging in when I get home, boo.

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journaling outside on my porch w coffee every morning I possibly can. Wrapped up in a blanket, if necessary.

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Swimming and gym hot tub afterwards. Recently got underwater headphones that I download podcasts on and it is a lifesaver!

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Taking a pottery class ATM that is awesome.

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Quilting but specifically hand quilting

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Embroidering, pole dancing, spinning, lifting weights

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Walking, drawing, and watercolour painting even if I haven’t painted in months because the best light is at the kitchen table and there’s never any space

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Thrifting

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Orangetheory + yoga + trashy romantasy books

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playing tennis with gals decades older than me; having my little tea with magnesium before bed; writing real letters in the mail to people who least expect it; using the good china on a daily basis

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Encaustic wax painting

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needlepoint. so dorky and slightly trad-wife-y, but I like it

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Romance writing. I’m in a writers group and it’s so fun and supportive.

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Mahjong and a gummy with the gals

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Bird watching. Really!

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Crocheting is good because it’s a lot of counting (rows, stitches, loops) and counting is something I do when I’m extremely stressed anyway so win-win

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Strength training immediately when I wake up, still in my pajamas. I feel so much better starting my day.

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I got into trees a few years ago and love to be outside around trees. I live in a neighborhood with a very active tree care group and I try to attend the weekly volunteer sessions as much as I can, which is maybe once a month.

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Running, and exploring/admiring houses while running

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NYT games 5ever

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Playing piano and going to Body Pump twice a week with the retired ladies help me. I am intrigued by silent book club’s audiobook walks, I saw this on insta yesterday as a local group!

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The Artist’s Way! also, Zumba

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Self-defense and sewing. Also long walks with friends where we don’t try to lower our voices and yell when we need to

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I resent doing it but cleaning the kitchen before I go to bed has made a difference.

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Great British Baking Show

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Voxer with my sister. We talk almost every day on there and it definitely helps.

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massages, video games

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Activism. I volunteer at a migrant center one day a week. Work full time (4 x 10 hour days)

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Photography, going to the Art Institute alone, walking while listening to a podcast (right now Good Hang with Amy Poehler)

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Aggressively switching hobbies every four months, doing a deep dive on how to do the hobby, and obtaining supplies. This is fun. Doing the hobby is fun, but less fun.

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Running long distances (the brain turns OFF), reading escapist fantasy, listening to Hozier

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Getting high and watching Hammer Horror Dracula movies and awarding them points for being 1) haunting, 2) hilarious, and 3) horny

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Lifting heavy weights. Taking weighted vest, walks. Crying!

End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. For me, going to OrangeTheory, cooking when I feel like I want to but don’t have to (while listening to an audiobook or podcast), and doing the Sauna Club by the lake are all things that keep me alive/offline/not in the shit lately.

Feel free to forward this email to someone you know who wants to take better care of their brain, but for totally understandable reasons doesn’t know where to start.

Check out the archives here, covering everything from postpartum to relationships to work to cooking to children, too, I suppose. If this issue or any past issues have made you think, “I enjoy/appreciate the 5+ years of content and commiseration on this site and would like to show my support,” I know a way!

Subscribe now

One witchy thing

From a friend—

First before I get to today’s guest post, two quick announcements/calls for input:

• Witch Edith Zimmerman is looking for advice from those who have been there on moving with small children (from upstate New York to Orlando; kids preschool aged and younger.) Please reply to this email if you have any experience on this topic and I’ll send them to Edith/round them up for a future issue!

• Live in Chicago? Friend/death doula Erica Reid Gerdes is going to be in conversation with Becky Robison, author of My Parents are Dead: What Now? at Women & Children First January 29. Whether your parents are dead or will be at some point this is going to be a great conversation.

Julia Elmaleh-Sachs is a lawyer and new mom in New York who had a feeling she was an Evil Witch before she even gave birth. Today, please enjoy a guest post from her about a few preemptive decisions she made around trying to make her postpartum experience less shitty, and if that was possible to do without feeling bad about it!

Before I even knew what the fourth trimester was, I became aware sometime in my twenties that the first six months as a new mom were NOT fun. “Miserable” is how one friend, one of the first in our friend group to have a baby ,described it. The older I got, the more friends succumbed to the trend of procreating, and the more the dreadof the nightmarish intro to parenthood became solidified in my brain. “Don’t take these times for granted: you’ll never be free again,” one newly postpartum friend advised me. “I didn’t sleep or shower for weeks,” said another. “I thought about asking for a divorce,” said MULTIPLE people.

The already daunting prospect of having a baby grew exponentially more terrifying. But once my husband and I decided that children were part of our imagined shared future, I decided to dig a little deeper. Was there anything I could do to transform this unequivocal hell into a less-terrible moment in time?

I surveyed the population, as well as my own set of values. I knew there was no way I was doing maternity leave by myself — in NY, we were fortunate enough to have 12 weeks of paid family leave, the details of which I am intimately familiar with due to my job as an employment discrimination attorney. If my husband wanted offspring, he was taking those 12 weeks with me, whether or not he got paid his full salary. I would rather eat peanut butter and jelly for dinner every day to save money than learn how to become a parent to a newborn alien by myself, and then have to teach my husband everything I knew after he got home from work. That would lead to divorce in less than a week.

The other thing I knew about myself by the time I got into my mid-thirties is that I am not a functioning human when I don’t get enough sleep. It is a waste of time for me to try to process information if I haven’t had a solid 7 hours. If I cannot process information, I certainly can’t learn a new skill, i.e., how to make sure your baby survives and potentially thrives. Solution? A very expensive night nanny. My friends who had hired one said it was “the best money they had ever spent.” How could I argue with that? As we began to try to get pregnant in our mid-thirties, we pooled together our savings and prioritized hiring a night nanny.

I had one friend who commented that it was kind of dumb to get a night nanny if you were breastfeeding because you had to wake up in the middle of the night anyway to breastfeed and pump. Like many progressive NY millennial women, I had always simply assumed I would breastfeed my children when the time came. I remember even remarking to a friend in high school that the “downside” of getting breast implants was no longer being able to breastfeed (I’m not sure how I knew this and whether it’s even true?) But as my friends started having babies in our early thirties, I began to understand that breastfeeding and pumping were kind of... hard? It might have, for some, contributed to the hellish landscape of their fourth trimesters.

By this time, at work, I had also represented a number of postpartum women who had been fired by their soulless employers after returning to work from maternity leave. My clients told me horror stories of pumping in the office (and by office, I mean a random storage closet with a broken lock and no sink or storage for pumped milk), pumping in a car, developing mastitis, and ever-dwindling milk supplies causing never-dwindling anxiety. None of that sounded like anything I desired to experience firsthand — hearing it secondhand and having to explain the guilt and shame my clients struggled with to old white male judges, opposing counsel, and mediators was more than sufficiently taxing.

When I got pregnant at 35, I wondered whether breastfeeding was worth the potential stress, inevitable physical pain, and inherent unbalanced division of labor. Then, during the first trimester of my pregnancy, four of my close friends gave birth to healthy babies. Two went straight to formula, and two attempted to breastfeed/pump. The anecdotal evidence of these four friends was dramatic: the two who went straight to formula had no postpartum anxiety, were sleeping almost the entire night because their partners were feeding their babies, and they were feeling like they were reinhabiting their pre-pregnancy bodies at a faster pace. Meanwhile, the two who breastfed and pumped were exhausted, meeting with lactation consultants, crying more, and/or refused to leave their babies at home with their husbands, even just to get a 30-minute manicure. One of these friends ended up breastfeeding and pumping for eight or nine months; the other one ceased attempting to breastfeed after eight weeks.

Given these stark differences and the fact that my breasts, which were already quite substantial, had doubled in size during my first trimester, my decision was easy: breastfeeding/pumping would not be part of my or my baby’s future. Once I made this decision, I learned of a medication called cabergoline that could dry up one’s milk supply instantaneously. I asked my friends who had gone straight to formula if they had been prescribed this magic pill: neither one had. They told me stories of wearing two sports bras at night for two weeks after the hospital, and nursing (pun intended) their swollen breasts with frozen cabbage leaves and ice packs. Luckily for me, once I mentioned it to my doctor, she said I just had to ask for it at the hospital, and she would make sure I got it. (This medication has fallen out of favor compared to earlier generations, but NYU is one of the few hospitals in the country that will dole out this medication postpartum to its patients to dry up milk supply!)

I am fortunate enough to have experienced only two instances of judgment and unsolicited feedback regarding my decision to go straight to formula, which I shared widely and loudly with any friend, acquaintance or service provider who would listen. One was from a physical therapist I started seeing during the last two months of my pregnancy for excruciating back pain; during our first meeting, she told me that formula was crap and that breastfeeding would make me lose weight. When I told her that I had made up my mind and there was no convincing me otherwise, she backed down and never brought it up again. The other instance happened during a prenatal massage. The masseuse told me she was a lactation consultant, and when I explained that I would not be breastfeeding, she looked at me in what can only be described as abject horror. She must have realized her mistake because she later apologized for her inappropriate reaction.

On July 5th, my due date, my water broke at 2:30 am. After a 30-hour labor, I gave birth to a healthy baby via emergency C-section. During the c-section, I developed uterine atony, which means that my uterus had trouble contracting enough to close the blood vessels, such that I hemorrhaged quite a lot and almost had to get a blood transfusion. The surgery took a total of two hours, and I was throwing up and shaking the entire time. The four days that followed in the hospital are blurry,y but I remember feeling immeasurably grateful to my nurses and all of the staff who never once pressured me to try breastfeeding or pumping.

As planned, they gave me cabergoline the day after my surgery, and when we went home a few days later, I asked my husband to grab a cabbage from the grocery store and throw it in the freezer. But I never had to use it! I never saw even a drop of milk come out of my breasts, nor did they feel painful or swollen. And thank god for that, because anyone who has gotten a C-section will tell you that the recovery in that first week is something else. From gas pains to incision pains, to being unable to walk or even lift the baby, I could only fathom what attempting to breastfeed or pump would have done to my mental health.

As the weeks went by, friends and family continuously checked in on me. “How is the fourth trimester going? I know it’s hard but it gets better.” But, much to my gratitude, I didn’t find it as hard as I feared. I loved hanging out with my family and friends, having drinks when I wanted, not having back pain, being able to wear all my clothes again, and getting to know the little human I had painfully grown and birthed. Aside from recovering from the trauma of an unplanned surgery and hemorrhage, it was freeing to feel like my body no longer belonged to an unknown fetal entity, that it was entirely autonomou,s and the only person I had to worry about was myself (I helped care for and bonded with our baby obviously, but I let my husband do all the worrying). I’m so happy for my friends who enjoyed breastfeeding (I don’t think anyone actually enjoys pumping?) and who had an easy time with supply and latching. But I also wish there weren’t so much societal pressure and blanket assumption that breast is best and everyone should at least try. I believe that going straight to formula and ensuring that feeding was a two-person job rather than a one-person duty was the right choice for me, and likely the right choice for many other women.

And if anyone gives you a hard time, remind them that it’s YOUR body and therefore YOUR choice only. I have no regrets whatsoever, and my husband knows how to take care of my daughter from feeding to diapering just as well as I do (he would argue better).

Julia Elmaleh-Sachs is a partner at the litigation firm Crumiller, where she leads various civil rights matters that include pregnancy and race discrimination, sexual harassment, and a plethora of other lawsuits against (true) evil actors. Prior to entering into the field of employment law, she began her legal career as a Juvenile Rights attorney with the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. Also, at 8 years old, she acted in a commercial for a Britney Spears Barbie doll and was paid in candy and dolls.

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Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. If you know someone who’d like this sort of thing in their inbox about once a week, please spread the word. Here is a nice thing someone emailed me recently about the newsletter:

I’m not really an “internet person,” but Substack has been a nice way to communicate with strangers without it feeling toxic and Evil Witches had been a big part of that.

Take a spin around our archives, including our last issue on what has been blowing up the group chat lately.

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One witchy thing

Happy 2026 witches, question mark?

First, for anyone curious for an update on my mom’s very dramatic ending to 2025, she is doing better, but has yet to come home after leaving the house in an ambulance almost a month ago. She is irritatingly/frighteningly unconcerned about what went down, or what will come next! I know that a lot of you out there have had your parents fall like a Jenga tower lately and I hope you have support /space / people who can let you talk shit about your aging parents if that makes you feel better. It sure does for me.

I am still pulling what was left of my brain back together after what went down so I thought this would be a fun time to look at some of the answers to one of the Evil Witches poll questions I sent out.

Since I sent this out in October there were a lot of answers about Halloween and KPop Demon Hunters. I got three times as many entries about ICE and Evanston’s District 65 schools than you see below. I want to give a special shout out to the witches who responded that they are happily chat-free (go you!) and hugs to the witches who said they are chat-free and feel out of the loop. I hope you get access to an informative, nontoxic, non-overwhelming witchy chat soon.

What is one of the latest topics to take over your group parents/school chat? (It doesn’t have to be juicy.)

At the beginning of the school year the new principal was like “you have to put this card on your dashboard to pick up in a car and you have to carry this other one in your hand to pick up on foot and also the first week we’re going to check your IDs” and I don’t know about the car parents because I’m an on foot parent but we just didn’t do it and nobody ever said anything about it again

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Ooh, the logistics around having a high school freshman who doesn’t drive and who wants to go to the football game wearing spirit gear, come home after halftime to change for the dance, get to a friend’s house to take pictures, and get to the dance, get picked up and taken to McDonalds and then back home before all parents melt into a puddle of exhaustion and overwhelm.

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Ohhhh the (very brief) use of a high quality stop-motion animated kids’ movie clip in an after-school science club (in which they sometimes do stop-motion animation) while the children arrived and ate their snacks, and how one dad thought it sounded a bit lazy to be using screen-time in the session. The subchats were the most enjoyable part really.

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Someone said the “n word” (4th grade), the Latin American Heritage Dance performance song for 2-4 grade was “I Like It”. If the teacher knows she is going to take time off, she should tell the parents/why are teachers allowed to take so much time off during the school year now? ALWAYS: why can’t people handle a pick up/drop off line??!!??

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The unfairness, inhumaneness, and bad pedagogy of missing one worksheet in middle school having at outsize impact on the grade. Also, why are moms expected to get middle-school cheerleading uniforms washed and drip-dried overnight after the last football game so they can be turned in the NEXT DAY?????

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We are trying to decide if we, the PTA, want to continue paying for a physical education enrichment program called Recess 101, or if we want to stop, and pay for like 18 other programs instead. It’s not juicy, but it is a question of $62,000 per year, which is a lot for a PTA to field.

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lots of talk about school board elections. juicy only in a very niche way which honestly I find very meaningful. the national stuff is so horrible but it makes me feel good to know about our school board. I’m nurturing a longstanding grudge against our school board president.

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The moms of babies who are SUPER anti technology/cell phones for teens but yet have NO EXPERIENCE with the situation. But they’re happy to preach to anyone who will listen about how technology is ruining children and shame parents who make other choices.

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One of the ladies in my mum’s group came to the park the other day with her 10 month old and told us she was a surprise 16 weeks pregnant, so will have a newborn and 15 month old in April! I wish her all the best but GIRL this is doing life on hard mode

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How to support families in the community who are scared/in need due to ICE’s stupid presence. Also, unrelatedly, how math is taught differently now compared to when we were kids, and some parents are extremely frustrated about that.

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An anonymous person on the PTO accused the longtime president of the school fundraising board of inappropriately using funds. It was both untrue and done SO unnecessarily dramatically with a letter to the principal, big eyeroll.

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The anti-ice volunteers don’t like being mean mugged by the staff who are literally being skeptical of random (white) strangers at (a mostly non-white) school because some of the other white strangers might be actual ice!!

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OMG everyone is up in arms about how much our after school care program costs. IT COSTS NEXT TO NOTHING. EVERYONE CHILL TF OUT. (Literally, it costs £15/dat, which gets the kid three hours of care and a healthy snack.)

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Our first grade teacher left a couple weeks ago and there’s been a lot of drama about the subs and waiting for our new teacher’s first day. The upheaval for the routine oriented kids has been a mess.

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The school chat is mostly people asking questions that are ALREADY ANSWERED IN THE HANDBOOK and it fills me with rage. Why are you asking a thread with 86 people on it what day jeans day is??????????????? WHY!?!?!?

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Whether the parents of the most dinosaur-obsessed kid should buy a former theme-park stegosaurus to put in their backyard.

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School Board commissioner who unsuccessfully fought to have a lawsuit settlement sealed in which he had to pay pack in fees to his personal business that he used for things other than the promised services.

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Whose problem is it if our middle schoolers loiter at the Starbucks across the street from school-- is it the parents for letting them hang out there unattended or is Starbucks who doesn’t want them around?

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One of the girls got a tattoo part of which is upside down. Because it’s not fixable we’re all trying to persuade her it looks fine and isn’t upside down. But it is in fact upside down.

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My youngest just transitioned to middle school, and the parents who are new to middle school are unhinged about the lack of contact with teachers. They want to be very involved.

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That many students in our community can’t read well and that standards are low in our school district. Also, that middle school teachers don’t respond to parent emails.

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whether your kids life is over if they don’t take algebra in 7th grade vs. 8 grade. sigh. my kid goes to Lab and will NOT be doing algebra in the 7th grade.

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Three kids logged into some other kids Time Tables Rockstar accounts to inflate their points and then used their points to buy stuff the kids didn’t want

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it’s pretty boring. We had a chat recently about AI. People are either resigned to it taking over or are bullish/excited about it, which depressed me.

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Parents chat involves revenge on the air bnb host who complained about our leaving crumbs(!) in her rental.

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whether and where to get swim lessons, some griping about people timing their kid’s birthday parties right on top of everyone else’s nap time

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99% is confusion over homework now that it’s the first year the kids have to note their assignments themselves AND do them on google classroom.

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Our school district is undergoing a massive consolidation/school closure/boundary change process and it’s dominating SO MANY discussions.

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Rescheduling a final soccer match - just cancel it! Also husbands delegating texting to their wives - did you lose your thumbs?!

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Sadly, it is how our once amazing public school system has started to crumble due to years of underfunding, among other things.

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my husband’s, since he’s on the band parent council: local bus doesn’t want kids bringing large saxophones on board

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Our school district is redrawing boundaries and moving magnet programs to be more segregated and less equitable.

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Are we trying any of these one-day camps that are available for the many random days off of school the kids have

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I’m on the PTA board and the president and communications coordinator are feuding over repeated typos in flyers.

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How frustrating it can be to let your kids have full control over the interior decorating of their own spaces.

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The drama with my friends daughter’s boyfriend. She’s a junior in high school and we do not like this boyfriend.

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I’m MIA on the parent chat, but I fear they are wondering why my 5-year-old can’t stop punching his friends

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Very boring. That they’re removing dioramas at a near by natural history museum & how we feel about it.

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Performative anti-racism by white PTA moms; not having clothes and boots that fit for the surprise rain

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A neighborhood escape artist dog that needs to be rehomed (but not to any of our homes), Prop 50

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How to sign up for the parent teacher conferences next week since the Google doc was locked. 🙄

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the pizza day online order form wasn’t working and the deadline was fast approaching - panic!

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how to ask your mexican coworker if they have a plan for if / when ICE arrives at the workplace

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Commiserating over the misery of swim classes and the pros and cons of all the local options

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How much freedom to give elementary schoolers to roam, both in the neighborhood and online

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Vaccines. It’s so dumb that the brain worm has fucked things up so much so quickly.

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Nap dropping vs the day care’s alleged policy that they have to keep napping

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School drop-off and how people are incapable of using their thinking brains

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Pre-K waitlists and strategies for getting off aforementioned waitlists

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Boys playing too rough in first grade (mine among them, unfortunately)

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mushroom foraging, I live in the hippy PNW (the normal eating kind)

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The upcoming school disco and how late our kindergarteners can stay

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How to support fighting ICE in between regular life commitments.

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Middle school team sport cuts and handling kid disappointment.

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A Costco recently opened in our town, so what we bought there

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How our citizen families can support our noncitizen families.

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neighbor calling cops on friend’s seemingly unattended child

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Whether to get a landline/Tin Can/some other home phone

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Getting sitters to get to friend’s band playing at bar

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where we are going on our kid-free getaway in February

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stupid exes and their terrible coparenting fails

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Teenage Girls are mean & teenage boys are turds.

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birthday parties. it is always birthday parties.

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That the fundraising options at the school suck

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Food we like from Aldi. Our shitty alderman.

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lunch at school: how to make kids eat it??

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Bradley Cooper & Mandy Moore’s new faces

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volunteering at the fall festival (ugh)

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Our children’s fascination with WWII.

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How annoying back to school night was

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SNAP and how fucked the world feels.

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Doing a pressed glass class together

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How many coffees we have normally

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six seven and AI brain rot stuff

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Having newly minted teen drivers

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toddlers being absolutely feral

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Fat bear week really popped off

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Stainless steel vs. plastic

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Menopause and smartphones.

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Taylor Swift’s new album

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Planning trips to Disney

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little league--boring.

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The Hunting Wives??

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Good old lice.

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Fake IDs

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Sleep

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Someone posted a cookie recipe w chickpeas in it, I called bs, then someone else posted a black bean brownie recipe. Barf

End credits

Hi! Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. If you know a mom who wants to be in touch with people who care about/have to talk about the things above, forward them this email.

Listen up! If you want to get the paid subscriber content but you are not in an optimal place to pay for it please just shoot me an email and I’ll comp you. Also! If you do have a few extra bucks and want to support this newsletter and/or be a subscriber in lieu of someone who cannot, hit this green button:

While I have you: Evil Witch/education/ADHD expert Sarah Wheeler is hosting an online workshop Choosing a School for Your Neurodivergent Child Tuesday, January 20, 2026 from 12:00–1:15 PM PST for $25. Expect a lot of compassionate expertise.

Finally, this is a question I may not cover til later this year but while it’s top of mind: if you have a child/children whose birthday falls annoyingly close to the holidays, what strategies/philosophies do you employ to make sure each thing gets honored? (You would not believe the bottom of the barrel scraping I am doing right now for my January 10 husband.)

One witchy thing

This top comment:

On this Instagram post:

(And this follow up is very satisfying.)

I found my mom (alive, I won’t bury the lede) in the kitchen last Thursday morning after she hadn’t been answering the phone. I knew things were bad when I saw the papers, packages, and mail piled up outside the front door. I could have checked on her sooner when she didn’t return my last few calls, but she could have been out Christmas or grocery shopp…

Read more

A couple of times a year, I ask my paid subscribers whether they have something they’d like to promote. I love running these issues because they highlight the talents and ambitions we maintain while also doing that caretaking thing. Plus, they boost witches’ businesses.

Below, loosely organized according to the type of services rendered, find something to buy, someone to hire, something to read, or a project you want to support, offered by Evil Witches such as yourself. If you are not a paid subscriber (or missed the call to get into this issue) yet want to promote YOUR project/business/wares, go ahead and mention it in the comments. Don’t forget to include a link!

Justice

I’d like to promote my podcast “LATER: A podcast about abortion after 24 weeks.” We have a sneak peek episode out right now; the rest of the season will be out next year. Listen because it’s a weird grown-up slumber party where two friends show up for each other and get real about having a reproductive body. Yes, it’s December, and yes, this is a subject that scares a lot of people. As producers, we have worked very hard on making this an inviting, expansive, and warm listen. If you like stories about paradox, monster narratives, and real reporting that also goes whale watching, we’re for you.

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I’m a comms, content, and crisis comms person with a particular specialty in repro and abortion projects — if you’re launching a new project in this field, or have an ongoing project that needs some love, please hit me up!

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Liz Soltan is the Brooklyn-based mom of a toddler and a lawyer representing whistleblowers. Her firm, Whistleblower Partners LLP, files False Claims Act cases about fraud on the U.S. government and tips to agencies like the SEC about fraud on the markets, money laundering, and other financial shenanigans. Finance witch and smell a rat? Reach out to us. Healthcare witch noticing shady billing to Medicare and Medicaid? We’d love to hear from you. Come work with a firm with lots of heart (and lots of devoted parents on staff) to help you right wrongs. Liz can be reached at liz@whistleblower.law and 646-503-1246.

Communications

Your work is smart. Your slides… could use some help. The Presentation Lab is my membership for women who know they need stronger presentation skills to get the next role, lead the room, or finally have their ideas land the way they sound in their head. We do monthly live trainings, office hours, Q&A sessions and a friendly discussion board, plus you get plug-and-play templates, talk tracks, how-to videos, and AI prompts so you’re never building a last-minute PowerPoint deck at the kitchen table after bedtime again. Come join us!

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I’m a communications and change consultant who helps teams move through messy transitions without losing their minds. I make sense of the restructures, the rapid growth, and the “why does everything feel chaotic?” moments leaders never plan for. If you’re a founder trying to tell your story without spiraling, a nonprofit leading change on a shoestring, or a team stuck in reorg purgatory, I’m your change witch. Clarity, calm, and direction — that’s the work.

Writing and Creativity

Are you a witch who wants to be a writer? Join Ann Friedman and Jade Chang for a 12-week writing workshop for ambitious beginners. You’ll complete a full draft of a personal essay or short story. New year, new creative practice! Remote on Zoom, starts Jan 17, $150 discount with the code YESIMAWITCH.

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I’m humor writer and tired mom Julie Vick, and I write the Substack Humor Me, which shares funny stuff and writing tips. I’ve also got an e-guide to writing McSweeney’s-style short satire pieces you can check out here.

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Heidi Fiedler’s new book Quickening: The Art of Being a Creative Mother is out now. Like The Artist’s Way for mothers, it’s designed to help you reconnect with your creative spark. You can also find Heidi here on Substack at Nebula Notebook, where she shares interviews with creative mothers and offers play dates with guest artists.

Bodies and Mental Health

I’m a NYC/Westchester/CT birth doula who helps families feel powerful, not steamrolled, during pregnancy and labor. My work blends evidence-based support with deep compassion (and witchy vibes). Having had a traumatic birth myself, I’m especially good at helping you navigate hospital systems and advocate for what you want. Virtual support available.

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Are you a smart, capable witch who hasn’t yet cracked the spell for quitting smoking? My book, Quit Smoking for Good, could be the talisman you need to undertake this journey. Tamara Dean, author of “Shelter and Storm,” says, “I feel as if I’m being shepherded toward a better me by a funny, faithful, supportive friend who gets me, who’s down to earth, and whom I can trust. Jennifer’s writing is wonderful, and her approach is science-backed.” I also have a free Newsletter for Quitters on Substack
and other practical magik for transformation seekers at nonsmokerforgood.com.

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If you ever wake up and think, ugh, what have I done to my neck, is this my life now, I can help. I’m a practitioner of the Alexander Technique, so if you’re game to try something that feels a bit woo, but not too wild, come see me in Chicago. I will not shame you for looking too much at your phone. I also do workstation and public speaking consults online.

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This is for a very specific audience, but if you have more than one biological relative who has had a glioma, or if you work in neurooncology, then I have a newsletter for you: The Familial Glioma Newsletter. We’re sharing news and resources while bringing attention to the fact that these clusters exist and should be studied.

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I am a clinical psychologist based in Philadelphia, and I specialize in working with couples. On my Substack orgasms & obligations, I explore how we love, want, and deal with each other through longer reflections, small stories from the therapy room, and the things I’m still learning right alongside my clients and my own family.

Reading & Literary Life

I make picture books (like Jabari Jumps) and wanted to highlight my two latest ones: Fairy Walk is a book about tromping through the woods: mud, bugs, mushrooms, tantrums and features my dog! (Also, a hidden ladybug in every illustration.) The Best Bed for Me: Perfect for kiddos who love animals, as well as their grown-ups who wish they would go to sleep already. Includes two moms, a pug sibling and a new baby.

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Stop pretending you have time to research children’s books — you don’t. Can We Read? is your weekly shortcut to raising readers without the overwhelm. I find the good books, so you can spend your energy reading with your kids. Subscribe and outsource the hard part.

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In Books are My Love Language, I write one newsletter per month about a book I really, really like and think witches should know about. I’m a sucker for excellent writing and scrappy main characters. Last month I wrote about The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts, the true story of Mainer Annie Wilkins who got a bad TB prognosis in 1954. She was 63 years old and underwater on the farm she inherited. She did what any witch would do and grew cucumbers for cash, bought a horse, and rode that horse from Maine to California (along with her dog Depeche Toi). See, that’s a book you need to know about, right?

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My newsletter Leave it to Leonor: Every Thursday, you’ll receive a curated newsletter of things to read, shows to watch, music and podcasts to listen to, places to go and other recommendations. I’ve been writing it for over nine years, and it is my favorite passion project.

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Readable Moments is a free weekly newsletter that helps you find the perfect kid’s book to navigate those tricky teachable moments in a way that helps you bond and build trust with your kids.

Midlife & Transition

Happy on Purpose is a bestselling newsletter about happiness, habits, and practical ways to thrive in midlife. Covering relationships, parenting, culture, travel, and style, Happy on Purpose is beloved by accomplished, stylish, (and fun!) women who refuse to settle for “good enough” and are committed to making the most of their one wild and precious life. Plus, here’s a 50% discount on paid subscriptions for Evil Witches readers!

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I’m working on a new project called Sonic Road Trip, making mixtapes for people who want to stay connected to their hearts amid the chaos. Witches, this first drop is for all of us trying to navigate the wild ride of midlife. You’ll find music to meet you in simmering rage, moments of existential crisis, and the joyful IDGAF energy of (maybe? finally?) accepting yourself as you are. Like what you hear? Subscribe to receive thoughtfully curated mixes twice a month, plus exclusive access to the growing project archives.

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If you like reading about gardening, but also grief, depression, midlife, and comics, also sometimes parenting and photography, and sometimes disability and chronic illness, and oh, can’t forget the overwhelming nature of societal collapse, but with weird collages and illustrations and pictures of rabbits, then hoooo baby do I have a newsletter for you.

Parenthood + Professional Development

Trying to figure out what’s next? I coach people through personal and professional transitions. I’ll comp your first session (just mention you found me through Evil Witches when you book). I also lead Matrescence Sessions for new witches, so feel free to send any new or expecting parents my way!

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A Wonderful Mess is a space for navigating parenthood with humor, compassion, and common sense while also trying to read a good book (or two). Readers can come here for writing about parenthood that doesn’t include tidy answers, scripts, or simple paths. A Wonderful Mess is also for those attempting to read more than a paragraph in a book before someone asks for milk…or pants (it’s always pants?). Written by Kathryn Barbash, PsyD, a mom of four, psychologist, book nerd, and amateur puzzle enthusiast.

Fun and entertainment

Rachel Rynick is a singer/songwriter/voice teacher, whose 3rd studio album of original alt-rock-y music is (in the words of her producing partner) “not NOT about postpartum depression.” If you want some rage catharsis in a sophisticated but listener-friendly package, After the Light is for you. It’s available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, and more! More details (and some behind-the-scenes exclusives) here.

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Holly’s House of Stickers - free biweekly newsletter about stickers.

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I’m a mom/writer/teacher who creates cozy bookish designs for tee shirts and notebooks. I originally made them to amuse myself. I always wanted a shirt that announced me as the Inciting Incident. I’m the moment everything changes! It turns out other people wanted that too, so here I am, selling literary tees. Maybe you want to announce yourself as the Main Character or the Plot Twist. I also teach online creative writing classes and clubs for teens and tweens, helping young storytellers build confidence and have fun being creative.

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Check out the Chapters app. Do you love romance novels? Do you love choose-your-own-adventure stories? We write romances where you get to make choices that change the story as you read it. Steamy, sweet, fun, fantasy, paranormal - whatever your favorite genre, we’ve got it. And it’s on your phone, so you can read it anytime! It’s available in the App Store or on Google Play.

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Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Here’s what this newsletter is all about if you are new! If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for future issues, you can reply directly to this email or leave them in the comments.

➡️ I encourage you to share this issue with anyone and everyone! ⬅️

The entire Evil Witches archives live here: check them out if you’re new. A few others from the archives on books cover how to write a book and be a mom, a chat with an author about rebelling against the kid activity machine, and my interview with certified witch lyz about her best seller inspiring everyone to get divorced (just kidding, unless that’s what you need right now.)

One witchy thing

A great threat I heard from a mom of two teen boys when we were commiserating over kids who come out of the shower yet still reek:

Nothing you haven’t seen before, right? Except for one thing:

While Ollie is a member of the family and possibly the one I love the most, this is what he actually looks like:

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I got the following email a few weeks ago from witch and artist of Drawing Links who has two young girls:

Q: Have you ever done an installment on the “please no gifts” phenomenon? For some reason, it drives me insane, it’s as if the invitation actually says, “please no gifts like there were at EDITH’S DAUGHTERS PARTY, we WOULD NEVER sink so low.”

I know it’s just to cut down on plastic/crap/toys/wrapping paper, but the kids like picking gifts out for their friends, and I feel mildly outraged on their kids’ behalf. Or am I just way overthinking it, and maybe I really just feel guilty about all the crap we have/buy and worry my kids are going to be spoiled etc.

I wrote back,

Ha! I’ve never thought about it that way. You come at it from such a nice, thoughtful, giving perspective compared to how I was at the Target the other day, trying to pick out a child I don’t know. Why didn’t I take my kid with me to let him choose his friend’s gift? I think I just wanted to go to Target alone like a walking cliche.
I swear, when we say “no gifts,” it’s because our kid is over-gifted from his grandparents, and I don’t feel like keeping track of who gave what, and I never judge those who don’t say no gifts. But this is food for thought.

She replied,

I thought I would be a no-gift person. I admit to also being slightly relieved when invitations say no gift, on top of feeling shamed.

Maybe it’s partly the age my kids are, when everything is so new and exciting. I guess in an ideal world, each kid would spend a day or two crafting some special gift at home for their friend, rather than their parents going out to buy something. But I know that world doesn’t really exist.

Claire: Now I’m coming full circle and feeling guilty for depriving my kids of the gifts, like maybe do I secretly really hate them? I am going to have to come to your house and examine all their things to reassure myself that your house is not as teeming with, say, Legos as mine is. This is probably a dumb idea, but do you want to turn this into a phone call chat dialogue?

Here is an edited version of our subsequent phone call:

Edith: I’m still trying to figure out what the protocol is for gift opening because it seems like people don’t do it in public anymore, which I find weird because the kids want to see their present being opened. At my daughter’s birthday party a month ago, I just let her open the presents that her friends were freaking out about. Like, this kid clearly wants her present to be opened right now, so we’ll just do that. But then it was okay, we just played it by ear, and then we opened the rest of them later once everyone was gone, and then we texted everyone a photo of her enjoying the present in the moment.

Claire: That’s really thoughtful.

I’m still trying to get the lay of the land when it comes to thank-you notes and gift acknowledgements because it really seems to span the spectrum. Some people don’t say anything at all. Other people, we’ve gotten maybe a couple handwritten notes.

When I was a kid, and you opened gifts at the party, it could be awkward if someone gave you a gift that was really thoughtful, that you really liked, or maybe even expensive. Then someone else gave you something that was sort of womp-womp.

At least in our world, the kids don’t open gifts anymore in front of other kids because of that same issue of gift equity, and maybe it’s also exhausting to make all the kids sit down and watch this happen. Maybe I’m eschewing that whole aspect of it just because I’m lazy. But also part of it, too, is like, yeah, the kids have so many gifts just in general from the other relatives, it seems like an extra round of admin.

What was the gift that the little boy got for your daughter that was so great?

He obviously didn’t get it at all. It was his mom. I told her, “Georgia’s getting into makeup and I’m not really sure what to do about that.” It was sort of a throwaway comment. But she got this amazing nail kit. Because Georgia’s little sister is almost two, they just take it out every day and play.

I don’t know if that mom has other kids or not, but I will say, as a mother of boys, it is a treat to shop for a girl.

I don’t know how much goodie bags have come into your world yet, but when your kid comes home with a little bag of shit and it’s just pieces of garbage that they may look at once or twice, you’re like, “Here’s this little stupid plastic toy top or a weird dumb bracelet that nobody wanted.” Part of me thinks, if I say no gifts, then we don’t have to do goodie bags. Although I have gotten a bunch of comic books to give away1. I figure it’s something for the kids to enjoy on the way home, and they can also recycle it.

I’m totally with you on the gift bags. I was thinking that the gift was in exchange for the party. The party was the gift for the kid who comes to the party.

See, I think the gift for the kid is that they get to celebrate their birthday with their friends. I had a party for my older son at one of those inflatable places. We have some cake afterwards, and it’s time to go home. One of his friends was like, “Do we have a goodie bag or anything?” I said, “Your memories of this day are your goodie bag,” I really showed her. But you put in so much work to arrange a party.

I think one of the takeaways is, as you go through it more, you realize it gives some people pleasure to make things really nice. Let’s say Valentine’s Day: I get so exhausted, and I just have them buy miniature bags of candy and write “From Paul” or “From James” on it.

Then some people will order custom-made little tackle boxes with each of the kids’ names on it, with special personalized candies. You have to make a deal with yourself that they’re not judging you if you don’t have it in you to do that same job if that makes them happy.

I think part of the deep-down witchy conversation of it is how anything can make you feel bad. If you’re feeling judged for not wanting to do no gifts, I’m feeling judged for being like, “Why aren’t we teaching the kids to be thoughtful?” When we were in Colombia, my son got some chocolate for a friend, and he said, “I can’t wait for Steve to open this. He loves chocolate so much.” I was like, “What a nice kid.” But that’s a different scenario than if you’re running around between activities and now you’re like, “Oh, dammit, we got to get a present on the way to this party.”

When you are most in your feelings or feeling like you are being perceived a certain way about the no gifts thing, what’s the narrative in your head?

I’m in this small community where we all have very young kids, so I just feel like we’re all getting our footing in the world of birthday parties and what’s too big, what’s too small, what’s just right. When some of my closest peers are doing things differently than I do, I’m like, “Oh my God, did I do it wrong?” I want to do it right and have it be fun for everybody.

I completely agree about the goodie bags. The girls love them, but then it’s just this stupid shit that’s I find myself spending two months picking up. I’m like, “I can throw this away, this stuff is crap.”

One of the best goodie bags I’ve ever seen is when mom had just a ton of leftover Halloween candy, and the kids could take some fistfuls of it on the way out.

That’s perfect.

You have to get your head right about what matters to you and to your family. I have a friend who is very generous. She will send the boys random gifts. It took me a while to stop feeling like I had to do a tit-for-tat because I thought I would look like a jerk. I was like, “No, this is the way she is.” I have to trust that she’s not doing it and being like, “Claire didn’t get us something. She must suck.”

When you were talking about the very legitimate upside of a child thinking about what their friend would like, you could even talk about getting a kid to appreciate how much something costs or not, that’s a really valuable lesson. Then I’m like, “Damn, Edith must be a more loving, thoughtful mom than I am.”

I think in an ideal world with the gift-giving stuff, each child would spend a week crafting a present that took them at most $4 to put together, and they would give it to their friend, and it would mostly just be a token of their friendship. All the kids would open the gift at the party and everyone would just be so delighted by one another’s mutual camaraderie. But of course that doesn’t happen.

My daughter’s party was bookended by two of her closest friends’ parties, basically,, and it turns out the other moms sent out invites that were like, “Please no gifts.” I read a tone into those messages. I think all invites now come over text. Of course they don’t write them in that tone, but I hear it like, “We’re not like you trashy materialists who fill your homes with garbage and teach your children to be disgusting plastic freaks like Edith.”

Oh my God, no.

No? Of course it’s not about me. I get it, but I’m also, like, the children are so little. Wouldn’t it be fun to just shower them with presents one day? I don’t know.

I didn’t think I would feel this way going into parenthood. I’m a pretty minimalist person in some ways, and I’m like quality over quantity, but for some reason, I’m like, I don’t know, they don’t need to learn restraint just yet.

It’s good to hear that point of view. I think it’s really illuminating, the things that can trigger you. Even when a friend of mine, when the inside of their car is clean, I’m like, “Oh, okay, you must care more about your stuff than I do. Trash Me.”

I think the takeaway is that whatever the thing is, you can always feel bad about it. The battle is not about gifts or no gifts, it’s really about what makes you happy, perhaps what makes your kids happy. I never get mad about buying someone else’s kid a gift.

I believe you. Do your kids ever complain about having no-gift parties, though?

No. Once in a while. I think there was a party maybe a year or two ago, and it said no gifts. James probably bitched about it, but I wasn’t feeling sorry for him. I was like, “Your party was a really nice party and all your friends came. You got a lot of presents from your family.” Some people still bring him a card or give a gift.

I will say one more thing: My son was invited to a party some years ago, and the parents are super Catholic and crunchy, and they said, “No gifts, but if you must please bring something pre-owned from your house.” I was reading that as, “We’re not materialists like you.” Then there was added pressure since they acknowledged that they would maybe take gifts, I had to find a used gift in our house that wasn’t disgusting.

You are sort of at a sweet spot, I think, where the kids are so new to this and anything you give them is nice and new and special, and as they get older, it gets harder to find something unique.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying this phase of life. I think it’s also very different if it’s your first kid versus your third or second kid. My cousin has four kids, and for a while we were exchanging gifts for each other’s kids at Christmas until some years ago. I said, “Can we stop? I have no idea what you guys have. I can’t buy gifts for four kids of different ages. Can we just enjoy each other’s company?” She wasn’t mad about it, but of course I still felt bad about it .

That’s my true takeaway. You can feel bad about literally anything if you just think about it the right way.

I think you are doing great and if it brings you and your kids joy to pick out a gift for someone, then do it. If it really makes you happy, just say, “I know you said no gifts, but whatever. Fuck you. We did it anyway.”

My friend, the one who loves to buy gifts, sent us this game recently. It’s like beer pong and flip cup for kids. My husband was playing with James, who was super into it, until the bad part of his ADHD came in, and he was like, “I hate this, I hate you.”

Anyway, I asked my friend, who has three boys, “Do you guys have this game Chicken Vs. Hot Dog?” She said, “No.” I said, “Don’t Google it. We’re going to send it to you.” The hot dog looks a hundred percent like a dildo. I sent it to her in the spirit of being silly and witchy more than “I hope your kids like it.”

Anyway. You’re doing great. Hold the line.

You’re doing great.

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I was talking with a newer mom yesterday about how, now that I have a kid almost in high school, I feel less shocked about my status as a mother and am in fact kind of used to it by this point—and whether that is bad for my creativity. Complacency!

But never fear, I still got it, baby. Here were a few instances in the last week where I just couldn’t take the bullshit and, as one of my kids’ former educators once amusingly put it, used my loud voice:

• When the younger kid would not stop arguing and talking back over things that should not be debates. Like how he should not go check on whether his brother was actually doing homework in case he was possibly doing something fun instead. Or why, after two instances of finishing-projects-in-a-hurry-due-to-poor-planning he should take his school binder out to check it every night including that very night.

  • In fact he muttered “Be quiet” to me when I was unspooling a very rational litany of why we need to stop with the last-minute-projects thing. Be quiet. To me!

• When same kid was messing with the dog by getting out all the dog toys (which live in the kitchen) to wave in the dog’s face while I was cooking dinner. I told him to put the toys back and he did with this sort of energy:
  

  

  So I dramatically dumped all the dog toys on the floor and told him to try it again.

• When I subsequently took my dinner to eat alone in the basement to calm down and I saw a mouse and lost my shit one more time.

• When the older kid (so you don’t think I play favorites) got home after the cleaning people had been over. Cleaning up all our shit —sometimes literally— before they get here is exhausting and I also tip a lot for their trouble. Said child took his shoes off directly in front of the door when he got home and closed the door so not only were they on the floor, I couldn’t open the door all the way.
  
  “Paul?” I yelled.
  “What?” he asked from his room.
  “COME DOWN HERE NOW!” I yelled.
  “What??” he yelled back.

  🔥🔥🔥🔥COME DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  I gently said. And asked him to put his shoes on the shoe rack next to the door.

Anyway, I don’t like losing my shit. It’s taxing and then you have to apologize after and it’s a whole thing. But it still happens sometimes, even to the best of us.

If you need to get a few amusing shit-losing moments off your chest the comments are open.

And if you appreciate having this space to talk about how it’s normal to lose our shit and put ourselves in time out be a pal:

(Especially because soon I’m going to be putting out the call for paid subscribers to send me their ads for our classifieds section! Free subscribers can contribute in the comments but the true heads get placement in the email that goes out to over 25K people.)

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Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers who are really not angry ALL the time. (The rest of the time we are eating!) If you know someone who’d like this sort of thing in their inbox about once a week, please spread the word. Here are some testimonials we’ve gotten lately on recent issues.

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“omg I love this and it made me lol and I love this space!!!”

“Thank you for being such a source of sanity for me. I fucking love your newsletter.”

Grateful for all of you. May your holiday bullshit be manageable. xo

One witchy thing

Compared to being pregnant, giving birth, taking care of a newborn, dealing with rear-facing carseats, illnesses, potty training, and sleep training — the admin aspect of childrearing is fairly gentle.

But “fairly gentle” doesn’t mean easy. Running more than one person’s agenda involves focus, organization, strategy, and exactitude. There is a reason why people get paid well to be people’s executive assistants and don’t just do it as a hobby.

Looking back, when I left my day job to stay at home and work for myself, I was naive when I assumed it was feasible, even pleasant, to earn the salary I’d make outside the house, do most of the housework, and to simultaneously “be there” “if” there are childcare needs — without regular outside help. Even when my husband also worked from home.

I often wonder if I’d be much happier if we had regular paid childcare in the form of a nanny or au pair. But the idea of the cost, of paying someone while I stayed home, of actually putting in the effort to find someone and manage them, made me think it couldn’t be worth the tradeoff.

However, our family admin shit got so overwhelming the last few years that I accepted something that I have always suspected but became extra-clear: I can’t do this (or do it well, or do it happily) without more regular assistance.

The childcare ship has sailed, but I wondered if I could at least get some help with the part of our lives that revolves around making and setting plans, driving, checking sports apps, signing up for things, executing those things, and remembering things.

Again, it seemed like it shouldn’t be that hard, but it felt so overwhelming. First, I’d handle action-item tasks as soon as they popped up. Forget any sort of concentrated good work, let alone creative work. My brain felt like it was being split apart like so many hemp ropes in a Victorian British workhouse. Then I tried to be a little more organized and disciplined, saving all the admin work for the end of the day to do in front of the TV, but opening the calendar would instill a sense of dread and anxiety —even setting up social plans with friends felt like work.

If I could have anything, in addition to having a black hole to put all our family’s actual shit, I wished for a black hole where I’d just shove off any logistics-related emails and not have them be my problem.

I found out, this is possible!

I asked folks a while ago if there is such a service and got a few recommendations. I heard of a few options that were A.I.-enabled, but I felt strange turning over more of my life to some bots (and letting the robots know my whole life. It’s not their business!) The one that sounded best to me is a company recommended called Faye, which matches you with a family advisor to help you with your needs.

This summer, I reached out to the company and gave them the lowdown of what I needed, and within a day or two, they connected me with a family advisor (or personal assistant, or “calendar lady” as I sometimes call her) named Erin, who lives here in Chicago. We chatted on the phone a little bit so I could tell her where I could most use help.

Turns out that Erin has three little boys younger than my own! I asked her how she is able to stay on top of people’s shit like this, and she told me it’s easier for her to manage other people’s schedules and needs than her own. Relatable.

We did a soft launch of our new partnership the week before school started, so I could cross-check that the things I forwarded to Erin showed up on the family calendar (which she has access to. She also has access to some information like various passwords, but she can’t see them to use them independently of me.)

She didn’t drop a single ball, and after that first week, I stopped double-checking and we just got going.

Here are just a few ways Erin helps with our lives:

• I forward her every single email from school, sports, or church (my kid is getting confirmed this year, so there are a lot of emails about meetings and volunteer time) so that someone responsible reads it and picks out the action items we need to worry about. I forward these emails to her the second I get them and then read them later when I can.

• If school sends out a Signup Genius, she will get me on it and order things for me, like candy for my kid’s Halloween party or snacks for the school teacher lounge.

• She booked our COVID and flu shots.

• She sends us a ‘digest’ of things to keep in mind at the end of each week: what’s coming up, deadlines for me and the kids. I will sometimes say, “Please help me to remind my kid he has to finish his paper this weekend,” and she will.

• I gave her our insurance information, and she is going to help my husband find a new primary care physician.

• She tells me what days/times of the week look most promising to do grocery shopping and sends me some meal-planning ideas.

• When I need to schedule something like a work interview or a hangout with friends, I give her the restrictions (like how I’m in Central Standard Time but need to talk to someone in Dubai or I want to make plans with one friend who can only hang out after school and other friends who want to see our kids during the day) and she sends me several time slots.

• When she saw we had theater tickets a few weeks ago, she asked if we’d like to add dinner plans to the evening. She found a few restaurant options nearby based on our food preferences and made us a reservation.

• When I was buying wine for a school party, she advised me how many bottles to buy (so I didn’t over-/or underdo it) and a few suggestions of decent wines to get at the price point I sent her.

• Most thrillingly, she has created carpool schedules for us and our nearby friends, incorporating various bullshit like the days our pals need to be downtown early, how school starts/ends early on Wednesdays, and that the kids’ sports practices typically don’t take place at school/right after school.
  
  This, in particular, has made our lives so much better, my husband marveled, “I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner.” I know why. Because it’s a pain in the ass! And if I had dedicated my precious brain cells to figuring out an equitable and practical carpool, and anybody had criticized it, I would have been butthurt to hell.

Thanks to me finally getting some help, there is a happier vibe in the house now. I feel less like there’s another work shift coming up once the kids go to bed. I’m a little less cranky now that the pain of logistics is lessened, and as the old saying goes, when Mom’s Less Cranky, Everyone’s Less Cranky.

So, numbers: I pay $169 per month for Erin to give us four hours of her time, a rate I was grandfathered into since the rate now is $199 per month. I still think that is a pretty good deal, considering how much she has improved our family life and how seamless the onboarding process went. It’s not a huge discount, but if you witches are curious and want to try the service out for yourself, sign up with this link for 15% off your first month.

Maybe you don’t need help in this area. Maybe you are much sharper than I am and find the admin work kind of painless. But the way I naively thought I could just run the kids to the pediatrician on sick days, just throw in some laundry once in awhile, just run to the grocery store in the middle of the day (all while working! And even showering!) only to find myself a frog in a boiling pot of nervous breakdown, if you’re in some hot water yourself, you deserve someone to help you with the five full time jobs you’re juggling too.

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Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. New here? Here’s what the newsletter is all about.

If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for future issues, you can reply directly to this email or leave them in the comments. Our Instagram, curated by Carly O., lives here, and the Evil Witches archives live here. A few past topics I think sum up our vibe include:

• Don’t let parenting weirdos tell you you shouldn’t want to get some sleep

• What can you really tell expectant first-time parents?

• What you can tell first-time grandparents

• Thanksgiving fights (and also the legend of fuck Thanksgiving)

If you are not a paid subscriber, I hope you consider joining us. You sponsor stuff like you see today and get access to subscriber-only content (plus bonus eps of the podcast I co-host, Not Right Now—just tell me if you’re a paid subscriber but haven’t gotten access yet), intimate, funny and helpful threads where we have candid, funny, sometimes hard discussions.

An upcoming newsletter topic I’m working on is witches who are swole! Are you serious about weight lifting? I want to hear about your practice, how you got into it, why you like it and if your family is impressed by you (they better be.) Get in touch if this is you.

One witchy thing

Via longtime witch :

Hi witches,

Our time is nigh. I hope you’ve been doing well as you wash and steam your cloak, check in on your newts, make sure there’s enough gas in the broom, etc.

Here are a few things that have been going on here over at E.W. H.Q., rated by emojis:

• 🙌 Political fundraising: We raised over $15,000 for Virginia’s Dems (once the matches come through). T…

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I always feel like I should do more chat threads with readers but something about the Substack format doesn’t entice me because it requires so much logging in. You know how you get to a stage of parenthood and you have to log into Scholastic/the sports portal/the grade portal/Venmo/the calendar/LifeTouch all the time and you want to log out of life? So this may be a fun way to have a cross-reader chat.

But first, some quick (democracy-saving?) business.

I have not been motivated to do much for politicians lately. But I got an email from O.G. witch Melissa Walker at the States Project. “Can I convince you to jump in for VA this year?” We had a call where I asked her what her spiel was for progressive people who are burned out and freaked out. She said our job is Virginia. “The outcome is incredibly important.”

The Virginia state election is the first referendum on Trump 2.0. (Don’t want to keep reading? TL;DR give here.)

Currently, Democrats hold 1 seat majority in the Virginia state house, which they are trying to maintain but ideally deepen, and the office of governor is also up for election.

In case you’re unfamiliar with States Project, this grass roots, strategic states-level fundraising makes a big difference by focusing on achievable state-level wins. In fact, the reason why the Virginia House has that one seat majority is because of work like this that resulted in a victory by 975 votes.

Losing the majority and the governorship will indicate that Donald Trump is invulnerable. Hanging on is better than nothing but it will leave the Virginia Democrats paralyzed.

But a decisive win, with the governorship and extra seats flipped, means not only better policy for Virginia residents, it turns the narrative tide that has been such an incredible bummer.

What if there was good news for once and we were part of it?

I’m raising money through October 28. Are you in? The great news is that I already emailed everyone who has ever chipped into the circle and that got us over 70% of the way to a $10K goal. I know together we can close that gap.

If you already have donated to this campaign, I hope you are glowing from the good spells. You are an angel for reading this twice.

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First, BIG congrats to witch Christina Kinon, named to the prestigious Black List Writers Lab. The Deadline announcement mentions her work CHICKS which we have been proud mention in the classifieds ads. It was fun to see that series go from my inbox to a major press release.

Anyway, thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Here’s what the newsletter is all about if you’re new here. The archives live here. A few things we’ve talked about in the past that cover a range of interests include:

• A daily timeline of parenthood favorability

• Spiteful gifts for kids whose parents you want to troll.

• Why some witches love their bearded dragons.

• How to help a friend in a marriage crisis, maybe.

• What slightly older children think about younger children getting smart phones.

• Wisdom from moms who have had kids over a span of time

And if that convinces you to become a paid subscriber who gets access to additional content, preferred placement in the classifieds like Christina, and more, the survey is below!

By the way if you are not a paid subscriber yet but did donate any amount to the Evil Witches Giving Circle, forward your States Project donation receipt to ew.clairezulkey@gmail.com and I’ll comp you a year of of the newsletter!

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The paid subscribers voted in the last issue on the next Witches topic, and this is what the majority of you wanted to know: What’s up with cognitive load?

A few weeks ago, sociologist Allison Daminger of invited me to chat with her about her new book, What’s On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life.

Once I got into it, I was surprised by how much her research explains about a certain exhaustion and disconnect in couples that occurs once you have kids. It’s something we touch on a ton in this newsletter: It’s the monitoring of the toilet paper supplies, it’s the keeping track of kids’ seasonal clothing, it’s the family calendar, and it’s the packing list. Do you ever feel a whirring in your brain that is tiring but doesn’t quite feel like work? Does your partner seem to have a completely different type of family brain? How does this happen? Daminger’s book gave me a new way of thinking about this.

This is an edited and condensed version of our conversation at Women and Children First in Chicago last month.

So, how is cognitive load different from emotional labor?

Emotional labor is about managing your feelings and managing the way they affect other people. When my daughter is screaming during her fussy time of day, it’s like, “Okay, I am not going to scream myself. I’m going to be cheerful and keep a calm family atmosphere.” What I wanted to get at was, what are the needs that people are anticipating? Today in my life it was like, “Okay, I need to get myself and my daughter here to Chicago, and my husband was already here. What is the order of operations? What do we need to pack? Okay, it’s just one night.” thinking about all the things we’re going to need, figuring out the plan, either researching or brainstorming or going to friends, making a decision, then following up and monitoring, to say, “Okay, here’s what I decided. Did this meet the need? Do I need to go back to square one?”

How did you get your subjects to measure cognitive load beyond just how much time they put into minding their family?

I knew that if I just asked people, “How much time are you spending thinking about stuff for your household?” I probably wouldn’t get great answers. Not because it wasn’t meaningful and important and a source of stress and strain in their lives, but because there’s no easy way to translate it into the measures that we have available.

When I started recruiting parents, I asked them to keep a decision log before the interview. It was simple; they could do it on the spreadsheet, or they could just do it on a post-it note. I said, “Write down the decisions that you are making or contemplating for your family over the course of the day before our interview.” That would be mostly mundane things like, “What should I feed my child for breakfast?” “I noticed that his snow pants are getting snug and winter is approaching, so probably I should go some more.”

Sometimes it was bigger things, like some families were in the middle of moves and thinking about what moving company to go with or what school to enroll their child in.

Then, I would speak with both partners independently, and I would say, “Walk me through this decision. You wrote down that you decided to feed your daughter eggs for breakfast. What else did you consider? How did you know what ingredients were on hand? What were your considerations? What were the benefits of eggs? Why not cereal?” They would talk me through these and elaborate, “Well, she hasn’t had much protein. It has been a real struggle to get her to have protein. She’s into carbs, and so the eggs she’ll sometimes eat.”

That told me there’s a lot going on behind the surface, even on these decisions that we make on a daily basis. What I wanted to try to understand was what the footprint of that work is in people’s lives, and how that varies by gender. [Ed: Before our conversation, Allison and I swapped bullet points of our own cognitive loads over a span of 24-ish hours—paid subscribers can check it out below.]

So spoil it for us, who is doing the majority of this thinking?

I did find that in about 80% of the different gender couples that I interviewed, it was a woman who was doing more of this cognitive work, especially the anticipating, constantly scanning the horizon and the calendar, the schedule, the seasons and knowing what is coming out that we might need to deal with. “What do we need to be talking about? What do we need to be planning for?”

Then on the back end, the follow-up and monitoring and saying, “Did you call the plumber? Did the babysitter ever text us back? Is this new sleep thing we’re trying with our toddler working or do we need to go back to square one?” Those were the pieces that I saw being most gendered, with women doing more of them. The stuff in the middle was a little bit more complex. For most decisions, it was a joint effort. If it was a decision not necessarily about what to have for dinner, but about where to go on vacation or whether our child should do soccer, couples usually at least talked about it.

One person—usually her—had usually done more research to bring it to the decision stage, but it was not as though the men that I interviewed were totally absent and not involved in decision-making for their families.

The research part had more women, but it varied depending on the topic. I had a lot of men who were passionate about researching appliances or tech, and they had elaborate spreadsheets figuring out, “Okay, we’re going to get this Alexa,” or whatever the latest gadget was at the time I was doing the interviews. But overall, women were carrying a lot more of this work.


Was that very different when it came to the queer couples you interviewed?

I did two more rounds of data collection to diversify the sample socioeconomically and by gender roles. With queer couples, what I found wasn’t 50-50 in the majority of couples. Most of them had some level of cognitive labor inequality. But there were differences that I found illuminating.

One of them was that the gaps were a lot smaller. It was maybe more like 60-40 than 80-20. Another was that it didn’t divide up into one partner doing the more female-type cognitive work, and one partner doing the more male-type cognitive work. It was a much more mix-and-match situation where partner A would say, “I am keeping my eye on all the home maintenance things, but I’m also making sure that our childcare setup is fine.”

When I spoke with straight couples, I often got the impression that they were having some realizations in real time. One interviewee memorably said to me toward the end of our interview, “Oh, I do all the girl stuff and he’s all the boys’.”

Whereas with the queer couples, it was much more common for them to say, “Oh, yeah, we talked about this. There was an article that my partner sent me and we fall into this type and we’re okay with that, but we can change it.” They had much more of an ongoing dialogue with their partner about whether this was something they were okay with, whether they wanted to change it, and they felt like they could if they wanted to.

You also spoke with folks where there was a stay-at-home dad or the mom earned more than the dad. Did that change the cognitive load for them in those cases?

I spoke with a number of couples where her career was more significant in terms of income or hours, and the majority of those couples still assigned more cognitive labor to her.

That said, those one in five couples where it was him doing more or the couple sharing at 50-50, they were all couples where her career was bigger in either the income or hours. Whereas in all the couples where he earned more, it was clear that he was doing less of the cognitive labor.

Talk about that one mom who got shamed by the pediatrician for being busy.

I have a chapter in the book on couples where he does more of the cognitive labor, or they split pretty 50-50, and a number of those couples reported upsetting incidents. This mom had a job that was much less flexible. Her husband’s job was much more work-from-home. So he did most of the pediatrician appointments, and she went to one, and the pediatrician says to her, “Oh, it’s nice to see mom at baby’s visits.”

This was years later, and she was telling me about this in an interview. It’s a message that, “Hey, you’re not fulfilling your role here.” I don’t want to ascribe bad things to that pediatrician, but I think he probably felt that she was derelict in her role as the mom by sending her husband.

I don’t consider myself a conservative, trad wife person. I am not happily taking these responsibilities I do tend to take care of (like laundry, and food, and kids’ wardrobe.) I’d like to think that I’m not just falling into what we would consider gender norms. How did that feeling translate with the folks that you spoke with, and how they saw themselves?

That is a common pattern that I saw. Most of the couples that I spoke with talked about how their preference was for it to feel fair. They did not want to be in a relationship that was their parents’. They talked about the importance of mutuality and fairness. Many of them did not want to feel like they were in an unequal or traditional partnership. What they told me was, “It’s just our personalities.” She’s type A, she’s organized, she has high standards, she’s on top of things, and he is laid back.

Fun dad.

Fun dad. Exactly. My job as a sociologist is to come in and say, “Huh, seems like if all of the couples I have talked to are happening to have personalities along these lines that maybe something bigger is happening here.”

What I end up arguing is that by putting it on the shoulders of personality and by blaming it on our personality, I think that is helpful for keeping the peace. I think it’s a lot easier to say, “Huh. My husband, he’s not observant. He just doesn’t have a good spatial awareness,” rather than say, “Oh, there, there’s something he’s opting out of here when it comes to our home.”

I don’t think that in many of the couples I interviewed, it was a case of weaponized incompetence. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, and I think that is a real phenomenon, but not so much what I was seeing. It was more about women anticipating how others would see them.

I think about this when my mother-in-law comes to visit. I assume that she’s going to think I’m a bad housekeeper because we haven’t vacuumed in months and there’s dog hair everywhere. My husband has got other qualities, but she doesn’t expect him to be a housekeeper. Whereas women have internalized, I think, the expectations that are quite real. Who does the consequences fall on if something goes wrong? This was especially true with kid stuff. “If my kid forgets their clarinet, I’m going to get a phone call and then I’m going to have to interrupt my workday.” It’s a not quite rational, but reasonable response that people are going to judge me differently and I’m going to be the one to pick up the pieces if things fall apart.

People told me about a lot of things that I don’t think they would tell me about if they were trying to put their best face forward. I can never know what is truly in their heart, but I think on at least some level, it bothered them that there was this evidence that they were not quite living out their ideals in the way that they had hoped.

It sounds like people would get to a point where they’re like, “Well, am I the problem and how can we fix this?” I know this is not a self-help book and you’re not here to give solutions, but talk a little bit about where those conversations would end up and what you observed.

I remember one couple in particular. He was a doctor and she was a librarian. Both of them, in their independent interviews, talked in circles. I could see these acrobatics that they were trying to do because I was gently, I hope, asking questions about, “OWho does this? Who does what?” I think they were like, “Oh, no, it’s going to look like she does everything and he does nothing.” He went on this whole thing about how, “Well, historically you could say it was a gender thing because maybe she didn’t do well in organic chemistry, and maybe that was something about, but really, even though historically we’d have a lot of hiring male doctors...”

I could see him wrestling with it in real time. I heard from a bunch of couples after the interview that it had generated productive conversations.

Since you got married and became a mom after you’d begun this work, was there any part of you that was like, “Well, I’m not going to fall into these traps because I see what all these people are doing. I’m going to get ahead of it”?

I like to think that we are in a good position to enact our values. I was pregnant and then we had a six-month old and we found ourselves living the social forces that I write about. For example, while I was pregnant, my family was texting me about the shower. “What are you going to do with this? Should we buy this? Should we buy that? When should we visit?” Wait a minute, no, we’ve got to put both of us on. It’s the group thread.

There were those moments where you realized that it’s not just about your intentions; you are part of a much broader system, and it takes a lot of energy to fight back against those things. For us, I think it’s been about picking our battles and saying, “Where do we actually not like the norm?” and where are we like, “Oh, we’re okay with it.”

I try not to do anything with our cars. I know that that is gendered, but I don’t care, and I was not socialized to care about it. My husband has another set of tasks that he was not socialized to care about. For us, it can be helpful to acknowledge the system and acknowledge the broader forces rather than saying, “It’s all up to us and we can fight the good fight.”

End credits

Thanks for reading this issue of Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Feel free to forward it to a friend if you like. If someone forwarded it to you and you read some of the archives and think “Holy shit, I may have found a new good place on the internet,” I hope you show your support and become a paid subscriber, which also gives you extra/more personal members-only threads and emails, the ability to promote your work to the other readers, etc.

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If you have any questions, ideas, feedback or suggestions for other issues or chat threads, you can reply right to this email.

Vote for Not Right Now!

Thanks to those of you who have given a listen to the podcast project I’ve been doing with called “Not Right Now” (we are currently recording new eps).

It’s nominated for an award! Feel like taking an extra second and showing your support? Please go here and vote for us in the Family & Child-Raising category! It will get us more eyeballs and maybe eventually a sponsor or something even. Thanks!

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Earlier in my parenting career, I tried to sell a pitch on a story that got to the bottom of why and how parents forget the earliest part of their kids’ childhood. It seemed impossible to me (while I happened to be in it)—why and how our brains would allow us to forget one of the hardest, scariest, most confusing, exhausting, literally painful parts of our lives. Was this just a natural part of brain function, or was there a particular biology that encouraged us to lose touch with those traumatic feelings in order to have even more kids?

Nobody took me up on the piece and I carried on with life, and my brain did its brain thing, stirring up feelings of nostalgia when the old photos on my phone instead of only remembering things like “I’m so glad I don’t have to do bottles/daycare dropoff/Diaper-Genie-emptying/highchairs/carseats/baby fingernails/baby boogers etc anymore.” This exchange I had with Fred Bryant about parental melancholy gives me comfort. You can’t get out of it!)

But as always, it was products that really let me know my time and place.

First, it was this baby helmet, which a relative of mine had purchased for her child and caused me some mirth (This particular helmet is designed to keep your child from bumping its head while it learns to crawl and toddle, not for skull healing/development, btw):

In my recollection, in my day (2013-2016), we just assumed that if babies bonked their heads, it probably wasn’t from a far enough distance to the ground to do them that much harm. I mean, we weren’t monsters: we babyproofed everything else, just not the baby. The helmet is also a metaphor for the sweet hopefulness of new parents—“This product will prevent everyone’s discomfort, and there is no way my baby will even consider noncompliance.”

But then I learned about the Owlet sock. I edited an article by newer mom about how hard it is for new moms to find true community when there is so much parenting content going around that say things like you should never say “no” to your child. (If you haven’t done this yet, I highly recommend it. A nice hard “No.” with absolutely no explanation is invigorating1.) Now, of course, this kind of shit was around 10+ years ago — who can forget Evil Witches legend, Bag-of-Flour Man? But it didn’t seem as bad yet.

Now tech has penetrated the chat deeper than ever before. You thought it was hot shit that your baby monitor played soothing music and let you know the room’s temperature? The Owlet Sock (look it up; I’m not linking to it) “tracks your baby’s health, safety, and sleep in real time,” with various forms of health data including oxygen levels. As some friends and I joked, whatever happened to just walking into your kid’s bedroom and staring at his back to make sure that he’s still alive? It makes me mad to see “data will save your baby” still being pushed first-time parents to make them think they have much control/knowledge beyond a certain tiny amount. Then I think about what it must be like to be a new mom right now, and there’s fuckin’ TikTok and protein and discovering accidentally via social media your daycare mom-buddy is maybe-okay with acts of fascism.

Caroline’s piece made me realize that I had actually forgotten many of the the pains and uncertainties of new motherhood. But I guess I’d rather take the earned experience in lieu of the older vivid memories if it’s a choice. I have a lot more experience being a parent than I did; they have a lot more experience being humans, and that shared experience to me is more enjoyable than everyone being younger but figuring out more things. But her piece got me riled up to look back on the things that I was/we were feeling witchy about over the years.

I don’t know if “open rate” really correlates to popularity, but according to Substack, these are the most opened Evil Witches issues ever.

If you want the most opened paid issues and/or vote on the next issue, you will have to go beyond the paywall:

1. Birth order stereotypes

2. We are weaker together

3. What a kid's behavior assessment reads like

4. A very relatable mom (did this lead indirectly to MAHA? My bad if so!)

5. Midlife crisis, or midlife?

6. The rage on backorder is being delivered NOW

7. Take this Thanksgiving plan and shove it!

8. Don’t believe the bedtime hype!

9. Just say no to your kids doing things

10. Diamonds for men who hate women

The content below is for paid subscribers, who can also weigh in on what they might want next, email-wise from Witches. Here is a little offer for you, good until 9/26/25.

Get 20% off for 1 year

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Hello and happy September. How was your August? Ours went by fast, but also had this muddy, spacey feeling that maybe was a result of the cicadas, perimenopause brain fog, or finally going through that damn portal.

Here were some of the things I got up to. Some of the slightly more personal stuff is behind a paywall.

A few days with the kids out of the house:

The boys went to summer camp for a short week, and my husband and I did some fun stuff like a downtown dinner date and a round of golf together. But it was still hard to shake off the shutdown feeling I get at the end of the day, even with the kids gone. Sometimes my husband tried to talk to me when the iron gate of engagement had come down, and even without bedtime, dinnertime, and laundry time, some nights I was still tired mom even if I wasn’t momming.

He later took them out of town for two nights later on for a music fest thingie. Each time the kids were gone, I kicked it off by doing a big clean on the first floor so I could get their gigantic baseball bags and strewn crocs out of my sight. Simple pleasures: a house that is not continuously getting fucked up every morning and night like the tide coming and going.

At one point, I even cleaned off the tops of the washer and dryer in the basement, a catchall type of place. You all would be proud of me: without looking inside it, I threw away a crumpled-up shopping bag that had come from my kid’s backpack many months ago. What was inside it? Probably crayons and shit. Fidgets and jibbitz. Little sticks and erasers. I’ll never know for sure. #freedom

A trip to Wisconsin with the boys and my parents:

My parents treated us to a trip to Kohler, WI, to celebrate their anniversary. I was a bit nervous about this because my husband couldn’t come with us, and my parents are doing that bummer aging thing. I was worried I’d be a stressed-out, irritable depresso the whole time, only catering to folks a generation above and below me. But it was a pretty nice short week, with a few bullets:

• Leaning into what the kids wanted was the move. Normally, we don’t let them do screentime before the afternoon, for instance, but what was I going to do when the three of us all woke up before 7 and were sharing a room? So, screentime was every day 7-9 a.m. before breakfast (for me too.) Bedtime was watching sitcoms in bed til around 10-11 p.m. I was a chill mom who was less likely to grouse about things like “If you had just eaten dinner you wouldn’t feel like eating Tostitos in bed.” I just let them eat the Tostitos in bed. The only bad part was having to smell Tostitos breath at bedtime.
  

• Because it has more space, I drove my husband’s pickup truck to Wisconsin, but it’s so tall I have to take a derpy little hop when I get out of it. He loaned me an apple box to put down for my creaky folks to get in and out of the truck, as I did all the driving while we were there. I felt like an old-timey carriage footman. The one time I snapped at my parents, they had both said something along the lines of “There’s a car coming, Claire,” while we were driving, and I was like, “I KNOW,” but I think I was otherwise a pretty good daughter.
  

• The boys and I played a round of golf with my dad. My younger kid, the ADHD one, got a little hot a few times (golf is frustrating), but he kept his shit together pretty well instead of having a baby meltdown that would tarnish everyone’s entire experience. In fact, he was quite complimentary to the other players, which I was proud of because he used to be so unpleasantly competitive. I was trying to explain to a childfree friend what a huge relief and sense of pride it is to see your kid tone down from being someone who loses his shit a lot to someone who loses his shit a bit less and she told me about a nephew of hers that had a similar vibe and thus earned the nickname “Volcano Head” as a child, so she got it.
  

• On my parents’ anniversary, while they had a fancy dinner, I took the kids to a Milwaukee Brewers game. I only walked away from the kids angrily/passive aggressively once on this trip, and it was at the game after I’d navigated an hour past several accidents to the stadium to arrive right when the game started. I wanted to get to our seats, but the boys wanted to linger by a table where some insurance company or bank was giving away free garbage. It was one of those “Okay BYE” kind of moments.
  
  Aside from that, the game was good. I like having older kids a lot. I got up and walked around the stadium on my own at one point after the boys promised they wouldn’t go off and wander. In this instance, I felt comforted by the police state because I knew if someone kidnapped them, it would be on multiple security cameras.
  
  Also, during the game, a nice man gave my younger kid a ball he’d caught from a player. He was so excited. I told him about the concept of karma and how he had to make sure he did a random good deed (or more.) He kept trying to show the ball to his salty older brother, who would rather die than acknowledge or touch the ball his brother had unfairly received
  
  (You know, of course, we have 9,000 MLB baseballs at home.)
  

• Shout out to Evil Witch for recommending the game Quicktionary (which I think would be a great classroom game for you teacher witches out there.) That and a card game version of “Would You Rather?” helped kill some time at a few dinners with my parents. My older son was otherwise trying to show us some card tricks he’d learned at camp, which wasa little boring for everyone but him (“Yes, that’s my card. No, that’s not my card. Oooh. Wow.”)
  

• During the longer drives, we listened to Nate Bargatze’s book (absolutely one of those book deal books and not a “I really have something to say” books, but still pleasant and kid-appropriate.) We also listened to the podcast Criminal, along with Criminal+, where the host Phoebe chats with her producer. The boys love Phoebe Judge. Sometimes she drives me nuts, especially when she acts like she just woke up in the 21st century after being frozen for 80 years, but I like that my boys enjoy listening to a conversation between two women.

Back to school and home again.

Something I learned: I don’t need to be there when the boys leave the house for the first day of school. In fact, it is perhaps better if I’m not! If I’m not there, I don’t add to the general hype of the moment, including getting that damn first day photo. This time, I left before they did in order to take the dog to an appointment. My husband got the required photo. Nobody yelled too much.

Of course, merely 3.5 days after school started, our 13-year-old came down with strep throat. Again, there are benefits to bigger kids. I’m grateful he could articulate that his throat extra-hurt instead of just scream-crying over it, that he tolerated a strep test without me holding him down, and that he can handle taking large pills (thank you, Mexico illness.) He improved so much that by the end of Day 1, he was asking if he could ride his bike over to the park and meet his friend (No.)

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I don’t have a story or parenting hot take for you. My kids have been at sleepaway camp for 6 days so I have been able to enjoy the little things, instead of raging at the little things. Which I will resume in a few hours when they and all their stuff get home.

But til then, here are a few food and beverage, lifestyle tweaks, and products in my life that have slightly raised my dopamine levels lately. None of these are sponsored or affiliates. The TL;DR version is that I believe that as you get older you should get to spend more money on your sleep and on your feet.

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I’m also going to take August off recording the “Not Right Now” podcast, which I’m humbled to have heard a lot of nice things about (see these great, funny reviews):

I won’t be doing as much nothing as I would like (although how much nothing is good for me is always tbd.) I hope to jump in the lake a few times, but I will also be:

• Writing some freelance stories for my academic institution clients

• Doing work for Inbox Collective, where I’m managing editor and contributor, writing/reporting/editing stuff about newsletters.

• Writing, editing and sending out Raising Evanston, a parenting newsletter I now edit for the local Evanston RoundTable. If you know people in/from/moving to Evanston who have kids, let them know about it!

• Kid things that include but aren’t limited to:

  • Summer baseball (which has 🏄whatever🤙 vibes that I’m fine with)

  • Day camp (see our chat here for what we’re doing for camp lunches)

  • Also, a week of sleepaway camp and a few days of ultimate frisbee morning camp

    Become a paid subscriber if you want to be in touch a bit more over the summer.

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Summer is the opposite of relaxing for many parents, but my husband and I were saying how much more chill this season is compared to school because we are off from our school “jobs,” which in my case includes aggressive twice-a-year fundraising/thank-you-note-writing/envelope-stuffing for teacher thank-you gifts.

This is still a bit more chill than at kids’ former school, where I became achingly familiar with how Queen of Hearts fundraisers are run, how hard it is to get businesses to make donations to your school fundraiser when every other school is also hitting them up, how to do a personalized-school-paver-to-raise-money-for-the-playground thing, how to take minutes during a school board meeting when the principal is crying, and how to run a virtual children’s magic show to raise money for the annual fund during a pandemic.

When I was a kid, my mom was part of a group of families that helped transition two Catholic schools into one. She served on the school board and did a lot of fundraising. She was a SAHM (back then: “housewife.”). I took it for granted, as many kids do, that she had the time/know-how to do this kind of work just because she was a mom. I didn’t come to appreciate, ‘til later in life, how much skill and knowledge it takes to make a school run on the parent-support side. I assumed it was just the act of showing up that took care of most of the business, but no. I realized how much more absurd this can get when I spoke to a witch who found herself on the facilities committee at her kids’ school and suddenly had to learn how a 100-year-old huge building works. Her background is in marketing, not engineering, architecture, or custodial services.

This “system,” of course, fails school populations where caretakers can’t afford to break off this type of time and talent or have the patience to learn new skills and work together with strangers. What really grinds my gears is when I do freelance work for a big consulting agency and realize how obscenely people get paid for similar types of work but for non-school clients (a fancy word for the school-combining my mom did, or perhaps helping your school get on a new CMS is “organizational change.”) Do you know how many Box(es) of Joe you could buy at that pay grade? A lot.

Here are some other stories from witches who didn’t mean to but became very good at running shit, for free, after they had kids:

I became the president of the HOA because the pavement on our streets was 25 years old and deteriorating, and my kids couldn't ride their bikes on it without falling and getting scraped up. So now I know all about the differences between seal coating and repaving asphalt, something I truly never wanted to know.

It’s so cringe to be the HOA president. The guy who held the post for the last 25 years let everything fall into disrepair in the common spaces. No one else was stepping up, so I finally raised my hand to do more unpaid work.

**

Running the annual book fair is easy, they said. It practically runs itself. Fast forward a few months later and I've contributed many many hours of my life enduring ‘required’ phone calls with the vendor, dodging the deluge of ads that slow down the our online volunteer signup tool and trying to remember to jot down notes so that I can transmit them to the next project lead...whom I need to recruit.

Some of it has been rewarding — I’ve made some new friends and gotten to witness the angel-on-Earth energy of the school librarian in person, and the PTO gave a free book to every student and teacher — but I’ve also felt gross and conflicted throughout, because: capitalism! And of course — though I made sure we blew our sales # from last year out of the water — I likely won't put any of this on my resume, because: sexism!

I really LOVED being in the school library. And I felt the privilege and the luxury of it, and I sat there almost weeping in the safe bubble of it, wanting to write an op-ed about how important librarians and school libraries are. I still keep meaning to do that. And at the same time, I feel conflicted about whether we should do the fair at all, and it made me want to go back and binge-listen to every episode of the Integrated Schools podcast, and and and all the things.

P.S. Exactly one out of the 20+ people who signed up to volunteer was a man.

**

As an underemployed mother in America, I joined the PTA at my kids’ school to make mom friends and to feel productive and, of course, to curry favor with the teachers and admin.

Turns out that running PTA shit is an actual (unpaid) job. I was in charge of fundraising for two years and a) priced out school-logo swag to give as incentives to donors while maintaining my profit margins, b) created a badass multi-tab spreadsheet where I learned how to make PIVOT TABLES and c) raised $30K each year.

Am I a businesswoman now? Yes, yes I am. I went on to be president, and now I can do anything. I can chair an ice cream social for 1600 people over three days in my sleep. I am extroverting my introvert self like never before for my kids. Most importantly, I am putting all this shit on my resume! And I tell other hardworking witchy moms to stop gaslighting themselves about their capabilities and get work-world credit for this kind of invisible labor, too.

**

Without knowing a thing about soccer (aside from having watched Ted Lasso and the David Beckham documentary), I stepped up to coach my son’s team when no one else would do it. I got a book from the library and watched a few YouTube tutorials. We only ended up winning one game all season (turns out strategy is hard), but we all learned a lot about resiliency and the importance of showing up. Crazy how official a grown-up becomes when given a whistle!

**

In learning how to advocate for my twice-exceptional kid, I am inadvertently becoming an expert in state and federal laws regarding special education and giftedness. I now know so much more about state mandates than I ever wanted to, and I am considering pivoting my career into disability rights advocacy.

**

I was a philosophy major, but I have a master's in everything relevant to my son’s care, including obscure GI medications and gestalt language processing. I don’t want to be the most informed person in the room on these topics, but I often am when we have IEP meetings and doctor appointments.

**

From Laura McComb-DiPesa:

I’m a mom of two boys, ages 5 and 9, living in Brooklyn, NY, currently also caring for my elderly mother, who has the beginnings of dementia, since my dad died in early April, until I find a suitable assisted living facility for her. I work as a social worker and therapist.

I’ve been spending most days entirely driven by making written and mental task lists, then monitoring, tracking, prioritizing, executing, adjusting, and re-grouping those tasks. “Tasks” includes household tasks such as food-procurement, cooking, noticing what chores need to happen, doing them or assigning them to husband/kid. There’s a heavy load of financial tasks, because in addition to my own money management, I am also submitting forms to my dad’s bank/retirement accounts and life insurance, and paying my mom’s bills. Medical tasks include scheduling and escorting my kids and mom to doctors appointments and overseeing their medications, and even a new type of task, pet care, which has involved finding first a cat sitter and then a new home for mom’s.

Most importantly, there has to be time for emotional care and connection with my family members each day. These are the care-work tasks - listening as my 9-year-old describes his tough night at soccer practice, setting limits on my 5-year-old’s tantrums, knowing when my mom needs a hug.

According to many people in my life, I am doing a great job “managing this difficult time.” (Though a friend of mine said, with a much-appreciated infusion of dark humor, “I’d like to praise your ability to be a cockroach and endure.”) My kids call me “the CEO of our family,” a moniker that makes me feel appreciated, but doesn’t capture what I do. Our family is not a profit-driven entity working towards efficient production of a product, but rather a system of caregivers and receivers.

If I have any special capabilities in handling all the tasks on my plate right now, it’s thanks to my training as a social worker. Social work, which emerged in the early 20th century in response to the extreme suffering of the poor in capitalist, industrial urban centers, created a profession to care for people in need. Professionalizing care means that attunement to someone’s suffering and needs is “assessment.” Attending to those needs and easing their suffering happens through categories of service provision such as “goal setting,” “guidance filling out public assistance applications,” “medication monitoring,” “coaching in self-advocacy,” and “supportive counseling.” The last is a catch-all for caring about someone’s feelings and interacting with them in a healing way that’s as vague as the word “parenting.”

In my first social work job, I was a case manager in a supportive housing complex in Manhattan where formerly homeless individuals diagnosed with mental illness could be placed in affordable studio apartments. I was responsible for the cleanliness and safety of their apartments, the payment of all bills on time, their adherence to medical recommendations, and their prosocial behavior in the building. A day might involve a trip to buy socks and underwear with one client, a counseling session with another about the long history of alcohol abuse in his family, and an afternoon medication monitoring session with a third to watch him take his mood stabilizer.

I learned to make effective use of to-do lists and also to accustom myself to constantly shifting and adjusting plans. I would often need to drop everything if a client fell and needed to go to the hospital, or a co-worker was out sick and needed me to take on their clients for the day. I needed to accomplish everything critical by 5 pm. If that sounds overwhelming, it was, and I left agency practice after 8 years.

My observation is that every parent today is a social worker (and it follows that social work is actually professional parenting.) Every parent is asked to be responsible for everything under the sun. To navigate our Byzantine institutions successfully and with aplomb so that kids can go to camp and a widowed parent can finance assisted living, and then to talk to those kids about how hard it feels to go to camp without having a friend there yet, and to allow the widowed parent to vent her anger about needing this kind of help. Care work is all-inclusive, the practical and the emotional bleeding together.

Social workers are taught to try to change faulty systems and also to learn to navigate them in the meantime, to seek help in that process, and to do good things for ourselves so we don’t burn out under the pressure. So that is why my to-do list today includes things like “journal,” “plan a FUN activity for the weekend,” “finish book,” and “ask James (my husband) to pick up dessert.” A lot of my to-do list of care work will continue to beat me up, and I'll probably never shake its tyranny. But now some of those bullet items are there, so I get some of the care, too.

End credits

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One witchy thing

Thing 1: My first Substack Live. Last week, I did my first Substack live with my old pal . Richard has been a …

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